I'll start by stating I'm not a financial analyst and I have no formal experience in national policy. I'm just a Canadian with a numbers background and some experience working in the corporate environment of North America.

I came across an article today discussing someone's position on Obama's plan to tax US based multinational corporations' foreign revenue. [You can find the article at BusinessWeek.com]

Believe it or not I'm still looking for an addition to my department. I've been getting a lot of applications from unrelated fields - I knew my sector was hard to fill for, but I had no idea it would be this difficult in this economy.

One of the largest challenges I deal with in my current office is with educating our programmers and system administrators on the value of maintaining our application's database as an independent structure from the software code.

Our company started in much the same way that other internet start-ups do: a small group of highly technical people (mostly programmers and sys-admins), with one or two sales/business people. The role of the latter group was just to sell and get money - do whatever it takes to get the cash flowing. The role of the first group was, as you would expect, to do whatever it took to get the website(s) up and keep them running. Unfortunately, that mentality frequently requires cutting many corners for the sake of speed. It's a forgivable transgression, and in some cases a necessary evil.

I've been in Las Vegas since Monday night, and for the most part I'm prety satisfied with the content at Engage 2009. I didn't come here with particularly high expectations, so having learnt a few gems and getting the opportunity to meet a few software users with similar problems and concerns as myself is cool. The conference portion of the engagement was definitely too short (only two days with only 3-4 sessions per day) - I definitely would have liked to see more content. I also would have liked some more technical and lower-level discussions/panels - but I as I said I didn't have really high expectations anyway.

I've started looking for a new number 2 for my department at Instaclick. You can read about the position and apply at monster.ca. I'll field some questions in the comments, but I won't discuss salary or office specifics. Good luck to everyone who's interested.

I've been working with WebTrends very closely for a long time (both WebTrends Enterprise 7 and WebTrends Enterprise 8). I have to say that my experience up to now has been ... an up-hill battle. Since 2005 I have learned (and inferred) quite a bit about how their software is designed and how log analysis works. Most of this knowledge has come about as a necessity for survival. I've always said that WebTrends' first tier support has been more than a little lackluster.

What's made it worse is the conferences that WebTrends has put on in the past.

Things have definitely been busy lately. Not sure why it has to be this way - seems like every time I'm ready to dig in and pump out some good stuff, a million distractions pop up.

As it is, this site hasn't seen an update or even a post since it's initial set-up. Kinda sad really...

What would be nice is to find a lackey to help with the menial work. Or maybe just a secretary I can dictate to whilst doing other things.

Ah well, we'll see how it goes in 2009.

Welcome to the new face of pMazzotta.com. It will be changing a lot over the next few months as I learn more about the Drupal application and how to use it to deliver exactly what I need here.