Category Archives: Thoughts

Thoughts

Talk about screwing up

I get digest emails from the Economist every Thursday, on politics and business. Two things caught my eye in today’s edition.

  1. Chrysler appointed Robert Nardelli as its CEO. This is the same guy that left Home Depot after employee and investor dissatisfaction with his management and personal style, with a severance package worth about $210 million. So the guy pisses off people at Home Depot left and right, is run out of the company, but gets hundreds of millions in bye-bye pay… and then Chrysler hires him? Isn’t Chrysler supposed to be in trouble as a company? What do they see in him?
  2. Trump Entertainment Resorts reported a second quarter loss that was more than double that of last year’s. So they’ve been losing money all along, just like all of the other business ventures run by Trump, and yet their share price surged when they released their earnings report?! Are the investors sane?!

I’m going to rant a bit now, because I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. Donald Trump has to be one of the most overrated businessmen ever. On the whole, his career and life are an exercise in ridicule.

Take business: for years, he’s managed to do poorly in his ventures. He’s had a few successes, but on the whole, he’s run project after project into the ground. The ones that are still standing are so heavily in debt that they should be dead by rights. Yet investors continue to sink money into his ventures in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The guy cannot run a business in the black. He’ll run them all in the red, and he’ll pay himself tens of millions while his companies wither away.

Take life: he managed to get a TV show that was a hit with the general populace — that in itself was incomprehensible. He, the clueless, poorly performing CEO, dared to dole out business advice to others, and to act as a role model for other businessmen. If Trump is a model for American business and leadership, then God help us, because we’re headed for the crapper!

Take style: the man looks like he’s got a dead cat on his head. Over the years, he’s persisted with that cockamamie hairstyle to the chagrin of decent people everywhere.

Trump seems to be rubbing it in our faces: he’s ridiculing us. He may be saying something else, but his actions say, “Look, I’m going to thumb my nose at all of you. I’ve got you all eating out of my hand even though I can’t run a business to save my life.” In spite of this, people clamor to kiss his behind and stand in line to invest in his businesses. I don’t get it.

It seems to me that greedy losers do best in modern business, and Americans on the whole love to celebrate them. The two people I mentioned in this post are just a few of the guilty parties. But then, is that any wonder when almost every CEO has ridiculous compensation packages regardless of their job performance, and when companies (especially those that deal in non-physical assets) are stupidly overvalued? I think we’re headed for the crapper, and Trump and others like him are the icing on the cake that’s going to give us the runs.

Standard
Thoughts

Technorati’s new photo message

Logged into my Technorati account late last week to check my profile settings, and guess what I saw on my photo page? Granted, the message wasn’t for me, it was for every Technorati user, but I thought it was hilarious nonetheless:

For the benefit of those of you that can’t see the image above, let me quote the text:

“Tip: Please favor us with a photo that doesn’t depict your very special but also very private parts. We have to hunt down and quarantine those, and that’s bad for everyone.”

I guess they’re having problems with nasty people posting nasty pics of themselves, or else they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of warning users. That’s pretty sad — to know there are people out there with absolutely no sense of decency and self-control. Zooomr had a huge problem with this last year, in Mark II. You could browse its full photo stream — all public photos posted by users, as they posted them, and I did that a lot to discover great photographs. While I found plenty of great photographs that I faved, I also found plenty of pornographic images.

At any rate, that stuff was pretty nasty, and I spent plenty of time emailing Kris and Tom with specific links, and they would dutifully either make those photos private or remove them altogether. Flickr has the same problem, and that’s why they’re rating accounts as Safe, Moderate or Unsafe, which I think is a better approach than Zooomr’s — Kris and Tom are still stuck doing manual removals, even though they promised they’d introduce a feature to allow users to flag questionable photos.

My rantings aside, I thought Technorati’s approach was pretty funny, and I’m glad to see more companies do their part to make sure the nasties don’t get to poison everyone’s good time on the web with their filth.

Standard
Thoughts

The Simpsons me

I read a post over at Dawn Armfield’s blog today that resonated with me. It’s about one’s online identity, and whether you’re comfortable enough to be yourself even when you can be someone else. If you read my blog regularly, I think you pretty much know where I stand on that. I write in first person, my photo’s everywhere, I’m not shy about expressing my opinions, etc. I would ask where you stand on that, but it might be a moot point. I get the feeling that the people uncomfortable revealing their identity online, for whatever reason, won’t reply. I’ll only get comments from the ones like me.

Something fun did come out of it though, and I wanted to share that with you as well. Dawn built a Simpsons avatar for herself (you can see hers in her blog post) and inspired me to do the same. I headed over to the Simpsons Movie site, which is where you can partake in this fun little experience, and built one for myself. It was a bit difficult to find the bits and pieces that would make the character look like me, but in the end, I arrived at a reasonable facsimile. Have a look below. Ligia got a kick out of it. She said she liked it, and that it was really funny.

I don’t think I’ll be using this as my online avatar, but it’s fun to look at it. For example, I had no idea that I would like a hippie if I wore certain clothes. What do you think? And by all means, if you want to chime in on how you identify yourself online, please do so as well.

The Simpsons Me
Standard
Thoughts

The winner of the "Java I/O" book drawing

A few days ago, I announced a free book giveaway. The book was Java I/O, 2nd Edition, by Elliotte Rusty Harold (my review). All you had to do to qualify was to leave a comment on that post with your thoughts about ComeAcross — what you liked, what you didn’t like. There were only two takers, Jeremy and Cosmin. I held the drawing tonight — actually, the word drawing is a bit fancy. It was a coin toss. I went by the order of the comments and Jeremy got heads, Cosmin tails. Jeremy came out the winner, and will get the book. Jeremy, please send me your mailing address, and I’ll ship the book out to you! 🙂

I also promised I would post a link to the winner’s website directly in my blog post. Here is Jeremy’s blog, and it’s pretty cool. It was started in February of this year, and it deals with photography, technology and programming.

Stay tuned for more book giveaways in the future! I have plenty of books that might be useful to others, and would like to give them away if I can. Doing it through my blog is a pretty nice way to do it, too.

Standard
Thoughts

Book giveaway: Java I/O, by Elliotte Rusty Harold

I’ve got a whole bunch of new computer books that I’ve reviewed, and I realized I’m not using most of them. But I know there are people out there who need them. So, I thought I’d hold a free book giveaway. That’s right, it’s FREE. But you will need to pick the shipping method and cover the shipping cost, which you can PayPal to me.

The rules

So, how does it work? It’s simple, really. I’m always looking for feedback and ideas on how to make my blog better. All you have to do to qualify is to leave a comment on this post telling me what you like and don’t like about ComeAcross. I’m looking for thoughtful, considerate feedback. You don’t have to write entire paragraphs, this isn’t an essay. Just get to the point in a few sentences or less.

All of the people who leave comments will be entered in the drawing that I’ll do this Saturday evening. I’ll announce the result at that time, or on Sunday morning. I’ll contact the winner via email to get his or her mailing address, and if they’ve got a site, I’ll link to their site in a post right here on ComeAcross. That reminds me: please don’t post your mailing addresses in the comments… I’ll contact you to ask for it if you’re the winner.

The prize

The book I’d like to give away is “Java I/O, 2nd Edition“, by Elliotte Rusty Harold. It retails at $33. You can read my review of it right here. As a matter of fact, I encourage you to read my review before you ask for the book, just so you know what you’ll be getting.

I’ll be waiting for your comments, and thanks! 🙂

Standard