Chris Pearson is a self-employed website designer and general geek. I came across his blog while looking for help with putting a Flickr “badge” in the sidebar of a WordPress blog I have. Chris’ instructions were the most detailed and helpful I had yet found, but still I was unable to make the Flickr photos appear on my page. So I added a comment to Chris’ blog-post, explaining my predicament. A few hours later (if that), I got an email from Chris himself giving me some hints and info. It took a couple more emails back and forth for me to achieve the result I wanted, but Chris replied very promptly, knowledgeably and with patience. I was impressed.

Chris’ blog is a little too geekish for my needs, but I was interested to read this post on how to kiss corporate life goodbye. The comments are pretty funny, especially this one:

You sound like one of those infomercial guys selling books on how to make ten grand a day for sitting on your ass and placing tiny ads in the backs of magazines. heh

I found another method of avoiding the corporate world that is better suited to the risk-averse geek: working in higher education.

Altho first prize goes to,

Unemployment allows similar freedoms without all those pesky tasks like appointments, doing work and making bank deposits.