"Every child at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado was taken into custody more than six weeks ago after someone called a hot line claiming to be a pregnant, abused teenage wife. The girl has not been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax."
Of the 31 people the state initially said were underage mothers, 15 have been reclassified as adults, and one is 27.
Got this from a friend the other day, thought it was insightful:
An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids.
He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.
The human resources manager tells him, "You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day."
Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address.
To this the manager replies, "You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day."
Stunned, the man leaves not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family.
During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.
Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.
At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.
By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed over one million dollars.
Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned,"What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!"
"Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour."
Which brings us to the moral of the story:
Since you got this story by e-mail, you're probably closer to being a janitor than a millionaire.
Sadly, I received it also.
It's all been said already by those who can say it better than I can:
The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)
Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web
Facebook ‘Grants’ Devotees a Disappointment
But when did I ever let that stop me before?
My history of "social web" goes something like this...
I've had a web page for almost as long as individuals outside of universities could have web pages of their very own. Why? Because it was there. I've always been more interested in the creating/writing/tinkering than with whether anyone was reading it. I've never even told family members or most of my friends (and certainly not employers) that I even had a web page. My web pages have always been anonymous, or as now, used an "online" identity, and I think with fairly good reason. Until someone pays me to be a journalist, I'd just as soon not have to worry so much about identity theft, stalking, and things like that.
In the time since the early Web, I've participated in dozens of online activities, chat rooms, IRC, instant messengers (just about all of them at one time or another), and on to 3D virtual reality systems, which led to operating a forum, creating a lot of content for the forum, starting a blog, then another, and another, buying a few domain names, and so on.
In the process, I've made a few online friends. People who I would never have met in real life, but who are just as much friends as those I have met in real life. Friendships are built on common interests, common viewpoints, common struggles, longevity, trust, and so on, and whether they are primarily face-to-face, primarily by e-mail, on-line chat, or Morse Code, I think is far less important than those other factors.
But I'm not sure the founders of Facebook see it that way. In fact they make it clear they want you to only use your real name, something I am loath to do. I know this because I saw one of them in a YouTube interview say exactly that, and that their goal was to mirror each persons "real world" network of friends, associates and relatives. I'm getting ahead of myself though, first back to my history...
One of the many things I did to experiment with the Internet was to set up a domain named "Paperworth.com". The original plan was very simple. At the dawn of the personal web page era, it occurred to me that there were far too many people giving far too much information out about themselves to total strangers. My plan was to do a tongue in cheek parody of such efforts as an example of what not to do. Paperworth, a name I chose because I couldn't find that real name in a phonebook or online anywhere (I have since) was going to be the name of a fictitious family in "mid-America" who's father had just gotten his very own web page for the family. I've told this story before, so I won't drag it out, but I was going to include photos of the family, pets, and kids, including such useful tidbits as where we hid the spare key to the house and what the kids route to the school bus looked like. I'd have photos that carelessly exposed credit card numbers, private phone numbers, and so on. The only thing that stopped me from doing it was having a real job at which I worked too hard, and too many other "hobbies" like getting drunk five nights a week and recovering the other two. OK, I probably shouldn't have divulged that last part, but I've reformed, retired, and told potential employers where they can stick it so many times that any career for me will have to start with busing tables anyway. Of course when I did have enough time to do the project it was too late. Real people everywhere were now telling more about themselves to the entire world than I could ever have made up, the joke had become real, only in its reality, it wasn't funny any more.
With that in mind, I've since anonymized my domain names, checked pretty carefully for identifying info on those web photos and so on. Do I think it would be impossible to track the real me down if someone were determined to do so? Of course not. Just as you can't keep some nut from picking you at random in the grocery store parking lot as someone worth giving a hard time to, nothing protects any of us from random acts of insanity, or from very determined villains either.
So, when I first wrangled an invitation to Orkut out of curiosity (and before they were acquired by Google), I used a fake name. Orkut was fine for what it was, but it wasn't all that interesting to me. If everyone I knew in the world had suddenly shown up at Orkut, I would certainly have wanted to continue using e-mail, the telephone and air travel as a means of communicating with people. The groups you could join on special topics were less useful than the average IRC channel or Usenet group or web forum on the same topic. I soon dismissed Orkut as not useful enough to stick with. In fact at some point when I realized that almost all the messages I was receiving in Orkut were in Portuguese I just deleted my account. Apparently it had become really popular in Brazil.
