Submitted by greggles on
I've had fun with stupid spam in the past, but this was basically just as good in a different way.
I just got a call from an aplus.net autodialer - they didn't actually talk to me, just played me a voice mail. I rarely go over on minutes, so I wasn't too worried about the time, but it's my cell phone for crying out loud.
Submitted by greggles on
Damn the man!
Submitted by greggles on
Project re-Duplication? Well that's a crazy idea that people would not only duplicate a project, but re-duplicate on top of that. Except that it happens all the freaking time!
Zack from CivicSpaceLabs has done a comparison of Moodle and Sakai.
Either one of those projects could/should easily be integrated/absorbed into other Content Management Frameworks which is his kind of his point today.
Submitted by greggles on
I've been reading Design Magazine "Dwell" for about 3 years now. It's generally full great and relatively practical information. It's a little more academic than, for example, the very practical and often cheap Ready Made Magazine, but I still like Dwell very much.
They've been preaching about the coming of "prefab" housing for a while. Not so much the "piece of crap trailers" kind of "prefab" more of the "this is really awesome design and it was at least partially built in a factory which makes it cheaper for the quality and makes assembly time shorter" kind of prefab.
There are two really good books on the subject that I recently read Prefab, by Alison Arieff and Prefab Modern by Jill Herbers. I had heard of the Arief book from Dwell Magazine and found the Herbers book when doing a library search for the Arief book. They are both good, but oddly enough much of the content is the same. Also, they seem to mostly follow in the "Dwell Magazine" format - that is looking at the houses from the Academic point of view with less focus on the every day practical concerns like cost and usability. The houses are almost all gorgeous, but some of them are just wicked expensive or funky useless layouts - or both.
Then, you can imagine my surprise the other day when Businessweek ran an article covering several of these same resources, people and homes Businessweek isn't the best of the business magazines I read, but it's a decent one and they are occasionally ahead of the curve in predicting trends. So hopefully this gets more popular.
All the same, I'm very glad personally to see growth in this area. It's something where almost everyone wins: housing can be higher quality, lower cost, more efficiently produced, better designed, etc. etc. The main drawback in my mind is that it could lead to more "cookie cutter" homes - but looking around suburbia and exurbia these days, I don't think we could have a housing trend that takes us any further in the wrong direction on that one. The other perceived drawback is that prefab makes a shift in the labor market. I say "shift" rather than "would force people out of jobs" because I view it as a movement from one area to another.
Submitted by greggles on
I have a friend who does call center outsourcing. They have call centers all over the world - USA, Argentina, Canada, Philippines, India, all over! Naturally, lots of their projects are met with protectionism and lots of times when he tells people what he does, they get mad about how unpatriotic it is. When you get past that, he loves to talk about the regional specialization in the call centers - that they don't put support centers in Argentina because that doesn't suit the Argentine personality. Instead Argentina gets sales centers because that is their nature: be a little pushy and close the deal. Philippines gets more support centers - they are more culturally focused on pleasing other people. USA and Canada get the more high end/high touch calls. You might even call that "specialization".
Submitted by greggles on
I tried (really, I did) to find a list of sucky blog categories. I couldn't. So I'm making my own. Care to help create the list of sucky blogs? Add a comment or contact me. Of the categories I have so far, the "Nothing+Aggregator+Ads" is clearly the worst.
Linkfest
Steps to duplicate:
Example: I had a hard time finding one. Is that good or bad?
In his review of Ten Signs of a Cheap Blog Nick Wilson lists this as sign number 5.
