typewriting

I woke up this morning and was minding my own business when Shelley threw not one, but two memes at me. It's been a while since I've encountered a formal meme. My original weblog over on blogspot was called MEME3, and to my surprise it's still there after years of neglect. I liked how the letters and numbers of "MEME3" were all pretty much the same shape turned, and at the time I thought ultimate truth or something would be found in breaking down false dichotomies. That was back in the days when I often read memepool, which is surprisingly still alive and kicking. So I have a special place in my heart for memes.

But this kind of thing has a bit of the feel of those "pass this around or you'll get cancer" type of chain emails, which I loathe. Jessica sent me one of those with a "person least likely to return this" question, for which she had thoughtly chosen me as the answer. Sure enough, I didn't fill it out. The questions this morning are interesting enough, and I've already read them enough to know my own answers. But let's not all make a habbit of throwing memes at Scott, okay?

Now, first question: Total volume of music files on my computer: This is a tough one. I have music scattered about three different computers right now. Some of it is my own recordings, which are of better quality, and so take up more space than a standard MP3. One computer has a radioSHARK connected, so that's full of NPR shows from the past few months. Another has a copy of NetNewWire running filled with only podcasting subscriptions. And my final machine has Indy running, which saves local copies of songs even if I only listen to five seconds. So I'm not sure what all I should be counting here. I'll just count it all now that I've made all those qualifications. I have, on those three machines respectively, 885MB, 6.97GB, and 3.25GB in my "Music" folders. By my math, that's over 11GB of audio. But I would guess only about 6 or 7GB of that is actually music.

The last CD I bought: I try not to buy CDs because I hate to indirectly fund lawsuits against music fans. I think the last CD I "bought" was actually an anti-Bush compilation from MoveOn.org. I think it was called "Rock Against Bush" or maybe that was a different anti-Bush compilation CD. I haven't listened to it much, but it was for a good cause (or against a bad cause), and it included a then-unreleased song by Elliott Smith, who I like a lot, though as I recall, the song wasn't that great.

Song playing right now: No audio is playing right now (Jessica is sleeping), but the last thing I listed to was "Between the Bars," by Madeleine Peyroux. It's a jazz cover of an Elliott Smith song, and JJ played it for me yesterday. I still have it in my head.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: I was going to defer to iTunes here, but it turns out my most played songs are those I've listened to repeatedly while learning them for Los Vivos. I'm not sure those should count, but I'm also not sure how else to answer this. I'll just list five songs listen to a lot: XO by Elliott Smith, You Stay Here by Willy Porter, Cold Water by Damien Rice, Song for a Girl I Don't Know by JJ Hamon, and For Liberty by me, which I just now realize is not on my website for some reason.

Now, meme #2, books: You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? The first few times I read this, I thought it meant "as which book do you want to be burnt?" and thought "what difference does it make?" It's been a while since I've read Fahrenheit 451. But I now realize that this is referencing the books that characters memorized so as not to lose the contents. Shelley said "when faced with a society that could condone the burning of books, truth has to matter more than beauty," and then went on to not really answer this one. But I think the book I've found most valuable in my life would be particularly appropriate for a world in which book burning was common practice: The Essential Writings of Mahatma Ghandi. That may not be the "ultimate book on truth" Shelley talks about, but there will be other people memorizing books, so I think this one is good enough to be worthwhile.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? I guess. No one in particular, but I think I would be interested in the main characters in many stories.

What are you currently reading? In an attempt to understand the big deal about Hunter S. Thompson, I recently "borrowed" Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from someone at my old job who I will likely never see again, but I haven't started reading it yet. I recently listened to the audio book of John Grisham's The Rainmaker. Does that count? I think my last treeware book was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, but that was months ago.

Five books you would take to a deserted island? I would certainly not take any pleasure reading to a deserted island. I would probably start with the thickest botany book I could find, so that I could learn about the local vegetation and also have fire kindling if it came to that. Then maybe a boat-building book, a world atlas, a medical book, and a general survival guide. I wouldn't last a week on a deserted island, so my main focus would be to get back to civilization as soon as possible.

Now it's the fun part where I get to inflict memes upon an unsuspecting population. Bwahahaha... I'll pass to the two people I referenced here, who both conveniently have blogs: Jessica and JJ.

Rory is using my MySpace blog scraping code to keep a copy of his blog on his own server. I hadn't even considered that as a potential use. Good idea, Rory. It just took a few minutes to make the changes. That makes two features MySpace could be offering (and charging for): RSS feeds and off-site hosting. It's a shame they're not providing such functionality, but at least they haven't (yet) tried to prevent others from providing it.

Disemployed is hiring. With the new job, I don't expect to have time to do what I'd like with Disemployed, so I'm looking for outside help.

In the less than twenty four hours since accepting my new job, I have been offered two other jobs. Some of my friends and family think I should consider these offers, but I'm not. There's something wrong with an economy in which it's easiest to find new jobs when you least want or need them. I have no idea what that something is. I'm just saying it's odd. Kathy Sierra may be on to something when she says:

I would hope that all hiring managers everywhere will read this book and perhaps get a new (counterintuitive) insight into why they might actually get a better result by, um, lowering their standards. Although I don't think of it as lowering, since candidate A who has this different perspective but isn't, say, as young, high-IQ, or classically-trained as candidate B, might bring something even more valuable. In other words, what you lose in IQ points might be more than made up for by other things...

