the art of writing is discovering what you believe
For a bonus challenge, try mixing up Macs and PCs on the same network. Into this mess a new breed of entrepreneurs rushes offering home networking skills. (At a rate of $60/hour, if you’ve got the know-how, you’ve got a steady job.)
It ain’t that hard, but for that kind of money, I’ll keep that to myself.
Possibly proof positive that the members of Orkut may be social-networks a priori of joining the online adjunct, a nifty geographic display of Orkut member locations showing the clustered majority are clearly close enough to go bowling.
[screenshot of the linked graphic below the fold in case it goes away].
Yup, the death of distance has been somewhat exaggerated.
I guess there is some overlap with the outsourcing/offshoring discussions I keep stumbling across. Where it’s relevant to me is that Seattle didn’t have the critical mass to sustain a high-tech economy as San Francisco or New York seems to have had, Portland even less so. So when the cash infusions stopped coming, businesses were shuttered and people faced the options of staying in the same geographic location and finding other work or voting with their feet (or a U-Haul trailer) and moving to where the work is. Perhaps the circus will come back to town someday.
Continue reading “location, location, location”
Killing the Music (washingtonpost.com)
Don Henley discusses the music business and how it’s much more about business than about music.
Crooked Timber: Outsourcing; welcome to the world
‘Multinational corporations are faithless and fickle and will move on to the next source of low-cost labour as quick as you can say ‘globalisation’.’ [ . . . ] Other countries have lived for years with the risk that that the big IT firm they attracted to their spanking new industrial park (having won a bidding war against Glasgow, Lodz and Bratislava) will up sticks before even paying their negotiated rate of lower corporation tax. Entire national economies are structured according to the roll of the dice, or the simple luck to be in the right place at the right time and have a relatively cheap, eager, English-speaking workforce. But every European finance minister is looking over her shoulder for the next upstart country with a pocket full of structural funds and a crazy dream to be the next tiger economy. That’s just life.
Interesting read, with a lot of comments (very high comment to post ratio at CT).
So what are the “safe” (ie, only as portable as *you* want to be) careers?
from Suzanne Vega’s Celebrity Playlist commentary, in this week’s New Music Tuesday email …
Yet another playlist I’d love to buy.
This is proving to be quite useful.
Like working with CPAN modules or FreeBSD’s ports system, all that’s stored locally is a skeleton outline of what’s available: you request something, and down it comes, fetched, unpacked, and installed. Uninstalling is just as painless.
I have more plugins installed than I realized, and I had to walk through the manual registration process (you match each file in your plugins directory against a registered plugin) to start things off properly. The only one that is unclaimed is the Zeitgeist module, but that will be taken care of soon, I’m assured.
Almost all those plugins are in use: the ArchiveYear one I have yet to work with and the Outliner is giving me some problems. The author and I have been in contact: it’s supposed to take the OPML data from NetNewsWire or your RSS reader of choice and generate a reading list/blogroll based on what you’re actually subscribed to.
The only gotcha I have found is in getting the MTW3CValidate and MTTextile to play nicely. MTTextile needs to load first, ideally as the first item in the template, followed by MTW3CValidate.
<$MTTextileOptions smarty_mode="2" trim_spaces="1"$>
[ . . . ] the rest of your page [ . . . ]
If you think this would help (and you’re a MovableType user) check it out.
MrG finds it interesting that the RIAA is OK with file-sharing _as long as the artist agrees to it._
He suggests that artists embrace the idea by asking listeners to share their music, and asked for some button ideas. Here’s mine: 
This seems like it could be an interesting wedge to use against DRM schemes. If an artist explicitly releases their work under a Creative Content license and as a consequence insists that any distribution scheme (iTunes, WalTunes, et al) remove any DRM from their content, would that break their paradigm? Do the DRM systems support graded licensing?
Center for American Progress – The Progress Report – Page:
*Daily Outrage*
bq. Conservative allies of the White House have resorted to attacking the military service of former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a triple-amputee war hero decorated for his service in Vietnam.
This is just outrageous. I don’t know what makes me more angry, the fact that someone would be allowed to broadcast this kind of slander, knowing it will be peddled as fact by “rip and read” conservative news organs, or that no one will repudiate these comments before they become woven into the fabric of the debate.
Despicable. A soldier covers a grenade to save his brother soldiers, 4 days after winning the Silver Star for gallantry, and the best a grateful nation can do is allow worthless pundits to disparage him.
I dug out the 25 most-requested URLs since the epoch (April 2002) and am listing them in the sidebar. Needs some work still (the Archive pages don’t make sense there). But an interesting look at what Google thinks of the stuff here (that’s how most people get here).
Many New Causes for Old Problem of Jobs Lost Abroad
Interesting and pretty balanced piece on outsourcing and who’s affected.
Some structural change is inevitable, and has always been part of the reality of the workplace. It’s partly the pace of change that makes the difference and partly the types of jobs that have become portable.
Am I the only one who sees any irony in the resistance to telecommuting (that might allow companies to lower costs by moving parts of their workforce into less expensive domestic real estate) at the same time as jobs move offshore?