Ah, romance

As we approach Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach a new market in the machinery of love this holiday has evolved into has come to my attention: candy hearts such as men would produce.

You know—those little sugar hearts with less-than-Twitter-sized snippets of sentiments stamped on them?

Someone has reimagined them to capture genuine male feelings around the whole courtship ritual:

The only thing I find astonishing about this is that I’m unable to locate anywhere on the web where you can actually buy these things. I’d have thought that, in a marketplace where an Australian guy makes a killing by sending your enemies an envelope full of glitter, roMANce candy would at least be worth a flutter. But evidently I would be wrong.

Perhaps one of my readers will take it up. 

Social constraints

For some reason—and I really don’t know why—two wineries have started following my professional account on Twitter. You know—the account I use to follow software companies and people involved in technology in one way or another, and to tweet tech-related things so I look, well, professional.

Meaning: the really boring account.

So I really don’t see the connection between cyber security breaches or social media tips and wine making and marketing. But once Kendall-Jackson followed me, for some reason Murphy-Goode did also.

I’ve certainly supported their product lines over the years, but I doubt they know it. At least, I really hope they’re not keeping direct tabs on what I buy when Safeway has those 30%-off sales.

Anyhow, when I looked at their profiles, I found something I thought quite interesting:

I’m not quite getting this you-must-be-21-years-old-to-come-to-our-exclusive-yet-completely-public-Twitter-feed thing. Yes—seems like every liquor website that uses English as its language makes you swear that you’re 21 (or, in some cases, 18). If it were strictly an e-commerce relationship, I could see that—but since when does going to a company website (or Twitter feed) require proof of age? If you’re not old enough to purchase or consume the stuff legally, you shouldn’t be able to know anything about it?

That’s like saying that you shouldn’t provide sex education for adolescents because they’re not really old enough to make intelligent decisions about those activities. And that has been shown over the centuries to be entirely wrongheaded as an approach.

Well, I clicked on Murphy-Goode and so we’re now following buddies, woo-hoo. But, interestingly, when I hit the Follow button on Kendall-Jackson, here’s what appeared:

People—it’s a public freaking feed, not the Illuminati! What could you possibly be tweeting that’s not for the eyes of the under-21 set? Okay—perhaps a little food porn in your timeline. But, really—I have to show government-issued ID to see it?

Plus—is there anyone who, when confronted with your little faux-authentication step, isn’t going to lie about his or her age?

Tell you what—I’ve just looked up one of my favorite-most wineries ever, King Estate. They don’t even have that twaddle about being 21 to view their precious tweets. And so I just followed them instead of Kendall-Jackson.

They have the best Pinot Gris on the market, anyhow.

Social media gotta be free, dudes.

Academic relief

It may or may not come as a surprise to you, but apparently every semester, in a lot of colleges and universities throughout the land, there’s an epidemic of grandparent death, for which professors and teaching assistants are asked to either extend deadlines for coursework or exams, or perhaps remit them altogether.

Interestingly, in a study of this catastrophic recurrence, it hits hardest at mid-terms and finals time. And evidently some students have an endless supply of dying grandparents.

Well, The Chronicle of Higher Education has solicited advice from a variety of instructors (although I notice they’re pretty much all in the humanities—no mathematics, engineering or physics profs here) as to how they would reply to a student seeking academic relief in their hours and weeks of need.

The responses are just cherce. No, really, you have to read them, but I’ll give you a couple of samples.

Takiya Nur Amine, associate professor of dance, UNC, Charlotte:

“I only consider make-up work when illness or family crisis is documented via official letter from the Dean of Students office. Please do not show up with an obituary or a copy of the funeral program or have your mama call me and leave nasty voicemails about how I had better accommodate you because your granny has just died. Upon receipt of the required documentation, I will make an appropriate arrangement concerning the midterm for you. And I am sorry you had a death in the family. That truly sucks.”

Angela Jackson-Brown, assistant professor of English, Ball State:

“Dead grannies no longer impress me. In fact, dead grannies are so 1990s it’s not even funny. And to be honest, the way my luck has gone this semester, I probably have already taught your mother and/or your father, and if DNA is any indicator, they most likely “killed off” your granny years ago. Thus I’m asking you to forgo that little granny dance of death with me. And it would probably only take me a half a minute of Google searching to find your granny taking selfies of herself in real time. So let’s save each other the trouble.

“Drop my class and keep your granny from dropping dead … again.”

Lisa Guerrero, Associate professor of critical culture, gender and race studies, Washington State:

“I believe in karma … both mine and yours. And if you are fine with tempting karma by virtually knocking off family members on a whim simply because you can’t get your act together, then you have bigger problems than the grade you’re going to get in my class.”

Well, you get the drift.

This whole spate of quasi-inventiveness reminds me of the last lecture that my zoology professor gave before the final exam. He informed us what we’d be allowed to bring into the room for the test, and all the measures he’d taken to prevent us from cheating. Reciting that preventive list took a lot longer than the part about what we were allowed. And he was quite clear that he’d amassed that list over years of teaching and discovering all the ways students would cheat.

(For example, he allowed us to bring in one 3”x5” note card with whatever we wanted to write on it. But he stipulated that it was a single card, with only two sides written on it. Because in the past, students had used razors to split the note card so they’d have four sides of notes.)

I remember thinking at the time that if people had devoted any fraction of their cheating effort on actually studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat. But obviously I would be wrong.

Power to the people

Well, here’s a historic anniversary: Magna Carta is 800 years old. To celebrate, Brits have moved all four surviving copies to the British Library.

Technically, the birthday dates as of 15 June, but the four documents, from the Library, Salisbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral, will be on display together for three days. Then—for some unaccountable reason—they’ll spend a day at the House of Lords. (Perhaps to remind those archaic residues of hereditary privilege of that notion that no one is above the law, not even those who claim some sort of divine right to rule.)

(Or possibly because they squawked about not being able to score tickets to the exhibit at the Library.)

I mean, the principles laid out in that original document were the first step towards a system of parliamentary democracy. And, even if it took about 700 years to filter down into something beyond oligarchy and plutocracy, it was out there in ink and sheepskin to be referred to whenever someone tried taking the political piss.

While Magna Carta essentially curbed the excesses of King John, it primarily only expanded the powers of the aristocracy. However, it formed the basis for our own Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are not insignificant things.

So for the next few months, take some time to pour yourself a nice glass of whatever appeals to you and drink a toast to those barons who muscled the first inklings of democratic government from a hereditary king.

Gratitude Monday: Unknown security

Today I’m a little surprised, but deeply grateful, that I’m spending a good five hours interviewing with six people for a product manager position with one of the leaders in the computer security arena.

I’ll be speaking with the hiring manager, another product manager, a developer, a business development guy, a tech support guy and a product marketer. I’m doing this understanding that my knowledge of endpoint security (not to mention encryption) is quite limited—they understand that, too. The hiring manager said that while, of course they’d prefer someone who already understands that stuff, they can work with someone who’s interested in it.

Well, that’s me.

I'm also very grateful that a friend-of-a-friend spent an hour the other day walking me through a lot of endpoint/encryption issues, and gave me pointers on what information I might want to acquire from each of those six interviewers. It turns out that he worked with the hiring manager for a few years, and he gave me very good gouge on her, information which tells me that she'd be a great colleague and that she runs a smooth operation. This is invaluable.

So here I go, stepping out into the largely unknown. Should be interesting.