There might be a master plan

I succumbed to the hype, and decided to try out one of the ‘presence blogging’ services in earnest. I chose Jaiku, since they are prettier, younger, and don’t have some of the horrible backgrounds Twitter has. Don’t know yet how exactly will I use this new medium, or if I will use it much at all, but let’s try. I’m curious.

Feeds for my bookmarks, photos and listened music are being pulled into my Jaiku stream. And I’ll post some random crap every now and then. So follow me if you are curious and you have a Jaiku account. And if you don’t have a Jaiku account, I happen to have 6 invites left, so ask below.

Oh, and I added a Jaiku badge to the blog’s sidebar. Because you can’t have too much crap on your sidebar.

Photo of Steve Jobs at home in 1982, by Diana Walker.

From the caption: “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” —Steve Jobs

Really tells you something about him, doesn’t it?

There are some other interesting photos of well-known faces by Diana Walker in the The Bigger Picture gallery.

(found via Jose’s tumbleblog)

In The Blissful Interview Candidate Gavin Terrill writes about an interview question he often asks[*], the various steps of the question, how people usually perform, etc.

One of the main points of his post is something that often I feel candidates don’t really understand: there is no Right Answer to the interview question and that is not what the interviewer is looking for, anyway. In Terrill’s words:

The point of this exercise is not for the candidate to get everything right, but to see how they operate when they don’t know an answer. My observation is that the more competent you are, the more intelligent a conversation you can have, and that is really what I’m looking for here. I like to see candidates who are on a voyage of discovery, buoyed by a passion for knowledge and personal improvement.

So the next time you have a technical interview, don’t try to guess what perfect answer is expected from you. Just be yourself, think about the problem and aim to have an intelligent discussion with the your interviewer. That tends to work out better.

[*] Yes, Singletons are the root of all evil. But that is not the point here, so let go of your anger and reflect on the nature of job interviews instead.

Cory just posted over at Boing Boing the best brief description of DRM that I’ve read so far:

DRM — Digital Rights Management, or Digital Restrictions Management — is technology that prevents you from using some files by taking over part of your computer so that it won’t obey your requests. DRM is always proprietary. Before a DRM is released, it is infected with “Hook IP” — a patent or trade secret that is introduced to the technology so that the only way you can implement the DRM is by licensing the Hook IP. Anyone who licenses the Hook IP is forced to promise to make their DRM behave as intended, preventing uses and taking over computers and devices. Without Hook IP, a company could implement the DRM but leave out the restrictions, shipping products that allow all the uses their competitors’ products deny. Hook IP gives the DRM maker something to sue over if this happens.

More on DRM:

• Wikipedia article, with a more detailed description
• EFF’s site on DRM, including discussion, court cases, pointers to related issues, links, etc.
• Defective by Design, the FSF’s campaign against DRM. From their website: “There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future.”

Great minds have purposes; others have wishes.
– Washington Irving

Skrymta challenges me to write a wishlist. With nothing less than 7 wishes.

Reading his nicely written list I feel inadequate (in short: patience, friends, sleep, debate, a new kitchen, tech that Just Works (TM) and a cool haircut). Sigh. Though I do have a cool haircut. But still.

Ok, so here goes. In no particular order.

• Invest more in my hobbies. And I don’t mean more money, no. I mean more time (and effort?). This means take more photos, read more, possibly blog more. (And maybe code more. Or maybe code less. Dunno.) And strive to do these things better, which hopefully will lead to more satisfaction (and fame and money, of course).
• More time. If only there were more hours in the day to invest in the above stuff. For example, it would be useful to not need sleep. Alternatively, a guaranteed lifespan of at least 3000 years might work (yes, my to-read pile is that big).
• Own my own company. Probably something related to the internet. Maybe a nice cafe with free wifi. Or both.
• An Eames lounge chair.
• Learn German. For all the obvious reasons. See above on having more time.
• Speak and write better English. See above on blogging more. Not forgetting my Spanish would be nice, too.
• Remember to recharge my cell phone. Given that this is the only phone I have, it would be really useful if it actually was on most of the time.

