Yesterday I wrote about a colleague's lament that she was tired of all the bad economic news and a Slashdot poll that revealed not only a remarkable amount of workplace sloth, given the times, but another dose of grumbling.
While reading the 250-plus comments on the Slashdot poll, I came across one that took my snark away and touched off an internal debate about whether to share it with you folks (it didn't "fit" with yesterday's post). It was titled "Retired, but working more than ever." Here it is and here's where you can read the replies of Slashdotters:
Snugly nestled into our new home near the beaches we love and more than ready for retirement, my wife and I learned that she has inoperable cancer. The last seven months have been a cascade of mostly bad news and setbacks, the most recent being a spontaneous fracture of the right femur, but with enough good news to keep our hopes high.
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I've been meaning to write about this Slashdot poll, but other work kept getting in the way. As you'll see from the survey results, however, not everyone can claim that excuse ... at least not with a straight face:
The poll asks a single question: "How many hours do you REALLY work each day?" (The emphasis, added by Slashdot, is critical here.) Read more
I just encountered a co-worker at the water cooler (yes, literally) as a nearby TV spewed yet another story about yet another laid-off worker struggling to make ends meet without a paycheck.
My co-worker, as relentlessly cheerful a person as you'll ever want to meet, muttered to me: "I'm so tired of hearing the negative stuff; I'm just so tired."
There wasn't a whiff of callousness in what she said or how she said it; just a palpable weariness.
Blogger Louis Gray is very good at explaining why things matter and why some things matter more than others. Here he applies that skill to Facebook: Read more
Stroke of genius warning: I have come up with a virtually fool-proof plan for stopping extortionists and assorted whack-jobs from mailing ransom notes, exploding packages and poison-laced envelopes to innocent victims ... or Congressmen, for that matter.
Simply require that all mail originating in the United States -- every letter, bill, catalog, magazine and parcel -- be physically transported by the sender to a United States Post Office building, where a postal service employee will biometrically authenticate and record the sender's identity while under the watchful eye of a video camera. No more skulk-and-drops into an unguarded mailbox. (No more little-red-flag pickup service outside your house, either, but what's a loss of such convenience when we're talking about protecting the public's safety?)
Nutty as Ted Kaczynski, you say? Read more
I learned to steer clear of LendingTree.com three years ago when my use of the site to search for a mortgage delivered nothing but spam. When I say I'm done with them, however, that's just an expression, as you're about to see.
This tale -- which, coincidentally, arrived as I was digesting Facebook's terms-of-use debacle -- comes from a friend and redefines the phrase "customer-retention program:"
Thinking about putting LendingTree.com to work for you (you know, the "When Banks Compete You Win" folks)? Think again. Tried the service for a car loan and when they couldn't find anyone that wanted to loan me anything (which is a frightening glimpse into the state of the financial world since I have little debt and an excellent credit history) I went to close the account.
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The uproar caused by Facebook's recent terms of use changes could scarcely have been more negative, so it's no surprise that founder Mark Zuckerberg waved a white flag while most of you were asleep.
From Zuckerberg's blog:
A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is contributing $12.5 million to fund projects worldwide that help poor people who have no access to banking services nonetheless make financial transactions using their cell phones.
According to this story:
The GSM Association, which represents 750 mobile phone networks in the world, said a grant ... would help fund 20 initiatives in Asia, Africa and South America. Money transfer via mobile phone is seen as a potential area of growth for network operators in developing countries, where millions are without access to the banking system.
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That Twitter had more downtime last year (84 hours) than any of 15 social network sites measured should surprise no one: The site's "fail whale" is so famous it was just featured in the New York Times.
However, what may surprise some Twitter users and industry observers -- me, for example -- is that the site's availability performance showed dramatic improvement over the second half of 2008.
And the same cannot be said for LinkedIn, which appears to have caught a case of whatever had been knocking Twitter offline so regularly.
Those are a few of the findings from a report out this morning -- "Social Network Downtime in 2008 (.pdf)" -- from the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. The report covers Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows LiveSpaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and eight months worth of performance from Imeem. Read more
Every now and then I read a story that makes me stop and ask, "Really, just now?"
Such it is this morning with this item from a television station in West Virginia:
10-digit dialing is creeping into our area so 911 centers and Verizon are trying to get the word out.
Beginning February 28th Verizon and other companies in the Mountain State will require all calls to be made with an area code and Verizon tells us this is the most significant telephone change we've had in 50 years.
