It has really gone too far. I don’t follow sports at all, but I heard the bullshit reasons for expelling one U.S. Team member prior to the closing ceremonies, now we read this:

The International Olympic Committee will investigate the actions of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal victory Thursday night by swigging beer and smoking cigars on the ice in Vancouver.

A number of players, including 18-year-old superstar Marie-Philip Poulin, were drinking alcohol on the ice following the team’s 2-0 defeat of the United States. (The legal drinking age in British Columbia is 19.) Players lingered for more than 70 minutes after the awards ceremony reveling in the arena, which was empty except for media and arena staff.

For crying out loud! They’re Canadian! They drink and smoke, thus enjoying life, much like we used to here in the U.S.A. until we allowed religious zealots that are one hijacked plane away from being the next Bin Laden into our governmental process. Now, everything which makes life worth living is taxed out of existence and banned in most places you would want to do it. Our jobs are being shipped over seas and viciously poor quality product is coming back in return, along with payoffs into the pockets of the terrorists which have been put into government by those same religious zealots who claim abortion is killing yet blow up abortion clinics with patients and workers inside.

Let me go on record as telling this terrorist organizations the following: You may have fucked America beyond recognition by taxing and or removing alcohol, tobacco, and all real pleasure known by man, BUT LEAVE CANADA ALONE. All one has to do is take one glance at this debacle known as health care reform to know that one more religious zealot added to the mix would make us the next Iran, not something any country would want to be, except the “moral minority” bound and determined to force their religious practices upon the world…just like Bin Laden.

It’s bad enough when massive banks which took millions, and in some cases billions, in taxpayer bailout money, import L1 and H1 visa workers with little to no care about either taxpayer opinion or national security. We’ve even gotten used to the “consulting firms” which were flying operatives over on tourist visas then billing them out as consultants to clients and paying these people on a 1099. Thankfully the IRS caught onto it as well and now there is a massive round up going on. Now, the colleges are even openly funding al-Qaeda. Of course, the IRS seems to have caught onto it at roughly the same time a guy was busted in Denver for buying lots of hydrogen peroxide for another group of guys in New York. Now CEO’s and HR executives are quaking in their boots because when the case goes to trial, those who signed the sponsorship will find out they agreed to serve the same sentence as the convicted.

Back in December, near the 15 ^th, a technical college in Madison Wisconsin put out an “ immediate need” requirement for a technical writer. In January, they decided to bundle all 89 IT project requirements they had into one massive bid. At no point was there a requirement that submitted candidates had to be a U.S. Citizen. Judging from the phone calls I received on this, there was also no requirement that any consulting firm submitting candidates for bid have a single U.S. Citizen on their payroll or in management. English certainly wasn’t required to be the primary language of anyone involved, which makes one wonder what the result of all the writing would be.

The “immediate need” still has not been filled. It’s now February 17 ^th, so this has gone on for more than two months. If a technical college is teaching their IT students “immediate need” means under three months, then they well and truly are turning out useless graduates, but, they don’t care, because they are directing our tax dollars into an area with the highest probability of those funds ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda. While it is true that there have been home grown terrorists in the U.S., the bulk of the recruits and funding still lies overseas. While federal authorities can track all of the charities in this country which sympathise with and are suspected of directly funding acts of terrorism against this country, It is a much more daunting task when the money leaves this country in the form of payroll or savings and enters a banking system which is not electronically monitored.

Earlier this week, the college managed to release counts, but not lists of names of those they selected. They have repeatedly had time to send out communications to all those submitting that “high bids” will not be short listed. There is no adequate description of what a “high bid” is. There is also no mention that as a school receiving federal money in one fashion or another that they are required to pay the prevailing wage AS DETERMINED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR for each job.

Then again, you would think that a college, funded with federal tax dollars, either directly or indirectly via student loans and grants, and state tax dollars, either directly or indirectly, and the college savings accounts of U.S. Citizens in and around the area would demand that all contractors submitted be U.S. Citizens. It is the only ethical thing for them to do. So far, I have seen no evidence what-so-ever that is the case.

