I wrote an article for an in-house publication about a new technical book. I was surprised to find that this brand-new book had alredy garnered two glowing reviews on Amazon - until I noticed that the reviewers were two of the same names in the author's acknowledgements - and one of them was his wife!
TiVo realizes they are dealing with a self-selected market of people who will buy this gizmo and open themselves up to this kind of profiling. They are actually eager for someone else to suggest more things for them to buy and watch. The less info you give out about yourself, the less anyone is going to bother you or "market" to you.
I went to a community meeting last summer about how to keep a 60-foot cellphone tower out of our little "historic neighborhood" and noticed I was the only person sitting around the conference table who wasn't packing a cellphone. Everyone wants to complain about their cellphone service, but no one wants a tower in their line of vision. Actually, we tried to steer them to a couple of churches who could have used help with their crumbling steeples. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the tower would benefit only those who were using Cricket phones, not wireless communication in general, and that there is no limit to how many companies can build towers within the same area. There was also some grumbling about Cricket, with its short range, being the choice of "hookers and drug dealers." As it turned out, Leap Wireless, hardly has enough money to keep their NASDAQ listing, much less fight a bunch of pitchfork-wielding homeowners, so they never built the tower.
Seems like a great product that could be very useful to travelling businessmen, and even just vacationers looking for a good place to eat.
Finding food while travelling is one of the most basic instincts - even the most primitive hunters and gatherers managed it. I've been on many trips and vacations and never found it necessary to do much more than "follow my nose" to find something decent to eat. Most "travel guides" seem to steer you to over-priced tourist traps, so I would need some other motivation to take another expensive gizmo along on a vacation.
In most of the world there is no such thing as a doggie bag. -- Prof. Kelly Brownell
The raccoons I feed don't seem to give me the same problems.
My idiotic neighbors in California used to feed raccoons, no doubt humming "I went to the animal fair" in their blissed-out little minds as they did so. This was in a rural area where a lot of folks kept chickens. Every time they went on vacation, the raccoons would break into at least one henhouse and destroy quite a few chickens and ducks. Chickens, by the way, are perhaps the ultimate recyclers. They will eat any kind of kitchen scraps, even, ahem, chicken meat and eggshells.
Eminem was my first thought, too. He's edgy and alienated and in-your-face, about the right age and a big enough star to draw a lot of people to see the movie. His hair's not nappy enough, though.
There's a little Slim Shady in all of us. Let's all stand up.
It was an excellent call to present the log of Sept. 11, 2001 today so readers could recall not only what happened but how they came to know what was happening that day. But this would be a good time for Slashdot to re-think its policy on leaving the year off posts in its archive. As time goes by, the years blur together, and a 9/11/01 post becomes indistinguishable from 9/11/99 or 9/11/02.
Well, I for one was unemployed until I got enlisted into a job at a hotshot Internet company, and I made good money for three years until the bottom dropped out. I moved over to a Web job in a sector that's actually making money (good ol' healthcare) and aside from the $$$ I lost in the "employee stock plan" at BigCorp, I'm better off today than I was back then. I still have the T1, I still have time for/. I miss the excitement of all the multi-hundred-million dollar deals that were supposedly flying by, but it turned out to be a magic carpet ride anyway.
When Nortel and United Utilities announced plans to offer high-speed Internet access over electrical power lines in 1998, it was hyped as "the Holy Grail of the electrical industry." But that project and a similar one undertaken by Siemens in Germany were canned, due to a change of market focus on ADSL products, plus complaints that the PowerLine technology could drown out other radio traffic and interfere with civil aviation and emergency service transmissions. The Brits also found that streetlamps interfered with the signal. The last I heard, there were new launches planned for last year in Europe, and some of the early problems were being ironed out. It seems this technology would work better in densely-populated Europe than in the U.S.
Our 18-member team likes to have birthday parties every month, and we've got every month covered except September, so we've asked management to make sure our next hire has a September birthday.