It wasn't until MySpace was in the process of getting purchased for billions that I decided to test those waters again. This time didn't take nearly so long. I hated MySpace. First of all I didn't know anyone there. The interface was cluttered from the get-go, and all the features that allowed you to customise your "home page" (or whatever they called it) only seemed to make it more so. Add to that the system was very slow at times, and the things that would often spill out onto the screen taught you more than you wanted to know about MySQL and PHP (or whatever language they were using at the time). My testing of MySpace ended after only a week. I kept the ID for maybe a month, checking back from time to time for an announcement that they had thought better of it, wiped it all out and started over. When no such announcement came I again cancelled my account. One less thing to generate e-mail reminders that I hadn't signed on for a while or... whatever.
Always a glutton for punishment, I was intrigued again by the hype over Facebook (instead maybe the nature of the hype should have served as a warning).
So I signed up. Nobody invited me. Nobody I knew had told me how great it was. I just made up a name, not my real name, and signed up. There was nary more than a mild warning that they wanted you to use your real name. But like the second thing they asked for, my credit card information (which they said would be for "my convenience" in making future purchases) I decided not to take that request too seriously. Like almost everything online today, my "proof" that I was a real person consisted only of my giving them an e-mail address they could send my authorisation link to. Whoop Dee Doo! But then, I wasn't as hung up on this "real person" angle as the Facebook people seemed to be.
Oddly enough, using my online name, I was eventually discovered by several of my online friends. Hey, this Facebook thing might be useful after all! Hopefully they weren't going around looking every new user up in the phone book or something. I continued to not worry about it.
But then I looked up my university. Not working at the moment, I couldn't "join" as a member of some company, but I wanted to join something that was more than just a special interest group "sewing for men" etc. So I went to my university, where I found out you had to actually have an e-mail address associated with the university to join. Hmmm, I'm a member of an alumni thing. Is there an email address associated with that? Turns out there was, but I had never signed up for it. So off I go to do that. Of course they are fancy and really serious about identity, they get your name and address so they can send you letters begging for money. And of course if you are going to have a chance to contact old school chums through that (assuming I had any) using a fake name you just made up a few years ago would hardly do.
So now I was stuck. To test this whole social network thing with my alumni association, I'd have to change my name to my real name on Facebook. Could I even do that? After all, I'd already sworn on a stack of Bibles that I had used my real name in the first place. But the name change option was pretty easy to find, well trodden path I would say, complete with a fresh warnings like "You must use your real name", and "Facebook staff must approve your name change". Sure they do. The staff seemed to have done their work in mere seconds. My network of Facebook contacts didn't even notice a ripple in the space-time continuum.
So now that I was the real me, I could look up people and connect like crazy with other folks I went to school with right? Well, maybe. Only problem being that as wildly popular as Facebook might be at Harvard, and Stanford, and Starbuck coffee shops around Silicon Valley, it didn't seem to have caught on so well with my ole buddies at Podunk U. I couldn't find a single name there that I even remotely recognized, nor a picture, and similar to my experience with Orkut, it seemed that everyone who went to college where I had, now resides in India or Brazil. What-up with this?
Then I tried my high school. Well, I didn't see anything that required I have an old high school e-mail address, if there even was such a thing. Only problem is, they had a drop-down for the year I graduated, only the years didn't go back far enough to cover when I graduated. Now I know I'm old, but this is ridiculous. It's not like I was in the first (or 8th) graduating class or anything. I don't actually know how long the school had been around before I went there, but I know it had seen some wear and tear. So, essentially, there was not a single soul I recognized from my high school either, even though they would have all been younger than me, I should have been able to spot someone or some name, that I'd recognize. Well, at least they all hadn't moved to India!
Now this last week, a fairly well known online celebrity known as "Mini-Microsoft" was unceremoniously ousted from Facebook for the obvious TOS violation. Now MM couldn't exist as he/she does being critical of Microsoft from within, and I'm quite sure the individual made no effort to join the Microsoft employees group as that would have required an identifiable MS e-mail address. So what was the problem? Did some MS exec apply pressure to the company they were talking about investing a few million in? Inquiring minds are still inquiring on that I guess.
So there it is on "Real" versus "Virtual" identities. Facebook is only interested in the former (preferably with credit card information to go along with it), and not the latter (even if you have more REAL friends online than virtual friends in the real world). They talk a good game about verifying identities, but they really let alumni associations and workplaces do all the work. Want to game the system? Get a free web site from Google (or AOL), form a fake company and you and all your fake friends are off to the races! Are you getting the picture yet about what this company is really all about?
