Ani DiFranco is going to be playing in the renovated Orpheum back home! I am so there! What a great excuse to finally see the new place!

It has been a while coming, but I'm beginning to realize I need to get back to taking care of myself, and not just taking care of my job and my professional career. To be honest, taking care of my job has gotten me relatively nowhere. Not the level of respect I would want, nor, more importantly, the level of income that I feel I can be worth. I need to start taking a step away from dwelling on that and spending so much time on it, and instead get back to taking care of myself again... The stress, the time given, and the amount of learning and effort and mental energy I devote to it, are all slowly outweighing the reasons to maintain such levels.

To put it in lame terms, why bother with the amount of stress and professional integrity I go through for the amount of pay that I do? I think perhaps it is more time to match effort with compensation, and look to balance that out by bringing up the enjoyment of the rest of my life again, before it slips further by...

Sticker: My kid reads your honor student's email.

I just wanted to put on here that it is high time I moved over to Linux as the OS on my main box. Now would be a good time too, since I'm not really doing much on this particular box other than learning some coldfusion and SQL...

Bush uttered a new "Bushism" today:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

An article on CNN.com illustrates a wonderful example of "not my problem" issues when it comes to the environment.

A huge "dead zone" of water so devoid of oxygen that sea life cannot live in it has spread across 5,800 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico this summer in what has become an annual occurrence caused by pollution.

"Fish and swimming crabs escape [from the dead zone]," said Nancy Rabalais, the consortium's chief scientist for hypoxia, or low oxygen, research. "Anything else dies."

In the last 30 years, the dead zone has become an annual summer phenomenon, fed by rising use of nitrate-based fertilizers by farmers in the Mississippi watershed, Rabalais said.

Farmers don't in land-locked states don't have to worry about a mysterious "dead zone" down near the Gulf of Mexico. But that's the story about nature and physics, you do something somewhere, and it affects things everywhere else; cyclical.

Professionals are like cars in terms of value. Cars have a particular book value that is determined by how much the car is worth to most people based on marketing, engineering, accounting, and many other factors that finally dictate exactly what the book value of a car is; the bottomline value of the car on the market. For the sake of argument, I will make the terms "book value" and "sticker price" the same, as in there is no difference in them.

This car then has an additional relative value to each individual buyer. Perhaps a particular car has a particular aesthetic appeal to me, an image, a few particular features that are more special to me than to all the John Doe's down the street. This inflates the value of the car beyond just the book value. Likewise, perhaps a car looks ugly or is very unreliable in accidents and thus may increase the chances of harm coming to my family should there be a downturn in luck on the road. This then deflates the value of the car below the book value.

People buy a car, or decide that a car is buyable when the relative value is higher than the book value. If an object is perceived to be worth $25 to me, but the price is $30, then I won't buy it. Only when the relative value of the item is equal to or greater than the book value...then do I consider the item to be desirable. If an item has a book value (sticker price) of $45 dollars, but to me, a loyal consumer of this particular product, it might actually be worth $60 to me. This is a good deal in my eyes! They could charge more for the product, and I'd still buy it. This is the relative value of the product.

I think people can be seen in much the same way. People in a particular profession or job type have a particular book value. In other words, they have an average value across the industry that they can expect to earn. This can be based on education, experience, skillsets.

In addition, people can have an inflated (or deflated) relative value to the particular company. Perhaps an employee has a particularly good reputation amongst the peers in the company, or has a particular set of knowledge about a company process that everyone else competing for the job does not have. This inflates their relative value to the company, ths increasing what the company would pay this person. Take for instance 4 years of experience. This is a lot of experience and knowledge not just about the job this person will be doing, but about the company, processes, technologies, and culture that this person has acquired above and beyond what a fresh new worker will have knowledge about. That's inflated relative value. This is relative value and not book value, because the knowledge this person has or experience this person has in one company's processes and tecnologies may not necessarily convert to another company.

Much like the standard car can be of particular extra relative value to individual people, standard workers can be of particular extra relative value to individual companies.

Unlike cars, I don't think people depreciate quite as much. In fact, I think they appreciate instead. The longer a worker works, and the more valuable and knowledgable the worker becomes, the higher the value of that worker. This may be a reason why so many employers (and I believe state laws) require yearly compensation increases...to acknowledge the idea that experience helps an employee by adding relative value on top of the book value.

Of interest pretty much only to me, I've been poring over my log files for my web server; I certainly don't do enough of this so I might have to craft some perl script to parse them out for me. But I do get to see a number of different exploits up close and personal. None of which have done any damage as they all appear to target programs I do not have installed, and also appear to be pretty random scans.

The most prevalent is easily a DocuShare exploit that is actually probably pretty old (at least back in 2002 DocuShare installed with full access to everyone by default...wow). Following that one is a FormMail battery of attempts, MS WebDav exploits, and attempts to overrun a MS FrontPage Extension buffer...and on down through a trickling of other attempts.

Still, even in the 2 weeks' worth of logs I read through, there were well over 2 dozen exploit attempts and/or scans that my webserver actually picked up, plus the multitude of others that are not picked up. It just illustrates how dangerous it can be for people not familiar with things to be putting systems, webpages, and other services out on the Internet. If I had put out a default IIS 5.0 installation, my computer would easily have already been owned by someone else and used for who knows what purpose.