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It’s my birthday today and, since I’m really rather a long way away from them I didn’t expect anything more than a really great phonecall. However, what I actually got was a call from my intercom, and man from a local florist, saying he had a bunch of flowers for me! And what a bouquet! Incredible! Completely unexpected and the nicest surprise ever! When the delivery man rang on my door I really thought he’d got the wrong person: who’d be sending flowers to me? And more importantly, WHY?! Then I got it; I’m so dumb sometimes.
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Not the kind of thing you want to see.

Even worse:

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In a highly effective tactic to avoid working, I’ve been reading a couple pages of the Guardian Newspaper’s Style Guide. Not only a great correction for many grammatical and style mistakes that one often makes in casual writing, but hilarious as well.

actor
male and female; avoid actress except when in name of award (eg Oscar for best actress)
One 27-year-old actor contacted the Guardian to say “actress” has acquired a faintly pejorative tinge and she wants people to call her actor (except for her agent who should call her often)

The stylebook can bought via The Guardian Bookshop, or downloaded in PDF format.

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Following on from ‘Microsoft is Dead‘, I’ve just read another long essay in which Paul Graham, a computer programmer, author and venture capitalist, muses on the potential of the young, how large (technology – in his concept) companies should really be buying small startups instead of trying to hire all the good people direcly as well as the quandry of whether to stay in school or start your own business. Graham’s basic thought is that ‘the youth of today’ have immense power because we can take all the risks in the world and largely, come out unscathed from them. We can create our own companies and see how they almost value themselves within the marketplace rather than having to rely on a corporate master for a dollarEuro value on a paycheck. He acknowledges the risk that people take when considering leaving college, grad school or business school but also counsels that it may be the best decision one can make. It’s all a question of timing and of your own and your colleagues’ personal skill.

Here are some quotes, which I’ve shuffled around in order and context to make work here. The essay is worth reading in full. The link is below.

Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high….The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean…. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.

Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks… Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try.

What’s an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.

The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you’re 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. If you’re really productive, why not make employers pay market rate for you? Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get you?

-from Hiring is Obsolete by Paul Graham

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The sneaky ‘e’ is a wink to Madame Ségolène Royal who is the Parti Socialiste’s candidate. She’s been a bit creative with her campaign by appending an ‘e’ (signifying the feminine form) to the word président, creating ‘présidente’. This is notable because président is normally a masculine word, and because everyone is making a huge fuss about how she’s a woman. Early in the campaign (which only officially started today) she was asked, ‘But who will take care of the children?!’ France may be more progressive than some states but in other ways it seems as progressive as a glacier. They’re as chauvinist as any rabid Republican in the US, but fiercely proud of their liberties, equalities and fraternities, as long as that doesn’t include women being paid equally to men, equal treatment of immigrant groups and so forth. It’s a funny place; I love it.

At around 10:30 last night I was randomly channel surfing and came across a promo for the news of TF3 (Télévision France 3). Because I was in that exhausted phase that I get for a while after a really good but hard run, I decided to wait around for this news program. While waiting for it, rather unexpectedly, I was presented with 15 minutes or so of political ads for the various Presidential candidates. I read the newspapers here a lot so actually catching these things was fascinating; even more so because I’ve been taking a class on Political Communication in which the professeur would each week give us a summary of the campaign and often show clips of the high profile interviews of each (main) candidate. A couple things that I thought of on seeing these ads:

