Mod up for getting past the HR. You have 2 options here:
- network like hell to get directly to someone with a brain and decision power
- check out small/very small organisations where they have little or no HR
Another thing though: you will probably not be able to rise very much in the organizations you work for without a degree, but YMMV

A few years back I was in the same situation as the OP. I tried JS/HTML and there's no getting around it, the developer experience, the tools, the kludges you have to deal with are horrible. You can try to hide some of the suckiness with jquery and the like, but it's like sweeping dust under a carpet. It's still there, it's just that you have it isolated.
Flash was cool then so I moved to Flash, and though it has it's faults it's light years ahead of JS. Now things have changed so I wouldn't recommend going Flash anymore, but Haxe could alleviate the pain.
If you enjoy writing elegant code with a good IDE, stay away from the web unless you really need to. I decided to do web stuff anyway because of business reasons, but I do sometimes miss the Java work I used to do.

Noooo! I'm going to get in line 2 days ahead so I can be the first in the theater!

Collaborative democracy doesn't need the net. It works equally well with people shouting at themselves in a barn. The point of representative democracy is to elect somebody who you trust to make the right decisions for you. Obviously it doesn't work as well as planned, but imagine the opposite: every one of your neighbours has to vote on whether or not that new parking lot gets made. I don't see e-democracy or meta government change that fundamental situation.

Whoever came up with the idea of using "f-bomb" to avoid using "fuck" needs to be shot

I develop RIAs for a living, and I'll use whatever technology the customer wants. Once in a while somebody mentions Silverlight or HTML5, but 99% of the time they want Flash. Independently of any technical merits, Flash is all that they have heard of usually.

Something else that is worth watching is Flash. They have an export to iphone app planned for CS5, even if I'm kind of sceptical about it. And even if Flash dev still sucks, it beats developping with DHTML.

Hi, it won't necessarily do the project bit, but for organizing lists of tasks I find freemind a great tool. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Hi, Silex is a CMS that works nicely with touchscreens. It does multilingual pretty well, which I think you're going to need. It's Flash based, so it will work with Flash Media Server smoothly. It's open source so it should go with your Linux ethos. Now you just need some hardware that can take the abuse. take a look! http://silex-ria.org/ drop me a line if you want to talk about it (disclaimer, I'm a contributor) Ariel

I think there are a lot of things being mixed up here. My job in IT sucked. So I left and am now a freelancer doing web related stuff, and working as a teacher, also on IT related subjects. My point: it's having a boss that sucks, not the actual IT. When I come in from the outside and I'm being paid big bucks for it, I get respect that I wouldn't if I were a wage slave. The reason they treat salespeople better is that they know how to market themselves, whereas there is this persistent image of IT people as Rainman types who you can kick around. Unions would help, but just leaving works too. In France we call this "voting with your feet".