Author: sean

10 Fastest Growing Jobs in US

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by Seth Fiegerman

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-your-future/10-fastest-growing-jobs-u-193751596.html

Personal Care Aides 69.4% growth

2nd Fastest-Growing Job: Home Health Aides 69.4% 

3rd Fastest-Growing Job: Biomedical Engineers 61.7%

4th Fastest-Growing Job: Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, Tile & Marble Setters 60.1%

5th Fastest-Growing Job: Carpenters 60.1%

6th Fastest-Growing Job: Veterinary Technologists & Technicians 52%

7th Fastest-Growing Job: Reinforcing Iron & Rebar Workers 48.6%

8th Fastest-Growing Job: Physical Therapist Assistants 45.7%

9th Fastest-Growing Job: Pipelayers, Plumbers, Pipefitters & Steamfitters 45.4%

10th Fastest-Growing Job: Meeting, Convention & Event Planners 43.7%

Some of this tells me that construction is picking up, which is always a good thing. With Meeting, Convention & Event planners it tells me that companies are looking to spend some marketing dollars in an effort to sell their products, which is also a good thing. I’d be interested to see the next list of ‘Fastest Growing Jobs in the US’ to see how it compares to this…and who would be right?

Update WordPress to 331

Man it has been some time since I updated the version of the site. You have to do that or expect to get spammed/hacked.

The tricky thing with my site is that I do everything via ssh and I lock down ftp except to one home directory.  Essentially I

  1. download the WordPress zip file to my local machine
  2. unzip
  3. upload to home directory via sftp
  4. export wordpress entries to xml, which gets me all my posts, comments, pages, and categories in case I hose everything
  5. then backup: themes, index.php, uploads, plugins
  6. cp -R the contents of the new ‘wordpress’ directory to the existing one
  7. jump to browser and go to /wp-admin/update.php
  8. message saying wordpress is updated, prompts me to update database
  9. update database
  10. done

I then delete my – themes, plugins, uploads, index.php directories and file since all looks good.

Now I’ll do the same method to update the plugins.

Yes, it’s a pain in the butt to do this all. Right. I could set it  all up so that I can run the auto feature of wordpress, but I don’t want to open it up – so I sacrifice.

Career Fair Follow Up – Do You Provide Internships

I attended career fairs at Madison College and Herzing University yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin.

The Herzing University fair lasted about 90 minutes and I met good people to include a couple folks from Robert Half Technology – what’s up Bob and Steve?

Many of the student  I spoke to were looking for an internship of some kind. Herzing students go year round with no break and often attend classes during the day. Madison College offers 2 year degrees, but you can come across students that can do day and/or night classes. This is important to know when addressing the “do you provide internships?” question.  It is also important to know that Madison College requires an internship, or job in the field of study, in order complete the requirements for their associates degrees. This latter detail will certainly make you understand why an internship is such a big deal. Continue reading Career Fair Follow Up – Do You Provide Internships

Job-IT Director-Corporate Support-Madison-WI

My current employer located in Madison, Wisconsin, has a job opening.

They are looking for a well qualified IT professional for their IT Director, Corporate Support position. This job is located in Madison, WI. The person that held the position previously has moved to another position within the company. Below are some of the base requirements. If you’d like to apply online or view the job description in its entirety visit:

https://careers.cunamutual.com/viewjob.html?refnode=99088

Continue reading Job-IT Director-Corporate Support-Madison-WI

Fusion 2012 CEO-CIO Symposium Madison WI

Fusion 2012 CEO-CIO Symposium

With a solid list of sponsors – IBM, SalesForce, Gartner, this is an event being held in Madison, Wisconsin on March 7-8, 2012. Join CIO’s, COO’s, CEO’s in an interactive environment featuring the following talks:

 

• Amplifying the Enterprise: When Technology Trumps IT
Speaker: Mark McDonald, Group VP, Head of Research, Gartner Exec. Programs


• Demystifying Big Data – Finding Business Insights Without Breaking the Bank
Phil Shelley, Chief Technology Officer, Sears Holdings Corporations


• The Making of A “Social CIO”: Are you Ready?
Bruce Richardson, SVP and Chief Enterprise Strategist, Salesforce.com


• Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success
Tom Koulopoulos, Founder and CEO, Delphi Group

Register online

GSMI Social Recruiting Strategies Conference 2012

I traveled to San Francisco last week to attend the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference held by GSMI. The question most people ask me, especially my boss is, “did you find it valuable?”

The short, yes, yes I did.

Sure there were some social networking kool aid being served, but it was backed up by details and metrics. Anyone attending could find something beneficial.

Talks from the following speakers (not all inclusive by any means) included:

I apologize for not listing all of the speakers which also included folks from Pfizer, UPS (yes the brown can do for you), Intuit, and Verizon.

Topics ranged from measuring your social media efforts in the recruitment space to using video in your recruitment efforts be they interviews, job descriptions or day-in-the-life.

Many new tools were brought to my attention. Many of the tools I come across, be it Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever, comes from folks that talk about what they use. It may be from Twitter, a podcast, or word of mouth. Some tools that were mentioned can help you determine when your followers check twitter which provides you optimum times to spread your message. Other tools, like LinkedinLabs.com, can provide some unique tools that tie into your Linkedin features.

