Again with the telecommuting

Mitt just emailed me some stuff. He is upset at me because I won't let him work from home. He says that when I posted his job on Craigslist it said telecommuting is okay. I told him that I don't pay him, I never hired him, and he just hangs around and forces me to make coffee twice as often.

From Mitt:

Telecommuting or telework is a work arrangement in which employees enjoy flexibility in working location and hours. In other words, the daily commute to a central place of work is replaced by telecommunication links. Many work from home, while others, occasionally also referred to as nomad workers or web commuters utilize mobile telecommunications technology to work from coffee shops or other locations. Telework is a broader term, referring to substituting telecommunications for any form of work-related travel, thereby eliminating the distance restrictions of telecommuting.^{[1] (telecommuting on wikipedia)}

This Isn't Telecommuting #2

This Isn't Telecommuting #2You know. My grandma tells me every so often. "Its amazing what they can do these days." 

Boy, gee isn't it though. Mechanics. Fixing Cars. Telecommuting. The internet will blow your mind.

its a jobby-job, just phone it in dude.

this is mitt here. i have been helping mfg to look for jobs. and i wish people knew what telecommuting was. actually i dont wish they did; rather i wish plagues of dead first borns upon people who post jobs that are not telecommuting jobs, be it out of ignorance or miscategorization.

so we have a new feature, where we show examples of what some people think is telecommuting. first up, someone in Circleville:

click through to harass the guy.

mfg is looking for a secornd jerb.

[...in this economy...]; Hi! this is mittthedevourer here, Mr Responsibility and stuff...

mfg needs more of a buffer with paying for this blog and my salary. he needs a second job that cannot conflict with his current m-f, 8-5. FYI:

he thinks he's all this and that and a stack of pancakes

with whipped cream and strawberries and bacon

 ...and is looking for 10-20 hours per week (mostly nights and weekend-days). has laptop, won't really travel. (telecommuters do save your company money!) he is looking for an administrative, part-time position or one as a part-time executive assistant. here's the current job's specs and some of mfg's qualifications. he'd be mortified, or will be when he sees i'm posting this:

Experience

+ September 2008 to Present

Office Assistant 3 for the [X, Y]* Regions: [(1000+ employee) Employer-statewide]*, Columbus, OH

(*identifying info stricken)

In addition to prompt and accurate work, this position has continually tested the limits of productivity and given cause to improve adopted methods for performing job duties with ever-increasing efficiency. Regular and quick correspondence with clients and subcontractors (typically on behalf of the [Region Chief]), in addition to our two regions staff is a must.

+ Currently I manage the bidding process of [third-party] services subcontracted for the [employer-regional] of the [employer-statewide]. This involves the regular mailing of correspondence to [third-party firms] and our clients on behalf of the [Region Chief], completion of standardized paperwork on deadline. I draft, revise, and issue both the Requests for Proposals and final contracting materials as well as any modifications to these contracts. This process involves both developing a proper maintenance system for bid proposal materials from the [third-party] firms, as well as collating confidential feedback from clients. Also, it is requisite that I keep our clients on deadlines in order to ensure timely awarding of contracts, and I do.

+ Management and upkeep of payroll and project tracking database records for [2] regions' projects as well as contract client data maintenance.  Performed invoicing verification functions for billing rates and amounts, as well as updated budgets and costs for regions' projects.

+ Assisted in an executive/administrative assistance capacity with the temporary management of state-wide contracting approvals for all nine regions (including the two I currently generate materials for). This involved materials which needed supervisory approval by the Deputy Chief [X], then curating and distributing these records; in addition to corresponding with [third-party] firms across multiple regions regarding the status of various projects, retrieval of contracting records for nine regions, and the execution of Public Records Requests by [third-party]firms.

