merubin75

First, thank you for the suggestions.

To answer your question: I really don’t know yet. The request comes from wanting to do a project together, and also for him to learn valuable future skills. He loves Legos, Spider Man, and Star Wars, so we will have to wait and see where his imagination goes.

I thought it was “to make the world a better place.” ;)

https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso

In my opinion, everyone is focused on the wrong thing. HOW these layoffs occurred is not as important as WHY.

According to various sources, the company is about to go public at a $6.9 billion valuation. On top of that, it just got a $1.5 billion cash infusion.

Can someone tell me why the CEO and the executive team aren’t getting laid off, too?

“On Nov. 30, TechCrunch reported that the company was getting a cash infusion from its backers sooner than expected. Blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better with half of the $1.5 billion they committed immediately instead of waiting until the deal closes.“

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/01/better-com-lays-off-9-of-i...

Everyone is focusing on HOW the news was delivered. To me, this is not relevant. What people should be focusing on is WHY.

The company is set to go public via SPAC at a $6.9 billion valuation. It just got a $1.5 billion infusion of cash last week.

Tell me again why the CEO and the executive team isn’t among the 900 people getting laid off?

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/01/better-com-lays-off-9-of-i...

“On Nov. 30, TechCrunch reported that the company was getting a cash infusion from its backers sooner than expected. Blank-check company Aurora Acquisition Corp. and SoftBank decided to amend the terms of their financing agreement to provide Better with half of the $1.5 billion they committed immediately instead of waiting until the deal closes.”

This made me laugh out loud. Sooooo true.

"The excuse is 'what about ancient applications that don't run properly in recent Windows.' But you know the real reason is 'I suffered for my art, now it's your turn.'"

"Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The team is continuing to listen for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarizations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver. The team has begun mission clock fault recovery commanding 'in the blind,' in the hopes of catching the rover during an awake period, as their strategy of last resort."

Source: NASA mission update for sols 5340-5346 (Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2019) https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover-status/opportunity/r...

Thank you for choosing to be a douche canoe instead of being kind or helpful.

Have a nice day.

This is how Redbox always plays hardball with the studios; don’t want to negotiate a fair deal for us to stock your movies? Fine, we’ll give our employees credit cards, send them to Best Buy, and have them buy 10 DVDs. Then we’ll have a pizza party, unwrap all the shrinkwrap, and then ship them out to all the field workers who stock the kiosks.

How is this any different, except with digital downloads codes instead of physical discs?

FWIW, I worked at Redbox back in the day as the company’s social media manager. The process I described is exactly what happened when the studio that owned the Twilight movies refused an agreement that would let Redbox stock “Breaking Dawn (Part 1)” earlier than 54 days. Fun times.

Of course, it was all fun until we discovered that we’d sent out disc 2 (special features) instead of disc 1 (the movie) by mistake to about 80% of the kiosks. The Twitter shitstorm from angry suburban moms was ... not fun.

I consider myself a reasonably educated guy, and this article feels like a lot of gibberish and gobbledygook. I admit I read through this article three times and can’t make sense of it.

WeWork ia a coworking space where you can rent an office on the cheap. Meetup is basically the SIG/user group model writ large.

I ask this in all sincerity: what am I missing here?

Hi joosters,

I work for Patientory. Please explain why the application -- which is not proposed, but has actually been in development for 16 months -- is dumb. After all, it only has the potential to make data breaches in healthcare organizations a figment of the distant past, reduce health IT costs, and provide a universal medical record that's unhackable.

At your service, Michael

Truth be told, I'm being generous when I say "inbox duty." It's basically me. I flag things for my boss's attention with a label, but apart from that, I'm the guy responding to most things.

But don't you dare try to use your iPod during takeoff! It could crash the plane.

I suspect you're right. But regardless of the reasons, the Power Computing clones were FANTASTIC compared to the crap Apple was peddling at the time. I bought three PowerComputing machines in the space of two years and each one was a leap forward in terms of speed, upgradability, and ... ahem ... power. All for a quarter of the price Apple was overcharging for the nearest equivalent PowerMac.