It’s been a while since all of the crimes happened. We still haven’t seen a criminal prosecution of Google executives, and as long as the Writer’s Guild has the drug induced fantasy that they will one day be adequately compensated, we never will see actual criminal justice handed out. This has lead to a new definition of “Googling”.

Googling The displaying on a Web site without permission or intent of financial compensation, copyrighted material, most notably books, in PDF or other easily pirated formats.

Given that nobody from Google has went to prison for it, this has become a new Internet Mega-Trend. There are now more and more sites engaging in the practice. One Googling site I discovered today doesn’t even try to look legitimate.

http://www.pdfqueen.com/

No ownership or contact information is displayed. Just like Google, they are breaking international law and they know it. It appears to have some serious crawling software behind it as well. When I was attempting to get my SOA book converted into EPUB format using Calibre, I found a number of bugs. I ended up sending the first 205 pages of the PDF file up as an attachment to the bug report as this file could reproduce every problem I was having. In order to look at that portion of the information in the bug database you had to be a valid registered user. I say this now because that very file and information leading back to it turned up on PDFQueen. There is no method listed for protesting the use of copyrighted material or requesting its removal.

Once again, I’ve been Googled.

I guess I could also title this post “Are There Any Ethics Left in Technical Recruiting”, but everybody already knows the answer is “No!” In order to make anything blog worthy about that statement, one must be able to demonstrate just how non-existent ethics really are. This goes way beyond the typical practice of flying illegal aliens over, paying them on a 1099, and stacking them 8 deep in a room at Homestead Studio Suites. I’ve had a lot of smaller examples over the past few weeks, but one recent example really stands out and should serve as a good example for the industry.

Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this firm uses a precious stone/metal as its name. A more accurate name for the firm would be clinker, but that is an entirely different blog post. Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this one boats of its memberships in organizations which are supposed to improve IT and consulting in general. They claim to belong to ASA (American Staffing Association) which has a published code of ethics, and TechServe Alliance (formerly NACCB) which also has a Statement of Business Principles which also wraps up a code of ethics. The thing of it is that nobody actually audits to see if the firm meets any of the requirements or violates the code of ethics. A consultant or a client must crawl across broken glass filing complaints with the organizations with little hope of intervention.

Simply put, once the logo is on the company Web site, it’s business as usual for most of the members. Here’s a shiny example.

Here are your responsibilities as a technical recruiter:

1. To read up enough on the industry skill sets to know that the REQ in your hand requesting a Windows CICS developer is just wrong in so many ways. When a requirement comes in with an acronym you’ve never heard of it is your responsibility to research a definition before including it in your posting.

2. When you publish a phone number with your job/contract opening, it is your responsibility to respond either by email or phone to everyone who leaves a message within 2-3 business days. If you don’t want phone calls your ad must clearly state people are not to call and must not show a phone number.

3. When you present a candidate to a client it is your responsibility to keep the candidate up to date. If the position “ goes on hold” it is your responsibility to inform the candidate the same day. Yes, email is fine. At no time is it ever acceptable to hurl a resume over the wall and ignore the candidate.

4. It is never ethical, moral, and in most cases not even legal to tell a candidate to rewrite their resume to match the job posting with all of the buz words from the requirement highlighted.

5. It is your responsibility to talk with the candidate before presenting them, not only to agree to billing rate, but payment terms and contract duration. It is never acceptable to simply present a resume which came in via email at some point without contacting the person. You will need an email from them stating they have given you the right to present.

There used to be technical recruiting associations which actually enforced these rules…well…the email thing is a rather new addition…replacing fax…but these were basically the rules. They are actually squirreled away in a lot of the ethics codes out there, but you usually have to find a supporting document when interpreting things like:

DO NOT misrepresent a consultant’s pay rate, contract terms, assignment duration, or other subjects pertinent to the business relationship.

