Try his Cosmic Trigger series if you're looking for a place to start. I thought Cosmic Trigger II was incredible. Maybe you will too. One nice thing about them (and a lot of his other stuff) is that you don't have to read them in order. Much like his hero James Joyce he deals with fragmented thoughts that aren't necessarily linear, so one won't be a spoiler for any of the others.
I don't know what sorts of assets he holds or doesn't hold, what he's sold and what he's kept or what he owes to who so I'm not really in a position to advise him or anyone else in this case. You may know something that I don't, in which case I agree with you. What's the point of keeping something "valuable" when you're dying?
The question in my circle of friends was "where is his family and why aren't they bailing him out?"
At the end of the day though I still don't feel bad about the idea of giving something back to someone who I feel gave something to me, in addition to whatever I might have paid for his books. It'd feel a lot less wasted to me than contributing to someones political campaign, for example, although in a way this guy's body of work IS a political campaign of sorts.
What's wrong with rewarding a "slightly loopy world view"? Isn't that what artists exist for?
I'm not necessarily saying "give give give" in this particular case (although I like his the books and his world view), but I personally feel that life would be much duller without people who have the insight to see things differently and the guts to put it out there for public consumption. Lots of artists & writers have died poor -> don't make the typical mistake of creating eqivalency between *talent* == *lots of money* because it's a lie.
Just because the wealthy propogate the myth that those without money are somehow less worthy doesn't make it so. Artists don't have to live with the same bullshit values about what's important. Mozart died in poverty. So did Van Gogh. Phillip K Dick. Jack Kerouac. What were their landlord's names? Who did they owe money to? What banker got to keep all the property? History has forgotten lots of self-appointed *important people* who had plenty of money but in reality did nothing of substance - it remembers the people who had something more to offer. I don't find the idea of helping one of those people that repulsive. YMMV, of course.
You can see David Yow from The Jesus Lizard get "bottled" on youtube if you watch the live "Seasick" video - that looked like it hurt pretty good. Knocked him flat, it did...of course it didn't keep him down for long but this spammer kid ain't no David Yow, I'll bet. I'd say it'd be a decent punishment, although personally I think having to make, address, & send apology cards to everyone at the company might be better. Just think of the paper cuts and the cops watching him so he doesn't eat the glue sticks.
Damn that crafty bastard! He just *proved* that he's smarter than most other folks with his excellent manipulation of the media! There should be some sort of a prize for that as well.
How about the chick in Chris Isaac's "Wicked Game?" I always liked how she could look so bitchy and so hot at the same time. Being a model I guess it may come naturally to her, I dunno.
Actually I'd venture a guess that the price of fuel has over time contributed to the rise in ticket costs. For example, the Rolling Stones had over 90 semi trucks full of gear they were crossing the country with - that shit adds up. Even a "smaller" act like Rob Zombie will have 15 to 20 trucks full of gear.
And then there is, of course, good old fashioned greed.
My company routinely gives personality tests to all new sales applicants. I suspect they use it more to corroborate impressions from interviews than as an actual "pass/fail" kind of thing - the two work together in tandem.
I was given one during some management training I attended and found it to be not only somewhat interesting but also informative about the other people I was with. I was pretty suprised to see how closely the results matched the predictions. We were given the test and then given the descriptions of the 4 core areas of this test. Then before we got our scores we took turns trying to predict what each other's scores would be. It struck me as a *fairly* accurate measure - nothing to get too bent out of shape about but closer than a 45 minute interview would be.
Another potential positive about taking a test like this is that it could indicate potential to your employers that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. If you're working in a cube all day and your bosses boss never sees you then they might not know that you're "a born problem-solver" or "a natural leader" since they never interact with you. Keep in mind that there's room for lots of different personality styles in a business, so there's nothing wrong with being "on record" as having a particular style. Successful people have lots of different personality traits - it's not like there's only one way to do things...
TMM's remark about interviews being personality tests is also 100% correct in my opinion.
