There’s a huge catch in all of this though. Web developers are quite possibly the dumbest professionals on the earth. No other industry sees it’s standard salaries and income vary as much as the web development industry. Imagine trying to pick between one lawyer who charges $300 / hr, or one that charges $10 / hr. The cheaper one sounds enticing, but we all know you usually get what you pay for.

That’s the trouble with the web. Because so many developers are willing to provide services for next to nothing (for a variety of reasons), the entire industry suffers. There’s just not much consistency in what people expect to pay for professional web dev services.

And now, professional companies are starting to get into this mindset as well. As I’ve been trolling for steady jobs, I’ve seen tons of positions open for senior web developers that pay $15 to $20 / hr.

That’s an insultingly low rate to pay a senior web developer. The skillset and intelligence required to perform solid web development duties is typically on par with my own background in structural and civil engineering. This stuff is complicated, and $15  / hr isn’t reflective of the skill required to successfully create and implement a good web app.

So, what will likely happen, is good paying jobs will be more geo-centric to tech hubs throughout the country (New York, San Francisco, etc..), and the remaining web development work will be limited to implementations of the products that come out of those areas.

The variety that’s made the web so intriguing for years, will likely fade to a much more bland version of the web, filled with millions of cookie-cutter websites about uninteresting products and services.

It’s frustrating, because even some of my closest friends feel the need to undercut their services to get work. My own colleagues and buddies are helping to enforce the un-sustainability of our own careers.

President Barack Obama’s first prime time Presidential news conference was tonight, and it went off with many a hitch. First, President Obama insisted upon the same fear-mongering that has dominated his first month in office. Second, sounding like a dictator from a third-world country he claims the conservatives who voice dissent represent ‘old habits’ that are ‘hard to break’. Then, when President Obama had clear chances to show a level of common ground with conservatives (or, just the American people) he failed.

The first, and most obvious part of President Obama’s speech was in reference to the ‘stimulus’ bill being debated in congress now. The debate is a facade. House and Senate Democrats will have enough votes to force the bill through congress. What’s really going on, is a war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

We the people, are rightfully skeptical about the justification for putting the next few generations of Americans under serious national debt and hyper-inflation for the sake of propping up socialist columns in government. President Obama mentioned being upset that “the same folks who presided over 8 years of doubling the national deficit” would question a bill that would likely quadrupale that amount. His repeated claims that there is no serious doubt about the validity about passing this stimulus bill is equally offensive. There are plenty of very smart economists who do not believe that this bill will help jumpstart the economy.

First of all, two wrongs dont make a right. Secondly, the doubling of national deficit was largely done to support a war on Islamic fundamentalists who, on top of murdering thousands of Americans, spurned a mild recession into a serious one in 2001. Certainly some of the money could have been spent better than it was. That does not mean however, that the people most responsible for that spending are now beholden to give your administration and it’s congressional allies a blank check for the ‘PORK SPENDING’ that you now feel entitled to.

The sense of panic being pushed on the American people is akin to a sales pitch to push an impulse buy in any store you can think of. By asking the people to not question the largest spending bill in history of the world, you are asking them to blindly follow what they cannot understand. If the people of this country are willing to follow without question now, to President Obama, then they certainly are capable of doing the same for someone whose intentions might be far more sinister. The people of this country are rightfully being skeptical, and asking tough questions. They deserve the best answers that their money can buy.There were other topics that managed to bring my blood to a boiling point over the conference as well.

A reporter for the Huffington Post asked … Wait a minute… THE HUFFINGTON POST? Since when is a socialist blog aggregation considered a reputable news outlet worthy of having access to the White House? The number of attrocities the Huffington Post is responsible for in it’s amazingly biased output of information is not countable. The fact that someone from that waste dispenser got a press pass is enough to make me lose nearly all respect for the administration. The fact that someone from that site was even allowed to ask a question? OMG, I need to calm down …

More horrible reporting, without an appropriate response: someone, from some news outlet, asked President Obama for his thoughts on the recent discovery that Alex Rodriguez has admitted to using steriods in 2003. I absolutely do not pay taxes to listen to my elected (or non-elected) government representatives talk about sports. Sports has no bearing on the well being of this country. Government’s only business is government, not entertainment. Next we’ll be asking for congressional hearings to find out if Paula Abdul is really on drugs.

