It’s an interesting indictment of today’s employment practices that some industries not only require applicants to have a degree, but some will not even give your CV a second glance unless its the right kind of degree from the right institution as well. I read with interest yesterday the comments made by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto: I wouldn’t get a job here now.

Miyamoto is a true games guru. He’s the man behind the classic Mario and Zelda games and the innovations such as the Gameboy and Wii consoles. But he admits that were he applying to work with the company today he’d struggle to get in with his qualifications. So what does this say about the way we measure creativity and intelligence?

It reminded me of when I bumped into an old colleague a while ago. We’d worked together about fifteen years ago for a utility company. He was still there but bemoaning the fact that everyone there is now a graduate, even for basic clerical jobs. This of course meant also that despite his years of experience, he’d hit the glass ceiling long ago and was just killing time ’til retirement.

An interview coach recently posted a list of the way out and weird questions that Google might ask you if you decide that you want to work for them: 140 Google Interview Questions. I don’t know about anyone else, but my bullshit threshold is quite low and I’d probably walk out of any interview that fired nonsense like this at me.

All this is weighing heavily on my mind at present. I’ve just come out of a ‘job matching’ process at work and a set of arbitrary and out-sourced criteria have decided that I’m not worth what I’m being paid. My bollocks feel well and truly kicked and the job market seems a daunting and uncertain place.

Never a dull moment in my life.

I have never been able to sit still (people who know me can attest to that) and my need to be on top and ahead of everything is starting to wear me out.  But I can stop lol. Right now I’m juggling studying for the GMAT, working a full time job at Deloitte, learning and staying on top of social media, staying on top of current affairs, spending time with friends, doing things with/for family and having time for myself. Oh and find time to take pictures.

GMAT: I’ve started studying for the GMAT again.  I did the Kaplan self study guide around the same time last year but then put the MBA idea on hold after work got really busy.

Tip: don’t schedule prep course classes on a week night after work, you’re so tired and zoned out after a full day at work you don’t get value out of the classes. The first time I signed up I chose the Wed night class and ended up having to postpone it. I picked it up again recently and picked a Sunday class instead. You’re well rested and absorb everything. Best decision ever!

I’m taking the Princeton Review course right now and have close to 2-3 hours of homework a day.  I suck at Verbal, my Math is slowly getting faster, I’m going for extra help, doing 4 hour practice tests on top of the homework and just all around drowning but motivated.

Work / Deloitte: I’ve been getting a lot of great and encouraging feedback lately and I FEEEEED off having and keeping the ‘rock star’ status but I’m starting to lose steam.  I’ve been doing the same role for 3 years now and I love what I do but I need a change, and while I’ve been presented with opportunities that I have turned down I am sitting tight for the ‘right’ change.  My manager is amazing, Nikki Wallace, if you ever meet her this woman is smart, sharp, Type A in her work but Type B in her management style.  Her favorite saying, “I don’t need to micromanage you, I give you enough rope to hang yourself.”  She is a mentor, a friend, my confident, someone I respect, strive to work hard for and can laugh with.  How many of you can say THAT about your boss? =)

Social media: More recently I’ve decided I want to be more involved in the social media community.  I’m more active on Twitter, I’m starting to blog again, I’m attending seminars and planning on going to networking events (he he he random thought, GMAT has taken over my life so much that I just dissected my last sentence making sure I had parallel construction, sorry I digress).  Twitter updates so much and so often that I’m trying to figure out how to stay on top of it without having to check it every 10 mins, it’s exhausting.

Current affairs: As you may have seen in a previous post of mine I have a love hate relationship with my newspaper.  As much as I am a techno-phile, I love the smell of newsprint lol, I love reading it on the subway, I love doing the crossword puzzle in pen.  I don’t think I’d ever get into the e-book Kindle but who knows.  But I am having the same problem with my newspaper as I am with social media.  My newspaper comes every day and I’m trying to find time to read it.

Friends / Family: While trying to do all these things, I strive to have strong relationships with the ones I love and boy do I loooove them.

Me: I’ve been reprioritizing things lately and ‘me’ time has been hard to come by but sleep is me time right?

