It is hard to believe that four years ago I began my undergraduate studies at  University here in Ontario, Canada. This month I am graduating with an Honours Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Business Administration and now looking for work in the Greater Toronto Area. In order to graduate with a Science and an Arts major, I had to attend four years straight including summer classes.

As a result of my graduation I am available for work! For the past two years I have worked part time for my school doing Windows, Linux and Solaris systems administration. I setup a new system (on new hardware) and maintain the servers that are currently used for academic support in the Computer Science Department, including web, development and database servers or anything else a need arises for. During school I have contributed to a couple Open Source projects including a popular multi-platform BitTorrent client as well as multiple web related side projects, mostly developed in PHP.  Prior to starting school I was in sales, attaining recognition of sales figures in my district and even attaining top 10% of salespeople in the country for two back to back quarters.

My passion and spare time for the past year has been starting the development of my own project, a desktop/web app that I have been wanting to build to improve the Microsoft Windows experience. About a year ago, after finding a mentor and recruiting four of the most skilled students at school, we started work designing and writing our app. I dont want to reveal specifics yet as we hope to have a public beta of our app in the summer. I have developed the desktop portion of our app and did the initial work on our application server (C# and WCF) not to mention all web/development server maintainance and configuration (which unfortunately almost equals development time).

I am looking for a .NET position developing desktop or web applications. I am well versed in C# .NET and confident in C++, Java and Python. I am very familiar with all common development tools and paradigms, taking an active part in the .NET community. If you are looking to hire an extremely promising and motivated young developer, I am available next month for remote or office work in the GTA. Send me an email (markstahler a@t gmail.com), Twitter message or use the contact form and I will send you my resume. I will also be attending the HackLab.TO Job Fair this Saturday in Toronto.

After I began Tweeting myself occasionally which has now become usually every day, there have been times where I have vented frustration with a particular product or company to my twitter followers (there are also times I have congratulated software companies ofcourse).

A month or two ago, one of my domains was expiring. GoDaddy (Dont Click!! NSFW ) was my registrar but after seeing some of the latest advertisements and seeing the company owner’s shameful blog I decided it was time to take my business elsewhere. I disabled domain auto-renewal and followed the instructions sent in the email to start the process of a domain transfer. A long story short is that GoDaddy charged me for the renewal of a “business” registration even though my domain was no longer with them. I became quite upset and vented my anger to my Tweeple, one of whom shared my dislike for GoDaddy and urged me to fight the charge (which ofcourse I did and got my money back within a week).

Not more than a few days later I received an email from someone at GoDaddy that found my Tweet online. Due to the very public nature of twitter, anyone can use Twitter Search to find just about anything. This gentleman (who was very polite and professional, unlike the company owner) had looked up my file, found the error and suggested a solution (which was already in process via support tickets), urging me to stay with GoDaddy. I thanked him and told him I appreciated his help but explained why I was changing registration companies. I never heard back.

I had another experience when I was speaking to the author of XBerry Live!, Xbox 360 program for the Blackberry about Cloud Hosting solutions offered by GoGrid.com. I knew he was a customer and I was interested enough and asked him some questions that I did not see answered on the company website. When I awoke the next morning, I had several more @replies from a GoGrid employee / cloud computing evangelist offering me more details and a $100 cupon. Wild! This guy found me and my conversation with another faster than I would have got an answer to a support inquiry!

I had another experience very recently. It was my sisters birthday recently and I wanted to send her a funny E-card. JibJab was one of Googles first page results and after previously seeing a delightfully stupid JibJib video of myself dancing with my wife and members of  her family I thought it might be worth a laugh. I found a funny card but could not send it until I became a member of JibJab, or so that page told me. I signed up and returned to the card I found, unexpecting another message stating I had to have a $16 paid membership to send that particular premium card. Fine, I thought, Ill settle for a less funny free one as I do not send E-cards very often. After spending another 5 minutes looking for a unexisting free e-card I wondered what was the point of a two-tiered membership if the free membership provides absolutely nothing! Again I vented my frustration to the Twitterverse looking for comfort. Within HOURS this time, @JibJab replied to my post sending me instructions to find the free cards, which were only to be found via a small, single text link contained at the bottom of the page beside the copyright notice.

I dont know what to think. Should I be impressed that these companies are taking such an interest in their products? Messaging users on a single mention of their company? Is this pro-customer or are companies doing this just as a public way and cheap way of damage control and to find potential customers? It also makes me rethink how smart it is saying certain things on Twitter, especially when I have experienced the very public nature of what I say, not expecting others that I do not intend to speak to to listen and respond to me. There are products now out that allow you to follow a person on Twitter, receiving everything that users says without actually subscribing (or sending the email alert) to the user. SCARY! I like Twitter but I really hope they give us some more security and privacy options in the future.

The 260 is awesome. Crysis and Warhead both play 45 fps average on High settings. Runs much lower temperatures with the stock cooler than my 7800 with its aftermarket heatsink. The power consumption however is through the roof.

So I started experiencing hard system locks a couple days after getting the cards. After little bit of investigation, I discovered my PSU fans (2 x 80 mm) had given up the ghost. After a certain while, the PSU became so hot it just halted. If I put my nose close to it it smelt like burning metal or if I touched it I would burn my hand. Luckily it is covered under warranty and I am getting a much better replacement which should be here next week. Ultra X3 800 w PSU is my replacement.

I also ordered a new case. The GTX 260 is massive. I needed to rearrange half my components to get it to fit which I did not enjoy doing. I have way too many things jammed into a relatively small mid tower. A friend is buying my current case and an extra heat sink and I am getting a Cooler Master 690. My apartment is so hot I needed to look for a case that had more air flow than my current Ultra Grid which has been a sweet case.

I havent even spoken of the new Asus Xonar sound card, I should do that soon. Sound quality in general is amazing but I am still unconvinced about its gaming capability.

This week should be a good one, new PSU, Case and I will be able to finally get to overclocking my Q6600 which I have had trouble with up until now. Lets pray my system becomes stable for the first time.