I guess people who don't have a life are hoping they will get one the next time around. Of course, by then their skills will be obsolete, they will run around using archaic phrases like "awesome" and "kludgy," they will bore everyone with their reminiscences and nostalgia for products and fads that no longer exist, and most predictable of all, when they hear the sounds people of the future are enjoying, they will grump "You call that stuff music?"
I don't know how this tradition got started, kind of like a penguin dropping a rock in front of potential mate, but here are some of the things a diamond ring is good for:
Intent. A guy may tell you he loves you and wants to marry you, but if he actually goes out and buys a diamond ring, you can surmise that he's serious.
Security. The fact that he can afford to buy this ring, and he's willing to buy it, indicates he's a good provider, and generous, and that there will be more goodies where this came from.
Attachment. When you start wearing the ring, it's a sign that you're "taken" and for all other guys to back off, especially after you get the matching wedding ring.
Status. Size matters. People notice. When a girl gets engaged, her friends surreptitiously compare the size of her ring with theirs and others'.
Insurance. An engaged woman may quit her job, sell her home, move to another area, etc. to prepare for the marriage. Her family begins wedding preparations. So if the guy breaks off the engagement, she gets to keep the ring, compensating for some of her costs, inconvenience and embarrassment, not to mention the lost opportunity of looking for another, more suitable mate during the engagement.
Beauty. Finally, all the mystique of how beautiful, sparkly and everlasting a diamond is.
It's worth noting that plenty of people find lasting happiness with or without marriage, with small diamonds, no diamonds, rubies instead of diamonds, etc., but I wouldn't recommend trying it with a fake diamond.
It's handy for keeping your updated resume and copies of letters to prospective employers and other stuff that you might want to work on during the day, to help you get out of that company. And it's pretty unobtrusive to walk in and out the door with. Also handy if you're working on small files on a computer with no printer connected and need to print them out at school/work/home etc.
Dadgummest subscription process I've ever seen
on
Ziff Davis Teeters
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Back in the last century, I used to love reading Interactive Week when I was working for a big networking company that was making tons of money, and so was Z-D. It was full of news, gossip and ads that were useful to my niche. I read and quoted from the online edition in my work several times a week, and my boss agreed to pay for a print subscription for me. But there was no apparent way to order and pay for a print subscription online. They wouln't sell you a subscription, but they would send it free - if only you filled out a lengthy survey of how much budget you controlled in a long list of categories. If you left out one, when you hit "submit," it erased everything, you got an error message and had to start all over again. You really had to want that magazine pretty badly to go through all that. My boss told me to just check off $50,000 for every category. I eventually started getting my magazines, but by then the tech bubble had burst, the magazine was barely thick enough to swat a fly with, and I had moved on to another sector, where my magazines nonetheless continued to follow me. So I don't see how they were making money on subscriptions, although they were probably told advertisers that they had a lot of powerful executives with big budgets reading their mag.
You must be present to win.
Re:Fowarding this to your boss, good idea?
on
Sysadmin Day. Yay.
·
· Score: 2
We wheedled our boss into a pizza party with ice cream for 18 people. The MSNBC link helped a lot.
Thanks for calling attention to this event and providing the official-sounding links. I convinced my boss that this is an important national day, and the company agreed to spring for a pizza party with ice cream and soda on company time for the whole IS department on Friday.
Good to finally get the recipe for this concoction. I drank a few Colorado Bulldogs (Bullfrogs?) at my bachelorette party, and it was the drunkest I've ever been - I can't believe those guys let me drive home! The next morning I got up and went to work - I wasn't hung over, I was still drunk. That's the only time that's ever happened to me. I spent quite a spell on the couch in the ladies' room. These days I try to keep it down to an occasional glass of wine or two, but sometimes I appease my inner geek with some Appleton's Jamaican rum mixed with Code Red and a good squeeze of lime.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote an article for an in-house publication about a new technical book. I was surprised to find that this brand-new book had alredy garnered two glowing reviews on Amazon - until I noticed that the reviewers were two of the same names in the author's acknowledgements - and one of them was his wife!
You can use the convenient online pregnancy calculator for this sort of thing.