Photography: I wish I was more creative. Photography is sort of my only outlet since I don’t really draw or paint or compose.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlegirlracer

I want to be the best at everything. A renaissance ‘man’ so to speak. My job. Be aware of the world beyond my world. Be involved in trends and social media and ahead of mass adopters in general. I want to be innovative and leader in my field.

I’m learning to do and be everything I want… never a dull moment in my life.

So Montgomery Burns (aka Rupert Murdoch) wants to start charging for content from his newspaper sites: Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google.

It’s not yet clear how his strategy might work. The conjecture seems split between plans to erect ‘pay walls’ around the sites and the idea of a deal with Microsoft to feature content only found through its Bing search engine.

Either way, it’s obvious that Mr Burns doesn’t like the open nature of the internet. He and his son want to see organisations like the BBC charging for their (our) content too. This is supposedly in order to level the playing-field for companies like News Corp who are hemorrhaging money and readers from their newspaper businesses.

I do occasionally read The Times Online but today got this (pictured) reminder of why it won’t be such a great loss if I can’t access the site in future. Apart from being utterly sick of the constant sight of these two moronic cretins in the press recently, it was the very idea that they are considered part of the site’s ‘Arts’ coverage that struck me. The Times is still considered in parts to be a high-brow paper, but its contribution to the dumbing down of the arts is there for all to behold. X-Factor may be mass entertainment TV but it is certainly not art, in the same way, not everyone with a recording contract is an ‘artist’ and not every newspaper or news site is full of ‘news’. Increasingly its all just celebrity gossip and lifestyle pieces. If you want to lose the contents of your stomach, try a visit to the emetically middle-class anxiety of the Alpha Mummy blog. I mean, who writes this shit and who reads it?

Of course, for the main part, Murdoch still plays to the cheap seats through Sky TV and The Sun. And, if any of his publications purvey any culture at all, then it’s surely just an attempt to mop up a small demographic of the literate. Just look at the Sky Arts channels (if you can find them) for recycled, clichéd, antiquated and second-rate programming.

In the U.S., Murdoch’s flagship network is Fox News, a station slammed by the government there as ‘either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.’ Murdoch doesn’t peddle news so much as he peddles an agenda to support his world view and that of his many business interests. That he now wants you to pay for his piss-poor content is a measure of his arrogance.

I looked for further similarities between Burns and Murdoch and I stumbled across this quote:

“Just give the great unwashed a pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending, and they’ll ‘oink’ for more every time.”

If you didn’t know the source, would you be sure which one said it?

So, much like the music industry assuming that every illegal download is a lost sale, Murdoch Burns assumes that people using the internet are now using Google to steal his content and that every time someone reads his sites, they are not buying a newspaper. He just want to secure revenues from new channels down which he can pour cheap shit to anyone fool enough to pay.

The truth is that the internet doesn’t function on the old top-down model and people will find content for free and in the way that suits them. And, there’s nothing that Monty or Rupert can do about it.

A year or so ago, Allison Park Church (and many other churches as well) financially supported a project from 24-7 Prayer to capture some cool stories about what God is doing through Night and Day Prayer and Intercession.

Enjoy THIS SITE and the stories of God moving through faithful prayer. Happy Thanksgiving!

Follow up to my post on the search-engine exclusive (which was linked to by AtlanticMonthly) … other interesting commentary:

From Gizmodo, another reminder about Microsoft’s past:

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company who’s CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it’s really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it’s easy to set Bing as the default search. [...]

People, I’m telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it’s only about the data’s prioritization over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritization if you can’t find it in the first place?

From eCommerce Times, on the gamble this is re traffic:

“If you’re giving up a big percentage of potential exposure to your existing or potential customer base, can you make up for that somehow? That’s like canceling your ads on the Super Bowl. There’s more potential detriment here to News Corp.”

From TechDirt, on the flawed vision:

But the key thing is that none of this does anything to help users. And that’s the problem. It’s not adding even the tiniest sliver of additional benefit to users. And these days, that’s a strategic error. If your business is focused on making life more difficult for a competitor, rather than adding more value to users, you’re doing the wrong thing.

From BoingBoing (Rob Beschizza, not Cory) on just how much Steve Ballmer may hate Google:

But there’s one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It’s easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers’ pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google.

