firebug

Let's not assume that no one in your network can help you out. This is a worst case scenario that requires the help of those close to you - family, extended family and close friends if necessary. The approach you take is also going to be highly relative to your experience level. Obviously if you have a ton of experience and there is going to be a bidding war for your talent, then there's not much to worry about. Otherwise a job search that takes six months or more to find a job that is suited to your goals is not unheard of and, indeed, I would say is actually the norm. Some people will say a good engineer should be able to get a job in two weeks regardless of the economy. And I've heard of that. But don't count on it. Instead make preparations for an extended job search and use undesirable work - office temp work, etc - to build up some savings so you can get out of your relatives' hair.

heredocs are great. I use them all the time for metaprogramming. I don't see them going out of style anytime soon. Not sure what you mean about complicated syntax.

I supect you may be new to Ruby and confused by the heredoc sytnax. If so, this post has a review of some of the syntactical issues with heredocs:

http://log.gmarik.info/2007/12/rubys-here-document-heredoc-m...

Hope that helps.

Because of the digital divide, people with easy access to the internet and the proper education to use it are also unequally represented in an e-democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy

Ditto - what niche? I'm out of work and could use a few tips.

True. Helping someone to save face should never be underestimated.

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund - Paul Graham - July 2008

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"#3: New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they've been slow to adapt to the web. It's more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives. "

->"Enlightened hiring managers just want to see output"

From my experience "enlightened hiring managers" are the exception rather than the rule.

Nice writeup. Had no idea you could do that with Google Spreadsheets.

Or any kind of application thanks to the mess of standards that web developers have had to deal with. Atlas and Flex are an imperfect workaround for that problem.

It's Eclipse.

Is Flex really such a big deal? I was under the impression that it hadn't really taken off?

What are all those metrics on iGoogle and how are they getting fed out as RSS? (if you don't mind me asking)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78291428@N00/3402002605/sizes/l...

This may not be the best forum for this type of advice. You might want to try: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blogging/

Also, before you quit your day job, read lots of stories like this one:

"Time to Hang Up the Pajamas: I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666

Also, why is Ruby seeing such a steep decline (-51%)? Does that correspond to the state of the Ruby contracting market? On the other hand, I wouldn't have expected to see such an increase in the popularity of Actionscript. Any theories on what's driving that?

I'll add a comment so you can click on the link:

http://radar.oreilly.com/assets_c/2009/02/TM_qtr_py_Prog_Lan...

Do these types of apps have any built-in safeguards to avoid spammers using them for their campaigns? Or do they not make judgments about what they're used for?

Not very consoling for an unemployed NY programmer. But I'll take any good news I can find.

"Demand in New York is off 44 percent versus March last year. The decline is not surprising given the number of financial services firms in the N.Y. area. However, there are still more than 5,000 open positions in New York on any given day, making it one of our larger markets."

When Dice talks about 5000 open positions I wonder what percentage are duplications from multiple recruiters and agencies posting the same position.

No thanks, my friend, but I appreciate your helpful advice.

As regards the white-collar gig, my suspicion was that if you appear to switch fields, HR assumes you're not committed to I.T. if you try to resurface later as a programmer. But I'm leaning in that direction anyway. It can't be any worse than being unemployed :)

Just to clarify, I wasn't saying there is anything precious about an American programmer versus programmers in other countries. What's precious to me is my ability to pay the rent. And finding a job would be a nice first step. As I said in my original post, I understand that foreign programmers are more than able to compete with me on every measure. Except that I'm here in NYC and they're not. So if that's the only advantage that I have, how can I best use that? I'm not making any judgments here. Or if I seemed to, I certainly didn't intend to convey that because that's not the way I think. Nevertheless, I appreciate your well-considered response. It sounds like it comes from some real experience with Craigslist-based gigs and sounds pretty realistic. Thanks for the feedback.