I've worked at a couple of places that went under, and while my experiences weren't as exciting as it sounds like yours were, the failing companies had three things in common:
* Laying off people, not hiring replacements, working remaining employees overtime to compensate * Salespeople selling smaller and smaller projects (took me two times to catch on to this red flag) * Frequent reorganizations (shuffling, restructuring, whatever you want to call it - it's just moving people around in a desperate attempt to look like the company's doing something to stay afloat)
I know some people who are into the whole scrapbooking scene. Those people are obsessed about everything being acid-free and archival quality. It makes me wonder sometimes whether, a couple hundred years from now, the primary documents left to remember this time in human history will be cutesy scrapbooks made by bored housewives.
I agree with you. The challenge, though, is convincing companies they need to hire someone with this skillset. Heck, it's hard enough now convincing them they need anyone with any kind of design background unless you also have a ridiculous list of programming skills as well.
I'm an interface designer who understands enough of how the programming part works to work efficiently with the programmers, but not enough to actually do their job. People are always appreciative of the work I do for them, after they let me do it. But it can be frustrating to convince companies that well-thought-out design can improve their products.
Here's a nifty little trick I learned at SXSWi this past year: Set the font-size for the body at 76%, then size everything else in ems. This will make all font sizes uniform across all browsers.
I have a large monitor set to 1280x1024 resolution and I sit nearly 2' away from it, so I depend on ctrl+ to make a lot of pages legible.
So, it isn't about being tech savvy, it is about common sense or the lack of it.
No kidding. When the first woman received the email saying it looked like her lunch was in the fridge on a different floor and suggesting she might have misplaced it, it should have ended there. If all she really wanted was her lunch, she would have gone down another floor and gotten it. But it looks like she was pissed off and itching for a fight, and that's what she got instead.
As far as radioactivity goes, I'd rather live within 5 miles of a nuclear facility than within 50 miles of a coal-burning power plant.
Which is good, because I'm moving to the Hanford tri-cities area, probably next year. Yeah, it's a desolate desert. But it's where my spouse's job is, so I'll make the best of it.
I truly believe that our beloved Internet is to blame.
I agree, but not for the reason you stated. Word of mouth travels a lot faster these days. 20 years ago, a lousy movie with good marketing could still hope to have at least a good opening weekend before everyone discovered it was lousy. Nowadays, movie reviews are easily accessible online before the movie's even out, and people can blog on Friday about the terrible movie they just saw, keeping others away on Saturday.
One thing that might work is trying out new concepts like the Buckhead Backlot or Cinema Cafe, two combination theater-restaurants I used to go to when I lived in Atlanta.
They were great for hanging out and watching movies with friends - nobody had to clean up their apartment or get up during the middle of the movie for more beer.
The only way it'll go anywhere is if some funeral home directors manage to guilt and manipulate grieving relations into buying the damn things.
That's basically the business model for "at-need" funeral sales. I used to work as a salesperson for a cemetery, in "pre-need." It was a crappy job - people don't want to think about buying a plot/niche/marker while they're healthy. Still, from a sales point of view, pre-need sales is basically like selling anything else: copiers, life insurance, etc.
At-need sales is a whole different thing. That's where the real money is made. You're basically guaranteed a sale because the people need what you're selling. The big bucks come from taking advantage of a grieving family to upsell them to a mahogany, satin-lined casket and granite marker.
If there's one thing I learned from working at a cemetery, it's get your affairs in order before you think you need to. Specifically state how you want to be buried or cremated and memorialized, so slick salespeople can't take advantage of your family when you're gone.
The IOC has always been very vigorous in defending the branding rights to the games.
A friend of mine worked as a translator for the '96 Paralympics in Atlanta, and she told me something I didn't know about sponsorships. Any sponsor of the Olympics had the option to sponsor the Paralympics, too. But if they chose not to, they could bar any of their competitors from sponsoring the Paralympics.
So Hanes was an Olympic sponsor for Atlanta '96, providing uniforms and t-shirts for athletes and volunteers, but chose not to sponsor the Paralympics. They also took the option to ban competitors, and the result was that the Paralympics had to spend a lot of extra money to get low-quality uniform t-shirts for many of the athletes. There were companies who would have happily provided those for free, but they weren't allowed to.
