No, not me, don’t worry :-).

On Friday I dropped by the office of an old boss of mine. He had apparently heard I was back in the building and wanted me to come by and say hi. It was pretty cool seeing him again; he was a really good guy to work for. I interned under him 3 years ago, and I believe the job I did that summer was the reason I got hired by my current company. The internship was a VB / Access job. It’s not the kind of job I’d want to do as a career, but it was fun to be able to apply all the VB skills I had racked up as a teenager. I churned out something like 2,000-3,000 lines of code a week, it was ridiculous. During the meeting he actually told me that most of the stuff I had done was still being used and that people still talked about me (which I found kind of shocking). It was really cool to know that I had had such a positive effect.

I don’t always have such good experiences though. I’ve had some jobs where I’ve felt bored or like I didn’t really live up to what I could have done. I thought about writing an entry contrasting good and bad experiences and how one can avoid certain pitfalls, but then I decided against it. Blogging about work is almost always a bad idea. Unless all of your stories are positive feel good stories – and the best work stories usually aren’t – it’s a bad idea to have a work related blog (same goes for dating, but that’s another blog post all together).

Interestingly enough, as I was debating whether to write a such an entry, I stumbled upon a blog post about a 28 year old video clerk who had been fired for blogging that Tucker Carlson came into his store (link). He didn’t reveal any personal information about Tucker, but he did joke about sending items such as frozen urine cakes to his house, and he did call the guy a “Gigantic Cobagz”, which is obviously not giving the store he works for the best image, so it’s no wonder he got canned.

After this interesting find, I decided to see how many bloggers I could find who had been fired because of blog entries they had written. Below is a summary of what I found. Some of them are pretty interesting. If you can find more, feel free to post links in the comments.

2. A blogger who was fired for joking about goofing off at work (link). This guy was essentially called into his boss’ office one day and told he was fired and had to leave immediately. His boss watched him clean out his desk and then escorted him out of the building. This was the post that got him in so much hot water:

Getting to surf the web for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Getting to blog for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Sitting around doing nothing for 3 hours while being paid: Priceless.
Installing Windows 2000 Server on a P2 300: Bloody Freaking Priceless.

Everyone experiences down time at work, however, this wasn’t a wise post to make. I do feel sorry for him though. It’s a harsh punishment for something that was just intended as a light hearted joke.

3. A Google employee who was fired for saying too much about the company (link). Almost everyone loves Google, and if you have a blog that talks about what goes on inside of Google, people are going to read it (hell, it’s one of the reasons I read Steve Yegge’s blog). The problem is, Google doesn’t want you to do this, and divulging too much about them will get you fired (this is true for almost every company).

4. A Nintendo blogger who was fired for “Inexcusable Behaviour” (link). This blogger, who actually wrote under a different name to protect her identity, was fired for blogging negatively about her co-workers. Quote from her blog that most likely got her fired: “One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily… My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fucked in years”. Not a good thing to publically say about your boss.

5. A Microsoft employee who was fired for posting up certain pictures in his blog (link). Companies take their proprietary info very seriously.

6. A flight attendant who was fired for posting up risque pictures in her blog (link). This probably wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had these not been taken at work and then posted on the web, oh well.

7. Thailand teacher fired for writing about her personal life (link). From the blog entry:

Imagine my surprise when last night I received a rather cruel email (didn’t even bother with the courtesy of calling) from my employer terminating me from the school after a week of labor because of an article I wrote days before I got the teaching job. My lifestyle apparently does not conform to the acceptable teacher’s way of living (if there’s such a thing). They were afraid that at some point I’d start writing about the school and tarnish its precious and rather inexistent reputation, and I wasn’t a good enough teacher.

Oddly enough, since these people were among the first to get fired over blogging, most of them became minor celebs after they got fired. That probably won’t be the case as time goes on.

Edit: As a side note, this is kind of a weird entry to write, isn’t it? I should say that I don’t have any fear of being fired (hopefully it didn’t come off that way), I’m on good terms with everyone I work with. I’m just cautious about this kind of stuff and it’s interesting to see how small missteps can get you escorted out of a building.

I feel like I should try and check in at least every week or every other week, just so I don’t let this site get away from me. Ideally I’d like to have 2-3 updates a week. However, because working on this site isn’t my full time job, updates sometimes happen in quick succession, and sometimes far apart.

I also feel like I’ve had a rather uneventful last two weeks. Programming wise that is. In real life I’ve done a bunch of a stuff, including changing jobs within my company, which is strange and exciting but also daunting because it means having to learn a whole new system and set of processes. I’m hoping this learning curve doesn’t interfere too much with the plans I have for this site.

It’s amazing how energized I can feel about a certain idea. I’ll have it in the back of my mind all day, but then when I get home, I’ll be exhausted and not feel like programming. I’ll end up doing something lazy like watching TV, or something slightly physical like going to the gym. It’s not until around 11 o’clock that my mind wakes up again and I feel like doing something that requires brain cells. In fact, it’s amazing how much of the work for this site gets done between the hours of 11pm and 2am (I usually don’t get into work until around 10am).

