jpreardon.com

Evidence is mounting that working in the technology field might not be what some of us thought it was cracked up to be. First there was a study showing that most IT workers were unhappy. Now comes the report that techie types didn’t even rank when salary.com asked “What’s the sexiest job?”

Firefighters top the “sexy job” list, and yes, hell would freeze over before a software engineer or database administrator made the top ten. But to mention dental hygienists, CPAs and milkmen and leave out high tech workers, that’s just a slap in the face. Okay, milkmen might hold some fantasy value, but come on ladies, what about the guy who fixes your email?

In related news, the next written exam for the FDNY is in March.

< /a>Warning: If you are sick and tired of hearing about The Gates and/or looking at pictures of the Gates, read no further…

Now that we’ve rid ourselves of the Gate haters, here are a few pictures from this weekend. Based on what I have seen in other people’s photos, I would say that the Gates look best in bright sunlight as opposed to the muted light of overcast skies or late afternoon sun. Unfortunately, overcast and late afternoon are what I have thus far. So, I’ve pulled out what I thought were the most interesting shots. In two cases, I resorted to heavy editing to make the shots more interesting (more on that after the break if you are interested).

If you live in or around New York City, I suggest that you take a walk through the park while the Gates are here since this is an installation that is best experienced in person. If you need further convincing, Felix Salmon has written one of the best posts I have read about this event.

The photoblogers are out in full force, for full pictorial coverage, check out Flickr [gates, thegates] and photoblogs.org
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At least five or six phishing type emails find their way into my inbox daily. Most of the the time it is fairly obvious that they are scams since they appear to come from banks where I have never held an account. However, many of these emails look quite convincing. This morning I received a legitimate email from my bank, some marketing junk, but legit nonetheless. This email made me wonder why banks even bother sending out these HTML rich messages chock full of images and links. Surely the effectiveness of this type of email has been greatly reduced by the number of illegitimate messages everyone receives. Sure, banks need to communicate with their customers, but wouldn’t it be better to send whatever message they need to send in plain text with clear instructions to log into their web site for more information? Plain text might not be as snazzy as stock photos featuring smiling banking type customers, but people would probably feel safer cutting and pasting a link into their browser of choice.

It is worth noting that Firefox throws up some warning messages when one clicks on a bogus link (one that appears to go somewhere safe, but really goes elsewhere).

Taxing telecommunications services can be tricky; Congress has a plan to simplify things: Tax all data communications! Easy right?

VoIP vendors have been fighting to remain free of taxes on their services for some time now. Their fight has yielded some success against individual states, but it looks as if the FCC was just reserving that tax base for the Federal government.

via engadget

Last night I was thinking “Hey, I haven’t seen any comment spam in a while. Perhaps the rel=nofollow initiative has slowed things down a bit.” Apparently, I spoke to soon; I awoke this morning to find my blog blanketed with trackback spam. This was a first for me although it does not seem to be any more or less of a pain in the ass to deal with than comment spam has been. At any rate, since I was still getting spammed this morning, I have disabled trackback pings. I think I see a weblog software upgrade in the near future…

Update: From comments, but worthy of the link: Anthony points to an interview with a comment spammer; then promptly calls me a bastard. He clarifies things in a later comment by pointing out that the spammer was to be the target of the “bastard” comment and not me. Obviously Anthony doesn’t know me that well