Now on to usability, and usefulness of Facebook. In short, as far as I can tell, there isn't any.
Is there an IM (Instant Messenger) capability? Well, no, unless you count keeping a web page open and bringing it to the foreground every 30 seconds as there is no beep or other indication of activity. Do they hook up with AIM - no, MSN - no, or the free and open Jabber used by Google - no.
They have something that sort of resembles e-mail, except that you can't send from a real e-mail system into it, or from it outbound to a real e-mail system. No, instead, you are supposed to go about your business as usual, until something important happens like, uh, someone throws a virtual pie at you from within Facebook at which time you get an e-mail message that summons you to Facebook where you are informed that "Someone has thrown a pie at you". And that's it. No fancy graphic, no splat sound, nothing. You have to wonder why they couldn't have just included the text with the e-mail message they sent you... as in: "Someone in Facebook has just thrown a pie at you, you might have better things to do than check on that right now, but if not, come on in." Who in their right mind would want to use this for business, or anything that remotely resembles business? Oh, yeah, Robert Scoble.
Yes there ARE some people who get paid to play with technology and write about their experiences. I don't begrudge such people the idyllic life they lead. I do get annoyed at the presumption that they have anything meaningful to say about how the majority of us... and by "us" I don't mean factory workers and plumbers, I mean people who work with technology, like payroll system, billing systems, aircraft avionics, and so on... how that fairly large group of people are going to benefit by whatever the latest fad is in Silicon Valley. (And while we are at it, shouldn't some of these WhizzBang things be of benefit to factory workers and plumbers?) I mean unless you are in some sort of specialized area, that somehow (and I can't even imagine how) benefits from sending and receiving a constant stream of text messages regarding what you had for lunch, how is a service like Twitter of any use to you? Sorry, but to me it can never be anything but a toy, and if you really need text messaging from anywhere at any time, then Blackberrys are already in place and do that job just fine. A better use of Silicon Valley's supposed brain power would be to duplicate the functionality of RIMs service at a fraction of the cost. How about free?
Oh, but back to Facebook, a program, that like Myspace, might dump screens full of MySQL and PHP statements out at you at any moment. The same program that wants my credit card info RIGHT AWAY, just in case they, um, need it for something, takes a regular DUMP (we used to call it that in my mainframe days and nobody ever laughed, I don't know why, it seems like such an uncomfortable word to use now) on my screen with all sorts of information that I suspect the programmers would rather I not see. How can they expect to be taken seriously? Just because the kid that started it, or stole the code, or whatever he did, looks and acts a lot like the young Bill Gates? Pull the other one. That seems like a reason to avoid Facebook like the plague. Why would anyone want to go down that road again? The biggest detour 'round the barn that technology has ever taken, Windows, and we are looking for someone just like that to invest our time, no, time and dollars into? OK, I'm dense, I admit it. So 'splain it to me Lucy.
OK, so you've now figured out I don't have much use for Facebook. I don't. As it stands anyway. But I'm not above giving my advice, and then saying "I told you so!" later when the company has run aground. Like, you know, when I was against Apple's switch to Intel, which I'm still sure, eventually, in thirty years or so, or someday, will be seen to be the mistake that I.... Well, OK, I probably got that wrong.
Take Second Life for example. For the life of me I can't figure out what to do with it other than to go in there and play tinker-toys. It's fun. But I think it should be more than that. IBM thinks it should be more than that. I think it can be more than that, easily, relative to the difficulty of a virtual reality in the first place. I've begged in the forums (while they still had forums) for better interaction with the outside world. Nothing. But I go in to talk to an IBM guy, in a well built IBM "build" and he knows less about IBM than I do. Five minutes and I've done all there is to do there other than oooh and ahhhh over how nice their building is. But these things have to be more than just fun don't they? They have to be useful for something. I'm a big supporter of Second Life, have been since the beginning. I go to an IBM presentation, "simulcast" in "real life", "Second Life" and some other virtual world (one I used to use and don't have much ongoing respect for) and the whole thing seems silly. The slides aren't in sync with the speech, they keep having to pause for technical issues, and as far as I can tell, and I really had to stretch to get this out of it: "we're in there, because it's there, and we don't have anything better to do."