DO actively avoid misrepresenting a consultant’s skills or experience.

DO NOT defame clients, consultants or competitors.

To treat all applicants and employees with dignity and respect, and to provide equal employment opportunities, based on bona fide job qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, or any basis prohibited by applicable law.

To maintain high standards of integrity in all advertising, and to assign the best qualified employees to fill clients’ needs.

So, over the course of eight business days I left a message each day with Variable_J. I never received an email or a return voice mail. Adding insult to injury the greeting on Variable_J’s phone sounds like he recorded it after smoking his fourth joint of the morning. It leaves a caller with the impression he is off satisfying the munchies and may not return for days.

After eight days, I had pretty much had enough of this. I called the main number and asked for Variable_J’s boss. I was told that was Variable_K and transferred to his phone. I left a message stating that I had been trying to contact Variable_J for eight business days without response. I also informed him that the greeting on the voice mail sounded like he was stoned, and that the combination was highly unprofessional.

Some time later my cell phone rang with a RESTRICTED number. Naturally I didn’t answer. Telemarketers call like that now I’ve been told. A few minutes after that failed Variable_K called back from a regular number. He told me it was not cool to call the boss of a recruiter even if the recruiter wasn’t doing their job. He said never to bother him again and hung up.

You know, there was a time when the New York Attorney General would take the time to file wire fraud charges against such a place. Then again, that same AG tended to book a date with a hooker right after such a filing, so I guess justice must be somewhat limited in the world. Isn’t it really wire fraud to post membership logo’s on your corporate Web site, then adhere to none of the ethics codes those logos imply?

http://www.americanstaffing.net/members/code_of_ethics.cfm

http://www.techservealliance.org/about-techserve/techserve-business-principles.cfm

If you’ve worked in IT for any length of time you have encountered every type of bottom feeding technical recruiter. Some firms in the Chicago area have standing instructions with their receptionist to route all job related phone calls directly to a voice mail box and to empty that mail box any time it is full. I have heard of greeting messages from some, supposed heads of technical recruiting, that they would not be returning any voice mail left regarding a job opening.

It’s pretty obvious that ASA, TechServerAlliance, and all the rest of these agencies don’t bother policing their membership otherwise “clinker” wouldn’t be able to have their logos on its Web site.

I remember quite some time ago when there was an ad campaign which simply said “vote the crooks out of office”. Any money it raised went into running more ads. There were even T-shirts sold to fund the campaign. The campaign didn’t care what political party the candidate was in. Rather, it had a simply philosophy, every incumbent was obviously a career criminal which needed to be moved further away from the tax payer’s wallet.

Funny how things come back into style. I’m seeing a lot of the same campaign. Some say crook and others say criminal, but they have the same sentiment. We’ve all been royally screwed by both Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas, who said “no job is worth this” during his confirmation hearings, then took the robe and voted in favor of his former client, Monsanto, during a genetics trial which screwed farmers world-wide, not just in America, and every American tax payer that eats. I’m talking about the recent decision by the Supreme Court which said the limits on corporate campaign dollars were unconstitutional. Any entity can now spend as much as they want promoting the candidate of their choice, so now, big corporations are simply going to put forth one of their own employees and spend shareholder’s money promoting the employee, who is expected to help enact legislation no ethical person would enact.

Today, we are all watching as the checkbooks are open and the sky is the limit when it comes to trampling down health care reform. I would believe the healthcare companies have actually spent more in lobbying efforts than they spent in executive bonuses and stock options over the past 4 years.

