Pay what?

I was walking around the Cupertino library/city hall complex the other day, when I noticed this:

Yes, smack in the civic center of the Home of the iPhone there is a pay telephone. Go figure.

But when I got up close, I saw that it’s not branded with any recognizable service provider; no Verizon or AT&T. The only thing written on it was Payphone.com, which is a manufacturer of equipment. I don’t know who provides the connection, and I didn’t drop a quarter into the slot to find out.

I was too bemused by the whole back-to-the-last-century-ness of the whole thing. Maybe people just use it as a prop for selfies. Yeah, that’ll be it.

Terms & conditions

I must say that I found this rather cherce—I was downloading a mind-mapping app, and had to click that I agree to the end-user licensing terms. You always do. And I’m betting that you—as I—pretty much never actually read the agreement. You check the box and click.

Well, this time, I clicked on “read”. And here’s what I got:

Good trick, no?

Yes—I went ahead and checked the “agree” box and downloaded the application.

Rolling the Dice

I got a giggle out of this tweet from Dice this week:

You know: Dice, the technical jobs portal, which has become your one-stop shop for being spammed by contract labor job shops for cut-rate no-benefits “contingency” positions that result from massive layoffs by Fortune 50 tech firms.

I can’t recall the last time I was contacted by a recruiter for a full-time position with an actual direct-hire company via Dice. But recruiters based in India with US addresses and VoIP phone numbers? Yeah.

Only occasionally are they for anything I’m actually suited to (clue: I’m not an architect, network administrator or developer). And apparently there are no maps of the United States in India, because Kentucky, Texas, and Ohio are not within commuting distance. Even Los Angeles is a deal breaker for someone in the Bay Area.

Also—thanks for the offer of helping me get an H1-B visa. But no.

(As an aside, many of these companies are 8A certified—meaning they are designated as “small, minority-owned” for purposes of Federal contracting and therefore receive preferential consideration in procurements. And many of them are gold or platinum partners of companies like Microsoft and Oracle. As another aside, Microsoft is one of the companies that is pushing for more and more H1-B visas because they claim there aren’t enough qualified technical prospects already in this country.)

However, I realize I’m spitting into the wind here. Dice doesn’t give a monkey’s about what kind of spam its users receive as long as the spammers are paying their subscription fees. Therefore, this little advice graphic is particularly amusing. They must have needed to meet a tweet quota.

Make way for ducklings

Following on yesterday’s post about the therapeutic effects of ducks, here’s a video that really appeals to me, from Norway:

Because there’s nothing like seeing armed police escort a family of ducks along a highway and across town.

(BTW: am I the only person who thinks those ducks are totally booking? I mean, for not being built for land travel, they are definitely moving at speed.)

According to a Danish friend, at the end of the video the cop tells the journalist that they got the call earlier and walked the ducks all the way home. And that it makes him feel good and he would do it again.

Well, yes.

My Danish friend says that this sort of thing happens with some frequency in the Nordic countries and that motorists do not get their knickers in a twist over yielding to ducklings.

I contrast that with what the scene would be like here in the Valley They Call Silicon. Scores of self-important ninja rock-star thought leaders in Priuses and Teslas would be turning both the air and the Twitterverse blue with their indignation at the hold-up in their commute, for whatever reason.

Of course, they’d do that in the rare instance when it rains, too.

Gratitude Monday: Nesting instinct

You may recall last year that I told you about a pair of ducks that annually raises a clutch of ducklings in the atrium of an office building in Mountain View. I think they developed that as their brooding destination because of the faux pond/stream environment that seemed like the thing to spend space on in the 1980s, when that building was built.

What with the drought here in California (which is turning from the Golden State to the Brown and Dusty State), the building’s management company turned off what little water it had allowed to go stagnant there over the past months. I therefore thought that Mama and Papa Duck would have to find another location for their family activities this year.

However, I was wrong. Early last month I was pleasantly surprised to discover Mama with a trail of five ducklings scuttling about the walkway.

I mean, for raising your spirits, it’s hard to beat ducklings.

But the next week when I went back looking for them, I was told that they were gone. The building holds a number of startups (of the 13 guys and a dog variety), which come and go with some speed. Apparently someone from one of them (who hadn’t been there in previous years) ratted them out to animal services, who came and scooped them all up.

I don’t know where they’ve gone. No doubt it’s some approved duck sanctuary, but how will Papa Duck find them? The high tech hotshots broke up a stable family with their meddling.

Even so—I’m grateful I got to see them again this year, and I wish Mama and babies all the best, wherever they may be.

Resistance is futile

Lately I’ve noticed that Google is going all nanny about things, because I’ve been getting notices of potentially “suspect” activity, like they’re trying to be helpful and respectful of my privacy and security.

What’s interesting to me is that the “suspicious” activities involve only devices and properties that aren’t owned by Google. First it was this notification that someone had logged into my Gmail account from…Firefox; on Windows:

I particularly like the part where they tell me they “were unable to determine whether you have used this browser or device with your account before.” Because I’ve been using precisely that browser and that device for more than three years.