Well, there is nothing wrong with doing something just because it's fun. People play video games for fun, go bowling for fun, and if they want to send text messages to each other all day for fun, who am I to say they shouldn't? Just don't pretend to be anything else but a fun thing. Second Life, if after all this time you haven't seen the advantage of hooking your virtual meetings into an IM, IRC or other text interface, I guess you never will. Can I ever send a message to an SL user without going into the interface? Can't each SL user have their own web page? Can't Facebook, using standard old HTML and RSS and messaging technologies work seamlessly with iGoogle, MSN Live, and AOL Instant Messenger? It isn't rocket science, but I guess if you 're all about scoring the next big billion dollar buy-out you can make it look like it is.
Warning to investors: It isn't worth it. Scoble and some others will tell you that once a company builds that walled garden and gets a few million users inside you will never get them to switch. Some carefully chosen examples will support that claim. But tell Yahoo that people haven't migrated from Geocities or their own e-mail program, not to mention search. Tell Blockbuster that Netflix hasn't hurt their business, or tell Netflix that Walmart, Amazon and Blockbuster going online hasn't hurt theirs (even if some of those efforts haven't been spectacular). There is a healthy ebb and flow of customers in any healthy commercial ecosystem whether it's cell phone carriers or plumbing supplies. Where there isn't that free flow of consumers there is decay. Windows, and the ecosystem that surrounds it is a perfect example. That's being fixed though, it took way too long, but it will get fixed eventually, with or without Microsoft's cooperation.
I don't think the tech sector is stupid enough to go down that road again, not during this generation of users anyway. Maybe in another twenty years when the echos of "Where do you want to go today?" have faded.
What we need today are more projects like OpenID, Jabber, cross platform operating systems and browsers and a spirit that says "I'm going to compete on features, I'm not going to lock you in, I'm going to let you weave in and out of my system freely and into others that may be of more use for you in other areas. You can get my stuff on your phone, instant messenger, home page, or inbox, it's all up to you, and we will take input from all those sources as well. And one more thing, we'll value you as a person whether you use your real name or not. We'll take the real you or the virtual you, and let you hook up with other people however you choose."
I don't hear those words coming from Facebook, and until I do, they can't be the next big thing.
Update: Apparently Dave Winer has pointed out that Facebook is a closed system. So Scoble now agrees that it sucks. Which seems odd considering his name is on this document:
http://opensocialweb.org/
here are some other handy links on the subject:
http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability
http://movemydata.org/home.html
http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability
Why in the world anyone would want to post their personal stories on the Internet I don't know. But people do, and some times these stories seem so tragic and real that you just want to reach out a helping hand how could I resist?...
My own little soap opera(s) of this nature happened in the late 70s early 80s and often enough that I think of my own emotional makeup as being more scar tissue than anything else, but I allowed myself to be too self absorbed (don't we all?) and got what I probably deserved in the grand scheme of things. Suffice it to say that I've retired from romantic entanglements, more by choice than by necessity (even though two CAN live more cheaply than one, managing ones finances as a single person is MUCH easier).
So here, semi solicited, is my very jaded view of the subject:
What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego?
Now let that last thought sink in for a bit while I say that we (mostly) have been conditioned by Ozzie and Harriet/Bradie Bunch (substitute your own TV adolescent societal programming) to think that the only NORMAL mode of human existence is to get married and raise as many children as your income allows you to support. Not only does (did) this formula seem to work on TV, but it clearly worked in real life for long enough for us as countries world-wide to develop schemes such as Social Security that actually DEPEND upon it. Ponzi schemes collapse without an ever broadening base. But even before Social Security schemes, this system actually worked very well. One kid could support two parents into their old age, two could do so better, three better still. There was a "natural selection" advantage to larger families, but not so extreme that smaller families were wiped out. If you are a Darwinian, you probably imagine that some process sets an optimum number of kids for things to just work nicely, with variations on either side being preserved in the gene pool for, uh, lets say, GLOBAL WARMING! (Al Gore is proud when you work this into conversations on ANY other topic.)
Now back to: What is there that is more important about a (with emphasis) *modern* *human* relationship than ego? Well, if you are really paying attention, there's sex for one. Part of that involves ego too though in ways that are really hard to tease apart. Let's simplify though and factor sex out of it on the assumption that, in this modern pr0n driven Internet world you can always become a do-it-yourselfer.
Oh yes, and one more thing, (at the risk of devolving into a Monty Python sketch) a fanatical devotion to spreading our DNA all over the place.
Our world has changed much faster than any natural selection process can keep up with. If we could just keep things steady for a few thousand years, with no major new technologies, industries, disruptive housing breakthroughs and so on, I'm sure the hand of Darwin would make adjustments to our psyches, gonads and so forth (in addition to having enormous heads and longer fingers as all the sci-fi authors predict) to make everything come out just right again. Of course this is complicated by the fact that so many of us have opted out of the gene pool in one way or another. Many of us may have ideal traits, but we certainly aren't passing them on, forcing nature to constantly re-invent the wheel so to speak.
