Category: Archive

This presidential campaign does not shine. Obama keeps repeating “We need change. We ‘ll do it differently “. To make any change, you need cash. Obama does not have it. Who does? We do. Rich people. We should be taxed more heavily. Who ‘s rich? Mary and John live in Brooklyn, NY. She ‘s a QA specialist making $70K a year (before taxes) and he makes $85K. This couple is rich. Or it seems so for Mr. Obama. They should be taxed more. You have to share with people who are less fortunate and prefer making kids and sitting on welfare to studying and working hard.

So when Obama states “I ‘ll give you this or I ‘ll give you that ” he actually means that Mary and John will give you this and that.

I ‘ll vote for McCain not because he ‘s a star, but because he ‘s a republican. They also raise taxes, but they do not consider this being the only source of money.

I ‘ll vote for McCain even though he believes that Putin is the President of Germany. I ‘ll vote because I do not want Obama in the White House.

Yesterday, CNN quoted McCain saying that “unemployment at 5.5% and gasoline for $4 a gallon would be such good economic news in France that they would be dancing in the streets “. You may not like this statement, but it shows that McCain is a down to Earth person and will not think of the USA as being somewhere up in the sky while everyone else is down below. The difference in prices between us and Europe becomes smaller. Just get used to $4-$6 bucks a gallon. Do you have to drive this half mile for the grocery store? Do you have to move 2000 pound car to get 10 pounds worth of food? Talk to your boss and see if you can work two days from home. Find carpool. Do you have to drive this seven-seater SUV to work sitting there alone? Learn from Indians – they ‘d load it with a least 20 people . Oh, yeah, you bought it to carry stuff from Home Depot. When was the last time you ‘ve been there buying 2×4 ‘s?

Five bucks a gallon is OK. Just get used to it as you got used to paying $8 for a pack of Marlboro.It ‘s your call now – a pack of cigarettes or two gallons in in the car. Not ready to quit smoking? So sit down and shut up.

I ‘m still wondering, may be McCain knows something that we don ‘t? May be Putin secretly rules in Germany?

I spent Saturday night at the release-CD show of the band called The Diplomat. The show took place at The Saint that ‘s located in Asbury Park, NJ and looks anything but the place where saints live. The GPS girl in our car has announced that we “ve arrived to our destination right by the sign The Saint. The heavy bass and drums sounds were shaking the building. A small door revealed the staircase to the second floor. Oops, sorry. This is a rental place located right above the club. The thunder of music is tearing these tiny apartments apart. I wonder how much the landlord pays the tenants for living here? Are they deaf?

This brings back my memories. More than twenty years ago, when Yuri Fain , the leader of The Diplomat, was born, we were renting an apartment in a building standing by the railroad, which became pretty noisy each time when a train was passing by. Initially this building was erected for deaf people, but right after they moved in, it was discovered that the vibration caused by the train affects deaf as bad as others.

I ‘m sure you ‘ve guessed by now that the only reason I went to this show was the fact that it was my son “s band.

The real entrance to the club was around the corner. The band and their friends were waiting outside while the opening bands would finish their sets. One of the guy suggested, that next time we come here, we “d better rent a car. Makes sense, makes sense hellip;

The opening band was good but extremely noisy. For your convenience, the bartender sells ear plugs for a dollar, but I did not need them. Small stage. People are standing in front of it drinking beer and other adult beverages while listening to the band playing.

I went to the bar counter.

“One beer and one Cosmopolitan rdquo; ndash; my wife does not like beer (can you believe this?)

The girl goes, “If you know the ingredients, I “ll make it for you rdquo;.

“No problem. Forget about it. Do you have red wine? rdquo;

“Sure rdquo;. And she disappears. In a couple of minutes, she comes back saying She had two news for me, and I ‘ll start with the bad one.

“Sorry, we could not find the cork opener. But I “ll give you a discount on your drinks rdquo;.