Let’s be real here. We have the Post Office. We also have UPS and FedEx. The Post Office couldn’t turn a profit on a bet given its charter, and I’m OK with that. Six days per week a mail carrier delivers mail to every address in the country. Anyone that currently is inside of our borders can write a letter, place it in an envelop, and mail said letter to any address in the continental U.S. for under a buck. Not only is the cost low, but the letter will arrive within 3-5 business days…even on Saturday…for no extra charge. We always joke about the Post Office delivering the Christmas mail in June, but for the most part, it’s a money losing business which does a good job. UPS and FedEx have found ways to both compete with and utilize the Post Office. Those who have money and don’t like the Post Office have other options. Those who don’t have much in the way of money, still have service. Even if you never mail a letter, the Post Office will continue to deliver mail to your address.

I’m a Republican, though it hurts to say that out loud after two terms of snot-nosed-George. I want a public option. We already have Gubmint Motors putting out shitty cars and other manufacturers putting out better ones. Yes, you “could” get by with a Gubmint Motors vehicle, but after the screwing they gave the tax payer, nobody who pays taxes would even consider adding insult to injury by purchasing a new Gubmint Motors vehicle. Admittedly, in the future, I’m sure Congress and/or the White House will authorize pissing even more tax dollars down that abyss and funding programs to get low income people new Gubmint Motors vehicles to help clean up the environment. Of course, since many states have a mandatory insurance law, that program will simply be there to help fill the prisons faster.

I didn’t want Gubmint Motors. I was vehemently against giving any faction of those lying-thieving-inept-bastards one red cent from the federal treasury. We ended up with Gubmint Motors. While they will cook the books in Aurthur Andersen accounting style to “show” a profit, they can never pay back enough to the treasury to cover the royal *(&)_(*&ing we got by them ducking out on their pension and healthcare liabilities. Until they cover all of that along with every cent we’ve had to pay every former GM employee in unemployment and health insurance benefits, they haven’t turned a profit. I want to see a law enacted which garnishes the wages of GM’s upper management and Board of Directors taking 70% of their wages and 100% of all bonus and stock options from them until they pay back every last red cent of that debt.

On the flip side, I want a public option. I want a government run health plan which provides all of the basic coverage needed by both individuals and families and I want every citizen to have the option of signing up without any exclusions. Rather than basing the premiums on the current industry trend, I want the premiums to be based upon a person’s ability to pay. At some point your income will be low enough your coverage is free. Those people making more than $180K/yr (based upon adjusted gross on their 1040) would find the premiums quite high compared to regular commercial plans. The Gubmint Insurance option would never make money, but it would force a nationwide ethical threshold for insurance.

Right now we have absolutely nothing establishing a bottom. Each state licenses the health insurance providers it allows to operate within its borders. Naturally, there have been an awful lot of bribes and some states only have one or two “licensed” providers. This really hit home recently.

A friend from NY asked me what I did for health insurance. I said I went to this eHealthInsurance.com Web site, answered some questions, and took a real 80/20 policy which costs less than $500 every two months. I told him there were dozens of providers selling insurance there. We are in the same age bracket and industry. In NY there were about three different companies providing insurance and the “cheap” policy was pricing out at $1700/month if you wanted anything other than a “surgery only” policy. Just for grins he changed his zipcode to mine and wa-la! There were about a dozen competing insurance companies and he found premiums of under $500.

Will Gibmint Insurance help me? Yes, but not as much as it will help him and everybody else in that boat. People in those markets will flock to Gubmint Insurance simply until the premiums in their area drop to an acceptable level. I expect there would be a shuffling of premium pricing in IL. Whenever book sales are high and I’m working a lot of overtime consulting, my current insurance would be best. When there is another slow down and the income stream drops to around $20K, Gubmint Insurance based on ability to pay would be best.

It’s up to us to fix this. The midterm elections are coming up. Not only must we vote the criminals out of office by making certain no incumbent returns, but we must replace said incumbent with any third party candidate vying for the seat. We went through this back in the days of Ross Perot. Before the dude went weird and dropped out of the election, America was set to elect its first third party candidate. No matter how awful of a president he turned out to be, he would have been better than what we ended up with. One thing happened though. During the debates and the interviews, the two main party candidates fell all over themselves to point out just how much like Ross they were.

