This essay seems to be making the blogging rounds.

The market itself has forced companies to be as competitive as they can be, and the same technology and systems that allow US companies to outsource to India can also be used to let you work in your pajamas from your ancestral home in Mt. Airy North Carolina instead of the inner city hell you once had to settle for because thats where the work was. I say this with total command of my faculties that fully 25% of the US workforce could start working remotely within 90 days.

Speaking as someone else who commutes about ten feet, I think Varifrank misses a few points:

1. Maybe it’s true that “workplaces” are due to inertia, but that doesn’t change the fact that inertia is the third most powerful human drive.
2. There are some bosses who want to have their employees in person because he doesn’t trust them, or his own ability to manage them, if they’re home in their bathrobes.
3. There are some employees who don’t trust their own ability to get anything accomplished without a boss literally over their shoulder. In my book, I called them the “untrepreneurs”—they get all they need from their dream of working from home by dreaming it, not living it.

Believe it or not, I have only owned 16 of the top 100 gadgets of all time. And thank God they included a Tickle Me Elmo in the list, because that should innoculate me against another useless collecting habit.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Can someone please explain to me why, when you change your Yahoo! marketing preferences, you are required to please allow approximately ten (10) days for this change to take effect? “That’s the time it takes to fill in our marketing request form with a #2 pencil, and ship it ground from our web servers to the guy with the Teletype who enters it into our Offshore Marketing Database SAN.”

Note to Yahoo: please allow ten days for me to reconsider next time I think about purchasing one of your services.

So true, it hurts.

You probably have to be utterly blue state liberal to find this amusing, but I thought it was a hoot. Via How We Work:

Via Reuters, the latest research from Penn:

Apparently their research standards have gone down since they stopped braining live monkeys.

Over at Daring Fireball, John Draper consults his magic 8 ball on why Napster won’t dent the iTunes Music Store.

My question: 10,000 songs is just under 42 days of non-repeating music, at 12 hours per day. This would be a bit longer than a month. So does anyone really think of “filling my iPod monthly” as a selling point? Most of what you go through the trouble to select and download, you’re never going to actually get to.

But my entire music library would fit easily on an iPod shuffle, so maybe I’m not the guy to ask.

Go to TiddlyWiki. Bounce around the site for a bit and enjoy its interesting user interface. So far, just another wiki implementation.

Now, save that page you’re playing with as a local HTML file. Close your browser window. Open the file. Note that it’s exactly the same. Whole thing is self-contained within your browser.

Reattach lower jaw to head.

The one thing that makes this less than orgasmic (well, if you’re as into information tools as I am) is its horribly painful save method (which the author apologises for), and the charming feature that since your browser won’t recognize a changed page, it’s all too easy to close the window and lose everything you’ve worked on. But still… wow.

If you’re a bit disappointed that success in life no longer involves acing the SATs, stop by the Difficult Analogies Test. Really, though, I’m only blogging this so I can brag that I scored 23/30.

Simply breathtaking. As reported by I, Cringely:

“Fiorina never understood that you have to spend a little money to make money. That’s why HP went from a respected, innovative company that made quality products to one that makes most of its profits off printer ink.” Quoted in Technology Review.

The same discussion that led me to the deranging panic also took me here, where I learn with interest that I’m not the only computer professional who has had “learn to drive” on his to-do list for 15 years.

Which reminds me, two of my favorite places these days are Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, and its corresponding Google discussion group. Fascinating discussions, ranging from how to use emacs as a project planner, to setting up a CVS system to allow “multiple computers, one calendar”, through the merits of manila folders versus clasp envelopes as part of a GTD filing system.

I don’t want to think about how many of these behaviors I exhibited in college. (But not anymore. Nosirree, bob.) Adapted from Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, 1989.

I’ve been playing around with iCalViewer for a few days now. It’s an interesting hack which pulls your iCal calendar and splashes it across your desktop, below your windows and icons, but riding above your background screen.

Right now its best feature is that it’s making it easier for me to keep timeblock appointments with myself to get things done; harder to ignore something when you can see it creeping up to the “now” line all day long. But even if it weren’t particularly useful, it still gets plenty of points for looking cool.

Just got a call at 2:10 AM from a friend of mine—a usually stolid and reserved friend—who was bouncing off the ceiling giddy. The purported reason? Red Bull and vodka, mixed in with his usual quota of alcohol for the evening. Guy’s state was altered enough that I wondered if someone had spiked him with something harder and less legal.

So I’m going to have to give this a shot sometime, without the alcohol. Working theory: mixed in with my usual estimated daily intake of 18 mg of nicotine and 1,890 mg of caffeine, the only effect I’ll see is a lighter wallet. Either that, or my head will explode.

“To call Cingular’s technical support ‘incompetent’ is to do a disservice to incompetent people everywhere.” Quoted from Macintouch.

Al Gore’s speech is worth watching just to prove that the guy can give a stemwinder. Also because it’s not every day when you hear anyone calling for the resignation of half an administration. But it does leave me wondering: Al, where the hell were you?

If you need any more evidence why it’s dangerous to criminalize communication, read this. Maybe Jack is lying. Maybe he’s not.

Fifty-seven percent of those polled “believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda,” and 45 percent “believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found.” Moreover, 65 percent believe that “experts” have confirmed that Iraq had WMD. “Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had WMD, 72% said they would vote for Bush and 23% said they would vote for Kerry….

Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had supported al Qaeda, 62% said they would vote for Bush and 36% said they would vote for Kerry.” The reason given by respondents for their views was that they had heard these claims from the Bush administration.

From a report issued by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, quoted in Salon.