I promised my assistant I wouldn’t pick fights with the world in general on Tuesdays and Fridays, as she’s very busy elsewhere and doesn’t have time to comb through the comments.
Cracks knuckles, uses carnival barker voice: Welcome to the rumbl— er… Monday!
Smiles sharkilly.*
Let’s talk about the new, new thing and how terrible it is and fraught with trouble.
Which new thing? Well, sweetlings, we live in an era of rapid change. Real change, not the social from the top down bs, but change driven by technology which alters the way we do things because it exists. That in turn drives other change. (And I suspect if Trump can get things going the way he wants to, things will get changing faster.) So, new thing? We’re spoiled for choice.
I’m going to leave aside AI (which ain’t. No, I don’t care how much it throws shadows or how much it SAYS it hates/loves someone. If you guys think it hasn’t fed on every single story about AI rebelling/falling in love with/ruling the human race? You’re nuts. It’s an LLM.) simply because ce n’est pas mon metier.
Neither are self-driving or drive assist cars. I have experience as being not only a nervous driver, as one whose vision is going specifically on the “contrast” property. As in, I’m having trouble finding things that get lost against the background. I first realized this at the zoo, where they were trying to make the enclosures looking natural and the result is I didn’t see the animals at all.
I’ve never used full self-drive. I’ve used drive-assist, and found it perfectly safe except you can’t not be in the driver’s seat because there’s things that make it not “sense” right. (Like LLMS it has holes. It’s not human.) The weirdest one was a car with a HIGHLY polished back. For some reason this caused the car to start accelerating insanely towards the truck. But I was behind the wheel, I felt it, and I stopped it. I honestly don’t know why it was “light reflected on front, go very fast”, but there must have been a reason. Definitely needs adult supervision.
Anyway, so we’re not going to discuss that. We’re going to discuss things that I’m conversant with, granted at two or three remote in one case.
That case is remote work. The other case is indie publishing and ebooks.
Years ago, my friend Charlie Martin who sometimes writes posts for this blog told me something that I’ve never forgotten “ebooks win out in the end, because ebooks are the most economically efficient way to deliver story which is what the cstuumer is buying.” (Now that’s not all the custumer is buying with a traditional book. We’ll talk about that later.)
And the fact is that despite many, many surveys, polls, public chest beating to the intent that people loved paper will always love paper, that reading is a sensory experience and blah blah blah… ebooks outsell paper books ten to one. EVERY MONTH.
One of the problems with the ebooks is specifically Amazon’s outsized footprint. And their KU program which probably is violating some kind of restriction of trade regulation, but who is going to beard the gorilla.
I get less from KU now than I did for years, as a percentage of my work. But– It’s still almost half of my income from Amazon, and let’s talk about it: Amazon is where the money comes from. You might tell me you don’t buy from amazon, and I believe you, but 90% of people do. Because you get 2k from Amazon, you get $200 from B & N. You get change from EVERY OTHER SOURCE.
(But I’m about to make an experiment. I’ve taken the DST books from KU and once they roll off, I’m starting my own shoppify store, and also put it on all the other sites.)
However, revealed preference and what it forces on me or not, I’m open to the inconveniences and downsides of electronic books: mainly electronic books CAN be changed. And while the charge of “Amazon reached into my kindle” while it was bad publicity is also bs because they had to do it, for copyright reasons (THEY HAD TO. (And were probably set up.)) that’s not the big change danger. The big change danger are the things publishers are doing to books, and the reason I have Agatha Christie on paper, in case of grandkids. (I’ll note we’re a bit nutty, here on this side of the pond, as the the rest of the world has been on an “updating books so they connect to the current generation’s tastes” kick for 50 years at least.)
There is also, yes, that you can’t store it and all the DRM makes “own” it iffy. (Though honestly most of what I read on Kindle I’ll never want to read again.)
So, yeah, I do realize Amazon’s quasi-monopoly (even if a lot of it was acquired by being better) is a problem. A serious problem. Partly because companies with that commanding presence get sloppy and Amazon’s customer-service has already gone downhill.
BUT for now most people are voting for ebooks and Amazon with their money. It is what it is.
Also, the technology is very young. The kinks will get ironed. They get ironed by running into them and figuring them out. There are always problems. Someday we’ll discuss the jungle of paper backs back in the day. From violated copyrights to writers not getting paid, to– bah.
Also a lot of the complaints you have about ebooks — the changing of texts — you can complain about paperbooks too. Try getting an original Joy of Cooking. And I have a problem finding non-screwed-up Enid Blytons, though that is a problem that won’t affect most people here. But Europe is bad about this stuff, and I’m on the side of we “I want the book the author wrote” nuts.
The unfortunate problem is that you can keep a lot of books on paper, but not all of them. (And a lot …. well, check the bracings on your foundation.) You can keep a lot more electronic, if you can have a clean copy to archive.
No, I see no reason to doubt Charlie in this. The cheapest most efficient delivery method wins. Pretty much always.
This doesn’t mean paper books will go away, they’re just a different animal.
I used to buy popcorn books on paper — because there was no other way to buy them — popcorn books defined as books you read like you eat popcorn and don’t even remember very well after. Mostly mysteries, but also fantasy and SF. I bought them, I read them, sometimes I donated, more often they came unstuck (I bought books used. So I was often last stop) or I simply forgot to sell them and they cluttered the house for years and years.
I still buy books on paper. But I only buy those I wish to keep. The books I’m keeping now on paper, and I suspect most people are keeping, are special ones. Signed books. Books that had a profound effect on me. Books that remind me of an experience, like meeting the author.
People still buy books on paper, just a lot fewer, because now they are souvenirs, or experiences or — listen to me — for a certain kind of book, display items. if you’re not like us, and don’t read to read, but read to show off, and keep them around to display their erudition or their political opinions.
So no, paper books aren’t disappearing, but they are already a rump market, and my guess is they’ll become more so. And in the process, we’ll find each wrinkle with our nose. And then fix it.
Which brings us to another innovation: remote work.
Oh, the screaming and the belly aching. “But what if people aren’t working at all?”
And then there is this brilliant bit: Nail salon employee pleads guilty after netting nearly a million bucks by outsourcing U.S. government tech jobs to China and North KoreaNail salon employee pleads guilty after netting nearly a million bucks by outsourcing U.S. government tech jobs to China and North Korea. And more on that: here. (Side question, is “Maryland Man the criminal brother of Florida Man?”)
This immediately causes people to go “oh, no. Bring them to the office. This is not trustworthy.”
Let me interject that there are jobs that should never be done from home. Even desk jobs. And there are jobs — most of them involving national security — that should — if done remote now — be tightly controlled and watched. And most of them probably should not be done remote.
But your average job? Well, we’re back to the thing: Lowest expense for the delivery of work.
But Sarah, you’ll say, didn’t you read that thing above?
Oh, you think that’s new? Because I’ve seen things like that done in companies my husband worked for since mid oughts. You know, internet exists. You can supposedly work in an office and offload all your remote work to several people even in other countries, and then, well, you’re working very hard, late and early and here’s the work.