“OK, get me a beer and a cocktail you know rdquo;

She smiles to me, “Sure. I “ll make you one. Trust me, you “ll like it rdquo;.

The lesson learned: you came to listen to the music ndash; enjoy the show and drink what other people do. Don “t be an asshole trying to impress someone with your knowledge of fancy cocktails names. Especially if you do not know the ingredients.

The Diplomat performed really well. Needless to say, I knew all the songs, have a CD and the basement in our house was shaking for a while as the band was rehearsing. BTW, these are a couple of photos from the rehearsal. Here ‘s Yuri singing:

And this is another one. Son, if you ‘ll work hard like your daddy, you ‘ll also will be able to afford good beer (I recommend Leffe from Belgium). But Yuengling is an OK beer too.

I “m sure this music set can and will be a hit in Manhattan “s Greenwich Village clubs soon. And trust me, I “ll blog about the MTV awards party too when the time comes and The Diplomat will be on stage. At this point of his music career, my son is indie, which has nothing to do with the country I visited in May . Indy means independent . But his favorite group Radiohead, that has also moved from the indie to mainstream or vice-versa?

These are some of the pictures I “ve taken at the show:

Here ‘s The Diplomat on stage at The Saint:

And these are the band ‘s fans. I ‘m sure you ‘ve recognized Tim Rowan from the Time Out New York magazine:

Joe Spinelli, the man who put this show together, is selling the “This is my mountain ” CD by The Diplomat.

If you “d like to listen to some of the Diplomat “s songs, purchase the CD, or find out the schedule of the upcoming shows, visit this page.

Good luck, The Diplomat!

Keynotes are often boring, but watching today “s keynote from WWDC conference was better than the movie “Sex and the City rdquo; that I “ve enjoyed last week in the theater near me. I do not want to repeat the facts about iPhone 3G. I “ll buy a couple of them this summer. I do not want to bore you with the facts about the countless possibilities that open iPhone SDK brings to the table. Just watch the keynote.

While we “ve been writing articles comparing RIA technologies, Steve Jobs locked the iPhone team in the underground bunker, they “ve been working hard and delivered. Big time.

During the last fifteen years, excitement in the software development was slowly moving from Microsoft to Sun Microsystems, then to Google and now it has arrived to the new destination ndash; Apple “s iPhone.

People will enjoy developing applications for iPhone, and this device will spread around the world at the speed of sound. Sure thing, Japan has some super phones, but people there use not more than 5-10% of their abilities. Sure thing, Java ME has to solve a lot more complicated task of offering tools for developers dealing with hundreds of different phones, while Apple has a luxury to have just one phone device, just one OS, and they are the same. Who cares? If this phone is the best and the OS is great too, why bother looking somewhere else?

We are talking about advantages of the RIA platform that use Flash Player as a runtime, but if Adobe won “t find a way to put the player on iPhone, they “ll lose lots and lots of customers. Of course, just having open iPhone SDK is not enough for porting Flash Player to iPhone, but there should be a way to find the key to Steve “s heart. Sun Microsystems should dig in the same direction.

Enough said, just get some popcorn and watch the Apple “s keynote at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0806wdt546x/event/index.html .

The laurels of Jesse James Garrett who created a popular acronym AJAX make some people uncomfortable. How come, he did it and I did not?

John Lam from Microsoft also wants to father of something nice. His (or Microsoft “s?) baby will be called ARAX. The eWeek magazine published an article called “Move Over, AJAX, ARAX is Here rdquo;, where R stands for Ruby.

Unfortunately, John Lam was not able to articulate why would developers want to write the client portion of the Silverlight RIA in IronRuby other than mentioning the ability to reuse some handy utility that you might have created in Ruby on the server side. I “m sure, there is a lot more handy utilities written in VB.Net or C#.