Then, on the advice of a techie friend, I downloaded the Outlook app onto my iPad (and don’t even get me started on the number of hoops that iTunes made me jump through to download a free app), and fired up my Gmail account:

Again—that same unknown browser/device wheeze. Yes, the application was new (not the native iOS mail interface I’ve been using for the last seven months), but they’ve certainly seen that device before.

I think that what got up their nose was the fact that I wasn’t using Chrome in the first instance (they’re forever urging me to get “faster access to Google” by downloading Chrome; even though I already have it installed; and you can’t turn off that importuning), or an Android device in the second. It’s kind of sore loser-ish, which doesn’t really suit a company that already has more money and customers than God.

But I guess that’s how they got that way: by playing hardball and annoying the spit out of you until you acquiesce.

Kind of like a four-year-old.

The library mystery

I do a lot of my library borrowing based on book reviews and recommendations for books and movies from friends. Since my days haunting the Reston branch of the Fairfax County Library system, my habit is to read a review, reach for the laptop and put whatever it is on hold. This obviates the need for checking that I have a fistful of little scribbled-on scraps of paper when I go to the actual facility.

I place holds even if a library near me has the material on its shelves. Because—see above about scraps of paper. Plus, I reckon it keeps library people in employment.

Anyhow, often by the time a book or movie is ready for pickup, I’ve forgotten all about it. Especially if it’s a new material and I’m number 245 in the queue for the 43 copies (as I was for The Grand Budapest Hotel). So it’s a little like opening a Christmas gift when you’ve passed around a wish list. You’re not entirely surprised, but you’re still glad to see it.

However, a few weeks ago I was completely nonplussed to go to the reserve shelves at the Cupertino Library and find...this:

Because it’s a historical novel, set in the 12^th Century, during the war between the Empress Matilda/Maude and King Stephen in England.

The thing is, I have no earthly notion why I put it on reserve. If I’d passed it in a bookstore I’d never have picked it up, much less bought it. I don’t read novels except for detective fiction; I don’t even read any of the latter except for police procedurals. I did, in fact, read the series of mysteries about Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters, which are set in that period. But that was in the last century and I’ve moved on from then.

Also, I don’t know the authors, and I can’t imagine what possessed me to go after it. Someone must have recommended it to me, but who? And why did I think I wanted to read it? Was it the protagonist being a 12-year-old redheaded archer? Was it because it was billed somewhere as a mystery (even though everything was predictable)? I just do not know.

As it happens, it was an okay read—I mean, it was interesting and all, until we got to the last act. Then the plot was resolved in a completely manipulative and inorganic way so quickly that I thought maybe they’d lost the lease on their writing space and had to get the hell out before the bailiffs showed up.

So that’s my novel for the year out of the way. Normal service has resumed, as I’m starting Peter Longerich’s biography of Heinrich Himmler. I don’t have to worry about any plot twists here because this stuff is way weirder than any novelist can cook up.

The bald truth

While perhaps not entirely true, this is indeed indicative, and somewhat related to yesterday’s post.

Library resources

The Santa Clara County Library District (SCCLD) is apparently performing a system software upgrade, which is taking four days. Starting Sunday, 31 May, and going through Wednesday, 3 June, you can’t do anything online (which includes my major activity: putting materials on hold).

You can walk into the actual libraries and physically get books and stuff, but evidently checking them out involves handing your card over to a staff member for some sort of quasi-manual process.

Everything’s closed/non-operational on Wednesday. Normal services are slated to resume on Thursday.

So I made sure to go in on Saturday to pick up some holds and stock up on extra books to tide me over the four days of famine. I went home with seven items, but these two ought to keep me going.

Gratitude Monday: Making 'em laugh

On this Gratitude Monday I’m grateful for a couple of things related to a job interview I had last week.

First of all—I had a job interview, with a company that develops interesting software and seems to have a pretty balanced (read: European) approach to the work-life issue. I await next steps with interest, even though I’m pursuing other opportunities in my pipeline because I’ve learned that it ain’t over until the fat lady has sung, taken her curtain calls and left in her limo.

But second, the portion of the interview with the HR person was very interesting, because she mostly wanted to know what kind of a human I am, with an emphasis on what I might bring to the company in the way of fun.

(I did tell her about organizing a going-away party for a colleague, which included a cow. And I told her for free that it’s not that easy to milk a cow.)

She inquired whether I’m still in contact with any of my former colleagues, and what they might say about me.

Well, thinking about this on my drive home, I recalled something that I wished I’d mentioned.

A couple of months ago I posted on Facebook that I’d won Best Table Topics at my first Toastmasters Club meeting. (There were only five people at the meeting, okay, but still…) One of my ex-workmates, JH, immediately asked, “Did you make them laugh?”

Well, I hadn’t—the topic was have you ever been to China, or if you hadn’t what would you like to see. I had no trouble waxing poetic about Shanghai, which has always seemed to me to be the most alluring, exotic city on earth.

But it did make me feel good that the first thing JH thought was that I make people laugh. We worked in a highly stressful environment and it’s not at all a bad thing to be known as someone who can lighten the atmosphere.

So in my follow-up email to the HR person, I mentioned this. It can’t hurt to let them know that not only do I know how to have fun, I can help other people do so, too.

With or without a cow.