I’d like to tell you that all these bright boys were caught, but not even. Most of them even though we figured out what was going on… well, the bosses wouldn’t believe it even if we told them. These were golden boys, and they kept advancing, etc.
So, it’s not a new scam. Is it easier remote? Well, yes. To an extent. But if you read the stuff above, they were criminally negligent in both hiring and management. You interview in person, where it’s harder to fake. If it’s at all a sensitive position, you have them work in the office until you KNOW him/are sure of him. Administer a test, by all means. (Now they can.) Oh, yeah, and if you hire him for anything vaguely sensitive, by all means give him a dedicated laptop, and keep your own spyware on it that tells you what he’s up to. What are you, stupid?
In fact that entire sh*tshow was so badly managed that one wonders if the management was in on it and this was their way to sell secrets to China. Because I’m not stupid. And neither are you.
But are there problems with remote work? Well, let’s start with “how do we know if they’re working?” My husband (buffs nails) figured that out managing a remote team in the 90s: make it task dependent.
But what if people are working three or four part time jobs and cheeeeaaaaaating?
Get over the idea you’re buying time. Buying time for tech, creative or other brain labor NEVER made much sense. It’s a holdover form factory line work, when you bought time to buy a certain amount of work. It’s not real.
In tech work, or writing, or planning, or frankly just about anything you can do remote without issues? You’re paying for the task, not the hours. The hours are irrelevant.
Remote work is just underlining this fact, but it was always true. I know the readership of this blog. You guys know you’re faster than most people out there on the same task, right?
Say I pay someone (I’m about to) for managing a release and publicity? She actually gave me her price per hour, but I’m calculating that for what I’m willing to pay how many hours that would take. if she does it faster? I don’t actually care. Why would I?
If I wanted her to work exclusively for me, I would do so. I don’t. I would also have pay her more. Maybe someday. IF I have a dozen books coming out at once or something.
If the person is doing the job, why do you want them to work for you only if you don’t pay for exclusive. Is it a power thing?
It shouldn’t matter at all. Again, you’re not buying hours, but a completed task.
The other stuff? A lot of it are already solved problems that don’t inhere to distance work. A lot of them people know how to fix.
But there are bound to be some we haven’t thought about.
And there is, of course, the fact we need to start thinking of things another way. Jobs as tasks, just like we need to think of “books” as stories, not paper bricks.
What needs to stop is the freakout about everything that goes wrong with new tech. All the “ZOMG that changes everything!” “Ditch the new tech!”
New tech and new ways of doing things have bugs. Of course they do. They weren’t delivered from on high fully formed. They will have problems. The problems will work themselves out.
Chill. Most of these changes are taking power from centralized information and technology control. We know where the centralized modes are going: Europe for some reason just won’t make these changes. So they’re going hyper-controlled and hyper authoritarian.
The changes work in favor of decentralization and decentralization works in favor of liberty.
Why do you think all the orchestrated freakouts?
Chill. This too shall pass. And if we need to, we’ll find new solutions for the (few) new problems.
Keep driving.
*It’s totally a word. I just made it up.
According To Hoyt 
Regarding Amazon: The more complicated, frustrating, and/or cumbersome a task is made by a company, should another company come along and do the same task simpler for more or less the same price, the first company usually loses. There’s not a few things Amazon has done that p*ss off the customers. Yeah, they are the big gorilla in the room now. But they will not always be.
Work from home, well, I’ve done piece work before. Get paid for what you did not how long it took. I worked twenty hour days a lot. Some days, the $ per hour was pitiful. Some days, I took in four digits in a couple of hours. All depended on the job.
Some people will want that per hour wage. Not always because they are lazy and want to shirk. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But neither is there anything wrong with doing an efficient, clean job in half the time while still in your jammies with a cat in your lap.
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My problem with coding “piece work” is the nit picking that goes on after delivery. Or (who am I kidding “AND”) working with a company that I dang well knew the specifications were unclear and incomplete. With a few exceptions, had been for 12 years. Nope. Not a chance. Not happening. Give me what you need passed off. I’ll do it and tell how many hours it took. Tweaks, fixes, that is more time on the clock. Might be why I got called only once. Boss insisted on flat 4 hours … took an hour, and that included driving to the office. Steps: 1) Bring up the “problem”. 2) Bring up the documents I’d written to cover their asses because I was retiring. 3) Point out how step 2 related to step 1. Offered a compromise. Project work, but if went over those hours, hourly. Helps that while I thought I’d miss coding … I don’t. Not even a little bit.
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I saw a good example of buying the time instead of the task a few years back. The post office hired a fellow who was a runner. He combined his job with training and ran his route in about half the time of other mail carriers. Of course they made him stay in the post office when he returned doing make work so they got their full value. I’m frankly amazed they didn’t hobble him. He wasn’t smart enough to go sit in a coffee shop or something until it was the approved time to return.
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If he had gone and done something else between the time he finished the job and was approved to return, they’d have found out somehow and fired him, and we’d be talking about that instead. (Optimism? What’s that?)
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Mine was as a graduate student whose advisor gave me a summer stipend (unasked for) along with a stack of scientific papers to work at converting our diffractometer data collection from lower to upper hemisphere. The first Saturday reading through the mathematical BS, I realized that the only difference was removing a negative sign in one equation. This was way back in the day when the diffractometer was controlled by a PDP-8I with blinking lights and faceplate toggle switches. Nothing in the manual said that I could insert a machine language instruction inside a Fortran calculation. Nothing said I couldn’t either. Toggled in a machine language NOP (no operation-skip this instruction – instead of taking the negative of the number), crossed my fingers, and ran the program (and diffractometer). Worked perfectly. My advisor was very pleased with my result – not so much at how quickly I did it.
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On one hand, paying for a task makes sense; on the other, adjustments that make a half hour task take a week are an issue. Which is where pay-by-hour comes in…which is already screwed up by putting someone on salary, which then got countered again by some overtime rules being put in, because folks are being jerks.
That said, the guy was caught because he contracted to build a webpage for a company that got the contract to make a webpage, who only figured it out when they got a contract for something else and he… applied to work for them on that, too.
Which has my eyebrows going up for what exactly they were bidding on a contract for, if they could not build the website. Was this a bundled deal? Or is this company basically farming contracts to subcontract and skimming the profit? In which case it gets a lot more likely that they were aware of the guy radically changing appearance between different interviews with the company for the same job but they knew they’d get caught when it was the same SSN for different jobs.
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–
The last job son worked at. Company wanted son to move into management. Son knew better. On paper at 40 hours “looked” better than shift line supervisor. But, management was salary exempt, but supervisor was hourly not exempt. As a supervisor son was working 65 hours per week with the paperwork that had to be completed nightly. Guess who else had to work 65 hours per week, because shift management couldn’t leave until all the supervisors had left. Son was making more per week than his manager. Total compensation could still be higher for manager because manager got a higher percentage year end bonus than supervisors. Could but barely. We suggested to son that if the company really wanted him as management, that salary not exempt (i.e. got overtime pay over 40 hours per week) could be an option. Turns out another company was also head hunting son. He jumped. (More per hour, and better year-end bonus, but less yearly because of less overtime. Last was a bonus as far as son was concerned.)