As per eWeek, besides other questionable statements, Lam said,

“If we do our jobs right and we get Silverlight to play very widely, then all of a sudden for folks that are interested in doing some ARAX, they can. They have to ask, Do we want to take a dependency on this thing? It ‘s pretty brain-dead to take a dependency on Flash, because Flash is everywhere already. So this becomes a more compelling scenario over time, ” he said, noting that as Silverlight adoption grows the opportunity for ARAX development increases.

And this is the first time in many years when I have no idea what this paragraph means. Long time ago, when I was studying English and my vocabulary was about 500 words, I often did not know the meaning of a half of the words from any given paragraph. This time I have another challenge ndash; I know the meaning of every word from the above, but I have no idea what these words mean if put together in this particular order.

I don “t think that the acronym ARAX can go as far as AJAX did. The thing is that by the time of creation, AJAX was already a very popular detergent, a household name familiar to any housewife. But when I hear ARAX, the only thing that comes to mind is a river that flows somewhere along the borders of Iran, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which does not really help in spreading this term in the USA given the tense relations with Iran and the Borat movie. Remember infamous Chevy Nova automobile that was not selling well in the Spanish-speaking countries because it meant “doesn “t go rdquo; in Spanish?

I don “t know how Jesse was able to come up with his creation, but in case of ARAX, the lack of adequate preparation and marketing research is pretty obvious.

Similarly to the popular detergent, JavaScript is available on every computer connected to the Web – just add a bit DHTML and an XMLHttpRequest and you are set. But this is not the case with Ruby, and especially with its Microsoft “s version called IronRuby.

The IronRuby will be supported by Silverlight 2.0 (currently in Beta) that includes Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). In general, it “s a good sign that Microsoft is quietly moving away from relying just on the Web browser as a runtime environment for RIA. It “s even better that they finally realized that there are people who do not use Windows, and Silverlight will be offered on other platforms too. The more languages DLR will support, the better. But first, the install base of the Silverlight runtime should reach some serious numbers (at least 50%), which definitely won “t happen this year, and when it does, Microsoft should offer really good reasons of why someone would write a Silverlight client application in IronRuby.

John Lam should start working on the whitepaper that would clearly show the benefits of using IronRuby. A benchmarking site similar to the one created by James Ward would not hurt either. Meanwhile, let “s see if ARAX will become as strong as one of the largest rivers of Caucasus.

Got off the bus early – this week I ‘m teaching a class. Natasha called me (she was still driving on route 18), “Should I buy something for dinner? ” But I recalled that we ‘ve purchased some lamb chops from New Zeeland a couple of day ago and said that I ‘d grill them.

You can not spoil lamb chops unless you keep it on the grill more than 10 min, which I did not. Lambs is probably the healthier meat that you can eat – they do not eat junk. Natasha made fresh salad. Our son likes Silvia ‘s sauce, but we had balsamic vinegar glaze. David said, “Mom, please don ‘t add too much lemon to the salad next time “. For dinner, we usually drink inexpensive red wine from Napa Valley (Beringer Merlot for $8.99 a bottle).

Then I wanted some desert. Back to the fridge. We had strawberry and leftovers of Mascarpone chess from Italy and Clotted Cream from England. Who cares that Mascarpone has 34mg of cholesterol and the British cream has 45Mg. You take a strawberry even though American strawberry sucks, and put a little bit of cream on top and slowly eat. I mean s-l-o-w-l-y!. It was so good that I ‘ve decided to blog about it right away.

When I ‘ll finish blogging, I ‘ll get some vanilla ice cream with cherry jam (never buy fat free ice cream).

And guess what, this dinner is less expensive than your Chinese that you order twice a week.

I have not been to Paris for two year. Need to go there. Badly.

OK, yesterday Obama and Clinton met, and of course, their main goal is to unite the democratic party. As if during the last 16 months each of them did not hope that the other person would get hit by a truck. Some people even think that Obama will offer her to be a VP. If he will do so, it “ll be yet another proof that he has no clue about the politics. Let “s not even worry about her qualities as a politician. Do not forget about her closes relative ndash; Bill.

