News, and, the end of ?off

Oh, man, I'm gonna be Platinum Elite on Continental this year. There's no avoiding it.

The trouble is, well, I have trouble saying "no" to speaking invitations (see upper-right-hand corner).

In the meantime, a little news.

Construction began today on the Fog Creek expansion. I think we have a much better contractor this time. The last contractor we had was so bad we had a different theory every day as to what his problem was. Depression? Liquidity crunch? Incompetence? Planning to steal the money and flee the country? So far the new contractor seems a heck of a lot better.

Summer internship applications are due February 1st. Students, get on it! We do not have any reason to even look at applications received after that date.

The Project Aardvark documentary, Aardvark'd, is currently featured on the Google Video home page! It tells the story of last summer's interns, who build Fog Creek Copilot from scratch in one summer.

If you have a high bandwidth connection, Google Video lets you purchase and watch it online for about seven dollars. For a higher resolution experience, you can still buy the DVD from us, but that's about $20.

Finally, an announcement. I used to have, hidden so deeply that almost nobody found it, a discussion forum on this site colloquially called ?off. It was the official off-topic forum and was virtually uncensored. It was foul, free-wheeling, and Not Safe For Work. It generated quite a few severely antisocial posts, which were sometimes funny. There was a core community of probably ten people who regularly participated, and occasionally someone would wander in by accident and be shocked, but there was a small but real community of virtual friends hanging out there.

Anyway, it wasn't really appropriate. It didn't have anything to do with software, I didn't participate, and there was no compelling reason to host it on my servers. Over time, the number of reasons to shut it down increased. Today, the last straw was broken when one of my actual friends (you know, a real-life person) told me that the discussion group was getting downright disturbing. Some of the participants in the group had probably crossed the line from common obnoxious online behavior to downright psychopathic behavior. In a discussion group which prides itself on "anything goes," this was impossible to control.

At 6 pm today, I closed that discussion group, having learned an important lesson about anarchy.

Students: Fog Creek Software has awesome summer internships in New York City. You get free housing, free lunches, lots of free New York activities, and a chance to write great code with great developers. And a competitive salary. Apply today: we only have four open positions and usually get hundreds of applications, which will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the Author: I'm your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz - the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot - the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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