From [Slashdot](http://slashdot.org/:)

Circuit City said yesterday that it had fired 3,400 of its highest-paid sales staff — 8% of its employees — and will replace them with lower-paid workers. Sign On San Diego called this ‘a risky strategy to cut costs that goes beyond the layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes commonly used by struggling companies.’ The fired workers have a chance to apply for lower-paying positions after a 10-week wait, the company said. Quoting a Circuit City spokesman: ‘This is no reflection on job performance… We deeply regret the negative impact. Retail is extremely competitive, and if we’re going to thrive and operate a successful company… we just have to control costs.’ So: work hard, become the best in your field, and get fired so they can offer you a new job 10 weeks later at a lower salary.

That’s just unreal. There’s gotta be a better way to cut cost! I’ve been there and done that. I essentially lost a job once because I had advanced to the point where I was making some good money, and therefore when it came time to cut cost, they could save a significant amount of money by letting me go.

How about we do it this way: let’s fire the CEO and all **upper** management, and promote from within the company, paying less than they were getting paid. I bet we save a whole lot more money, and the company continues to flourish.

Unless [[Circuit City]] is run like [[Ben & Jerry’s]] where the CEO’s max salary is tied to the minimum salary of its employees, I can almost guarantee that the CEO is over paid (aren’t they all!).

From [Scripting News](http://www.scripting.com:)

Is April 1, the 10th birthday of Scripting News. Right now, nothing special planned. If you have an idea, post something and point to this post. We’ll all see it in [Technorati](http://www.technorati.com/search/http://stories.scripting.com/2007/03/25/oneWeekFromToday.html

)

Wow. Has it been that long? The 10th anniversary of this blog is on 6/21/1997. I was an early adopter of [[Userland Frontier]], while it was free and before it became commercial sometime around 1999 or 2000. I based the early versions of this site on the NewsPage suite, and that eventually evolved into the concept of blogging.

Time sure does fly.

From [Boston.com](http://www.boston.com:)

Launching an improbable partnership in Northern Ireland, Rev. Ian Paisley, who long epitomized the ‘Ulster Says No’ hard line of Protestant unionists, and Gerry Adams, a former commander and public face of the Irish Republican Army, agreed yesterday to form a power-sharing government in Belfast.

How long will it last? Who knows, but cheers to you Rev. Paisley and Mr. Adams. Is this a first step to a peaceful, unified Ireland with the British finally pulling out? Time will tell, but it’s a step nonetheless.

Well, I made quite a few updates to the site this past weekend.

# I can now create the different document types again.
# I updated the look of discussions to be a little bit more interesting visually
# likewise, I updated the look of the blog pulling some interesting tidbits off the internet.
# I added some Wiki like features to the linking syntax.
# I added the tidying of the html for pages to make the syntax easier to comprehend
# I added the ability for members to comment on articles again (i.e. the discussion forums are working again)

Lots of interesting progress! There’s still a lot to do, but the new rails site is coming into its own.

Update: I just found a bug in the discussion forum that I’ll fix when I get home tonight.

From [Slashdot](http://slashdot.org/):

Raul654 writes ‘Philip de Vellis, the author of the anti-Hilary Clinton viral video was outed yesterday on the Huffington Post. The company he worked for, Blue State Digital — a Democratic Internet strategy company that does work for Barack Obama — has now fired him as a result. Said Vellis: ‘I made the ‘Vote Different’ ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process.’

Say it with me… **ridiculous**. It was a great parody, and got people talking. He did it on his own time. His company supports Obama. Everything fits together like it should and there’s no reason he should get fired.

It took a while, but I finally made the decision to go with textile as the text markup of choice for documents posted on CarneyWeb. It’s far more expressive than MarkDown (in my opinion), and it’s a standard.

From now on, documents may no longer contain HTML. Use the Textile format instead.

It’s almost time for the last rite of passage from winter into spring. That’s right, we’re just two weeks from [[The Masters]] golf tournament… the most storied tournament on the greatest (well, one of the greatest) golf courses ever designed.

The story line this year (as it seemingly is every year since 1997 when [[Tiger]] burst onto the scene) is whether or not [[Tiger]] can continue his dominance of the even and win it for a staggering fifth time. He’s currently tied with Arnold Palmer for second place in Masters victories. Only Jack Nicklaus’s six is still in front of him. He’s passed Hogan, Nelson, Snead, Faldo, Price, and other notables… and he’s still only **30 years old!**.

This looks like a much more expressive language. I may have to use it instead. It has ways to markup tables and nested lists, which I really like. And it supports footnotes and some other nice markups like superscript and subscript. I think this outweighs some of the other things that I like about Markdown better. Stay tuned.

I’ve changed the software the formats the pages to use Markdown instead of my home grown system. Markdown is a quasi-standard simplified markup language that allows for very nice web pages to be written with no HTML coding required. The goal of markdown is to use the formatting of the text itself define how a page should be formatted in HTML.

For instance, to get a bulleted list, I just start each line with a ‘*’ and the right thing happens in the page:

* This
* Is
* A
* List

This is very similar to what I already supported before (for reference, take a look at the [[Vanila Markup Language]]). There are a few differences, but I don’t have to maintain this stuff anymore.

More things up and running. There’s an [RSS](http://www.carneyweb.com/blog/rss.xml) feed available now. Also note that the search feature is back. I decided to stay away from the FULLTEXT feature of MySQL and instead went with [Ferret](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToIntegrateFerretWithRails) instead. This keeps me database independent, and it works really well.

Also, the calendar is working a bit better, although there’s still some bugs.

Stay tuned!