A Networked World

Reality checks and data points

This piece from CIO.com is a nice reality check and the general principles apply to everyone, not just IT people. Retire? How About Never?

Overall, the recession has had far more of an economic impact on late-middle-aged adults. In an April Pew Research Center study of 2,969 adults aged 50 to 64, nearly 75% said the nation's economic problems are making it difficult to afford retirement.
Click here to find out more!

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in that age bracket said their 401(k) accounts or individual stocks have been clobbered, with two in 10 claiming that their investments have lost 40% of their value and another four in 10 saying nearly 20% to 40% of their retirement funds have been erased.

I have never believed that I would be able to retire, not just because I could not save enough to do so, but because I have known half my life that when the moment came to kick back I would be doing it with millions of other boomers whose removal from the "productive" economy would shrink that economy and make it too small to support us.

I've also been pretty much convinced that rule number one of investing is "never give your money to someone else to play with on your behalf, never, ever, no, I really mean it, never"

So I have paid off my mortgage and I'm building an urban homestead where we are aiming to be able to live, not just survive, on about $200 a week in current dollars.

While most of the rest of my peers have spent their lives trying to get rich enough to retire, I've spent mine learning to live poor.

My wife is a teacher on a 4 year contract and she has 2 years to go. Here's how I rate that contract.

• Chances of it being renewed on similar terms - 20%
• Chances of being significantly cut on renewal - 40%
• Chances of not being renewed 20%
• Chances of being bought out before the end 20%
• Chances of surviving any of those otucomes, pretty good.
  

Now eher are some more data points.

1. 56 year old family member on contract for a company that provides training to large insurance and financial companies. Unpaid for several months, yesterday asked me for a loan to get through Christmas
2. 58 year old CFO for several medium sized north American companies. Laid off in march, 10 months on global search for new job. Nothing
3. 58 year old former exec and successful business man. Lost his company 3 years ago, still no job and about to run out of money

Just people close enough to hear about their actual problems and 2 of those in the last 4 days. Interestingly, all three are still in denial about their real situation, still looking for the silver lining that tells them all is going to come back to what they fondly believe is normal.

Economic recovery? Not close.

This thing hasn't even cleared its throat yet and as the CIO peives goes on to say, "there is no place to hide in this economy"

Logos and meaning

There's a fierce amount of BS that gets spouted around the launch of a logo, especially where its a rebranding exercise. Millions have to be justified by some tiny graphic object and many pages are spent going into its deep psychology; how "it" represents some deep yearning we have for the company's products and services etc etc etc ad bleeding nauseam.

So, I thought I'd turn it inside out. Here's the logo.

What does it represent and whose logo is it?

If you know for a fact, ie you have stopped by the forum I found it on or the original, please hold off identifying it, I want to know whether it conveys anything by its essence.

My take is that logos mean whatever we vest in them over time, none of them have any inherent meaning so they can't express anything at all until they have been in use for a while.

This has meaning


But this

Doesn't.

Although once it did. It meant failed product and the name still does, but the logo, not so much

Or, never mind changing the shade of the lipstick, what have you done with the pig

Gambling rats and a contradiction

Canadian psychologist, Catharine Winstanley's gambling rats were an important development because "the neurobiological basis of gambling is still poorly understood and few treatment options exist," Money is on rats to help fight gambling addiction

Her international team devised a system which gave the rats four choices for getting some sugar pellets in a 30-minute time limit. The more pellets that were on offer to the rats, the higher the risk, with a greater chance of more frequent and longer periods without being able to get at the tasty food.

The rats became successful gamblers, learning that it was better to choose an option with fewer pellets but fewer penalties.

"Rats are capable of playing the odds. They learn to avoid these risky options to maximise their earnings," said Professor Winstanley, whose study is published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

The rats were then treated with drugs that reduced the levels of two chemicals in the brain - serotonin, which is associated with impulse control, and dopamine, which is associated with pleasure.

In the first case the rats became much worse at playing the odds, and took more risks. In the second case, the gambling rats became better at maximising the number of sugar pellets they ate.

Cool experiment, but what I don't get is that people with very high risk-taking behaviours don't suffer from high dopamine levels, in fact either their dopamine level is lower than average or their receptors are less sensitive and require much higher levels of dopamine to trigger their pleasure centres, so they seek risk.

I would give good odds that when they try this on humans, we find that reducing dopamine production has a similar effect, the gambling addiction gets worse because what we crave is the high.

My wife wants to know what the deal is with us pessimists, do we have too much serotonin? Does that keep us from the kind of risk taking that we see as unsafe but most people just think is fun?

Testing Windows Writer

Tris Hussey suggested this so I'll give it a whirl. tris was involved int eh Qumana experiment so if he is using it, its worth a go.

The pic is me and my sister from 1,000 years ago. Dang, I was three once

OK, it works nicely for cold posts, but how do I quote and link to the original?

Need to check that before its really useful Bet it works with IE but not FF

Hmm, neither. Just left this at their feedback window.

The tool needs an ability to import the title, selected text and URL of a web page that is being quoted.

Many blog entries are responses to and quote from other sources, my Typepad bookmarklet does all of that, WlW needs one to be fully useful. One thaty also works in FF

Otherwise a nice tool to use but wont be replacing my bookmarklet yet.

End to End Identity

John extends the ideas in Retiring the Browser.

So what if we moved personal information properly to the edge too. What if we took it all back and made it available locally in a standardised form that was completely under our control?

Exactly. I think it was Dave Winer who came up with an idea a few years ago about a structured text file that we could all maintain for ourselves and that was hosted in a standard position on our home page. I vaguely remember it being called something like biz.txt but don't quote me.