I’m not normally very political, but this is pissing me off. It’s obvious the bill of sale has been completed by the healthcare industry for every public official in Washington at this time. It’s time we flood Washington with people from all of those “other” parties who’ve never held public office, never had a taste of lobbyist dollars, and never forced an earmark into a bill just to get some lobbyist project funded.

Vote the crooks out of office and send in the third party candidates. It is the only way to effect change at this point.

Scammed this from a message in comp.os.vms

–2010 Date Recognition Problems

(January 5, 2010)

German payment cards are not the only technology to be hit with problems recognizing dates in the new year. (See story below.) Smartphone users running Windows Mobile are getting text messages dated 2016. Symantec’s Endpoint Protection manager is labeling signatures dated in the new year as being out-of-date; until the problem is addressed in an update, new malware signatures will be dated 12/31/2009 with increased revision numbers. Other vendors affected include Cisco, SpamAssassin.

ISC:

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7870

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7873

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/The-year-2010-is-causing-I…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/symantec_y2k10_bug/

Yesterday was quite entertaining. I spoke on the phone with a pimp late in the day about a contract at a former client site of mine. This pimp was obviously not a native and was subbing work through the industry bottom feeder, US Tech (they’ve actually managed to take the title away from EDS which should tell you just how low the firm is.)

The hilarious part of the conversation wasn’t hearing from the pimp, but rather hearing a voice which was obviously not from the midwest of the USA lament about how the off-shoring and influx of illegals had trashed billing rates and slaughtered the quality industry wide. He received hundreds of positions every day he didn’t bother to post or work because the billing rates were so low you could only get someone that would end up putting you in prison via the sponsorship clause. (For those who don’t understand that, some time around the time of the Patriot Act the rules changed for sponsorship. If you sign on the line for someone who is caught planning or committing an act of terror against the country or the people you get the same sentence they do. If they get the death sentence, you’ll be the very next person strapped into the chair on that very same day.)

I found it odd that someone, who obviously knew his company made money with these people, would be so dead set against even working the positions. At least I found it odd until we got around to discussing my working on a 1099 basis only. He hem-hawed around about really prefering W-2, but finally admitted they could work 1099. They just had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for their lawyers because of some recent problems.

Ah, the truth starts to leak. Why haven’t we heard it on the news? I guess, indirectly we did. There were some business announcement about tax collections being up this year without any explanation as to why. Now, the truth has slipped out. Plane load after plane load of IT and other “consultants” have been coming here for years on tourist visas which do not allow for income generating work to be done. Well, a few firms finally got caught. You see, the tourist workers just plucked a company name out of the air without getting an EIN (Employer Identification Number), because they couldn’t.

Well, somebody slipped up and tried to issue a W-9 to one of these people. The IRS came to visit. The IRS went to a judge and got all of their payroll records for the past N years. The IRS collected all of the taxes on every person they had issued a check to, even if that person had already paid the taxes. It was a pay us now and fight to get your money back later situation. When the IRS got done collecting taxes and issuing fines, they sent all of the information they had gathered over to the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. When INS showed up it wasn’t a free visit either. I didn’t hear it from him, but there were a few contracts which suddenly re-opened within a few days of the INS visit as the people working on-site had to leave.

You’ve heard me complain for years about the incestuous relationship these off-shore companies have. When one of them gets a contract, the automated subbing network is so large that they all have the contract and are all trying to take a $5/hr cut. Well, the IRS is currently “following the family love trail”. If you watch postings on DICE it is pretty entertaining. You can almost chart the progress of the IRS. Off-shore companies which always flagged things CON_IND are suddenly updating positions to flag them CON_W2 or FULL_TIME. You can pretty much chart the day the IRS arrived.

Since none of those people could legally work here, none of them paid taxes. When they got sick they went to the emergency room and the taxpayer, not the off-shore consulting company, picked up the tab. Well, the bill is coming due. Guido and Vic are making the rounds and suddenly IRS collections are way up for the year.

