Got myself a Gmail account – I feel so priviledged! Well, not quite – seems many people get more invites than they know what to do with. There are clearing houses on the net where you can pick up an account. I got mine from ISnoop. Got one the same day I put my address down. The account has 1Gb of storage, which blows most other offerings out of the water… Well, it did, but now Yahoo, Hotmail et al seem to have increased their storage considerably.

My new address is d.drury@gmail.com. Putting that on the web should check out their spam filtering capabilities.

Had an interview for a position at Audioscrobbler – very exciting. Lots of ideas for their service, but haven’t heard anything back yet.

I have been asked to set up an online shop for A-non, a T-shirt shop next to our place. A good chance to flex my PHP muscles. Been meaning to put some time into designing a shop front for myself.

Had a rather ridiculous phone call from Huntress Recruitment. Having been foolish enough to put my CV on Monster and CWJobs I regularly get called up by recruiters. They are invariably time wasters, either not having any jobs to offer, or desparately trying to shoehorn me into an unsuitable job. The woman from Huntress was not too pleased when I refused to answer some of her questions, and used some pathetic emotional blackmail techniques to try and convince me to hand over information that was of no use in getting me a job. I have no faith in these people – as far as I can see they do very little for me and very little for employers. They find me on Monster, and they find jobs advertised on CWJobs. A completely pointless middleman situation. Anecdotal evidence suggests they rarely check references – something an employer might care about. They almost never have a sensible job description, even when supplied with one by the employer, so interviewees often go to interviews without full knowledge of the job. They advertise jobs that don’t exist to phish for job seekers details. They undermine confidence in order to sell you at a lower price (conversely to what might seem obvious, the recruitment agent wants you to accept less money, and get the job by undercutting others – if they don’t "sell" you they don’t make any money. The list of annoyances is quite long. I am tired of having my time wasted.

Using a recruitment agent is a pretty good way of showing that you don’t care – either what job you get, or who you hire.