You are rather dense aren't you. Simply put I live where I do because it makes me HAPPY. I am able to DO WHAT I WANT without people ( like you ) telling me what I can and can not do. My neighbors are like minded people who believe everyone should be able to live without interference. Why should I work in an area that does not make me happy? Why should I consent to subject myself to people who believe it is OK to IMPOSE their beliefs upon me? Why should I have recruiters harassing me about opportunities in areas that I will not be happy living in even for short periods. I should not. For me, $500/hr is not sufficient to entice me to work elsewhere simply because I would not be HAPPY in another area. No amount of money is enough. If you can not understand that, oh well. From what I see, you are a small sorry human being who is not happy unless he/she are right all the time.

jschell wrote:

I would be willing to work anywhere in the US

That's you, and I am me. Everyone is different. Each of us, have certain preferences, brought on by our life's experiences, possibly colored by our prejudices valid or not. I prefer to live where I do for various reasons, including my hobbies. It was difficult finding a property not encumbered by HOA or covenant bullshit so I could pursue mu hobbies as I choose. For example, as an amateur radio operator, I have spent years setting up a bunch of HF, VHF and UHF antenna systems. My current project is a phased array of 16 antennas for 440Mhz Moonbounce. I hesitate to even estimate how long it would take me to take down all the antennas, amplifiers, disassemble the towers and dig up all the buried cables let alone putting them all up again elsewhere. I would have difficulty just moving down the mountain because of this one issue alone. Having lived in the Northeast, land of liberals who believe everyone's pursuit of happiness must give way to their own, I know it could take years to find a property when I could pursue my amateur radio hobby the way I desire in any Blue State. Again, it rude and obnoxious for a recruiter to call me about an opportunity outside my stated preference while implying they have read my resume which clearly states my location preference. I have had many recruiters continue contacting me even after I requested to be removed from their database. My solution to continued calls was to state a rate that I KNOW would not be considered. I feel it would be just as unprofessional to turn down an offer after I quote a high albeit possible rate. I found that stating a "ridiculous" rate the best way to handle the situation.

jschell wrote:

No I understand your point.
My point is that everything is always a negotiation.

You ARE missing the point. There is NO room for negotiation. I used to live in the Northeast and I know from experience that I would not be able to reproduce my lifestyle anywhere up there at a "reasonable rate". Currently I have a 30 minute commute to work and return every night to my home on a mountain ridge with sufficient land to more than adequately ensure my privacy. I do not have neighbors nor government agencies trying to tell me what I can and can not do. If I feel like target shooting or hunting on my property I can. If I want to start raising chickens or other live stock, I can; without having to jump through hoops imposed by others seeking to limit my pursuit of happiness. I simply do not want to live or work outside the Southeast. Period. End of story. In reality NO AMOUNT OF MONEY could entice me to work anywhere else.

jschell wrote:

I also understand that it possible, although unlikely, that they would in fact pay me what I would consider worthwhile. But for that to be meaningful I at least need to have some idea what a real the actual rate that I would need where I would actually do it.

Why should I care about a reasonable rate when I have absolutely no interest in relocating. The sole purpose of that ridiculous rate is to get recruiters who are too lazy to read a resume to REMOVE me from their database so they do not continue to harass me.

jschell wrote:

Perfectly reasonable but you should actually pick a rate which, presumably, isn't ridiculous and yet if they did agree to that then you would be happy accepting the job. You might also want some other requirements as well such as length of employment and early termination severance.

You are totally missing the point. I have clearly written in my resume I am only interested in specific areas of Southeastern US. If a recruiter would just read my resume they would know I am not interested in opportunities in say Philly or Dallas or San Francisco. In the past I have asked recruiters from these areas to remove me from their databases and subsequently I would still be contacted. I found giving a ridiculous rate achieves what a polite request fails to do.

Cheers, Tim W.

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

The problem is that they can't pay me enough to work in a blue state, especially if it's above the snow line.

I feel the same way. But if a company want me bad enough to pay $100,000/hr then I could manage "force" myself to work there, for a couple of weeks. Even in the heavily taxed Northeast, I would be taking a nice chunk of change home. I would be able pay off all the bills and still be able to take a few months/years off after working a few weeks. Do I think a company will really pay me that kind of money? No. Never. But it does encourage the northern recruiters to remove me from their databases, which is what I want.

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

To be honest, it's hard enough to stay in Texas.

It is the same here in northeast Tennessee. Most employers here do not want to pay much but then want you to work like a slave. Right now I am working as a consultant/contractor; The pay is okay and I get treated better than the employees. I have had to work away from home at times. I can make 2X what I make locally when I work away from home. I limit myself to areas within the Southeast when I do consider working out of the area. I tend to work near Atlanta a lot, mostly because (a) I have college friends there who are amenable to leasing me a couple of rooms in the basement at a decent rate and (b) I already have working relationships with the local recruiters.

Cheers, Tim W.

I figure if a recruiter wants to attempt to convince me to go to a location I do not want to work, then the rate should capture my interest. Having worked in the northeast US before, it would take far more than $100/hr to want to deal with living in a big city. Besides, if I ever do find a sucker, I mean an opportunity that would pay like that, I could retire after a couple of weeks.