I must confess that I was deeply saddened to learn that David Tennant would not be continuing as “the doctor” in Doctor Who. As a young kid, I was never that into Doctor Who. When the new series came about, I must tell you that I was less than impressed with the actor they had playing “the Doctor”. I watched some of the episodes because the scripts were so well done, but I couldn’t call myself a fan.

Things changed dramatically when they brought in David Tennant. I had no idea who he was or that he was even in the Royal Shakespeare company, let alone that he played Hamlet for them. The first thing to change was my buying of the premise. David’s acting ability is such that he was on screen for less than a minute and already I was simply along for the ride.

A few episodes into the new doctor I noticed that the level of writing for the show was skyrocketing. The scripts kept going farther and pushing the actors and they kept rising to the challenge. I must admit that I only “liked” the Rose Tyler character. Perhaps because the “wholesome blonde from a bad part of town” angle of her character seemed a bit cliché, perhaps because it was a bit too obvious everyone was trying to push for a love story with that character.

Then the writers introduced Donna Noble. What a treasure of a character! The chemistry between her and the doctor was simply could not be written into a script. During the all of the finally specials you heard several times people saying that David Tennant was an actor without limits. While I agree with that statement whole heartedly, I think a good many of the people saying such things failed to notice that Doctor Donna kept in locked step with the Doctor throughout her existence in the series.

It’s a horrible thing to watch the end of such a magnificent pairing and an even more tragic thing to see a young and brilliant actor walk away from such a remarkable show. I understand being young and wanting to branch out into other things. I also understand wanting to go out on top, rather than riding a once loved series all the way to the bottom as so many have done before. Speaking as one who is long in the tooth, at some point in the not too distant future, the energy of youth will fade and one will look back fondly on this time wondering why they didn’t try to make it last just a little longer.

One must pity any actor who thinks they can fill the shoes of David Tennant or that they will be given a companion character like Donna Noble or an actor (actress) like Cathrine Tate to play the role. Speaking as a published author who has never written screen play, I have to ask, where do the writers go after having written for David and Cathrine for so long? Do you continue lunging forward setting up the replacement for a spectacular flame out in just a couple of episodes or do you pull back to the level of writing we saw with the first new Doctor when I wasn’t a fan?

I am going to miss the Doctors without limits. Their particular DVD set may find its way into my collection.

I can’t read the following article without thinking they must have been hearing the opening bell from AC/DC’s “ Highway to Hell” throughout this entire demonstration.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-shows-off-Windows-apf-68417458.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=4&asset=&ccode=

MickeyWare has failed each and every time it has pushed a tablet onto the public. Bloated software and bad design cannot be compensated for by marketing. I’ve been there since the beginning. Early in my DOS days I was writing route auditing systems for Waste Management using the GridPad computer and proprietary pen based OS. Try as Tandy might, they couldn’t speed up the interface enough to compensate for the fact it had an 8086 running under it. Probably the worst thing they ever did was to allow for the display of graphics because management wanted every button to have a bitmap once they found that out. Adding insult to injury was the fact we had what amounted to EEPROM cards for both software and data storage. The combination of these two things made every screen paint horribly slow.

This isn’t the first time MickeyMouse Ware has tried to push a tablet on us. Anyone reading this old enough to remember when PenWindows came out? http://danbricklin.com/tabletcomputing.htm It is nice to see that not much has changed since that blog was written in 2002. What is more impressive is the fact we have seen nearly every computer manufacturer drop one of these turds onto the market and, without exception, they have all failed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer Just take a look at the long list of convertible PCs at the end of that article. I’m not even certain the list is complete, but I remember the hype surrounding each one of those products as the plopped into the toilet of life.

The convertible was always the holy grail for hardware designers. In theory this allowed you to satisfy your existing notebook base while grabbing new sales territory. In reality, they simply polluted landfills faster. That flexy-twisty spot used some form of cable in every design and the cables always broke.

