Russell Beattie

I had a damn long day. I got to work at 9:30 a.m. with a deadline for delivering a build at around 6 p.m. or so (9:00 a.m. EST). I was still there at 9:30 p.m. before I finally got things working and had to wait for another hour to babysit the 85megs of code to SCP over to the U.S... Ugh. It's only 13 hours of work or so, but it was one of those days when I didn't even stop for lunch and was eating junk food all day. Just pure stress. Lots of people have been waiting on this stuff for over a month also, which just added to the tension. Hopefully things will calm down a bit now and I can cut back on the hard liquor after work.

Anyways, I didn't get a chance to write what was going on with my website. An article I wrote a few days ago about the Spanish job market - which I'm sure most people outside of the country just blew off - got a large quote and a link in the Spanish Slashdot: BarraPunto. The comments are pretty supportive, but do range from "right on!" to "what's this stinking yanqui know about our country?" which sounds about par for the course on a rant like that. ;-)

Barrapunto doesn't get anywhere near the traffic as Slashdot and its forums aren't nearly as popular and so at first I just sort of thought it was interesting. Now that well over a hundred Spanish readers have clicked over to this site, I'm wondering how far the effects of this post will go. It'll be interesting to see if any of my Spanish coworkers put 2 and my blog together.

This has happened before with serious consequences... I ripped into ATG Dynamo on a TheServerSide forum last summer while working at Telefonica I+D. The people at ATG followed my link back to my blog, didn't like what I was saying about their technology nor my opinions about Spain, found out where I was working, went to my bosses who decided to print out pages of offending posts and then confronted me about them in a meeting. It was, ahem, less than fun. To their credit - no one said "you need to delete these posts" they just said, "you shouldn't have mentioned our names together, because the project is secret. And oh, by the way, we don't like this post about Spain."

I had actually just started blogging, Alex had just been born and I just landed a job after being out of work for 6 months, so I capitulated and deleted posts. That won't happen EVER again. First and foremost, I think this weblog is doing more for my life than any job or any boss that might get annoyed at some off hand remark I said. Secondly, I've made sure not to repeat that mistake above and not reveal any info that's not publicly available including not hiding who I work for (though I don't mention them often because of my ever-increasing Google ranking - the last thing I want is for my blog to come up on the first page with them!).

Anyways... you can't hide while you're blogging even if I wanted to. Google knows all. Some bozo the other day who works for IBM of all places ended his email with "Unlike yourself, I am reserved about posting things online where my manager or colleagues can read them. Doesn't that worry you at all?" Uhh... No it doesn't, because I'm not a spineless twerp. There'll always be other jobs.

And on that note, it's back to the Jack Daniels.

-Russ