I've only been traveling outside the US for a couple of years (mostly to Europe, but one trip to Hong Kong with the boyfriend). The article alludes to the Culture Shock series of books. I find them very helpful and recommend them very highly for both work and personal culture explanations.
A number of years ago in a statistics class, we discussed sampling methods. When a completely valid sample of users were asked how often they brushed their teeth and how much toothpaste they used, the extrapolated result would have almost doubled the actual sales of toothpaste. We really want to brush twice a day with a big gob of Crest (and read two books a month and watch less TV - I won't go into how Tivo might affect these numbers - and socialize with our friends, neighbors, and families for two hours a day, etc.), but good studies have ways around these "rate yourself" responses and "adjust the numbers." I can't tell if this has been done for this study.
I came from a good union household and was trained at an early age to buy union (and US-made) whenever possible (and also to vote Democrat, but that's really another whole off-topic issue). My parents bought a Magnavox TV (which still works and is fine for them) when it was the last US manufacturer and my Dad wears a Hamilton watch (the last remaining US watch manufacturer, I believe). Until recently, I drove a Ford (I came from a Ford family, rather than a GM family) and bought US-made applicances. But to prove I'm not much of a flag waver, I hate America's greatest company, Wal-Mart: the home of all things cheaply produced in third-world countries.
Alas, I'm one of the few people who was willing to pay extra to try to keep a few of my friends in work and now I'm looking for work (in the US) too. So I guess you're right, I tried not to benefit but am still stuck with the results.
Prints from lithographic plates, from negatives, from analog tapes, etc. etc. etc. This is a huge issue that artists have been dealing with for a couple of hundred years now. I suggest you read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/VPAB0 4/VPAB04_98/stud ent/Cox/ben1.html It's available all over the place and the basis of a bunch of post-modern thought.
I think that most of my best "finds" have been from random shopping at library book sales and old-school book/junk sales (or is that "old-school book/junk sales", I'm not sure where the hyphen should be in this case).
A number of years ago I bought a couple of years worth of "Art in America" magazines (when pop art was "the op-art wave of the future") that I still enjoy browsing. That was from the Pueblo, CO, public library.
I also bought a first edition Voltaire (some obscure thing) with notes in French in the margins that's just beautiful. That was at a Kearny, NE, bookstore, crammed to the rafters with paper.
And other stuff, too.
But I wouldn't have bought any of these treasures online, regardless of the price. Sometimes it's about love of books and learning and not just the cheapest copy of something you have to have this week.
For some of us, Yoko never left. For others, Yoko's back with a dance hit or an art show or an idea that she wants to spread. Lots of people do not like her (or are anxious to parrot some overexposed stand-up comic and pick on an apparently easy target), but if I can be as innovative or productive when I'm 70 years old (as she is), I'll have lived a rich full life.
When I was in college, I would regularly do research by finding the shelf or shelves in the library that I needed and browsing through a huge number of books on them. One day, a guy in a wheelchair (who couldn't even get between the shelves, let alone browse the high shelves) was with an official librarian who went with him and found the two books he'd written down and brought them to the end of the stacks and handed them to him and left. I asked him if he wanted anything else, and he said "Everything," so I brought the entire shelf over and put them on a table so he could browse them. It was a simple thing to do and he seemed to appreciate the simple effort. Since then, I've been very aware of how often I originally reach for one thing, but wind up with the book that's next to it.
I'd like to hear what you're going to buy next. A year or so ago, I considered buying a Gemstar but just never got around to doing it. I'm not sure what I'll do now.
Wouldn't it be somehow amazing if we preserved this line of C. elegans worms as a tribute and made them available for continuing research (I'm not suggesting that they are now "worms from outer space" or anything like that) with scientists aware of their historicity as a quiet recognition of what happened. Or is that creepy or sensationalistic?
What you've just described ("authoring tools that are so powerful and easy to use that the authors of documentation don't need to think about the separation of content and formatting") has been the holy grail for development/documentation teams for a number of years now.
But earlier, you called for an investment in skilled technical writers. The fact that you even remember when a tech writer was assigned to every project (mostly because the mainframe programmers had no time or skills for such nonsense) should be a hint that those days were in a golden past. Tech writers, graphics developers, trainers, and so are are fast disappearing from all but the largest companies. Because of the ease of use of many development/design tools, all of us are expected to be analysts, designers, developers, writers, trainers, and maintenance men. Tools, such as XML that allows single-sourcing of documentation, is another step toward the combining of roles and the disappearance of another antique role.
The Single-Source SIG (special interest group) of STC (Society for Technical Communication) defined single-sourcing as "using a single document source to generate multiple types of document outputs; workflows for creating multiple outputs from a document or database source."