It would have all our publicly available information from phone numbers and email addresses to qualifications, business skills yadda yadda. Maybe a public one and an encrypted "personal contacts" one for those to whom we want to provide more information.

It would then be trivial to maintain that file (my PIM could automatically update it and ftp it to the site every time I added a new bit to the puzzle - I might even GET a PIM) and everyone else's PIM could access it and update their own records as needed.

The fundamental problem with Plaxo-type services is that they are intermediaries and if they fail, as some of them will, or if they start charging fees that I balk at paying, my identity vanishes from the network. Not what I want.

The data should sit in my domain and when you need it you know where to find it, and whenever I update it, that change propagates throughout my network of contacts in a day. facing a shift to new Zealand in a couple of months, the last bit I want to deal with is the changes of phone numbers and physical addresses that we will have to deal with.

I would LOVE to be able just to update my biz.txt file and forget it. Especially at Christmas card time.

Oh, and thanks for finding the typo John. Fixed

This

Is just plain weird. But its on the top of this story in the NYTimes.

I can't wait to see what Bagnewsnotes has to say about it. Oh, and the video is here, even weirder.

Testing the Proposition

A while ago I suggested that any business could easily delete most of its legacy data, apart form statutory stuff, and barely notice the difference. A couple of days ago I got the chance to test that proposition.

The laptop had a major haemorrhage a few weeks ago and, although I had backed up the data, it needed to be hospitalised. I came back last week and I spent half a day sorting out all the material on the desktop to prepare to sync the two machines up again via a backup drive.

Somehow, in getting rid of duplicates on the desktop, I deleted my entire personal folder. Everything I kept there, from old Christmas letters to a play or two, half a book, some poetry, pretty well everything that i had created on a PC since 1989 I had managed to transfer from machine to machine along the way.

Then I did a total file fragment and defrag. THEN, on Sunday, I missed the Personal folder.

Some swearing, some self laceration as a total idiot etc etc. A mate with a file recovery tool tried to get them back, but its all gone short of getting some industrial recovery work done at god knows what cost.

It took about 24 hours to realise that the reason i had not noticed was that I almost never refer to that folder any more. I had probably not added anything to it for a year or more, and it was even longer since I had actually opened any of them. It had become digital baggage that I was keeping for no real purpose except, maybe, posterity.

Give. Me. A. Break.

Who I am, mostly, is scattered all over the net, what I think, or at least what I'm prepared to say is yours, and posterity's, for the taking in exchange for a quick google. Assuming anyone is in the slightest interested.

The things that matter to my family and friends (and enemies) they will remember without my assistance and even my ego is not that big that I expect to spend the latter years of my life reading over my deathless prose, hell I forget what I wrote 2 years ago, let alone 20 years.

And guess what? Its oddly liberating. Who I am now is what I am now, how I got here doesn't matter to anyone except me and the memory of that process is encoded in everything I do now. The building remains under construction, but the scaffolding is gone, big deal.

New Media With Fangs

When Jim Webb's campaign for a Virginia Senate seat assigned a worker to attend all the public events of the incumbent George Felix Allen, they made an extremely shrewd move.

Gathering intel on your opponent is SOP, but doing it with a video camera in public was a new wrinkle, and it plainly annoyed, perhaps unnerved Mr Allen, who eventually unloaded on the cameraman.
The cameraman's family came from India, and Allen was careless enough to lift the corner of his racist rug and let out the French racist epithet, Macaca.

Taka Asks the $64 Million Question

In his responses to the piece on Myspace For Grownups, Taka gets to the heart of the matter with this.

This raises an interesting question about what a relationship exactly is. I subscribe to several blogs where the author reveals a lot of personal details about themselves and their inner thoughts. Yet I've never commented on their blog, nor are they aware that I'm reading. I know more about them than I do some of my closest friends! Are we having a relationship?

People blog about their marriage, divorce, illnesses, death of child, so if I've been through a similar thing, isn't that our common experience? What's the difference between going to a support group in real life and meeting a bunch of strangers who have been through the same thing as I have?

Oops - Bang Goes the Identity Server Idea

OK, I got a little brain fart about an identity server last week. But it seems that I'm WAY behind on that idea, and that it sucks more than a little. As Ming discovered..

But it turned out that they've implemented a new elaborate security verification scheme. Which consists of asking me questions based on what they've found in the public record about me. They asked me about 10 different multiple-choice questions. They were basically two kinds: 1. giving me a list of domain names and asking if I've registered any of them, and if so which one, or whether I just don't recognize any of them. 2. giving me a list of addresses, and asking me whether I've had any relation to them, and if so what city they're in, chosen from multiple choices, or whether I don't recognize any of them.

I own lots of domains. But yet they gave me several lists of domains I'd never heard of, which I told them. And they gave me lists of addresses I didn't recognize. Except for one, which was an address I used to have a mailbox at, 15 years ago. And then they gave me a list of 5 cities, to identify which one would go with the address. The problem was that my address at East Broadway was in Glendale, California. But the choices were "Los Angeles", "Riverside", "San Berdardino", and a couple more. I explained that to the operator, that there must be some mistake, the address I recognized was in Glendale, and not in any of those, but if I had to choose one of them, the closest would be Los Angeles.

So, then after all 10 questions like that, he informs me that, sorry, but I don't pass the Western Union expanded security requirements. Which, obviously, are screwed up somehow. Essentially they take the kind of stuff that is in one's credit record, or in domain registrations, and if there's anything that happens to be a bit incorrect, or wrong, or one doesn't remember one's address of 15 years ago, one is out of luck.

It seems that the Internet may know exactly who I am, but that is no damned use if I can't remember exactly who I am. Brain, meet drawing board.