A gray day, it actually

A gray day, it actually started to sprinkle today.

It occurs to me that while the age of computers does in theory create a paperless office, there are times when you absolutely must have a physical copy of the document to look at. Like when places you want to apply at take submissions electronically but refuse to open up attachments. Cutting and pasting ASCII text resumes is an option, but ASCII text resumes offend my sense of aesthetics. In plain speak, cutting and pasting ASCII text it's ugly, it screws up the format, and you have no idea what it looks like on the other person's computer. If I'm getting my resume looked at by potentially the people who will hire me, I don't want them to think that I don't know the proper places for carriage returns when the resume ends up looking something like this:

UC Berkeley HD&CCS/Information Systems, Berkeley, CA
Programmer/Analyst II 1997
Program and debug code for the McDonnel Douglas Series 18 mainframe computer. Troubleshoot and document end-user problems with the Series 18. Systems Administration of IBM AIX RS/6000 as well as other Linux servers/ Administration of Sybase System 10 SQL Server. Program web applications using Perl.
Designed and created a program to tabulate results from annual housing surveys and generate web pages for university officials to view.

Anyways, you get the point... it looks bad, and it's definitely not something I want passed around like that.

So, succumbing to the need to kill trees and further populate the landfill with empty print cartridges, I went to go look at printers. Having a Mac creates an interesting challenge, since apparently 80% of all high-quality printers under $100 exclusively work with Windows only. Anyways, after looking at the various ink and bubble jet printers, I decided that what I really want is laser printer.

One of the interesting things about technology is that there is a product to fill every price niche. For instance, 10 years ago, we had dot matrix printers filling the $50-$200 range, ink jet printers were in the $125 - $300 price range, and $600+ was laser printer range. Now we have ink jets filling the lower price range niche, photo printers filling the mid-range, and laser printers are still the top end. True, the features of printer that you get today is much more than compared to that of 10 years ago, but if it was a printer with average quality you could purchase for $150 10 years ago, you still get a printer with average quality for $150 today.

I went to the career transition center to get the resume printed, but I had a problem on the PCs because the security settings were such that I couldn't browse my ftp site to download my resume and cover letter onto the PC.

Luckily, they had an iMac there, (which few corporate people know how to secure) so I used the iMac to grab my resume and cover letter and printed them. That iMac saved my job application materials.

God, that almost sounds like an Apple Commericial.

(Apple Logo goes here)

My name is Mike, and I'm Sysadmin.