I think I also jump around to too many ideas. At one point last week I was reading tutorials on Ruby – I’d heard so much about it that I wanted to see what the fuss was about – but then, after about an hour of reading, I realized I didn’t really need to know this language. It looked cool, but there were other languages I was currently using/learning, and it wasn’t really something I needed on my plate. A similar distraction happened when I looked into developing Facebook apps. You know those annoying things people post up on their profile pages? Apparently there’s big money in it:

LA Times Article on Facebook Software Biz
Business Week Article on Facebook Money Making
Crazy Story About a 17 Year Old Who’s Making 70k a Month From Her MySpace Layouts Page

The idea of making it big is appealing, and it caused me to look further into Facebook development, however, I actually do find most of the Facebook apps annoying, so I don’t think I could bring myself to make one. The fact that people are making so much money off them actually blows my mind though. How can such a dinky little app pull in so much money?

I love google. Lately it’s been bringing me lots of visitors. It brought me 55 yesterday, which is a pretty damn cool (and pretty good for a small site like this one). However, this past weekend when I messed up my .htaccess file, it brought me no one. In case you weren’t here: I screwed up my 301 redirect links and no one was able to access anything in the /software, /downloads, or /programming directories of this site (you were just redirected to one of my blog pages). I will now do a total site checkout after touching that file. I can’t believe I was that stupid.

Like an idiot I let this error sit around for a few days before I realized something was terribly wrong. That something wrong was that google was no longer bringing me traffic. I’d fallen in my page rank. I quickly fixed the error and my page rank mostly returned. However, my ranking for the term Patrick Gillespie seems to have disappeared. I was actually kind of hoping to grab the top spot from that stupid news article on the pervert named Patrick Gillespie. Though then again, it was my Tiburon entry that was climbing the top ten of that page, and I’m not so sure that article would look good next to one titled “Patrick Gillespie arrested for failing to register as a sex offender.”

Back to the topic at hand though. Luckily google forgave my foolish .htaccess blunder. I was reading an article on some other blog earlier this week where the site owner wasn’t as lucky:

Google Penalty Nightmare

Google penalizes sites for certain offenses. Usually this is because a site is trying to do something artificial to raise its page rank. But since google doesn’t tell these sites the reason they are penalized, no one can be sure why a page suddenly drops in its page rank – or in some cases, is removed from the search results. Sometimes you mess up and things go back to normal (like me), and sometimes you mess up and things are sucky for a decent amount of time (like the girl in the blog entry above).

I find the whole idea of a secret penalty system quite interesting. It makes sense that they wouldn’t release all of the details, because then people would know exactly what to try and get around. Not knowing what you’re up against means there are more mines you could potentially step on, and when those mines are things like being removed from google’s search results, you’re less likely to do something to try and cheat the system. At least that’s what I think their reasoning is.

Not surprisingly, webmasters have tried to understand this system and some have even put together lists of possible google penalty filters. Below is one such list:

Google Filters

Jargon you’ll need to know to understand that article:
SERPS = Search engine results pages
SEO = Search engine optimization

If you’re a webmaster, that article is worth reading. It’s even caused me to think twice about the naming of my “links” section – though it’s late now so I’ll rename it later.

Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering, the title of this entry is a reference to a famous Homer Simpson quote. I figured it would probably be a good idea to mention that :).

There’s been a decent amount of hysteria on some of the social news web sites about a new campaign to block Firefox users. The reasoning behind this is because Firefox has a plug-in that allows you block ads.  Proponents of this campaign argue that this robs website owners of the opportunity to make money from their site. You can see the campaign’s website here:

http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com

The majority of people who are reacting to this seem to be upset about this. However, after doing a bunch of googling, I was only able to find one site that is participating in this campaign (and it sucks).

Anyway, I figured I’d give my opinion on this issue since I’m sure I’m in the minority. Frankly, I don’t see why so many people are getting upset. If a website is going to block you, just don’t visit that website. There are millions of places to go on the internet, if a handful of sites want their ad revenue and you don’t want to look at ads, just don’t go to those websites. For every site that blocks Firefox, I’m sure an alternative will spring up somewhere.

I kind of like the ad revenue based system though, since it allows a lot of stuff to be free. Most sites I visit have a tasteful display of ads. If I go to a website and they ambush with lots of crap, I just never go there again. I’d hate to see this model replaced with a model where ads are injected into the actual content (movies and TV shows sometimes do this). I wouldn’t put it above sites to do this either. They’re going to make their money one way or another (or disappear).

As a site note, according to my web stats, 37% of the people who visit this website use Firefox. 52% use Internet Explorer, and the rest use a variety of other browsers. I guess that’s indicative of a more web savvy audience.