Saturday, October 13, 2012

OpenCoSF Conference

I attended the OpenCoSF inaugural event, Friday Oct. 12, where 2000 attendees attended sessions at the worksites of more than 50 tech companies located in San Francisco. It was produced by John Battelle of Battellemedia. I used to like to visit my friends at their offices to see what their work environment was like. This has become harder to do, as security concerns have grown as fast as openness.

I went to Federated Media Publishing for my first OpenCo stop. They had about 30 people in a half full audience. They connect branded goods with content produced by bloggers. They keep track of preferences of tens of millions of people. They work with a couple of hundred thousand bloggers who produce content for the millions of readers. Levis pays them to arrange for product to appear in a favorable light in content. Federated Media  is not an ad agency. If the viewer can recognze it as an advertisement, which might be something to avoid clicking on, they have screwed up. Some agencies are beginning to see them, not as competition, but as a resource. Each worker in the office had a lot of workspace, two large monitors on the workstation.

Next I went to Wired Magazine. They had about 25 guests in a room with 15 chairs. Editor in Chief Chris Anderson led a team describing the vision for the company. Wired began in warehouse space South of Market. This kind of warehouse flavored office space has become a cliche. Editorial staff is here. Business Offices is with CondeNast in New York. Originally, about half the staff was engineers. Now that is all outsourced. This publisher tries to be fair but not even handed. They preach that technology and innovation will change the world for good.

In the afternoon I went to see the offices of Bloomberg West. The original business is still the core business. Stock traders can subscribe to a rented workstation starting at $1900 a month. Some of the workstations used by the 70 reporters in the office had four monitors. Before the internet this replaced private phone calls among brokers and investors as the way to get business news first. The publishing empire still gives the workstation subscribers at least 15 minutes headstart before the news hits the airwaves. We saw Cory Johnson performing on television the show Bloomberg West. The closing story of the day was that Apple had agreed to pay the Swiss Railway a license fee for copying the clock face too closely.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Office Applications on Mobile Devices

This is not an easy question. My brother thinks that Windows is going to be fading fast while Android and Apple continue to grow. I think Windows will be around the office for the rest of our working lives.

In the meantime, mobile devices and their apps will become essential business machines. Microsoft is having a hard time getting market share with mobile devices. They will be attempting to put Windows 8 on Windows phones, with light versions of Office soon after. I am not excited about any phone apps that try to compete with Microsoft Office.  I just downloaded an app that reads the documents.

AT&T and Verizon have the most phone choices. Sprint unlimited plans are more unlimited.
Here are some fault lines where earthquakes will appear. Intel/AMD processors in PCs use 10 times the energy of the Arm processors used in phones and tablets. Laptops need recharging after a couple of hours, smart phones may last all day, dumb cell phones a few days.

I have Windows 8 beta version on one of my computers. I had to retrain myself considerably to use it. I can do almost everything I can do with Windows 7, but some applications won’t install on it, most notably my Hewlett Packard scanner applications. For a mobile device, reviewers are being kind to Windows 8 as a way to access phone apps. For a desktop computer, I see no real advantage.

I also have a version of Linux on my Android phone. I had hopes that my phone would become my daily desktop. After a month fooling around with it, I have pretty much given up on it. The two major problems are that Bluetooth keyboard combinations like Ctrl-C don’t get through to it, and it cannot see anything coming from any device that wants to connect to it with a USB connection, like a flash key. The Arm processor is fast enough. The single gigabyte of high speed ram is more of a limitation.

There are tablets that have both Arm and Intel processors. They need to be charged often. Nobody likes them.


The agency was Premier Staffing

The agency was Premier Staffing. The two presenters at Experience Unlimited San Francisco were a practiced team, with a Power Point presentation. The woman was Brooke Simon, and the man was AJ Mizes.

Premier has a busy lobby with a busy receptionist. It is on Sutter at Mongomery Street on the fifth floor. The recruiter who had time to talk to me was Zack Sutter. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt, but a rather expensive one. 

The job I applied for was a Backend PHP/MySQL developer. My one page resume was very responsive, but it turned out he was supposed to steal someone already working at a somewhat more developed start-up. I'm supposed to send him a resume going back beyond the last twelve years, which will be hard to do without raising distracting culture issues. 

Monday, April 16, 2012

Sample pasted

Services
E-mailPrintPDF
Experience Unlimited provides its members with a range of services.
  • Every meeting features a knowledgeable and interesting speaker to motivate and inform you in your job search.
  • At EU workshops and classes at the Concord EDD office where you can find out about today's job search challenges, practice interviewing techniques (including video recorded sessions), learn effective salary negotiation and create a more compelling resume.
  • The Concord facility also provides computers, printers and job search resources, as well as a less structured setting to meet with fellow EU members.
  • Members can set up Job Search Action and Accountability Teams (JSAAT); small groups that work together to focus their job search.
  • The EUCCC Yahoo Group distributes online news, information and job leads to all current members.
  • The EUCCC.ORG website & online calendar posts job fair information, class schedules, holiday schedule, office closures, featured speakers, desk duty volunteers & much more!