And now, the dreaded nomination moment. Because no blog meme is complete if you don’t inflict it on your favorite bloggers, I’d like to read wish lists from: RinzeWind, Su, Helga (see above on learning German) and dalr. Thanks in advance.

A list by Warren Ellis would be a wish come true, but I don’t think he is reading this. Oh well.

A Taiwanese lingerie firm celebrated Camisole Day on the 21st of November: more than 90% of their 500 female employees wore only camisoles and knickers while at the office that day.

So when is briefs day? And which will be the brave company to celebrate it?

(found via Neatorama)

Executive summary: if you were a subscriber of On jobs, work and careers, please unsubscribe from http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/feed and subscribe to http://anaulin.org/wordpress/feed instead.

—

You’ve possibly noticed already, but just in case you didn’t: following readers’ comments and my own preference, I’ve merged the blog on jobs and careers with this one. It sounds like most people anyway subscribed to both feeds, so this should save everybody some hassle.

All the entries from the other blog appear now here. The feed for the old blog is now redirected to the feed for this blog, which will carry all entries. Eventually, the URL for the old feed will start returning 404s.

So if you were subscribed to http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/feed, please point your feed reader to http://anaulin.org/wordpress/feed instead. Thank you for your understanding.

[And yes, I broke all the links from the previous blog. I don't think anybody was linking to those, and Googlebot will recrawl the new URLs soon enough, so no worries.]

Dear readers,

As you might know (or not), a while ago I started a little side blog, On jobs, work and careers. After a few amazingly brilliant posts (if you don’t believe me, just go have a look!), it got neglected in favor of this older but comfier blog.

I just asked the readers over there what should I do with it. So I thought it would be only fair if I asked you guys as well: what to do about the young and feeble creature? Should I merge it with this blog (maybe the readers of both blogs are all the same people, and it annoys the hell out of you to have to follow two separate feed for the crap of just one little person)? Should I let The Other Blog die unattended? Or what is your genius suggestion?

Discuss.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

If you’re one of those readers that are paying attention (of which, admittedly, I probably don’t have many, but still…), you might have noticed that I haven’t been writing much around here. I’ve been writing a bit more on the other blog, though.

Since I don’t like to leave things to rot unattended and unfinalized, I want to ask you, my gentle reader, what should I do about this blog On jobs, work and careers.

Below is my list of proposed paths forward; please state your preference in the comments. If I don’t get at least three votes, I will declare this blog dead.

1. Migrate all the entries from this blog to the other blog. Post all subsequent related posts there.
2. Keep this blog separate and post more frequently. If this is your preferred option, please suggests post titles or topics that you would like to see addressed here. You can also list your preferred posting frequency, if you so wish.
3. Other: do you have a better proposal?

Thank you very much in advance.

The TV console in the living room of Chateau Cthulhu — the geek house I share with Pinky and Brains, both of whom work for the Laundry — is basically brain candy, installed by Pinky in a desperate attempt to reduce the incidence of creative psychosis in the household. I think this was during on of his rare fits of sanity. The stack contains a cable decoder, satellite dish, Sony Playstation, and a homemade webTV receiver that Brains threw together during a bored half hour. It hulks in the corner opposite the beige corduroy sofa like a black-brushed postmodern sculpture held together with wiring spaghetti; its purpose is to provide a chillout zone where we can collapse after a hard day’s work auditing new age websites in case they’ve accidentally invented something dangerous. Cogitating for a living can result in serious brain-sprain: if you don’t get blitzed on beer and blow or watch trash TV and sing raucously once in a while, you’ll end up thinking you’re Sonic the Hedgehog and that ancient Mrs. Simpson over the road is Two-Tails. Could be messy, especially if Security is positively vetting you at the time.

Following the success of the talks we gave last year, a bunch of Spanish Googlers (including myself) will be giving a new round of Tech Talks on Google technologies and culture, followed by Q&A sessions. These are the dates, times and locations:

Monday, November 12th, 12:30
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Salón de Actos
Planta Baja del Bloque I
Facultad de Informática
Campus de Montegancedo
28660, Boadilla del Monte
Madrid
(map)

Tuesday, November 13th, 12:00
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Salón de Actos
Facultad de Informática
Santesmases s/n
28040 Madrid
(map)

Wednesday, November 14th, 12:30
Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña
Aula Master, Edifici A3
Campus Nord
08034 Barcelona
(map)

Thursday, November 15th, 12:30
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Escuela Técnica Superior de Informática Aplicada
Camino de Vera s/n
46022 Valencia
(map)

Drop by and say hi!

