Ryan Morlok’s Blog

Our parents had to worry about being drafted to serve in Vietnam when they were young adults. The military has a much better strategy these days. Instead, now they try to trick people to enlist with strategically placed ads on CareerBuilder. For example, you login to your account, and before it takes you to your profile, it’s shows you a form with most of your contact information filled in, and all you have to do is click the largest button on the screen and an Army recruiter will contact you personally. To continue to where you expected, you need to locate the smaller, “No, just continue” elsewhere on the page.

“You know, I was just trying to log in to my CareerBuilder.com account, but instead, I think I’ll join the military…”

The site does the same thing during the job application process. It’s actually worse there, because you’ve just been through the process of filling in a bunch of forms, and this one pops up at the end. If you don’t look carefully, you’ll just fill in the information and submit it.

On the upside, CareerBuilder.com will actually let you delete the account straight from their website. If you go and edit your contact information, there is a convenient link to delete your account. Nice and simple. Now was that so hard Monster?

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve just completed a job search and this morning I thought I’d try to go in and delete my accounts on the career websites I’ve been using. Simple operation you might think, but so far I’m 0 for 2.

The first site that I had to deal with was 3M. My first complaint there was that I kept receiving job postings from my “job agent” but the emails didn’t contain a link to unsubscribe from the mailings. Things got worse as I logged in, as I couldn’t find a way to delete my account (I was able to unsubscribe from the job agent, though). My solution here was to just enter bogus information. I’m now Big Bird at 651-555-5555 along with a bogus email address. Thankfully, they didn’t have much information on me, so it wasn’t too much to falsify.

The bigger challenge came when working with Monster.com. Now this is one of the best known career websites. You’d think they’d have easily accessible options for removing your information from their databases. No. I’m almost positive this is intentional. Some business genius figures that if they can avoid having people remove their profiles people will continue to use their service for their next job search. I’m sorry, there is no way I want to trust them with that much personal information in the long run. I really wasn’t comfortable giving them the information when I was looking for a job.

Anyway, after about 15 minutes of searching through the website, I came a FAQ that actually tells you how to delete your profile. You need to CALL them directly. This from a company who is pretty much entirely web based. The call center is (of course) in India, and when you manage to navigate through the multiple menu levels to talk to a real person, they still ask you if you’d like to just disable the account rather than delete it.

For those of you who may be google-ing for how to remove your info from monster, just call there phone number 1-800-MONSTER (1-800-666-7837). I think it’s appropriate that the first 3 digits of their # is 666.

CareerBuilder.com is next on my list. If things are as tough there as it was on Monster, I’m sure another post will be out this afternoon.

Every so often I need to format string in .NET.  For whatever reason, the printf formats always stick in my head from years ago, but I don’t use the .NET equivalents frequently enough to drill them into my head.  Instead of having to Google the pages I use to refresh my memory, I’m just going to post them here.  Way to use the blog as a bookmark tool…

• Kathy Kam’s .NET Formatting Tutorial
• John Sheehan’s .NET Format strings cheat sheet (pdf)
• SteveX’s String Formatting in C# tutorial

Gophers won the WCHA tournament 3-2 in OT over North Dakota this evening.  They’ve now won the regular season and the tournament title.  Hopefully their success will continue to the NCAA tournament.

Facebook just released a new plugin for iPhoto that allows you to tag people in pictures and export them to Facebook.  The plugin is really well done, and works well.  The developers at Facebook have continued to impress me with the quality of work they churn out.  These are people with a cohesive vision of what they’re trying to put together.  One minor quirk with the plugin, depending on a friend’s privacy settings, it appears that their name won’t appear on the tag list from iPhoto where it might actually appear in the list when you upload to Facebook via the website.  If you type in the name correctly, however, it will pick up the tag upon export, though.

I wonder if anyone has done a study regarding the total dollar sales per customer based on the price of complementary objects in vending machines.  I ask this because the vending machine down stairs sells gum for $0.55.  Now if we can overlook the fact that you’re totally getting screwed by that price to begin with (at Sam’s it comes to under $0.25 per pack) you’ll notice something curious.  Assuming that I pay with a dollar bill, I will be left with $0.45 in change.  That’s less than the cost of the smallest item in the machine.  If I’m going to make another purchase in the machine, I have to break another dollar bill.

Everyone is familiar with the idea of keeping prices just below the next big cutoff value.  Psychologically, we perceive things as cheaper because we tend to forget about the digits that aren’t in the most significant place.  That’s why you see prices for $9,999.95 instead of of $10,000.00.  Five cents doesn’t really change the price, but it can change our perception when we look at it.

Anyway, to get back on topic, breaking a dollar is a significant cutoff.  That’s a major purchase decision.  Getting rid of the change in my pocket isn’t.  So if the price of gum was, say $0.50 instead of $0.55, I bet I’d be a lot more likely to buy $1.00 of stuff in the vending machine instead of $0.55.  Kind of makes it silly for the vending machine companies to be greedy for that last $0.05.

My parents safely arrived in Tanzania on Sunday.  They are there for several weeks on a Gethsemane sponsored mission trip.  You can follow the whole event on the Tanzania blog: http://tz.geth.org

First they start an AHA hockey team…then they get custom jerseys…finally they move on to merchandising…

I just wish they could have a found a more attractive model.

Thanks to this article I will never lose a technical argument again.

To follow up on my previous post, HawkWings.net is a site that’s full of great information about the Apple Mail client. Usability improvements, fun add-ins, and all sorts of other stuff, it’s a really great resource if your on the Mac. The speed up tip I’m mentioned previously has definitely helped make my mail app more zippy. Especially when starting the program.