Saturday, March 17, 2012

The Feldenkrais Method



The Feldenkrais Method - Outline – Toastmasters 2nd Speech, Organize Your Speech

OpeningMoshe Feldenkrais wants to use awareness to improve your functioning
   I hold emotional tension in my jaw - tongue tied – mispronounce syllables
Four principles
   Ease of movement
   The absence of resistance
   The presence of reversibility
   Comfortable breathing
The Feldenkrais Method
  Two Techniques for teaching
    Awareness through movement classes sensation, movements, feeling, rest
    Functional Integration, one on one counseling
  Spreading the word – Famous Musicians
    Feldenkrais Guildpractitioners near you
    BooksThe Potent Self
Moshe Feldenkrais
  1904, 1918, 1930s 1933, 1936, 1940, 1951, 1954, 1957, 1960s, 1969-1971, 1975-1978, 1981, 1984
Other Related Disciplines
  Alexander Technique – Similar story , 20 years earlier
  Gurdjieff SocietyAwareness, more mysticism, less science
  Physical TherapyMedical schools – Work through pain
Conclusion
  I hope this talk shows how you can use your awareness to improve your functioning.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Jazz, Blues Ngram

Google Books Ngram Viewer

Graph these case-sensitive comma-separated phrases:
between and from the corpus with smoothing of .

Search in Google Books:
1800 - 1836 1837 - 1978 1979 - 1988 1989 - 1995 1996 - 2000 blues (English)
1800 - 1934 1935 - 1985 1986 - 1991 1992 - 1995 1996 - 2000 jazz (English)
Run your own experiment! Raw data is available for download here.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Farmer's Blues

Artist/Band: Stuart Marty
Lyrics for Song:
Farmer's Blues
CWho'll buy my wheat, who'll buy my corn,
To feed my
Fbabies when they’re Cborn?
The seeds and dirt, a prayer for rain, that I can
Guse.

I work the
Cland, I watch the sky,
I talk to
FGod and wonder Cwhy,
But it's the
Amonly life I Gknow, these Farmer's Cblues.


CHORUS
I see the
Gseasons come and go, sending Frain, fire and Csnow.
I'm at the mercy of it all, this life I
Gchoose.
Sometimes I
Chang my head and cry,
When that Fevening train goes Cby,
Wish it could take me far
Gaway, from these Farmer's Cblues.

CThe tractor's broke, the fence is down,
Put on my
Fsuit and go to Ctown.
And ask for a loan, that I know well, they might
Grefuse.

CBut back at home, still by my side,
The one I
Flove with worried Ceyes,
Waits for
Amme, to love Gaway, these Farmer's Cblues.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Roger Ebert has been reminiscing on Steak and Shake

RT  Roger Ebert has been reminiscing on Steak and Shake on Twitter. It's a meal

Mentioned in this Tweet

Thursday, January 12, 2012

CyberCoders 1/12/12

CyberCoders


JobTitleLocOpenedClosed
Director of Product for consumer web products SF01/12/1201/12/12
Frontend Developer - Client-Side, JavaScript, AJAX, HTML5 SF01/12/1201/12/12
Software Engineer - Thriving Pre-IPO startup! SF01/12/1201/12/12
Software Engineer- Ruby on Rails, Javascript, MySQL- Fitness SF01/12/1201/12/12
SQL DBA -Enterprise Datawarehouse Admin- Fortune 100 Internet Co SF01/12/1201/12/12
.NET Engineer -C#, ASP.NET, SQL, High-traffic -3+ Month Contract SF01/11/1201/12/12
Senior Front-End Engineer - Exciting High Traffic Start-Up SF01/11/1201/12/12
Senior Software Engineer - Java - PHP - Oracle - Stable Start-Up SF01/11/1201/12/12
Systems Engineer for a Fortune 500 Brand Name Internet Company SF01/11/1201/12/12
Algorithm Developer- photo & video algorithm- online marketplace SF01/10/1201/12/12
Digital Forensic Examiner - Computer Forensics - eDiscovery SF01/10/1201/12/12
Front End Web Developer- HTML, CSS, JS- online marketplace SF01/10/1201/12/12
International IT Manager - NorCal - Computer, Data, Telephone SF01/10/1201/12/12
Lead Front End Developer for award winning start-up SF01/10/1201/12/12
Senior Software Engineer- Backend, Ruby on Rails 3, RSpec SF01/10/1201/12/12
Sr. Front-End Developer - Web UI - HTML5, CSS, JavaScript SF01/10/1201/12/12
Data QA Tester - BI, SQL, SQL Tools, Unix/Linux, C++, Java, Ruby SF01/09/1201/12/12
Flash Developer - ActionScript 3 Engineer - Game Developer SF01/09/1201/12/12
iOS Mobile Software Engineer - Mobile Developer for SF startup SF01/09/1201/12/12
Java Software Engineer - Java Web Developer - Web 2.0 SF01/09/1201/12/12
Salesforce Developer - CRM - .NET - Growing Technology Company SF01/09/1201/12/12
Senior Java Software Engineer - Sr. Java Web Developer - Web 2.0 SF01/09/1201/12/12
Systems Engineer - MySQL, MongoDB, Chef, Linux, Cloud SF01/09/1201/12/12

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Top 25 Web Sites



Top Sites Alexa Internet Alexa Internet http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global
The top 500 sites on the web. The sites in the top sites lists are ordered by their 1 month alexa traffic rank.

The 1 month rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past month. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

Compare this to my second blog post in June. The web is becoming more international and more Google.