Paul Jacobson

I was watching "Malcolm in the Middle" the other night and there is a part where Malcolm is complaining to his mom about his new job at the same store she works at and she says something to the effect that if he thought that work is meant to be enjoyable, he is mistaken.  This isn’t exactly a new concept and it seems to be the dominant view of work in general.  Is our working life meant to be so miserable and unsatisfying?  Is the best most of us can hope for that we can park our life when we walk into the office and pick it up in the evening (when we are not working) or on the weekends (again, when we are not working)?

Think about this one.  How often do you come across a story about someone who loves his/her work and you find yourself either wondering if that work is capable of supporting that person (the premise being that enjoyable work can’t be terribly productive or lucrative work) or if that person is somehow better luckier or better than you?

Have we become a society of people who resigned themselves to a dull existence during working hours in the often desperate hope that we may have some happiness on the weekend?  What happened to not accepting any work if it is not work we at least enjoy.  What about work we, gasp, love?  Kahlil Gibran said that work is love made manifest.  Is it?  At least the way we do it?

While still on a work note, here is a quote I saw yesterday evening which appeals to me:

Opportunity is missed by most people because it   
comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.   

    –Thomas Edison

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I feel like I have been working almost flat out for the last month or so.  I have worked just about every day and night to get things going that I feel like I am forgetting what it feels like not to work at night.  It is late, again, and I am exhausted.  There is a baby in the building screaming its head off - it sounds like cats fighting and that is a disturbing sound.  Poor baby is probably teething.

G and I had a fight tonight over some stupid shit because I was irritated because she expected me to varnish a set of bookshelves even though G stained two sets of bookshelves and gave the one a coat of varnish.  Silly me!  So she has gone to bed, upset with me and probably thinking she did something wrong.  Instead it was just her silly boyfriend getting uptight about having to do his fair share.  I so rarely get annoyed about things and when I do it is often about something silly.

Did I mention there is varnish all over the place and there is this annoying mosquito still flying around evading my half-hearted swats?

Ugh!  Bed time.

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I got this one from one of my colleagues.  I have seen it before and it is brilliant!

1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud.  Let your stillness be as the
wooded glen.  And sit up straight.  You’ll never meet the Buddha with
such round shoulders.

2. There is no escaping karma.  In a previous life, you never called,
you never wrote, you never visited.  And whose fault was that?

3. Wherever you go, there you are.  Your luggage is another story.

4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the
following: get rid of the motorcycle.  What were you thinking?

5. Be aware of your body.  Be aware of your perceptions.  Keep in mind
that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

6. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

7. Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Forget this and
attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

8. The Tao has no expectations.  The Tao demands nothing of others.  The
Tao does not speak.  The Tao does not blame.  The Tao does not take
sides. The Tao is probably not Jewish.

9. Drink tea and nourish life.  With the first sip, joy.  With the
second, satisfaction.  With the third, Danish.

10. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all
sentient beings.  Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being
who happens to be Jewish and get married?

11. Be patient and achieve all things.  Be impatient and achieve all
things faster.

12. To Find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand
flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.  Each blossom has ten
thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

13. Be here now.  Be someplace else later.  Is that so complicated?

14. Zen is not easy.  It takes effort to attain nothingness.  And then
what do you have?  Bupkes.

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Wired posted a really good article about Firefox and its development and as a self-proclaimed Firefox nut, it was a pleasure to read all three pages of the article.  The article is titled "The Firefox Explosion" and if you are interested in the background to Firefox as well as some more about its recent successes, check it out.

I have pasted a chunk of the article to whet your appetite:

For Rob Davis, the final straw came during a beautiful

weekend last summer, which he spent holed up in his Minneapolis

apartment killing a zombie. The week before, a malicious software

program had invaded Davis’ PC through his browser, Internet Explorer,

using a technique called the DSO exploit. His computer had been

repurposed as a "zombie box" - its CPU and bandwidth co-opted to pump

reams of spam onto the Internet. Furious, Davis dropped out of a

planned Lake Superior camping trip to instead back up his computer and

reformat his crippled hard drive. Then he vowed never to open IE again.

Lucky for Davis, a new browser had just appeared on the scene -

Firefox, a fast, simple, and secure piece of software that was winning

acclaim from others who also had grown frustrated with Internet

Explorer. A programmer friend told Davis about Firefox. He didn’t know

that the browser was an open source project and a descendant of

Netscape Navigator now poised to avenge Netscape’s defeat at the hands

of Microsoft. He just knew that he didn’t want to waste another weekend

cursing at his machine. So Davis drove to the friend’s house and copied

Firefox onto his battered laptop. He hasn’t had a problem since - and

now he’s telling anybody who will listen about Firefox’s virtues. "I’m

no anti-Microsoft zealot, but it’s unconscionable that they make 98

percent of the operating systems in the world and they let things like

this happen to people," says Davis, a PR man by day who liked Firefox

so much that he initiated a fundraising campaign to help promote the

browser. "There’s a lot of pain out there."

Firefox couldn’t have arrived at a better time for people like Davis

- or at a worse time for Microsoft. Ever since Internet Explorer

toppled Netscape in 1998, browser innovation has been more or less

limited to pop-up ads, spyware, and viruses. Over the past six years,

IE has become a third world bus depot, the gathering point for a crush

of hawkers, con artists, and pickpockets. The recent outbreak of

malware - from the spyware on Davis’ machine to the .ject Trojan, which

uses a bug in IE to snatch sensitive data from an infected PC - has

prompted early adopters to look for an alternate Web browser. Even in

beta, Firefox’s clean, intuitive interface, quick page-loading, and

ability to elude intruders elicited a thunderous response. In the month

following its official November launch, more than 10 million people

downloaded Firefox, taking the first noticeable bite out of IE’s market

share since the browser wars of the mid-’90s.

…

Continue Reading »

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Here is a nice bit of trivia I found on business2blog.  The Register has reported that David Bradley, the guy who invesnted, amoung other things, the often used keyboard combination and cure for recalcitrant computers, Ctrl-Alt-Del, is retiring:

Ctrl-Alt-Del inventor makes final reboot

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)

Published Thursday 29th January 2004 19:56 GMT

David
Bradley, one of the ‘dirty dozen’ engineers who created the original
IBM PC at Boca Raton, Florida, is to retire this week after 29 years
with the company.

Bradley’s accomplishments are numerous - he wrote the BIOS code for
the original PC and rose to become architecture manager at the PC
group. But David’s claim to fame is that he devised the most famous -
and probably most used - three key combination in computer history:
Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Continue Reading »

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