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So, you like your job? I like mine pretty well and the reason is I haven’t followed these steps:

1. Office gossip is your friend. If you like your job now just listen to and believe everything people tell you. We are all getting laid off, they are moving the division to India, we are migrating to windows. Whatever they say, believe it. Then tell other people about it.
2. Make sure to worry about things you can’t control. Maybe you don’t like the backup policies of the finance team. Worry about that. Look up better tools. Angrily tell people that the finance team is using the wrong tools. Even better, if you aren’t in marketing, think of reasons your marketing is crap. Visualize the sales numbers dropping.
3. Get involved in office politics. Assuming everyone is saying bad things about you behind your back. Respond by saying bad things about them behind their backs. Try and get people on you side of an issue. Learn from Karl Rove: Go negative early and often.
4. Complain about everything. If you aren’t complaining out loud your new negative attitude is going to waste.
5. Assume other people are talking about you all the time. If there is a meeting and you aren’t invited, make sure to ask what it was about.
6. Blame people for things. If something goes wrong, someone should be blamed. Make sure you do the blaming.
7. Think up ways people with different jobs could do them better. Tell everyone about it.
8. If other people are unhappy, ask them why. Then agree with everything they say
9. Repeat this to yourself: you are underpaid. It doesn’t matter how much you make, you deserve more.
10. Find your company’s biggest competitor. Write a list of reasons they are better.
11. Look for a new job. But do not apply to the new job. You just need to think about how much better the other job would be. (note: if you screw this up and take the new job, return to step 1)

I think there are other techniques, but these are the best ones I can think of. The trick to hating your job is embracing negativity. Every job has annoying things. If you just ignore them and focus on the tast at hand you are probably just not going to start hating your job as much as you should.

Upset that you aren’t rich? I think I have the secret. I have provided it in a handy “choose your own adventure” format:

How to get rich in three steps. (Choose your own adventure):

Step 1. Be rich. Money makes money. It is very simple to turn lots of money into even more money. There is almost no way to get rich with out this first step. If you don’t have your own money you must know people with access to money. Again, it is very difficult to become rich without the money to generate more money.

Ok, now you are ready to get rich. Now comes the choose your own adventure part. Assuming you have lots of money that belongs to you it is easy to get very rich. If you personally have a net worth of at least a five million dollars skip to section I. If you have access to some money (parents most likely) skip to section II. If you only know people with money, skip to section III.
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Hello friends. Now, as this is my only soapbox, I want to vent a little. I love that our friends are getting married left and right. This is lovely for all involved and I am happy to be part of it. HOWEVER, could you guys spread this out a little or something? I mean, in two weeks we are heading off to our forth wedding in ten weeks. A little less than month later we are heading off to our fifth, and final wedding for 2007. (we had to miss the sixth we were invited to) Only one of the five weddings was local.

The cost in plane tickets alone is about to break three thousand dollars, once I buy the next set. So, those of you that are currently unmarried: can you please, if you intend to get married, wait until the first quarter of 2009? We already have two booked for summer ‘08, and I think that is about the maximum I can deal with. The next wedding is in Denver, and due to a profound liquidity crisis caused by the above mentioned weddings (and Elise’s new scooter, to be fair) I am considering walking there.

This article covers a lot of my issues with Rails. I think PHP has taken a real beating over the last few years. This beating has been good for the language and good for developers. Exploring rails taught me a lot about the MVC pattern and left me with some great ideas for how to develope web apps. But I came back to PHP because I found the framework often didn’t want to do what I did, which always slows things down.

There will always be a place for Rails in the world of rapid development. I think it is a great solution for a small consultancy that needs to produce solid apps, fast. But for large scale development PHP is going to continue to be the  standard scripting language.

I am sorry this blog is almost unreadable. I really will fix it some day…really.

Google Maps traffic is really nice. I love the time estimates that take traffic into account. BUT why, why did they decide to use green/yellow/red/black? To those of us (a sizable percentage of men) with red/green color blindness it is very difficult to tell (especially on a mobile device in sunlight) the difference between green red and black. (yahoo maps does the same thing, except with those little circles, for me the red and green look the same). There must be a better way.

Julien, who is a super genius, has a write up building apps with ant, including the all important concatenation of js and css files. In my experience a shocking number of people working on web apps have no build process beyond “copy the files to the server”. Tools like ant make it easy to deploy.

Wait…what if I think java is the devil and prefer PHP? You are in luck, because Phing is the same thing but for PHP. Even better, it includes phpunit testing tools.

People in San Francisco have a tendency to fight any change (like everyone I suppose). But in a city that has no more land and is growing at the pace this one is the only choices are building up or accepting that everyone will be priced out of the rental and housing market.

Alex writes up the state of the art from microsoft. The word “sucktastic” comes to mind.

Amazon.com has redesigned. It looks pretty, but I am a little disappointed they didn’t modernize a little. I am sure they had their reasons, but I think there is no excuse for using tables for layout anymore. Also they really could improve performance, the signed in home page takes around 6 seconds to load. Its understandable with so many images and somewhat uncachable custom page that performance is difficult. But they could at least try concatenating som js and css files. And I would bet getting rid of tables would reduce the file size.