Month: January 2003

A great Darwin Award candidate:

“When his 38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California, would be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder: He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.”

I’ve heard it said that we all demand justice, but ask for mercy.

For a year and a half, I’ve shown mercy to Mango– the client who has refused to pay me for work I did. I’ve tried to work things out, tried to reach an arrangement, tried to be patient as I heard (week after week) that surely next week the money would be there. At last, my patience gone, I sued in court, won, and now find myself in the frustrating process of collection.

And yet, even after all this, I was willing to show mercy. I didn’t want to disrupt Mango’s business, and I didn’t want to approach their clients to explain the situation and demand the money. It just seemed mean-spirited.

Today I interviewed someone for a potential position at my company, and in the course of the conversation I learned that he was doing contract work for Mango. I asked what sort of PHP development that involved, knowing full well that the PHP expertise of that company was extremely limited. He explained that he’d been tasked to enhance a slick back-end web administration tool that Mango sold to clients. Hmm. I asked him the name of the software.

“Forge.”

My response? “I wrote that!” Yes, two years ago I wrote Forge from scratch, and explicitly told Mango that it was for that particular project, and reselling it was out of the question without my explicit permission. My files contained very clear legal instructions to that end, and I know they were aware of those restrictions.

And yet, two years later, it turns out that (1) they haven’t paid me for my work developing the software, and (2) they’re reselling it for a profit to their clients… and certainly marketing it as their own. As I thought about it, I was absolutely beside myself. Unbelievable.

So no more mercy. They shall have justice.

Yesterday evening a reporter from the Longmont Times-Call came over to do a brief interview about my work. He’s writing an article about a few businesses in the Longmont area have managed to do well despite the dismal economic conditions. Apparently most of what he writes for the Business section isn’t terribly happy news.

He was here for an hour and a half, which is far longer than I had expected. The interview went great, the conversation was smooth, and I was able to show off all sorts of fun and interesting things about my company and the work I do.

Now I’m waiting with great anticipation for Sunday’s edition of the paper, to see how it all turns out…

Today I was driving and saw a truck that had, emblazoned in huge letters on its side, the word BIMBO.

Apparently it was some Hispanic company– the rest of the test was in Spanish– but I thought that was sort of an unfortunate name for a company.

Laralee: Kyra, can you go and pick up your toys?
Kyra: No, but thank you for asking.

I just read some articles about online book publishing. Very interesting concept, and one which may be taking off. Apparently some authors (and publishers) have decided that making texts available– for free– on the internet is a way to generate free and rampant publicity, and also a way to potentially boost printed sales because people who enjoy the online version may go out and buy the printed version.

It’s a wonderful thing to see, particularly in a day when digital rights management has become a bunch of big companies blustering about how their multi-billion-dollar business is doomed because a handful of people are swapping files. The enforcement of digital rights has degraded into threats of legal action and other bully tactics.

Soon we may see music artists moving their wares online as well, and as the movement gains momentum we’ll start using the global network the way it should really be used.

Last night I posted a job “opening” for a PHP/MySQL developer to help me in my busy times. I made it very clear that I wanted experienced PHP/MySQL programmers, and that I don’t have any steady work– just intermittent projects.

The posting has been sitting out there for a few hours, and not surprisingly I’ve been inundated with resumes. Many of the people are well-qualified, and I’m trying to sort through the ocean of mediocrity to find the gems who would be exactly what I need.

Several interesting responses:

* A Romanian company who says I should consider using Romanian developers because the pay rates over there are much lower. (This guy also called and left a long message in broken English.)

* Someone who said, and I quote: “In your list of absolutely required skills you list MySQL, which I lack…”

* Several people who are new to PHP but seem to think “absolutely required” somehow equates to “just learning”.

Laralee: “Hey Kyra, Dad’s home!”
Kyra: “Was he gone?”

Ouch.

For the second time ever, I decided to read Slashdot. It’s one of the most popular geek news sites around, and if I want to stay on top of the not-quite-news stories I should probably expand my reading horizons.

I was amused to find someone had posed the question “What would ‘The Lord of the Rings’ be like if someone besides Tolkien had written it?” The responses were riotous, with one of my favorites being Dr. Seuss:

Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!

I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.

I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.

I cannot take it under Moria,
that’s one thing I can’t do for ya.

I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border.

Either I have plain bad luck with Windows, or Windows just plain sucks.

Today I spent about four hours trying to install Windows 98 on two sort-of-old computers from my friend Kindra. She needed ’98 so her kids could play their little educational games (which don’t run under the NT family). It seemed like a simple request, but turned into a nightmare of reformat-install-fail repeated again and again.

After four failed attempts on one, I finally gave up, wiped the hard drive, and gave it to her in the hopes that some CD she had at home would be adequate to the task. The second computer failed twice before it reluctantly accepted the OS.

Don’t even get me started on how much easier and faster it would’ve been to install Linux on both of those machines…