The only real reporting for the night, was done by Fox News. Yes, you heard me right. Major Garret, of Fox News, asked President Obama about remarks that Vice President Joe Biden made. Vice President Biden made comments that “there’s a 30% chance that this might all fail”. Garret asked President Obama if he could elaborate on what Vice President Biden was referring to. President Obama broke into laughter upon hearing the question. His response “I have no idea what Joe was referring to”.

If the Vice President is going to make remarks like “there’s a 30% chance that this might all fail”, then I expect the President to know what the hell he’s talking about. Laughing it off like the crazies at Fox News are grasping at straws is offensive. Vice President Biden was President Obama’s pick. If he can’t handle the loose cannon now, then he should have never picked him in the first place.

Alas, even with so much to disagree on, there was one glimmer of hope in President Obama’s remarks tonight. When asked about the war in Afghanistan, and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from the region, President Obama responded with some comforting remarks. “We cannot allow those safe havens (for Al Queda) to exit”. Thank you very much Mr. President. I hope, despite the incredible pressure you must be under from the people who helped get you elected, that you don’t forget that. Our economy can falter, and we will recover. If our defense falters, we might not.

We’ve shared space with Push for 18 months now. We love those folks. They’re an amazing bunch of people, who I’m pretty stoked to call friends now. Friendship aside however, it was time we had our own space, to *push* our own identity. Hopefully we’ll all still see each other at Lizzy’s. Our new office _is_ right there anyways …

All of the team spent a hell of a lot of time preparing the new office into something we could call home. When we got the space, it was setup for a construction company. I guess that’s a bit ironic for me, but it plain sucks for everyone else. So, we all worked our asses off to remove carpet, paint, clean, and do a million other things to make the office into something that begins to represent Hydra, the raddest digital agency in the world.

The whole process was a little cliche of the things you’d expect from working your balls off after a full day’s worth of regular work with co-workers. I have a bit more respect for everyone, and I definitely care a smidgeon more about everyone there. I know it sounds like a load of crap, but everyone really gave it their all, and I couldn’t be more proud of what all of us have been able to pull off. 

The move definitely had it’s perils though. I had to dodge insane traffic to pick up equipment I dropped in the middle of 50 during rush hour. We destroyed some walls we had to put back. More than a few nerves were a little frayed from the tremendous amount of work we had to do. 

I know I’m gonna get some shit for this: Regardless, of everyone who stands out in this whole process, Bobby Jones is definitely the man. Bobby is undoubtedly the best employer I’ve ever known. During the entire transition between offices, Bobby probably worked 80 to 100 hours on the new office. He poured himself into making the transition relatively smooth, and keeping the rest of us motivated while we helped realize his vision. The sort of stress he must have been under is impressive. What’s more impressive, is how calm and collected he remained throughout the affair. Ask Rob and Parker how many times Bobby took the late workers out to IHOP at 5:00am to feed the most dedicated of folks. I’ll probably follow up my ‘Folks that mean shit to me’ lineup with Bobby next (even if it does give me a brown nose).

Anyways, a mega-huge thanks to everyone at Hydra for working your asses off doing shit you didn’t know how to do, but did it anyways. I’m honored to call all of you my coworkers, and more honored to call all of you, my friends. I’ve worked with some of the toughest people in the world. I’d trade every one of them for you guys, you’re all the best.

I hope they’re right. 

I sincerely hope that Obama does not work to socialize health care, which has been proven to reduce the effectiveness of health care in every large society that has tried it. Instead, I hope that he works with existing providers to find ways to effectively provide the benefits to people that need care, not meaningless doctor follow-ups and frivolous tests to appease fears about the ailment of the week.

I sincerely hope that Obama does not unilaterally surrender to rogue nations, intent on our society’s demise. Instead, I hope he keeps the offensive on Al-Queda, and other islamic fundamentalist groups hell-bent on creating a global islamic state. I hope he carries that same offensive on all other enemies of the state (loaded term, I know).