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I am the gulliblest gullible who ever gullibled, and I totally for sure buy that every single freakout is 100000% natural, spontaneous, and not suspicious in any way shape or form.
Which is to say that a lot of stuff changes. Too much to track, even, especially if productively busy.
It is actually correct to filter lots and lots of stuff out, and not have an opinion.
If one finds oneself having a strong emotional reaction, there are at least three hypothesis. 1. There was a deliberate input manipulation pattern to evoke emotion. 2. It is genuinely something that could naturally evoke emotion, but one is stressed and picked that to react to. 3. One is actually having some overwhelm, or emotional instability. Now, neither mutually exclusive nor comprehensive, duh, duh duh.
Being vulnerable enough to outside manipulation to feel strongly about some new input is not necessarily bad.
but, well, I have been taking at step back and looking at soem of my emotional reactions, and behaviors that I previously have not taken the time to evaluate and process. I have not been well, and I have not been behaving with the level of appropriate to others that I would prefer. Now, some of it is ‘just’ some biological stuff, maybe fixable, and pretty boring all considered. Some of it is genuine imbalance and such in how I have processed and responded to 2020, et alia. Oh well.
Anyway, may partly simply be that the ideal I have for sane, for sanity goal seeking, is itself including some outright insane and not based in reality priors. The new realization is that one element is more or less that I think people should be able to store and respond to thirty or forty year old stuff, and ignore newer social manipulations that way. The problem is that the 100% form of this is impossible, and ignores that sane humans mostly seem to actually need a fair amount of ongoing social contacts that is pretty immediate.
New technology has teething problems, and that is why we morally should not try to compel specific bits of technology as solution to the problems that wildly distant people have.
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Sharkilly. I know. Exactly the idea meant. The keyboard setup loves to throw periods around and change what I type. I see a cartoon grinning shark. Close cousin of crocodile tears.
OK. Your technology problems are ebooks. Mine is electronic pictures. A good part of my social life revolved around taking slide pictures of railroad subjects and showing them thru projecting them for others to see. Physical things. I took some pictures a week ago but how do I show them tmmw night? Process is totally different and not universal unlike slides. A friend uses Power Point but that’s a rare beast.
. O for the days of DOS and Lotus 123! They worked!
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There are projectors you can hook up or Bluetooth to a laptop, but I don’t know that they are cheap.
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My husband did a family slide show via something-casting off of his smart phone. Most smart screens (“TVs”) will do this.
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So… remote work is PIECEwork. The pay is for the RESULT, not the time spent to get the result. If Able can make 100 Virtual Widgets an hour, he gets paid for 100 Widgets for that hour. If Baker can make 100 Virtual widgets in a minutes and take a 59 minute break… he gets paid for that minute. No, they BOTH get paid by the Virtual Widget. Baker could double his pay by working for ANOTHER minute, if he so chose. Heck, work 10 minutes and call it a day.
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I came here to say this. There’s a big stigma about piecework for SOME reason. I believe some states and/ or industries ban it entirely.
Me, I’ve been fired lots of times, always for being “too slow”. Management prefers the guy who does EVERYTHING at ninety miles an hour even if he has to go back and redo stuff half the time because he was going so fast he screwed up. (As for me, I NEVER had to go back and redo. I may be slow, but it’s done right the first time.)
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Takes me longer to do or explain something. But when done, it actually does what it is suppose to do, and if not what client said they wanted, it was what the client actually needed (sometimes even both). Explain takes longer because I add information that the questioner implied but not asked. They not only get the answer but they get WHY, and maybe, just maybe, they won’t be back with the same dang question again, and again, and again, and repeat. No it is not good enough let them ask why. It just isn’t.
Drives hubby crazy. Taken a few years … Okay decades. But have learned with hubby to answer the question, not add why. At least the first time. Second time is “if you’d let me tell you why last time you might be done.” Rarely a second time, so there’s that.
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It’s possible to really screw people over with piece rate…but it’s possible to screw people over in all sorts of other ways, too. Not sure what would be so uniquely bad about it as to disallow it completely.
The only time I’ve ever done piece work — at a production job where each worker built a product start to finish — they set a rate that was some percentage lower than the average wage per piece, figuring it’d give us incentive to work faster. They were right. I saw dollar signs and tripled my pay. (One coworker in particular did just barely enough to keep his paycheck from going down and acted like I was doing something unfair; he was a total moron.) The shop was raking in orders and profits…until some people elsewhere in the company complained that we were being paid more than they were and management changed the deal to make the crybabies feel better. Whatever. I had already left for greener pastures by the time the New Raw Deal went into effect.
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😉
Reminds me of:
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Of blank space? (WPDE…it will delenda anything in your comment it doesn’t like with no warning)
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???
Shows up on both WP Firefox screen and email on my PC.
Seen this with others comments when comes in as an email. Clicking on the comment to make it come up in WP screen usually lets me see what was picture was posted.
Very old classic tech cartoon:
Panel 1: Boss: “Our goal is to write bug-free software. I’ll pay a ten-dollar bonus for every bug you find and fix.”
Panel 2: Software developers: “Yahoo!!!” “We’re Rich!!!” “Yes!!! Yes!!! Yes!!!”
Panel 3:
Boss: “I hope this drives the right behavior.”
One developer: “I’m going to write me a new mini-van this afternoon!”
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It’s blank for me too, on the TorBrowser’s Firefox.
Your text description sounds Dilbert-y, with Wally delivering the last line.
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It is.
Looks like WP is doing something different depending on browser.
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Found it in the source: https://i.sstatic.net/bQOvF.png
WP flips its coin to decide which comment interface it’s gonna give me. This time, and the time just before, I got the “improved”, “helpful” version, so this prob’ly won’t work:
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Hoo-boy. WP doesn’t even FAIL reliably! And THIS time it’s given me the good old plain-vanilla version, so let’s see if it will embed by just pasting in the image’s URL:
The newfangled one worked with Select Block –> Embed Image –> Embed from image URL.
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LOL!!! And, just to complete WP’s little joke, *NOW* I can see your original image!
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Unintended consequences. I think Reason has a video series on the tube of yous
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More coffee! 🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵🍵
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But why is it green? :-o
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Romulan ale?
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Romulan Ale is blue. Plomeek soup is green.
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Romulan ale in yellow coffee?😉😜
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Meddle ye not in the coffee of dragons, for they will grind you and add you as a seasoning.
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On the other hand, anybody who confuses the color of the Coffee Mug and the color of the Coffee in the Mug isn’t very smart. [Very Big Crazy Dragon Grin] 🍵
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The outside is white. Whatever’s inside is green. As far as I can tell from the low-res emoji, anyway.
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My mistake.