Bill Clinton is a lot better politician and a lot more charismatic man than Obama, and having Bill in the White House day in and day out would put Obama at a disadvantage.

In software development, an ideal team is the one where everyone else is stronger than you, so you get a chance to learn and improve your skills. I wonder if this principle holds true if you are the president of the USA? Do you want to have around people smarter than you?

And Obama is thrilled and honored over Clinton support . Yeah, right!

I “ll be voting for McCain, anyway. Not that I “m too excited about him, but

a) I do not share democratic ways of “making our lives better rdquo;

b) I respect the country and the man who was a Vietnam prisoner of war but was able to make it all the way to the top. To put it in perspective, most of the Soviet POW of World War II were sent straight to Siberian camp as traitors.

Let “s see what happens.

I “m a blogger. I “m a techie. My vocabulary is limited. I never took classes on writing. My word processor takes care of spelling errors, but I still make syntax errors. To write a blog, I don “t spend hours on Google trying to research a subject, but I just share what I “ve experienced, learned, seen, thought of. Just take it for what it worth.

But since I “ve been writing articles and performed duties of a technical editor, I can also see how rapidly things are changing in the technical journalism field. Technical journalists are people who write technical articles for a living. These people almost ceased to exist. Wide spread of blogging is successfully killing this profession.

OK, why would Mary Lou, the programmer, bother writing an article for a technical magazine? Five years ago, I “d say “to become more visible in the industry and to make her resume stand out rdquo;. Sometimes, the Publications section on your resume can help you to pass through the first line of defense of job agencies. But if Mary is an active technical blogger, she can add HER BLOG to the Publication section of her resume and have the same effect. If I need to interview Mary for the job, I “ll definitely read her blog, and I could care less that it was published on wordpress.com and not in one of the well known magazines.

But there is a group of technical journalists that “s doing just fine, but the trick is to not call themselves journalists even if you are. Because if they did, they would not be able to justify selling 7-8 page stories on where technology is going for several hundred dollars. They call themselves analysts. See, having good English vocab can make a huge difference. As to the credibility and accountability they are pretty much on par with regular technical journalists. Whatever Google returns hellip;

For example, two years ago Forrester was offering a 7-page report for $379 stating that AJAX is great for the enterprise software development. Two years later they offered an 8-page report for $779 stating that Ajax is disappointing.

When the company I work had to price our own software, one of the vendors gave us good advice, “Never set the price too low. The higher it is the more professional you “ll look in the enterprise market. rdquo; Apparently, this guy gave the same advice to Forrester leaders. Who “d be purchasing a 7 page article for forty bucks? You gotta be kidding me, I “d rather get a good technical book for this much. ust raise the price for this article tenfold, and it “s going to sell like hot cakes. Now the rich guys will start look into these articles calling them “technology trends research rdquo;. Of course it makes sense to spend mere $700 to save millions on doing things right the first time.

Every day I spend about an hour reading blogs. If I bump into an interesting blog that resonates with one of my current interests, I write a blog with my opinion on this subject. Tomorrow, my opinion may change, so I ‘ll write a different blog. Blogosphere is overcrowded. The noise-to-signal ration is high. Blog aggregators were created to group blogs by interests. Here ” a place where Java bloggers hang out, and this is a place for Ruby folks. But automated aggregators are not as good as the hand-made ones. I like the place called Developers Zone (dzone.com) created by Rick Ross. Real people are selecting technical blogs on various programming tools and add a steady stream of daily blogs. Readers can vote these submissions up or down, which helps in finding interesting entries. I like browsing entries having the most negative rating. The noise-to-signal here is a lot higher.

