The Internet is quiet – too quite. No sales, no email, no blog entries, no twittering, no interesting news other than Lehman’s demise and Patricia N-H’s heart attack. This is a little frightening.

Speaking of Lehman’s bankruptcy. This is a major disaster and marks yet another drop in the economy. All my stocks are down and the DJIA is down nearly 300 as I write. This should have been no surprise to traders, yet they act like it is news. (I have been intending to sell my IBM stock for a couple of months. I even filled out the form. I should have mailed it in three weeks ago. Now I have to take a hit if I sell it.)

The stock market is tanking, but, as I read recently in the Marlowe book, The economy is like the climate, the stock market is like the weather. Dips in the market are only fronts moving across the terrain. The general climate of the economy, however, is more like an ice age approaching.

I have interviewed for jobs several times at Merrill Lynch, but I always wanted more money than they were willing to pay. I don’t prostitute my programming talents cheaply. I am glad now that I didn’t take the jobs as they have been bought out by Bank America. Soon all of the Merrill Lynch programming, network and other support jobs will be moved to Raleigh Durham (the land of my birth). That means that probably by January, several thousand desperate unemployed programmers will be competing for the handful of programming jobs left in New York that didn’t go to India or China. (Right now, I bet, they are being told that their jobs are safe – yeah right.)

The job market for programmers looks bleak in the near future. Retirement may be sooner than I thought, whether I like it or not.