Where was I? Oh, anyway, (human) society has placed a whole new layer of pressures on us beyond the formerly natural kill-or-be-killed simplicity that various animal species have to deal with. Take birds: watching one of those nature films, when the male birds parade around, wing and tail feathers spread wide, trying to gain the "affections" of the female birds, one male bird gets selected to fertilize those eggs. What does the rejected male bird feel? I've often wondered. Is it just sexual frustrations? Are their "egos" crushed? Do they become suicidal? If birds had Civ IV to resort to would they? (I'm serious!)
I've read where many, maybe even most, animal species mate for life. Others only long enough to get one generation of offspring going followed by each partner seeking another mate for the next time around. Maybe natural selection hasn't been able to settle on a "best" formula in this area which is why there seem to still be so many people who do it successfully one way and so many other people who do it successfully another way. We've all seen, known or even been a part of a family unit with one husband and one wife, mated for life, raising children (or sometimes not) little or no infidelities, friends for life, teammates, if you will. God bless them, and by the way, in my experience these are mostly religious people, who have succeeded in this lifestyle IN SPITE of egos, IN SPITE of sexual urges and IN SPITE of Darwinian propulsions to spread the seed a little further. They got where they were by human rationality of the type that has to be intentionally exercised (whether you agree with the results or not, they got the results THEY wanted).
The other successful model that comes to mind is Hollywood. Here copulation is king. Slam, bam, thank-you mam. Why do they even bother getting married? Oh, yeah, so that they can get their pictures in Variety. Not a lot of forward thinking goes on here. Or thinking at all as far as I can tell. But it makes kids in large numbers, and these people are rich, so the kids are well provided for, at least financially. And do these "stars" get too upset during the breakups? Not so you can tell in most cases. If you lower your expectations enough you can live with almost any circumstances I suppose.
I don't know about you, but as free-thinking as I once was, I couldn't picture myself in multiple casual relationships over my lifetime. Oh I did get around for a while, but for me it was always a search for what I hoped would be an ultimate permanence. I too was more often mentor than mentee, more often financial provider, more often the emotional support rather than the one supported and certainly gave as good as I got in the sex department (or at least that's the way it seemed to me at the time).
But at some point (and it took far too long as I had been given the advice many times) I realized I had never gotten comfortable with the notion of being alone. From high school onward I was always "on the make" holding off any thoughts of marriage until after college by an extreme exercise of will (and the knowledge that parents would probably cut off funding). And then in the AM (after marriage) it was one relationship after another, all ending as soon as the sex wasn't so good any more (for one of us). Without wanting to, I was leading the Hollywood lifestyle, when what I really wanted (or thought I wanted) was the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle.
So I went solo. It was rough. Particularly since I am not the macho type of guy who likes to do manly things like fishing, hunting, or home repair for that matter. I went to restaurants alone, even nice ones where I'd never been without a date. Quite an exercise of self confidence to go to a fancy French restaurant alone, and sit there and read a book. This will flush out any secret desire you have to be the center of attention. Yes, people will think "what's WRONG with him, why isn't he WITH someone?" and whats more you will know that is what they are thinking. But after about two years (I think that's what it took for me) you won't care. And after another two or three years you might actually start to dread the thought of another relationship. Or you may decide to dip your toe in the waters again, find a woman on an Internet dating service who "loves" you for who you are, only to find that she's married with kids.(and not all that unhappily married as it turns out). And lest you think I'm making that up, it happened to me. (TWICE!)
But enough about me, lets get to what YOU think about me? No, that's from another comedy bit. In the final years of my career, I was hit on by many women, a few of which I actually found attractive and after they asked around and found out I wasn't turning them down because I was gay or anything their efforts only increased. I've been the intended victim/subject of several matchmakers. I keep telling them they are wasting their time. They invite me and the woman over for dinner at the same time (not telling me in advance) hoping for nature to take its course. I'm polite, but I know better than to let nature take its course, because that course is for us all to breed like rabbits, and whether we call it sex, or ego, or self esteem, or even layer some societal ponzie scheme requirement, or the need to spread the faith by out producing the other faiths, you know, deep down inside you know, that human happiness of a lasting kind is not what it is all about. Lookout Jim it's a trap! (Star Trek) that is, unless you get religion or some other "ion" and make that relationship you seek secondary to some other goal (and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this approach).
