The Indians are lying in the weeds now. They no longer ring my phone off the hook with offers of immediate and preposterous employment. This may be because I haven't updated my resume on all the online posting services. Or possibly hiring managers have gradually grown wise to their antics.

I still get e-mail "offers" however. Here's the latest. It requires 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails and AJAX (both of which have been around for about three years). That should trim down the applicant pool.

 Oh, and you've got to move to Atlanta. Good to know.

Note the area code. That's the usual area code these characters use, 732. No address is given, but we appear to be in the swamp-and-stripmall wilderness of northern New Jersey. I imagine a switch room slightly larger than a broom closet, barely enough to establish a postal address and landline, and hold whatever equipment is necessary to route the phone calls from the boiler room in India.

Oops! Spoke too soon. Here's another one. This one operates out of a switch room in California. That's a change.This was sent with a "Re:" in the subject line, as though it were in reply to something I'd sent:

My name is Sam and I work with GIodyne Inc. We have an urgent requirement currently with our client.

Please let me know if you are currently available and looking for new projects. I would like to have the resume in word format to forward it to my team.

Below is the brief description of the requirement. Please take a look and reply soon to this e-mail with resume. Do not hesitate to call me if you have any queries.

Job Description:

The Lead UI Developer works with the Project Manager, Technical Lead Engineer, User Experience team and other engineers, Business Analysts, and QC Engineers on various projects within the Plateau Talent Management product suite.  He or she would be responsible for developing the UI artifacts required to implement the various product features while maintaining the highest quality standards during the entire development effort.  The Lead UI Developer would also be responsible for establishing and maintaining the overall UI standards and in mentoring other engineers and UI developers in adopting these standards across the suite of Plateau products.

The successful candidate has team leadership experience, is self-motivated, able to work independently with little or no supervision, and is committed to the highest standards of quality for the entire development effort. The candidate should have experience in the full lifecycle of large (preferably enterprise) application development, from requirements analysis and design through QC. Strong experience developing web-based user interfaces with application server development technologies is essential.

Required qualifications:

• 4+ years experience in user interface - web-based applications, 5+ years preferred
• Team leadership experience with a UI team
• Expert in Adobe Flex and ActionScript
• Experience developing reusable Flex components
• Good understanding of the Flex data models and integration with remote services such as Blaze DS
• Experience customizing existing Flex components
• Understanding of XHTML, DHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript development skills and cross browser compatibility issues.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced environment with high degree of complexity and change
• Flexibility to contribute on short notice when required by the business.
• 2+ years experience with one or more server-side web application technologies with a database-driven application
• Understanding of accessibility and web standards such as 508, W3C
• Experience with Windows 2000/XP, Mac OSX
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent job experience
• At least some exposure to the full product/project development lifecycle-requirements gathering and analysis, design, estimation, development, QC and user-acceptance testing
• Experience working on enterprise software delivered over the web a plus
• Experience in graphic design for the web (Photoshop, Fireworks, etc)

Location:Arlington, VA

Duration: Full Time (permanent)

Thank Gawd for this thing.

Sometimes a nabob or nitwit will ask me what my idea of good design is. I don't know what to say. And I freeze up if they couch it in that obscurantist and emptyheaded jargon they teach in classrooms (yes, believe it or not, some people actually Go to School to learn this stuff)...rubbishy buzzwords about Usability and Accessibility and Best Practices. 

But I CAN say..."Better if I tell you what a really BAD site looks like." And I steer them to BravoTV.com. 

If I'm feeling generous, I can study the site closely and make out what looks to be the skeletal conception of the thing. Banner ad on top, logo underneath, links at right, rest of page anchored by this skewed wide-format video still.

Somewhere in the Edenic prehistory of the site, in the Mind of its Prime Designer, this layout may have once been a Force for Good.

But now all those endless bloglinks and the ads for dogfood and visible pantyliners...just somehow...get in the way. 

"Build bulletproof web applications with Rails 2.0!" Or some such. That was the blurb for a recent book from Sitepoint (the Australian firm that cranks out a web-related book about every week, whether it's timely and needed or not, and promotes it with lame and chirrupy copy).

Bulletproof! That was also the first thing I thought of today upon waking. Because one thing my little foray into Ruby on Rails did not lead me to was a bulletproof, easy-peasy application. It took me a week or two just to get this app up and working. Then it fell down yesterday for no good reason (so far as I could tell). Surely a bulletproof application does not fall down for anything short of nuclear war or hack-attack by a teenage Turk. And in my half-sleep I lay there, wondering , "Is Ruby on Rails a fad going noplace? Fragile, unscalable? Falling down for no good reason? Was this just my Frog of 2008, kissed but still unkissable?"

 It turned out that there was nothing wrong with my website; the problem was that my webhost had upgraded Rails to a new version. And what do you know, this usually makes Ruby on Rails apps fall-down-go-boom. Right now I'm inclined to think that in two years' time we won't be hearing much more of Ruby on Rails.

This was my first RoR app and installation, and since putting it up I have forgotten most of what little I knew.

Last night my web hoster upgraded my Rails from 2.0.2 ro 2.2.2. Did you know that this usually breaks a Rails application? Well it does. Dreamhost says it notified everyone of the forthcoming upgrade, but I never heard anything, and neither did many other dissatisfied customers. 

