Category: two wheels good

Wired News: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill (12):

“These guys are really quite scared,” said the source of Microsoft’s management. “It shows how their backs are against the wall…. Even though it’s Microsoft, no one is interested in what we have to offer, even our own employees.”

So concerned is management, owning an iPod at Microsoft is beginning to become impolitic, the manager said. Employees are hiding their iPods by swapping the telltale white headphones for a less conspicuous pair.

“Some people are a bit concerned about being traitors, not supporting the company,” he said. “They’re a bit stealth about it.

Of course, some of their brighter people are Apple fans.

[apologies to Thoreau]

So I have noticed a lot of hubbub about Moleskine paper products, these really nice notebooks that Bruce Chatwin made famous. I look at them. They’re nice looking. They feel good. They exude exotic adventure and travel, risk and romance.

MoleskineUS:

Moleskine is a family of notebooks for different functions, pursuits, and endeavors – personal and professional.

Fortunately, impressionable as I am, I never bought any, even when I was reading Chatwin. I have accumulated lots of other ‘blank books’ and kept some travel journals, but I find that those old school composition books are just as good.

composition books @ froogle:

Results 1 – 10 of about 38 confirmed / 155 total results for “composition books”. (0.23 seconds)

Cheaper, by far, available everywhere, and if you really get off the beaten track, you might find something local (rice paper? hand-sewn paper?) that has more than mere connotations of exotica.

I’m too utilitarian for Moleskine, I’m afraid. One argument in their favor, on a practical level, is that if you buy a nice quality journal, you’re more likely to keep it up. I don’t know if that would work for me . . . . I can drop an expensive habit just as easily as a cheap one.

Lingering Job Insecurity of Silicon Valley:

Building software, he observed, is “becoming the equivalent of blue-collar work.”

Unemployment has risen sharply in computing, making it more like blue-collar work in that sense. The unemployment rate last year among computer scientists, for example, was 5.2 percent, the highest level since the government began tracking this work as an occupation two decades ago. In most of those years, the unemployment rate for computer scientists was under 2 percent [From my dim recollections of undergraduate economics, 4% is generally considered to be as good as it gets: a graph accompanying this article shows it dipping close to 1% — ed]. Similarly, unemployment among electrical engineers last year, at 6.2 percent, was the highest in 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[ . . . ]

The persistence of record high unemployment among skilled computer engineers suggests that something beyond the usual up-and-down cycle of business is at work.

Do tell.
Continue reading “waiting for the curve to bend”

We hear a lot of a claims and counter-claims about how much viruses and worms cost the average business, but what about ISPs? Their bottomline is more directly impacted by this kind of thing. My ISP reminded me to keep my Windows installation up to date . . .

I recall in the summer of 2002, the NIMDA worm was consuming a lot of my bandwidth and server cycles: scale that up across a broadband infrastructure and take a guess at how much a Comcast or Qwest might have to absorb in unnecessary upgrades (to cover wasted bandwidth) or additional payroll to meet their SLAs. Such is the power of a monopoly, they have to eat those costs.

Education Secretary Paige calls teachers union “terrorist organization”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization” during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday.

I need to find out how the NEA is represented at my school: the whole thing smacks of the McCarthy era: “are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying member of a terrorist organization?”

EmptyBottle.org: Echo and the Bunnymen

Perhaps it’s time to retitle my weblog . . . . guilty as charged.

of course, I have been thinking about this differently. I have been thinking about it as voting or adding one’s voice to the choir. If the big city newspapers don’t want to address an issue (like if the president of these United States has been playing fast and loose with the truth on his military service), we self-publishing cranks can and, I think, should.

This echo-chamber notion and the whole “death of distance/corporate cronyism” meme are overlapping here.

Scotsman.com News – Entertainment – Arts – Joyce grandson threatens to ban readings at festival:

AS anyone who has ever attempted to read Finnegans Wake will attest, nothing is easy about James Joyce. And now the writer’s home city of Dublin is tied up in knots over its attempts to celebrate the centenary of the day on which his marginally more readable novel Ulysses is set – June 16, 1904.

The city has planned a three-month festival of celebrations costing about £700,000 [US$1.125 million, as of 2/22/2004].

Unfortunately, the only living direct descendant of Joyce has promised to disrupt the festival by banning any public readings of his work.”

Even if you concede that the obstreperous Mr Joyce has the right to protect his grandfather’s works, I would argue that he has the responsibility to see that they are appreciated by a wider audience. And what better opportunity than the centennial of the book’s events?

Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face . . .

I have been looking into doing this but I can’t see to find where the category is defined in mt_entry record. I see the categories defined but the values are all NULL in the table. The pages all rebuild properly, so I am confused.

Help?