Paid subscriptions for the technical magazines do not make much sense. I “m having hard times to read even a small number of free printed magazines that arrive to my mailbox. Once in a while, they ask you to fill out one of these BS surveys with questions like ,

“Are you planning to make a purchasing decision in three-to-five or six-to-twelve months? rdquo;

“Are you a decision maker when it comes to ordering servers for your firm that has 10000-200000 employees? rdquo;

Sure thing. No purchase order goes out of our organization unless I personally sign it.

Then, these publishers would sell the advertising space flashing these survey results proving that about a half of their readers are decision makers.

But I don ‘t mind reading these free publications if they have columnists that have something to say. For example, in the past I was reading a bi-weekly column by Allen Holub in SD Times. Then something happened, he stopped writing, and this magazine became less appealing to me. The Inc magazine invited Joel Spolsky to write a column there, and this is the only reason why I “m reading it.

I “m getting the InformationWeek magazine too. Once in a blue moon I see there a decent overview of an emerging technology . But most of its content is written by googler-journalists who have little understanding about the subject of THEIR article. Who cares, the editor ordered an article on the subject X and it has to be written by the date Y. And the article will be ready.

A new Web site called Ulitzer will go live this Summer. It will give each author a personal page, and the readers will be able to rate authors. I “ve seen an alpha design of this site and it looks nice and clean.

There is yet another interesting subject to discuss ndash; the money. I “ve written hundreds of articles for free. Once in a blue moon I was paid for writing technical articles. Let me tell you, it “s an absolutely different game. When you write for free, you are free in what you write. When you write for money, you have to write in a politically-correct way.

On another occasion, I was offered to write short online commentaries on a regular basis for a modest honorarium. I thought to myself, “I do it in my blogs anyway, why not pocket a little chunk of change for doing the same thing? rdquo;. It did not work. After writing several commentaries, I realized that I couldn “t write just because I had too. I quit without making a penny.

There are some sites that offer blogger money. I do not believe in this. Blogging should be unconditionally free. But this does not mean that blogging can “t help you in making money. If you are running a small software business, publishing technical blogs on your company Web site is a must. It “s a lot less expensive than hiring PR firms to spread the word about your firm.

You are reading my personal blog at the moment, but I also write for our company blog , which has about 15000 unique visitors a month. This blog brings us new business. We share with people our little discoveries and they think of us when need technical help.

My word processor shows that this blog is about 1200 words. This is more than enough. The end.

Yesterday I realized that my Friday “s calendar is wide open, and I decided to take the test called Adobe Flex 2 Developer Exam rdquo;. Well, I knew plenty of other ways to kill Friday, but I had to take this exam and here “s why. About two years ago I went through training and became Adobe Flex Certified Instructor. At the time, Flex2 Developer Certification did not exist.

Last year, my colleague also became certified Flex instructor, but he had to pass the developer “s exam first. I was happily giggling to myself till March of 2008 when I had to contact Adobe about purchasing the courseware for my Flex 3 class. They picked up my records and found out that I was never certified as a Flex developer. Yes, they realized that it was not my fault, but said ndash; that they wouldn “t let me use Adobe “s courseware until I pass the developer “s exam.

Finally I found a day to take the test. The next question was how to prepare for it. Needless to say, that being good developer has not much to do with passing the multiple choice computer based exam, but I had no choice.

In the past, I went through a similar certification exam in PowerBuilder and Java and started googling for mock exams. Let me tell you, this is not Java, which has tons of free test emulators. I found one and it was not free. The name of this Flex 2 test is Attest. It started with forcing me to install more than 60Mb of .Net framework files. Isn “t Flex a better no-install solution for mock exams for Flex? Not too kosher , but I did not have a choice.

Attest had a free trial 35-min test with emulates a half of the real one. The passing score was 72, and I decided to take a shot without any preparation. To my surprise I got 68. Actually, I “d pass the test but one of the questions in the test had a wrong answer. This gave me hope, and I spent half a day skimming through Adobe “s courseware that I use for teaching. If you don “t have it, get the book “Training from the source rdquo;. Get the new one even though you “ll be preparing for an old exam. Then, I skimmed through first 200 pages of the book “Essential ActionScript 3.0 rdquo;, and finally, looked at the information about charting in livedoc . This was my preparation.