+ [Analysis] Report and correspondence document creation, style guideline application, proofing, and editing; final proofing and bookmarking in Acrobat

he's currently trolling Craigslist looking for part-time telecommuting jobs to see if he can swing a nights/weekend plan. if you've got a lead or if this sounds like the kind of person you want, drop him a line at mfgink[at]gmail[dot]com

posting courtesy of your friendly Mitt the Devourer

Should my Avatar color for 'Day of Anger' be #FF0000?

i am angry about not much at all. i am low on wrath these days.but hey, i would like to see if our union representatives can hammer in a <day of anger: 8hours leave> into the next contract.

i think it would be nice for americans who are still employed, it might actually make them appreciate their employment and employer a bit more while still allowing them to vent and not work in an officially sanctioned manner and fashion at a specified place and time.

anyway, for now americans, be mindful of these people who are willing to over-throw their country when next we imply that taxes being too high, or socialized medicine not covering everyone (for free) will mean the burning of DC and subsequent decay of mankind. if you really do care, Egypt is what that looks like. for now civil disobedience is the better model to follow.

Update on 8:49AM by mfg

ha, just realized that red, the color of blood looks like foo in #html

America Online 3.0, HTML5, and APIs: part iii

i will keep this short, concise.

[i failed at that so here is the conclusion from all the way at the bottom:]

suffice it to say, microsoft creates an illusion of protection, apple dumbs you down so you dont know to want more. if real life experience could inform user level experience, we would have a very different attitude toward both.

i dont want to pursue this topic much further since a lot of better writers are already going after it*. i would like to hold up one attitude particular post to scrutiny however as it represents a dangerous attitude better than anything i could try to describe. i guess he already is trafficked enough to have a rep, but here is john gruber / daring fireball's explanation of the core justification of jobs comment that adobe is lazy; http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash .

this article has little to do with the iPad. it has little to do with DRM even. the attitude that is being touted and revered is that its appropriate for a company to control a hardware platform, a software platform, and a harem of consumer-grade peripherals. what is the end result of such a situation? apple, jobs, and gruber would have the world believe that it results in a better... something. depending on the situation the something changes. sometimes it is a better user experience, sometimes it is a better development experience, sometimes it is a better world. all of these things, of course, feed and bathe in the same ecosystem, so none of these are exactly diametrically opposed like tax cuts and budget deficit reduction (oh noe!).

however, jobs and his apologists are apt to justify any movement along the lines of, its my ball, you can play the game my way or go home. i dont mean to call jobs a bully, that is not the important thing here. what is are not only his apologists who evangelize to the masses, but additionally that no other CEOs "have the balls to stand up to cupertino." i throw that in alarm quotes, because that is where the diversion begins, and then its microsoft who isnt driving the market, or creative who isnt making a good enough mp3 player. however, similar to the problem i noted before, none of these other companies have the lateral monopoly that apple does.

itunes and the reported price scheduling for the iPad are not only bad insofar as they are apple-taxed. they also kill markets' elasticity. apple is an anti-competitive company. they work in the worst interest of the consumer. the price of music, and the fifteen dollar e-book on their servers is a four-alarm fire people seem to greet with open arms.

search amazon and macmillan and youll see thread after thread of people critical of amazon (sure they have supporters too), and the idea that an ebook should cost about ten dollars. for some reason people seem to unite behind macmillan and believe that an electronic book should cost twelve to fifteen dollars, or more. i dont understand this, its like people screaming and picketing that jammie russet should owe the riaa 126million. its insane.

people have been paying too much for music on the itunes store for a long time, and they likely wont stop any time soon. i personally believe that amazon is in the right. markets should seek their bottom when they are inflated. when you take the commodity out of the picture and are left purely with the intellectual property (in this case, of a book), should there really only be a 20% reduction in user cost? is that really better for customers?

as far as adobe goes, and the whole HTML5 and APIs header, suffice it to say that apple is lazy or poisoning the well to make the comments they have made. i dont support Adobe's flash. it probably is a pile of coding horror; its version ten and has probably never been torn down. however, to act like you can abandon 32-bit programs tout de suite and act like the dev is to blame bespeaks a foulness in apple.

