The October Surprise?

U.S. says Iraq agrees on a timeline to peace. 2 weeks before the elections. Funny how that happens:

Iraqi leaders have assured the United States they will stick to a timetable of measures over the next year to curb violence and allow U.S. troops to go home, Washington’s top officials in Iraq said on Tuesday.

Two weeks ahead of U.S. congressional elections that have put
President George W. Bush’s Republicans on the defensive over their Iraq strategy, the U.S. ambassador and military commander in Baghdad told voters directly via a rare joint news conference that success was still possible, and on a “realistic timetable.”

Insisting sectarian bloodshed had not caused Washington to water down its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq, envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he expected Iraqi leaders to make “significant progress in the coming 12 months” in meeting “benchmarks.”

Tuesday iTunes Blogging

Haven’t done this in a while. Here’s the first 10 in my random shuffle today:

Come Around – Marc Broussard
O Marie – Daniel Lanois
Bombay Awakes – Bombay Dreams (London Cast)
Hand Me Down – Matchbox 20
Whoomp! (There It Is) – Tag Team
Higher Love – Steve Winwood
Money Changes Everything – Cyndi Lauper
Boadicea – Enya
Color and Light – Sunday in the Park with George
Sky Blue – Peter Gabriel

And now, off to campus for a long day of slogging through Managerial Accounting problems.

Where have all the managers gone?

According to Ram Shriram, there’s not enough middle managers out there. I also heard this meme from three sales executives in a speaker panel organized by one of my professors the other week.

Memories must be short around the Valley. Remember what happened a few years ago? The big tech bubble bust. Companies cut headcount and went out of business in droves. That cut the guts out of a lot of people’s careers. An awful lot of the folks who should have spent 2001-2006 working their way up into those middle-management roles instead struggled to find work, got out of the business altogether, hunkered down in survival jobs, moved out of the area, or stagnated in roles they were overqualified for. Others went into their own startups or have made the leap to the executive level. At any rate, now that things are better, there’s a great big hole in a lot of people’s careers where the last 5 years should have been.

The real question is, why are any of these executives surprised by this?

Although to be fair, Shriram is not quoted as being surprised, so it might be incorrect to suggest that.

Maybe someone should rewrite that old folk song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’ and turn it into a YouTube video to help raise awareness of this critical business issue. What do you think?

Confidence Builders

Despite the fact that it’s open to anybody, I was always too intimidated to actually do anything to Wikipedia.

Recently, however, we created a wiki for a project at work and I was put in charge of managing it. It’s a technical documentation wiki, so my primary task is to try to bring some structure to what the tech staff puts in there, plus trying to figure out how our users will eventually want to use the site and adding a bit of marketing spin to the front page. At any rate, now that I’ve actually been using a wiki, I finally felt comfortable enough to actually touch Wikipedia.

To start out, I removed a factually inaccurate statement from one article, and then corrected a spelling error in another. Not very thrilling contributions, to be sure, but at least I’m not intimidated anymore.

Actually, if I ever get the time at work, I think it would abe a good idea to rewrite Wikipedia’s entry on my employer. That, however, presents an intersting question. Is it considered appropriate for a company to substantially re-write their own entry? If you remained consistant to the Wikipedia standards of accuracy and neutrality I don’t see why it would be so bad, but then, I’m still pretty new to wikiland.

Friday Night Blog Drama

There have been times when I’ve wondered whether I was doing the right thing by not hiding behind anonymity or pseudonymity on the Internet. Each time I’ve thought about it, though, I’ve ultimately decided that if someone were to get so offended by what I put on this blog that they would not want to hire me or allow me to keep a job that I have, then I wouldn’t want to work there anyway. My politics are almost boringly mainstream Democratic. Someone who found that objectionable would likely be a serious wingnut, or, since it’s no secret that I’m Jewish, an anti-Semite.

And after seeing the latest feminist blog-drama going on regarding threats of “outing” and anonymous blogging, I regret my decisions even less.

I have no beef with people who choose to not reveal their identities online. There are a lot of good reasons for blogging in anonymity. Ultimately, what matters more (at least to me) is the quality of your blogging. However, the trade-off is that anonymous bloggers with a higher degree of visibility — like Zuzu — can be subject to pressures that those of us who are less hidden don’t have. I have the luxury of not having to deal with those pressures, and I’m glad.