We shall see if Apple has figured it out. Microsoft is obviously a has been company given the joint announcement they had with HP about yet another market turd this week. They had to be rushing to have a conference in front of Apple just so they could try to make it sound like they didn’t attempt a cheap imitation of yet another Apple rip-off. Anyone remember Zune???

I’m willing to be Apple got it right. I’m willing to bet they ditched the “convertible” idea completely and simply provided extra USB and/or PS/2 ports on the side of a razor thin table. You see, today’s “gear kids” already go through keyboards like an older generation went through Boones Farm wine. Not only do they keep multiple keyboards laying around at the various places they tend to work (as do most business travellers today), but the younger crowd tends to carry these things in their backpack. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/5a7f/ I’ve seen them for under $20 in some mail order catalogs. I’ve tried typing on them in a few stores. Definitely not the easiest on the fingers, but you can get through a couple of meetings with them, no problem.

What was once considered an oddity is now considered common place, and that is the true norm of life. I’ve had a habit for years of rotating out keyboards every so many weeks or months, just to break up the monotony of typing. You see, I have to blame Chicony for this. Some time, not long after I bought my AST Premium 286 PC, I bought a Chicony KB-5181 clicky keyboard. That keyboard was the absolute best! It had the perfect spring and it was loud with its clicks. Most of today’s keyboards (even the cheap ones) don’t make any noise, or simply make a plastic rattle when you type fast on them. The 5181 had IBM PS/2 keyboard users telling me I needed a quieter keyboard. (You might still be able to find a PS/2 keyboard to get an idea just how loud the 5181 was.) I moved that keyboard from machine to machine to machine.

The problem was that the old keyboard used a big-DIN connector. I had various adapters to take it down to PS/2, but they all seemed to fail after a while. Finally, it became apparent that the keyboard driver chips on “modern” computers simply wouldn’t support a keyboard that still had an XT/AT switch on the bottom of it. (Yes children, there was a time when you couldn’t move a keyboard from one computer to another without tossing a well hidden DIP switch on the keyboard.)

After having gotten to the point in life where I had to toss that (and the other old big-DIN) keyboards out I had accumulated over the years, I got into the habit of picking up keyboards if I happened to see one for under $12 (usually $6) that seemed to type nice. I was doing my travelling consulting bit then, and the one thing you could always leave out of your gear to save space/weight was a keyboard for your notebook. Oddly enough, there always seemed to be room to bring the keyboard back. I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.

I suppose if I hadn’t gotten into the “cheap keyboard” phase and hadn’t been travelling to client sites I wouldn’t have gotten into the accumulate keyboard phase. I simply would have went out and dropped another $60-$80 on a keyboard I loved and moved it from machine to machine again. Of course, I take computers with me more now that I have a notebook instead of a singer sewing machine to lug around. Unless you are really old, you probably don’t have any concept of what a 38lb portable computer the size of a portable sewing machine looked like. I even had trouble finding a picture on-line. Mine weighed in at 38LBs because I had the 9” color VGA monitor and a whopping 40Meg hard drive with a dual 5.25 and 3.5” floppy drive. Those of us who needed to be able to add cards into our computers (like Digiboard 8 port serial cards or PIO-48 cards to control relays) had no choice. Eventually “ lunch box” computers came out. They weighed less, and as long as you didn’t need to put in a full length ISA card, you could get by with them. All of them had a built in drop down or tilt out keyboard that “could” be used to type on, but most of us also lugged around a keyboard we liked. A lot of vendors now sell “ rugged” versions of these lunch box computers pretty much for the same reason many of us carried a sewing machine.

