Blogging Ahead

Finding tech workers

You can quibble with parts of this speech by Paul Graham (one of the developers of Viaweb), but I found this part interesting in terms of the Jacksonville economy:

With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. I can't tell, even now. You also can't tell from their resumes. It seems like the only way to judge a hacker is to work with him on something.

And this is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. The active ingredient here is not so much the professors as the students. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together they cook up new projects of their own.

One of the somewhat hidden treasures of the First Coast is FCCJ, known nationally for its technological programs. In the long run, I think, the school is important because it can bring together creative people and get them working together on projects that will have long-term impact.

A company by any other name ...

Another example of things that make the Internet great ...

Ever wonder why Yahoo! is called Yahoo!, or why SAAB is written all in caps? Or just curious about who, exactly, McDonald's and Kawasaki were named after? Well, wonder no more.

The Wikipedia -- a free, user-created encyclopedia -- includes a list of company name etymologies, running the gamut from ABN AMRO to Zeus. (Well, technically from 3M, since they start with numbers, but that doesn't sound as good.)

Late to bed, late to rise

Coming on the heels of this article, I'm beginning to wonder how any work gets done in England. Today, the Guardian offers a book excerpt that ponders why we're so obsessed with being busy:

For all modern society's promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose. Why have things come to such a pass? Well, the forces of the anti-idle have been at work since the fall of man.

'Just a business transaction'

We're not about to urge people to try making a living out of playing the lottery, but for a couple of guys in Missouri, figuring out the math behind the luck turned a Pick 3 game into a sure thing.

The numbers the lottery drew in Thursday's midday Pick 3 game were 4-5-2 in the regular drawing and 1-4-4 in a bonus drawing that Seidel says guaranteed him a 20 percent return on the $23,000 of chances he and his friends bought, at $1 a pop.

That was an easy $4,600 in profit that they cashed in on Thursday afternoon and Friday.

"It was just a business transaction," Seidel said of the plan Friday, after reaping the bulk of his winnings from a Dierbergs store, where a manager ushered him and his friends in a back room to dole out several thousand dollars.

Making cable competitive

When Comcast made its unsolicited bid for Disney back in February, it seemed like an odd move: Comcast is an infrastructure company: It's supposed to just supply the pipes that companies like Disney provide the programming to send down.

In an in-depth interview with Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast (Jacksonville's cable operatore). we find out how the company is looking at the future, and why the Disney deal was so important to the company:

Like a card player who has tipped his hand, Mr. Roberts acknowledged with the bid that Comcast needed more exclusive programming to complement its national cable network. The combination would have transformed Comcast from an ordinary cable operator - of the type that are increasingly being treated by Wall Street like reliable but slow-growing utilities - into a media company with the clout to battle Time Warner, Viacom and the News Corporation.

More travel tech

Following up on the last post, here, via Gizmodo, is a review of another, non-Apple, traveling access point:

SMC has thrown the kitchen sink into its traveler’s access point, a street price $99 device that has the full complement of Wi-Fi options

Connecting on the road

This is a little on the techy side of things, but this discussion on using Airport Express in hotel rooms might be of interest to business travelers (or the sort of people who bring their laptops/WiFi devices everywhere they go).

The conversation started with the author explaining how he used his AX to bridge a wired connection to his laptop. The real value, though, might be in the comments readers have added:

We've done something similiar to what Colin Smith described above. We had three people that needed to work together in the hotel room, so one of us connected to the hotel LAN network, charged the $10 to their room and then created a wireless network using their powerbook. Then the two other people connected to that powerbook wirelessly.