Category: a learning experience

Apple cracks open the iPod, slightly | CNET News.com

Apple has also posted on its developer Web site some instructions that allow the device to be operated in a “museum mode” in which the iPod’s interface can be customized for use as part of an audio tour. For example, a text note about a Van Gogh exhibit could link to audio files that offer a guided tour of the paintings.

Hmm, a electronic museum exhibit guide has been done but my experience wasn’t all that wonderful, and I’m guessing an iPod would just as good. You could bring your own and “install” the museum’s information, then scroll through to the right bits as you walk around. That was one of the problems I found with the MEG system at EMP: if there was crowd around an exhibit, it was hard to point the infrared sensor at it and get MEG to do it’s thing. If the control was at the device, rather than requiring interaction with the space, it would work better.

Well, I submitted my resignation letter, and got my reply (the Way Things Are Done). To my considerable disappointment, the letter contained a reminder that the corrective action process was still in effect, in direct contradiction to the agreement we had reached.

This came on top of a very frustrating morning as the two most insecure yet ego-ridden people I have ever worked with manifested their highest level of incompetence: if they can’t communicate and work with each other, why must I be whipsawed at every turn?

So I’m at home today, making sure I keep an inevitable ulcer at bay. I met with a pair of union stewards yesterday and their consensus was that this boiled to a lack of groveling on my part. The action they want to correct, if you read between the lines, is a lack of obeisance and self-flagellation on my part. Sadly, I’m genetically incapable of panicking or making everything into a crisis, and I was sufficiently well brought-up to avoid making my failure to plan someone else’s emergency.

So I’m looking into making tomorrow my last day and just saying to hell with it. It’s not worth it.

According to an oral agreement reached today by myself and the Superior Professor, my last day at my current job will be Dec 31, 2003. Of course, she has to check with the authorities to see if this is all above-board, but my research and my intuition tell me it’s up to her discretion and sense of fairness, vestigial as that may be.

This marks the third time I have made the offer to leave while still allowing them — the Superior Professor and the Subordinate Professor — to find the right person for the job and me to find a new position. I made the offer in June, realizing that this was not a long-term situation, but that wasn’t what was heard (hey, classes were out for the summer and European teaching assignments were more appealing to think about).

After this contractually-specified corrective process came about, I reiterated the offer, still no sale. Today, after several minutes of conversation, I laid the idea on the table again and it was accepted, with the admission that my previous attempts had not registered at all. When I explained, with stunned amazement, that this was the same offer I had made previously, I was told that wasn’t what she heard at all. (I related this story to a high-ranking member of the administration and after he expressed relief that things would be resolved without any prejudicial information in my record, he made it clear that his experience — what you say isn’t what they hear — is consistent with mine, for both the Superior and the Subordinate Professors.) The prejudicial information is very important: if this process gets to the next stage — again, purely at her discretion — I lose any oportunity to work at the University.

Is it any surprise this has been such a struggle? If you can’t communicate something as fundamental as that — especially to someone who claims to have the interests of their research and policy center first and foremost in the mind — what do you have?

So that’s a relief. I had to then listen to a litany of gripes about how the Superior Professor comes to work after dinner to write and research and her family is suffering as a result. But working at her office rather than at home is her choice, by her own admission: her children are, in her words, “an attractive nuisance.” And the things she is working on are her choice: one doesn’t assign tasks to full professors, after all. So if she has chosen to work on law review articles and programs to raise the profile of her center, that’s her choice.

And of course I had to hear a torrent of abuse and revisionist history directed at her predecessor, who to hear it all was inept in every way but is in fact a senior assistant attorney general for this state and the chair of the Consumers Union board. Not a lightweight, in other words.