I “m sure, eventually the folks that created Attest will get their act together and will release a Flex or AIR version of this test, but even now, I “m thankful for giving me an idea that if I did not know that HLOC chart was a good selection for displaying financial data, I would not pass the test.

Today, I “ve arrived to one of the closest authorized testing centers. These guys take this process very seriously. First, they “ve confiscated my cell phone so I would not ask help from friends like in the popular show “Who wants to be a millionaire rdquo;. Then, I “ve signed up a document that was forbidding doing anything but breathing and typing. After that, the guy asked me,

“How many erasable pads do you need to take with you? rdquo;

“Excuse me? rdquo;

” You may need to take notes during the exam, but you can “t have a regular notepad and a pencil rdquo;

I wonder if anyone ever went through a polygraph test? How was it?

Then the guy showed me to a specially designated and equipped room. While going there, I was thinking to myself, “If I knew they would not ask me to take off my shoes, I “d prepare some mini index cards and put them inside the heels rdquo;. But when we “ve arrived to the room, I realized that it would not work – a grim poster read “The room is under constant video and audio surveillance rdquo;.

The poster did not lie. I noticed a camera under the ceiling, and the guy politely said, “After you are done with the test, please remain seated, just say aloud that the test is over. I “ll be watching you anyway. rdquo;

And the test began. It consisted of 67 questions, you “ve got 75 minutes, and the passing score was 73%. There are four categories of questions:

Flex Application User Interface Creation

Flex System Architecture and Design

Flex Application Programming Fundamentals

Interacting with Remote Data and Flex Applications.

The questions were not too difficult, but sometimes they tried to trick you hoping that you “d forget when to use the property lastResult, and when just result, what are the method signatures of some functions, and some basic OO stuff. I was really surprised seeing there a couple of UML diagrams, and I was expected to remember UML notation and identify one of the four classes that corresponded to that diagram. Some questions were poorly formulated (was it on purpose?), and this could be the only reason I did some wrong (I do not know which ones though).

Anyway, I got 83% and passed the test, which did not make me happier.

This test did not prove much. Any young person with good memory can pass this test after reading a couple of Flex books. Memorizing method signatures and other information that is just one click away in the real world and remembering these things does not make anyone better programmer.

Such certification is useful only when you are applying for a job, and your employer has no qualified people to interview you. The fact that you are certified gives the employer some peace of mind. I “m not sure though how to check if the person who claims that s/he “s certified really is.

That “s my certification story. I wish you good luck if you decide to get one too. Hopefully, Adobe will release the Flex 3 version of the exam before the release of Flex 4.

Bill Gates has announced that the upcoming operational system Windows 7 will change the way people operate the computer. The mouse will be replaced with touch screens. The new OS is due to be released in 2010, which (read my lips) means close to the end of 2011.

Computer mouse literally made a revolution in the eighties . It has evolved from a mechanical mouse to a sophisticated laser device that gives people carpal tunnel syndrome a lot sooner that the older models. Several years ago, my wrist started to hurt, and someone has given me an advice – switch hands. I started operating the mouse with my left hand and it helped. But eventually,I abandoned the mouse – the touch pad on my laptop does not give me any wrist pain.

I ‘m trying to visualize an IT floor of 2012 in a large corporation. Open space, no cubical dividers, everyone has two flat 21-inch monitors, and makes woo doo passes with their arms. You can ‘t reach the top left corner of your left monitor with the right arm, so most of the day people keep both arms in the air. While the left arm is having fun with a word processor, the right one is harassing Internet Explorer. The carpal tunnel is replaced with the Schwarzenegger effect. There is no need to lift weights in these expensive gyms.

