Just a couple of exceptions to this. First, the only part of our calendar that is based on 'astrological' occurrences would be the Zodiacal Signs, and it is arguable that these are not part of a 'modern' calendar. The others are based on *Astronomical* events. Your post implies that there is a certain arbitrariness in the choice of using the revolution of the Earth around the sun as the basis for a year. Of course, you could use some other planet's year, but then you would have a terrible time working out the seasons. Most other temporal measures longer than an hour and shorter than the century, are also, with greater or lesser accuracy, based on actual things that happen in the Sun-Earth-Moon system. Season - bounded by the extreme and median positions of the Sun's apparent motion north and south in the Earth's sky Month - 1 revolution of the Moon around the Earth Week - Easily quantifiable phases of that Moon's illumination as seen from Earth Solar Day - 1 rotation from noon to noon of the Earth Sidereal Day - 1 rotation from 'fixed star' to fixed star of the Earth (about 4 minutes shorter than the solar day).

I'm a #9.

I got laid off in November from an online travel company that had a double whammy - bad economic times for travel and they lost a big corporate contract the month before. I had only worked for them for a year.

I am good at what I do, but I am not able to make that ranking of "hey I am the best of the best". I have met many better than I am and I have met many who never had an original thought. But in general, I am unable to really rank anyone other than those I work directly with.

As for the market, I have applied for probably about 40 full time jobs since I got sacked. Of that I have had about 5 phone interviews. I am working 3 part time jobs, one of which isn't even in IT.

It seems that employers are becoming incredibly picky. Last week I applied for a job for which I was dead on for every one of the required qualifications, except 1. I had long time UNIX experience, all the way back to Sys V in AT&T. I had Solaris, HP-UX and Linux - years of all of them (sys admin as well as software development in C, C++, Shell, Perl, Python, Web, ...). The hiring company wanted all of that, and AIX. I didn't even get to talk to them. The recruiter said the AIX was a deal breaker.

As an aside, I could be way off, but my experience tells me that UNIX is UNIX. With the exception of where each sticks its application packages and some differences in the init files, it is pretty much all the same. Maybe they thought I would be unable to learn the intricacies of the administration console.