I admire Mr. Hale's honesty and thorough examination of what went wrong. But something he said really bothered me. At the press conference where they discussed the foam situation, he called it "unsatisfactory" and then in hindsight, calls it "A pretty bland word for the way I really felt."

THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH NASA!

In any other situation, when faced with such a dangerous close call, there would have been emotion and strong language used. But in NASAworld, that's all considered verboten. As Mr. Hale points out in his post, these people were his friends. He knew their families well. They weren't just employees. They dodged a bullet, and all he could call it was "unsatisfactory."

I'm not asking NASA to be full of raving loons. But show some goddamn emotion from time to time! One of the most wonderful things about Curiosity was not just the amazing landing, but the sheer jubilation the JPL team went through once they realized their little rover had safely survived the "7 minutes of terror" and landed. For 10 minutes, they hugged, shouted, and cheered. For crying out loud, the flight director had a mohawk! I have no doubt that by showing themselves as fully human, these amazing people just created a whole new generation of kids who will dream of sending probes to faraway places like Europa, Titan, and beyond.

Bottom line: I admire Mr. Hale's honesty in hindsight. But his bland non-emotionalism is one of the reasons people just don't care about space anymore. Make it exciting and demonstrate emotion, and people will care. Act all Spock-like 100% of the time and people will think you DON'T care (so why should they?)

"Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself."

Source: John Gruber, Daring Fireball blog http://shar.es/HUYIU

As a non-programmer, I absolutely love this. I was able to complete two courses within 10 minutes.

More than anything, this makes programming seem like FUN.

Well done and kudos to the Codecademy team!

He had me until the last line: "I don’t know what Paul Graham means by 'typical Arrington fashion,' but I do know this. It’s not my job to fix it when companies do stupid things."

Bullshit!

No, it's not your job to fix the mess other companies create through stupid policy or bad decisionmaking. But it's also not your job to pile on and stir up everybody's passions when something goes wrong.

Michael Arrington is a huckster -- Walter Winchell and Drudge mixed together. For years, he's picked fights and written stories that destroy reputations. Then when he's called on to the carpet for his behavior, he reacts in the 'typical Arrington fashion,' by protesting his innocence and calling on his readers to save him.

I'm not an apologist for what Airbnb did here. But Michael Arrington and TechCrunch helped fan the flames. Not because they reported on it, but becausse of the WAY they reported on it. And now when they're called on it, he reacts by wrapping himself in a flag of righteousness.

Yep, smells like bullshit alright.

I don't know about this conference, since I wasn't there. But speaking as someone who has helped organize conferences attended by a few thousand people, there are two points I would like to respectfully make:

1. Sometimes, the conference is about PEOPLE and the content of the sessions. I confess that at more than a few of the events I helped organize, it was no accident that the WiFi was wonky or non-existent. Yes, some people bitched and moaned, but the overall effect was that that attendees and speakers felt engaged with each other because everyone put their laptops away and actually paid attention to one another. In conversations and after-event surveys, the #1 bit of positive feedback was, "Hurray for having an event where the WiFi was turned off."

Yes, we all know that a lot of people attend events and use Social Media to bring in a larger audience from those who could not attend (I do), but all too often, I see people sitting there with laptops open to work e-mail. They're not there to add anything to the discussion, and really, what's the point of even being there?

Of course, a good conference organizer has already worked to insure that the speakers are well-prepared, moderators are trained and will actually do their job, and the content is valuable (not a sales pitch). It pains me to no end when I attend an event that waste my time by not having those three items checked off.

2. "Now you booked a venue and they say that they can handle the WIFI for you. Chances are, they are lying."

Respectfully, there's no conspiracy here. If your event is taking place at a hotel or conference center, then more times than not, WiFi is an expensive add-on (all things are expensive add-ons in the hospitality industry, but that's a subject for a much longer post). You have no control over it, and in fact, if you try to rig up a few routers and roll your own hotspot, you're often in violation of your facility's contract which means fines or blacklisting from future events.

Just my two cents from my own experience. Yours may differ, so we may disagree, but no flames, please.

I've worked for three startups in my career so far. Besides working, a fair amount of time was spent interviewing potential new employees. All had some modicum of talent, but almost all had stars in their eyes from reading glamorous puff pieces about the allure of startup life (Foosball! Unlimited supplies of Jolt! No rules! Exclamation points everywhere!) They were so eager to leave their corporate lives that they had illusions about what they were really getting themselves into: shitty hours, cranky co-workers, and fixing your own goddamned wifi.

I wish I had been able to show them this before we hired them. Would've saved a LOT of trouble, tears, and heartache.

Reality check -- sometimes you reject a candidate for less than scientific reasons. Either you didn't "click" with them, or there was something that you just didn't like. Shallow? Maybe. But when I've hired people in the past, I've made the mistake of overlooking someone's personality in favor of what looked like a superior skillset. Several magnificent failures later, I won't do that again.

The reality is that you have to look at someone's personality and whether they'll mesh with your team as much as their skills. That's a fact, and nobody -- repeat NOBODY -- wants to hear that they come off arrogant, ageist, misogynist, etc.

Completely agreed.

"Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money."

Or consider that they don't want to have anything to do with the transaction anymore. If someone is trying to throw up all over you, you don't stick around and wait to see if he succeeds.

And there is a third -- those who criticize without doing a tiny bit of fact-checking first.

Either on his own or with others, Dave Winer has created a lot of the tools we take for granted for today. Outliners, RSS, OPML, podcasting, roll-your-own blogging tools, etc.

I don't know him personally, but I've been reading his blog and DaveNets for over 10 years. Go back and do some digging and you'll find he's the real deal.

Regardless of what you feel about him personally, his point is valid. There are plenty of other efforts out there to create a forked version of Facebook (and Twitter, for that matter). Why puff up some guys who haven't actually written any code yet? Most folks would call that what it actually is -- vaporware.

Wow! We got our first computer when I was 11 -- an Apple IIc my parents brought home over Thanksgiving weekend, 1986. The store they bought it from was also giving away free subscriptions to Compute at InCider magazines. I spent MANY hours pouring over these magazines and later when I learned BASIC, typing in the programs they would give away for free in the back of the magazine.

Anyone else remember InCider and A+ for the Apple II?

"Once upon a time, back before you got real popular, you used to take part in the public square."

Really?

True story: back in the mid-90's, I worked as the Relationship Manager with the Arizona Macintosh Users Group (AMUG) in Phoenix. This was the largest MUG in the world at the time, and to say it was an uphill battle would be an understatement. With Performas going unsold in places like Office Max and acquisition rumors running rampant (Apple is going to be bought by Disney! Apple is going to be bought by Sun!), it was incredibly difficult to be an Apple fanboy.

Frankly, they could have added the name "beleaguered" to their name and nobody would have blinked. Every bloody news story that ever came out about Apple described the company as "beleaguered computer maker Apple Computer..."

Anyway, AMUG was a source of pride and optimism for the company. At least it should have been. I can't tell you how many times I tried to call on reps at the company for assistance and was rebuffed. I'm not talking about financial support, either. I was asking for things like t-shirts and stickers. Simple stuff. Apple reps treated MUGs like they were the proverbial "Cousin It" of the family -- to be barely acknowledged, if at all.

I'm happy for Apple's success. Really. But for Battelle to claim that Apple was somehow part of the conversation at some mythical time in the past seems rather ridiculous.

An amazing song and science mash-up featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye. I've listened to this ten times on my iPod today.

There are a few other tracks, but this is my favorite.

These TED Commandments are terrific. I've organized conferences and recruited speakers for large events before, and I wish I had had this list to distribute.

You’d be surprised how many people willingly violate #7 ("Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness"). These people don't get that you actually add get MORE value in return by talking LESS about yourself/company/service. Instead of gaining respect and people's attention, it just makes you look amateur and low-class.

Respectfully, I would also like to suggest adding an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt respect the moderator and not attempt to flout speaker rules just to make you look like a 'rebel.' It makes thine self appear as an ass.

...Michael

--- Michael E. Rubin merubin@gmail.com // 847-370-3421 // twitter: merubin