There seems to be a lot of group-think in hiring practices, probably because it's easier. Rather than actually research so many job candidates specifically, it's much simpler to just filter out a large chunk by assuming there's a good reason inexperienced or unemployed people are so. To see this in action, currently one out of every six job ads on disemployed contains the word "experience." Unfortunately, the end result of that practice is homogeneity, not only internally in a given company, but across the whole economy with each company doing the same thing.

Speaking of everyone at work being the same, today I discovered the blogs of my two new primary coworkers, Ian Leckie and Ryan Colley, both of whom have interests very similar to my own. But, in a bit of delicious irony I could not have scripted if I'd tried, one of us has a beard.

Though I would guess unemployed people more often have beards than the general population, beard quotas isn't really the trend I'm trying to suggest here. What I'm getting at is that everyone out there with jobs openings should stop offering so many to people like me who neither need nor want them, and start actively seeking candidates who are unemployed. It may even do more good for your company than the beard quota has apparently done for Apple or my new employer, Integer.

I have been searching for jobs for a couple months now, knowing that my contract with my employer was set to expire in August with no sign that I was any closer to doing what most interests me - making web applications. It has been with some pain that I have restrained myself from discussing job possibilities for fear that doing so could cause me to lose my job with nothing yet to replace it. And it has been particularly difficult to not discuss the job I accepted today, as I felt the job offer was becoming increasingly certain after the phone interview, and then the interview. I have told people over the past few days that I was about 80% sure I would get a job offer after my interview this past weekend. But that 20% of uncertainly about unemployment just isn't worth a juicy weblog post.

But now I have a new job. In late May I will begin working at The Integer Group - Midwest in Des Moines, Iowa. I will be a web developer working mostly on standards-compliant and open source-centric intranet applications for Integer's employees. But I may also have opportunities to do things like Dashboard Widgets, AppleScripts, OS X desktop applications and pretty much everything else I currently do for fun.

The actual work is just the tip of the great new job iceberg. The office sits on a hill with an excellent view in all directions, and is filled with natural lighting, food and drink, interesting people, pretty things, and everything else I imagined I would find in a dot-com job straight out of college before the tech bubble burst. The interview process involved several long, interesting conversations with people throughout the company, during which I was never once asked about my salary expectations. Instead I was asked things like what I learned in Taiwan, and how I managed to hit myself in the head with a boomerang. The interview was more fun than stressful.

I have little doubt the job will also be as much fun as work. But it will be a lot of work. And it will also be a lot of work to move and get started in a new town where I don't really know anyone. And it will be sad to leave my friends and family here in Bloomington, particularly Los Vivos. I may still play with Los Vivos one more time at the upcoming show at the Tremont Turkey Festival on June 11, but by then I expect to be pretty well settled into a new job, a new town, and a largely new life. And I'm very much looking forward to it.

If you're reading this from the future (or the past), there's still time to catch the time traveler convention at MIT (via BoingBoing). In January, 2000 I had a post-apocalypse party. I figured it was a no-lose proposition, as there would be reason to party whether or not the much-prophesied apocalypse occurred on 01/01/2000. We would either be happy we survived, or we'd be dead, as thus unable to consider the failure of the party. (We survived.)

This convention is similarly no-lose, as if you miss it, you can always go back later, assuming time travel is invented, creating some reason to go back. It will be interesting to see who speaks at this convention. The field of experts must be huge, as anyone interested can always go back and make themselves experts.

I made a comment over on The Diabetes Blog that has since caused further discusison, some of which seemed mildly offended at what I said. I'll reproduce it here in full:

I've had negative feelings about type-2s for a while now. But I think it's sort of like watching rich people waste money. I'd probably do the same if I were rich, but as I'm not, it's annoying to see them waste something I'd love to have. In the case of type-2s, that something is the opportunity to not be diabetic, which to me is more valuable than money. But it never occurred to me that non-diabetics might feel the same way because they also have that something I'd love to have, so I wouldn't think it would bother them so much to see it wasted.

Amy Tenderich quoted me, and a few type 2 diabetics have emailed me about this. I probably should have said that I realize that not every case of type 2 diabetes is self-inflicted. Further, I think I'm pretty good about not assuming I know what someone is going through just because they fit, or seem to fit, into some generalization. I have negative feelings about a lot of groups and individuals, but I still manage to respect them and remain on friendly terms with them.

That said, the generalization still stands as a generalization. Most type 2 diabetics are doing it to themselves, and the more I think about it, the more I think this should disturb not just type I diabetics, but everyone. For the record, I also do plenty of things that should disturb everyone, not the least of which is abusing my relatively mild diabetes with less-than-healthy diet and exercise. But the best I can do is not let my diabetes get worse. That's not true for most type 2 diabetics. They can get better, and they should.