Blackmoor Vituperative

Dixie Sommers, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, recites a list of the 10 occupations that the BLS expects will provide the greatest number of new jobs over the next decade. The bad news? Six of the top seven fastest-growing occupations are low-skill, low-wage jobs.

Not great news for me. IT has become a commodity for businesses, much like janitorial service or payroll — a necessary expense, and one which a great many people are willing to provide, aggressively competing on price in the process. The days when legions of businesses were scrambling to hire the best and brightest IT people for a competitive advantage are over. We have become temps.

There is no sense in gnashing our teeth, tearing our clothes, and bemoaning a changing society. As with buggy whips and “copyright”, the days of earning a lot of money just by goofing around with computers is gone — whether or not people want to admit it.

So, what to do? Change fields entirely? I have not the stomach for the health care industry, so that’s right out. Switch from Computer Science to Accounting, perhaps?

Or perhaps find a niche that will allow me to struggle on, perhaps not quite as comfortably, but still in the field that I love. Perhaps I should strive to break into auditing, and work toward a CISA certification.

I am not certain. What I do know is that I will not be able to continue on the path I am on. It was paradise while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever.

The journalists in Mindanao are asking the authorities to allow them to carry firearms for self-protection.

After learning a bitter lesson from the tragedy of the Maguindanao massacre on November 23 where 57 people were murdered in cold blood at the Ampatuan town, 31 of whom were members of the media, “the advocacy for arming of reporters by many members of the Fourth Estate in the South has intensified,” according to a high official of a media organization on Tuesday.

John Felix Unson, chairman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) for Central Mindanao, said “there has been a long record of killings of reporters in provinces and cities around Maguindanao.”

Unson who writes for Philippine Star was himself ambushed in Cotabato City by unidentified armed men on May 28, 1999. He had his caliber .357 mm [sic] revolver with him at the time and was able to return fire. The armed men retreated. Not a single bullet they fired hit the journalist.

[…]

“The best way for us to protect ourselves is to arm ourselves because neither the police nor the military can give us protection on a 24-hour, round-the-clock basis,” said Macabalang, now executive director of the Bureau of Public Information in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

(from Mindanao journalists want to carry guns, The Manila Times)

I hear you, Macabalang. I hear you.

While on the topic of “race”, this crossed my desk this morning…

(NECN/WFLD) – Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich apologized this morning for saying in an Esquire Magazine interview that he was “blacker than Barack Obama.”

Blagojevich, in front of his home in Chicago, told reporters it was a poor way of expressing what he wanted to say. In the interview hitting stands this week Blagojevich made this statement: “I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in the black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

(from Blagojevish apologizes for ‘blacker than Obama’ remark , NECN)

Personally, I think Blagojevish made a good point about the obsession with skin color in this country — not even skin color, but a completely arbitary “ethnicity” which has no relevance to a person’s actual character, background, or accomplishments. The way our media and our society treat appearance as more important than substance is an embarrassment. I may get vilified for saying so, but I do not think he should have apologized — not for that statement, anyway.

I wish he would get a haircut, though.

Apparently some people have chosen to interpret the theme of James Cameron’s Ferngully remake, Avatar, as racist.

The theme of the outsider who arrives, becomes an insider, and then helps save them, is about as anti-racist a theme as one is likely to find. The Thirteenth Warrior had the same theme (Arab becomes accepted among Norse barbarians), as did the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (alien decides not to destroy humanity). Even Twilight has a touch of that theme. This theme goes back at least as far as Beowulf (a Geat hero among Danes — and the story which inspired The Thirteenth Warrior), if not further.

People who cherry-pick their examples only to include races against which they have a grudge, and then use that as evidence of some kind of racist message, really need to examine their motives, imo. The message isn’t about “race” at all. It’s about crossing cultural boundaries. It’s about synthesis.

Yes, the human “saviour” in Avatar could do things the Na’vi couldn’t — because he would do them. He was not constrained by their assumptions about what was possible or proper (praying to the tree/planet/god, capturing a big red bird, etc.). But anyone who thinks that the Na’vi did not also teach him things completely misses the point. He was able to accomplish more as one of the Na’vi than he could ever have done as a human — and not just because he was big and blue.

We watch a lot of bad movies. Some are good, most are bad, and some are so bad they are funny (I laughed the whole way through 2012). I expected Arachnia to fall into the “bad” category. I was surprised to discover that Arachnia is actually a fun, low-budget monster movie.

