I've heard both Zircon and Zirconium on different versions. And Joe Volodorsky, the guy who told me Montana was about the Mac OS and its users, said Zirconium.
This little article grew out of some loose talk, with lots of laughter, about how you really need to be from L.A. to understand some of Zappa's stuff.
I mean, do you remember the Cheech and Chong line, where one says, "We're going to be bigger than Ruben and the Jets, man," or something like that?
Exactly. At age 57, time doesn't "pass faster" for me than it did when I was 23 or 24, but each day adds a lower percentage of new experiences and memories than it did back then. This should be obvious to most people over age 10 who have decent memories.
WARES instead of WHORES until right after the CES, when the Adult Entertainment show moves in -- and I'm sure unaffiliated hookers aren't allowed in hotel rooms during *that* show. Ha ha ha.
The problem for small merchants isn't calculating sales taxes, but disbursing the right amounts to the various states, counties, and cities.
Still, this is a problem that could easily be handled by PayPal (which I use to process online payments to my business), Yahoo, Google or any of the many other companies that handle merchant services online. In fact, I'm sure that about 30 days after we have federal legislation that requires online merchants to collect sales/use taxes, one of the payment processors will have a tax collection & payment system up and running, with the other services offering something similar within weeks, if not days.
I suspect that Google and PayPal, at least, have such systems already developed and ready to go.
If Wikileaks' biggest problem is that it's overwhelmed with readers, wouldn't our simplest and most direct way to help solve the problem be to simply not read Wikileaks?
Not if she was a federal employee since before 1984. She paid into the federal retirement system, not SS. There are some partial payment criteria that may be in play here. For example, she may get some little bit of SS disability. But this can get complicated and I don't know enough to talk about it.
Maybe the Magic Money Fairy comes by your house every other week, but he seems to bypass mine. And (shock) most of the people who pay me to make videos want to promote or sell something.
Are music videos promotions? How about live performance videos like this one?: http://vimeo.com/7366434
That's an original song, sung and played by its creators, shot and edited by me. But (horrors!) I mention the name of the band -- and of the nightclub whose owner was 100% happy to have me shooting his house band.
I post very little on Vimeo these days. My "fun" stuff often gets popular enough on YouTube that they send me money instead of the other way around, and other services happily host my promo videos at very reasonable rates. Vimeo is gradually falling off my radar.
I probably won't renew my Vimeo "Plus" membership. Too many limitations, and many other video hosts now offer H.264 quality as good as Vimeo's. Why should I pay where I'm not wanted?
When I need someone *local* to fix a problem in my living room laminate flooring, Craiglist.
If I want to buy or sell high-end commercial video gear, eBay.
Craigslist is local, eBay is national.
eBay is about "things," while Craiglist is more about services and events.
George W. Bush's VP -- nasty chickenhawk draft-dodger, don't remember his name right now -- talked up eBay but probably never heard of (or cared about) Craigslist.
eBay is about money and commerce, Craigslist is a community resource that happens to make a few bucks.
Pierre Omidyar has done many good things, including kicking in $400,000 when SourceForge nearly went down under one of the many inept exec teams Slashdot's constantly-renamed corporate masters have suffered from over the years. Craig Newmark has made an entirely new kind of online business possible. He is a hero to many small entrepreneurs. He's a nice guy, too.
Pierre's also a good person, but he's apparently a lot more into money than Craig.
I might invite Pierre over for supper. Craig is welcome to stay on one of our fold-out futons any old time. And he's welcome to hop on our unsecured-on-purpose wireless network (really, Craig. I mean it) if we're not home when he gets here. I'd let him borrow my Jeep, too.
Pierre probably wouldn't want to be seen in a dented, faded 1994 Cherokee. I doubt Craig would care. (It runs well.)
Meg Whitman? Um, no. A little hoity for people like us who live in a one-bedroom mobile home.
CLINCHER:
Craig & Jim (Buckmeister) aren't trying to screw up eBay. Meg and her crew are trying to screw up Craigslist.
HEY, PIERRE - could you please stop messing with Craigslist and get Meg involved with Republican politics or something else smelly, instead?