Before I confuse the younger crowd too much, there were no batteries with either the luggable sewing machine sized or lunch box sized portable computers. You still had a big black standard power cord wadded up in that box which had to find an outlet. You didn’t even think about trying to use such a thing on the plane or a train. In many ways I miss my 486DX laptop from those days. I could use it on a train and running DOS with WordPerfect or a programming text editor it got over 6 hours of battery life…sigh

So, HP and Microsoft are proving once again that they don’t have the vision required to open a can of beer, and the rest of us are waiting for Apple to come out with a tablet that allows a user to hook up their own keyboard if they want it.

There will be a significant business niche for a tablet computer, just not a consumer niche. The GridPad, while ignored by most of the PC trade rags, sold many units to business customers. Developers wrote customized business applications for them, and despite the cost of the units, they were put into the field. Until you think about just how hard it was to keep paper auditing forms clean and legible from inside the cab of a garbage truck, you cannot begin to understand how much money was saved by spending some on the GridPad and the auditing software. The data went straight into the corporate systems once the auditor got back. It wasn’t real time, but it was close enough for then.

I have seen UPS and other delivery companies steer away from pen based and touch screen based computers in their vehicles. Both companies appear to spend quite a bit of money on developing custom hand held computers. Part of me things the government should force both companies into handing some of that technology over to the U.S. Post Office so they could be a little more up to date on the package delivery side. Despite all of the brew-ha-ha you hear during the health care debate, The high end shipping companies don’t seem to have a problem with the Post Office being there. I have physically seen most of them come into my local Post Office to drop off packages for people. It appears the higher end carriers have some kind of arrangement for when shipping is light or doesn’t require signature that they simply drop it off at the local post office for delivery. In other words, the high end shipping companies have found a way to make money using the post office. I suspect the health insurance companies will do the same, much the way we now have Medicare with high end companies providing “supplemental” insurance.

Ah well, sorry, I veered off course there.

At any rate, the TabletPC is not going to be a “ wow gotta have it” product for consumers, especially in a down economy…unless Apple has found a way to get their smart phone to be solid at its current size, but expand to a full tablet with 24” monitor on demand, I don’t see the Tablet being more than a profitable niche. Actually, for Microsoft and HP, it won’t even be that.

While this blog entry might be considered self-serving (then again, what blog isn’t?) I need to tell you about an interesting Web site I found. It is interesting both for authors and for people who like the read. Those of you who cannot read probably aren’t reading this post anyway.

Harper Collins, one of the mega publishing houses with many imprints, has finally caved to the constant bitch-slapping it received about printing the same five books over and over again. They created a Web site which lets authors post some/all of their work for public review and comment. Book readers can communicate directly with the authors. If they like a book they can choose to “back” the book on the site. There is a convoluted formula to calculate ranking with. The site welcomes regular readers. Actually, it encourages the regular readers to join. It’s all free. Yes, the site has some technical problems, but those are mostly for authors trying to upload things.

What does HC get out of this? Well, periodically it takes the top N ranked books and forces their in-house editors to review them (along with the user feedback) for possible publishing contract. Of course, we have those who shouldn’t be writing out there trying to play ranking games to keep their book on the editor’s desk, but I could care less about that. I posted the promotional version of Infinite Exposure on the site mainly to get the feedback from readers. I’m not going to change anything in the book since I have it finalized for printing, but I will attempt to incorporate the comments into anything new I write.

http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=13804

So far the only major drawback I find with the site is that there is no manner of reading off-line. I don’t currently have a net-book (and until they get the battery life up to seven days instead of 70 minutes, I don’t want one). This means I have to read sitting at my desk, or lugging my laptop with power cable, into bed. This has become a regular occurrence for much of the business world it appears. Rather than fix the battery problem, the hard drive problem, and the software problem, a new product is created to make all of those problems more bearable.

http://www.brookstone.com/home-office-computer-accessories_e-pad-laptop-lap-desk.html?bkiid=categoryLandingPage_Home_Home_Office|C4CategoryProdList1FDT|6905345

Oh well. If you like being able to read books before they are published, and in many cases helping to shape their content or helping them to actually get published, you should check out http://www.authonomy.com.