Paying for Internships?!?

The Wall Street Journal on 2009/01/28 had an article discussing the state of affairs in the world of internships that caught me flat footed and slack-jawed. That people take unpaid internships is nothing new to me. What is new to me is that people are now paying to:

1. Have people find them unpaid internships to the tune of $8,000 !!!!  I'm not sure I would want to hire anyone who had to pay someone to get them an internship that paid no money.  Seriously if you can't find someone to take you on for no money, you're doing something wrong.  Especially if your family has $8,000 laying around.
2. People are buying internships at charity auctions.  I can see how this is great for the charities.  I can see how some people might find this analogous to paying someone to find you an internship.  But notice that the intern-to-be's life is easier as the effort of finding an internship has been reduced and there is NO MERIT COMPETITION.  You pay you play!


3. Christina pointed out (when I mentioned the article) that some vocational disciplines are charging for people to be interns or apprentices (not in the article).  This strikes me as ridiculously dark ages in mindset.  Originally I though this was the most outrageous, but then I realized that that the intern-to-be still need to find the position and prove their worth.  So in a bizarre way, this is the most honest of these 3 options.

Seriously, what has happened to our society?  I am assuming this is spill over from the massive surge that parents are putting on their children to over achieve.  (If you haven't read The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids go read it now - scary stuff!)

Silicon Flatirons Crash Course: Marketing for Web-based Startups

Photos from last night's Silicon Flatirons Crash Course on Marketing for Web-base Startups. This was an informative course and many of the pictures were taken during the "class exercise" in which the attendees were asked to segment and position a web-based startup.

14yo boy manages to impersonate a Cop and got a beat.

Chicago police arrested a 14-year-old boy for allegedly impersonating one of their own Saturday.

From the article:

"The boy, who has been charged as a juvenile for impersonating an officer, walked into the Grand Crossing District station, 7040 S. Cottage Grove Ave., dressed in a Chicago police uniform, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. The boy, who reported for duty about 1:30 p.m., partnered with another police officer for about five hours."

"The boy identified himself as an officer from another district but was detailed for the day to Grand Crossing and also was savvy enough to sign out a police radio and a ticket book, according to a source. The source also said the boy went on traffic stops with the officer he went on the street with."

Ok seriously folks, what the heck?

I fully agree that impersonating a cop is wrong.

But arresting a 14yo boy for being excited about being a police officer when he grows up?

Let's see:

1. he's 14!
2. had no badge
3. had an empty holster
4. newspaper instead of a ballistic vest

How about you arrest all the police officers who allowed themselves to be socially engineered on such an important matter.  The boy should've never gotten beyond the front door of the police station.

"After his tour was over, a ranking officer became suspicious of the boy. Police said the officer discovered the teen was not a real police officer when he couldn't produce any credentials."

Seriously?  The boy was on the beat with a partner and no one noticed until the shift was over?  And you're still making the kid appear in juvenile court?

Lame.

Rant: Comcast Support: Fail++

Ok so for the past few months I've had connectivity issues in the evenings from home.  I assumed that the culprit was the number of wireless access points in my community or possibly an overload in the shared last mile connection.

A couple of days ago I got fed up and started debugging the problem.  I turned the modem off, disconnected the WiFi, and plugged my laptop directly into the cable modem.  And tada!  the problem was still there.

Then I though to myself, I wonder if the signal is borked so I connected to the cable modem and tried to load the status page... this is the response from the cablemodem's server:

Safari can’t open the page “http://192.168.100.1/signal.html” because the network connection was reset, which sometimes occurs when the server is busy. You might be able to open the page later.

So I did what any frustrated engineer does... I keep trying and tada it worked after about 30 tries.  signal looked good and tried again.  and I got the same reset message.  (Firefox shows the page loading and then being reset prematurely).

Ok, so my cable modem is borked.

I called the Comcast support number and the first thing I hear is not an apology for problems, nor was it the call tree I expected.  No!  I got a bloody advertisement for pay-per-view WWE RAW.  (INSTANT FAIL!)

Ok, so I breath and start working through the call tree and was offered two options:

1) Is your cable modem not working?

2) Is your cable modem slow?

uhhhh...  call tree repeats.

Select #1 - on the basis that I might hit a technically literate person rather than a sales drone.

nope.  I got an automated cable modem reset that took 30 seconds.  Then an automated request to go to comcast.net to make sure the cable modem worked with a 30 second delay while I "did that."

How about an option for intermittent problems folks?  i.e. I had a problem last night but didn't have time to call.

I tell the call tree that my problem was not resolved and get told that the wait time would be about 15 minutes (I don't remember the range) and would I like a call back, so I go through the hoops of setting that up.

3-4 minutes later I get the call back and then after verifying that I am me. I'm told that all representatives are busy.  10 seconds later I get connected.  If someone was ready, don't tell me everyone is busy.  And if no one is ready, don't bloody call me back on the chance that someone will be free shortly, get the person on the line before calling!

Then after I've entered my information, the phone dialer has verified it, I still needed to give it to the customer service rep! Seriously Is this 2009 or 1960?

