At 7:30 this morning the redesign of EmploymentGuide.com was released. The new functionality as well as the design has been in development for about 6 months. New features to the site include: enhanced user interface, job snippets, fast and accurate job searches.

Google Search Appliance (GSA)
(Learn more…)
The GSA offers the ability to bring Google’s Search Technology in-house. We have amplified the functionality of the our GSA by extending to our users the ability to expand their search within a specified range (radius). Currently there is only one other site on the net that I’m aware of that uses the GSA with a custom radius search function.

Personally, I’m extremely proud as to how this project turned out. I have working with this new hardware for just under 6 months and it’s amazing how far we have progressed. Being able to implement search expansion using a user-defined radius was challenging, and oddly exciting.

Job Snippets
This new feature is used in combination with our nationally distributed publication EmploymentGuide. How does it work? Simply put… a job seeker finds a unique number specific to a job found in the publication. From there they simply enter the number into our website for additional information. They may also find similar jobs in their area in order to help with their search.

Employment Videos
Located on the homepage of the site, users can view informational videos that shed light on potentially new and exciting career opportunities.

A couple Richmond, Virginia film students pulled a number of pranks on their local DMV. They wore a variety of disguises and were able to have their picture taken and were given valid Virginia Driver’s Licenses. Take a look at these videos. I watched these videos a few months ago after hearing about it on the local news in Richmond.

Part 1

Part 2

News Coverage

It’s been a long time since my last posted so let me take time to play catch up on what has been going on…

In May I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Radford University. Shortly after my graduation I moved to Virginia Beach to begin my career. A friend of mine from college told me about her career as an Account Manager for Electronic Systems, Inc (ESI). Sounding like a good place to start I packed up and moved into a small, but nice, apartment in Virginia Beach. It didn’t take long to realize that Sales was not what I was looking for. I needed something more hands on. After a number of displeasing experiences during my time at ESI I decided to place my resume on Dice.com. Within a week I received several promising offers for technical positions that fell directly into my field. After much consideration I signed a contract with Dominion Enterprises in Virginia Beach. I must say thus far I am quite impressed with the company, my peers, and the overall positive worker morale. Currently I am working at Dominion as a computer programmer. My main focus of work is the development and maintenance of large niche web applications and services. The company has allowed me to gain experience with some of the latest technologies as well as offered time for self learning projects relating to web development.

If you are interested in a rewarding career and live in the Virginia Beach / Norfolk area or are willing to relocate forward me a copy of your resume and I’ll see what I can do. Please note that you must have knowledge of PHP, MSSQL and or Oracle, as well as Java Script.

ctwilliams at gmail dot com (Subject: Dominion Enterprises)

Funny I haven’t made a post in over a year and here I am again posting about my newest iPod. To be honest I hardly used my previous iPod. Perhaps the main reason was my hard drive gave out on my old computer and I lost all my music. Recently I have decided to get all my favorite songs back. 2GB wasn’t enough so I figured I’d upgrade to 30GB.

Thus far, I felt I would share 2 of my favorite tools that make the iPod work better for me.

If you have a video capable iPod you will notice that it is only compatible with the mp4 (mv4) file format. After quite a bit of searching I found a free tool that works wonders converting .wmv, .avi, .mpg, .mpeg, and many others over to .mp4

1) PSP Video 9 - http://www.pspvideo9.com/

Secondly, you may want to add Album Art to all your tracks. ::Sigh:: This would normally take days, if not weeks, to update your albums. So I will direct you to a little tool that will automate this task.

2) iTunesArtImporter - http://www.yvg.com/itunesartimporter.shtml

Hopefully this post will save you some time and effort in updating you libraries.

Happy Podding,

Chris

I sold my Samsung Napster Player YG-910S on Ebay for $130. Pretty good actually. After which I purchased an IPOD Mini for $245.

Personally I use iTunes with my iPod for a single feature, Audiobooks. I still will not pay for music. First and foremost, a buck a song is a little much still. Secondly, you can not find as many rare MP3’s such as Acoustic, live, and remix versions of a lot of songs. But back to the quick review.

Pros… My favorite features are the easy navigation, being able to charge the player while plugged into USB, great backlight, and its size.

Cons… 1) Navigation wheel seems like it could be made a little better and 2) Battery life could be better (seems like it will last around 3-4 (won’t exactley make my trip to California from Virginia with much ease).

Pros outweigh the cons though and I would recommend one.

For Christmas my dad bought me my first ham radio, a Kenwood TM-V708A (see here). I have only just begun programming it, there is a lot to learn on this radio in order to use it to its full potential. Now that I have my own radio and I do not have to use my dads HT I am thinking about creating a JAVA program with an online database to keep a log of all my contacts, until then a spreadsheet will have to do.

On Saturday December 11th, I took my ARRL Amateur Radio Exam and passed. I have always had some interest in Amateur Radios but I never really took the time to take the exam. About three weeks ago I decided that I was going to get my license. Only really took a couple days to get the material down but I had to wait a while in order to take my exam. After I passed my Technicians exam I took the test for a General not having studied for it and got about half the questions right. Looks like I will have to learn CW (Morse Code) and study a bit to get my General class license.

Today the FCC posted my Amateur Radio call sign in the ULS Database. If you live in the Richmond, VA area I should be on 147.340 at least during December and early January. After which I will be back in Radford, VA and will be monitoring the Roanoke, VA repeater (147.270).

P.S. To my Dad (WB9DZS) I told you that I would eventually get around to taking the test. Hell it has only been 12 years (wow) since I studied last, but at that point I guess I didn’t have the time to learn CW since it was needed under the past Novice requirements.

So for the amateur folks 73… KI4ICY Clear

I just sold my Sony Vaio 2.8ghz laptop for $1,000 and bought a new IBM Thinkpad X40 P-M 1.2ghz. The IBM offers a bit more of portability and longer battery life. The Sony was fast and had a much larger screen, but for the things I use the laptop for it was an inconvenience. As for the setup I only have XP on it I haven’t put Fedora on it yet.

“The X40 is the Mercedes of laptops!” — CNET.com

This time around I decided not to put MS products of any kind on the laptop unless I absolutely needed to. I have installed FireFox (browser), Gaim (IM client), OpenOffice.org (Replacement for MS Office). Still looking for a Windows Media Player replacement.

Suggestion: If you have a laptop you should consider downloading Post-It Lite by 3M (http://www.3m.com/market/office/postit/com_prod/psnotes). It sure does come in handy for setting reminders.

Windows XP is no longer on my laptop. I am now running RedHat’s Fedora Core 3 Project (Linux). What better way to become more fluent in another OS then running it all the time for everyday usage. Only real problem that I have encountered thus far was the number of dependency issues I have run into with the installation of new programs. Other then that my programming background has come in handy for understanding how to compile and build programs. By the way, never having to restart your computer can come in handy I have ran Fedora for 100 days without a single restart and it still runs perfectly.

For those of you that would like to try it out it is located at (http://fedora.redhat.com/). I must warn you that Windows XP will seem really junky after using Fedora. Did I mention that its free as opposed to $250+ for XP?

http://xbuzz.com/files/screen.swf (Watch This)

This may be a bit of an exaggeration but it is kind of scary what the government as well as many companies around the world could do with gathered information about people.