A long time ago I worked with a Boss who would say just about anything to keep his superiors happy and got extremely angry if we raised concerns about the project with him via email.

I think the idea of not sending emails works at certain levels of a business but at the worker ant level it can realistically be the only way to protect yourself from the corporate psychopath or from just simply being burnt by an idiot work colleague, or worse, a sneaky client just trying to get work for free.

From my own experience, contract interviews are 1 hour technical interviews where you go over some of your work history discussing technical aspects of each development.

In my very distant past, I 'broke' into a new language by stating the previous bankrupt company I had worked at for 3 months, used this technology. In my own time I'd put together a very complex application in that language as a 1 month coding exercise. I had already been developing applications for 5+ years by then.

Seriously, if you know your stuff, are intelligent and have decent development time under your belt, this type of 'deceit' is successful. Turn up to a place and not being able to deliver....that's when you deserve everything you get.

If you are going for contract work, the last thing people actually do is check your degree or to a certain extent, your work history. Be warned, the agent will call old work places to find new contract leads.

They just want to know if you can do the job, that you can do it next week, and you can hit the ground running. If you can tick those boxes, everything else is irrelevant. If you are sh*t, expect to be out of your job pretty quickly. Never lie about skills you have no experience with ;)

If you did work for a company that has now collapsed, even better. They can't verify your work experience.

If you see a skill being mentioned with Drupal, e.g. Agile, then read up on it and understand it. Even go so far as to use it.

A CV is not about being honest in your past. It's about selling yourself, the skills you currently have and making people believe you are a solution to their problems.

Oh one other thing, you need a website of your own.

I've known a number of businesses that got burnt by Groupon. One of the pubs we used regularly did a groupon deal and we went in and bought a lot of drinks with the meal. Most other people just asked for a glass of water and never came back.

There are two situations where Groupon works:
1) There is no cost to you (Gym membership) and there is a chance to up sell.
2) You have sourced an item at a ridiculously cheap price and even with Groupon taking 50% you are going to make a profit.

On (2), I knew somebody who sourced suits for $30, created a web site for the sales ploy, sold a 1000 units through Groupon at $250 and made a fortune.

Groupon can be extremely destructive to your business.

So what we're really discussing is which Adobe product we will be buying/using, their Flash IDE or their HTML5 IDE.

Pfizer are part of this because Canada and 20 other smaller countries' IP block comes under the SOPA regulation. They can simply close down the legal online Pharmacists in Canada causing untold damage to the poor in the US.

Flex was getting recognized as a way to deliver enterprise level solutions across businesses that were unable/unwilling to change, particularly financial institutions (where IE 7 can be the defacto standard). Technologies like this need a corporate sponsor to get buy in and when the Adobe makes this type of statement: "In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development." you really really really have to get very concerned. The whole reason people used Flex is because offered a platform agnostic solution that was not dependent upon the current version of your browser and provided a good feature set.

Flex will carry on, but without the corporate sponsor, it's not going to continue as a 'enterprise solution'.

They'll be dropping AIR next.

I think with where Adobe were taking Flash ( v11 bringing 3D) I think they pretty much realized they would have to branch Flash again. They've invested in PhoneGap and are supporting JQuery Mobile.

I still think the real issue for me, personally, is going to be the slow switch from Flash to HTML5 adverts. They are going to be a real pain to block.

They removed the ability to fail.

The real problem is that the low level content has been invalidated by Bind on account equipment items that scale better than any other items you can get in dungeons/quests for your level and boost the amount of xp you get as well. Basically the only interesting content is the end-game raiding content.

I play with a group of friends that get together once a fortnight to play WoW and we level new characters over the space of a couple of months. However we are dumping WoW in favour of Lord of the Rings. You can no longer fail at playing WoW.

Honestly you can ask to go permanent and that is probably it. Be grateful you appear to have a solid client that won't let you go.

From their point of view, they had the idea, the money, and the forward planning to know they needed an IT solution and put the right budget in place. If they did not have the budget, they would have offered equity at the time of your employment. You, at that time, would have said no.

Having been in a similar position, I turned it down. That venture failed eventually.

The real problem here is that there are game houses out there that are doing phenomenally well, while others are failing. A lot of this has to do with the business models they have adopted. Many of the 'failing' ones are very vertical. They contract develop games. This works well in a buoyant market, but during a recession, this can cause work to dry up.

The more successful ones have fingers in multiple pies, not only doing contract development but also developing their own in-house games with development targeted at mobile, console and PC.

Apparently crossfire scales better than sli and you are currently better off buying a couple of HD5970 as the cost is less than one HD5990/GTX590 and you get better performance.

I am on a 'tight' budget and bought one HD5970. I will upgrade next year by buying another should I get some sort of penis envy.