They were imagining that the green “steam” from the coffee meant that the coffee was green. [Embarrassed]
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You, Ms. Sarah, have more clearly defined remote work than anyone else I’ve heard from.
Thank you!
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Books:
I used to have several bookshelves full of technical books and sci-fi. Now I’m down to one bookshelf of printed books and the rest is digital due to space requirements. And the digital books aren’t bound to Amazon, they are PDFs and epubs on the house server with ample backups. I’d love to have a house with a large physical library, but poop in one hand and wish in the other then see which fills up first.
Remote work:
I worked on site for three plus decades. Now due to covid, I have a position where I can work from home. Still log hours, but our work product is monitored in more than one way. Folks that can’t produce/innovate get let go. Any shenanigans face more than just loss of job, there’s some serious teeth in the contracts. I wouldn’t mind working on site again, if the commute wasn’t multiple hours a day to and from the local urban blue hell hole of the city.
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Reading for fun I prefer having an actual book most days. I spend the entire day on the computer looking at screens, and email, etc. So reading stories on an electronic screen , other than for a very small amount, is not all that fun, to much like work.
I can see where a Kindle on vacation would be workable, not doing work stuff all day so wouldn’t trigger the work reflexes.
On working from home, what gets missed a lot is that there needs to be a LOT more explicit communications going on between people. It’s amazing how much information on projects gets transmitted in hall way conversations, or overheard in the hallway “wait what??? If you do that your going to break this other thing!”.
I have mixed feelings about remote work most days, especially when there is a blizzard going on and have to work for the day rather than saying can’t get to work today.
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the e-ink doesn’t feel like a screen to me. Mileage varying, etc.
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Same for me. I use my Kindles (kept the original Fire; it’s more robust if not up to snuff for the gee-whizziest features, so it’s my “go with me” one) for reading, but I hate reading much fiction on the screen. Gave up on one book that I had as ePub, because it was almost painful to read on the screen.
Since I’m retired, I don’t have to spend 8 hours a day in front of the screen. Matter of fact, a shovel, rake and the tractor are calling…
When we moved here, I had a lot of books, far more than I could situate in the house. Gave away a bunch, but about half the paper books are in shelves in the shop/barn. That doesn’t count the 400 titles in the Kindles (OK, a dozen or so duplicate paper books).
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Get a copy of Calibre; any format that isn’t DRMed can be converted to any other; for instance, epub to AZW. And the program recognizes e-readers, and can send the converted file direct to your Kindle via USB. It doesn’t (yet) handle removing DRM from the latest Amazon (KFX?) format, but plugins are available for most others; if your epub is “protected” Calibre can probably handle it. And for the new Amazon format, Epubor will work just fine and then Calibre can take it from there. Unlike Calibre, however, it’s not free.
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Epubor has quit working, again (do not have ability to use work around). I have a PC Kindle folder that is 2-JailBreak for a few titles.
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I used Epubor 2 days ago to de-DRM 2 books; no problems. Just as a reminder:
Make sure your version of Kindle for PC is no newer than 2.40; do not let it auto-update.
After the book appears there (you might have to “encourage” it via Amazon), paste the book into Epubor; everything in your Kindle for PC library should be available for de-DRM in Epubor.
Let Epubor do its “thing”.
Import the “cleaned” file into Calibre and do whatever you want with it.
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I have an ancient version of Calibre (4.18). Got a complaint about an outdated glibc. (Slackware’s production team is tiny, and versions nearing EOL get behind on updates. I don’t want to try the bleeding edge version yet; doesn’t look like it’s near release.)
So, I have to hit up FSF and get glibc 2.35. Being sufficiently paranoid, I’ll download a copy of 2.33, too, in case of non-coffee drinking dragons.
If that works, I’ll download more eBooks to my Kindle for PC and try conversions. Hmm, have to see how my copy of Wine is doing… Sigh.
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Never have had any problems with being on “current” Calibre versions, on Windows 11.
For what my 2¢ is worth.
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It sounds like you’re uising Linux. If so, I have no idea how to make it work there, whether directly or in WINE. I have both Linux Mint 21 and Windows 11 running as VMs using VirtualBox, and they work well, but I use native Windows 10 for all my ebook stuff.
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I have no Windows boxes in the house, so Kindle for PC has to run under Wine. Just updated Wine (“Wine Is Not an Emulator” Sigh.)
Still have to get a more modern version of Calibre. I can either update the library or go with a somewhat older version that works with the standard library.
It’s been a long time since I ran Kindle-for-PC (or any other Windows programs), so I expect a bit of a re-learning curve. Whee.
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I hear you; if it weren’t for the fact that some of the “controlled” websites I need to use on a regular basis don’t seem to be accessible from machines running Linux (“You Need to Upgrade your Version of Windows”; duh), I’d probably go that route. As it is, I have both Linux Mint and Windows 11 as virtual machines running under VirtualBox, so I’m keeping up with the latest.
Just a note: If you expect to ever run Epubor to de-DRM Kindle books, install Kindle for PC version 2.40, nothing later. For some reason, Epubor can’t work with files downloaded using the later versions, at least not yet. And be sure to not allow auto-updating of Kindle for PC in the options.
Good luck with whatever you decide!😎
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Same here. I can read a bit on the computer, but not novels or lengthy tech books. Pieces, yes; that’s why blogs like this or news sites are just fine. Continuous, for hours? Nope.
E-ink, OTOH, is not a problem; I read it just like paper.
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Same here on e-books. The wife has read probably a couple thousand books on her various Kindle devices, but I just can’t get behind it. I spend all day at work staring at screens to read and put words on them, and then when I get home, most of my hobby time involves MORE reading and putting words on screens. I don’t need or want any more screen-staring time than I’ve already got. Plus, the tactile experience of reading books is enjoyable in itself.
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The younger set lean toward paper books for fun reading, for the same reason. “School is a screen.” Or at least, writing assignments, watching teaching videos, many textbooks, and so on are all on screen.
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I like books for the ease of flipping back and forth (say, when looking for a reference, or an illustration), and even just for pleasure reading at home – but the Kindle for being able to take along and read any book on it, anywhere — without my reading glasses.
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I did run into the “overheard” and went “Wait! What? Um, no!” Problem is never was listen to anyway. Still interjected. Um, is “I tried to say something.” Same as “I told you so.”? Asking for a friend. Oh well. Don’t have to worry about that anymore.
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Unfortunstely, I have to be in the office Monday through Friday. Bleh…
Most of the rest of the company works a couple of days in the office, and spends the rest at home. Our real problem is the office campus that I work at. It’s made up of a set of interconnected buildings, so they can’t be sold off. And security reasons mean that leasing out office space isn’t feasible. That means that there are a lot of offices that are paid for, and management would like to get its money’s worth…
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I remember reading about a guy who was using ‘jiggle tech’ to fake being in the office. He was working as a manager, and still called into the meetings and apparently was making decisions, but was absolutely certain he was making out like a bandit defrauding the company and totally not getting caught.
But the thing that struck me was, if he is leading a team, and they’re actually getting their stuff done, how is he not doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing? And if he is not leading effectively, but it has no actual impact to the company, how is him being in and super attentive going to be worth anything at all?
I’m one of those ones who’s concluded I mostly need to be at the office, not necessarily because I’m more productive there, but because that’s where the majority of my human contact comes from. And I tend to go off the rails, or straight up shut down, if I don’t get it.
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Same on working in the office. Covid work-from-home almost killed me. Work is just about the only face-to-face contact I have with people outside my own home, and turns out that despite being scoring about 99% on every measure of introversion I’ve ever seen, I still need physical proof that I’m part of a larger group of people.
Plus, I need to have some separation between work and home. The ability to leave the day job behind at the end of the day is necessary to my mental wellbeing.
That might change if I had to commute, though. For the past 20 years, I’ve been with in a 45-minute walk/10-minute drive of my job. Current travel time is exactly 6 minutes, door to door. (Heck, I can see the corporate campus from my front yard; not ideal in itself, but I can put up with it.) If I had the urban/suburban horror scenario of multiple hours stuck in traffic every day, I’d probably have very different feelings about working on location.
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I’m at a 40m commute now, and really, I listen to a lot of pod casts that I would have just listened too anyway if I was sitting on the couch.
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What I missed when working remote was that you couldn’t easily get two or three people communicating. DM was awkward with three.
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Your observations on ebooks are right on–except many people find audio books even more convenient. And, of course, if done well, oral story telling is the ancient way and even more soul satisfying than that new fangled papyrus stuff. Larry Corrreia said at last LibertyCon that 85% of his sales are from audio books. Of course part of that is that the stuff Larry writes lends itself to such a format. In my experimenting with audio, I find I have to edit the manuscript to make it come out right for audio. (The good part is that ‘he said’/’she said’ is made redundant because the orator can do it by vocal inflection. The bad part is you rely on the orator to catch the nuance rather than use your cleverly selected adverbs.)
As to digital editing, I find it helpful that I can go back and correct typos that snuck through, but then there’s the whole ‘updating it to match current mores’ nonsense. Sometimes I find myself wishing someone would translate Shakespeare because he was inventing English as he went. Annotated works of Shakespeare (or the Bible) are problematical because annotators sometimes don’t just tell you what that weird word means, they try to show off their brilliant interpretations of what was being said, and they don’t differentiate between the two, so I wind up being annoyed as frequently as enlightened by footnotes. Actors and stagers of Shakespeare have given up. They may update MacBeth to look like it’s done in a corporate boardroom, but they know better than to change the words because the words are why anyone cares. Occasionally they’ll steal the plot (like West Side Story), which is fine because Shakespeare stole most of his plots anyway, and the plots aren’t what make Shakespeare special.
Reverence for the text matters. I have a friend who knew someone who was engaged in copying the Torah, and he would copy letter for letter, and even inkblot for inkblot, reproducing every flaw from the original because it was his sacred duty to transcribe the text as it was given to him. I’m sure very few regard Agatha Christie’s oeuvre with such reverence. There are authors whose main attraction is plot or character whose work lends itself to messing at the margins. There are others like Bradbury or Hammett whose imagery and style are unique and shouldn’t be messed with. Then there are translations, as alluded to in Star Trek VI about reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon :). We few, we happy few in the English speaking world find such issues in translations of the Bible. I’ve read the much honored KJV, the Jerusalem Bible, and the Orthodox Study Bible translations. The latter two, more modern translations claim to be more authentic, more true to the original Greek text (Yes Greek is what the Bible was first WRITTEN in even if the language it was spoken in was something else, and it helps to know the differences.) The problem is the KJV was translated not just by scholars but by poets, and the new translations don’t just drop the thees and thous, but insist on changing out perfectly good memorable language for marginally or sometimes just arbitrarily different language just to prove they’re different.
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I use audio books too, and am still searching for a good dictation program. you see, I’m addicted to story. I’d like to make it and consume it while doing crafts, walking, etc.
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If you find one that is adaptable enough to handle strange* accents, please share.
*No, not that kind of strange.
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raises eyebrow. Cat?
One of the versions of Dragon (3? I think) transcribed Pixel-cat. “Hello, hello, hello mom. What are you doing mom? Hi mom?”
Was that what he was really saying? Who knows? it was highly plausible, though.
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The Sunday School book for this quarter uses a “modern,” translation and I don’t like it. As an example, it changes, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” to, “Blessed are those who are harassed…”
Harassed can be being shoved around or yelled at. Unpleasant, but on a different plane from being tossed in the arena or wrapped in pitch soaked robes and used as human torches. (The author is also sneaking, “social justice,” themes into the lessons, but so far they are things like, “all people should have access to clean water and we should help with that.”
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The New Testament was originally written in Greek. But isn’t the Septuagint the oldest known Greek version of the Old Testament, and explicitly states it was translated from earlier Hebrew sources?
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It’s true that the Septuagint was written based on the ancient Hebrew stories but doesn’t state that they were from written sources although they probably were. Those in the New Testament quote from the Septuagint. Likewise Jesus no doubt spoke Aramaic, but his words were first written down in Greek by the Evangelists since Koine Greek dialect (Alexander the Great’s era) because that was the most universally understood language of the time.
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It’s called the Septuagint because they had 70 different scholars translating it into Greek, and they checked each other’s translations afterwards. So it’s considered highly accurate.
Apparently, the Protestant version of the Old Testament was from a pre-Septuagint source, which is why it has the Apocrypha books separate or missing entirely. Maccabees—the one that has the source for Hannukah—is one of the books in that group. In fact, pretty much all of those books are in the couple of hundred year period before Jesus’ birth, and describe a particularly heavy period of Jewish persecution.
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I’ll allow folk editing for continuity. Anne McCaffrey had that issue a lot, especially in her later Pern books. (This excludes the specific ret-cons she did, such as for dragon color with one secondary character who grew to have a bigger role.) She was also incapable of counting correctly, as shown by her casual references to time that changed between books in the same series. Someone going through and making all the little changes for consistency wouldn’t bother me.
However, if someone were to mess with the pseudo-science of her creations because we know better now, that would be a problem.
And as a note on your Bible translations, our current culture has somehow managed to reverse the concept of “thee” and “thou” to formal because of misunderstanding the KJV Bible. Those are informal tenses, which map perfectly to the Romance languages, and you could get in big trouble by thee-ing and thou-ing the king.
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That sounds like a good use for digital editing. Those are the things that real fans might catch, but a copy editor might not.
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The time thing is a side effect of gateway writing. I figure we pick up close-set parallel worlds.
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One other comment on ebooks that I want to make that you touch on is, how do you autograph an ebook? I haven’t solved that one yet, and I think it would make a good panel for LibertyCon. Once I start producing my books in hardcopy as well as ebook version, how do I personalize it for someone I meet at a convention? Maybe I can Tuckerize their individual ebook copy? Authors are all very familiar with what a pain it is to haul physical books 2,000 miles to get to a convention. 21st century problems as they say.
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Sigh. I suppose I could if everyone had a kindle “can write on it.” BUT even I don’t.
My solution is to get cards with the covers, and sign those for people.
BUT as a consumer, I usually buy books.
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also, no one is picking a fight with me over sharkilly. (snuffles.)
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Fine! I say it should only have one ‘l’, ie sharkily. ;) Long live neologisms!
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Agreed.
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But then it wouldn’t be a stealth pun.
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Yah, the way it’s spelled makes it ambiguous whether it should be interpreted as ‘like unto a shark’s grin’ or ‘kill like a shark while grinning’. :-D
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“To kill like a shark” would be “shark-killily”. With the dash. Because when sharks kill, dashing IS involved.
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One notes that there is a vicious circle involved in Amazon’s being the only place to get certain books.
The more writers go wide, the more readers can go wide.
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yes, but to go wide, you have to take the bite out of your income, first.
It’s like gentrifying a neighborhood in a way. The first stakers pay in lower security, etc.
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Same issue with YouTube. Everyone goes to YouTube, so creators have to go there if they want to make money. And since so many creators are there, that’s where the viewers go.
One of the guys in my Star Citizen org streams exclusively on Rumble. But he admits that it’s largely a principles thing, and he’d probably be doing much better on YouTube.
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Talked about working from home last month. I think one of the problems is new workers and a lack of proximity to experienced people to break in the straight-out-of-college “I just realized I don’t know squat about how this actually works” kid.
Yeah, once you have the experience, you could easily do it from home. And maybe the younger people can get that mentoring, and help, through a screen.
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Well, this blog post didn’t go in the direction the opening led me to believe, ha.
I buy print books cuz I buy print books. No matter what the fashion trend is.
Remote work is great….by work standards, and for non-governmental jobs I hope it sticks around.
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It’s a holdover form factory line work, when you bought time to buy a certain amount of work. It’s not real.
I’m not even sure it was true of factory work all the time.
My stepdad worked as a stripper in a zinc factory? … refinery? (before the EPA shut most such American factories down). A full shift’s work was defined as stripping a certain number of sheets of zinc off the electrodes (?) and stacking them for storage or transport.
If you could finish your allotted number of pieces in 4 or 6 hours instead of 8, you could go home, even if the time allotted to your shift wasn’t over.
Because you’d done a full shift’s worth of work as defined by the employer.
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Part of the paying-for-time-not-(just)-work-done is that you’re on site, so you’re on call.
This is why the hammer was brought down on the “must be on call and ready to work in X minutes, but not paid” shtick.
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No. Just line work. So many hours of sitting working the assembly line.
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On a different note, I knew of workers at one factory who would slip off and catch a nap while on the clock. Management turned a blind eye (until there was an open house, and apparently too many employees were talking about it with their family members) because it meant that there was cushion built into the line. If there was ever a sudden “crunch time”, they had enough employees on hand to pick up the extra work without having to bring in temps.
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Retired now so fortunately don’t have to deal with the implications of remote work.
I have more books than room to display them. But as the years roll on I find I am much more comfortable reading on my tablet due to the back light and being able to adjust the font. (Android tablet and everything, including the Kindle App books are stored off line in multiple places).
The one type of book I still buy hard copy are equipment manuals, quick reference books, etc. that I might need if I don’t have online or access to e-books. Of course with Liberty Con coming up I will have to buy some hard copies just to get them signed, even if I already have them on my tablet.
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Similar; I disposed of almost all my hard-copy books when we moved in 2019. I have no wall space for bookshelves, since I chose to put in a wine cellar on the biggest blank wall. (14×9)
Hey, it was our first new house, built for us; got a bunch of built-in things.
So, lots of kindle books in the app on a tablet.
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yes. I prefer e-ink for my aging eyes.
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Haven’t read today’s yet, so don’t know if Sarah mentioned Canada’s recent election or not. But it has come up over the last few days. Will let Phantom do the major commenting. But here is my take based on the linked article.
Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, need to get out of Canada, moved to the US (states 51, 52, 53 – they decide which order), before the rest of Canada bankrupts them. Be like Alaska! Who being a state, rather than taxing their residents, pay them because of their rich resources.
My 2¢ worth.
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It was discussed pretty extensively last week. Bottom line consensus: Every province except Quebec, eastern Ontario and (probably) western BC should get out of Canada; that makes (counts on fingers) 9 provinces (or groups of provinces; the Maritimes should probably count as one) available to become states. Quebec, eastern Ontario and (probably) western BC can lie in the bed they’ve made and starve.
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As someone who works from home in a job that is all but designed for remote work, yes, task-based is the way to do things. (Though I am paid by time and not task, because some tasks become major morasses.)
What do I do? Production work for a photography studio. (Primarily sports groups for schools, in my case.) Right now I’m working on constructing a photo for an entire youth basketball league, 433 subjects. I’m seven and a half hours in and still have five rows to go. Then there’s the reconcile round, where I make sure everybody is IN the photo.
Most things don’t take nearly that much time. A well-photographed “natural” team shoot takes about 45 minutes for a single team, with a large chunk of that taken up by paperwork. (Don’t get me wrong, though, I like the paperwork. The paperwork is the main way we’ve gotten the process so smooth, because individual photographer reviews are part of that and they LEARN.)
Anyway. I have a schedule as flexible as I need it to be (like picking up kids from school), don’t have a horrendous commute (because they moved the studio 40 miles away), AND I am not taking up space in the lab, which is now mostly a computer farm with only a couple of people on site. And I work from home, through their computer, using a program and server set based on the opposite coast. It’s pretty awesome and I’m almost done for the season. (The fact that I get summers off doesn’t hurt with summer camps, I have to say.)
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My current work-from-home day job does stuff for stuff that is used in stuff that goes eventually into supporting civil legal cases, so it’s all billed by the hour because that’s what lawyers do, billed through at frankly incredibly high hourly rates because that’s what lawyers do too.
It’s only ever been remote-work for everyone, so our practices and processes have evolved to make that work. Which meant when everyone got locked down and had to work from home, I’d been doing it already for the better part of a decade or so.
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Slightly off topic, but I reported earlier about the “up grade” Amazon did to its Kindle service which “killed” my use of Epubor Ultimate in loading and converting Kindle eBooks.
As was mentioned, Epubor suggested getting an older Kindle e-ink as Epubor could access Kindle ebooks when the e-ink was linked to my PC.
Well, I got an older e-ink and it worked as Epubor suggested.
The only problems are that the covers from the e-ink are black-and-white and That E-Ink is a pain to read. It’s a smaller one. [Crazy Grin]
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Run it through Calibre after Epubor removes the DRM. If nothing else, you can download a new color cover of your choice as part of the metadata edit process.
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I’ve thought of using Calibre to get a color cover.
I didn’t do so with this “run”.
Of course, I’ve used Calibre to “update” the covers of some older ebooks.
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You can copy the cover from the listing at Amazon, no?
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Yep
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Suddenly there’s a whole raft of Yoo-Toob videos about PLUTO HAS JUST COLLIDED WITH NEPTUNE! tossing the names of astronomers Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku around. I even clicked on one, and gave up on it after a minute of pointless A.I. blathering.
I know it’s bullshit. If such an event were going to take place, astronomers would have been anticipating it for decades. So what’s the purpose behind this hoax?
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If it’s what I think it is, it started as a “what-if” simulation, but someone must’ve realized that an “it’s just happened” title would be more effective click-bait.
I’ve watched several of the “what-if” simulations because they’re interesting possibilities to tuck away for space opera settings with weapons that can slam planets into each other and stuff like that — but seeing one presented as news rather than simulation would really annoy me, and probably turn me off on anything similar.
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Making us all lose IQ points?
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E-books. Great for fiction, and I like being able to rent expensive books that I need to read for Day Job but don’t want to own. I take notes with pen and paper, but don’t have to keep the book.
Work-from-home – It doesn’t work for K-12 education for a lot of people, both teachers and students. A very few people can do it, and might do better with distance learning than in the classroom. But for 98% of people? No, ixnay, nopity nope. College might be different, but K-12 does not benefit from school-from-home. Kids need to socialize, no matter what sort of studying they do. A hybrid homeschool-microschool with group physical labs and activities (like some homeschool coops already do) might work better, but at the moment, based on personal observations, distance learning is less than ideal for the younger set. (This was true even pre-Covid, but I can’t go into further details.)
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I was home schooled for 6th through 9th exclusively, and 10th was hybrid.
I concluded that school has a ton of wasted time, and we can learn faster.
Having friend groups was good, but I also learned to talk and listen to adults, which left me odd then, but helped later…
Two of my kids are struggling enough with peer groups that I’m strongly considering home school for them.
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There are advantages and drawbacks to everything. You pick the compromise that works the best for your needs. Technology is simply a tool, and it still requires a decision to be made by a human at some point no matter what it is.
My own personal gripe is every business and telco moving to VOIP phones. Advantages: 1) Inexpensive per volume of calls. 2) Clarity (no static) in normal voice ranges. 3) mobility, calls can be made from pretty much anywhere by any computer device. Drawbacks: 1) power issues. (Goes out at user end, no phone without UPS. Goes out where the servers are, no phone without generators.) Old copper wire phones were so low voltage that they could be used for a significant amount of time without power to the system. 2) unexpectedly loud noises drop out. (This one may have been fixed in the last several years, but gunshots near the phone wouldn’t always come through.) 3) ID/locations are much easier to spoof/forget to update.
The real trick to technology is utilizing it in a way that maximizes the advantageous parts and minimizes the drawbacks.
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”…but gunshots near the phone wouldn’t always come through“
This would be something my business career luckily managed to avoid being a hard requirement.
So, 911 operator use case is the issue here I’m guessing?
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Yes, 9-1-1.
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I run into that from time to time. Like many males, I have significant hearing loss right around “normal voice range.” Back in ancient times they plotted audiograms on polar coordinates for some reason; back then they called it a “cookie-bite hearing profile.”
Modern digital voice communication systems often conserve bandwidth bandwidth by two methods: either simply chopping off everything above and below a narrow part of the “best voice range”, or taking a slightly wider slice of the range and squeezing it into a narrower band; basically like a “power mike” on an old-time CB radio.
In the first case, the cropping removes the parts of the waveform I’m depending on to get intelligible information over a voice line. Sometimes I get choppy noise. In extreme cases, there’s just silence, as far as I can tell.
In the second case, the power-miked signal sounds like barking dogs or quacking ducks. Plenty loud, but nothing interpretable as a human voice. In extreme cases, for some reason they spike the front of every phoneme somehow, and it just sounds like rapid-fire gunshots. You can turn the volume down, but then all you get is gunshots. Those calls are pretty much an instant headache.
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The definitions of “advantageous” and “drawback” are…. flexible.
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Re “manage deliverables” instead of hours, I think I have told this story here before: In tech in the Golden State in roughly the early 1990s I had been managing a team for years, writing reviews and all that, when I finally got the title and was sent to the various management trainings. All of a sudden there was a C-suite panic, full on top floor uh-ohs, when the California Labor Board decided a case of a guy who had been working as a programmer in an “exempt” position, so salaried (note I don’t have a cite on this, so all detail is grapevine, but it all fits).
As was often the practice in tech, he had been closely supervised, with his breaks and lunch basically stop watched and recorded to the minute, his arrival and departure required to be precisely reported and watched closely, and so on. Basically he was managed like he was an hourly employee – but, he put in typical high tech hours, i.e. lots and lots of hours, extra time nights and weekends, which at most startups and some more established places was standard.
Then he got riffed, and got a lawyer, and said lawyer went to the CA Labor Board saying “You know what, my guy here was really hourly, based on how they treated him and what they kept close track of” and asked for back pay on all that precisely documented extra overtime and weekend hours at his fairly high hourly-pay equivalent rate, plus penalties and lawyer fees.
And he won. The award was lots and lots of money, for years of recharacterized “extra hours” past eight per day and forty per week that the guy had put in, at time-and-a-half and double-time, plus penalties. Really big money.
Shock waves raced through Silicon Valley C-suites. I and all the other line managers were rapidly pulled into hastily put together emergency training where we were absolutely forbidden from ever noting, let alone recording anywhere, any arrival or departure times, break or lunch durations, or ever mentioning in reviews or in any emails anything about the hours any “exempt” salaried employee was in their cube looking busy. The only thing we could do was note if someone never showed up at all in a day – any time at all at the job was “at work that day” and that was the smallest increment that we were allowed to notice and manage.
What we could do, however, was set deliverables and manage and track their completion. We could use deadlines for those, but never write anything like “if they were not taking two hour lunches, their projects would have been done on time…” or suchlike.
And in fact doing it that way worked far better than the old way. I was mostly there already, but for some micocontrolling managers it was just wrenching to change. Since I was a baby manager at that point I internalized that, and that’s how I did it from then on.
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There is something inherent about being a manager that requires you to, well…manage. Or at least look like you’re managing. Which was always my problem at a lot of jobs-I tended to work fast and I hid as much as I could because my supervisors and managers would give me busy work because “you have to look busy!”.
However, on the other side, there are employees that you have to stand over them with a baseball bat to get them to do their jobs-and can’t be fired because of Reasons. And being a manager means that if your boss comes and you don’t look like you’re working (i.e. whipping the peons), your performance review could be an issue as well. So, you over-manage (when you’re not kissing butt) to appear that you’re Doing Something.
(One time I was a supervisor? Deliverables and making it clear what my expectations were. As long as stuff got done, got done right, and on time or early, I didn’t have a problem about what they were doing. I might grab them for a project but that was because I needed a body and I was usually there, working on the project as well. Never had a problem except with one employee, and I couldn’t get rid of him because he was the office manager’s cousin or son-in-law or something and had Pinoy Mafia protection.)
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Ah I suspected that had happened, was the time frame around 2005 or so?