From the NZ Herald, a summary of the emotions coloring this announcement (the myth of rationality, front and center):

NewsCorp is furious that Google pays it not a dime for the content it skims from its global publishing empire, while Microsoft is fed up with seeing its own search engine service, relaunched earlier this year as Bing, so comprehensively outgunned.

From Hitwise, more data (emphasis added)

As of last week, WSJ.com’s referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively.  [...] The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com’s traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%. As we see in the table below, the Journal is receiving more than double the traffic from Google News than newspaper sites overall (a custom category including national and regional papers). Bing, a potential News Corp. suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News’ volume as of last week.

I was reading a blog that I regularly visit yesterday and stumbled upon instructions for creating audio books from any type of text file. It was so awesome that I put it out on Twitter early today and have been requested to “fill in the blanks”.


First and foremost, credit goes to Rick Mansfield and his blog This Lamp. Unfortunately for you users of PC’s and the multiple variants of Windows, this will not help you, but if your a Mac user you will find all the instructions here.


The example that Rick describes is converting a christian resource book into an audio book. Yet this method works for anything that contains text – I have created audio books from pdf files, Word docs and Pages docs, the list is endless.


One last thing that Rick doesn’t mention is that when you have your new “Text to Speech” file in iTunes, you can then convert it into iTunes audio book format by running a script called Make Bookmarkable by Doug Adams and you can download the Apple Script here.


Rick in his post mentions how little time it takes to create an audio book from scratch. One of the ones that I created was The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson. The final product was an audio book that would take 10 hours and 54 minutes to listen through – total time to prepare and convert on my MacPro was about 8 minutes. 


It’s an absolutely awesome way to get audio books onto your iPod or iPhone. The possibilities are endless – I can see myself converting some of my daughter’s Uni text books next year so she can listen to them as she commutes to Uni, rather than having to carry them with her.


I hope you enjoy exploring these unlimited possibilities. If you’re a Windows user and you know of a way to do it on that platform, I’d love for you to share the secrets.


Happy audio book listening!

http://2010.newsweek.com/video/decade-in-seven-minutes.html

Update: 30 November – TweetDeck Integrates New Retweet Feature

Almost two weeks ago, I urged early recipients of the Twitter retweet link to be cautious with its use, because most third party clients seemed unable to display these retweets.

Today I’m repeating the caution, and it’s not only because of spotty third party client implementation. It’s also because these new retweets don’t become “real time” in the Twitter.com timeline for tweets made by anyone you are already following.

High Level Summary
One of the advantages (to the original author) of RTs is that each becomes a new tweet, a new instance. This increases the chance that someone will “see” the original tweet.

Think of a retweet as “bumping” an item “up” in time. But that’s not how the new Twitter.com interface works. On low volume accounts, this isn’t a big issue. But on moderate- to high-volume accounts (measured by number followed), it is. Here’s why.

Twitter doesn’t “bump” the old tweet — it merely changes the “retweeted by” count. So if you read your Tweets on the Twitter.com site and missed a tweet the first time around, you’ll miss it each-and-every time it’s retweeted … because it will remain in “history,” far below the fold.

The third party clients that have implemented the new retweet feature, however, appear to be treating the retweet like a new instance. In other words, they are treating them like the “old” retweets. The problem: some popular third party clients haven’t yet implemented the feature.

1. Twitter.com – The new RT feature does not “bump” tweets, ie, these new retweets are not “real time” for tweets made by anyone you are already following. I think this is a fatal flaw.
2. TweetDeck — both desktop and iPhone application — is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
3. Seesmic Desktop is still not displaying retweets sent via the “retweet link” in the Twitter web interface.
4. Brizzly, a beta web interface for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts, is displaying the new retweets
5. Tweetelator and Tweetie2 (iphone apps) are still displaying the new retweets

Methodology
In order to test how well clients render the new retweets, I “bracketed” the new retweet with an old-fashioned copy-and-paste one — either immediately before or immediately after using the Twitter retweet link. I sent retweets from all three of my accounts: @kegill, @kegill_uw, @kathygill. Each account follows the other two; this is great for testing!

