For the last 4 months I have been reading Frank Herbert’s Dune books.  For those of you who saw the silly 80’s movie or the stupid Sci-Fi Channel’s mini-series, you are sorely missing out on the real deal.  I hate to sound cliche´ but yeah, the books are so much better than the movies.  Anyhow, in Heretics of Dune, several references are made to “chairdogs”.  Chairdogs are living furniture, semi-sentient beings who are purposely bred as furniture.  Chairdogs conform to the sitter’s desired posture and can sense stress, thus producing a massaging effect.  Very Sci-Fi indeed.  Or is it?

How I stumbled upon this I forget but the concept of living furniture is not science fiction at all.  In fact Peter & Becky Cook have been involved in living furniture since the late 90’s.  Check it out – link

Since being on the hunt for my next gig, I have been asked several hard questions by recruiters and clients. The question: “What kind of salary/rate are you looking for?” Now any consultant conducting interviews knows the inevitability of that question. And it should be addressed sooner rather than later.

The problem in answering that question is not knowing what kind of figure to give. Obviously you don’t want to low-ball yourself and giving a number too high can scare folks away. So I won’t belabor the point any further. Check out the salary calculator over at Simply Hired – link

Want to know what the average salary of a Senior Flex Developer in Dallas, TX is? Plug it in. Now get this: Simply adding th keyword ‘Adobe’ in the search parameters gives a significant jump in salary. So this may not be the best tool for zoning in on a specific number, but it will give you enough info to get some sort of range to play with.

Holy Geez! Where can I get one? What is especially interesting to me is that anyone who has fired a shotgun truly understands the term “recoil”. Its amazing how they have minimized the recoil effect providing a very stable weapon with sustained rate of fire.  Now if only they could have a magazine fed via a ammo box in a backpack.  Kinda like Tex’s weapon from Predator.