Given that I have a small version of myself running around my house, I think about how she’ll use the Internet when she gets older. Just the other day she, “Asked Google something” which made me realize that, although she’s just barely literate, my kid is going to “be online” for the rest of her life. Although I’m not really sure what “be online” will mean for her over the years.
I’m a huge O’Reilly Media fan boy. I can’t hide it. I hear Tim O’Reilly speak at conferences and I think to myself, “Screw being president, I want to be Tim O’Reilly.” I’ve been a subscriber to their online book services called Safari Books Online for years. Every month I see the bill for $43 come through and I think to myself, “Self, that’s the best $43 you spent all month.
Recently I’ve run into frustrations with Iron Mountain Connected Backup so I’ve been looking for alternatives. Alternatives: I’ve been running Jungle Disk at home and really like it. I could use that at work except I have not set up an Amazon or RackSpace account with my work credit card. But I am in Chicago and my database server/ file server is in Dallas TX. So I decided to just create a mirror on my laptop onto a shared drive on my server.
The alternative title of this blog post is “How to get your sorry ass fired by violating your internal IT policies.” So keep that in mind as you read this. I say lots of silly crap. Twitter allows me the pleasure of sharing this blather with the world. I was a little surprised that of all the things I have said over the last few months the above Tweet received the most discussion.
I don’t want this blog to become an echo chamber of the same crap they blog about over at Revolutions Blog, but they pointed out a really good article from Wired magazine on the topic of the Gaussian Copula and its roll in the current market meltdown. I was pretty impressed that the author, Felix Salmon was able to boil the issues down well and even give really good examples of how correlations can change over time.
It blows my mind that organizations choose names and acronyms that have alternative, non-flattering meaning. I understand this when there is language translation involved. No one at Ford knew that Nova sounds just like “no go” in Spanish. I mean, it’s Ford, they were educated in Detroit public schools. They don’t speak Mexican. But take Virginia, for example. Like other states, VA gives school kids standardized exams. Every states has some acronym for these exams.
Today I have a couple I want to print for reading later and I want to print them duplex so the stack of crap would be smaller. I need to go to Staples (the office supply store) later so I thought I would just use their online printing tool to print the document at their store and then pick it up when I go there later today. As with most sites they want a bunch of personal info from me so I diligently fill out 15 text boxes.