Update: You can submit your CV online here. If you want to be considered for the interview round that will take place in Madrid in early December, please submit your resume before November 26th.

Seems today is Pacman day.

First I find, via Rinzewind, a text-adventure version of the classic game.

Some hours later I run into a beautiful Steampunk reinterpretation (via Boing Boing).

Such anachronism. And yet such beauty. :: sigh ::

Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. “You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”
“Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interset to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, and no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, answers reader’s questions over at the Freakonomics blog.

Q: Which one of the Dilbert characters would you most like to see die?

A: One of my regular characters will die soon. You are the first to know.

The Swiss tourist office has released another TV ad that uses Swiss men as the primary reason why you should visit the country.

Last year’s World Cup ad suggested that women abandoned by their football-obsessed husbands should come and spend some time with healthy alpine men. The ad for this year’s winter campaign suggests that Swiss ski instructors are hot enough to warrant a visit.

Sadly, I haven’t spotted any of these hotties on the streets of Zurich. Maybe I should go up to the mountains more often.

Apple Insider has published a detailed, enlightening and simply beautiful history of the Mac OS System Preferences panel, Road to Mac OS X Leopard: System Preferences.

The brief mention and screengrab of the NeXTSTEP Display Preferences panel almost made me reach for a Linux workstation to run WindowMaker on. Almost.

(via SwissMiss)

Via Boing Boing I find a post on the thoof.com blog where they discuss some interesting stats on their users’ behavior.

Particularly amusing bits:

It seems that Windows users are 20% more interested in stories about religion than Mac users.
[...]
Mac users are 6% more interested in intellectual property law, and 5% more interested in fitness.

A couple of weeks ago I subscribed again to the RSS feed of El Pais, the biggest (and, supposedly, ‘best’) Spanish newspaper. Reading the headlines and some of their articles has become my daily dose of irritation with the so-called professional media. The articles are often misinformed, and at times show the utter ignorance of the authors and their unwillingness to do a little bit of basic research.

Take, for example, El Pais’ coverage of the OOXML vote.

The article’s headline is “Microsoft doesn’t give up in battle for OOXML”, and it is signed by Aitor Riveiro. The only external source referenced in said article is Héctor Sánchez, CEO of Microsoft Iberia. Mr Riveiro does not bother to mention which countries and organizations opposed the vote, and what are their reasons for voting ‘no’. Clearly Mr. Riveiro is of the opinion that it is of no interest to El Pais’ readers why countries like UK and Canada and France disapproved of the standard, or why the Spanish standards body, AENOR, decided to abstain.

Another El Pais article on the topic, linked in the sidebar of this first one, mentions in passing that Microsoft had “put pressure” on some countries. There is no mention of the accusations against Microsoft of trying to buy off its Swedish partners, or the uncanny correlation between corrupted countries and countries that voted in support of Microsoft’s proposal (not that I am suggesting that Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago don’t have a stake in document standards, but you will agree that their sudden eagerness to participate in the ISO and approve OOXML is suprising).

Compare this coverage with an article on the same topic from the IHT: Microsoft’s bid for ‘open’ document format is unexpectedly rebuffed. This article quotes Microsoft’s manager for interoperability and standards, discusses Microsoft’s “agressive lobbying” that “reached into high levels of government”, gives hard numbers on the opposing/approving votes, and details on the upcoming final vote on the issue, which will take place in February.

:: sigh ::

Dear Friend;

This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently
disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world.

The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you
and would like you to know the truth about where they went.

This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken
up to heaven.

[...]

This quote is the beginning of the letter that raptureletters.com offers to send in your name to a non-believer of your choice, in the event of the Rapture.

If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.

This rapture letter service is FREE and will hopefully gain the person you send it to an eternity in heaven.