The monsters in Arachnia are large spider-like stop-motion creations, like something from the 1950s. Other than a lack of color (the monsters are uniformly grey-brown), the stop-motion effects are reasonably well done for a low budget movie. The characters are distinctive, the acting is not too shabby, and the writing is actually pretty good. We chuckled several times, not just at the movie, but with the movie. There are even a few nude scenes (which I like, in principle), but rather than the awkward, uncomfortable to watch, overtly sexual and yet completely non-erotic scenes you get in movies like Final Examination, Arachnia has a sense of innocent fun. One of the times we laughed was actually during one of the nude scenes, and this was not a “laughing because it is so bad” moment, but a moment of intentional humor. How rare that is!

So, for monsters, humor, and fun nudes scenes, I give this movie four out of five stars.

Trivia: Arachnia was made by Edgewood Studios, the same Vermont folks who gave us Time Chasers.

We watch a lot of movies. Most of them are not very good. We recently saw a Belgian-French-German movie called Daughters of Darkness, which was really quite good. Images has a pretty good review of it.

This is for any potential employers or hiring managers who might take the trouble to Google me before scheduling me for an interview: I do not sign covenants not to compete. If you do not want me to use my skills for the benefit of your competitor, then treat me honorably and pay me fairly. It is just that simple.

There is an implicit assumption behind these “noncompetes” that the employer’s needs and wants are more important than those of the employee. Employer-employee is a business relationship. Each gives something. Each gets something. They are equals. Any agreement of any kind that favors one over the other should be rejected out of hand.

Have you ever seen a noncompete where the employer is forbidden from replacing the employee for six months if they leave? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. So why do people sign promises that they will be unemployed for six months after leaving a company?

When I was younger and more easily intimidated, I would sign nearly anything an employer asked me to sign. I am older and wiser now. If the agreement does not treat both parties fairly, I don’t agree to it.

Note that a covenant not to compete is not the same thing as a nondisclosure agreement. Preserving the trade secrets of a previous employer is just ordinary ethical behavior, and I have and will preserve those secrets with or without a nondisclosure agreement. Since signing a nondisclosure agreement will not alter my behavior in any way, I will cheerfully sign one — as long as it is a nondisclosure agreement. At least one potential employer has asked me to sign a “nondisclosure agreement” which was, in fact, a covenant not to compete. I suspect the irony of that attempted deception was lost on them.

NEW YORK – The home of superheroes including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men sued one of its most successful artists Friday to retain the rights to the lucrative characters.

The federal lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan by Marvel Worldwide Inc. asks a judge to invalidate 45 notices sent by the heirs of artist Jack Kirby to try to terminate Marvel’s copyrights, effective on dates ranging from 2014 through 2019.

The heirs notified several companies last year that the rights to the characters would revert from Marvel to Kirby’s estate.

The lawsuit said Kirby’s work on the comics published between 1958 and 1963 were “for hire” and render the heirs’ claims invalid. The famed artist died in 1994.

(from Marvel sues to keep Spider-Man, X-Men copyrights – Yahoo! News, Yahoo)

It’s no surprise that Disney (of which Marvel is a subsidiary) would oppose the loss of any of its copyrights. Disney has built its empire on appropriating public domain works and then twisting our copyright laws so that they never lose control of them. What is truly absurd about these dueling lawsuits is that anyone owns the copyright to work created over fifty years ago, the creator of which died over a decade ago.

I am watching the special features on the “Revenge of The Sith” DVD, the third of the second set of Star Wars sequels.

People in the special features keep referring to how Lucas doesn’t know what he wants until he sees it, and that they just keep generating scenes and hope that eventually Lucas will string the pieces together to make a movie. “That’s what it’s like to work with George.” They come right out and say this, over and over.

He even says it, although he phrases it differently.

It’s hilarious to hear George Lucas talking about how if he had more control over Star Wars (the first movie), that X would have been Y, and W would have been Z, etc. Essentially, that if he’d had his way, Darth Vader would have been a huge puss all along and that Star Wars would have sucked.

How freaking delusional can one person be?

A word of warning to those of you who rely on hardware-based encrypted USB flash drives. Security firm SySS has reportedly cracked the AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption used on flash drives manufactured by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim.

The crack relies on a weakness so astoundingly bone-headed that it’s almost hard to believe. While the data on the drive is indeed encrypted using 256-bit crypto, there’s a huge failure in the authentication program. When the correct password is supplied by the user, the authentication program always send the same character string to the drive to decrypt the data no matter what the password used. What’s also staggering is that this character string is the same for Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives.

Cracking the drives is therefore quite an easy process. The folks at SySS wrote an application that always sent the appropriate string to the drive, irrespective of the password entered, and therefore gained immediate access to all the data on the drive.

(from Encryption busted on NIST-certified Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives, ZDNet)