they dont care about devs. if youre a dev, apple doesnt give a shit about you. proof of concept: if there are a billion apps, and a million devs who made them, and their combined revenue now dwarfs the entirety of the niche and cachet adobe once helped apple maintain all those years, then apple can piss on any number of big developers for the sake of their platform. what makes you special?

why is microsoft so bad? they stopped listening. they also stopped being innovative once they stopped listening. so apple et apologists thinks 264 is a solution, its not that i think ogg is ideal to scale, but it is a foundation for an open platform. h.264 is certainly not. it might be free, like beer, at the discretion of the ownership collective. however, if you return to daring fireballs article where hes talking about flash on the iphone, and the justification for non-support, youll note it takes a user's experience edge for justification. however, when you move to the flip side, its the developers who get screwed.

sure, you can watch youtube with h.264, but if you try to do anything higher up in sophistication youre going to need to license it. if you want to have a program that edits or has corporate functionality, fork over some money. or, even easier, dont make your program. just let quick time do it. let apple do it. pay them instead.

at any rate, there is a subtle coercion of users by microsoft that the user is 'secured,' and its not true. the subtle coercion of apple is that the user is 'happy,' and they may have something, but they have supported the excise of freedom. i dont think it fits, but ill throw the 'he who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither' maxim in here for some fizzle of a finish.

suffice it to say, microsoft creates an illusion of protection, apple dumbs you down so you dont know to want more. if real life expereince could inform user level experience, we would have a very different attitude toward both.

*i liked these posts and they convinced me just to finish up:

• http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000676.html
• http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000675.html

America Online 3.0, HTML5, and APIs: part ii / iii

ignorance:

• why would i pay for internet explorer or netscape when i am already paying for america online (unlimited!)? i can’t afford another world wide web

Tell yourself right now: “I am NOT a Tourist.”

Coming to the computer, the only skill people should require is the ability to leverage their sense of real world knowledge and apply it to their expectations of their web presence. Considering that most people have some rough grasp of how they would fare being stranded on a desert island, it seems odd to consider that most people have no idea that the same scenario applies when they are dropped in front of a computer. Most people think would compare it with being dropped into a foreign city, though most of the time the people assume the people speak the same language, just with a dialect (based on users aptitude). remember the concept that people are familiar with the computer environment because the computer has a corporeal existence in some room in the user's home? this is a concept the user must, by now struggle to overcome.

However, as in the case of a desert island, a return to our baser instincts is necessary for survival and prosperity. For the sake of example assume rescue was never going to happen. Further, you want to build up a civilization. First you’ll need a foundation. In this endeavor we find the leveraging of our real world experience, knowledge, and expectations in addition to our constant need to test and re-test methods. Moreover, one needs to start thinking beyond the resources he or she hopes or expects to find and must become more tinkerous in finding ways to create tools and uses for things unknown.

Fortunately, in the case of a computer as opposed to a desert island, the operating environment and objects involved are much more resilient than if you eat that thing with the really, really pretty flowers both in maintenance and recovery.  Moreover, most trivial things don’t need to be learned over and over by trial and error, but can be researched quickly.

What I am driving at is not simply a survivalist attitude with respect to your computer, but rather to back down from the pedestrian attitude that you should rely on others like some complacent, idiot tourist. There is an increasingly limited space for the luxury of web tourism as more and more of our vital and standard life processes are basically embedded implementations of these technologies.

To begin with, why should you still be paying for cable and internet, or debating paying for one or the other? These are the same place, the same backbone, the exact same service. Is it not akin to paying for America online 3.0 and Cable internet? Essentially, the cable is the medium and the service provider wants to quibble over the service(“s”) coming out of the other end because they don’t want to cope with the elasticity of consumer goods (i.e. internetservice AND television). It should be $50 a pipe, additional services extra.