Yeah, that's a vaild point. I was more looking at it from a feasibility angle on my getting my work done rather than from the company's perspective (mistake number 1). I'm not actively working on trying to do it because it's not really that great of a fit for this particular position anyway; I was more musing out loud about "how could this work?"
With our merger and lots of upcoming changes looming on the horizon (Sarbanes-Oxley, anyone?) there is the potential for major restructuring in my department in the not-so-distant future, however, so the possiblity could open up for some of our folks at some point. My gut feeling about it in my case is that I won't be telecommuting regularly while I'm where I am because it probably won't make sense from a company perspective. Another gut feeling is that I'm likely going to get to participate in some of those "team workathons" you mentioned...moving from the private to public sector has it's definite ups and downs.
My brother works for a Fortune 500 and telecommutes. He actually lives about 5 hours away from his "office" in a different state. He does have to go there occasionally (quarterly or so) for meetings, debriefings, etc, but the rest of the time he spends working from home via vpn. I think he's a lucky bastard, myself.
I can *occasionally* telecommute, but my boss is highly suspicious of it. From a work standpoint I think I could work optimally from home 3 days a week with 2 in the office, but they're not buying it. As an aside, my company just got purchased by a Fortune 500 (the ink's still wet on that one) so perhaps my latitude will change in the future, but somehow I doubt it. I think the management style & corporate culture play a large role in the success of telecommuting even when the requirements of the job would easily allow it.
As far as SE being the best job in the country, well, I don't know about that. I have a Master's in Software Engineering and write software for a living (although not at a software company) and I enjoy what I do immensely, but that depends again on corporate culture and management. Our Marketing folks seem to have a pretty good time doing their jobs, and they get paid pretty solid too so I'd have to say that the "best" job is really just the one that you enjoy the most.
It's not only the "average citizen" that these power hungry you speak of are seeking to control. Apply your right to bear arms as a basic human right to the nuclear fiasco going on with Iran right now and it's easy to see that the US Gov't has not intention of allowing other soverign nations to possess the type of hardware that you'd like to be able to possess, let alone it's own citizens. The whole "right to bear arms" thing as a defense against governmental tyranny in the US was an antiquated notion 150 years ago and it's even more amusing now. In my opinion the "average citizen" has not had the opportunity for a level playing field in terms of military hardware with a large Govt in many many years, and (unfortunately) likely never will again.
Well, we can hack the sematics of the thing to death, but when I'm being paid to solve a problem programmatically, which is what I was talking about, I'd call it a "business" problem. The parent poster was also talking about a business setting, so I was following the lead. I'd imagine that everyone who codes does it recreationally at least sometimes, but that's nitpicking.
If it's more comfortable to deal with generalizations I could reframe the statement to include hobbyists or other folks who aren't coding for a living, but it doesn't change my point which was that understanding your desired outcome and how exactly you're going to get there is more important than what language you're doing it in and no tool is going to do that for an end user.
I personally couldn't care less about how well nonprofessionals in a non-business setting code because I likely will never run into their software or have to fix it, so I guess I was excluding them from my statement...sorry.
I've spent a lot of my career "un-fucking-up" applications that were written by the very same type of non-developers you're talking about. I wouldn't necessarily blame it all on VB though; the people I'm referring to don't use it, don't know it, and STILL can't design or code an application. Not that VB hasn't contributed it's share of problems, but I propose that lack of a grasp of the fundamentals of program design is the main problem.
The empahsis, once the easy to use tools are there, should be on logic and flow rather than syntax. People who are unable to clearly state both their business problem and their proposed solution are never going to be able to programmatically fix it regardless of the ease of use their tool provides. I have seen dastardly data models hiding behind lovely Access forms, for example, because the front end tools were there but the underlying knowledge wasn't.
Hell, bring 'em on! The more clueless development that there is going on out there the more work I'll have fixing these messes. Allowing unqualified people to perform important business tasks is of questionable wisdom.
