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.

Here's who let the dogs out

You know, I love a good prison break story. I mean, I must have seen The Great Escape about a bazillion times. (I even named my parakeet Eric Ashley-Pitt; go look it up.) And here’s one of my all-time favorites.

Humans at the famed Battersea Dogs’ (& Cats’) Home were going nuts, because they'd leave at night with everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, and arrive in the morning to find dogs out of their cages, having laid waste to the kibble in the pantry. 

This was only happening at night, and the keepers just could not figure out what the hell was going on. By the time they showed up in the morning, there was nothing but a mass of really full dogs of every description, and no one was ratting out anyone.

Finally, the humans set up CCTV, and they caught the break-out artist, er, red-pawed. An extremely intelligent lurcher (no, really—that’s a breed of dog) had been breaking out of his cage and then setting free the other dogs to roam the corridors and chow down on the foodstuffs.

(God, I love this dog!)

The identity of the culprit was a surprise, because (as one news report put it) lurchers aren't considered particularly intelligent dogs. No comment needed on that one, eh?

They put an end to Red's midnight marauding, but he will live on in the hearts and minds of freedom (and dog chow) lovers everywhere.

All that glitters

Filed under the heading of: dang, the Internet, I give you this service, which you may heretofore not have realized you needed, but reconsider:

Yes, it’s ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com.

For $9.99 (Australian, so—at time of writing--$7.88 USD), those clever folks at ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com promised to mail a packet of “this-shit-sticks-on-everything” glitter to the person or persons with whose day you really totally want to screw. From their FAQs:

Q. “Will the recipient know who sent the glitter?”

A. “Not unless you open your mouth.”

Q. “Why should I pay you to send glitter to someone I hate?”

A. “First off, use your fucking imagination. We’re going to be pouring a tonne of glitter into an envelope with a folded up piece of paper. You know what’s going to happen when that fuckface opens the envelope & pulls out the letter? The craft herpes will be released & will go everywhere.”

Q. “Why are you so obsessed with glitter?”

A. “Go fuck yourself”

The service so thoroughly meet a universal need that for a while when you clicked Buy Now you received the message that the proprietor(s) were so inundated with orders that new sales were suspended while they fulfilled existing ones.

However, this week it was revealed that one of the best game-changing paradigm-shifting next-big-thing innovations of the entire Interwebs was nothing more than a really, really successful prank.

And by “successful”, I mean: he sold it last week on Flippa.com for $85,000 USD. The purchaser has announced that he will fulfill the 10,000-order backlog and he has resumed sales. Both PayPal and credit cards. (“Yes, we know PayPal is a shitty company, hell why not send those dicks some glitter?”)

So you see, children, how the power of Internet can be used for good and the betterment of mankind? And how Aussies totally rock the ether?

Equality bytes

There’s an interesting oxymoron involved in applying for employment in the United States. Well, there’s a ton of them, but today I’m going to talk about this one: the Equal Employment Opportunity questions.

Employers have to report data to the Feds on percentages of employees of various racial/ethnic groups, sexes and disabilities; also whether you’re a veteran (of the Armed Forces) or not.

Interestingly, I’ve recently seen more than two choices for sex (or gender, as they politely like to refer to it these days), especially for companies around the Bay Area. It’s nice to have options.

Now, while it’s mandatory that employers report this information, it’s voluntary for applicants to supply it. I routinely check the “decline to state” boxes. They try various ways to trick you into giving the data, but there has to be an option to refuse to “self-identify”.

Now, here’s the oxymoron:

The drop-downs for each of those categories is a required field. So it’s mandatory that you respond to it, even when your response is “none of your dag-blamed business.”

So, I don’t really know how accurate that EEO data is on a national level. I just know that they’re going to have to interview me in person to make any guesses about my particulars.

Se non ora, quando?

Seventy years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G. Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for pest control), snuffed out their lives.

Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?

And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.

But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance and dogmatism are on the rise. And now that pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.

We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn that lesson, I just despair.

Gratitude Monday: Working the rooms

I can’t tell whether this is a stretch for Gratitude Monday or not, but today I’m grateful that I went to four tech/career-related meetups last week, and I kept a straight face and open mind through every one of them.

If you have never been to a “networking” event, then you won’t know what an accomplishment this is, because 9.5 out of every 10 of these things are teeming with pishers—people hustling a product, a service or themselves. And they move around like sharks, with their eyes continually scanning the crowd for new prey even as they’re trying to convince you why you should buy, hire or invest.

And the ones who aren’t trying to shake you down on the spot are clutching their Vista Print business cards in a death grip, with that deer-in-headlights look on their faces, silently beseeching you to put them out of their misery as they try to cough up the elevator pitch they memorized (but failed to practice) out in the parking lot 20 minutes ago.

So, not really my kind of soirée.

However, I decided that, as long as I viewed them as an old-fashioned tea party (with bulk pizza or tortilla chips and warm soda or beer to balance in both hands instead of teacup and saucer) where my particular object is to observe and encourage, I could approach each event as an opportunity to learn a variety of things.

Viz. There are a shedload of people churning out a world of healthcare applications in the expectation that they’re going to make money hand-over-fist, become internationally famous and, you know, help humanity. I think I was the only person in a room of more than 200 who did not raise a hand when the speaker asked (in the manner of a revivalist counting sinners), “Who here is working on a great idea to bring to the marketplace?”

This meetup was held at an interesting venue, a tech incubator. That same night there was also a meetup for retail tech, and one of its organizers assured me that they were much cooler than whatever else was going on. I should have taken him up on it; I could have hit two events in the same night. They might have had better pizza and colder beer, too.

It turns out that there is a 21^st Century equivalent of the old carousel of slides of someone’s summer vacation. At another meetup a tech entrepreneur (which, of course, is a redundant term, because I’m apparently the only person in the entire Valley They Call Silicon who isn’t working on a great idea to bring to the marketplace) showed a group of developers 35 photos of robots he took at the Consumer Electronics Show. Most of them were accompanied by this description, “So I thought this was pretty cool.”

However, in fairness, there was also a discussion of tech trends, including pros and cons of the Internet of All Things, that was, in fact, pretty cool. And the beer was somewhat chilled; although the tortilla chips ran out before the panel fired up.

I’m sorry to say that the least focused presentations (even including the My Trip to CES interlude) were at the women-in-STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) group, although the post-preso discussion, where attendees spoke of opportunities to mentor young women in the field, livened up considerably. Also, sadly, the wine and sodas were all room temperature, although the food (supplied by Google, I presume, since it was held in one of their buildings) was good.

And the last meetup, for job seekers, was a throwback to the last century inasmuch as the presenter—not introduced in any way—held forth for three hours on a non-generic (his description) success-guaranteed (100%) system for getting the job you want. It was the strangest atmosphere (particularly for job seekers) because there was no energy at all in the 50 or so attendees, no conversation, no networking—it was like a church just before they wheel in the casket.

Frank (no last name) had a few points I found cogent, although he buried them pretty deep in his smirky-if-well-practiced verbiage. He also kept referring to steps in his guaranteed-success system as “binomial” instead of “binary”. Not a sterling recommendation for his alma mater, UC Davis, but apparently his clients at various investment banking firms were happy with him.

(No refreshments offered at all at this one, unless you want to count the little individually-wrapped mints in the ladies loo of the too-cool-for-school hotel in Cupertino where it was held.)

To tell you the truth, I left two hours into his three-hour spiel, but at least I kept a straight face during that time.

And I’m grateful that I had all this live, free (pretty much) entertainment all around me. Got another three lined up for this week, too.