7 February

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #49: Devil’s Due

Devil’s Due
Season 4 Episode 13
Original airdate: February 2, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

While answering a distress call, Picard finds himself dealing with a person who claims to be the planet’s version of the Devil.

My Brief Review

This is a very memorable episode, if not an exceptionally brilliant one, featuring a woman posing as Ardra, an all-powerful being who “saved” a planet from destroying itself 1000 years ago, with a contract that would enslave the planet’s population after a millennium.

Of course, she’s not really Ardra (who maybe never even really existed), she’s just a con artist, and Picard must prove that, with Data as the impartial arbitrator. (After all, it is against his programming to… do whatever it needs to be against his programming to do for the plot of any given episode.)

Memorable Moment

After Enterprise tracks down Ardra’s (or whoever she really is) cloaked ship and takes control of it, Picard shows off his mastery of all of her tricks — earthquakes, vanishing, transforming into the Klingon devil Fek’lhr. Of course by this time he’s already demonstrated to the leader of the planet that his own people had saved themselves through years of dedicated effort, but that wasn’t enough to persuade him.

Crew Rando

Ensign Kellogg, sitting at Data’s ops station, certainly appeared stunned when he reappeared after Ardra had temporarily taken his place. Gee, if he weren’t a total rando, maybe Picard could have, y’know, asked him where he had been when she made him disappear and they might have tracked down her ship faster.

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 7.3/10

Recruit THIS!

I have perhaps an unhealthy contempt for technology recruiters. I know they’re just doing their job, but it just so happens that their job is only slightly less annoying to me than telemarketers, or those people working mall kiosks who want to shove lotion samples in your face and yell at you for not accepting it.

Part of my distaste for recruiters comes from my own persnicketiness regarding tech jobs themselves. I love technology, but a lot of the ways it gets put to use are tedious and boring or even worse, objectionable to my values. (My primary values being avoiding things that are tedious and boring.) And there seems to be a strong correlation between tech jobs needing recruiters to find people to fill them, and those jobs being the kind of tedious, boring, objectionable work I wouldn’t want to take anyway.

I know I was lucky to have mostly worked at places I found interesting (or at least acceptable) during my decade or so of employment, and I’ve been even luckier to create a niche as a small business owner where my clients and collaborators are interesting, creative, and doing work I value in the world.

In short, I have no place in my life for recruiters or the jobs they recruit for, and never really have, save for a brief period in late 2007 when the job I was in at the time was turning sour and I was desperately casting around for alternatives. That one experience I had dealing with a recruiting company was so negative that I vowed never to work with one again. And as it happens, I’ve never even had to consider it, because I found a new job without their help, stayed there for a few months, and then successfully went out on my own less than a year later.

But occasionally I still hear from the recruiters. Usually (thankfully) by email. And I usually only give them enough of my time to reply “Please remove me from your database.”

Today I got just such a recruiter email:

To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: update [sic]

Scott,

It has been a little while since we connected.

Just wanted to get a quick update on your status.

Thanks,
Recruiter X

I definitely did not recognize the sender’s name (and not just because it was “Recruiter X”), nor the name of his company. I was pretty sure it had been a very long while since we had “connected” — like, never. My reply:

To: Recruiter X
From: Me
Subject: RE: update

Please remove me from your database. Thank you.

I figured that would be the end of it. Surprisingly not.

To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: RE: update

Scott,

Can do. I am guessing that you don’t remember getting together a few years ago.

Continued good luck with your business.

Sincerely,
Recruiter X

Why no, I don’t remember getting together with you a few years ago, or ever, Recruiter X. And I just couldn’t leave it alone:

To: Recruiter X
From: Me
Subject: RE: update

No, I don’t. Perhaps you could refresh my memory on the context of our meeting.

I honestly did not expect a reply at all to this message. What context could he possibly provide, since I know we have never met before? But I was wrong.

To: Me
From: Recruiter X
Subject: RE: update

It was at a time that you were looking for additional work. I believe it was as far back as 09 or 10, so I understand if you don’t remember. The intent was as an introductory meeting and to do some general networking. You shared your resume with me at that time.

I obviously am not looking to spam you. I was just looking to reconnect.

Sincerely,
Recruiter X

Oh, yes! That time I was looking for additional work! Way back in 2009 or 2010! Now I… no, wait. I still don’t remember. Maybe that’s because I haven’t looked for work with a recruiting company since 2007. In fact I haven’t even produced, much less distributed, a résumé since early 2008. And I had never heard of Recruiter X’s company. And, no offense, but I took a look at Recruiter X’s company’s website and… well… let’s say it did not strike me as the website of a company that would be good at placing people in jobs in web development.

Obviously…

I started drafting a snarky reply (yes, even snarkier than this post), but I elected not to send it. I think I had, and have, already proven my point. Which was that I might complain about recruiters wasting my time, but I am more than willing to waste that time myself in order to complain.

Postscript

On the extremely remote chance that “Recruiter X” happens to read this post… don’t take it personally. Just delete my information from your database. And from the databases of all of the other companies your company shares information with in exchange for money. Because someone gave you my information, but it sure wasn’t me. I don’t blame you personally for how annoying I find the business of recruiting to be. But since my information is a commodity to you, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for your work.

The uncomfortable marriage of the UNIX command line and Mac GUI, and its implications for my sudoers file

I’m a longtime Mac user. A “power user,” you might say. Not so much a power UNIX user, though I do a fair bit of Linux-based command line tomfoolery as part of my job.

But things get ugly when the two come together. At the command line I am a bit too inclined to treat my Mac like a Linux server. It may have UNIX at its core, but it’s not Linux. And Apple has put some effort into de-UNIX-ing it as well. Things you expect to work don’t work the way you expect them to. (Yes, I just wrote that sentence. See what this is doing to my brain???)

For reasons I don’t care to get into, I decided today that I needed to modify the sudoers file on the studio’s Mac mini file server. And in my own inimitable and slightly stupid way, I handled this task as I typically do anything involving changing buried system files, not by struggling through using a command line text editor, but by copying the file to my desktop (where it is magically released from the prison of UNIX file permissions in which Apple has… uh… imprisoned hidden UNIX system files). I edited the file and put it back in the /etc folder where it belongs.

Only problem: in the process, the file’s ownership and permissions got changed. No problem, I thought. I’ll just sudo that sucker. Only problem is, when the permissions on the sudoers file aren’t what the system expects them to be, it doesn’t let anybody sudo anything.

Well… crap.

But then I remembered… Mac GUI solutions to the rescue! I opened up Disk Utility and ran “Repair Disk Permissions.” Problem solved! Apple has saved me from myself.

Now I can go back to my delusion that I am a power user.

Gil Amelio introduces Steve Jobs

Aside

Daring Fireball links to this vintage video from Macworld 1997, where then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio rambles on before introducing, to a rousing standing ovation, the returning Steve Jobs. Amelio’s facial expression while the ovation lingers is priceless. Cue sad trombone: