With fewer than 21 days until the end of school forever (or at least until I get the loans paid off), I've spent all my non-work time thinking about entrepreneurship management, emerging market strategy, technology strategy, and environmental economics. Between them I have three papers and one pricing project to complete.
The first paper is almost done, pending comments from one of my sources. I'd go celebrate but I have the other three assignments, you see.
Someday, I'll look back upon this time, laugh nervously, and change the subject.
Via TPM, this Duke project is cool:
This animated interpretation accentuates certain phenomena: the breadth and duration of support for Roosevelt, the shift from a Democratic to a Republican South, the move from an ostensibly east-west division to the contemporary coasts-versus-heartland division, and the stability of the latter.
More broadly, this video is a reminder that what constitutes “politics as usual” is always in flux, shifting sometimes abruptly. The landscape of American politics is constantly evolving, as members of the two great parties battle for electoral supremacy.
Security guru Bruce Schneier has great advice about when to change your passwords:
The primary reason to give an authentication credential -- not just a password, but any authentication credential -- an expiration date is to limit the amount of time a lost, stolen, or forged credential can be used by someone else. If a membership card expires after a year, then if someone steals that card he can at most get a year's worth of benefit out of it. After that, it's useless.
... An attacker who gets the password to your bank account by guessing or stealing it isn't going to eavesdrop. He's going to transfer money out of your account -- and then you're going to notice. In this case, it doesn't make a lot of sense to change your password regularly -- but it's vital to change it immediately after the fraud occurs.
... So in general: you don't need to regularly change the password to your computer or online financial accounts (including the accounts at retail sites); definitely not for low-security accounts. You should change your corporate login password occasionally, and you need to take a good hard look at your friends, relatives, and paparazzi before deciding how often to change your Facebook password. But if you break up with someone you've shared a computer with, change them all.
My new Kindle arrived just now, only (let's see) about 30 hours after I ordered it. Amazon pre-registered it, so from opening the box to reading a book I'd previously purchased took less than two minutes. Add five minutes to hook it up to my home WiFi (complete with 26-byte WPA password), two minutes to go to amazon.com to change the thing's email address, fifteen seconds to buy the next book I want to read, and—I am not kidding—fifteen seconds to download it to the device.
What does that come to? Less than 10 minutes after UPS left, I've got my next book ready to go.
Oh, and: it remembered all the books I've already bought, not counting the ones I'd saved to my local hard drive, so replacing them took just a minute or two longer.
Clearly, Amazon understands the cardinal rule of new technology: If you make it easy, they will buy it.
Update: Add another 30 seconds to find and download the $4.99 Scrabble Kindle edition.
My Kindle 2 died last week. Its battery, drained of every last electron, could no longer provide even enough power to recharge.
Two calls to Amazon customer service later, and I got an $89 credit towards the purchase of a Kindle 3, applied instantly to my account. I'll have the new one tomorrow, for about 1/4 what I paid for the original.
Everybody wins: I get a good deal, they sell a new item. They even refunded the last Kindle book I bought, since I discovered the Kindle-bricking when I tried to download it.
Reader DW pointed me toward this blog, a salve to the tortured OCD mind:
I love the blog's design, too. Very...neat.
One of the benefits Avanade provides is a fairly generous "technology" budget. I'm given cash, every year, to buy things that either demonstrate my (read: Avanade's) love of technology, or give me better work-life balance.
This week I bought a 240 GB solid-state drive for my work laptop to replace the 256 GB drive it came with. So, I backed up the entire drive using Windows 7 System Image, swapped the drives out, and...crap.
Did anyone else notice that 240 < 256? Yeah. Also, the bigger drive was bit-lockered.
So, yeah, I can't restore the image. I am now copying all the data I'll need and, in fits and starts this weekend, I'll be rebuilding the laptop from scratch.
Phooey.
(Apologies to Bill Cosby.)
The Chicago Tribune reported today that Chicago needs more software engineers:
With a national unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, many people assume employers have their pick of applicants for any job, McCombs said. Not so. Within every down job market exist bright spots, which in Chicago means tech jobs, particularly for software engineers.
The continued growth of the Internet and mobile technology is fueling the increased demand for IT professionals, McCombs said. Computer application software engineers will be the fastest growing job category over the next eight years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects a 32 percent increase in the number of computer software engineers between 2008 and 2018. The total work force is expected to grow 8 percent during the same period.
...
"I feel we're at 100 percent employment" for highly qualified software engineers in Chicago, said Zach Kaplan, chief executive at Chicago-based Inventables, an online marketplace for materials and technology. The company gets flooded with applications when it posts nontechnical jobs, but it struggles to find software engineers.
So, what about a software engineer with 17 years of experience and (soon to be) two graduate degrees? Would that be worth something to you?