Some loyal readers will have read my earlier ambivalent post about applying for a job in another city. Since doing that, I've been alternately depressed about not hearing back from them, and relieved about not hearing back from them. Well, I finally got "the call," and after playing phone tag for a day or two spent an hour on the phone with my potential possible maybe future boss. Not that I've decided to go through with this. Then again...

Anyway, despite my inner turmoil about actually quitting my job and moving, the whole "pre-interview" thing went pretty well. We chatted about all sorts of things, and I got the sense that an actual interview was a definite possibility.

To my mind, the oddest part came up at the end, when he pointed out that the job would involve at least one trip to a small northern-European country well known for its fairy tales. He wanted to know if I was OK with this, given that several applicants had said they would refuse to travel overseas in "today's climate."

My feeling on this is pretty straightforward, and it hasn't changed a whit since September 11: If someone -- anyone -- wants to give me a free trip to Europe, I'm totally down with that. I'll meet you with passport in hand, anytime, anyplace!

That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole job thing...

Spam subject line of the day: "Diplomas from prestigious, non-accredited universities!"

Wow. Not only can I get a diploma from a "prestigious" university, but it's also non-acredited! Isn't the Internet great?

Danielle just blogged this very cool project, wherein volunteers take pictures at the confluences of latitude and longitude lines around the world. Turns out that one of them is across the street from a greocery store near my parents' house.

See, I always knew there was such a thing as too clean!

The closed streets and helicopters in my neighborhood this morning turned out to be because George W. himself was stopping to say the pledge of allegiance at a school up the street. Actually he was in town for a big political fundraiser for senate hopeful Lamar Alexandar , but the pledge shindig apparently made it count as a "business trip," allowing the government to pick up part of the tab.

Lamar happily accepted $800,000 in contributions from the Bush fundraiser, plus another $300,000 in soft money contributions to the state Republican party. This despite the fact that a few years ago Alexander accused Bush of holding an auction for the presidency on the White House lawn. Guess he's over that now...

Word is that Spanish porn giant Private Media Group (which is traded on the Nasdaq exchange), has made an offer of $3 million worth of stock to acquire the twitching remains of Napster. The company says it plans to create an adult-oriented peer-to-peer file sharing network featuring premium contentat additional cost. The RIAA, I expect, is happy.

I was never a Napster junkie, but I'll confess that I used it on occasion. The great thing was that you could try out all sorts of music without risking spending $15 on a totally lousy CD. I found a lot of music that I never would have discovered this way, and I've purchased CDs because I heard the music first on my computer. I think if the record industry had tried to come up with a fair and reasonable way to make this sort of service work, they would have done well. Instead, their knee jerk reaction just forced Internet music to be more furtive and ultimately less controllable.

Singer/Songwriter (and Nashville resident) Janis Ian wrote a great article earlier this year about how internet downloads are actually a good thing for most recording artists. In it she methodically debunks the assertions of the RIAA about how downloadable music hurts musicians and the music business:

If you think about it, the music industry should be rejoicing at this new technological advance! Here's a fool-proof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise never purchase a CD in a store. The cross-marketing opportunities are unbelievable. It's instantaneous, costs are minimal, shipping non-existant…a staggering vehicle for higher earnings and lower costs. Instead, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off, bleeding on everyone and making no sense.

One of these days, the big record labels are either going to get with the program. Or they're going to decline as cheaper and fairer alternatives emerge. It's their choice.

A rainy night in Nashville

The rabbit has a charming face; Its private life is a disgrace. I really dare not name to you The awful things that rabbits do; Things that your paper never prints -- You only mention them in hints. They have such lost, degraded souls No wonder they inhabit holes; When such depravity is found It can only live underground.

--Anonymous

After an extensive Internet archeology project involving retrieval of 20-year-old 9-track tapes from a warehouse in Pittsburgh, Mike Jones has traced the origin of the ubiquitous smiley :-) to a post on a Carnegie-Mellon computer system in 1982. Here's the idea that started the revolution:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(

It appears that the idea for a "joke mark" emerged after someone caused a panic by joking that one of the physics department elevators was contaminated with mercury. (There had been a previous discussion about what would happen to a blob of mercury on the floor of the elevator if the cable snapped.)

Interestingly, in reading the followup thread, many people began using doing it the other way (-:, which doesn't look very familiar to us now.

And now, an excerpt from Pumas on Hoverbikes at MonkeyBagel.com:

We've all heard the "herding cats" analogy with regard to managing programmers. Managing sysadmins is like leading a neighborhood gang of neurotic pumas on jet-powered hoverbikes with nasty smack habits and opposable thumbs. Oh, and as a manager you're a neurotic junkie puma too, only they cut your thumbs off and whereas all the other pumas get to drive around on their badass hoverbikes and fire chainguns at the marketing department, YOU have to drive a maroon AMC Gremlin behind them and hand out Band-Aids and smile a lot, when all you're REALLY thinking about is how to get one of them to let you borrow his hoverbike for a few minutes so you can show those fools how it's DONE. This is because managers are usually people who proved that they were handy with a chaingun and were thus rewarded by having their thumbs cut off and their weapons handed to some punk college hire.

Hehe. Very true, I think. Except that some managers weren't very good with the chainguns in the first place.

