Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:
There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness. The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent. So go.
And bring your business cards… the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers.
I had a very strange thing happen to me today. One of my old friends called me to see how I was doing and he asked if I knew any db workers looking for a job. I had to kind of stop for a moment and pinch myself. Many of you probably know where I’m coming from when I say that I know a LOT of good IT folks who have lost their jobs over the last year and are still unemployed. I heard earlier today that many states are seeing unemployment over 11%, so hearing that a good paying job wasn’t bringing in loads of applications seemed odd. It turns out that the job just hasn’t been advertised much, and my friend needs someone good to work with so I’ll do my part and try to get a few more applicants headed to HR so he has a better shot of getting someone with some decent skills.
It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.
The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.
I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.
I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.
So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.
