Fiat Lux

I can take being rejected for a job because I don’t have the necessary skills, or because someone else was a closer match to the skillset in question. That’s business. But this is another matter altogether:

A state appeals court reinstated a fired manager’s age-discrimination suit against Google Inc. on Thursday, saying a jury should hear his evidence that a supervisor told him that his ideas were “too old to matter” and that the giant search engine company gave its older employees lower ratings and lesser bonuses.

[snip]

As part of the lawsuit, Reid presented a statistician’s study of employees and managers in his department at Google that found older employees consistently received lower evaluations than their younger colleagues, and older managers got bonuses that were 29 percent less than those awarded to managers who were 10 years younger.

Age discrimination is not new to Silicon Valley, but you’d think that as the industry matures we’d see less of it. Not yet, it seems.

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You might notice that the blog looks a bit different tonight.

Scott decided that it would be fun to go to the WordPress Upgrade Party that the inimitable Matt M held Wednesday night. I figured, it was a good time to see if I actually could port the blog over from Movable Type to WordPress. With 1220+ entries in the database, I was more than a little worried that trying to move them all would be hell and result in me having one massively screwed-up blog.

Well, I was wrong. The process was unbelievable pain free. Absolutely everything just worked. Amazing. I’m so used to tech stuff almost-but-not-quite working; for something to NOT screw up or require weird hacking to get it right felt…. wrong.

At any rate, I got the data ported over last night; tonight was the fun stuff. Find a theme, customize the sidebar, add a few plug-ins. The move is about 98% done, but if you catch any weirdness or bad links, please let me know. I still need to re-add the comment policy and a link to my old travel blog, plus decide what kind of spam filtering I’ll be doing. Akismet is up and running, but that may or may not be enough.

So…. after 4+ years, it’s farewell to Movable Type. I feel a little sad about it, but it’s time for a change.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know!

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There’s a few reports on the Web today that the Vista Service Pack 1 will actually be Windows XP.

Yes, I know, it’s a JOKE. But in every good joke, there’s a kernel of truth.

The next computer I buy is going to have OSX on it.

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So, a few weeks ago, I was getting fed up with the comment spam onslaught, and tried using captcha technology to shut it down. And it worked, which was great, but it also caused some problems for some readers, which was not so great. Pissing off readers is not something I want to do, so I dropped the captcha and am trying some new back-end spam filters instead.

Although the new spam filters seem to be working well so far, I’m a bit bummed about the outcome, because the captcha plug-in I was using — reCaptcha — is a bit more than your average spam deflector:

ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand.

I’d like to implement ReCaptcha at work instead of the captcha currently in place on the blog there, but it’s busy as hell right now; I probably won’t be able to get to it for a few more weeks.

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There’s a downside to every hype cycle, and given the heights of hype Apple received around the iPhone, it was inevitable that a backlash would hit sooner or later. The last 10 days have seem a number of Apple missteps, from the $200 iPhone price cut, to dissatisfaction with the way Apple is handling custom ringtones, to reports that the new, oh so sleek iPod touch devices may have some display issues.

And to top it off, the New York Times has weighed in with an article suggesting that Apple’s making no gains in the overall computer market due to poor handling of their retail channel.

It’s certainly not positive press coverage. But if you compare it to the kind of coverage Microsoft is getting these days — that same NY Times article called Vista “a world of hurt”, and when what the last time you saw any press at all about the Zune? — I’d suggest that despite the backlash, Apple is still in a better position.

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I’ve been going by ‘Fiat Lux’ online for 4+ years now, but I think it might be time for a change.

I’m getting very tired of being called ‘Fiat’ by people, for one thing. I’m a person, not a car. Yet for whatever reason, people fixate on the first part of a name when creating a nickname, not the second half.

As I’ve said before, I’m also getting very tired of having my comments on Wordpress blogs filtered into the bit-bucket because whoever runs the Akismet spam filters decided that the phrase ‘Fiat Lux’ is spam.

So what are my options?

I’ve been using ‘rslux’ as my blog handle on Wordpress blogs recently (it’s also my Twitter handle), so that’s one option. It’s not terribly catchy, though, and it incorporates my middle initial, which I don’t usually use, so it has the potential to be confusing.

I could also start using my real name more. It’s not my first choice either, because frankly it makes me feel unsafe. Being female and having an easily Google-able name makes me gun-shy of putting my full name online more than I need to, although I’ll be the first to admit that any information any stalker could ever want or need about me is already available online, one way or another. Plus, if I were that concerned about my privacy, I would have picked some other domain name for my blog.

There’s also an argument in favor of using my full name — doing so is better for my own personal branding. But as Kathy Sierra saw, that’s a very two-edged sword. I’m just not sure I want to go there.

I suppose I could split the difference of all the options and switch to using ‘Lux’.

There’s one other issue to consider — there are some blogs where I’ve been a regular commenter under my current handle. I either have to keep my current handle, or risk losing my identity and credibility on those sites.

What do you think?

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Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.

After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we’ve got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home!
I’m waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.

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I’m of the camp that feels a blog is not a blog without comments. I also feel that there should be as few barriers to entry as possible when it comes to allowing comments. Easy interaction is a huge part of what has made the Internet great, and I’m a huge fan of it.

However, the damned comment spammers have made it impossible for me to run my blog the way I’d prefer. The vast majority of my older blog entries have had their comments closed to keep the spammers at bay, I’ve added all sorts of anti-spam plug-ins, and I’ve turned trackbacks off entirely.

And despite it all, especially in the last 48 hours, the comment spam has been overwhelming.

So today, and unwillingly, Captcha verification has been added to the blog comment form (Thanks Scott!). I really wish I didn’t have to, but it’s either that or go to some form of user registration / comment moderation, and on balance, I think Captcha is a little less of a burden all around.

To all you comment spammers out there who’ve forced me into this: You suck.

To the rest of you: I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too much of a hassle.

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I agree 10,000%.

Look, we know what we’re talking about here won’t be able to happen today, tomorrow, or next week. It’s going to require some serious time, dedication, and faith in the brand you’ve built. Your stock is tumbling, the lowest it’s been in months; your customers have lost faith, and those buying Treos seem to be just going through the motions; your efforts to expand your business have gone unfulfilled, and perhaps most importantly your consumers are unhappy and looking for the next great thing — that you’re not providing. But it’s not entirely hopeless. Your biggest competition’s already shown its hand, and you’ve seen how successful they’ve been. Look at what they’ve done right (and wrong), and build upon it.

Even if you only implemented half the suggestions we’ve laid out here we think you could really turn things around. And we do, honestly, want you to make it through this thing. We want to love Palm like we loved it in the old days, and know somewhere, deep down, you’ve got some fight left in you. And believe you us, this is your shot. The bottom’s about to drop out on the Treo, and if you can’t make it happen soon, you may never get another chance to get a foothold on innovation.

Sadly, I think Palm is neither willing nor able to listen.

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It was only 6 months ago that I finally put down my money and upgraded to MT 3.3x …. and if I had waited a little longer, I wouldn’t have had to pay for the upgrade at all.

A bit annoying, frankly, but it’s my own fault for waiting so long, I suppose.

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