For more information: http://www.stcsig.org/ss/index.htm
I think that a lot of this information is aimed at documentation professionals (technical writers, content strategists, knowledge management system workers, there are a lot of titles) who are very creative and love to work with these systems, rather than analyst/developers who view documentation as an evil waste of time.
From personal experience, I know that it's not that difficult to mark text as "internal use only" so the developers can quickly find the names and values of parameters and "end user only" so that users who actually use the compiled system can see what the different options are.
I think that the issue is less of "creativity" than it is of thinking through the issues and handling them consistently.
I'm using a 12 year old HP LaserJet 4 that's gone through about a dozen cartridges and still works like a champ, much nicer than the (yeah, faster) Lexmark pieces of crap we've got at work now. The LaserJet 4 was $1000 in 1990 or 1991. I know that in another 10 years it's going to break down and I'm just going to be heartbroken too because by then everything will be a horrifying "cheapo printer! built-in cartridge!! No replacement parts ever!!! completely disposal!!!!" and nobody will understand why I'm so upset that my 20-year-old one-color printer isn't around any more. I get a new computer every couple of years, but they're just fashion. Printers are real hardware, like a car or a camera.
Be very careful.... I've been working under an S-corp agreement for more than a year now, and there are some tax tricks that only an accountant can help you get to take advantage of being an S-corp. I could NOT fill out the end-of-year tax forms myself as an S-corp (I'm just not tax savvy that way, or interested enough to read and understand all the fine print) so I had to use an accountant, but he made some great suggestions (including deducting part of my apartment rent as office space and advice on buying equipment!) that made it worth the hundreds of dollars I pay him. Unless you're pretty financially geeked, I'd definitely find an accountant and have a serious chat before you go too far.
He had to clarify that he wasn't gay, but he still read. His insights are great and gay characters are very realistic. (This is one of the better books that my gay book club has read. I liked Mysteries of Pittsburgh, too, but this more.)
Slashdot doesn't request books for review, it selectively chooses books that it wants to review.
A restaurant critic (here in the hyper-critical world of NY restaurants and foodies) was accused of only giving good reviews, and she said she gave bad reviews when places were very popular and expensive and people might need to be warned away (since they may only serve 100 dinners a night), but otherwise it was far more pleasant and a better policy to tell people where they should go.
I like this philosophy. If a book is very expensive or popularly reviewed as "good," a warning from a Slashdot reviewer might be a good thing.
I think that Buffy is better since it often seems to be about one thing (outsiders, death, lesbians, monsters) but is really about something much more serious and interesting (finding your place in the world, loneliness, discovering who you are, rational and irrational fears). Many of the issues may be "teen angst" but are still meaningful for me. The Sopranos is deep but not resonant for me.
If I have a complaint about Buffy, is that too often the monster-of-the-week is vanquished in the last ten minutes of the show (yeah, you might say formulaic), while issues are raised over time on The Sopranos.
It just seems that most of my gay geek friends do an OK job of hooking up with each other without the trauma (but that's not to say without the usual gay drama). Getting out of the closet is the toughest part.
>> it might be better if the hotmail account >> name isn't a dictionary word or name (ie. >> use a random string for an account name that >> the 'bots won't guess.
Alas, but such a name will be recognized as spam by the spam-spotting-statistical tools and so can only be used to send messages and never used to send a message. For example, buffy0412xxxmeb13mxy@hotmail.com (as Mr. Gleick himself suggests in the NY Times article) is obviously a spammer and is either doomed to be black-holed or deleted by an intended recipient.
I'm enjoying my digital camera a lot and getting ready to get a bigger/better/geekier one. What components should I get to maximize Photoshop and such? Any sites that offer such advice?
I just have an OK job, but it gives me the time and the money I need to do really satisfying stuff (photography, right now, and the usual reading of novels). I have a good boyfriend (not the traditional family, thank you), and we can travel once a year. I don't think that I could work a horrible horrible job just for the time and money, but sometimes a small upgrade to an acceptable OK job is all you need.
Clear, uncluttered, magnificant gray tones (what if they are in color?!?) and a realistic depiction of career life at that time. Is anybody capturing similar pictures of life as we live it now?
Slashdot Mirror
I have a dozen friends, mostly non-technical, who use AOL for the chatrooms, and that's it. And it's worth $25 a month to them for that.
I've only been traveling outside the US for a couple of years (mostly to Europe, but one trip to Hong Kong with the boyfriend). The article alludes to the Culture Shock series of books. I find them very helpful and recommend them very highly for both work and personal culture explanations.