I started hearing rumors about exempt being able to sue for overtime.
when I ran a shop I kept it hourly because I billed the customers hourly so it felt right…
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The number of deliverables and their schedule guaranteed you work overtime. Managers just didn’t call it that.
In today’s work environment, the number one manager skill is the ability to lie convincingly.
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I have several issues with remote work, not the least of which is managers who believe that they have more authority to dig into your life because you clearly now have all that pesky time that you weren’t spending getting to and from work. It doesn’t help that there have been rumors that some of the “mandatory, required” tracking software doesn’t go away when you uninstall it from your computer (meaning you need to work on a burner laptop at best). And I’m worried that piecework assignments might be organized in such a way that you’d have to work more than forty hours to get a “forty-hour paycheck.”
(I know people that cheated on remote jobs. Considering some of the managers they had, I’d have been cheating on them. Most jobs are far too over-managed anyways. Most managers are taking long meetings and working politics for the next position.)
On books…I like physical books. And wish I had space for more of them. I’ve been moving more to digital with few exceptions because it means I can carry a whole library on my iPad, and have the space for the physical books that I must have (stuff that’s out of print, not on Amazon, etc, etc, etc…). It doesn’t help that Dad has been trying to declutter our lives ahead of whatever will happen to him.
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Mandatory tracking software should be ONLY on company owned laptop.
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Working remotely we’d VPN into the office servers. Login to the server via VPN, then log into the office laptop. Part of the login to the laptop, whether we were remote or in the office, auto logged in and out the time.
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Yes, but you didn’t have mandatory tracking software on the laptop, right? I know someone who does, and he uses a company computer.
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No tracking on home computers. All home computer was used for was remote access to regular desktop.
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…this would require the company to be both competent and willing to actually spend money on employees beyond the bare minimum. Send them a fully-functional laptop, rather than have the employee buy the laptop and “reimburse” them (in six to eight months, and prorate if they get let go early) for the purchase? That would require the company to actually spend money that could be used for…I dunno. Sending the entire HR department on a “fact-finding tour” of meal tasting for the quarterly corporate lunch at headquarters? Much better use for the money…
(I have come to the realization that if you think of HR as the worst Mean Girls ever, because they now have actual power and gatekeeping abilities for the corporation, you have an idea of how much I loathe the modern corporate setup.)
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I’m so grateful my current job doesn’t have HR, but it is probably only a matter of time before we merge with someone who does…
I Agree, mean girls is right.
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Speaking of “trouble” and “worlds.” Just did a quick pass back to earlier chapters to remind myself of the layout. Found something I KNOW was fixed months ago. Problem is still there. In the manuscript, not any of the archive copies.
Did I dream it? Are my nightmares edits that have to be done over in the daytime? Because that’d be a serious nightmare right there.
(fifty seven chapters of fixes to verify, fifty seven chapters of fixes! Take one down, smash those bugs down, fifty eight chapters of fixes- wait, what?)
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I went back and read a chapter months after posting it and found a missing word. Well, anyway, the place where a word should have been, and wasn’t. I’m pretty sure it didn’t wander off when I wasn’t looking, and it was missing in every copy of that chapter.
I guess, when I was working on it I knew what I meant to write so that’s what I read. Even though it wasn’t in the text.
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Software. I’ve written. Gets down to release time. Pulled into formal testing (that I helped write). Going through it. “That works, has to. Next.” I’m not a good tester of my own stuff in that respect. It did work. Just not “proper formal testing”. Now piece testing. Which luckily is what my last job entailed.
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It’s generally the robustness testing that bites
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Gremlins. Only possible explanation
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So much this.
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The problem wasn’t so much that they *did*, as that they *could*. Their Kindle platform isn’t just spyware.
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Eh. They’re ALL spyware. I’m extremely disturbed when I have a conversation with younger DIL NOT NEAR PHONES about something utterly ridiculous, say how to make a doublet, and then sit down to work and get ads on doublets, ready made.
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“They” should be defined as ANY electronics with or without an “official” microphone.
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Yep.
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My new job that started last year is 100% remote, with all employees and contractors 100% remote.
Upper management tends to fly around meeting with customers, etc. I’ve had one trip to meet the entire US team early this year.
I really like it, but I need to get out more…
What surprised me Sarah is some of our best contractors live in Portugal, it seems Europe is starting to develop work from home as well.
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Dan’s too. We actually like it a lot. We can work in the same office.
SO MANY PDAs…. :D Well, not very public. I mean, it’s us and the cats.
It might be desperation, from Portugal.
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Ever gone to a shop to have your car repaired? Of course you have. You were paying for the task when you did that. Sure, the intake specialist (they’re called “service writers” because they write up the repair order for your car/truck/motorcycle) checked what’s called “the flat rate manual” to give you a cost because “the book” says “repair/replace/adjust Gizmo X takes 1.5 hours” so he computes 1.5 X the shop’s hourly rate to give you a cost. Cost between shops won’t vary a lot because they all use “the book.”
Talk to the mechanics doing the work – they all know they would starve if it actually took them 1.5 hours to fix Gizmo X. “Beating the book” is mandatory if they want to evade malnutrition. Which explains why EVERYONE back then used air tools (now it’s cordless stuff) because it’s faster. And tax deductible as “tools of the trade” (which last a LOOOOONG time if you take care of them – I still have all mine 45 years later) and every successful shortcut gets learned, or figured out, at the speed of light.
I worked my way through engineering school spinning wrenches on motorcycles, and the first few months were brutal because I wasn’t fast enough. I knew everything – I’d been working on my and friend’s bikes and cars for years, but mostly at the “hobbhy level” – I learned <i>fast</i> how to combine jobs (fixing Gizmo X required removing Gadget Y, so I’ll get the front desk guy to add an hour to the ticket when you come in to “clean and adjust Gadget Y” which you probably really did need anyway, or will in a few months) and I’ll learn how to fix Gizmo X AND Gadget Y in 45 minutes to “beat the book” by enough to actually make a living.
Point here is “you’re paying for the task” and always have been, with cars, electricians, carpenters, lawn care, accounting, even doctors (it’s a little more obvious there) even though that fact is hidden behind a monthly subscription fee or hourly rate.
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So I either waited much too long, or just long enough to read mythical man month.
I’m not through it yet, but chapter two basically explains a major part of why universities have screwed themselves.
The curve of speed per worker with complex interrelationships.
Barring the actual sabotage an insanity, this explains what went wrong with the universities. The sheer scope of things like climate modeling, is almost completely intractable to handle in full.
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Bob, you’ve piqued my curiosity, can you elaborate more on what you mean by the curve of speed per worker with complex interrelationships? Are you saying as the relationships increase it gets hard to get additional speed per worker?If so, what does the university part have to do with it?
I’m very curious!
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“Are you saying as the relationships increase it gets hard to get additional speed per worker?”
That’s Brooks’ book in a nutshell. Any task that requires communication and coordination between the performers has to devote worker time to that co-co overhead. Eventually, the overhead eats up all the extra productivity of the worker.
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