Rock & Roll Library Chooses The FuzzyGroup for Web Development

Donation of services to revitalize music archive's website.

BELMONT, Massachusetts, February 25, 2003 -- The FuzzyGroup, Inc., today announced the donation of web development services to The Rock & Roll Library, an educational non-profit organization focused on building an archive of popular music.

The Rock & Roll Library, based in the Boston area, provides a comprehensive website chronicling popular music with a variety of different resources including factual data, music clips, biographies, song lyrics, tour information and more. Among the most innovative of the Rock & Roll Library's features are the unique educational programs created around popular songs. The most successful program to date culminated in April 2002 with Melissa Etheridge visiting a middle school in New Jersey to discuss her music.

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(And just to add the obligatory level of personal commentary that this bloggish medium is so prone to, Anne, the founder of Rock Library, has been an absolute joy to work with.  A nice person and a good cause.  How can we go wrong?)

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Stupid Job Requirements Are World Wide

We've been seeing this in the U.S. for a while now but I hadn't ever noticed it being overseas.  What I'm referring to, of course, is the "Uber Job Requirements" or as I also call them the "Stupid Job Requirements".  You know the one where they want you to be a skilled programmer, gifted technical writer, 24/7 technical support expert and a graphic artist besides.  Here's an excerpt for Perl / Apache / Linux / XML Web Technician:

• Good Unix/Linux system skills, RedHat Linux preferred.
• Education to A Level standard in a variety of subjects, including English
• Bsc hons in related subject would an advantage
• Essential “business focused” and “interpersonal” competencies
• A range of programming skills including Perl and XSLT
• Will be involved with the development and documentation of all related procedures including the writing of Good Practice
  Guidelines
• As required, the role will also provide technical support in the form of XML & webs transaction tools for the SAP group, which may occasionally require immediate responses, which could be outside of the normal business hours.
• Additional skills and experience as an illustrator and graphics design would be an advantage  [_Go_]

And, of course, I suspect that this is a close to entry level position to boot.  Note to Global HR Departments:

S T O P  T H E  M A D N E S S  ! ! !

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Is Google News Evil?

I hadn't realized how volatile Google News was until just this morning.  I clicked onto it and opened an article in a new browser window.  My normal excessively windowed reading habit, I'll admit.  Then I happened to refresh the original Google News window and *Poof* after just a minute or two.  Gone.  Now don't get me wrong, I completely understand why it works like that but it did make me aware to the degree that Google News is starting to shape my thinking just by granting me access to a wider range of content than previously.  Here's content that it just filtered out of my view in real time.  Overall I do think Google News is good but this example really showed me how it could be applied in an evil fashion.  How do we know that the presentation algorithms won't get perverted?

Of course this is the question that has always existed with any type of news gathering organization -- they all bring bias to the table.

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Switch to XP ?

You have to think that this:

The new Desktop Center site includes an updated version of the Windows XP Application Compatibility Toolkit, a set of tools Microsoft devised to assess whether current applications of businesses will work under Windows XP Professional, Microsoft's latest operating system for corporate customers.

Rogers Weed, corporate vice president of Windows product management at Microsoft, said the tool usually helps IT administrators determine that they need to make minimal changes to their existing software roster to run XP. [_Go_]

is the result of low XP adoption.  And now Microsoft is starting to release XP only applications (ThreeDegrees).  I wonder if InfoPath will run on Windows 2000 or not?

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