TiVo realizes they are dealing with a self-selected market of people who will buy this gizmo and open themselves up to this kind of profiling. They are actually eager for someone else to suggest more things for them to buy and watch. The less info you give out about yourself, the less anyone is going to bother you or "market" to you.
Not was enough that recent vulnerability in IE that can run any program in an unpatched windows system.
Difficult to read this post is, hmmm?
I went to a community meeting last summer about how to keep a 60-foot cellphone tower out of our little "historic neighborhood" and noticed I was the only person sitting around the conference table who wasn't packing a cellphone. Everyone wants to complain about their cellphone service, but no one wants a tower in their line of vision. Actually, we tried to steer them to a couple of churches who could have used help with their crumbling steeples. A lot of people were surprised to learn that the tower would benefit only those who were using Cricket phones, not wireless communication in general, and that there is no limit to how many companies can build towers within the same area. There was also some grumbling about Cricket, with its short range, being the choice of "hookers and drug dealers." As it turned out, Leap Wireless, hardly has enough money to keep their NASDAQ listing, much less fight a bunch of pitchfork-wielding homeowners, so they never built the tower.
I thought it was going to be a sequel to "Pulp Fiction."
In other news, that Marshall backup QB who threw for 4 TDs and ran for one last night apparently had an unconventional freshman year as well.
Seems like a great product that could be very useful to travelling businessmen, and even just vacationers looking for a good place to eat.
Finding food while travelling is one of the most basic instincts - even the most primitive hunters and gatherers managed it. I've been on many trips and vacations and never found it necessary to do much more than "follow my nose" to find something decent to eat. Most "travel guides" seem to steer you to over-priced tourist traps, so I would need some other motivation to take another expensive gizmo along on a vacation.
In most of the world there is no such thing as a doggie bag. -- Prof. Kelly Brownell
The raccoons I feed don't seem to give me the same problems.
My idiotic neighbors in California used to feed raccoons, no doubt humming "I went to the animal fair" in their blissed-out little minds as they did so. This was in a rural area where a lot of folks kept chickens. Every time they went on vacation, the raccoons would break into at least one henhouse and destroy quite a few chickens and ducks. Chickens, by the way, are perhaps the ultimate recyclers. They will eat any kind of kitchen scraps, even, ahem, chicken meat and eggshells.
I attend both MIT and Stanford
Wow, you must have a heck of a commute!
Eminem was my first thought, too. He's edgy and alienated and in-your-face, about the right age and a big enough star to draw a lot of people to see the movie. His hair's not nappy enough, though.
There's a little Slim Shady in all of us. Let's all stand up.
LOL
It was an excellent call to present the log of Sept. 11, 2001 today so readers could recall not only what happened but how they came to know what was happening that day. But this would be a good time for Slashdot to re-think its policy on leaving the year off posts in its archive. As time goes by, the years blur together, and a 9/11/01 post becomes indistinguishable from 9/11/99 or 9/11/02.
Well, I for one was unemployed until I got enlisted into a job at a hotshot Internet company, and I made good money for three years until the bottom dropped out. I moved over to a Web job in a sector that's actually making money (good ol' healthcare) and aside from the $$$ I lost in the "employee stock plan" at BigCorp, I'm better off today than I was back then. I still have the T1, I still have time for /. I miss the excitement of all the multi-hundred-million dollar deals that were supposedly flying by, but it turned out to be a magic carpet ride anyway.
Would letting go be an option?
They used to have one of these in the lobby of the high-tech co. where I used to work. Now they're so broke I'm not even sure they have a lobby.
When Nortel and United Utilities announced plans to offer high-speed Internet access over electrical power lines in 1998, it was hyped as "the Holy Grail of the electrical industry." But that project and a similar one undertaken by Siemens in Germany were canned, due to a change of market focus on ADSL products, plus complaints that the PowerLine technology could drown out other radio traffic and interfere with civil aviation and emergency service transmissions. The Brits also found that streetlamps interfered with the signal. The last I heard, there were new launches planned for last year in Europe, and some of the early problems were being ironed out. It seems this technology would work better in densely-populated Europe than in the U.S.
