Category: life

Big surprise: CNET reports that 22% of all technology workers lack four-year degrees.

I remember my co-op job at the Systems & Technology division at a major national bank. My manager had taken Anthropology.

That’s why you should hire me. I’ve got my Bachelor’s of Engineering, I’m the real deal, all natural whole grain, unlike those other cheap knockoffs. Heck, I spent five years in engineering purgatory to get a Management co-degree, all the while the Arts and Commerce students sat in their 3pm classes on a Wednesday dressed to the nines, ready for another night at the clubs.

Which goes to show, once you leave school and get your first professional position, your education is irrelevant.

We finally replaced Silverlotus’s Harmony phone (complete with malfunctioning Hold button) and answering machine with a shiny new Panasonic 2.4GHz (damn, it’s faster than my PC! :D) cordless phone set. It was a bit more expensive than I would have been totally comfortable with (it was $135), but we had a Bell World gift card so there you go. I’ll consider it an investment against future dropped calls and missed messages.

Hopefully people who call us by mistake looking for York University will stop leaving retarded messages on our digital answering system.

Our old answering machine used a microcassette, and the microcassette was deteriorating to the point all the voice recordings came out warbly. It sounded like everyone that left a message was crying or at the brink of tears.

I’m going to miss that answering machine.

If you see a pawnshop, church and karate dojo in close vicinity, it’s a bad neighbourhood. If you see a furniture store, Buddhist temple and yoga studio, it’s a good neighbourhood.

In Coupland’s novel Microserfs, one of the characters has relabelled his blender with pop culture references. One of the highest settings is “Disneyland when you’re 10”, and one of the lowest settings is “Disneyland when you’re 25”.

As a kid, I visited Disneyland in 1988, and Walt Disney World in 1991. The employees, called Cast Members, and themed attractions truly made them “the happiest places on earth”. At home, I devoured articles on Audio-Animatronics and Imagineering. To me, Disney was synonymous with limitless creativity and compassion.

Fast forward to 2004: When I think Disney, I see the Disney-CBS-Touchstone Pictures media conglomerate. A conglomerate trying to oust its own CEO at the moment. My Disneyland memories are tainted: what I once thought was cuddly is now cloying.

After reading MiceAge, it seems it’s not just the memories that are fading. The Skyway, Submarine Voyage and Main Street Electrical Parade are long gone. The Cast Members of the Jungle Cruise no longer carry muskets to “shoot” the marauding hippos due to political correctness.

And DisneyWorld’s EPCOT, my favourite of all the parks, is replacing its cerebral, Animatronics-laden attractions with more action rides. Horizons and World of Motion (which I rode on twice) are gone. I guess learning about alternative energy and world cultures is boring compared to thrills and chills.

Next year will be Disneyland’s 50th anniversary. Many of the attractions, such as the Tiki Room and Sleeping Beauty Castle are getting much-needed restoration work done. But people still care, and as long as they do, I’ll probably bring my future kids there some day. At least they won’t think it’s a Mickey Mouse operation.

After sitting on a library waiting list of over eighty patrons long, we finally got a hold of Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, the second book in a swashbuckling historical fiction trilogy entitled “The Baroque Cycle”. Stephenson is to be commended for being able to mix irreverent, wanton violence with minute 17th century trivia. Add in alchemy, banking, 14 bars of stolen gold, and a dash of cryptography, and you have a bizarre but good tasting literary recipe.

The good news is, at 815 pages, The Confusion is a hundred pages shorter than the first book, Quicksilver. There is also less inane chatter about the monarchy and how life was like before the Industrial Revolution, so more things actually get done. Half-Cocked Jack sails to Asia and even Mexico in a high-tech ship, while Eliza manipulates the burgeoning financial markets of Old Europe as France and England square off in battle.

The series remain geeky, with many obscure references to both Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and actual historical events. Neal Stephenson has started a wiki called MetaWeb for providing backstory on his books.

He even writes items for it, making him one of few authors that have annotated and commented on their own works.

Salon also ran an interview on Stephenson, where he talked about the monumental sea-changes in the 1600s that gave birth to modern finance and even computer logic: [via ]

“There was a review of ‘Cryptonomicon’ with a line in it that struck me as interesting. The guy said, “This is a book for geeks and the history buffs that they turn into.” I’m turning into one. I’m in this history book club, which is not all geeks but it’s definitely got some serious geeks in it. It’s been going for four or five years maybe. We’re all consistently dumbfounded by how interesting history is when you read it yourself compared to how dull it was when they made you study it in school.”

Stephenson explains to Wired how fame and fortune changed hands from the blue bloods to the crafty commercants:

“Bills of exchange weren’t a new concept. They had been around for centuries at the time the book takes place. They were the basis for the medieval economy and the rise of the Italian banking houses. It is, however, a new concept to the nobles to whom Eliza’s explaining it, because according to the code of behavior of the noble class, they’re not allowed to dirty their hands with commerce.”

I’ve noticed that many bloggers (myself included) often talk about significant events in their childhood or distant past.

But what of the children of the blogging generation? They will have recorded these events in their present time. What will they be talking about ten years from now, since all the reminiscing material has already been blogged?