However, as is common in scenarios like this you have two industries fused that should have nothing to do with each other. Content creators/distributors should have no affiliation with content delivery. This amounts not to a horizontal monopoly, where the company in mind controls a price fixable amount of the market. Rather it is a lateral problem where a merger of the two, as in the case of Time Warner, has a direct interest in stifling the market and providing a low level user experience due to a vertical monopoly. The merger of infrastructure-resource (I-R) is a problem because you have an entity that is able to apply market pressure on two different ends of the spectrum, you have two outcomes:

1. the I-R company outweighs the interests of competitors by virtue of restricting either the I- companies’ access to -R, or vice versa
2. the I-R can fix prices and retain inelastic product growth, wherein the goods as a resource-delivery never see innovation in pricing or productivity, creation or medium
3. the I-R company will be a contradictory bag of motivations, and it will act on behalf of one half in spite of the other. I.e. throttling internet connections utilizing p2p software due to piracy concerns, or DRM encumberance despite the supposed open platform of the network

This is akin to why health insurers should not also own hospitals. When you have one entity with sufficient clout to not only inform the decisions of an industry, but to place all others into a defensive crouch it is bad for said industry. But what does this have to do with the users?

The users ultimately have their wants and desires, expectations and ambitions shaped by the network and the providers. Here is where the hospital-insurer analogy is particularly apt. Rather than it being competitive between doctors providing good better best services, and then paying insurance, we have a system where you pay your premium, step in line, and hope for decent, mediocre, or just bad. But when the hospital-insurer linkage extends throughout the system, one might say, don’t the lateral monopolies compete against each other to provide better doctors and better prices in their networks? Ultimately no, they are a battle of lesser evils racing for the mediocre in an effort to appeal to bigger contracts. Its not that eventually you cant settle into a complacent happiness with whomever you find. The problem is that they beat you into samey complacency and settle-for-something-edness.

Think about this. Eveytime I go to my one doctor, I need blood work. I get hit with an EOB (“Explanation of Benefits”) from Aetna and an invoice from the Lab that hasn’t been paid. Now I know that if I wait long enough, Aetna will get around to paying some of it. Typically, the claims get re-submitted against me though since aetna’s EOB says only $X.XX is appropriate for any given service, and since the invoice is in excess someone is responsible for the rest. So I get a second invoice, reduced, but am I responsible for this one? My deductible is done and I paid the copay, so what is this extra out-of-pocket fee?

Does this make me want to find out more and learn about HMOs, PNPs, etc; or am I likelier to just pay the second invoice, or worse, change doctors for the sake of not getting this bothersome mail? Its not like any amount of reading your policy will make you prepared for these scenarios, just like reading your windows vista manual isn’t going to help you with resizing an active OS partition. Yet ninety percent of my transactions with aetna, a company I and my employer pay to provide me services, are like this?

So this results in reinforced ignorance. Should I pay for both my American online and my Internet Explorer service? Should I pay my doctors office twice and send more money to Aetna? Was the infrastructure involved in it at all? Better not ask. the networks and content providers conspire to inspire this mental reticence. Its in their dollar to dollar best interests.

What does this mean when we return from that analogy and apply it to html5 and APIs? The answer is in what kind of Hardware-Software, Internet-Content lateral monopolies there are. But before we tackle that, we must address the issue of ignorance.

(Aside from ‘leveraging blah-blah’ obviously,) how does one arrive at the understanding that, “hey wait, I don’t need to pay for America online and my web browser, it’s the same thing?” this is where we return to the desert island, and try to boost users’ self esteem and hope for eventual self-awareness. Don’t let the lateral monopolies convince you that living off the sea water and fronds is nutritious, or like you have any idea already how to survive. Don’t let the lateral monopolies make you in the mold of a tourist. You're not a tourist, you're there for good, and its yours to do with as you see fit, not what's in their best interest. They don’t know what's best for you, remember, they are supposed to react to changing markets rather than contrive market changes.