What was allahpundit? A religious blog?

I can't remember the name of the site, but there was a stock market type site with blogs as stocks, and Ace was #72 in the political category.

It's called blogshares. I could never figure out what any of it meant.

I'm higher on the ecosystem, but my "price" is probably low on blogshares because my "earnings" are steady but never rising.

COBOL?

I can still write a PERFORM statement that would make you blush.

That was so yesterday. We're up to plushies for lushies who do slushies in their hush puppies at their desks while Fortranning for dimes of cocaine. Get with the program!

COBOL? Good Lord, what a reminder of the past. Believe it or not, in a prior life I could write COBOL. The University of Michigan used to make multi-million dollar decisions about their construction plans based on a report that I wrote into their PERT program. For all I know, they are still using it.

Blogs by women comprises a category alongside politics, lifestyle, etc.? When did females producing prose and posting it to their blogs become such a novelty? Does the writer of this appreciate the implied insult here?

COBOL is so 1999, once Y2K passed COBOL was officially dead. Now its all about Linux hacking your TIVO...

There is a reason I remember the sub-routine that I stuck in UM's PERT program. In the process, I learned an important life lesson.

At the time, I was a business student working part-time at an educational research foundation, doing statistical analyses of government programs (basically, Head Start vs. Home Start). My boss was named Bob. He was the computer guru. All this was happening in FORTRAN, the cool language at the time. COBOL was not cool.

Bob noticed that on my spare time I was teaching myself COBOL. I was doing this just for kicks, and because COBOL was the business language and I was a business student at UM.

Bob got side work doing jobs for various clients, including UM. So, he offered me this job of writing a sub-routine into UM's PERT program that would generate a report.

My response was: "Bob, I'm totally unqualified. I am just goofing around and teaching myself COBOL out of a textbook. (Which I had to go to Ypsilanti to buy at an Eastern Michigan bookstore, because COBOL was not cool enough for any UM bookstore).

Bob looked at me and said: "Michael, you will never get anywhere in life if you only take jobs you are qualified for."

So, I took the challenge and went to UM's data center to write this sub-routine in the early evening. It should have taken about an hour and a half. But it didn't. I kept submitting test jobs, and the entire program crashed. I was freaking out. I had visions of UM's entire construction program coming to a screeching halt, with guys in hard hats standing around idle, because I had fucked up the construction planning program.

Around 4 a.m., I found the problem. It was the typical thing, like a misplaced comma. I fixed it and everything was fine.

But I still remember what Bob said. Since then, I have never taken a job that I was qualified for. Actually, I have taken numerous jobs for which I was hopelessly incompetent. So what. You bluff for a few months, you figure things out, and then you start to make a contribution.

That's my story about COBOL.

Michael,

Apparently, I've had to support some of the applications you developed.

Thanks, dude.

The only thing I am missing is the tech part. I'm politcal, sooo hipster! and...yep... a woman.

I guess I should brush upon tech, huh?

*unless hipster means something other than being hip. Like Ecstacy fueled Cuddle parties. Then out there as well.

You don't have to know how to do a job, you just need to be capable of knowing how to find out how to know.

They're hiring you because they don't know and think you know more about it than they do.

Looking at those lists, I notice that both Free Republic and Drudge come in ahead of that #3 porn blog. Kos, whom I had assumed is enormous and on the scale of Freep, is way down there.

Howzabout that?

(I guess you can check drudge at work without getting canned.)

I used to slap programmers who said "I don't know" this or that language.

If you can't figure out how to push bits around in another language, who needs you?

Speaking entirely for myself, I'm pretty inbred.

So "blogs authored by women" is a category separate from politics or tech or lifestyles? Are they only allowed to talk about womany stuff, or what?

Wow, this thread is like watching the history channel.