I sincerely hope that Obama does not increase taxes on the very people I rely on for my job. Instead, I hope Barack can find a way to reduce the number of programs the government provides, and streamline those that aren’t as competitive as their private counterparts.

I hope that Obama does not increase the country’s dependence on government in their lives. Instead, I hope Barack can inspire people to be the type of independent, successful people that he has become. 

I sincerely hope that Obama does not restrict free speech, by implementing a fairness-doctrine unilaterally on talk radio. Instead, I hope that Obama will recognize that a left-wing television already counteracts a right-wing talk radio media. Instead, I hope Obama just stays the fuck out.

I sincerely hope that Obama does not infringe on my right to bear arms. I’ve heard a lot of folks, weary of the type of gun controls implemented under President Clinton’s administration, talk about rushing to buy weapons. Instead, I hope Obama stays out of my gun cabinet. 

I hope the rest of you were right. All I have left now, is hope.

• Fan involvement –  While I was sitting in the USF side of the field, I swear the USF fans were much more involved in the game than UCF fans were. Those fans know all of the songs, word for word, and they belt them out with full force. By contrast, the only time our fans started to act half as involved, was when it looked like we had a shot to win.
• Fair-weather Fans – with about 12 minutes left in the 4th quarter, a lot of UCF fans gave up, and started leaving. Of course, this was much to the delight of the USF fans, who started chanting “Where You Going?”. If our team has any shot of being successful (more on that in a bit), then our fans have to start acting the part. I suspect many are waiting for a successful team before they start rooting for us. That’s a bad attitude to have, and I suspect your life would reflect poorly if you carried that attitude at work, or at home.
• Fan belligerence - I was attacked by a UCF fan when I was walking out of a Porto-Let. The guy had me confused with someone else, and as I opened the door, I got punched in the face. I’m not a small guy, so the guy doing the punching must have had a hell of a lot of liquid bravery. I wrestled him to the ground and pinned him, pleading him to stop. After a minute of futile squirming to escape, he gave up. However, as soon as I let the guy up, he was screaming obsenities at me. He just had his ass handed to him (and I didn’t hit him at all), and he was still ready to fight.
• Undisciplined Players – I thought George O’Leary was some kind of disciplinarian. Watching the game last night, you wouldn’t know it. While I’ve heard some guys say that the refs were making bad calls, most of the calls I saw were completely legit. Our players were making some of the dumbest penalties I could think of, and it cost us the game. I might have sympathy for that sort of thing on the first game of the season, but not the second. I’m especially disappointed to see that sort of behavior against a team we lost severely too last season. I thought we were supposed to be the cleaner smarter team?

So, while the tailgating is excellent at UCF, the game leaves a lot to be desired. UCF fans were largely uninvolved. The most involved fan I saw all day, I had to pin his head to the ground to make him stop. That sort of behavior carried on to the field, were we might as well given guns to our players, so they could try to rob USF players. 

I’m not usually one to play Chicken Little, but I really think someone should be putting the pressure on O’Leary regarding the penalties. There’s no excuse for that sort of thing. If our players are outmatched, and we lose, that’s one thing: Playing dirty football is another. I’m quite ashamed today, even if we did almost win.

UPDATE

My buddy Alex has a good review of the game on his amazingly awesome UCF sports site, UCF Insider.

So, my AC stopped working last night. I live in Central Florida, and it’s August, which means I was in hell. Melissa and I tried to fix the issue, but eventually accepted that we needed a professional to repair the system. A mechanical engineering friend of mine recommended Gembecki Mechanical, so I gave them a call. I was quite pleased.

Melissa had called me yesterday morning to let me know something was up with the AC system. I was really busy at work, and hoped she was just crazy. I forgot about the problem, went to the CoLab Orlando open house and came home. When I got home, I learned quite quickly, that Melissa was not crazy at all.