Our 18-member team likes to have birthday parties every month, and we've got every month covered except September, so we've asked management to make sure our next hire has a September birthday.
Although a few are members of Congress.
I guess people who don't have a life are hoping they will get one the next time around. Of course, by then their skills will be obsolete, they will run around using archaic phrases like "awesome" and "kludgy," they will bore everyone with their reminiscences and nostalgia for products and fads that no longer exist, and most predictable of all, when they hear the sounds people of the future are enjoying, they will grump "You call that stuff music?"
I don't know how this tradition got started, kind of like a penguin dropping a rock in front of potential mate, but here are some of the things a diamond ring is good for:
- Intent. A guy may tell you he loves you and wants to marry you, but if he actually goes out and buys a diamond ring, you can surmise that he's serious.
- Security. The fact that he can afford to buy this ring, and he's willing to buy it, indicates he's a good provider, and generous, and that there will be more goodies where this came from.
- Attachment. When you start wearing the ring, it's a sign that you're "taken" and for all other guys to back off, especially after you get the matching wedding ring.
- Status. Size matters. People notice. When a girl gets engaged, her friends surreptitiously compare the size of her ring with theirs and others'.
- Insurance. An engaged woman may quit her job, sell her home, move to another area, etc. to prepare for the marriage. Her family begins wedding preparations. So if the guy breaks off the engagement, she gets to keep the ring, compensating for some of her costs, inconvenience and embarrassment, not to mention the lost opportunity of looking for another, more suitable mate during the engagement.
- Beauty. Finally, all the mystique of how beautiful, sparkly and everlasting a diamond is.
It's worth noting that plenty of people find lasting happiness with or without marriage, with small diamonds, no diamonds, rubies instead of diamonds, etc., but I wouldn't recommend trying it with a fake diamond.I Quit!
No way I'd work indoors in 97 degrees.
It's handy for keeping your updated resume and copies of letters to prospective employers and other stuff that you might want to work on during the day, to help you get out of that company. And it's pretty unobtrusive to walk in and out the door with. Also handy if you're working on small files on a computer with no printer connected and need to print them out at school/work/home etc.
Back in the last century, I used to love reading Interactive Week when I was working for a big networking company that was making tons of money, and so was Z-D. It was full of news, gossip and ads that were useful to my niche. I read and quoted from the online edition in my work several times a week, and my boss agreed to pay for a print subscription for me. But there was no apparent way to order and pay for a print subscription online. They wouln't sell you a subscription, but they would send it free - if only you filled out a lengthy survey of how much budget you controlled in a long list of categories. If you left out one, when you hit "submit," it erased everything, you got an error message and had to start all over again. You really had to want that magazine pretty badly to go through all that. My boss told me to just check off $50,000 for every category. I eventually started getting my magazines, but by then the tech bubble had burst, the magazine was barely thick enough to swat a fly with, and I had moved on to another sector, where my magazines nonetheless continued to follow me. So I don't see how they were making money on subscriptions, although they were probably told advertisers that they had a lot of powerful executives with big budgets reading their mag.
You must be present to win.
We wheedled our boss into a pizza party with ice cream for 18 people. The MSNBC link helped a lot.
Thanks for calling attention to this event and providing the official-sounding links. I convinced my boss that this is an important national day, and the company agreed to spring for a pizza party with ice cream and soda on company time for the whole IS department on Friday.
Good to finally get the recipe for this concoction. I drank a few Colorado Bulldogs (Bullfrogs?) at my bachelorette party, and it was the drunkest I've ever been - I can't believe those guys let me drive home! The next morning I got up and went to work - I wasn't hung over, I was still drunk. That's the only time that's ever happened to me. I spent quite a spell on the couch in the ladies' room. These days I try to keep it down to an occasional glass of wine or two, but sometimes I appease my inner geek with some Appleton's Jamaican rum mixed with Code Red and a good squeeze of lime.
There are rarely just two options