In closing, if you are not discouraged enough, consider that:
(1) All the good ones are taken. Really, there is no getting around this. Of the happy old couples that I've known that live together until they die, they either got together when they were young, or they got together when they were so old that neither of them had enough time to jump ship first. If you want someone who is not a chronic ship-jumper during middle age, your going to have to find someone who's mate has tragically taken from us in the prime of life. You will never be loved as much, if at all. Your reason for being chosen as the replacement might be a subject best never explored.
(2) No matter how objective you try and be, all is probably not as you've presented it. Maybe you snore really loudly (I do) or your farts really stink (as do mine) and those are two things she has never been able to stand, but she has never been able to confront you with them because, since those things are so important to her, she thinks they might be really devastating to you as well. One of my gals had a big nose. But I never told her I really LIKED big noses. Come to think of it, most of my gals had big noses. Darn I wish I had thought about that sooner.
Anyway. Glad I could help you out with this. I look forward to updates.
Of late, I've seen signs of fatigue from a number of high-profile bloggers who are taking blog vacations, begging for guest bloggers to take their normal place, or in some cases, the bloggers are choosing to keep us updated in other ways - preferring Twitter or other venues.
"First" there was this article: How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT
Which was mentioned in this Slashdot article.
And them maybe coincidentally or not I thought yesterday's Dilbert cartoon was particularly relevant.
And I'll leave as an exercise the finding of the /. comment I was responding to, except for the last line I've quoted here. Leaving only the questions: "Can anything be done, and if so, what?"...
"Debt" is a ten thousand year old playground game.
"Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated.
I didn't hate it because it was badly written -- it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable.
No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil."
(Nice cartoon at title link)
From the Mercury News Article:
"Language fluency was a big reason some of Sun Microsystems' technical support jobs were moved from India to Nova Scotia. Customers in the Americas who needed tech support had griped about having a difficult time understanding the English typically spoken in India. ``This move offered a better fit for our customers,'' said Sun spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek."
"Innovation is the source of U.S. economic leadership and the foundation for our competitiveness in the global economy. Government investment in research, strong intellectual property laws and efficient capital markets are among the reasons that America has for decades been best at transforming new ideas into successful businesses."
The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Shapiro put it during an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales."
"Designed to project your cellphone's screen onto a larger screen for demonstrations, the ICD-5000 is a boon for developers, marketeers, sales monkeys, and people who want to show their buddies the time they met Erik Estrada at the Chevron station."
"After five months of grueling play, my first world championship contest with Anatoly Karpov was abruptly cancelled by the FIDE president. Instead of having a set number of games, our match was to go to the first player to reach six victories, a goal that had proved unreachable despite Mr. Karpov's jumping out to a 5-0 lead. After I won games 47 and 48 to move to the score to 3-5, the match was abruptly cancelled. The Soviet sports authorities who had such influence in FIDE didn't want to take the chance I would win another game. Their loyal favorite, Mr. Karpov, hadn't won a game in months, and I -- the outspoken youngster from Baku -- was getting too close for comfort."
Oh my. I can feel the good-times grinding to a halt as we speak.
Is it a full moon?
First, they attempt to go "dumpster diving" which Amanda thinks is an acrobatic activity (really now?) Next they sneak into an unused part of a freight yard somewhere and get caught by a security guard. Has the left-wing politics schtick taken them just a bit over the edge maybe?
I know dealing with actual issues, (or even technology, Dan Gillmor) is a lot of work, and we are having some nice sunny weather, but cool it guys, you are making the left seem even loopier than it seemed before, if that's possible.
Hint: Dumpster diving is probably not something best done in New York. But in any locale, a high tech store or high tech office building is where you want to do it. I also think flip-flops are a bad idea. Really, if at all possible I'd find an old NASA space suit, unless you are pretty sure there is no rotting food, rats, and other crawly things in there. Stories of people pulling out fully working PCs, including high-end servers out of those things are interesting, but rare. People going for a meal, well thats just sad, and not something to make light of.
Rooting for the Martians - Yahoo! News: "Hollywood has grown eye-poppingly angry with the rest of the country, mostly over Bush and
Iraq, but partly, at least, because the left-coasters apparently thought they were somehow entitled to a string of Democratic presidents after Clinton. The upshot is that even mild-mannered nonpropagandists like George Lucas have come under pressure to display their lefty credentials with silly political touches. "
Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out - New York Times: "Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out."
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