Don’t get me wrong, CC isn’t a best store around, but I’ll miss that big landmark from the Union Square. At least the big red and while sign is more fun than yellow on black counter of national debt.

By the way, don’t expect any huge sell-offs, discounts and so on. If CompUSA’s going out of business process is any indication, then the so-called “huge markdowns” would be jacking up price 20% and then discounting it by 10%. So if you might think they have a good deal of 10 or even 15 per cent off – be sure to check other stores. You might be in for a surprise.

8th mile

• can I vote for my money being given back to me if I don’t want to support this idiotic bailout?
• can I vote for every CEO and every top official of every company that got the bailout to go to jail for a very very long time, and their money and stocks go into the same basket as my tax money?
• can I vote for every piece of property they have had to be auctioned off and sold, with money going into the same basket?
• can I vote for both parties to dismiss current candidates, so they would start over and give us candidates that worth their time on TV?
• can I vote for law that will punish Bloomberg for being so straight-in-your-face-asshole and trying to dodge election in order to keep his sweet president-of-NYC seat?
• can I vote for a little more respect from the government?

Put a software developer in the cubicle. Block almost all of his internet access, including developers’ forums, blogs, personal e-mail (where he may be subscribed to newsletters and newsgroups). Have him work on web application. Keep randomly block more web sites as the work progresses. Watch what happens.

Here, I’ll admit – I am neither the best nor the brightest star in the team. I constantly need to learn something new and re-address what others already know to be able to keep up with the team. Of course, I have some knowledge up my sleeve too, but in general – I know I have much to learn, I don’t mind learning and I enjoy it. I also know that 90% of my team have similar kind of catching up to do on a daily basis. Which we all cannot do, because finding an unblocked useful resource takes increasingly longer times – and we still need to get the job done.

So, what kind of bright management decision was to block access to all these resources? So that we would not spend time on personal pleasures? Or because management don’t trust us enough to let freely search the internet for the information we might need in our course of work? Or maybe because someone up the food chain all the answers to all the questions in the universe are in MSDN that is installed locally?

Couple of years ago I read an article about bank workers (and these were not the tellers – the regular office workers) who were only allowed 3 to 7 minutes of bathroom time per day, 2 minutes of walking to and from their workstations and two 15 minute lunch breaks. It was stated that efficiency increased to about 130% from the previous level. What the management usually fails to notice is that if you put a really muscled guy with a whip and a bat to force people to work, it may increase the efficiency to 200% and even 300%. But for a very short time.

If you are like me and mix and match working inside the corporate culture with freelancing, then this rant is old news to you. But I need to let some steam off, so here goes…

Whenever I work for a large company – and by large I mean a company that have departments led by different people, not Joe Shmoe being the director of IT and supervisor of accounting department at the same time – I can’t help by wonder why so much time, money and energy goes to waste. Thanks to bureaucracy, every good idea can go so wrong it would be doing just the opposite.

Take the company I happen to work for right now. The software development team is supposed to have decent laptops and additional 21″ LCD screens. Newcomers get their laptops pretty fast, but the request for memory and 21″ screen needs to be put separately and (I did the asking around) takes on average about 3 to 5 months. So all this time new employees are forced to work on a year model of an underpowered laptop with only one gig of memory, low performance CPU and an average hard drive. Two installed security suites, full-blown software hard drive encryption (with built-in security chip unused), bunch of software and remote management utilities running in the background being the default installation. Now add here MS Outlook 2003, couple of Internet Explorer (or Firefox) windows, MS Word or Excel – and you get a decent workstation for an average clerk. Now, on top of that let’s add Visual Studio 2005, SQL Management Studio or Enterprise Manager, maybe a feature-rich text editor (like UltraEdit) – and you get a pony trying to pull a firetruck to a fire.

Recently, I timed the bootup of this laptop (I happen to be the proud owner of one) – for all the tools to fall into place and start working properly it took from bootup (include two login/password entries – one for boot another for Windows/domain login) to being able to start typing the code in Visual Studio. It took me just under 20 minutes. That’s every day now. Talk about “wasting your time at the watercooler”, eh?

What struck me as I was filling out form by form is how all those social web sites treat your information. Some of them post in large print that your information will NOT be shared. Another one (namely Blinklist) pushed some ads, some “Get Free Something” bait and switch offers and after declining – some more in-between advertising pages. Another one (Simpy) sent me three confirmation e-mails. The whole point of all three was: 1) to promote Simpy Firefox Add-on (first e-mail), 2) to welcome new user (that’s the one I expected) and 3) to promote Simpy blog widget. Why would I have to get all this junk in my mail box – beats me.

If anyone from those web sites can hear me, here’s my statement: if you want me back on those sites – get rid of these techniques. Now.

While I was installing the new Travelogue theme, ran into Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in …[cut]…/wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php on line 623 error. While fixing the issue – killed the blog, killed the database, everything was pretty much in ruins. Thanks to smart ass I am – I got a back up on Amazon S3. So the database is restored, updated version of WordPress and new template are running, all is set.

BTW, the solution to this error is not on WordPress web site. It’s posted here and for sake of keeping up the good theme (hey, one of my favorite porn sites use it) I’m copying the solution here.

The solution is easy:

1. Open functions.php in travelogue2 theme folder

2. Edit line 102 from: $table_name = $table_prefix . “travelogue2″; to $table_name = $table_prefix . “t2″; (you have to change travelogue2 with t2)

2. Save, that’s all.

Thanks, Google

My name is XXXX XXXX. I am a technical recruiter with XXX. I was hoping to speak with you about some of the exciting opportunities that my firm is currently working on.
If you are searching for a new career opportunity please forward over an MS Word copy of your most up to date resume and email me back when it would be best for us to speak.If at this time you are not on the market but know someone who may be in need of my services. Please feel free to forward my information as I would be happy to speak with them.

Thanks and I hope to hear from you soon.

When asked – what specific position do you have in mind – the reply is almost always the same:

This position is fulltime in NYC with a financial firm

I can almost swear – I always hear this same response. Are there any other firms, hiring people in NYC? Any other place, but midtown? Oh, wait, just found another one – “reputable financial firm in NYC”.

Some headspammers even include the job description, but when you reply – guess what? – it’s already gone, but they just might have something similar, so they’ll let you know.

Some don’t even bother to come up with their own subjects and just forward the requirement to all people on their e-mail list with subjects like “FWG:FULL TIME WEB DEVELOPER OPENING…”. Others begin their message with “Hi Applicant”. Figure out how to use Outlook macros, you dumb ass! You’re hiring IT people, not robots.

However, there are couple of companies that truly driving me nuts. It’s Algomod and Berman, Larson and Kane. These two are the best. They send e-mails for positions with skills you never knew existed. They send you invitations to their seminars. But they quite rarely reply to your job applications. Why bother? I don’t know.

One more headspamming trick – using a lookslikelegitwhileitsnot.com domain. Like technologyindustrywebhosting123.com – insert any number instead of 123. These guys don’t even bother with user e-mails, they just carpet-spam everyone they can get their dirty hands on.

Gee, all I wanted was a good full-time job. Now I feel like I’m in the middle of a war.