Cheers, Tim W.

I understand your pain. Like you I have been working in the field for an extended time, 20+ years. I have on my resume that I do not want to relocate, but constantly get recruiters contacting me about opportunities "up north." At the beginning of my career I lived in one of those northern states whose name begins with "New", and have since escaped to the mountains of eastern Tennessee via Atlanta. I guess that since I worked up north at one time, recruiters think I would be eager to return to snow-blower country, places like Boston, Philly, NJ, or NYC. I found that no matter how much I would indicate I was not interested nothing seemed to deter recruiters from repeatedly wasting my time and theirs. I finally got smart and started speaking their language, $$$$. Now when contacted by a recruiter about a position in an area I am not interested in I simply state "To get me even remotely interested in going to so-and-so the rate will have to be something God-aweful, like $100,000/hr. Now if you have something closer to my area I can come down significantly." I just love the shocked silence that ensues. I have yet to have a recruiter contact me a second time.

Cheers, Tim W.

CaptainSeeSharp wrote:

Why do math on paper if you can just use a calculator?

At least when I do math on paper I can figure out where I screwed up and fix it Using a calculate you just have to waste time and energy by starting... awwwww hell you like to start from scratch anyways.

I took a look at you site and I caught a few things that would make me thing twice about hiring you. First, you do not really appear to know your target group. While you are targeting both web design firms needing to outsource work, you are also targeting individual business owners. Your message will be understood by design firms, it is way over the heads of most business owners seeking web exposure. It is the business owners you should be directing your message towards since there are way more of them than there are design firms. Over all, these clients do not care about "elegant code" or "beautiful code". They do not care about technical details. Those wikipedia links just confuse the issue. You need to keep your message simple...how can you help their business grow. Second, you do not explain why your way of doing things is good. You just say how you do them. What you need to do is adjust your message to how does your way of doing things help the potential client. How does your way solve their problems and help them sleep at night. Lets look at the section of page one about "Standards". Clients really do not care about customer experience or faster downloads. Just look at all the crappy, hard to use web sites out there. What you should be saying is that abiding by standards allows their web page to be seen functioning correctly by more customers using many different browsers, and that a well functioning web site leads customers to a perception of competence and confidence in the business, which leads to orders etc, etc.... You might want to also say standards also permits making future modifications easier/simpler and therefore less expensive to their bottom line. Lastly, incorrect grammar. Simple grammar mistakes are killer. For example, your line "Software doesn't need to suck but it usually does, because it's to complex." The final "to" should be "too". When you are in a technical field, where attention must be paid to detail, you can not afford to make these kind of mistakes. They indicate sloppiness and ineptitude. If you can not take the time to make your web site perfect why should your clients believe anything you say about making theirs perfect?

Under "File/New" you should also see a selection for "Website". Select "Website" instead of "Project."

For me monitor size is important, but you must also consider your video card resolution also. There is no sense in getting a high resolution monitor if your video card can not drive it at those higher resolutions. That said, get the biggest monitor you can afford and drive it at the highest resolution you can easily read. For example, I use a 21" ViewSonic P810 at 1800 x 1440 resolution. At this resolution I get 66 lines of code on the screen versus 17 lines of code at 800x600 resolution. More lines of code on the screen reduces the amount of paging required to view the code, the more paging that is done the more likely one is to lose their train of thought. The more lines of code on the screen makes it easier it is to follow the code functionality. If I could get a bigger monitor I would because bigger monitors at higher resolution makes me more productive.

Everyone has a favorite way to architect an application. My design philosophy is different from yours which is different from Joe Cool's down the street. Personally I believe exceptions should be thrown and handled by the layer that makes the most sense. If the user is entering data into an interactive application, and an exception is thrown in the data layer, the exception should percolate back to the user if it is something that the user could fix. This way he knows how to fix the problem, and let you know you should have figured out a way to better validate data before the record/s got send to the database. If application is non interactive, a batch job say, let the database handle it by logging the error, and putting the troublesome record to the side, either storing it in a temp table or a file and then going on to complete the rest of the processes. In most cases there is no need to propagate exception outside the layer in which they occurred. SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0 No rows returned

for lots of things: 1. Hang em from a string to keep birds out of the garden. 2. Throw em in the air to shoot at. 3. Coasters 4. Frisbees Add some of you own "Things to do with toasted DVDs" to this list.

I am working on a project that communicates to an embedded microprocessor through a USB/UART chip. The processor is wired so that it can be reprogrammed through the UBS/UART also. My software is able to open the serial port and communicate with the microprocessor. I open the serial port with the following parameters: Baud 115200, Data Bits: 8, Stop Bits One, Parity: None, and Handshake: None. The problem occurs when the serial port opens: the DTR line goes low momentarily, which causes the microprocessor to reset. The software to reprogram the microprocessor forces the DTR low during the reprogramming process, so we can not just disconnect the DTR line. Basically, my question is this: is there anything in the SerialPort.Open() internals, or the internals of the WinSDK functions that the Open() uses that would explain this?