The Tennessean has posted a collection of almost 500 reader essays about September 11th. They are written by a wide variety of people -- 5th graders to retirees. Some are pretty out there -- one guy claims that he tried to warn NYC officials about the attacks based on what he read in the book of Revelations. But other are well written -- and taken as a whole the project is a notable cross section of the way people dealt with the tragedy. Here's one:

Why do people hate each other so much? I don't see why people hate each other so much that they would kill people and destroy buildings. I think they don't know what love is or have never felt love in their lives. I think we should all find ways to spread love around to other people. Some things we can do is be nice to all our friends and enemies, help feed the hungry and poor, give homes to the homeless and help our neighbors. Since Sept. 11, people have been nicer to each other and more helpful in their communities. To remember those who lost their lives, we should all try to do something every day to make the world a better place to live.

--Caleb Pease
Westmeade Elementary School

Here's another good one about living in fear. (The section also contains more than 400 drawings done by area school children.)

Check out Peeling the Onion, an interesting look at the making of The Onion. (Link via Scrubbles.) Includes this interesting observation:

Stalberg says he particularly liked Siegel's [Pulitzer Prize] nomination letter, which ended with a George Bernard Shaw quote that Stalberg wrote down and saved: " 'Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.' "

That, says Hanson, is what the Onion is all about. "Some people see comedy as a venue to provide light distraction, put a smile on other people's faces," he says. "And yet if you really understand what comedy really is, I believe, it's not about lightheartedness at all. It's about very harsh and terrible things that were really horrific. It's sort of a way of processing horror and misery. That's where comedy comes from."

I just applied for a job in another city. This is not a new thing. It's actually the third out-of-town job I've applied for in the last three months. The difference is that this is one I'm actually qualified for. The others were more "no way in hell they'd hire me, but if they really want to give me a lot of money to come work there, it would be cool." Crossing the line into jobs that I actually have a chance of landing is a bit of a leap for me. The thing is, I'm not even sure I want a new job. I came to work in Nashville just over four years ago. I never thought I'd end up this far south, but I was out of school and needed a job, and there was one here. By all rational standards, it was a pretty good job. It paid well, had a passing relationship to my undergraduate degree, and was a great opportunity to learn. The first year was a bit crappy, but overall I've learned a lot and I've gotten to do some very interesting things. But I'm not sure I've ever truly become a Nashvillian. Not that I have anything against the city. If anything, it's grown on me. And I think great things are happening here. Since I arrived, two pro sports teams have come to town, and a agreat new art museum and central library have opened. I think it's definitely a city on the upswing. But I continue to spend too much money flying back to places like Washington, New York, and Boston to visit friends and family. And when I am in Nashville I feel like I spend way too much time working. Perhaps, I tell myself sometime, it's just time for a change of scenery. This is not a new thing -- I've been telling friends that I'll be out of Nashville in two months for about 4 years now. But I now I'm actually considering doing something about it. But then there's my job, which for the most part I like and would have no real problem with if it were located elsewhere. And I don't think they'll go for the full-time telecommuting thing. So I'm totally not sure what I'd do if I were to be offered a job elsewhere. But mulling it is certainly keeping me up nights.

Where have I been?

Newton's Kumquat has been on something of a summer vacation for the last month or so. I'd like to reassure my dozens of loyal readers (well, ok, two) that this is not permanent and should not be taken as anything more meaningful than a fit of inexcusable laziness.

As some of you may know, I'm taking online classes from the University of Maryland University College toward a master's degree. Since this involves a lot of typing, I tend to end up glued to my computer for hours on end. (This isn't always welcome, since I spend most of my time at work also glued to my computer.) Blogging provides me with a way to avoid school work while pretending that I'm still busily slaving away.

August, however, was a month of no classes and hellish hours on a project at work. Since I didn't have to do school work, I tended to avoid the computer when I got home. (My real-world accomplishments included skipping town to visit friends in New York, watching strange late-ngiht TV movies, and actually reading books that didn't appear on a syllabus.)

But, now that classes have started again, I'm once again glued to the computer and looking for ways to procrastinate. And so, gentle reader, be assured that you can look forward to more of the quality prose you've come to expect from Newton's Kumquat.

How 'bout this? I wonder if they'll come out with "Six Feet Under" brand caskets next...

Biologist Jennifer Purcell, considered one of the top Chesapeake Bay jellyfish experts, says the difficulty in generating money for jellyfish research may boil down to one simple truth. "It's best to get funding for something that people want to eat," said Purcell. (from this WaPo article.)

Bad Penmanship Foils Holdup OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. (AP) — It might have been the third bank holdup this month in Ocean Springs, Miss., if the would-be robber had had better handwriting. Police say an attempted robbery was foiled yesterday when a bank teller couldn't decipher the writing on a holdup note. When the man handed the teller the note, she told him she couldn't read it. The man ran.

Check out the story of Ozzy the cat, who racked up 63,000 frequent flyer miles after stowing away on a British Airways plane.

Turns out Tennessee gets back $1.20 for every tax dollar it sends to the federal government, at least according to the Tax Foundation. Sucks to live New Jersey -- they only get 67 cents.

Well, my mom just left town on Saturday after spending 5 days here in town. Among our exciting activities: shopping for new cell phones for her and Dad. Apparently the fact that I deal with computers for a living somehow makes me more qualified to decipher the intracacies of daytime minutes, nighttime minutes, and service contracts. She decided to switch from Sprint to Verizon, but apparently they can only activate phones locally. So for the moment both of my parents have Nashville cell phone numbers. Supposedly they can get them switched easily, though.
We also went and saw "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," which was pretty funny. But it's one of those "lonely 20/30 something finally stumbles across the right person and lives happily ever after" flicks. <sigh> I'm still waiting...