Or perhaps they will see their past in a different light. It is said that human memories build on each other, each memory assimilating facets of another. Perceptions change. An event that was considered traumatic at first may be seen positively in retrospect. Like a rearview mirror, maybe our pasts are not what we think they are.

Went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 after a day of sightseeing in Chinatown. An entertaining movie, with Moore’s trademark deadpan humour and fast cuts. The beginning was a bit unfocused, especially with a few decidedly cheap shots. It’s when the movie reaches past the one hour mark that its thesis is found; war is waged to profit the wealthy at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised.

As Michael Moore quotes from George Orwell’s 1984:

“It does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous…A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance…war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or east Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

When you see the infomercials hawking “anti-terror” equipment, or the mother of a killed U.S. soldier being heckled in front of the White House, this isn’t about politics, it’s about money. Those who dare argue against the Patriot Act or the Second Iraq War aren’t against the men and women in uniform – they’re against the concept of war itself.

As we came down the escalator, a girl behind us was telling her friend that F911 made her feel the same way when she rented Bowling for Columbine. “It makes my blood boil,” she said. “I mean, why do these things have to happen? God, why?”

Regardless of your political leanings, there can be no denying that there are too many unanswered questions, too many conflicts of interest, far too much evidence of deception, and a growing amount of maimed and killed human beings. Why indeed.

• Transcript to the film – As transcribed at Redline Rants, in three parts
• Michael Moore’s War Room – Rebuttals and footnotes so anyone can check the facts in F9/11 to their heart’s content

Who do you think sleeps better at night, Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds? We’ll never know for sure unless they ever shack up together like a 21st century Odd Couple, but BusinessWeek argues that sometimes passion and pride outperforms money, like how thousands of developers have contributed their blood and tears to the Linux operating system for no apparent reason.

It’s not like Linus is a pauper. The Linux kernel became his resume, and he was quickly hired by hot startup Transmeta when he graduated from the University of Helsinki. The RedHat IPO left him a millionaire; he drives a Mercedes SLK. Like Gates, he’s married with three kids and lives in the Northwest USA. He’s known for his humility (he was once spotted waiting in line with everybody else for his ID badge at a Linux conference, even though he was the keynote speaker) and straight-faced wit (such as when he stepped in to describe the ideal Linux mascot – a plump penguin).

Despite the fact Bill Gates has personally contributed $5 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charity in the world, people are merely jealous of Gates. Linus, on the other hand, is adored.

Who do you think sleeps better at night, Dennis Hayes or Dale Heatherington? Together, they founded Hayes Microcomputer, the inventors of the computer modem. If you ever had to type in an AT command, it’s because your modem’s manufacturer licensed Hayes’s technology. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution attests, “Hayes was always the one who got the glory. Heatherington was the one who got the money.”

Hayes wanted to remain in control, and remained there when the company finally fell in 1998. Hayes is currently a part-time consultant living in a rented Manhattan bachelor apartment. He is twice-divorced, hounded by alimony payments.

Heatherington, the silent partner, retired in 1984, shortly after the company hit the big time, amassing a payout approaching $20 million. He now lives in a 7,000 square foot home with his wife, dedicating his time tinkering in his workshop. As Heatherington says, “How much money do you need? You go through life once. You’ve got a certain number of years to live.”

“If you put the energy in to build a profitable company, why not be good to yourself and enjoy it?” says Kelli Greene, an entrepreneur interviewed by Inc.com. She’s managed to handle one of the largest growing private companies in America with a 25 hour work week.

In the D drive: Thief: Deadly Shadows True to its past, but why do I have to fiddle with the default.ini just to make it bearable to play?

“I didn’t upgrade to the latest cheats, and I was banned.” He was waiting at St. George Station, carrying a canvas and a hiker’s backpack, so he’s probably a university arts student. He got banned from playing the online game Counter-strike. No remorse or guilt in his voice; it’s a minor inconvenience. Ironic since in the online gaming world, where gaming skills can mean cash prizes in cyberathelete competitions, cheating brings out very strong emotions. He plays “Amplitude” on the PlayStation2 now.

Two rollerblading teenagers, cruising down Bloor Street Village, are regaling this curious story: “So then, this asteroid heads toward earth and then turns around, saying “F— that!” But he’s not talking about what he’s seen on television or on the movies. He’s talking about the Flash animation “WTF Mates?” (The End of the World).

Saw a man teaching a young girl sign language on the streetcar. Did you know there is a gesture for “Tim Horton’s”? I only caught it in the corner of my eye so I probably am not getting it right, but it looks like the index and middle fingers pointed outward as your right hand moves in a wide upwards arc from right to left. “McDonald’s” is signified with a gesture tracing the shape of the Golden Arches.

The Two Things

1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.

2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.

The 25 most difficult questions an interviewer can throw at you. From 1983, yet still topical.

23. What do you feel this position should pay?

Don’t sell yourself short, but continue to stress the fact that the job itself is the most important thing in your mind. The interviewer may be trying to determine just how much you want the job. Don’t leave the impression that money is the only thing that is important to you.