Oh- just remembered the Bush VP's name: Dickhead Cheney. Couldn't he and Meg go shoot lawyers together or something? We have at least a million surplus lawyers, enough to keep Meg too busy to screw up Craigslist for many years to come, and more than enough to keep Cheney out of politics for at least a century or two.
Yah. I remember, as a kid in Orange, California in the late 50s - mid 60s, the unanimous line from parents and teachers about how comics would rot your brain and keep you from ever reading "real" books.
Funny thing: me and my comics-reading, comics-trading buddies all grew up to love reading. We graduated from comics to adult (not meant in the porn sense, you dirty-minded pervert) books earlier than most of our peers, and still, in our 50s, tend to read more than most people.
Being quoted in an article about software gives you "expert cred" that makes more people likely to try your project, more developers likely to want to work with you on it, and is a nice thing to attach to your resume if and when you want to get a contract, a job or raise capital to start your own company.
And FYI, smart reporters have already read the FAQs and other material before they interview you. The interview is, ideally, an exploration of your motives and thoughts. And, yes, maybe a little clarification of some of the technology involved in your project so that people not intimately involved with it can figure out why it's worth your time and possibly theirs.
"...if *you* want something, then it's your problem, not mine."
Uh huh. And three years from now, when you're doing something for which you *want* and *need* publicity, and reporters you contact remember how arrogant you were to them the last time they spoke to you, don't be surprised if they say, "...if *you* want something, then it's your problem, not mine."
True, and common. Back when I drove a cab it was routine for me to take blind passengers to drive-through ATMs and pull up so the rear window, not the front one, was aligned with the machine. This way way more convenient for a blind passenger than getting out of the car and navigating to and from a walk-up ATM by cane or with a dog's help.
My wife and I live in a one-bedroom, 480 square foot mobile home with a 200 square foot add-on room we use as office space.
The trailer itself is a 1960 Vagabond "10-wide," well-known in its day for being better-insulated than most stick-built houses of that era. We've added even more insulation, to the point where even with a stack of computers, a flat-top electric stove, and a 42" LCD TV, plus electric heat and three (admittedly very high SEER) window air conditioning units, our peak electric bills are still under $100 per month.
We paid $18,000 for the trailer and lot, then spent another $12,000 on remodeling and appliances. Our homeowners association fee, which includes water, sewer, and community amenities including a clubhouse and swimming pool, is $105 per month. Add property taxes, insurance, County trash collection fees, and cable/phone/internet service, and we are at just over $400 per month, total.
Big? No. Nice? You bet. The bedroom is smaller than my wife would prefer, but on the other hand we have more closet space than most of the larger places we've lived in over the years. Plus we have a nice patio for outdoor BBQ cooking and eating, plenty of shed-type storage, enough yard to make our 50-pound dog happy, and a separate little fenced space where we store our bikes, lawn mower, and kayak, along with my tools, spare lumber, paint, and other "stuff."
We have room for up to four guests to stay overnight, all on foldout furniture. And much of the year we can feed them fresh orange juice from our own tree, too.
We've lived in three to four times as much space, but haven't ever really lived *better* than we do now.
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I have never suggested a "magic machine," nor did I sit in a cubicle instead of getting out and doing real research into manufacturing processes. Some parts of clothing production can be automated easily, some are not. I looked at what could be mechanized, and, as I said, I knew there would still be a fair amount of hand labor involved. My then-partner saw a market for good-fitting clothes and wanted to know if it was feasible to do. The answer was "yes" when transportation, and the remainder problem you pooh-pooh (that causes retail buyers to go gray at an early age) were taken into account.
I've moved on to other kinds of work, so I'm not going to build a semi-automated clothing plant.
And you won't, because you're as sure it can't be done as the carriage manufacturers were that those smelly gasoline cars would never be popular.
At the time we ran costs for semi-custom women's pants, we were looking at fully-automated pattern cutting and partially-automated (guided) sewing using CAD-type tools that became common in the sailmaking business more than 20 years ago.
Yes, there's still skilled tailoring/finishing work needed, but in return for paying for that at U.S. labor rates, you never have overstock sales for sizes or patterns that didn't sell well that season. nor do you have shipping costs for finished goods, which need to be treated far more gently than bolts of cloth.
