Alright, this is what Google is all about. Hopefully some other sucker doesn’t follow up on the “job offer” letter I just got. This letter was from a company that only has the name “Vector” on it. Nothing more. NO return address. It is from the ‘District Manager’ Kevin Hanna. It says for me to call 262 789 6966 to setup an appointment. Nice. So now I have a letter with no return address from a company that just describes itself as ‘Vector’ .

Turns out it is actually the company: Vector Marketing, a firm that requires recent high school graduates and college students to pay approx $120 for a demo set of knives and tells you to go sell the knives to others for next to nothing. Check out this Wikipedia article. They say that there is a nice base pay, but this is misleading. There is no base pay, no benefits, and you operate as an independent contractor. A study by the Wisconsin Consumer Protection Department found that out of 940 recruits, almost half either made no money or lost money selling knives for Vector.

Great business idea. Turns out that Wisconsin is their big market.

So, lets sum it up. If you get a letter in the mail offering you a job that comes from a company that identifies itself simply as Vector , the return number is 262 789 6966, and the “District manager” is Kevin Hanna , ignore it, you are in for a rough ride.

Watch me get told to take this down… teehehehehe. Lets make this easy for the wonderful people at Vector: nickcatal@gmail.com is my email address, I am hosted by Steadfast Networks, a Wisconsin Corporation, who owns the IP block that I am on. The abuse email for the isp is abuse@steadfastnetworks.com. Tell them Nick sent you. Asshats.

Update: June 29th 2006 First of all, thank you for your kind comments and emails, I am happy that I can be of service.
Vector Marketing has sent me not one, not two, but THREE letters, IN A ROW. Basically the same letter as I got before. The words are a bit different, but I’m glad they are keeping me in the loop about their wonderful employment opportunities.

Mailed from New Albany, Indiana. But references a local manager. Makes sense, I guess, but is definitely interesting.

Update: June 1 2007 Thanks again, I got another one

Update: May 27 2008 My sister is getting them now. They call her ‘Sam.’ She doesn’t go by ‘Sam’ anymore.

Alright. Time for an update.

I applied to Loyola University Chicago last fall and was flatly denied. I kept in contact with my admissions person about going later. He knew I was very interested in the University simply via email. So I emailed him up awhile ago about what classes I should take to transfer to Loyola when I found out about this. So I got accepted. How many students have both a denial letter and an acceptance letter right next to each other (”We are sorry…” and “We are happy to accept you…”)

I have to go through a new program called (S T E P, what the acronym reads as I can’t remember and honestly don’t care) at Loyola University Chicago with about 20-30 other incoming freshman who had lackluster grades but show promise due to other things. With a 27 ACT I am going to have a better ACT score than 75% of my fellow incoming freshmen, but I will probably have the lowest GPA of any incoming freshman. It is a $5000 summer program that lasts from July 5th until April 1st (or so). I don’t know the Move In/Move Out dates, but the idea seems to be that Loyola can accept new students that would otherwise not get in but show promise without putting any money behind them (no financial aid is available to cover the 5k). 7 credit hours and I stay on campus (in a great residence facility, I have been in it).

Their “priority deadline” for financial aid is March 1st, which of course I missed. Then I get my wonderful admittance letter for this program and I need to submit my FASFA. So I do that rather quick and Loyola just gave me my first year financial aid package. Well, the total cost of going there is $33,000/year and Loyola currently is only going to finance $10k worth of it (including Stafford loans and grants). What do I need: A TON more grants. So now I have to appeal, lets hope this goes through. It is their philosophy that money should not be a defining factor in education, but it may very well be here.

So, where do I find another $20k, ahead of the $5k loan that is pending? Yay.

Eoban and myself were in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s State Convention’s opening day keynote by Senator Evan Bayh. We were working with Bayh’s PAC All America PAC and their Blog Team (employing my good friend Ryan Alexander) to facilitate a live webcast of his speech to supporters. We had everything setup and running into Eoban’s Powerbook G4. That means ethernet cord run across the busy hallways completely covered by black gaffers tape, a direct audio feed from the sound board, and a camera mounted at just the right height to prevent too many obstructions. We had two Dual Xeon Servers provided with almost no previous notice by Karl and Ray at Steadfast Networks running Darwin Streaming Server by Apple. We ran a test stream that morning.

When everything was up and running, a storm hit and killed the building’s DSL connection. To make matters worse, the actual DSL box (which we thought was a T1) was locked in a closet that nobody had a key to. They had to call in someone from the Oshkosh Convention and Visitors Bureau to drive out in the rain to open the door (I was ready to take a sawzaw to it, I mean the mayor and county executive of Oshkosh was in attendance, how much could go wrong?) While we were waiting with the young engineer from the hotel who was doubling was IT administrator for the entire event (nicest guy) thought of the idea of running an internet feed from the hotel to the facility. The interesting thing about this is that the hotel is across the street, connected by a skywalk. So there we were, with what was left over of a 1000′ spool of Cat 6 Ethernet Cable, pushing through everyone and laying unprotected cable across the skywalk. So we had internet connectivity, but it turned out that they were provided a cable modem that had an internal NAT or router so that multiple computers could access the internet without any additional hardware. Now, had we had more time we could have routed around this but with the limited amount of time that we had there was nothing we could do other than chat with Washington about how fucked up everything was. I ran back out and went to the closet where the DSL was at and immediately unplugged everything and reset the box. After doing this I plugged ONLY my laptop into the jack and found that I was getting nothing. It said everything was correct, but the DSL box (which turned out to ALSO be one of those hybrid modem/routers) was giving me nothing.

Tired and a bit dirty we finally gave up on doing the live webcast and decided we might as well record the event so we could provide at least SOMETHING to AllAmericaPAC. After recording it (and finding it to be 3gigs) we had to take it back to Milwaukee to re-compress/encode and then upload to our servers at Steadfast.
We had everything PERFECT! God damn mother nature!

At least the video turned out GREAT. Way better quality than we could have hoped for. Too bad we had to compress it so much (the orig. copy would look great on DVD).

See the Video we Provided AllAmericaPAC Here

Many times the only thing you think of when you talk about corporate group ware solutions is Exchange/Outlook and Lotus Notes. There are some other solutions, but those are the two main ones. Since I have gone exclusively to Gmail lately (I just love the interface, and conversations is so revolutionary and functional) I can only wonder if Google would be willing to get into the hosted groupware market. Hell, integrate with Salesforce.com (this is supported through S-Force, although somehow I see Google working a bit more closely with SalesForce). Imagine a calender and other features, it would be a killer application that companies could either host locally or have hosted by Google. Google could probably even put their advertising on it to make money.

Eoban thought of the idea of a Google Jabber Client before (and it surprisingly showed up a few notable places after he proposed the idea on his Apple website) and added on to this groupware solution I think that Google could take over the corporate world. Google has the ability to take off where Yahoo, MSN, and now AOL are going: with a lightweight solution that works everywhere as a functional solution for corporations.

I need to rave about a product here for a second. I register all my domains at Godaddy. It probably isn’t the lowest cost solution out there, but after today I am very glad that I am with them. I had not updated the WHOIS records for my domain names (too much spam) and I had an outdated card on file with them, so what do they do? They gave me a call today! They were like “Hey. Your domain names just went out. Wanna renew?” Now usually I hate these calls, but keeping these domains is important to me and since I am doing year by year registrations I am sure glad they did that. Hopefully you never need to have this service call you, but it is good to know that a company like that cares. Especially for domain names, where their profit margin is SUPER low (you can tell they make a killing off of hosting though).