Blogging on and off since 2003
This just in from Boing Boing
David sez, “A fellow on the CISSP mailing list set up a simulation of a portfolio whose strategy was simply, sell short every stock he got a spam about. He ‘made’ $8K in two weeks.”
Now, why didn’t I think of that? (Hint: What’s the opposite of Schadenfreude?) (Oops: Wikipedia provides the answer: mudita.)
There’s a new blog-meme floating around: I’ve seen it at Good Math, Bad Math and Pharyngula among others. The idea is to create an account on The Quotations Page and go through adding quotations to your page until you have five quotations which capture the essence of YOU. Here are mine:
There’s a thoughtful piece by Andrew Brown over at the Guardian’s CiF site about why on-line forums are so full of polarized, angry, hate-filled people. “Technology alone can’t really explain the madness of the online world. It is the social aspect that turns it into a playground full of gangs of angry eight year olds. Above all, it is the sense – the hope – that we have an admiring audience out there.”
His piece is followed by a variety of comments, some thoughtful, some angry, and some that (inevitably) start out as a parody of what he was talking about and slide into the real thing. To me, the saddest responses are typified by someone with the ID Scrittipolitti: “I really don’t see the problem. CIF is certainly no more abusive and angry than everyday life. “ If true (and how could it be?), what unremittingly depressing lives such people must live….
A couple of weeks ago I asked what Jonathan meant by “Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun’s dime”. What’s emerged is actually more useful than blog hosting: after all, it’s easy to find a free hosting service out there.* Instead, Sun is launching a blog aggregation page for Sun alumni, at community.sun.com. So if you’re an ex-Sun blogger, just head over there, click the Register link, and fill in the form. Once we’ve populated it with some content (other than me!), Sun and ex-Sun folks will be able to use this page to find out what their former colleagues are up to.
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* Try http://wordpress.org, http://www.blogger.com/, or http://www.bloggoing.com/
Legendary Microsoft blogger Scoble (soon to be ex-MS) recently visited Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. His account of their conversation is well worth reading. I found the following comment about the impending layoff particularly interesting:
For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun’s dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that’ll get posted by workers who’ve just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It’ll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There’s a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.
So does this apply to recently-laid-off Sun bloggers: will their blogs.sun.com accounts will be unfrozen? Can I get geoffarnold.com added back to b.s.c/planet.do? (At least until I land a new gig.)
And I guess they’ll have to change the b.s.c title, which currently reads:
This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
Emulating Gene Bob: Cause I’m a follower:
Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts/events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.
Events:
– 732 – Battle of Tours: Near Poitiers, France, leader of the Franks, Charles Martel and his men, defeat a large army of Moors, stopping the Muslims from spreading into Western Europe. The governor of Cordoba, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, is killed during the battle.
– 1971 – Sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, the London Bridge reopens in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
– 1979 – The Pac-Man arcade game is released to the Japanese market by Namco.
Births:
– 1930 – Harold Pinter, English playwright, Nobel Prize laureate
– 1959 – Kirsty MacColl, British singer and songwriter (d. 2000)
Deaths:
– 1979 – Christopher Evans, British psychologist and computer scientist (b. 1931)
Bonus fact:
– 1582 – Due to the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, this day does not exist in this year in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
Another intriguing web quiz (mainly because my score was atypical):
You’re an intellectual, and you’ve worked hard to get where you are now. You’re a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world’s problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational. You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking. It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power. You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you’re determined to try.
Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.
Good piece by Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times on the brilliant South Park Scientology episode. Money quote: “Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it.”
Nice piece by Nora Ephron (And By the Way, the World Is Not Flat) on The History Of Stupid Thinking About The Internet. Bottom line:
Which brings me to this conference on the Internet I attended last week, where it will not surprise you to hear that it was suddenly clear that there were billions of dollars to be made in the Internet from advertising. This is the new conventional wisdom: there’s a lot of advertising money out there, and all you have to do is provide content so that the ads have something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of “content” for an Internet company was “something you can run an ad alongside of.” I found this a depressing insight, even though my conviction that all conventional wisdom about the Internet turns out to be untrue rescued me somewhat from a slough of despond on the subject.
I was browsing Jim Lippard’s blog and came across a link to this extraordinary piece about London below (shades of Neil Gaiman). And that led me to the entire BLDGblog. Wonderful stuff – file under “Stimulators”.