/* T-SQL code */ DECLARE @htmlString VARCHAR(5000) SELECT @htmlString = '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"><html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><title>dumb thing to do</title></head><body>Generating html from sql is dumb sometimes, but not impossible or even difficult. Another query or stored proc could provide the content and nobody would be the wiser. This is how lots of content management systems work.</body></html>' SELECT @htmlString
I was pretty excited to see a link to "Leisure Time Chemicals" on your site. What a bitter disappointment the choices turned out to be... Man, you shouldn't get my hopes up like that!
All kidding aside, I think you nailed it when you said that users leave quickly if the presentation isn't professional and also when you said that experienced web folks already knew this.
You beat me to the punch - I was "fondly" recalling the first time, many years ago, when I got my first "LI" boot screen. Man, I'm starting to sweat again just thinking about it...Suuurre I have backups of everything, duh...All worked out ok, of course, but it was a long half-hour.
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Try his Cosmic Trigger series if you're looking for a place to start. I thought Cosmic Trigger II was incredible. Maybe you will too. One nice thing about them (and a lot of his other stuff) is that you don't have to read them in order. Much like his hero James Joyce he deals with fragmented thoughts that aren't necessarily linear, so one won't be a spoiler for any of the others.
I don't know what sorts of assets he holds or doesn't hold, what he's sold and what he's kept or what he owes to who so I'm not really in a position to advise him or anyone else in this case. You may know something that I don't, in which case I agree with you. What's the point of keeping something "valuable" when you're dying?
The question in my circle of friends was "where is his family and why aren't they bailing him out?"
At the end of the day though I still don't feel bad about the idea of giving something back to someone who I feel gave something to me, in addition to whatever I might have paid for his books. It'd feel a lot less wasted to me than contributing to someones political campaign, for example, although in a way this guy's body of work IS a political campaign of sorts.
What's wrong with rewarding a "slightly loopy world view"? Isn't that what artists exist for?
I'm not necessarily saying "give give give" in this particular case (although I like his the books and his world view), but I personally feel that life would be much duller without people who have the insight to see things differently and the guts to put it out there for public consumption. Lots of artists & writers have died poor -> don't make the typical mistake of creating eqivalency between *talent* == *lots of money* because it's a lie.
Just because the wealthy propogate the myth that those without money are somehow less worthy doesn't make it so. Artists don't have to live with the same bullshit values about what's important. Mozart died in poverty. So did Van Gogh. Phillip K Dick. Jack Kerouac. What were their landlord's names? Who did they owe money to? What banker got to keep all the property? History has forgotten lots of self-appointed *important people* who had plenty of money but in reality did nothing of substance - it remembers the people who had something more to offer. I don't find the idea of helping one of those people that repulsive. YMMV, of course.
You can see David Yow from The Jesus Lizard get "bottled" on youtube if you watch the live "Seasick" video - that looked like it hurt pretty good. Knocked him flat, it did...of course it didn't keep him down for long but this spammer kid ain't no David Yow, I'll bet. I'd say it'd be a decent punishment, although personally I think having to make, address, & send apology cards to everyone at the company might be better. Just think of the paper cuts and the cops watching him so he doesn't eat the glue sticks.
Damn that crafty bastard! He just *proved* that he's smarter than most other folks with his excellent manipulation of the media! There should be some sort of a prize for that as well.
I hope the snakes don't make their way into the tubes and attack me while I'm at work.
Mmmmmm...Sporty Spice!
How about the chick in Chris Isaac's "Wicked Game?" I always liked how she could look so bitchy and so hot at the same time. Being a model I guess it may come naturally to her, I dunno.
Oh well, at least we'll get to see some of that cool old David Bowie video again... :)
And then there is, of course, good old fashioned greed.
I was given one during some management training I attended and found it to be not only somewhat interesting but also informative about the other people I was with. I was pretty suprised to see how closely the results matched the predictions. We were given the test and then given the descriptions of the 4 core areas of this test. Then before we got our scores we took turns trying to predict what each other's scores would be. It struck me as a *fairly* accurate measure - nothing to get too bent out of shape about but closer than a 45 minute interview would be.
