dive into mark

So, I have direct deposit now. Which is nice, since my bank doesn’t have weekend hours. My first job out of college, I worked for a small software startup run out of a guy’s home office. And by office, I mean dining room. And by home, I mean apartment. He had incorporated the business in Indiana but then moved to Philadelphia. Every two weeks, I’d call over to the other side of the dining room and say, Hey Jon, isn’t it payday? And he would rummage around the clutter on his desk to find the company checkbook, and pay me with a hand-written out-of-state check. I would walk down the street to the bank, who would grudgingly accept it and then take five days to clear it.

Tim Bray’s account of his first days at Sun is interesting. Large companies are, well, large. It’s not all engineers injecting raw packets into exposed network cables. Some of it is, you know, overhead.

On Friday, I drove to Philadelphia to see some old friends, and to go to another friend’s wedding. It’s 900 miles roundtrip. You might think it would be easier to fly, and that thought occurred to me on I-95 while I was cursing DC traffic on Friday afternoon. But then I got home and discovered that, while I was cursing DC traffic on Friday afternoon, my airport was on fire. And it’s a good thing I didn’t need to go any further north, since further north, I-95 was on fire. I managed to get myself to and from Philadelphia this weekend while unwittingly avoiding two flaming balls of fire. I may never leave my house again. Oh wait…

Outside my office, down the hall, and to the left, we have a small kitchen. Like every company kitchen, it has a refrigerator for people to store boxed lunches and such. And like every company refrigerator, it sports a sign in Comic Sans Serif which states, contradictorily:

• Keep the refrigerator clean, there are no maids on this floor
• All items left in the refrigerator will be thrown out every Friday

Which begs the question of who, exactly, is going to throw everything out. The answer, as I discovered this morning, is no one. Someone had a party on Friday, while I was driving through DC and RDU was on fire, and this morning there was a large 3/4-empty pizza box in the refrigerator. The sign is just a remnant of the Kitchen TSA.

A few months ago on a whim, I defensively registered diveintomark.com and set it up to redirect to diveintomark.org. You know, in the hopes that someday I would be popular enough that people would want to register variations and typos of my name and set up porn sites. Come to think of it, flaming balls of fire would make a good name for a porn site. Come to think of it, so would come to think of it. Edgy intellectual porn, run by English major dropouts who spend their days penning subtle sexual puns and overusing adverbs.

Anyway, every few hours, for the past four months, Bloglines comes searching for my b-link feed on diveintomark.com, and every few hours, for the past four months, I have used an HTTP 301 status code to permanently redirect them to the appropriate feed on diveintomark.org. I’m not sure how much more explicit I can be about this.

Note to web spammers: you have no marketable job skills whatsoever. The skills you’re acquiring now? Not that useful. Don’t really pay well. Not much demand, except from criminals, who don’t really pay well. They’ll say they do, but they don’t really. The sites and products and schemes you’re hawking are probably illegal, which decreases the long-term payoff dramatically. Plus, you spend all your time surrounded by losers, which to me is too high a cost, regardless of payoff.

Here’s the point: experience is what you get doing what you do every day. You may be an experienced spammer, but that’s not a transferrable skill. You’re not gaining any skills that could be put to better use later. You may tell yourself that you are, but you’re not really. You may also tell yourself that you’re building a large network of professional contacts, but in reality the only people you know are criminals.

I wrote a little series, then I built a little site. Then (and this is the really magical part), lots of people linked to it on their own. It ranks highly in search engines, it’s been translated into several languages, and it helped me get a new job. This is not the only path to success, by any means, but that doesn’t mean that all paths are equal either. You’re surrounded by losers running from the law, and I’m surrounded by smart people and have direct deposit.