Shafting the Paralympic athletes seems to me to be classic asshole corporate behavior. But it was part of the IOC rules at the time.
You've got me there. I'd never tried to add additional tabs to the Firefox sidebar before (Mozilla is my primary browser at work, Safari at home). I assumed it would be the same as Mozilla, but now that I try I can't figure out how to add new tabs to the Firefox sidebar and there's nothing in the help file about it.
Sorry. It will still let you bookmark the sidebar as a web page.
I find the CSS Sidebar immensely useful. It lets me quickly look up a style and see what values it takes. It's also a good reminder of some of the little-used styles.
In the same vein, some guys I met recently are doing very well with their company which sells medical ebook libraries. The particular software they use lets students search, annotate, bookmark, and cross-reference anything in the library, and it all fits on a laptop. Much more convenient for looking things up than flipping through the indices of a stack of 10lb. books.
With a movie, you have to pay some attention, which pretty much rules it out as an on-the-go activity.
However, I would love to be able to download episodes of reality shows I watch, so if I miss one I can catch up before next week. For most of those shows, tiny picture and not-so-great sound quality wouldn't matter. Plus, many TV shows are short enough to watch on a lunch break.
Our research group has "solutions" in its name, so when we redesigned and reorganized our web site 4 years ago, it seemed to make sense to include a section titled "solutions." There is also a section titled "our work," with the difference being that the work is a list of projects we've actually done and the "solutions" are categories showing the types of projects we can do.
Looking at our web site usage stats for the past year, the work main page has been visited quite a bit and specific project pages have even more hits, but the solutions main page didn't get enough hits in a year to even show up on the list.
I think "solutions" has become a sort of synonym for vaporware, and people would rather read about something concrete, like "projects" and "work."
Nah, even when the weather is bad it's more pleasant on a bike.
I live in South Carolina where the humidity makes the air thick enough to chew. If I biked to work, with no showers at the office, it might be rather *unpleasant* for my coworkers. (There is one guy here who bikes, and a woman who lives close enough to walk. But during the summer, they both drive.)
I would love to take public transportation - I hate driving. But I live in a city that won't even put sidewalks in heavily trafficked commercial + residential areas. The city council equates "public transportation" with "welfare." This city is designed for cars, not people, and as long as I live here, all I can do is make the best of it by living fairly close to work and walking when I can, and repeatedly complaining to local government.
even when a job is specifically for you, you still have to be chosen acceptable for the job by the HR folks
I applied for a job that had been specifically created for me: the requirements had been tailored to match my skills and experience. After the interview, they called me in a panic because HR had rejected my application. Turns out, the people who wanted to hire me put the wrong number of years of experience in the job description. Fortunately, I was able to re-submit the application citing my time as an independent consultant as extra years of experience. But it just goes to show that, even when a company is determined to hire you, the HR process can still muck things up.
In a movie? Maybe a month ago. Today, most people are looking for Cruise in the tabloids to see what crazy-ass thing he'll do next. The Michael Jackson trial is over, sumer reruns are on TV, and the hoi polloi are bored.
Hang around sites like/. where people use atrocious pseudo-English and your skills will atrophy after a time.
My mom used to teach junior high English. She said that by the end of each term, she had a harder time noticing errors in the students' papers because she'd been surrounded by bad grammar and misspelled words for so long.
Using a digital receiver, I can get crystal clear pictures that are better than the lossy encoded signal the cable and sat companies give us and I pay nothing. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
So what kind of setup do you have? Were the digital receiver and HD-capable TV very expensive?
I just can't get too upset about a certain percentage of the population not being able to use their TV sets.
When there's a hurricane or other big storm on the way, local TV stations give constant updates. Radio gives only intermittent updates. People with no TV and no internet access might not get pertinent details in the event of, say, an evacuation.
It's not just poor people, it's people who live in remote areas. My in-laws' vacation home has a TV with rabbit ears. It's in a tiny town where you can't get cable. Some of the people who live there have satellite dishes, but the expense isn't worth it for people who only come down every other weekend.