And then the Subordinate Professor gripes about how underpaid she is and never had any money: I have learned never to go to coffee with her, unless I’m prepared to buy. Two full-time professor salaries, no kids, no hobbies that I can discern, and still no money. Granted, there may be loans to pay off, but those can be refinanced to 2% notes these days. I think it’s just too much dining out and Living the Life. And that recently arrived shipment of furniture and art from central Europe, bought during the summer while over there, probably doesn’t help.

This all seems so surreal, but I have never understood surrealism to involve pain . . . .

I’m just glad it will finally come to an end, by the end of December if not sooner.

Directions

I had to go visit the Microsoft campus today as part of my job: we were coordinating a continuing legal education session (MSFT were hosting and presenting). I had often seen the campus outlined on a map as if it were a small town, as in the lower map on the linked page but that’s actually a good description. You drive in and are confronted with markers to the different buildings as if you were in a town. Our hosts never thought to tell us we needed a map . . . .

We had to get to Bldg 9 (central to the upper map) from the orange freeway at the left side of the map and while the buildings may have been numbered sequentially as they were built, that ordering is not useful now: a map would have helped. I would suspect there are people who have worked there for years and never get to all or even a lot of the buildings . . . . .

A casual work atmosphere, to be sure, and very collegial/clubby from what I saw. The folks who hosted us don’t work in that building and I have no idea what goes on there: the X-Box in the lobby *may* have been a clue, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Continue reading “field trip to Microsoft”

I have been getting comment spam on random entries . . . . some of it was the usual mindless pr0n links, but some was for what could be a legitimate business. I have the same question for them as I do for the people who send email spam: what makes you think I would buy from someone who obviously has so little clue about how to start a business relationship? Or even that a commodity now?

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground

Some experts wonder if the industry’s efforts will create more trouble for it than ever. “The R.I.A.A. is breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Clay Shirky, a software developer who teaches new media at New York University.

[ . . . ]

Another file-sharing model is for business users who want to collaborate while protecting secrets from competitors. “The needs of businesses and the needs of file traders are the same,” Mr. Shirky said. “I want a secure way to send you a three megabyte PowerPoint file with no way for anyone else to see it. That is not different from an MP3 file.”

Emergency Rooms Get Eased Rules on Patient Care

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 — The Bush administration is relaxing rules that say hospitals have to examine and treat people who require emergency medical care, regardless of their ability to pay.

Under the new rule, which takes effect on Nov. 10, patients might find it more difficult to obtain certain types of emergency care at some hospitals or clinics that hospitals own and operate.

The new rule makes clear that hospitals need not have specialists “on call” around the clock. Some patients might have more difficulty winning damages in court for injuries caused by violations of the federal standards.

So after November 10, expect to be turned away from the emergency room unless you have an open wound if you visit any but the largest big city hospitals.

This is progress?

Event 5300350 Map

We had a small earthquake (over in Bremerton, where my niece lives) during the bedtime story hour, just enough to be noticed, but not enough to freak anyone out. I entered a response at the website where they track these things and found that 24 people in my zip code (98115) had also reported it.

I’ll see if I can let the facts slip out tomorrow morning . . . .

O’Reilly Network: Where ever I lay my URL [May 20, 2003]
You see, I just realised that no one – at least no one who pays me a wage – has any real idea where I am. I’ve never met my editor here at O’Reilly, Simon St Laurent, but given that I’m English he could possibly guess to within a few hundred miles, and my boss at The Guardian could perhaps narrow it down to within 10, but at the end of the day, my address is my URL, my email and my Instant Messenger accounts.
[ . . . . ]
This whole idea fascinates me – perhaps, for the first time, after years of prophecy, we can now truly declare the death of distance.

To paraphrase Twain, the death of distance is still exaggerated. At the end of this article, James Fallows offers a bet on whether the virtual workplace will win out over the physical.

Any takers?

Obviously, for Ben Hammersley and others similarly situated, this will work: writers have always been mobile. But consider a hive of knowledge workers like Microsoft or Apple: you *will* work in Redmond or Cupertino, and that’s that.