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Pardon my French, but I'm still recovering from Monday's post about Cursebird. (Do people still say "Pardon my French" when they mean "Sorry I'm such a potty-mouth"?)
Anyway, I was hoping to see how the Cursebird meme was doing among The Twitter People (as they're known to my 7-year-old son, Max) but for the past hour or so I've found nothing to see there except for that famous Fail Whale (actually, it says "Something is technically wrong" ... right). Read more
People swear a lot on Twitter -- it's the Internet, after all -- and when they do, Cursebird is there to capture and tally their every vulgarity in a real-time stream of potty-mouthed consciousness. Not a cuss word goes unchronicled; nary an expletive is deleted.
Cursebird cracks me up -- you don't need a Twitter account to partake and even Twitter haters should find it funny -- so I felt compelled to contact its creator, Web application developer Richard Henry, to get the straight poop behind this profanity tsunami.
Before we get to Henry, though, a warning: If you're offended by curse words and find nothing amusing about their use or abuse, neither Cursebird nor this post is for you. Flee, please. And, while no serious curse words will appear here, the links will take you to places containing language that is not safe for work, unless you work at HBO.
Great, I see all but three of my regulars are still here. Read more
With no indication, per usual, as to how it obtained the documents, the whistleblower-enabling organization Wikileaks has just posted to its Web site 6,780 taxpayer-funded Congressional Research Service reports that generally see the light of day only when sponsoring officials judge their contents politically beneficial.
The documents cover the gamut of today's most controversial political issues, including technology-related matters such as national broadband policy, privacy protection of consumer information, emergency response communications, the switch to all-digital television and funding for the National Science Foundation. Read more
This story about Breanne Fite of Upland, Indiana is quickly becoming a cliché ... and not a flattering one in terms of what it says about our society.
Twelve-year-old Breanne, you see, is one of those texting prodigies -- a Mozart who's all thumbs -- that our always-on culture has not only come to produce but to celebrate.
From The (Muncie) Star Press:
Her father's last Verizon Wireless bill showed that her previous 30-day texting tabulation hit a whopping 22,795 messages.
"All I could say was, 'Thank God I get free text messaging,' " said Michael Fite, noting the bill broke down his daughter's communications as 301 picture texts, 743 text messages out, and 21,751 text messages in.
Read more
Press reports indicate that police have reopened the long-unsolved "Tylenol killings" investigation because of new leads and "advances in forensic technology."
This is pure speculation on my part, but I'll venture a guess as to the nature of those advances: DNA fingerprinting.
The murders happened in 1982. Read more
Have you had your fill of layoff stories? And do you have a Twitter account?
Those readers answering yes to both should consider following @techoptimist on Twitter, which is my Network World colleague Carolyn Marsan's fledgling experiment in finding glimmers of hope amid all the doom and gloom.
Those who revel in the doom and gloom should stay right here ... and on Twitter follow @buzzblog.
It appears as though the electronic book reader has come of age.
According to TechFlash:
Mark Mahaney of Citigroup estimated that Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles last year (he did so by piecing together information from Sprint Nextel, which powers Kindle's wireless feature, and other sources). Mahaney said sales of the e-reader could reach $1.2 billion by 2010.
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Read that headline again. It boggles the mind, yet according to multiple news reports this morning it is absolutely true: Italian prosecutors as I type are trying four Google executives over their roles -- which were non-existent -- in the posting of a video that depicted cruelty toward a disabled child.
From an IDG News Service story:
In what is believed to be the first instance of a privacy executive being held accountable for his firm's actions, Google's global privacy counsel is scheduled to appear before a criminal court in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday on charges of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data.
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There's downtime and then there's DOWNTIME.
From the bloggers at Pingdom, a Web performance monitoring company:
Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime. ... The connection between the two? Both are owned by Live Universe, whose site is also unavailable.
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News comes via the Electronic Frontier Foundation that Michigan State University has dropped disciplinary action against a student who had been accused of spamming and network abuse because she sent e-mail about a controversial campus matter to 391 faculty members.
That the outcome is a just one seems obvious from afar, but it has me wondering if the situation would have been far stickier in a slightly different setting. I'll get to that in a moment.
From the EFF press release:
EFF argued that the school's email policy was an unconstitutional restriction on the university community's free speech rights and had begun preparing a lawsuit on Ms. (Kara) Spencer's behalf.
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