Look Mom! I'm Hip and Happening Dude with a BLOG!

It's official, after only 15 months, I am switching jobs yet again. Most of my career has been swinging from job to job. I held my first real job (if what you call $900 per month a real job) for over seven years. I had left school not knowing what I wanted to do. I found someone looking for a programmer, and I figured what the heck?

I kept that job for over seven years writing software in a language called Cadol. Cadol was a proprietary language for a computer called Cado. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cados were very popular business systems. Maybe if I just stayed a couple of years, and jumped on the PC bandwagon, I would of had a more successful career. Instead, I stayed with my job until it became absolutely obvious to everyone that Cado was going away.

I looked everywhere for a job, but with just one job as a developer on a proprietary system, there were simply no jobs around. I finally found another Cado dealer who was moving away from the Cado hardware and onto PCs. They had a $10,000 16mhz 386 with eight megs of memory. That was an impressive machine.

They were emulating the entire Cado system using a translator which translated the Cado code into C and C libraries. The OS was SCO Xenix (which was based upon Unix). I took the opportunity to leave Cado and studied everything I could about Unix. I read the entire reference manual until I knew every command. I was getting 29K per year and was the lowest paid programmer at that company.

After six months, I was handling system administration, programming in C, created a source control system (I didn't realize that Xenix had SCCS on it), brought in Kermit to allow us to download and upload files from our customer sites (saving a service call in the process). I did much of the research and development, was placed on special projects, and learned shell scripting.

For all of my effort, I was given an excellent evaluation, and a 4% raise which was a bit lower than the current rate of inflation. The next year, I worked even harder, got another excellent evaluation, and another 4% raise. I then realized that if I wanted to be paid what I was worth, I would need to find another job.

For the next ten years, I was hopping from job to job. Each hop would give me a 20%, 30%, or even a 40% increase in my salary. By the time I got to Kana Communications, I felt it was time to rest.

Unfortunately, at that point, things began to unravel. Kana lost most of its value and it looked like they were going to close their New Jersey office.

After only 18 months at Kana, I jumped to onehealthbank.com. They were paying me about $350,000 per year as a contractor. However, it quickly became obvious that they had no idea what they were doing. (Hint #1: Don't pay Configuration Managers $350k per year). After nine months, I got a job at Tellium just before onehealthbank.com self-destructed.

Tellium as a good company with a great product that no one wanted. I was hoping that I could stay at Tellium for the long term, but they simply couldn't sell the extremely large optical phone/data switch they were offering, and refused to produce a smaller one. This time, I had no job waiting in the wings, and I got hit in the first wave of layoffs after only 18 months at Tellium.

For the first time in 20 years, I was unemployed and quickly becoming broke. For the next two years, I held a series of short term jobs with long periods of unemployment in between.

So, for most of my career, I was jumping from job to job getting my salary up. Then when I finally got myself into the top tier of salary and wanting to prove that I could sweat it out for the long term, the recession hit.

I was lucky to be hired by ILEX. It was fairly close to home, and my department was run by my manager from Tellium. He brought together an excellent team. Unfortunately, ILEX is a bit of a tightwad when it comes to salary and pays quite a bit below the industry average. I tried bringing in some good people, but they weren't interested because of the pay.

Still, my salary was much higher than the average salary in the U.S., or even in New Jersey. It was a bit lower than I was use to, but I could pay the bills. My goal was to stay at ILEX for two years before I was even think of seeing what was available on the market.

Unfortunately, the head hunters didn't agree with my strategy. I was getting four to six calls per week from various head hunters promising me more money if I moved. There was even an offer that was walking distance from my house. I turned it down. No interest. Sorry, I am out of the market for another eight months.

A few weeks ago, I got a call for a position at American Bank. They were literally going to double my salary. It was the type of position that a CM dreams of -- a complete mess where everyone is willing to listen to everything you tell them to do. I would get to evaluate the situation, make the recommendations, and implement those recommendations with the help of a whole slew of people.

The offer was too good to resist. Plus, the BRAC commission was also thinking about closing Fort Monmouth which was where our project was based. Truth is that the closing wouldn't interfere with our project, but one never knows for sure.

Well, this job I am definitely going to keep for at least two years. I'm determined not to move this time. I am... What? You're paying how much?

Well, I finally finished setting up Etz Ahaim's new web page, and it looks pretty good. Again, I've seen once again that creating a web page is simple. It's filling it up with information that takes forever.

I still need to copy over information from their old web page, but at least there's enough information to look at.

Now for something completely different:

Safari has trouble using the built in Mambo WYSIWYG editor. I have a hard time using the various formatting functions, and I got to the point where I used Firefox and Internet Explorer to finish the job.

