Categories
Diversity

Wistful

Oddly enough Jon Udell’s hiring also left me feeling sad, and a little depressed.

I look back on the ‘announcements’ of new hires and moves between and to companies in the last year, and I can’t remember this same level excitement about a tech woman taking a new position. Heck, I can’t remember a tech woman even being offered such positions.

Totally irrelevant to Jon being hired at Microsoft, but that was my first thought when I heard the news.

Categories
JavaScript Web

Absolute must for web developers

Firebug has released a beta of the first full version, 1.0. The previous version was extremely helpful. This version is beyond helpful. I dare say it goes all the way to, “Wow!”

I don’t use Firebug because I’m a Firefox browser user. I’m a Firefox browser user because of extensions like Firebug.

Categories
History

Why don’t we remember Pearl Harbor

In St. Louis Today, Harry Levins writes:

As a general rule, newspapers stop running anniversary stories after 50 years.

The thinking holds that past 50 years, few readers even remember the event, much less took part in it. Past a half-century, journalists cede the field to historians.

World War II was an exception. Because that war dragged on for so long (45 months) and because it put so many Americans in uniform (16 million, or more than 10 percent of the population), it imprinted itself in the American soul, as only the Civil War had before it.

Both WWII and the Civil War involved the entire nation over a long stretch of time. And although nobody alive in America today remembers Shiloh or Gettysburg, enough Americans remember WWII to nudge newspapers away from the 50-year rule.

Thanks in part to the emotions stirred by Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” and to the movie “Saving Pvt. Ryan,” newspapers in the 1990s ran 60th-anniversary stories on the big WWII battles.

But that attention to WWII is fading fast, as is the generation that fought the war.

Come next June 6, some elderly reader will call the paper to grouse that his paper makes absolutely no mention of the fact that it’s the 63rd anniversary of the day in 1944 that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower led the D-Day landings in Normandy.

Chances are that the grumpy reader will be making his complaint to an editor who was born after President Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

Tis the season

I thought that now would be a good time to recommend two legal weblogs associated with consumer law, credit, and bankruptcy:

Consumer Law & Policy Blog

Credit Slips

We focus so much on DRM and copyright in weblogs that we forget that consumer law probably has far more impact on us, and far less public exposure.

Another related weblog is Ross’ Arbitration Blog, which covers the growing proliferation of mandatory arbitration clauses, and lack of accountability in the arbitration process. In particular he points to a LA Times article on arbitration that discusses some of the concerns associated with the increasing use of arbitration for any non-criminal court activity. (Sorry, free registration required for this article.)

A more pungent discussion on the current state of arbitration can be found in the article: Arbitration and the Godless Bloodsuckers, by a former state supreme justice of West Virginia. Richard Neely really lets loose with both barrels. PDF of actual article and be forewarned, it’s a large document.

Categories
Just Shelley

Why I’m writing more on Missouri

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave Winer writes that Daylife is in business. I vaguely remembered hearing something about it once, and then remembered, “Oh, yeah. That’s that Jarvis thing.” To make sure it was that Jarvis thing, I looked it up online and discovered this phenomenally self-referential post at Valleywag, that perfectly explains why I now write more about Missouri and other things.

As ParenthetiGal wonderfully puts it, that was the most satisfying comment-sex i’ve ever witnessed on valleywag. thanks boys!.

Damn! And here I was hoping to get a job with The Man.

update

Ut Oh! Someone forgot to sacrifice to the Mikey!

update

I must provide a disclosure on Daylife: I submitted a resume when the company was hiring people, was consequently sneered at and treated with disdain.

As homey as that left me feeling (“Hey! It’s just like being on Techmeme!”), I can’t say I have the most positive feelings about any one damn person involved with this really useless site that took a year and half to create.