So I guess I disproved my own point: it is all about money. If they cut off the analog signal, we just wouldn't watch TV there anymore. The radio would still work, so we could get weather alerts.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked at a couple of places that went under, and while my experiences weren't as exciting as it sounds like yours were, the failing companies had three things in common:
* Laying off people, not hiring replacements, working remaining employees overtime to compensate
* Salespeople selling smaller and smaller projects (took me two times to catch on to this red flag)
* Frequent reorganizations (shuffling, restructuring, whatever you want to call it - it's just moving people around in a desperate attempt to look like the company's doing something to stay afloat)
I know some people who are into the whole scrapbooking scene. Those people are obsessed about everything being acid-free and archival quality. It makes me wonder sometimes whether, a couple hundred years from now, the primary documents left to remember this time in human history will be cutesy scrapbooks made by bored housewives.
I agree with you. The challenge, though, is convincing companies they need to hire someone with this skillset. Heck, it's hard enough now convincing them they need anyone with any kind of design background unless you also have a ridiculous list of programming skills as well.
I'm an interface designer who understands enough of how the programming part works to work efficiently with the programmers, but not enough to actually do their job. People are always appreciative of the work I do for them, after they let me do it. But it can be frustrating to convince companies that well-thought-out design can improve their products.
Here's a nifty little trick I learned at SXSWi this past year: Set the font-size for the body at 76%, then size everything else in ems. This will make all font sizes uniform across all browsers.
I have a large monitor set to 1280x1024 resolution and I sit nearly 2' away from it, so I depend on ctrl+ to make a lot of pages legible.
So, it isn't about being tech savvy, it is about common sense or the lack of it.
No kidding. When the first woman received the email saying it looked like her lunch was in the fridge on a different floor and suggesting she might have misplaced it, it should have ended there. If all she really wanted was her lunch, she would have gone down another floor and gotten it. But it looks like she was pissed off and itching for a fight, and that's what she got instead.
As far as radioactivity goes, I'd rather live within 5 miles of a nuclear facility than within 50 miles of a coal-burning power plant.
Which is good, because I'm moving to the Hanford tri-cities area, probably next year. Yeah, it's a desolate desert. But it's where my spouse's job is, so I'll make the best of it.
So, Caucasian males tend to score better on IQ tests designed by Caucasian males?
I'd be really interested in seeing how well they scored on an IQ test designed by, say, Japanese women.
I truly believe that our beloved Internet is to blame.
I agree, but not for the reason you stated. Word of mouth travels a lot faster these days. 20 years ago, a lousy movie with good marketing could still hope to have at least a good opening weekend before everyone discovered it was lousy. Nowadays, movie reviews are easily accessible online before the movie's even out, and people can blog on Friday about the terrible movie they just saw, keeping others away on Saturday.
One thing that might work is trying out new concepts like the Buckhead Backlot or Cinema Cafe, two combination theater-restaurants I used to go to when I lived in Atlanta.
They were great for hanging out and watching movies with friends - nobody had to clean up their apartment or get up during the middle of the movie for more beer.
The only way it'll go anywhere is if some funeral home directors manage to guilt and manipulate grieving relations into buying the damn things.
That's basically the business model for "at-need" funeral sales. I used to work as a salesperson for a cemetery, in "pre-need." It was a crappy job - people don't want to think about buying a plot/niche/marker while they're healthy. Still, from a sales point of view, pre-need sales is basically like selling anything else: copiers, life insurance, etc.
At-need sales is a whole different thing. That's where the real money is made. You're basically guaranteed a sale because the people need what you're selling. The big bucks come from taking advantage of a grieving family to upsell them to a mahogany, satin-lined casket and granite marker.
If there's one thing I learned from working at a cemetery, it's get your affairs in order before you think you need to. Specifically state how you want to be buried or cremated and memorialized, so slick salespeople can't take advantage of your family when you're gone.
The IOC has always been very vigorous in defending the branding rights to the games.
A friend of mine worked as a translator for the '96 Paralympics in Atlanta, and she told me something I didn't know about sponsorships. Any sponsor of the Olympics had the option to sponsor the Paralympics, too. But if they chose not to, they could bar any of their competitors from sponsoring the Paralympics.
So Hanes was an Olympic sponsor for Atlanta '96, providing uniforms and t-shirts for athletes and volunteers, but chose not to sponsor the Paralympics. They also took the option to ban competitors, and the result was that the Paralympics had to spend a lot of extra money to get low-quality uniform t-shirts for many of the athletes. There were companies who would have happily provided those for free, but they weren't allowed to.
Shafting the Paralympic athletes seems to me to be classic asshole corporate behavior. But it was part of the IOC rules at the time.