In fact, Safari has problems working with b2Evolution which is the software I use for my blog. I simply cannot enter links via the link button. Instead, I have to manually put in the link which sometimes means messing up the format.

I like Safari because it has a built in spell checker, and I simply find the interface cleaner. Yes, I know that Firefox is more powerful. I even have GreaseMonkey installed with several modules. But, I simply find Safari easier to use.

We're getting new siding put up on our house which means they removed the satellite dish. Now, I'm not a big TV show watcher, but I always watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

By the way, if you didn't already know this, when Jon Stewart isn't doing the Daily Show, he's off protecting the Universe as The Green Latern.

Anyway, it's a way to keep me up to date with what is going on. Plus, it's much better than any of the other fake news show on TV.

The big problem is that I watch it as I exercise on my bike. I have a 10 speed on a roller that I ride while watching the Daily Show. It works out pretty well, I exercise for 30 minutes, and that's the exact length of the Daily Show.

Unfortunately, no Daily Show, no nightly exercise. I guess I could always put on a Rex the Runt or Spongebob DVD, but it's just not the same.

Instead, I'm sitting slummed in my chair, staring at the 'puter, and typing in my blog. Not exactly a great way to stay in shape.

By the way, I have one word for those who hate Spongebob: Learn to spell!

I finally finished the web page for our synogogue. So far, I've gotten excellent reviews, and we'll be moving it (some how) to our new web address.

Setting up Mambo wasn't as much of a problem as I thought it would be. However, getting the look of the page right took me quite a while. I like very clean web pages like . Take a look at Apple's web page for a second. I'll wait...

Did you notice something? It doesn't say "Apple" on top? There's no banner! There's also very little color on the page. It is very clean with just a hint of color here and there. There's a lot of white space, and everything is easy to find.

Compare Apple's web page to Microsoft's. Microsoft is typical of a large corporation. They've got their brand on top, then three columns of links to various other places on the site underneath with another "menu" on the left. Try to find your way around it!

Anyway, I wanted to keep the site fairly clean, and Mambo makes that a bit difficult to do. Mambo's page has a "frontpage" sitting in the center below the top banner. This is surrounded by modules that can do things like display a calendar, menus, search bars, log ins, newsfeeds, etc. A lot of Mambo pages get lost in the flood of modules.

Then once I set up the page's contents, you set up the "look and feel" of the page itself. I borrowed the JavaBean template that comes with Mambo and hacked it to give it a much cleaner look. This proved very difficult.

I had to learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as well as the PHP interface to Mambo. Cascading Style Sheets are like paragraph formats in Microsoft Word. You simply specify the paragraph format, and that specifies the font, spacing, size, etc. In theory, with CSS, you specify almost nothing about formating in your HTML code. However, the JavaBean template wasn't that clean. I'm not sure if it has been hacked through out the years, or that it was written using a program like DreamWeaver which, like most web page development software, mucks up the code.

Anyway, the page looks the way I want. There is a little anal-retentive voice telling me that I should go through the template and rewrite everything to make it nice and clean. There's also another more practical little voice telling me just to leave it alone. The page looks just like is suppose to, and I should just get on with my life.

However, I think I will listen to the anal-retentive little voice and redo the template from scratch. What the practical little voice doesn't realize is that I have no life.

I've been a busy li'l beaver. I'm learning something called Mambo which is called a Content Management System. In other words, it's for designing web pages.

I've done some basic webpage setup before, but Mambo is interesting because it allows you to setup the basic outline of what should be in your web page, and then allows other people to take care of the content. It's very much like blogging software, but not as specialize.

You've probably seen sites that use Mambo before, but don't know it because the look of the page can be easily changed by just changing the templates used. However, once you start working with Mambo, it's pretty easy to recognize when it is being used.

However, in order to learn Mambo, I had to pick up CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. In pure HTML, you embed into each and every element it's color, background color, font, style, etc. In a Cascading Style Sheet, you setup the basic format in a css document, and your web pages will refer to that document on their look and feel. An excellent and quick tutorial can be found at Starting with HTML + CSS.

Of course, Mambo uses PHP, but I already know enough PHP to get me into basic trouble. PHP is a programming language that is actually placed inside the web page itself. That is, as you are defining your web page, you put in little snippets of the code. This is unlike CGI Perl where you write the entire program in Perl, and generate the entire web page. Fortunately, PHP syntax is enough like Perl, so that any Perl programmer can pick it up fairly quickly. In fact, the original PHP programming language was written in Perl.

Anyway, with all that under my belt, I not only setup a Mambo project page, but also modified the PHP, CSS, and HTML code to generate my own template. I'm still working on the layout. It's a little too yellow for my taste, but I like the clean look. I made the logo myself using PowerPoint. I suddenly realize I have no real drawing program for Mac OS X. Darn.