Culture Shock Books from B&N
A number of years ago in a statistics class, we discussed sampling methods. When a completely valid sample of users were asked how often they brushed their teeth and how much toothpaste they used, the extrapolated result would have almost doubled the actual sales of toothpaste. We really want to brush twice a day with a big gob of Crest (and read two books a month and watch less TV - I won't go into how Tivo might affect these numbers - and socialize with our friends, neighbors, and families for two hours a day, etc.), but good studies have ways around these "rate yourself" responses and "adjust the numbers." I can't tell if this has been done for this study.
I came from a good union household and was trained at an early age to buy union (and US-made) whenever possible (and also to vote Democrat, but that's really another whole off-topic issue). My parents bought a Magnavox TV (which still works and is fine for them) when it was the last US manufacturer and my Dad wears a Hamilton watch (the last remaining US watch manufacturer, I believe). Until recently, I drove a Ford (I came from a Ford family, rather than a GM family) and bought US-made applicances. But to prove I'm not much of a flag waver, I hate America's greatest company, Wal-Mart: the home of all things cheaply produced in third-world countries.
Alas, I'm one of the few people who was willing to pay extra to try to keep a few of my friends in work and now I'm looking for work (in the US) too. So I guess you're right, I tried not to benefit but am still stuck with the results.
Prints from lithographic plates, from negatives, from analog tapes, etc. etc. etc. This is a huge issue that artists have been dealing with for a couple of hundred years now. I suggest you read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."0 4/VPAB04_98/stud ent/Cox/ben1.html
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/VPAB
It's available all over the place and the basis of a bunch of post-modern thought.
I think that most of my best "finds" have been from random shopping at library book sales and old-school book/junk sales (or is that "old-school book/junk sales", I'm not sure where the hyphen should be in this case).
A number of years ago I bought a couple of years worth of "Art in America" magazines (when pop art was "the op-art wave of the future") that I still enjoy browsing. That was from the Pueblo, CO, public library.
I also bought a first edition Voltaire (some obscure thing) with notes in French in the margins that's just beautiful. That was at a Kearny, NE, bookstore, crammed to the rafters with paper.
And other stuff, too.
But I wouldn't have bought any of these treasures online, regardless of the price. Sometimes it's about love of books and learning and not just the cheapest copy of something you have to have this week.
For some of us, Yoko never left. For others, Yoko's back with a dance hit or an art show or an idea that she wants to spread. Lots of people do not like her (or are anxious to parrot some overexposed stand-up comic and pick on an apparently easy target), but if I can be as innovative or productive when I'm 70 years old (as she is), I'll have lived a rich full life.
Thanks, Yoko.
When I was in college, I would regularly do research by finding the shelf or shelves in the library that I needed and browsing through a huge number of books on them. One day, a guy in a wheelchair (who couldn't even get between the shelves, let alone browse the high shelves) was with an official librarian who went with him and found the two books he'd written down and brought them to the end of the stacks and handed them to him and left. I asked him if he wanted anything else, and he said "Everything," so I brought the entire shelf over and put them on a table so he could browse them. It was a simple thing to do and he seemed to appreciate the simple effort. Since then, I've been very aware of how often I originally reach for one thing, but wind up with the book that's next to it.
I'd like to hear what you're going to buy next. A year or so ago, I considered buying a Gemstar but just never got around to doing it. I'm not sure what I'll do now.
Wouldn't it be somehow amazing if we preserved this line of C. elegans worms as a tribute and made them available for continuing research (I'm not suggesting that they are now "worms from outer space" or anything like that) with scientists aware of their historicity as a quiet recognition of what happened. Or is that creepy or sensationalistic?
What you've just described ("authoring tools that are so powerful and easy to use that the authors of documentation don't need to think about the separation of content and formatting") has been the holy grail for development/documentation teams for a number of years now.
But earlier, you called for an investment in skilled technical writers. The fact that you even remember when a tech writer was assigned to every project (mostly because the mainframe programmers had no time or skills for such nonsense) should be a hint that those days were in a golden past. Tech writers, graphics developers, trainers, and so are are fast disappearing from all but the largest companies. Because of the ease of use of many development/design tools, all of us are expected to be analysts, designers, developers, writers, trainers, and maintenance men. Tools, such as XML that allows single-sourcing of documentation, is another step toward the combining of roles and the disappearance of another antique role.
The Single-Source SIG (special interest group) of STC (Society for Technical Communication) defined single-sourcing as "using a single document source to generate multiple types of document outputs; workflows for creating multiple outputs from a document or database source."