Fortunately the fix was easy. 1) Change the version in the environment.rb, and 2) update the thing-- rake rails:update ... this last bit comes courtesy of Dave Hulihan himself. Thank you, Dave. 

It's good the New Year has started and I can pretend to make Resolutions.

Way up there on the list is the renewed resolve to avoid all Indian recruiters. In spite of my last two posts, I yielded to temptation a couple of days before New Year's. There was Haranth, passing me on to his good friend Rameet, who in turn had a friend named Anish who was the onsite hiring manager for an interactive firm located in...well where do you suppose? Yes, way out in East Buttfuck, New Jersey. 

It was a contractual job, the sort of thing that sounds less and less attractive the more you hear about it.  But your new Hindustani buddies somehow persuade you that this job--which pays decently, after all, and starts next Monday--is practically yours for the asking. 

So you break another promise to yourself and agree to do a Phone Interview. A phone interview is what they do when they don't really want to hire you but are obligated to do some perfunctory looking-around. Sometimes this is for a budgetary rule, sometimes it's because HR is pushing the Diversity racket. This has nothing to do with using Indian recruiters. No, it means somehow hiring a Woman. A Woman to work in a very Uncongenial Atmosphere, entirely populated by socially maladjusted males who are not even Americans, and in some cases not even Caucasian.

Work is a social experience above all else. You need to work with people like yourself, or Work just doesn't work. How can it? You're spending all your time doing anthroplogical investigations of another culture, and trying to understand your coworkers' incomprehensible idioms. Personally, I don't want to work with non-Caucasians, or even non-Americans, apart from the odd European. No, I want to work among nice all-American north-European types, the kind who built this country. Otherwise I'll go crazy and get cancer, because that's what Diversity leads to.

Anyway, I was interrupted in my afternoon's sejour at the Performing Arts Library by a mobile call from Anish, who was trying to set up a conference call with Konstantin. Konstantin! Fancy that, my prospective boss is a Russian geek, probably inarticulate, prone to firing trick classroom-style questions about "design patterns" at me.

And that's how it went. I eventually just said that I wasn't really interested in the job. That got Konstantin off the hook. He ddn't want me either. He wants another Russian, male. He doesn't want to work next to an American woman who makes him feel uncomfortable all the time.

No more, Rameet. No more, Anish. Au revoir, canards, canaille, conundrums.

The sea is still. The winds are quiet. Yet the phone still rings with unintelligible offers from the Hindustani recruiters.

There's something fishy about the whole business. These Indians do not speak good English. I do not think they are graduates of the University of Madras. They speak a kind of Basic Pidgin. They are always based in New Jersey, either in Bridgewater--a vast exurban swamp area south of Elizabeth--or in the vicinity of Newark. This is not to say they are physically there, but the tie-line travels through there, probably through some hovel of an office that a compatriot rents over a Mexican restaurant (run by real Mexicans).

It is quite possible they actually ARE in New Jersey, the same way a lot of desperate Bengalis are in Abu Dhabi. Somebody lured them over to work in a Balti House (wait--do we even HAVE Balti Houses in America?) and then took their passports away, and now they're imprisoned in a boilerroom and forced to make cold calls for 18 hours a day.

They do not leave phone messages. Some of the old Indians did, but these do not. I know of them only because I see these strange New Jersey numbers on the Caller ID, or because my husband picks up my line, and later says, "What's the story with these Indians?"

My East Indian recruiter friend Pharat is unlike most other East Indian recruiters, because when he phones he sounds as though he might very well be just down the street. When he says he's calling from New Jersey I believe him.

This is very different from most of the other East Indians I hear from. They always seem to be phoning me from a boiler room in Madras or Bangalore via an old-fashioned tie-line (although they often tell me they are phoning from Parsippany--why Parsippany, one wonders).

Their technique, obviously, is to scan the online job boards for open positions and CVs, and then try to match up a candidate. There's always a good chance the candidate has already applied for the job, and if the candidate is a real star he (or she) probably isn't looking for work anymore. I am not a star, so I stay in the orphanage, getting more and more scuffed and abandoned-looking.

I find that our friends from the Hindustani call centers get miffed if you call them on their deceit.  I can empathize.

...somehow we got this Amethyst blog raked and ready after ten days of twiddling. My installation kept conking out when it reached the database descriptors. After a dozen tries I put it aside for a few days.

My friend in Oslo, Geir, suggested it might a simple problem of syntax--the database.yml file might have a tab instead of spaces. From what I read around the web, that's a common problem. Alas, it wasn't that either.

It turns out that the database settings look for a "localhost" by default. Everyone expects you to test your application on your desktop before you move it to your server. Ha ha, not me. I just plunk it on the server and fire up. Eventually I found where to add the "host" line in the database.yml, but it took some hunting.

The blog app itself is a download from

http://www.hulihanapplications.com/

and while I don't want to sound ungrateful, I find this incredibly ugly. It's like user-interface design from the Carter Administration.  A portent of the next few years, perhaps?

Hulihan promises "customizable themes (coming soon)" but that was many months ago.