OK … for starters … I think people trying to better themselves through getting an education and getting a better job is a great thing. A wonderful thing. Certainly better than being stuck in a dead-end job, living in a bad neighborhood, etc. etc. etc. But the good folks (they are “educators”) at places like DeVry and ITT Tech. are pushing the envelope these days. I see their ads on TV every night, and being someone who grew up with the high-tech industry, and have been working in it for twenty-five years, well, the lies get hard to watch.

To begin with, jobs in computers and IT just aren’t as easy to get as ten years ago. Between the recession and the rampant out-sourcing of jobs to Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim, the opportunities are severely limited. And companies would prefer to hire someone from a 4-year college, or with some experience.

But the ads on TV make it sound like after a 2- or 3-year program you can become a Director of IT overnight. Or be buying houses and cars. Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen. The tech-sector doesn’t pay like it used to – again, thanks to the recession…

The latest versions of all the IM clients are starting to border on bloatware and adware … in some cases, both. In my cruising for new technology I came across meebo. An AJAX-based multi-protocol IM client. It doesn’t do all the wizzy things like video and file transfers. But it sends and receives messages, and it archives everything in one place you can get at from any machine you’re logged into. Ain’t that what IM is supposed to do?

Plus, it logs you into all your IM accounts at once and it seems to grab and manage all the contacts you have everywhere just fine. Being AJAX-based, you basically turn a browser window into an MDI (multiple document interface) for all your chat windows. Which I guess isn’t as “nice” as having them all on your desktop. But there’s no ads, no spyware, and it loads as fast as a web page – nice.

Chalk this up to one of those “things that make you go ‘Hmmm’”. Ken Lay, the man who led Enron to screw over many, many, many Americans in an orgy of corporate greed and deceit, quietly dropped dead in July at his home in Aspen. Just a few months before he was to be sentenced to probably (hopefully) spend the rest of his life in jail for his part in the Enron scam. There’s a bunch of things one can say, and surmise about this; a feast for conspiracy theorists, no doubt. But still, it was a curious turn of events and one does have to wonder if he’d have croaked like that if he hadn’t been found guilty. Anyway …

• Lay was a freind of W’s. The Bush’s probably didn’t want him in jail, where he could be pumped (sic) for information on dealings with the White House. So a convenient CIA-esque quiet death … the kind of thing ole Ross Perot would go off about … comes into play. Not that far from believable.
• A quiet death was too good for him. He should have come down with AIDS or that Flesh-Eating diseases … or at

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