1. Twitter.com
Even though I do not follow Howard Rheingold from my @kegill_uw account, the retweet showed up in that timeline on Twitter.com, with his avatar. Note that the timestamp relates to when Howard tweeted, not when I retweeted. This is a major change and is a little jarring if you’re looking at tweets before and after it that were sent seconds ago. Twitter should add the time stamp after “you”. This time-stamp business has other ramifications that I will explain momentarily.

This Tweet Appeared In My Timeline As "Retweeted"

On both of my low-volume accounts, the Twitter.com interface shows both original and test retweets in real-time. But on my high volume account, @kegill, not a single test tweet (there were four) was displayed in real-time. Why not?

For example, the @kathygill timeline shows multiple retweets — both the “test” retweets as well as tweets retweeted by the account and by other accounts. This is a very very low volume account (follows 18 mostly low-volume accounts).

Example of Multiple Retweets, @kathygill Timeline

Next, see an example of the @kegill timeline, with the @eMarketer test retweet showing at the top. In this instance, the test retweet was made after the new retweet, as you can see from the prior screen capture.

The original tweet, with the eMarketer avatar, did not appear in my @kegill real-time timeline on Twitter.com, although I retweeted it, using the new feature, from both @kathygill and @kegill_uw. I went 5 minutes back in time looking for it, even though the tweets were sent seconds apart.

This is a big problem with the new feature.

Because @kegill already follows @eMarketer, that tweet had already been displayed in my timeline. The new retweet doesn’t “bump” the tweet in time, it merely changes the “how many people RTed” data on the original tweet. This means retweets aren’t “real-time” for anyone who is already following the account you retweet. I think this is a fatal flaw.

Twitter.com Displayed Only The Test Tweet In @kegill Real-Time Timeline

However, if someone that I do not follow is retweeted by someone that I do follow, that retweet shows up in real-time, even when it’s really old (in this case, 48 hours old):

Real Time Retweet From Someone @kegill Does Not Follow

One of the advantages of the new feature, however, is public metrics. Twitter added a “Retweets” link beneath favorites (right hand navigation). It’s a handy way to see how many people retweet the things you do (or your tweets) as well as who they are.

2 and 3. TweetDeck and Seesmic

This is the latest version of TweetDeck

I made several attempts to see if TweetDeck would display a tweet that was retweeted via the new web interface link. Not a single one was displayed on TweetDeck, whether iPhone app or desktop app. I do have the latest version of TweetDeck on both the desktop and iPhone.

Here are sample screenshots — they show the “test” retweet (copy-and-paste). I guess you’ll have to take my word for it when I saw the original did not show on any screen.

In this screenshot from the desktop, the “test” retweet was sent immediately after the original. Howard Rheingold’s tweet, without my “test” label, did not show up in TweetDeck.

TweetDeck Desktop - No New Retweets

The same is true for TweetDeck iPhone. In this instance, the “test” retweet was sent immediately prior to the original.

TweetDeck iPhone - No New Retweets

Seesmic Desktop does not display the new retweets, either. What follows are three screen captures — one from Twitter.com, showing a retweet; one from Seesmic, showing that it is missing; and one from Tweetdeck, showing that it’s missing.

Retweet In Context From @kegill Timeline

Seesmic Does Not Display The New RT

TweetDeck Does Not Show The Retweet Either

4. Brizzly
Brizzly is in beta (just ask if you’d like an invitation) and is doing a great job of rendering new retweets.

Brizzly Displays New Retweets

4. iPhone application Tweetelator
There’s no change since my last report; Tweetelator is still displaying the new retweets. Moreover, it marks them with a little flag:

Tweetelator Marks New Retweets With A Flag

Conclusion
First, the new retweet link is designed to make it easier for people to retweet. However, there’s nothing to stop old-fashioned copy-and-paste if you’re using the Twitter.com web interface. Keep an eye on how your third-party clients implement this feature — will they retain their current “RT” process or adopt the new? My vote is for the former.

Second, one advantage of using the retweet link is the Retweets summary link, just below Favorites in the right-hand navigation. This feature makes public statistics about each retweet — just how many people retweeted and who they are. I’m not convinced this advantage outweighs the limitations of retweets not being real-time, however, for moderate- to high-volume accounts.

