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Twitter Updates for 2009-07-04

Please send your checklist as it now stands of things to do to prepare for redundancy.
I know you’ve already done some of the stuff on there and that there are things to add which will be specific to me, but I’d be grateful!

But alas most of it has been erased because that’s how I work; to reconstitute it from memory will be hard, so I’m posting this to the world in order to solicit feedback/ideas and stuff I’ve missed.

So far, what I can remember doing / planning to do, is:

1) mail your manager to get confirmation that you are being RIFed - a 1-liner will suffice

2) if you want to keep your cellphone number, forward your manager’s confirmation to the “mobilephones@” alias, along with your cellphone number; this will get you a PAC code so you can take your number elsewhere

3) contact your healthcare provider (BMI, BUPA, whoever) and talk about carrying your existing policy forward into a private one; this will save you the cost of a medical check for future health insurance, because they roll your existing coverage forwards rather than treating it as a new enquiry.

4) visit hrweb/hewitt and print out *everything* pertinent to you. PDF copies also make sense, but check for page-orientation issues.

5) visit the stockoptions website and print out *everything* pertinent to you. PDF copies also make sense, but check for page-orientation issues.

6) get a good independent financial adviser; you will need pension statements (both kinds, if you have the contracted-out as well as the corporate pension) and throw all the above paperwork at them.

7) tell the inland revenue as soon as everything is confirmed. tell them you will be unemployed from whatever date, etc. tell them if you intend to work again, and if so, how soon. ask them to issue a new tax code on that date. do not mess around with this else you will get laid-off in august and they will expect you to keep paying taxes as-per your tax code until April, and then ding you next year for a lot of money they expected but never got. eventually they might let you have some of it back.

Your mileage may vary, I am not a professional, there may be many other things I have missed.

Anyone else got any good ideas? Stuff that I’ve missed? Pleas add as comments to this posting…

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IF YOU ARE BEING RIF’D FROM SUN UK, PLEASE ADD TO THIS TODO LIST / CHECKLIST / POST

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Twitter Updates for 2009-07-03

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Twitter Updates for 2009-07-03


Message # 00661
**Hacker's section**
From: JONATHAN BARBER
To: ALL
Subject:EUCLID
Date: 6/3/86
Fob all of you who want an easy
hack heres how to get onto the
EUCLID computer.First di!l up'
JANET gn 01 831 6181 for 1200/75
or try 01 388 2333.Type PAD
and RETURN as soon as your connected
Then type HELP ADDRESS.Then type
CALL UCL.EUCLID*If nothing happens
hit RETURN a few times.You should
get a request for your account
number.Type in WMAPB00 W.The
password is PROJECT.

Have fun!


…referencing OS4000 on UCL EUCLID — I remember using those modem numbers at 1200 baud, too; with a huge modem (more than A4-size and 4cm deep) and a soldered-in linedrop switch.

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when hackers talked in even parity and were 40 columns wide

I predict a return to blogging as people discover the power of being able to finish a thought, and to link to another site without going through an intermediary. Once again people will discover the power of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

…and I think I agree that people will return to blogging — as I am doing — rather than Twittering, but for a series of reasons more complex than he avers:

This (above) is how I blog.

There are a variety of routes to navigate this diagram:

• I post a blog entry; this generates a tweet
• I tweet, this generates a blog entry
• Either of the above routes involve tweeting, which updates my Facebook status
• All tweets which were not generated by the blog, are rolled-up in a daily digest blog posting

…those are only four basic rules (for clarity I am leaving out blogs.sun.com, LiveJournal and LinkedIn, which sit under the “Aggregators” node) - but even if I have only two points of insertion (Blog/Twitter) I then have many places which I must “monitor” for comments; Facebook is the worst offender since I cannot (?) get ATOM feeds of status responses, so I must rely upon e-mail alerts, “Referer:” strings, GoogleAlerts / Searches and my memory; and then I anywhere I participate in a “conversation” I must continue to monitor them in order to pass feedback … juggling an ever-increasing number of chainsaws.

Again FB drops off my radar fastest, because I only truly use it as a distribution mechanism for Tweets, alas so many of my friends are there that quite lengthy comment-threads can occur, but not to be seen by anyone other than the permitted.

Friendfeed tried somewhat to address this, but it’s become just another silo. The problem is one of “silos” - data goes into one place but gets replicated everywhere (thank you, Dave) and then I/we lose track of it. A solution (possible the solution) to this is to disintermediate - have all my content on my blog, and have everything else be distributions of references/links back to it; but that risks being boring, think “truncated / partial content RSS feeds” and you’ll know why it’s boring.

I think the dispersion of data is part of the reason I have such a downer on Activity Streams which I see as the technological blogspace trying to ape Facebook’s “Status Updates”, rather than the other way round which is how I currently use Facebook. The specifications of Activity Streams are cute, and possibly even useful; but the direction in which they point implementors — further fragmentation of your digital footprint, the real extent of your “identity” as Adriana has explained — scares me.

So I believe that what you really will need is a Mine! - your own, literally your own personal silo. You decide who gets to see what. You hold the master copy for everything, and replication tends to wither away. No, it’s not going to replace Facebook or Twitter for everybody - if you’re reading this and thinking “this will never apply to me / I don’t have cascaded blogs / feeds / replication / what’s an aggregator / how will I back this up?” then you’re probably not my target market, and that’s OK.

But then, how recently did you get a blog? In the future, things might change…

More, later…

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Why, in the future, everyone will be blogging (again), and it’s not just what Winer said.

In the first video, Adriana deals with the user perspective of the Mine, and why it is being created; the second video is me reviewing the technical goals and talking about the implementation.

Each video is about 20 minutes. Bon appetit.

–
*i forgot to turn the camera on until way too late. mea culpa.

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The Mine! Project - Google Tech Talk Videos #themineproject #vrm

First impressions: for the price I paid, I was thinking it would be somewhat larger - sort of “Security Engineering, Second Edition”-size. Instead it’s closer to a “this slim volume…” size.

It looks like it’s a two-day read, but there’s a lot in the queue before it, so check back in a couple of weeks - I also have “Masterminds of Programming”, “Perennial Vegetables” and a swath of Python documentation to plough through first, as well as a refresher of the aforementioned Anderson book.

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New Book: The New School of Information Security

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Twitter Updates for 2009-07-02

I think it’s on its third set currently, since buying it in 2000. It gets used prettymuch daily for the Today programme, etc.

It would be great if my iPod nano could last that long on a single charge - but it can’t, and that’s rather the point.

Here’s hoping that an “analogue switchoff” for radio, dies a rapid death.

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Radio revolution will leave listeners in silence

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step 1 towards more blogging

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-30

Must read, Will Laugh.

Best quote:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

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Kid Swaps iPod For Sony Walkman, Gets A Culture Shock

Also: G1 runs Android runs Emacs. #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-27

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-25