Viva Telecommuting

My brother in arms Peter Cohen on the push back against telecommuting:

I couldn’t agree more.

A few com­pa­nies ago I spent three years work­ing from home after the local office closed. Those were the three most pro­duc­tive years of my career. In that time we rebuilt a Quality Assurance depart­ment from the ground up, includ­ing devel­op­ing new QA and Customer Satisfaction cap­ture, eval­u­a­tion and report­ing sys­tems from whole cloth.

My cur­rent com­pany, how­ever, refuses to allow telecom­mut­ing even though I have a 25 mile one-way com­mute, I’m the sole per­son in my office in my depart­ment and the rest of my team is on another con­ti­nent. It’s fuck­ing insane.

Link: Michael Arrington Wants You to Work in a Digital Sweatshop

I guess it’s time for yet another “gen­er­a­tion” of tech work­ers to wake up to the fact that the bosses are lying. We aren’t spe­cial snowflakes whose pre­cious skills are trans­form­ing the world. In real­ity we’re just as much cogs in the machine as the Chinese saps assem­bling our iPhones.

I remem­ber when I had that epiphany. It was in 1999 at the height of that tech boom when my boss flipped out because I had the audac­ity to leave when my shift was over.

I told the crack-addled prick, “You pay me by the hour, I work by the hour. Take your bean-bag-chairs, fooze­ball tables and sub­dued light­ing and shove it up your ass.”

Life is too short and too spe­cial to waste mak­ing some other ass­hole rich.

Link: The 5 Best Toys of All Time

Jonathan Liu at Wired’s GeekDad blog breaks down the 5 great­est toys of all time. And by all time, for once, they don’t actu­ally mean “since 2002″.

The down­side is that now we’re sure to see a Doctor Who branded “Geek (hip­ster) Approved”® Box for sale at ThinkGeek by Christmas.

Link: Violet Blue on the Kindle Fire

My learned col­league Harry Marks on noted imbe­cile Violet Blue’s opin­ion of the iPad vs. Kindle Fire as pre­sented as part of one of ZDNet’s idi­otic “Great Debates”:

I would sug­gest a slightly dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­ity. In its never-ending quest to slake its unquench­able thirst for page-views ZDNet has con­trived yet another point­less “debate” about two prod­ucts that com­pete with each other only in the febrile imag­i­na­tions of delu­sional tech “jour­nal­ists”. As to why Violet has taken the posi­tion she has — well, Steve Jobs was mean to her once…

Occupy My Nutsack!

Warning: No actual polit­i­cal con­tent ahead.

Woah there hippy…slow down…read past the headline…this post isn’t quite what you think it is. You see, I’m pretty much in agree­ment with the Occupy move­ment. Unfortunately there is a dark, insid­i­ous, and frankly evil thing that has come out of the Occupy move­ment that needs to be squashed like the fuck­ing cock­roach it is. I’m refer­ring to the sud­den fetish of shit-bag “jour­nal­ists” and lame-ass “hack­tivists” to slap the word “occupy” in front of every gods damned thing that hap­pens to annoy them.

Case in point, two recent “move­ments” Occupy Flash and Occupy HTML (links both cour­tesy of Daring Fireball). Look, I don’t care what your posi­tion is on Flash or HTML “purity” (hint, Flash sucks crusty hobo dick). Something that all right-thinking peo­ple can agree on is that nei­ther one of them needs to be fuck­ing “occupied”.

Come on peo­ple, we lost the war over “-gate”. Now we have to endure shitty head­line after shitty head­line about “Glassgate” and “Antennagate” and “My-Chalupa-Didn’t-Have-Enough-Fucking-Meat-In-It-Fucking-Gate”. It’s time we said enough is enough. Let’s take a stand and let these shit-birds know that we’re not going to take this lazy bullshit

Continue read­ing Occupy My Nutsack!


Fuck You Google

Yesterday Google posted an arti­cle on their blog with the won­der­fully Orwellian title Greater choice for wire­less access point own­ers. Addressing the per­sis­tent con­cerns over Google’s prac­tice of gath­er­ing data on pub­licly acces­si­ble WiFi routers in order to bol­ster their loca­tion data­base Google has pro­posed a solu­tion. Of course this being Google it’s an opt-out solu­tion that 99% of the con­sumers pur­chas­ing a router will never know about. Worse yet, the “solu­tion” is pos­i­tively insult­ing to those who do know about it:

That’s right, in order to pro­tect the pri­vacy of our per­sonal net­works Google wants us to mod­ify the net­work name to con­form to their arbi­trary stan­dards. I think that tonight I’ll be chang­ing my network’s SSID to “Fuck you Google you arro­gant assholes”.

Legitimatin’

I’m some­what amused by the mem­bers of the chat­ter­ing class who’ve insisted from the out­set that Apple’s pri­mary, if not only, moti­va­tion for iTunes Match was extract $25 from peo­ple to “legit­imize” their ill-gotten music col­lec­tions who have now gone on to write reviews of iTunes Match show­cas­ing their vast col­lec­tion of non-iTunes Store media. So what you’re say­ing is…

Link: Journalism Is About Trust and Respect

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop writ­ing about his phi­los­o­phy as a journalist:

If only more so-called “jour­nal­ists” believed this.

Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

Warning: Political Content Ahead

Booyah! My friends over in Mesa actu­ally did the right thing and booted out the fas­cist piece of human garbage Russell Pearce. Combine that with Democrat Greg Stanton defeat­ing Tea Party friendly Wes Gullet in the Phoenix may­oral elec­tion and this is a decent day for Arizona pol­i­tics. Combine that with the wins in Mississippi, Ohio, Maine and else­where and it’s a pretty good day for san­ity overall.