Therefore, until Twitter displays retweets in real-time in the timeline (something that I doubt they will do) and until all third party clients display retweets (hopefully like Tweetelator and Brizzly, in real-time), I again urge caution if you are using Twitter for branding or influence. Not only is there an issue with everyone being able to see these retweets (think Tweetdeck) but there is the issue of their possibly not being real-time on the Twitter.com interface.

Wes strongly disagrees.

Update: problem resolved. User error (but you’d probably already guessed that!)

The goal this afternoon … walk five communication students through setting up WordPress on their UW student accounts. Armed with the UW step-by-step instructions and with the help of Kristina Bowman, it seemed doable. After all, Kristina and I had both done this before.

Well, it wasn’t doable.

After two hours, the students left the lab disappointed. They were far more familiar with “pico” and “cd” and “ls” than they ever wanted to be, I’m certain.

I uninstalled, reinstalled; uninstalled, reinstalled. I found one place — ONE — where I’d made a mistake the first walk-through. But even that wasn’t enough to make phpMyAdmin work (although it did result in a different error message) or cause WordPress to complete its installation.

Here We Go
Computing services has a few relevant “how to” pages:

• Installing Word Press
• Using the UW mysql Libraries
• Installing phpMyAdmin

(1) The first prerequisite is mysql. We successfully got mysql running (step 11). However, everyone ran into an error when trying to grant privileges to “root@” … “grant command not found” (step 9). [1]

Error : no "grant" command found

(2) Nevertheless, we moved to on phpMyAdmin installation. Several of us had problems. The tutorial says:

The phpmyadmin configuration script hasn’t been working very well.

You can say that again. We had a 25 percent success rate; everyone else had create a config.inc.php file from scratch and then copy-and-paste from the tutorial, followed by an edit, per the tutorial.

We were then able to set up phpMyAdmin, but were unable to administer the account: “Host ‘courses02.u.washington.edu’ is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server”. Huh? Is this related to the inability to “grant” privileges while setting up mysql? [In the off chance that the courses alias is linked with the student server, I substituted "vergil.u.washington.edu" for "ovid.u.washington.edu" ... and got the same error message.]

Success setting up phpMyAdmin

UW mysql installation rejects connection

(3) Not terribly surprising, WordPress would not install either. I know that the login information is correct (root, mysql-password). And the path to the database server is also correct. So what gives?

WordPress would not install, either.

Dangling Prerequisite
The WordPress installation tutorial has two prereqs. The first, get mysql running, is clear (and there is a link to the tutorial, even if following it was less than successful). The second, related to the php.ini file, not so much:

Before you install a PHP application on your account you should configure your php.ini file. In order to do this you need to copy the file to your public_html directory and then edit any settings you need to change. You should at least edit the upload_tmp_dir setting. Depending on the application and how you’re using it, other settings might also be a good idea.

I talked to a WordPress-savvy admin who helped me find the ini file; I then edited it per the “minimum” (upload_tmp_dir) recommendation.

mysql error
After writing this, I started thinking about permissions. So I tried to shut down mysql. Something is clearly amiss, however, because I cannot (and yes, I know the password):

-psh-2.05b$ ./bin/mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown

Enter password:

./bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at ‘localhost’ failed

error: ‘Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)’

I tried to reset the mysql password. After all, if I can’t stop the process, there’s something bad happening with authentication. I followed this UW tutorial. Copy and paste instruction set failed here, too.

Syntax error in UW instruction set

So, one more time, delete the mysql installation.

Catalyst Call Thursday
Thursday I’ll get on the phone to Catalyst and see if they can figure out what went wrong. Fingers crossed.

[1] I was right to identify the problem as being permissions.

The instructions say “type these commands” when issuing mysql commands. But I was still “copying-and-pasting” like I’d been doing with the UNIX commands. However, in mysql, the backspace key kicks you “out” – you go back into shell prompt. So when I’d try to backspace to change “password” to the password in order to grant permissions … I’d get kicked back to shell prompt. However, I wasn’t “seeing” the difference. Hats off to Nick, who spotted it!

Other notes:

• Syntax for using secure Terminal: “ssh YourUWNetID@UWHost”
• Fugu