The conference lasted a couple days and covered quite a good amount of information, too much to actually spell out here. I hope to incorporate some of the tactics and strategies into my own personal brand – rewriting my Linkedin profile to be more SEO-based, use this blog more to better define my name, tweak twitter with the same profile info, etc. Become more of a goto contact for IT jobs. Then it won’t matter where I work.

In the end, it was a good place to meet good people like Brad the Blackhawk pilot who does recruiting, the aforementioned Jason, Craig and Jen. Others include Matt from Jobvite, everyone met from Work4Labs – Kurt, Ken, and Andrew. Alissa from Verizon, Gail from Intuit, Todd and many more I should mention. Don’t be offended I didn’t. I know we’re connected.

CyanogenMod Update to HTC Incredible-HowTo


CyanogenMod has breached 1M users. At this time, that’s 1 out of 200 android users are using CyanogenMod.

So what exactly is CyanogenMod. From the website:

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for a number of cell phones based on the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones.

Cool, right?

I have a HTC Droid Incredible. An older phone, but I like the form factor. I don’t like the big bricks out there nowadays. I don’t watch Netflix on my phone, so the screen size is just fine for me.

I decided to check out CyanogenMod. This is how I did it*.

  1. *Download Astro File Manager
  2. Once Astro is installed, back up all apps. I had done a factory reset so my apps were minimal. I also did not backup other things like images, texts, etc, which you can also do via Astro.
  3. Rooted my phone using UnRevokd method for my phone. I use OSX so it was VERY easy.
  4. Install ROM Manager
  5. Open ROM Manager and backup current rom

Then I followed instructions from CyanogenMod’s wiki page for my phone as folllows:

 

  1. Launch RomManager.

    2. Optional: Choose the first option in the app, Flash ClockworkMod Recovery to update to the latest version.

  2. Select the Download ROM option from the main menu in the ROM Manager.
  3. Select the CyanogenMod option, and then choose the latest version of CyanogenMod from the menu.

    4. Optional: When you select the latest version of CyanogenMod, check the Google Apps* option.

  4. Once the ROM is finished downloading, it asks if you would like to Backup Existing ROM and Wipe Data and Cache.
  5. If Superuser prompts for root permissions check to Remember and then Allow.
  6. The HTC Incredible will now reboot into the recovery, wipe data and cache, and then install CyanogenMod. When it’s finished installing it will reboot into CyanogenMod.

I could not get the download to come through ROM Manager due to the zip being corrupted.

I finally got the download to go via ROM Manager. It took me several times. Kept giving me timeout error or corrupted zip. I just didn’t let my phone dim or timeout, kept it up while the download took place. Something to consider. Otherwise go ‘Recovery’ route: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/HTC_Incredible:_Full_Update_Guide

At this point my phone rebooted, got the CyanogenMod splash screen but continued into a loop. It never got into the OS. I was posting updates on Google+ so a follower told me to check this: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Troubleshooting (Thanks to Tony Love)

So I had to proceed with the following instructions found here and outlined as follows (i used ClockworkModRecovery):

  1. Pull the battery from the device.
  2. Boot into the custom recovery image. Refer to this article on more info on that.
  3. Download the latest version of CyanogenMod on the computer.
    Optional: Download the Google Apps for the device.
  4. Mount the device into USB storage mode:
    • ClockworkMod Recovery: select mounts and storage » mount USB storage
  5. Copy the CyanogenMod update.zip to the root of the SD card
  6. Unmount USB storage mode:
    • ‘ClockworkMod Recovery: select Unmount
  7. Wipe userdata:
    • ClockworkMod Recovery: select wipe data/factory reset
  8. Flash CyanogenMod:
    • ClockworkMod Recovery: select install zip from sdcard » choose zip from sdcard and select the CyanogenMod update.zip
  9. Reboot the device and everything should be fine.

 

Of course there was a bad zip. So I had to redownload the file to my computer, rename it ‘update.zip’, transfer it to root of sd card on phone, and then repeat the instructions above. I eventually got it running!!

Confidence will prevail. As long as you have ClockworkModRecovery installed, you should always be able to revert to factory reset. YAY!

    *Disclaimer – take responsibility for your actions. While I outlined what I did, you have to make sure your backup is good and that making this change to CyanogenMod does contain some risk of bricking your phone. No guts, no glory, but don’t blame someone else.

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    First Go at Meditation



    One of the things I want to do from 2012 on is to explore consistent meditation. I picked up this book a while ago to get some insight on where to start. I’d recommend it. It’s not preachy or religious, though it contains bits and pieces on how meditation plays a role in some spiritual beliefs.

    Today was my first day trying to zone out and meditate. It’s not easy and as the book says, practice will help. It also mentioned meditating 15min in the morning and 15min in the evening, and that you’ll find yourself typically going over the 15 minutes. You’re not kidding. I literally thought I was going to stop and look at the time and think time was creeping along and only 5 minutes would have lapsed. I was wrong, it was 17. Wow. Continue reading First Go at Meditation

    Thank you Steve Jobs




    “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs, at a Stanford University commencement ceremony in 2005.

    Steve Jobs 1995-2011