The total cost of semi-custom finished pieces came out fairly close to the total cost of a pair of women's slacks made in the Mexican maquiladora zone near Nogales, once you figured in the cost of unsold merch, which is HUGE in the clothing biz -- especially in women's clothing with its constant style changes.
I was thinking in terms of professionally-published books where the prep work has already been done, not $10 for a one-off 300 page book including design and other pre-press work.
Returns -- remainders -- are a huge drag on both the publishing industry and on authors. Look at the royalty statements for the next book you write for a major publisher. Sure, there may be huge bookstore orders when it comes out, but even if your book sells well in some stores, it's inevitable that other retailers stocked too many and returned them to the publisher for full credit -- which can result in a royalty statement with *negative* amounts on it. Horrifying. It's happened to me, and it's happened to Stephen King and Dave Barry, who were both members of an infamous amateur group called The Rock Bottom Remainders -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Bottom_Remainders -- that got its name from this sad part of the publishing business.
Print on demand has (and, really, had 10 years ago) the potential to solve this problem.
We've had the technology for in-store print on demand for at least a decade. Darn near every bookstore should be able to print you a copy of darn near every book in its catalog in a few minutes. The fact that this is not already common (at $10 or less per 300 pages) is due to stupid business decisions all through the publishing chain, not to lack of technology.
And at least 20 years ago a woman I knew who had a fairly large (and quite nice) butt wondered why we didn't have semi-automated make-to-order clothing stores in every mall, where someone like her would look at a style sample, say, "I'll take that style in fabric #402," and have them either measure her on the spot or used her measurements they already had on file, and make her exactly what she wanted, in a size that fit *her* body instead of an arbitrary measurement.
This was all technically feasible, including the beeper you'd carry around the mall while you did your other shopping, that would alert you when your new slacks were ready at the "Pants That Fit" store.
If nothing else, make or print to order gets rid of the remainder problem that plagues both book publishers and clothing manufacturers.
Redundancy isn't expensive if you use peer to peer commo. No, I don't mean Limewire, but *real* peer to peer. Ham radio is peer to peer. CB radio is peer to peer. A direct RF dispatch radio system for a police or fire department or a cab company is peer to peer.
You can buy handheld CB radios for as little as $50 that'll work over a mile or so. A city could buy a stack of those, put in a $400 CB base station (with a decent roof-mounted antenna) and a 100-watt ham rig next to the CB base station for out-of-the area commo, a generator to power the base station rigs (you charge the mobile units' batteries in cars), and there's your backup communications system -- for well under $10,000.
Move to the Tampa Bay area in Florida and submit your work to WMNF. They play lots of local music; might even have you on the air live or book you for one of their many popular pconcerts.
LinkedIn and Facebook can both help
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
When I was laid off Dec. 31 I immediately announced my freelance availability on LinkedIn, Facebook, and a private journalists' email list I'm on. I've been busy ever since. LinkedIn has gotten me the most/best leads, but I've gotten some nice local ones through Facebook and a few from colleagues through the journo list.
The most interesting project I've landed came from a LinkedIn contact in Austin, TX, who hooked me up with someone in Raleigh, NC, who was doing a health care IT startup and needed writing/PR/marketing help. So I have a nice freelance account doing socially useful work for good people, all arranged over the Internet (although we've met F2F since).
Don't knock networking. It's the best way to get jobs you might actually like, with people you might like -- and who might like YOU.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard both Zircon and Zirconium on different versions. And Joe Volodorsky, the guy who told me Montana was about the Mac OS and its users, said Zirconium.
This little article grew out of some loose talk, with lots of laughter, about how you really need to be from L.A. to understand some of Zappa's stuff.
I mean, do you remember the Cheech and Chong line, where one says, "We're going to be bigger than Ruben and the Jets, man," or something like that?
There is a Frank Zappa monument in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Not all talk, all articles or all monuments need to be serious, you know.
- R
Um, sorry to tell you guys, but when he's not watching porn, Mike "Road Rage" Bennett manages to introduce plenty of nasty legislation.
I live in his district, sorry to say.
Never voted for him, but still... :(
- Robin
Exactly. At age 57, time doesn't "pass faster" for me than it did when I was 23 or 24, but each day adds a lower percentage of new experiences and memories than it did back then. This should be obvious to most people over age 10 who have decent memories.