That’s right: eternal spam. An updated version of eternal damnation that you can enjoy directly from your iPhone, intermingled with your Twitter updates!

(via I blame the patriarchy)

International Herald Tribune: Are your jeans sagging? Go directly to jail:

Starting in Louisiana, an intensifying push by lawmakers has determined pants worn low enough to expose underwear poses a threat to the public, and they have enacted indecency ordinances to stop it.

Since June 11, sagging pants have been against the law in Delcambre, Louisiana, a town of 2,231 that is 80 miles southwest of Baton Rouge. The style carries a fine of as much as $500 or up to a six-month sentence. “We used to wear long hair, but I don’t think our trends were ever as bad as sagging,” said Mayor Carol Broussard.

In case you didn’t get it the first time, I’ll repeat that again:

… an intensifying push by lawmakers has determined pants worn low enough to expose underwear poses a threat to the public …

No comment.

Jeff Hawkins, the author of On intelligence and founder of Palm One and Handspring, is not just an expert in mobile computing. For a long time, Hawkins has been interested in understanding how the brain works. His hope is that a better understanding on human intelligence will make it possible to build intelligent machines.

This passion for understanding intelligence led Hawkins to found the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in 2002 to advance research the field and, eventually, to write this book (together with Sandra Blakeslee).

On intelligence proposes a unified model to describe how the human cortex (the site of our intelligence) works. Hawkins’ hope is that neuroscientists will be able to use this model to accelerate the advance of research in that field; computer scientists might be able to use the model to start experimenting with new approaches to artificial intelligence.

The main ideas behind this model are summarized by Hawkins thus:

The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive moemory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

[...]

To make predictions of future events, your neocortex has to store sequences of patterns. To recall the appropriate memories, it has to retrieve patterns by their similarity to past patterns (auto-associative recall). And, finally, memories have to be stored in an invariant form so that the knowledge of past events can be applied to new situations that are similar but not identical to the past.

In the last chapters of the book, Hawkins briefly addresses ethical concerns around building intelligent machines, suggests possible applications of these ideas to the field of artificial intelligence and offers some cautious predictions.

Overall, I found the book an interesting and informative read. I definitely recommend it for those that are interested in learning a bit more about how the human brain works, or in new possible paths of exploration for the field of AI.

On the negative side, I got a bit bored by the overly detailed 70-page-long description of the cortex. Surely this detailed description is more interesting for someone that has some background in neuroscience (which I don’t), and it is necessary to give Hawkins’ ideas some scientific validity, but I found it the least fun part of the book.

More on the book’s official site: http://www.onintelligence.org/.

According to beenda.com, anyway. Not that bad, I suppose.

Not sure why Hagia Sofia is appearing as a star in the middle of the US, though.

Now let the flamewars on “what is a top destination, really?” begin!

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

When we talk about work and career, there is a lot of talk about resumes and how to get a job. But it is as important to select your employer carefully. After all, having a mind-numbing job at a company you don’t respect never helped anyone’s career.

So when you next search for a job, be sure to seek out those employers that seem to provide the sort of environment and challenges that you are interested in. For some companies, you can already tell from their job ads. For example:

Rashmi writes about the Calacanis-Winer “breakup” and asks Has anyone else noticed this trend - men being more open on their blogs?.

I don’t think men are being more open. I think these people have a clear case of diva-ism.

The blogosphere has given the so-called A-list bloggers an opportunity to behave as capricious prima donnas, and they are using it to the full. This is nothing new for men. Men have behaved like this in other spheres, such as the arts, for a long time.

But maybe it is not only the blogosphere what fosters this behavior. Perhaps it is also Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological gurus and “alpha-geeks”.

In case you didn’t see it already, silicon.com has an interview with William Gibson (aka the father of cyberpunk) that has been making the rounds.

silicon.com: You’ve written much about the way people react to technology. What’s your own attitude towards technology?

Gibson: I’m not an early adopter at all. I’m always quite behind the curve but I think that’s actually necessary - by not taking that role as a consumer I can be a little more dispassionate about it.

Most societal change now is technologically driven, so there’s no way to look at where the human universe is going without looking at the effect of emergent technology. There’s not really anything else driving change in the world, I believe.