I opened up the air handler, and found the coil encased in a large block of ice. Quite naturally, I figured that the refrigerant was low, and I might have to go to Home Depot to get some more (apparently not, since HVAC refrigerant isn’t sold without a license). In the interim, I thought it best to try to melt the block of ice obstructing airflow to the cooling fins of the handler.

Melissa and I stood there for about an hour, with hair driers and screw drivers trying to melt / chisel away the ice that had built up on the coil. After we decided that we had sufficiently melted all of the ice away from the coil, we put the AC back on, albeit at a much higher temperature ( 80 degress :/). 

Well apparently it was still too much for the unit to handle, and it quickly refroze. I slept on the tile floor for the night and called my buddy (the mechanical engineer) immediately the next morning.  He quickly listed a possibility of options (including letting me know I wasn’t going to pick up freon at Home Depot). After knocking down the possible DIY solutions, he mentioned that the refrigerant might need to be charged, and I would have to call a company to do that. He quickly recommended Gembecki, based on previous experience (personal and professional).

So, I called Gembecki Mechanical to put in a service request. Within an hour I had talked to a few people, who were all very professional, and very upfront about what to expect (service time ETA, pricing, etc …). Around 11:30am, I got a call from someone at their office that Tony was going to be at my house within a half hour.

About 30 minute later, Tony showed up. I followed him around a lot (I have an insatiable curiosity about things) to see what was wrong, and how to fix it. After a bit of basic investigation, Tony was able to confirm that the refrigerant was low. 

Usually, when refrigerant is low, it’s because there’s a leak. My case is no different. I undoubtedly have a leak in the line between my air compressor (the big fan outside) and the air handler (the noisy thing inside). Rather than jump the gun on leak detection and repair, Tony asked me what I was comfortable with right now. 

My options were: pay now to try to fix the refrigerant line, that had a leak small enough to only become obvious after 2 years of use, or wait a little while longer to see if the refill holds for a while. Gembecki has a 30 day warranty on that sort of work, so if the leak becomes a problem quickly, they can send someone back out within a month for no charge. 

What’s more, the repair to the line (provided it’s not in a terribly obscure location) is relatively cheap. Given that Melissa is going out of town this weekend, and she’s been looking forward to her fun time; I elected with the more irresponsible option. I’m gonna wait it out. Money is still a little tight right now, and I don’t want Melissa to miss her chance to have a lot of fun with her friends this weekend over this.

Tony’s clear layout of my options were great. He was done within an hour and the house is cooling of quite nicely now. My total cost was $150, which considering everything they did for me, I couldn’t be happier about. I cant thank him and Gembecki Mechanical for everything they’ve done for me!!!

Yeah, so UCF Insider rocks, and you should check it out.

For those of you who don’t immediately see what I’m talking about, look at the lines on the screen ‘command.com’, ‘config.sys’, ‘bio.com’, ‘comspec.exe’, and ‘memory.dat’. Those are all very MS-DOS like files that run under typically Windows operating systems.

Seems appropriate, I suppose. Just think about it: “Police states of the future choose Microsoft!”

[Networks - The places online for social media]

1. Twitter – Probably not a surprise to most tech folks out there. For those of you who don’t know (geez), twitter offers a sort of ‘micro-blogging’ platform. It’s kinda like blogging for people who don’t have time to blog. With a max post length of 140 characters (not words), you can’t say too much. However, it’s a great way to keep up to date with your friends, or important people, like Tim O’Reilly. 

1.a. Pownce – For all the same as Twitter, but a different network (with more features too). This is Kevin Rose’s (Founder of Digg) Twitter Clone. 

2. Delicious – I can’t begin to say how much I like Delicious. The actual site (again, for those of you who are scratching your heads right now) is del.icio.us. The idea is to have a place online where you can store your bookmarks. That way, you never have to worry about not being able to find that one video online, when you’re at your mom’s house or something.

2.a. Magnolia. – For all the same reasons as Delicious. Magnolia is just a different interface to the same idea as Delicious. 

3. Flickr – Hands down, nobody has online photo sharing down like Flickr. The amount of things you can do to your photos with Flickr is nothing short of obscene. To top it off, the developers are a pretty eclectic group of characters. Call me an idealist, but I like the idea of nutty dudes (and dudettes) writing software that really does something for the world.