WARES instead of WHORES until right after the CES, when the Adult Entertainment show moves in -- and I'm sure unaffiliated hookers aren't allowed in hotel rooms during *that* show. Ha ha ha.
Totally. I used to do 5, 6, 10 things at once. Now, at age 57, I am perfectly happy to do nothing at all...
- Robin
Here's the biggest existing one: https://thestc.com/
The problem for small merchants isn't calculating sales taxes, but disbursing the right amounts to the various states, counties, and cities.
Still, this is a problem that could easily be handled by PayPal (which I use to process online payments to my business), Yahoo, Google or any of the many other companies that handle merchant services online. In fact, I'm sure that about 30 days after we have federal legislation that requires online merchants to collect sales/use taxes, one of the payment processors will have a tax collection & payment system up and running, with the other services offering something similar within weeks, if not days.
I suspect that Google and PayPal, at least, have such systems already developed and ready to go.
- Robin
http://internetvideopromotion.com/
If Wikileaks' biggest problem is that it's overwhelmed with readers, wouldn't our simplest and most direct way to help solve the problem be to simply not read Wikileaks?
Not if she was a federal employee since before 1984. She paid into the federal retirement system, not SS. There are some partial payment criteria that may be in play here. For example, she may get some little bit of SS disability. But this can get complicated and I don't know enough to talk about it.
Heh. A squealer, no less.
It's not as if someone's "advertising" is showing on *your* Vimeo page or in the forums.
Whatever.
If you are the "we" of Vimeo, I want no part of it.
FYI, all music in all videos I've posted on Vimeo is legal.
- R
Who is this "we" of whom you speak?
I'm a paid Vimeo member, too.
Maybe the Magic Money Fairy comes by your house every other week, but he seems to bypass mine. And (shock) most of the people who pay me to make videos want to promote or sell something.
Are music videos promotions? How about live performance videos like this one?: http://vimeo.com/7366434
That's an original song, sung and played by its creators, shot and edited by me. But (horrors!) I mention the name of the band -- and of the nightclub whose owner was 100% happy to have me shooting his house band.
I post very little on Vimeo these days. My "fun" stuff often gets popular enough on YouTube that they send me money instead of the other way around, and other services happily host my promo videos at very reasonable rates. Vimeo is gradually falling off my radar.
I probably won't renew my Vimeo "Plus" membership. Too many limitations, and many other video hosts now offer H.264 quality as good as Vimeo's. Why should I pay where I'm not wanted?
You guys have fun, okay? :)
- Robin
When I want to advertise my *local* video production services, I use Craigslist: http://sarasota.craigslist.org/muc/1498727387.html
When I need someone *local* to fix a problem in my living room laminate flooring, Craiglist.
If I want to buy or sell high-end commercial video gear, eBay.
Craigslist is local, eBay is national.
eBay is about "things," while Craiglist is more about services and events.
George W. Bush's VP -- nasty chickenhawk draft-dodger, don't remember his name right now -- talked up eBay but probably never heard of (or cared about) Craigslist.
eBay is about money and commerce, Craigslist is a community resource that happens to make a few bucks.
Pierre Omidyar has done many good things, including kicking in $400,000 when SourceForge nearly went down under one of the many inept exec teams Slashdot's constantly-renamed corporate masters have suffered from over the years. Craig Newmark has made an entirely new kind of online business possible. He is a hero to many small entrepreneurs. He's a nice guy, too.
Pierre's also a good person, but he's apparently a lot more into money than Craig.
I might invite Pierre over for supper. Craig is welcome to stay on one of our fold-out futons any old time. And he's welcome to hop on our unsecured-on-purpose wireless network (really, Craig. I mean it) if we're not home when he gets here. I'd let him borrow my Jeep, too.
Pierre probably wouldn't want to be seen in a dented, faded 1994 Cherokee. I doubt Craig would care. (It runs well.)
Meg Whitman? Um, no. A little hoity for people like us who live in a one-bedroom mobile home.
CLINCHER:
Craig & Jim (Buckmeister) aren't trying to screw up eBay. Meg and her crew are trying to screw up Craigslist.
