Cory Collier

Web Development is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Nearly every day some new product or development turns the whole scene on it’s head. Just a dozen years ago, the thought of being a web developer was less than promising for most folks. Today, that’s quite different.

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.

I went to my first UCF home game at the new stadium yesterday, and I’m a little disappointed at the experience. There was plenty of cool tailgating going on, and there are a lot of new shiny buildings out there which were really nice too. Shiny things withstanding though, I’d rate it a mediocre experience for a few reasons.

• 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. Continue reading »

So I got a call from a client today regarding a few issues they were having. Most of the problems weren’t all that difficult to solve, save one….

The boss’s computer would immediately log off after he tried to logon. While this might sound funny (in other circumstances, it really is), the client (who is a really cool guy, whom I respect a lot) did not think it was funny at all.

So, I dived into the Google to find out the issue. The short version; there was a bad registry setting. Basically, when this sort of thing happens, the first thing you should check is the registry. Now, you can’t connect to the registry locally, since you can’t logon to the computer with this issue.

So, the first thing you need to do, is logon to a computer on the same network as a user who has administrative rights on the computer concerned. Once you’ve gotten that far, you’ll need to open regedit. Something like this:

After that, you’ll need to connect to the computer in question. That’s easy, check the following pics:

then… 

The following key is what you should be looking for:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

That key should contain a string value for ‘Userinit’. If you’re confused, you should see something like the following:

Well, you probably shouldn’t see the green box, but you should see the string value for Userinit. If you don’t see that value in the root of key Winlogon, then you’ll need to create it. 

That’s not too bad either. First, right click the right hand pane of the registry editor:

Select the ‘String Value’ item in the right click menu. Once you’ve gotten that done, you’ll have a new string value in the right hand pane, awaiting you to name it. It’ll look something like: 

Name the string Userinit. After you’ve done that, right click the entry and select ‘Modify’. Make sure that the value for the key is:

c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe

Again, here’s a picture:

And that’s it. If you have any issues after you’ve gotten this done, I recommend an ERD disk or formatting your HD. Those are extreme options, I know. However, I don’t think you want to tool around with your computer for hours on end ( or maybe you do ).

So, as  a follow up to my rant about the lack of value in most social networks that clog the arteries of the internet these days; I thought it’d be a good idea to follow up with some thoughts on networks and programs that I do like, and why I think they’re cool.

[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]