Years ago there was a film with this exact premise. An offbeat scientist (Jeff Goldblum) invents the first artificial heart, and a cardiologist (Donald Sutherland) installs it to save a patient's life. The patient becomes anxious because her pulse has been replaced with a constant shshshshshsh sound. The film was Threshold (1981).
Now that I think about it I do have my own distilled list of rules for business e-mail and it's not far from the above. But what surprises me is how taking time to write clear, concise emails with easily read ordered lists can be reduced to a useless exercise. Am I crazy to observe that there are many people in the corporate world who simply can't read or write beyond an elementary level? How do people graduate from universities in this country without being able to author a simple written argument? I receive several meaningless emails every week from such people, but I suppose my emails to them must seem equally meaningless. The disparity in literacy levels between correspondents is what creates the potential for misunderstandings.
So I think that in a business environment it's a mistake to rely upon e-mail for anything critical - I can't forget that some of my colleagues receive hundreds of non-spam e-mails each week, and I can't reasonably expect them to filter through all of that (much of it meaningless, remember) to determine what's truly important. So I keep my e-mails as simple as possible (but no simpler) and follow everything up with phone calls and face-to-face interaction.
After a week of keeping it simple however, it's always relaxing to sit down and put pen to paper to write a letter to someone, or to exchange lengthier personal e-mail missives with someone that I know well.
I wonder if this goes against that terms of their settlement with Apple Records... according to this brief history [ZDNet] Apple Computer settled with Apple Records sometime in 1989...
...Between this and invoicing companies for unsoliticated direct snail-mail, I think that the latter might be more profitable. Unless you have a legal precedent in mind, I doubt that any lawyer would touch this with a 10' pole...
The reason recruiters (headhunters) always ask for resumés as word documents is because they plan to (a) delete your contact information so that the employer can't cut them out of the loop by contacting you directly; and (b) slap their own logo or letterhead at the top, and in the process destroy all your precious table column/layout formatting AND THUS ensuring that the extra last page will be only 6 lines of text.
In my experience, 99% of agency headhunters will look at the PDF of your resumé and send you an RMS-like rejection e-mail requesting a Word doc. For their benefit this is why I keep an HTML version posted on the web: let them copy/paste from IE into Word and format it themselves, har har har!
Re:Philosophical differences, and the Unix Way
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Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 1
How do I run it on the machine hooked into my stereo from my desktop with the display that is in the other room?
Attach an old PowerBook to your home audio system with a $5 phone->rca adapter from radioshack, and install a vnc server on it.
Then you can control iTunes (and any other audio source you'd like to pipe through - internet radio anyone?) from ANY machine on your home network, including your windoze, wince and *nix boxes, or better yet your 802.11b-enabled PalmOS device!
This is trivial and elegant in my UNIX environment.
Just because it's not a UNIX environment doesn't mean it can't still do things elegantly...
Konami has been cranking out these games for awhile now. DDR is a crude (though fun) example - recently I've been seeing more 'physically interactive' games that actually leave you in a sweat...
There's a fishing game with a rod and reel (which left me scratching my head) and a police shooting one where you duck behind objects while targeting the baddies. Sort of like time crisis only moving one step beyond the "action" pedal.
My personal favorite (not on konami's site yet it seems) is the one where you put on a pair of 'boxing gloves' and duke it out with a computer opponent, you actually have to dodge the opponent's punches! It even measures reaction time and calories burned (though I don't see how it does the latter without knowing the player's weight).
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Years ago there was a film with this exact premise. An offbeat scientist (Jeff Goldblum) invents the first artificial heart, and a cardiologist (Donald Sutherland) installs it to save a patient's life. The patient becomes anxious because her pulse has been replaced with a constant shshshshshsh sound. The film was Threshold (1981).
"I don't consider myself a genius because there are 6.5 billion people in this world and each one is smart in his or her own way."
Shut up, Wesley!
A couple of years ago I invested $10 in a metal travel wallet that functions as a de facto Faraday Cage. Or you could spend 8x that on a microwoven stainless steel version...
Now that I think about it I do have my own distilled list of rules for business e-mail and it's not far from the above. But what surprises me is how taking time to write clear, concise emails with easily read ordered lists can be reduced to a useless exercise. Am I crazy to observe that there are many people in the corporate world who simply can't read or write beyond an elementary level? How do people graduate from universities in this country without being able to author a simple written argument? I receive several meaningless emails every week from such people, but I suppose my emails to them must seem equally meaningless. The disparity in literacy levels between correspondents is what creates the potential for misunderstandings.
So I think that in a business environment it's a mistake to rely upon e-mail for anything critical - I can't forget that some of my colleagues receive hundreds of non-spam e-mails each week, and I can't reasonably expect them to filter through all of that (much of it meaningless, remember) to determine what's truly important. So I keep my e-mails as simple as possible (but no simpler) and follow everything up with phone calls and face-to-face interaction.
After a week of keeping it simple however, it's always relaxing to sit down and put pen to paper to write a letter to someone, or to exchange lengthier personal e-mail missives with someone that I know well.
I wonder if this goes against that terms of their settlement with Apple Records... according to this brief history [ZDNet] Apple Computer settled with Apple Records sometime in 1989...
The reason recruiters (headhunters) always ask for resumés as word documents is because they plan to (a) delete your contact information so that the employer can't cut them out of the loop by contacting you directly; and (b) slap their own logo or letterhead at the top, and in the process destroy all your precious table column/layout formatting AND THUS ensuring that the extra last page will be only 6 lines of text.
In my experience, 99% of agency headhunters will look at the PDF of your resumé and send you an RMS-like rejection e-mail requesting a Word doc. For their benefit this is why I keep an HTML version posted on the web: let them copy/paste from IE into Word and format it themselves, har har har!
How do I run it on the machine hooked into my stereo from my desktop with the display that is in the other room?
Attach an old PowerBook to your home audio system with a $5 phone->rca adapter from radioshack, and install a vnc server on it.
Then you can control iTunes (and any other audio source you'd like to pipe through - internet radio anyone?) from ANY machine on your home network, including your windoze, wince and *nix boxes, or better yet your 802.11b-enabled PalmOS device!
This is trivial and elegant in my UNIX environment.
Just because it's not a UNIX environment doesn't mean it can't still do things elegantly...
Konami has been cranking out these games for awhile now. DDR is a crude (though fun) example - recently I've been seeing more 'physically interactive' games that actually leave you in a sweat...
There's a fishing game with a rod and reel (which left me scratching my head) and a police shooting one where you duck behind objects while targeting the baddies. Sort of like time crisis only moving one step beyond the "action" pedal.
My personal favorite (not on konami's site yet it seems) is the one where you put on a pair of 'boxing gloves' and duke it out with a computer opponent, you actually have to dodge the opponent's punches! It even measures reaction time and calories burned (though I don't see how it does the latter without knowing the player's weight).