For more information:
http://www.stcsig.org/ss/index.htm
I think that a lot of this information is aimed at documentation professionals (technical writers, content strategists, knowledge management system workers, there are a lot of titles) who are very creative and love to work with these systems, rather than analyst/developers who view documentation as an evil waste of time.
From personal experience, I know that it's not that difficult to mark text as "internal use only" so the developers can quickly find the names and values of parameters and "end user only" so that users who actually use the compiled system can see what the different options are.
I think that the issue is less of "creativity" than it is of thinking through the issues and handling them consistently.
Why isn't anybody suggesting the Casio Exilim EX-S2: It's fast, sealed (as far as I can tell), got no moving parts, and generally well reviewed.
s 2- review/index.html
2 .h tml
I dropped mine in a puddle and immediately picked it up and brushed it off without problems.
It requires a cradle (very irritating, but so easy to use that even my boyfriend can do it) or you can pull the memory card out and use a reader.
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/casio/exilim_
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/exs
Just what the construction-site foreman asked for!
I'm using a 12 year old HP LaserJet 4 that's gone through about a dozen cartridges and still works like a champ, much nicer than the (yeah, faster) Lexmark pieces of crap we've got at work now. The LaserJet 4 was $1000 in 1990 or 1991. I know that in another 10 years it's going to break down and I'm just going to be heartbroken too because by then everything will be a horrifying "cheapo printer! built-in cartridge!! No replacement parts ever!!! completely disposal!!!!" and nobody will understand why I'm so upset that my 20-year-old one-color printer isn't around any more. I get a new computer every couple of years, but they're just fashion. Printers are real hardware, like a car or a camera.
Be very careful.... I've been working under an S-corp agreement for more than a year now, and there are some tax tricks that only an accountant can help you get to take advantage of being an S-corp. I could NOT fill out the end-of-year tax forms myself as an S-corp (I'm just not tax savvy that way, or interested enough to read and understand all the fine print) so I had to use an accountant, but he made some great suggestions (including deducting part of my apartment rent as office space and advice on buying equipment!) that made it worth the hundreds of dollars I pay him. Unless you're pretty financially geeked, I'd definitely find an accountant and have a serious chat before you go too far.
He had to clarify that he wasn't gay, but he still read. His insights are great and gay characters are very realistic. (This is one of the better books that my gay book club has read. I liked Mysteries of Pittsburgh, too, but this more.)
Slashdot doesn't request books for review, it selectively chooses books that it wants to review.
A restaurant critic (here in the hyper-critical world of NY restaurants and foodies) was accused of only giving good reviews, and she said she gave bad reviews when places were very popular and expensive and people might need to be warned away (since they may only serve 100 dinners a night), but otherwise it was far more pleasant and a better policy to tell people where they should go.
I like this philosophy. If a book is very expensive or popularly reviewed as "good," a warning from a Slashdot reviewer might be a good thing.
I think that Buffy is better since it often seems to be about one thing (outsiders, death, lesbians, monsters) but is really about something much more serious and interesting (finding your place in the world, loneliness, discovering who you are, rational and irrational fears). Many of the issues may be "teen angst" but are still meaningful for me. The Sopranos is deep but not resonant for me.
If I have a complaint about Buffy, is that too often the monster-of-the-week is vanquished in the last ten minutes of the show (yeah, you might say formulaic), while issues are raised over time on The Sopranos.
It just seems that most of my gay geek friends do an OK job of hooking up with each other without the trauma (but that's not to say without the usual gay drama). Getting out of the closet is the toughest part.
>> it might be better if the hotmail account
>> name isn't a dictionary word or name (ie.
>> use a random string for an account name that
>> the 'bots won't guess.
Alas, but such a name will be recognized as spam by the spam-spotting-statistical tools and so can only be used to send messages and never used to send a message. For example, buffy0412xxxmeb13mxy@hotmail.com (as Mr. Gleick himself suggests in the NY Times article) is obviously a spammer and is either doomed to be black-holed or deleted by an intended recipient.
I'm enjoying my digital camera a lot and getting ready to get a bigger/better/geekier one. What components should I get to maximize Photoshop and such? Any sites that offer such advice?
I just have an OK job, but it gives me the time and the money I need to do really satisfying stuff (photography, right now, and the usual reading of novels). I have a good boyfriend (not the traditional family, thank you), and we can travel once a year. I don't think that I could work a horrible horrible job just for the time and money, but sometimes a small upgrade to an acceptable OK job is all you need.
Clear, uncluttered, magnificant gray tones (what if they are in color?!?) and a realistic depiction of career life at that time. Is anybody capturing similar pictures of life as we live it now?
Oops