HEY, PIERRE - could you please stop messing with Craigslist and get Meg involved with Republican politics or something else smelly, instead?
Oh- just remembered the Bush VP's name: Dickhead Cheney. Couldn't he and Meg go shoot lawyers together or something? We have at least a million surplus lawyers, enough to keep Meg too busy to screw up Craigslist for many years to come, and more than enough to keep Cheney out of politics for at least a century or two.
Thanks,
- Robin
Really. I just did a survey of all the computers in my house. Three were running Ubuntu Linux, one was running Windows Vista.
That's a 75% market share!
Yah. I remember, as a kid in Orange, California in the late 50s - mid 60s, the unanimous line from parents and teachers about how comics would rot your brain and keep you from ever reading "real" books.
Funny thing: me and my comics-reading, comics-trading buddies all grew up to love reading. We graduated from comics to adult (not meant in the porn sense, you dirty-minded pervert) books earlier than most of our peers, and still, in our 50s, tend to read more than most people.
Go figure!
Hmm? Does this mean Amazon has re-invented and patented The Dialectizer? -- http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/
Or the lolcat translator? - http://speaklolcat.com/
"SPEEK SOFTLY AN CARRY HOOJ STICK" -- Theodore Catavelt
"Speek sufftly und cerry a beeg steeck" -- Theobork Borkevelt
Being quoted in an article about software gives you "expert cred" that makes more people likely to try your project, more developers likely to want to work with you on it, and is a nice thing to attach to your resume if and when you want to get a contract, a job or raise capital to start your own company.
And FYI, smart reporters have already read the FAQs and other material before they interview you. The interview is, ideally, an exploration of your motives and thoughts. And, yes, maybe a little clarification of some of the technology involved in your project so that people not intimately involved with it can figure out why it's worth your time and possibly theirs.
"...if *you* want something, then it's your problem, not mine."
Uh huh. And three years from now, when you're doing something for which you *want* and *need* publicity, and reporters you contact remember how arrogant you were to them the last time they spoke to you, don't be surprised if they say, "...if *you* want something, then it's your problem, not mine."
What goes around, comes around.
True, and common. Back when I drove a cab it was routine for me to take blind passengers to drive-through ATMs and pull up so the rear window, not the front one, was aligned with the machine. This way way more convenient for a blind passenger than getting out of the car and navigating to and from a walk-up ATM by cane or with a dog's help.
My wife and I live in a one-bedroom, 480 square foot mobile home with a 200 square foot add-on room we use as office space.
The trailer itself is a 1960 Vagabond "10-wide," well-known in its day for being better-insulated than most stick-built houses of that era. We've added even more insulation, to the point where even with a stack of computers, a flat-top electric stove, and a 42" LCD TV, plus electric heat and three (admittedly very high SEER) window air conditioning units, our peak electric bills are still under $100 per month.
We paid $18,000 for the trailer and lot, then spent another $12,000 on remodeling and appliances. Our homeowners association fee, which includes water, sewer, and community amenities including a clubhouse and swimming pool, is $105 per month. Add property taxes, insurance, County trash collection fees, and cable/phone/internet service, and we are at just over $400 per month, total.
Big? No. Nice? You bet. The bedroom is smaller than my wife would prefer, but on the other hand we have more closet space than most of the larger places we've lived in over the years. Plus we have a nice patio for outdoor BBQ cooking and eating, plenty of shed-type storage, enough yard to make our 50-pound dog happy, and a separate little fenced space where we store our bikes, lawn mower, and kayak, along with my tools, spare lumber, paint, and other "stuff."
We have room for up to four guests to stay overnight, all on foldout furniture. And much of the year we can feed them fresh orange juice from our own tree, too.
We've lived in three to four times as much space, but haven't ever really lived *better* than we do now.
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but I have never suggested a "magic machine," nor did I sit in a cubicle instead of getting out and doing real research into manufacturing processes. Some parts of clothing production can be automated easily, some are not. I looked at what could be mechanized, and, as I said, I knew there would still be a fair amount of hand labor involved. My then-partner saw a market for good-fitting clothes and wanted to know if it was feasible to do. The answer was "yes" when transportation, and the remainder problem you pooh-pooh (that causes retail buyers to go gray at an early age) were taken into account.
