And the “most bizarre information architecture decision” award goes to Xign, which has posted seven different career tracks in its “Employment Opportunities” page. There are no positions available in any of those categories.
Nice work organizing that mountain of data. Maybe you should add a search function.
I found this sign posted on a number of telephone poles in Cambridgeport:
SPY ALERT!
Cambridgeport Residents Please be notified that certain persons claiming to be Cambridge police (undercover) and “working for public safety” have been observed in your neighborhood. THE TRUTH? The are Bush-Romney operatives spying on activists and Muslims. Bush-Romney spies have been seen on the following streets: Erie, Pearl, McTernan, Brookline, Magazine, Hamilton, Speridakis & Valentine.They sit in parked cars (with lights on) after dark. If you see them, kindly tap on their window and tell them to move on. JUST SAY NO to Bush-Romney spies in Cambridgeport!
-D.D.P
I’m not sure what to say about it, really. It’s misguided, and sad, and probably the product of a genuinely tortured soul. On the other hand, it’s also hilarious.
Jeff Stryker is the original gay cowboy.
I’ve started reading “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s latest book of essays, and I have, against all expectations, begun to like it. The first piece, “Big Red Son,” about the Adult Video News awards show, has all the humor and vitriol that makes DFW so good– and all the annoying digressions and notes and abbreviations that make his work read like notes for an article, rather than a finished product. Still, I liked it.
Even more, I liked the second piece, on Updike. I’m not a big Updike reader, but this piece is great: it manages to skewer both irrational Updike-haters and Updike’s place in the canon of postwar American fiction.
What got me started on this post, even before I’ve finished the book, is the way that DFW illustrates exactly what irritates him about Updike’s protagonist, and by extension, Updike and his entire generation of solipsistic narrators. It’s his “bizarre adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair.”
Anyway, I expected David Foster Wallace to be well written and insightful and incisive. I did not expect it to be enjoyable. This book is. Highly recommended.
You’d think I’d update more, what with not having to get up and go to worky worky. But mostly I’ve been getting slower and dumber and lazier the longer I’ve been out of work. Accomplishments this week: did legally required minimum work search. Filed for unemployment benefits. On Tuesday I took a shower, and on Wednesday I made some dinner. Today my goals, in addition to posting this crap, are to shower and leave the house. We’ll see how far I get.
Here There be Tygers is a fun journal by a nice young woman named Anette who joined me and a few other folks for shabu-shabu on my birthday. We followed the meat-and-soup with $2 pints of Brubakers at the Tam. Quite the holiday celebration.
The current slogan, “I liked you better before I sold out,” is getting tired. So I need a new one.
I was thinking “Every day a fresh outrage” or perhaps “Pointless, incessant barking” (from a New Yorker Cartoon, in which a dog says to another dog that he used to have a weblog but just went back to barking…) might work.
But I’m going to go the route of the Holy Roman Empire– adding a disclaimer noting that this page is neither secret nor ironic.
It has also come to my attention that Running Linux, 5th Edition has gone to press. If you know anyone who could use a good practical guide to Linux, I highly recommend it. Also, I wrote one of the chapters. The new edition is expanded and updated, covering new versions of GNOME, KDE, the kernel, and more.
I get it. You hate the song. It’s a vapid novelty jingle masquerading as a momentary pop hit. Relax, will you? Perhaps you should listen to other tracks on the record, since they might be better.
I’ve been browsing lists of small technology companies in the SF and Boston areas. Many of these small companies have terrible websites. Each is bad in its own special way. Some have too much markety jargon (“the leading provider of software solutions that enable service providers to accelerate the creation, control and delivery of high-value applications as hosted services?” Nobody’s accelerating anywhere with that kind of turgid copy.) Some sites are from web design companies who can’t design a navigable UI to save their lives– or who have a variety of dead links in their menus.
More informative and more interesting, though, are the sites for industries that time forgot, like Viable, provider of CAD solutions for Jacquard looms. It reminded me that the tech-driven industry has been living in Boston for a long time: Lowell was founded shortly after 1820 for those newfangled mills.
What you gonna do with all that junk inside your trunk? Possibly sell it on Ebay, I guess.
I’m listening to Riding, which seems to have a lot in common with Nimrod’s Son, thematically.
Secretly Ironic 