Another potential positive about taking a test like this is that it could indicate potential to your employers that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. If you're working in a cube all day and your bosses boss never sees you then they might not know that you're "a born problem-solver" or "a natural leader" since they never interact with you. Keep in mind that there's room for lots of different personality styles in a business, so there's nothing wrong with being "on record" as having a particular style. Successful people have lots of different personality traits - it's not like there's only one way to do things...
TMM's remark about interviews being personality tests is also 100% correct in my opinion.
With our merger and lots of upcoming changes looming on the horizon (Sarbanes-Oxley, anyone?) there is the potential for major restructuring in my department in the not-so-distant future, however, so the possiblity could open up for some of our folks at some point. My gut feeling about it in my case is that I won't be telecommuting regularly while I'm where I am because it probably won't make sense from a company perspective. Another gut feeling is that I'm likely going to get to participate in some of those "team workathons" you mentioned...moving from the private to public sector has it's definite ups and downs.
I can *occasionally* telecommute, but my boss is highly suspicious of it. From a work standpoint I think I could work optimally from home 3 days a week with 2 in the office, but they're not buying it. As an aside, my company just got purchased by a Fortune 500 (the ink's still wet on that one) so perhaps my latitude will change in the future, but somehow I doubt it. I think the management style & corporate culture play a large role in the success of telecommuting even when the requirements of the job would easily allow it.
As far as SE being the best job in the country, well, I don't know about that. I have a Master's in Software Engineering and write software for a living (although not at a software company) and I enjoy what I do immensely, but that depends again on corporate culture and management. Our Marketing folks seem to have a pretty good time doing their jobs, and they get paid pretty solid too so I'd have to say that the "best" job is really just the one that you enjoy the most.
Oh...
It is indeed all about the people skills, isn't it?
It's not only the "average citizen" that these power hungry you speak of are seeking to control. Apply your right to bear arms as a basic human right to the nuclear fiasco going on with Iran right now and it's easy to see that the US Gov't has not intention of allowing other soverign nations to possess the type of hardware that you'd like to be able to possess, let alone it's own citizens. The whole "right to bear arms" thing as a defense against governmental tyranny in the US was an antiquated notion 150 years ago and it's even more amusing now. In my opinion the "average citizen" has not had the opportunity for a level playing field in terms of military hardware with a large Govt in many many years, and (unfortunately) likely never will again.
If it's more comfortable to deal with generalizations I could reframe the statement to include hobbyists or other folks who aren't coding for a living, but it doesn't change my point which was that understanding your desired outcome and how exactly you're going to get there is more important than what language you're doing it in and no tool is going to do that for an end user.
I personally couldn't care less about how well nonprofessionals in a non-business setting code because I likely will never run into their software or have to fix it, so I guess I was excluding them from my statement...sorry.
The empahsis, once the easy to use tools are there, should be on logic and flow rather than syntax. People who are unable to clearly state both their business problem and their proposed solution are never going to be able to programmatically fix it regardless of the ease of use their tool provides. I have seen dastardly data models hiding behind lovely Access forms, for example, because the front end tools were there but the underlying knowledge wasn't.
Hell, bring 'em on! The more clueless development that there is going on out there the more work I'll have fixing these messes. Allowing unqualified people to perform important business tasks is of questionable wisdom.
Because "G" and "K" were already taken...
All kidding aside, I think you nailed it when you said that users leave quickly if the presentation isn't professional and also when you said that experienced web folks already knew this.
Hey, I didn't realize that my boss read slasdot! Sorry man, I'll return your stapler this afternoon...
I only hope that it didn't have the same catastrophic effect on the moon dinosaurs as the first one did...
You beat me to the punch - I was "fondly" recalling the first time, many years ago, when I got my first "LI" boot screen. Man, I'm starting to sweat again just thinking about it...Suuurre I have backups of everything, duh...All worked out ok, of course, but it was a long half-hour.
Probably the kind that are all stuck together...