DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last week, Frank (not his real name) took a job for minimum wage. A fortysomething Web engineer who has worked for some of the biggest dot-coms, Frank had come to expect that his nearly 100K-a-year income was assured. But now that he’s been out of work for a year, he simmers with suppressed energy… So he took the job with the teenage-level pay, even though he considers it a humiliation. An exploitation.

Well, life sucks all over, Frank. You bled the system as hard and fast as you could, changing jobs five times in as many years, demanding a $10,000 raise every time, ultimately tripling your salary over the boom years. You became an “impulse shopper” and traveled the world on your big dot-com paychecks. You bought a house in San Francisco?! And today you’re making $9/hr.

I don’t suppose you see the connection between overpriced employees and failing companies, do you?

I think a little loyalty might have helped out. It’s difficult to become indispensible when you’re still figuring out where the coffee machine is.

Before the crash, new hires were often paid more than senior employees — not because the new folks were more valuable to the company, but because the market forced adjustments to compensation packages. In other words, thanks to job-hopping mercenaries like Frank, companies had to pay more to get less-skilled employees, and the senior staff sometimes got cheated in this process.

Of course, lots of them still have jobs. “Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”

In our parents’ generation, a typical career path spanned exactly one employer. Young and multiply-pierced dot-commers laughed at the notion of the gold watch, not only because it’s a pretty pitiful token for 50 years’ hard work, but at the base concept that anyone should have to work for 50 years in the first place. Personally, I feel the same way — I don’t plan to work for 50 years. But the retirement horizon is a lot farther away than it was three years ago, and although I could blame faceless entities like “the economy,” I’d rather blame people like Frank. If he and his ilk had stuck with one company, and built some products with value, maybe the crash wouldn’t have happened.

OK, wait, I take that back — we were doomed from the start. Too many people were trying to cash out for the industry to sustain itself. And I’m sure no big-city newspaper reporter would get suckered by a venture capitalist’s sob story, so Frank has to bear the brunt of my wrath. Honestly, I’m impressed he stuck with the industry after the bottom dropped out. I’d think most long-term-unemployed folks would bail out of this sinking ship, into different (and higher-paying) jobs in other sectors.

San Francisco hosted an anti-war demonstration on Saturday. I was suspicious and disheartened that the San Francisco Chronicle reported the crowd size at “tens of thousands of people”. See also the headline: Huge protests for peace / Tens of thousands in S.F. demand Bush abandon war plans

Within the latter article, two more estimates are given:

The protest’s organizers, an umbrella coalition called International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, estimated the crowd at 200,000. Police put the number at 55,000.

Here is the report from A.N.S.W.E.R: 200,000 March in San Francisco. I understand that it is in the organizer’s best interests to overestimate attendance. But I don’t understand why it’s in the Chronicle’s best interests to underestimate it.

Today the SFPD realized their numbers were impossibly low: Protest numbers don’t add up / Police now say 150,000 safe guess. This makes the Chronicle’s earlier headline even more irresponsible and inaccurate. Kudos to the SFPD for admitting their mistake. Kudos to the Chron for publishing the SFPD’s recount. But I’d still like to see them publish a recant.

In other Peace Rally news, here’s the Chron’s Peace Rally Photo Gallery.

Here are aerial photos (with yet-another crowd-size estimate over 100,000).

Here is a gallery of rally photos taken by Bim Lipp, a participant who according to the Chronicle’s reporting could not possibly have been in San Francisco that day, because at least “tens of thousands” of participants coming from less far away had already arrived.

Mmmm, bialys!

(Those are raw, by the way.)

The recipe is from Artisan Baking Across America, and it’s the fastest bread I’ve made in months: about six hours, start to finish. The stuff in the center of each round is caramelized onion paste, apparently the traditional topping for these flatbreads.

They turned out very well for a first attempt, but I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be improved by an overnight fermentation, and maybe roasted garlic rather than onions on top. Fortunately, I have more flour in the cupboard…

Recently I wrote about an apparent shortage of wireless network detection software for MacOS X.

I’m happy to say I’ve already found a solution. The free-software world moves really quickly sometimes.

KisMAC is a network scanning (and cracking) application that includes its own Prism-chipset-compatible driver. The latest rev, 0.03a as of this writing, is stable in my testing, and functions just fine with my scanning rig.

I described my rig previously; here’s a picture.

Also, here’s a screenshot of KisMAC in action — a drive across town picked up a dozen different wireless networks. The next step is to get up on the roof — assuming it ever stops raining — in hopes of spotting the local community network from here. It’s a longshot (about 13 miles as the 2.4 GHz crow flies) but would deliver me from the evil that is ISDN.

Having a PowerBook running OS X has made me a Mac fanatic again. Last week I had a long list of software updates to purchase, and a long list of questions to find answers to, so I went to the best place in the Macintosh universe to satisfy both needs: MacWorld Expo.

Many exhibitors offer “show specials” — they sell their products at discounted rates at the expo. It’s not like I generally need an excuse to buy software… this is equivalent to giving free needles to addicts. But I saved enough in discounts to cover my admission fee.

I also got some important questions answered. This is a key feature of the Expo: many of the best software engineers in the community are working their employers’ booths. So are the company founders. Often, this is the same guy.

At one point I was in a conversation with one of the three-letter-title guys for a particular company, and I asked a technical question he couldn’t answer. He said he’d go get an engineer to answer the question. I didn’t want to put him to the trouble, so I said, “Hey, that’s OK; I can call your tech support folks tomorrow.” He paused for a second, and said with the air of a man admitting something that’s commonly known but not commonly admitted, “Er, you don’t want to do that.”

The best part of the Expo this year is that I did not contract any apparent disease.

The hygenic low point of the day came when I was introduced to a senior engineer from a particular company. I planned to pepper him with obscure and difficult questions (the type that the phone-support guys can’t even spell, much less answer). The engineer turned away to cough — a suspiciously wet Expo-style cough, indicating the incubation of foreign microscopic nasties deep inside his respiratory tract — and then he reached out to shake my hand, offering the hand he’d just coughed into. Insofar as I needed his help, I felt it would have been rude to refuse the shake. But I quarantined my hand until I could get to the restroom for emergency disinfection procedures. Ech.