Bryan Mann's, Life or...'' It's life Jim, but not as we know it. ''

The end of summer rapidly approaches.  I am still searching for a job, any job.  My latest find, I could be a school bus driver.  I don't know why but it's sad to know that the best prospect I find in a summer of sending out emails and responding to web-help-wanted ads for software engineers and architects in my local paper's classifieds section is a $750.00 sign-on bonus for school bus drivers!!  I remember, fondly, the hey-day of the valley, Silicon, that is, when signing bonuses were in the 10s of thousands of shares of stock and dollars.  When some were given Porsche Carreras as sign-on bonuses and 'close in' parking spaces.  What a wonderful time to be a geek!  A time when we were stars, a time when knowing sendmail meant something, knowing X-Windows and C++ mattered, and if you had Java or Linux kernel development experience, name your price and then..., the bottom fell out.  From boom to bust in 3 easy pieces.  I remember the twinge of "we aren't going to make it", you know that feeling if you've ever done something really stupid like driving too fast on a snow covered road to discover too late that your brakes have no effect and your car really is going over the edge of the embankment, or when you threw the ball toward a playmate and as soon as it left your fingertips you knew it was headed straight for Mrs. Pickett's picture window and there was nothing you or anyone else could do about it, well I had that feeling strongly when the Hammster said in response to my question, "I notice that recently public Internet companies are taking a beating in the stock market these days, do you think we should be concerned about our positioning?"  And he said, "We aren't an Internet company."  Of course it did take him 8 minutes 45 seconds to say that but that's why we paid him the big bucks.  I wanted to get up, pack my office into the two storage boxes I kept behind my desk and tender my resignation.  But instead I felt the guilt of leaving co-workers in the middle of a new battle.  A battle for survival.  A battle to make a difference so I decided to stay and see if I could make a difference.  In the end it turned out ok.  We sold the company, our stock vested and some of us got to keep our jobs.

And again I wonder what would my ideal job be?  As it stands I most enjoyed my time at TSI tweaking a kernel into something that could run on multiple processors, after that I'd have to say the time I spent working on Whistle was the best time of my life, with the top of that being when we were working on implementing a set of services that could be switched on remotely, e-Utility computing.  That was fun.  A lot of hard work but fun.  And of course there was implementing a development process for IBM/Hitachi that I did single handedly on Linux using apache, CVS, and tcl/tk.  Essentially I implemented a miniature version of Vignette's flagship product.  I have an interest in embedded systems because I spent the early part of my college career enrolled in electrical engineering.  I really enjoyed assembly language programming and especially designing printed circuit boards.  But somewhere along the way I was seduced by the dark side, the polymorphic tendency of software.  I loved compiler and language design and operating systems and thought the whole world would benefit from 3d integrated circuit technology but the problems were too big for my undergraduate mind.

I believe then that my best job would be one that leverages my operating systems and server design experience, one that allows me to work un-impeded by the need for politics.  Of course Mr. Saikat urges me to forgo the job and get funding to build the next great open source based development company.  His statement, 'yeah you may be the millionaire maker, but now it's time to make yourself a millionaire.'  Hmmm.

Anyone interested in investing??  I have the business plan ready.

That is all.