Tech guy checks the signal strength and fairly quickly conludes that it could be the modem, as I told him, and since I'm renting it, that I should just go to the Comcast store and exchange it.

overall customer service score: fail++

Visit to Sake Zanmai Amu on Thursday 1/22

Thursday night I made my way to Amu in downtown Boulder, CO as has been my modus operandi on Thursday nights for years.  Amu is an izakayai - an after-work drinking establishment that serves food.

Amu is honestly my favorite restaurant and beats out all the san francisco bay area izakaya that I tried in summer of 2007. 

If you haven't been, you should definitely go!  

The key selling point is the authenticity of the menu, recipes, and overall experience - some nights I've entered and been greeted to a packed house of native Japanese speakers who all vouch for the authenticity of the experience.  For years I've mentally binned Amu as The Japanese Cheers for the friendly open atmosphere where everyone knows your name. 

What made this past Thursday worth talking about?

First - the Toro - extra fatty blue fin tuna. I haven't had toro of that quality in a long time.  Nobu, the head chef remarked on the quality of the piece when he took it out of his magic fish box :F  I had to get a glass of sake to complement it and keep my mouth fresh for more

Second, the japanese couple sitting next to me got a wonderful looking hot pot and offered to let me try some (yay friendly restaurant) which I did and it was delicious! They told me that this is a classic salary-man dish in japan and therefore is standard fare at izakaya all over japan.  In fact it is remarkably cheap to make - considering it is made of stewed beef tendon and tofu.  So Good!  Gimmie a pot of that and a bowl of hot rice and I'm sold :F

Now I've gone and made myself hungry.  

What to do with the money?"

Recently folks have begun openly questioning the existing Venture Capital model.

Two examples are Bill Stensrud's post on The Primacy of the New Tool and pehub's interview with Bill Stensrud.

The conclusion of many of these articles is that the Venture Capital model is broken and cannot continue to generate pre 2000 levels of returns. Pehub's article quotes Bill in the title with, "I Couldn't figure our what to do with the money."

As a fundraising entrepreneur my obvious tongue-in-cheek response is, give it to me ;)

In all seriousness.

I agree with Bill and many other people who say that VC practices need to change. Specifically, that investing in companies that provide incremental advances on technologies controlled by incumbents is foolish - always has been and always will be. The only way to take on an incumbent at their own game is: 1) for the incumbent to be asleep at the wheel, 2) to field a disruptive technology, 2) to field a disruptive business model (Innovator's Dilemma).

However I am having trouble swallowing the conclusion that after 50 years we are done with extracting all the value from the "transistor" (Bill). This seems premature and counter to the driving force behind IT innovation and disruption. In my opinion the plateau we are on is temporary and has come into play due to two factors:

1. The computing performance delivered by individual processing cores is no longer increasing exponentially the way it has for decades (Moore's Law/Corollary). In the past one could rely on generational improvements in processor performance to solve application performance problems. This means that programmers in the past could continually increase the complexity of their applications to better fit user needs without developing new algorithms or having to resort to difficult to implement parallel algorithms. For example the human genome project was possible only once sufficient computing power became available. Speech recognition has also become feasible due to advances in computational resources. The end result is that we now have to figure out a way to make parallel programming accessible to the masses.
   
2. Socially we are satisfied with current technology and are in an absorption stage.  Culturally we are trying to figure out what social network and other new technologies mean and how they'll change society so the demand for new technologies has dropped.

What we have is a situation in which we have temporarily plateaued until either we figure out how to change a business process through technological advancement or a driving societal need that needs to be filled manifests (good luck guessing what that is).

Technologically we have reached a "crisis" point (Structure of Scientific Revolutions) with respect to parallel programming.  Theory says that an answer, i.e. a good general purpose programming model, will emerge within a few years.  Alternatively we will figure out how to improve the performance of individual processors again with 3-dimensional chips, optical interconnects, or other technology and thus avoid the nightmare of parallel programming where decades of research has only been able to address a limited subset of the problem space.  Fortunately at LineRate Systems we have already devised a parallel programming model for programming network appliances with general purpose multicore hardware.

My best guess says that the parallel programming problem will be solved first and that there will be a doozy of a revolution in a few years that will make the web revolution look like child's play.  This will coincide with society's absorption of existing technology and resumes its appetite for the next big thing.

Meaning folks are already close to an answer... Invest and Carpe RoI!

Holy Fermenting Kimchi Batman...

First... let me say that I love love love the fermented kimchi I made mid december. The stuff is delicious and makes a mean pot of kimchi chigae (kimchi stew).

However there is a slight lesson that I learned... leave headroom in the jars! During the week of christmas one of the jars managed to blow its lid off and spew kimchi juice all over my fridge. I guess I succeeded in achieving fermentation ;)

no picture since I quickly consumed the entire jar :)

A friend suggested that I vent the jars to prevent future kimchi blowouts. The problem is that I opened a jar and it immediately began forcing juice out and when the lid was removed the mass of cabbage inflated to form a dome over the lip of the jar.

Todate, I've consumed/used 2 jars to date and given one away. At this rate I'll have to make more soon... darn ;)