[Software - The stuff on your computer that helps _you_ out]

1. Twhirl – I use Twhirl pretty much exclusively for ‘tweeting’ these days. Twhirl runs off of Adobe AIR, a sort of intermediary between a program, and it’s operating system. This means that if you’re running Windows (XP, or whatever Vista variant), Linux (within reason), or OSX; you will be running the same program. That makes for easy support. Anyways, Twhirl is awesome because it doesn’t always give me the ‘too many requests’ errors of twitteriffic, AND it posts to Pownce for me too.

2. Flock – Flock is a browser that’s built on top of Firefox. It makes keeping up with Social Media sites pretty easy. Some of the features of flock (like the top media bar, displaying photos and videos) are equally awesome, and cumbersome. Despite some of it’s shortcomings, Flock is still a really cool app that does a good job of combining a web browser with a social media dashboard.

3. Adium – Now, some of you might not think of instant messaging as a type of social network. No websites, no pictures, no birthdays, no etc… However, IM was really the first type of social network, and it was well beyond it’s time. These days, if you’re not on IM, you don’t talk much to me. Seriously, my wife has to get on IM to chat with me, when we’re in the house together. IM is king, and Adium makes using IM a breeze.

I was scrolling through Twitter & Google Reader today, and something occurred to me: There are way too many social networks ‘out there’. It’s funny too, ’cause all of them want you and all your friends. It’s an obvious pitch (what business doesn’t want as many consumers as possible). The thing that’s interesting though, is to what length many social networks will go to get your friends.

I forget who’s blog I was reading, but someone made a really good point about handing out passwords in a social network signup process. Join LinkedIn or Facebook, and you’ll be prompted with a message asking for your Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.. email and password. The idea, is to get all of your existing friends immediately on this new social network. The point? That’s probably akin to handing out your social security number over the internet.

How preposterous is it to think it’s a good idea to hand out your email and password to a 3rd party? Your email, and it’s associated password are likely the most important passwords you have on the internet. So for someone to ask you to hand that out, is like a salesman asking for your house keys. Do you really trust someone you don’t know to be judicious with your most personal of internet information?

Add to that, Facebook Apps. A preface to all my friends, I like you, and I treasure your friendship. However, I never ever ever add Facebook Apps. Why? I don’t give out my personal info to 3rd party apps, just because my friend got roped into it. Just because all of your friends jump off the Brooklyn Bridge …

Facebook applications are a subset of social networks. Those applications, just like Bebo and Orkut, are looking for a larger and larger base of users, to justify some sort of buyout by a VC firm, or Ad revenue from someone else looking to tap into their publishing reach.

It may sound so obvious that it’s stupid. That’s fair, but really think about that the next time you want to send a ‘How Much Do You Think I’m worth’ invitation to me. The same way a stripper acts like she likes you, is the same way these apps pretend to provide something you might care about.

Remember, the underlying motivation is to reach as many people as possible. That’s very different than trying to help as many people as possible.

And that brings me to the point:

What are all these networks about? Really. After a while; I’ve connected with enough old friends, I’ve shared enough fun facts, and I’ve wasted enough of my life. What now? Where’s the value? If some network is going to ask for some of the most important information you have, then shouldn’t it be really worth it?

That’s the point. The way most social networks are written now, to reach the broadest base possible, there simply isn’t any real value provided. Granted, some folks will probably use them incessantly. For the rest of us, there’s a world out there waiting for us. 

So, the challenge:

To all you Social Network Entrepreneurs out there, how about a social network that actually provides something worthwhile? The next big thing is social networks isn’t just being in a network that has a refined set of the same features as everyone else. The next big thing must have more than that, like a social network that raises the average users credit score or something. 

I suppose it’ll happen about the same time we get WYTIWYG editing

** UPDATE ** I’d be completely remiss if I didn’t thank Chris Scott, a local Orlando developer for showing me the following video. Dude, you are the man. Thanks again.

[youtube bkSaNToDbW8]