Last 5 Entries

Cancelled US News magazine

I just cancelled my years-long subscription to US News & World Report.

I originally subscribed to Newsweek, to get my weekly national and world update. But even though they had a number of very good columnists, including a few that responded to me personally when I emailed them about their articles, Newsweek skewed more and more neo-liberal (well past the point of featuring a smiling mass-murderer on their cover).

I switched to US News, and was satisfied with their comprehensive coverage - until they closed their weekly print edition and replaced it with a digital weekly edition and a monthly special feature in print.

They should have also changed the name - to Only Inside Washington D.C. Weekly. Because that is essentially what every single issue contains - only US government news. If the federal government had no significant hand in it, it will not be reported. And no world news, short of - you guessed it - US diplomatic relations with other countries.

So there goes easily more than a decade of getting a comprehensive weekly update on national and world events. Some of the information can be replaced through other outlets, but I will miss the curating and the exploration.

That happened to me, too!

From a comment on the article Mini-Microsoft: The KIN-fusing KIN-clusion to KIN, and FY11 Microsoft Layoff Rumors:

having been in MS for only 2 years... I'm impressed with the smart ICs I have been working with... but I'm never impressed with any people managers @ Microsoft. If I start up a company, I will make sure not to hire any MS leaders. And I don't know why, but after some ICs become leaders, they become ineffective & corrupted in this company.

[Quick acronym guide: IC == independent contractor, MS == Microsoft]

I worked alongside a contractor, back in the days before MS's 100-day breaks. She started a week or two after I did, and we were officemates for over a year. MS eventually hired her, and then she became her former teammates' manager.

Have you seen The X-Files episode that starts with a guy in a call center watching how people are summoned to the manager's office and then turned into fly monsters that only someone under stress could see?

I think that's what MS does during its manager training. Because my former officemate and fellow contractor became an incredibly unsympathetic and demanding boss. She appeared to actually forget what she had done and experienced as a contractor, and turned quite unlikeable. I left shortly afterward.

It's KITT!

Marginal Revolution: Robot Parking

Obligatory Wikipedia reference

Color me impressed - Rockbox 3.5.1

Just installed v3.5.1 of Rockbox onto my Sansa e200v1 music player.

There are legions of commercial applications that could take some serious cues from Rockbox's ease of installation. On my Linux OS, I plugged in the player, ran the installer (a single file that worked fine as a 32-bit program on my 64-bit CPU), clicked a single button, answered a query about my player's version, and done.

No lengthy questionnaire about my host or target. No tweaking, startup problems, messing around in config files, searching for hidden options to enable the primary functionality.

It. Just. Worked.

Well done, Rockbox contributors.

Dear AT&T

Taking 19 hours to deliver a text message is not acceptable. Charging me 20 cents for doing so is a rip-off.