You've got me there. I'd never tried to add additional tabs to the Firefox sidebar before (Mozilla is my primary browser at work, Safari at home). I assumed it would be the same as Mozilla, but now that I try I can't figure out how to add new tabs to the Firefox sidebar and there's nothing in the help file about it.
Sorry. It will still let you bookmark the sidebar as a web page.
I find the CSS Sidebar immensely useful. It lets me quickly look up a style and see what values it takes. It's also a good reminder of some of the little-used styles.
In the same vein, some guys I met recently are doing very well with their company which sells medical ebook libraries. The particular software they use lets students search, annotate, bookmark, and cross-reference anything in the library, and it all fits on a laptop. Much more convenient for looking things up than flipping through the indices of a stack of 10lb. books.
Sorry, that was just too funny not to comment. Wish I had some mod points. Heeee hee hee.
(I hope you weren't being serious?)
With a movie, you have to pay some attention, which pretty much rules it out as an on-the-go activity.
However, I would love to be able to download episodes of reality shows I watch, so if I miss one I can catch up before next week. For most of those shows, tiny picture and not-so-great sound quality wouldn't matter. Plus, many TV shows are short enough to watch on a lunch break.
A few new shows they could try
Our research group has "solutions" in its name, so when we redesigned and reorganized our web site 4 years ago, it seemed to make sense to include a section titled "solutions." There is also a section titled "our work," with the difference being that the work is a list of projects we've actually done and the "solutions" are categories showing the types of projects we can do.
Looking at our web site usage stats for the past year, the work main page has been visited quite a bit and specific project pages have even more hits, but the solutions main page didn't get enough hits in a year to even show up on the list.
I think "solutions" has become a sort of synonym for vaporware, and people would rather read about something concrete, like "projects" and "work."
Nah, even when the weather is bad it's more pleasant on a bike.
I live in South Carolina where the humidity makes the air thick enough to chew. If I biked to work, with no showers at the office, it might be rather *unpleasant* for my coworkers. (There is one guy here who bikes, and a woman who lives close enough to walk. But during the summer, they both drive.)
I would love to take public transportation - I hate driving. But I live in a city that won't even put sidewalks in heavily trafficked commercial + residential areas. The city council equates "public transportation" with "welfare." This city is designed for cars, not people, and as long as I live here, all I can do is make the best of it by living fairly close to work and walking when I can, and repeatedly complaining to local government.
even when a job is specifically for you, you still have to be chosen acceptable for the job by the HR folks
I applied for a job that had been specifically created for me: the requirements had been tailored to match my skills and experience. After the interview, they called me in a panic because HR had rejected my application. Turns out, the people who wanted to hire me put the wrong number of years of experience in the job description. Fortunately, I was able to re-submit the application citing my time as an independent consultant as extra years of experience. But it just goes to show that, even when a company is determined to hire you, the HR process can still muck things up.
Today, many people want to see Tom Cruise
In a movie? Maybe a month ago. Today, most people are looking for Cruise in the tabloids to see what crazy-ass thing he'll do next. The Michael Jackson trial is over, sumer reruns are on TV, and the hoi polloi are bored.
Hang around sites like /. where people use atrocious pseudo-English and your skills will atrophy after a time.
My mom used to teach junior high English. She said that by the end of each term, she had a harder time noticing errors in the students' papers because she'd been surrounded by bad grammar and misspelled words for so long.
Using a digital receiver, I can get crystal clear pictures that are better than the lossy encoded signal the cable and sat companies give us and I pay nothing. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
So what kind of setup do you have? Were the digital receiver and HD-capable TV very expensive?
I just can't get too upset about a certain percentage of the population not being able to use their TV sets.
When there's a hurricane or other big storm on the way, local TV stations give constant updates. Radio gives only intermittent updates. People with no TV and no internet access might not get pertinent details in the event of, say, an evacuation.
It's not just poor people, it's people who live in remote areas. My in-laws' vacation home has a TV with rabbit ears. It's in a tiny town where you can't get cable. Some of the people who live there have satellite dishes, but the expense isn't worth it for people who only come down every other weekend.
So I guess I disproved my own point: it is all about money. If they cut off the analog signal, we just wouldn't watch TV there anymore. The radio would still work, so we could get weather alerts.