And the next step in this evolution is obvious – we need to engage legs too. Each foot is standing on a special configurable pad or wears a special sock with five finger pockets. For example, the middle finger of the left foot initiates spell check in MS Word. Some design ideas can be borrowed from this geekiest toilet .

I ‘m sure Microsoft can invest into hiring several famous drummers and do a research to finding optimal leg movements that would help women in getting rid of the the cellulite in their legs, which will definitely revive the interest in our dying profession.

I like reading blogs. People have opinions and I have opinions. Some of the blogs may change my opinion or two. But this time I ran into a blog that just gives poor (IMO or IMHO) advice on things that a person has to do on the first day after being laid off. At this point, kindly switch to Jason “s blog and read it. Done? My turn.

Being laid off is one of the most serious cataclysms in anyone “s life. Stronger that this could be moving to a new house (been there) and American divorce (no practical experience here, just the horror stories from people who went through it).

If any person will tell you “I was laid off, but received good severance package. So I do not really care rdquo;, s/he lies to you. S/he “s very upset. Everyone should be upset receiving a sudden punch in the face.

Jason suggests to book a flight and see the world because “you will never have a better chance to see the world than right now rdquo;. I love travel, but I prefer to do so when it “s convenient for me, and not because someone kicked me out of the house as an Indian cow that stopped producing milk. It “s kind of weird analogy, but I just came back from India , and I went there not because of being laid off.

Then, Jason makes another cute statement, “You have a pile of savings and a severance package rdquo;. My sincere congratulations to the author, but I can tell you a little secret, most people (in the USA) neither have a pile not a package. The only thing they have is a burning painful thought, “How long can I last till they kick me out of the house rdquo;. Because these days American dream has converged from having a house to making money for a down payment.

One more gem, “You “ve got 6 months to a year before your skills start getting rusty rdquo;. If they are not rusty now, why not getting another job, and see the world when it “s going to be your choice, not their?

Moving along hellip;Jason recommends to fly to Thailand, and this is not a bad idea, if you go there when the sun is bright and the grass is green, which is not the case on the first day after the layoff. Contradicting to himself (remember the pile of cash?), the author states that Europe is crazy expensive, and you may even consider going to South Africa, where you get a room for $0.75. After years and years of travels, I “ve learned one thing: hotels cost pretty much the same everywhere in the world if you “ll compare apples to apples. Go online, take any hotel chain you like: Hilton, Sheraton, Four Seasons and pick any country in the world. You may be surprised to learn that the prices are the same.

Of course, college kids happily travel in Europe staying in Paris hostels for $10 a bed. But there is a big difference between the state of mind of happy campers whose main goal is to quickly get drunk and get laid (without off) with a different person each day, and a laid off guy/gal with a little pile in their hands.

Then Jason starts bragging, “Did I mention that I take about 9 months vacation a year rdquo;. Congratulation again, but the rest of the world are just not like that. Poor thing, he “start missing work after about six month away rdquo;. I feel for him. Staying in $.75 rooms for six months in a row must be worse than being an inmate in one of the American prisons. Jason reveals that he spends $1000 a month staying away from developed countries. Thirty five bucks won “t get you far, but you may try one of the Frommers guides like Scandinavia on 40 Dollars a Day ( get it for a penny at Amazon ) . Oops, it “s been published in 1987 hellip;Sorry. With today “s weak dollar, even Rachel Ray stopped telling her stories about $40-a-day travel and switched to a safer 30-min meals show.

To keep your skills up to date, you should take your laptop with you. I wonder if these $.75 rooms offer safe deposit boxes that can accommodate your laptop while you are out enjoying $3 lunch?

I can keep commenting, but here ‘s the bottom line: that blog gives a BS advice unless you are young just out of college kid and a cell-phone bill is your only liability. Get the e-book “Enterprise Software without the BS rdquo; (it “s a free download), and hopefully it “ll help you managing your career and be ready for layoffs, which suck. Really.