I've moved on to other kinds of work, so I'm not going to build a semi-automated clothing plant.
And you won't, because you're as sure it can't be done as the carriage manufacturers were that those smelly gasoline cars would never be popular.
But s*omeone* will. It's just a matter of time. :)
At the time we ran costs for semi-custom women's pants, we were looking at fully-automated pattern cutting and partially-automated (guided) sewing using CAD-type tools that became common in the sailmaking business more than 20 years ago.
Yes, there's still skilled tailoring/finishing work needed, but in return for paying for that at U.S. labor rates, you never have overstock sales for sizes or patterns that didn't sell well that season. nor do you have shipping costs for finished goods, which need to be treated far more gently than bolts of cloth.
The total cost of semi-custom finished pieces came out fairly close to the total cost of a pair of women's slacks made in the Mexican maquiladora zone near Nogales, once you figured in the cost of unsold merch, which is HUGE in the clothing biz -- especially in women's clothing with its constant style changes.
I was thinking in terms of professionally-published books where the prep work has already been done, not $10 for a one-off 300 page book including design and other pre-press work.
Returns -- remainders -- are a huge drag on both the publishing industry and on authors. Look at the royalty statements for the next book you write for a major publisher. Sure, there may be huge bookstore orders when it comes out, but even if your book sells well in some stores, it's inevitable that other retailers stocked too many and returned them to the publisher for full credit -- which can result in a royalty statement with *negative* amounts on it. Horrifying. It's happened to me, and it's happened to Stephen King and Dave Barry, who were both members of an infamous amateur group called The Rock Bottom Remainders -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Bottom_Remainders -- that got its name from this sad part of the publishing business.
Print on demand has (and, really, had 10 years ago) the potential to solve this problem.
We've had the technology for in-store print on demand for at least a decade. Darn near every bookstore should be able to print you a copy of darn near every book in its catalog in a few minutes. The fact that this is not already common (at $10 or less per 300 pages) is due to stupid business decisions all through the publishing chain, not to lack of technology.
And at least 20 years ago a woman I knew who had a fairly large (and quite nice) butt wondered why we didn't have semi-automated make-to-order clothing stores in every mall, where someone like her would look at a style sample, say, "I'll take that style in fabric #402," and have them either measure her on the spot or used her measurements they already had on file, and make her exactly what she wanted, in a size that fit *her* body instead of an arbitrary measurement.
This was all technically feasible, including the beeper you'd carry around the mall while you did your other shopping, that would alert you when your new slacks were ready at the "Pants That Fit" store.
If nothing else, make or print to order gets rid of the remainder problem that plagues both book publishers and clothing manufacturers.
Redundancy isn't expensive if you use peer to peer commo. No, I don't mean Limewire, but *real* peer to peer. Ham radio is peer to peer. CB radio is peer to peer. A direct RF dispatch radio system for a police or fire department or a cab company is peer to peer.
You can buy handheld CB radios for as little as $50 that'll work over a mile or so. A city could buy a stack of those, put in a $400 CB base station (with a decent roof-mounted antenna) and a 100-watt ham rig next to the CB base station for out-of-the area commo, a generator to power the base station rigs (you charge the mobile units' batteries in cars), and there's your backup communications system -- for well under $10,000.
Move to the Tampa Bay area in Florida and submit your work to WMNF. They play lots of local music; might even have you on the air live or book you for one of their many popular pconcerts.
http://wmnf.org/
When I was laid off Dec. 31 I immediately announced my freelance availability on LinkedIn, Facebook, and a private journalists' email list I'm on. I've been busy ever since. LinkedIn has gotten me the most/best leads, but I've gotten some nice local ones through Facebook and a few from colleagues through the journo list.
The most interesting project I've landed came from a LinkedIn contact in Austin, TX, who hooked me up with someone in Raleigh, NC, who was doing a health care IT startup and needed writing/PR/marketing help. So I have a nice freelance account doing socially useful work for good people, all arranged over the Internet (although we've met F2F since).
Don't knock networking. It's the best way to get jobs you might actually like, with people you might like -- and who might like YOU. :)
This is the advance *I'm* waiting for...