Dell is Hell. In the last 2 weeks I’ve been on the phone with Dell reps for well over 7 hours total. A few weeks back we ordered a 1U server and we needed it before the end of February. The highly praised Dell “just in time” business model gave me a ship date of Feb 26th with overnight delivery. A day after completing the order, I checked the status and the ship date jumped to March 12th.

I called Dell support to see if the order could be expidited to arrive before the end of February. Indian tech support reps told me they would expidite the order to March 9th. Dell’s response was, “We can remove all shipping charges and get you the server by March 9th.” After explaining several times again that the server was needed by end of February I finally had to cancel the order.

Cancelling the order should be easy, however my experience was almost worse then trying to cancel AOL. In hindsight, I wish I recorded these calls with Dell. I was routed through 4 representatives before getting to sent to a manager’s voicemail system. I called back, went through 3 more reps and then canceled the order. Ordeal over, or so I thought. (more…)

Following up on my previous topic about the woes of hiring web developers, we’ve decided to actually pay to post an opening on Monster.com. Thus far, I’m not impressed at all with Monster and I’m left to wonder how has Monster been able to retain dominance in the job search space.

Let’s begin with the job search system.

We’ve posted a job opening in the Denver, CO market under the keywords web developer. From the homepage, if you search on the phrase “web developer”, and “select category” is blank and “select job location” is Colorado-Denver, there we are numero uno! (more…)

In the past we’ve had great success pulling in resumes for web developers and asp.net programmers. It seems as if in the last 6-8 months the pool of resumes has dried up. At first I thought maybe our job posting was poorly writen, but after talking with several area competitors it seems we’re not the only ones. Which leads me to wonder where have all the web developers gone?

Have the post dot com bust web developers taken jobs elsewhere? Has the surge in Indian off-shore programming scared developers away?

There has been a lot of hype lately about Linden Lab’s Second Life. There have been all kinds of crazy numbers thrown around about millions of users and people making lots of money in this virtual world. Apparently in their effort to be more transparent and open they have let the cat our of the bag on their actual number of users. It turns out that around 5 out of 6 new users bail in the first month. Of those that stick around, only 10% of those have spend more than 40 hours total in the game. According to this article in Valleywag that works out to less than 200,000 people who have even played the game more than 40 hours over the entire history of the game. Most people don’t have enough time for their first life, much less a second life!

One of my biggest pet peves in .NET, specifically .NET 1.1, is the enter key when it pertains to a web form. Back in the old days, ASP web developers with round sunglasses and lava lamps cluttering their desks had the ability to use multiple form tags on the web page. When users would enter misspelled text into a INPUT box and pierce the enter key with 3 fingers, that form would submit its information to its ACTION destination.

Since Bill Gates invented DataSets, ViewStates, and PostBacks, he removed the need for multiple forms on a page. In .NET 1.1, developers admiring their Thundercats collection and listening to A-HA, tried to have a search box in their page header and a sign-up form below only to wave their fist in the air in vexation. When a user would hit the enter key in the sign-up form, it activated the search button in the page header. What to do? WHAT TO DO!?

Enter ASP.NET 2.0.

Very early in my trek using 2.0, I learned of the DefaultButton attribute in the FORM tag. You can now specify which form button is activated when a user hits the enter key. This is accomplished by a javascript function that gets rendered when the page loads called “WebForm_AutoFocus.” This is great and all but how does this help when I’m trying to mimic multiple web forms?

While coding an ASP:PANEL in Visual Studio Express, I noticed Intellisense give me the option to place a DefaultButton attribute in the panel. WHAT!?! If you incapsalate form sections of your web page with ASP:PANEL’s, you can pay homage to those ASP coders of the past and imitate multiple web forms.

Just keep your users from disabling Javascript…