• At times the fringe parties do themselves no favors. They use their allotted time to show themselves chatting with ‘representative’ citizens on the street. This doesn’t work because combined with people talking in odd accents and too fast, fast cutting of the film, the subtitles (show for all candidates) and the possibility of picture-in-picture to make room for someone signing the broadcast, there’s too much going on. It looks disorganised. Viewers don’t care about having to watch other ‘ordinary’ people question a politician: they’re not very good at it. We know this because we have professional interviewers who find it hard enough with training. ‘Everyday people’ doing their job just makes the citizenry stupid.
• The far left liberals don’t need to put everything they display on a red background. It’s already clear they’re the communist party. They did, however, have by far the best presentation, with ‘live’ text on the screen and short snippet-like responses: the kind of thing needed to keep a viewer interested. How many people will really wait for 15 minutes to see all of the broadcasts? I’m guessing, not that many.
• Ségolène Royal had active and lively graphics but instead of showing a lot of what she had done, most of the time, as when they had dozens of clips of her in bubbles flying toward the viewer, it made the production look amateur. She was also the only candidate who didn’t face the camera head on. She looked like she really meant to talk to somebody else on the other side of the room rather than the camera.
• There was no mention of the Iraq war in any of the broadcasts. The top topics were unemployment (‘le chômage est beaucoup trop haut’), tax on business , immigration (‘nous avons toujours la peur dans notre pays’) and nationalism (‘being a citizen should be an honour not a right!’), the environment, economic protectionism (I’ll tell Bruxelles to…’) and a need for a renewal of social values. Many of the broadcasts seemed to say absolutely nothing at all, or at least ten seconds after their end I’d already forgotten the content.
• Neither Bayrou, Le Pen nor Sarkozy were on tonight. Perhaps that’s a special treat for tomorrow.

In the news, the thing that really struck me (call me strange), is that the ads on political billboards put up in every town (normally outside schools and other public buildings) are put up by ClearChannel. ClearChannel, an American multinational that controls billboards all over the world, hundreds of radio stations in the US and a large number of concert venues and promotion vehicles. I just think it’s ironic that a company that stands for so much that France is actively against is the one actually promoting their political process.

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The next day, at the rally here [in Colo Iowa], Mr. Obama described the encounter for the crowd. The woman, he said, had asked if her son’s death was the result of a mistake by the government. “And I told her the service of our young men and women — the duty they show this country — that’s never a mistake,” he said.

He paused carefully as he reflected on that encounter. “It reminds you why you get into politics,” he said. “It reminds you that this isn’t a game.”
NYTimes: Two Years After Big Speech, a Lower Key for Obama

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Just thought I’d point out two or three features of the site that may not be initially noticable. First is the RSS Feed of the page – like a self updating bookmark of all the posts that I’ve been writing. You can drag the link below onto your Safari/IE7/Firefox toolbar and it will show an alert when a new post is published. RSS Recent Posts Feed.

The other thing is the ‘Asides’ posts on the right hand side. Something I’ve been looking at doing for a while – these miniposts allow me to post little bits of info/news without writing a whole lot about them. You can comment on asides just like on a normal post. Click on the number (normally a ‘0′) at the bottom of the ‘aside’ and that will take you to a full-post style representation of the content. It’s like a normal post but, smaller! Think of the hierarchy of posts as; full post, asides, then ma.gnolia bookmarks.

Oh, and there’s the ‘related posts’ thing. I just added that last week or so. Half for me to see what else is related, half in case the thing that’s related is interesting. It works by analysing the words of a post and linking to similarly themed posts. Clever!

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It’s just Belga, Belga, Belga, the whole day through…

There’s a Café not far from my house called Café Belga. It’s a nifty little place where the customers are cool, the bar staff are haughty and the beef is cold. It’s got massive big windows out onto the commune’s ponds and a large square that currently has a building work engulfing it. It’s been engulfed for the last four years as well: they don’t hurry on public projects in Belgium I guess. The clientelle simply pretend the building work isn’t going on and on Friday and Saturday nights the place is packed. It’s the place where ‘the intelligent’ people go, apparently.

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Some breast-filled ads on mainstream sites have really been cracking me up recently. I know the ads that you see on any ‘gay-interest’ sites aren’t going to be subtle either, all airbrushed abs and prominent bulges in all the right places, but the boobs are going to the extreme. I’m thinking specifically about sites that host Bittorrent files, the place you’d go if you’re looking to download the latest version of Linux, or a movie, or a tv show or some music (all those last three illegally of course). The websites can’t get mainstream advertisers because they’d likely be accused of supporting piracy so the websites resort to donations (from people who are specifically avoiding paying for their entertainment – probably not many donations there) or rather less reputable advertisers; the gambling websites, the ‘busty babes’ websites, and the ‘FREE SONY PSP FREE FREE’ type companies. What caught my eye was this knockout photo, so obviously a joke, or digital manipulation as to be laughable. Perhaps that was their intention.

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