dive into mark

Wow. I got over 19,000 hits yesterday, and I’m averaging 2,000 an hour today. To quote Oscar Wilde (or maybe it was just a Monty Python skit), “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” I should get fired more often and start selling ad space. ;-)

Thanks to MetaFilter for the lively discussion (and several thousand referers). Also Dave Winer and Robert Scoble of UserLand, Dan Lyke of Flutterby, the strange, strange people behind Cruel.com, and the many others who linked to me.

Thanks also to all the people who have sent me words of encouragement via email. However, it has come to my attention that a few of you are digging up email addresses of executives at my former company and sending them distinctly unencouraging messages. Please cut it out; it serves no constructive purpose. “Most of the people you hate don’t know it, and the rest don’t care.”

And finally, thanks to the very special people who have sent me job leads. I am following up with several local contacts, including a very promising-looking web design shop in Raleigh. (Their lead technical guy maintains a personal weblog of his own, and he seems much cooler than my former boss. Steve, if you’re reading this, please call me or reply to my email; I’m convinced we’d work well together.)

Today’s Zen meditation, brought to my attention by one of my 19,000 readers yesterday, is from Dogen (1200-1253):

Magnanimous Mind is 
Like a mountain,
Stable and impartial. 
Exemplifying the ocean, 
It is tolerant 
And views everything 
From the broadest perspective.

Afternoon update: Woohoo! Steve got back it me. It sounds very promising. I’ll keep you posted.

To the rest of you geeks, wondering why you should hire me, I’ll tell you here what I told him. Well, first off, I told him all the standard reasons: I have a strong and broad technical background, I pick things up quickly, I work well in a team. Yawn. All true, but a dime a dozen. Then I told him the real reason:

Simply put, I’m one of the really good ones. The hardcore geek, tempered with real world experience and a belief that technology should work for people, not the other way around.

• I was the freshman in high school huddled in the back of the computer lab writing 6502 assembly language in Merlin while seniors were sitting in the front struggling through stupid recursion-based Fibonacci programs in Pascal.
• I was the guy in college who got calls at the computer lab, because everybody who knew me knew it was pointless to call my dorm room.
• I was one of the guys on the Internet releasing GPL software years before it was cool, back when the best place to get source code was on Usenet groups (one of which I started, and got it picked up by the major backbones by seeding it with my own code).
• I’m the guy who installed Mandrake Linux on my iMac last week for fun. And then I installed LinuxPPC on my old Powermac 8500 and configured it with Apache, Samba, and sshd. And then, for absolutely no reason at all except to be able to say that I did it, I installed NetBSD on my Mac IIci. Now that’s hardcore geekdom.
• At the same time, I’m the one sitting in meetings saying things like “Is that what our users *want*? Couldn’t we make it easier for them? Couldn’t we automate this part? If 99% of the orders are dated today, why in the world can’t we default the ‘order date’ field to the current date? Are you people insane or merely sadistic?”

Don’t you wish you had more people like that? You could. Hire me. Before Steve does.

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