PUBLIC MARKS with search year

The skills I’ve acquired for the web can barely be passed on to my chil­dren, let alone their chil­dren. What I’ve learned to this day may be be wholly obso­lete a year from now. Because my work is not my own. And that is the real problem.

Over the last cou­ple of weeks, I’ve looked at avail­abil­ity of movies and TV shows that came out in the past year. But what about movies that came two years ago? Are those more avail­able today than they were a year ago? Let’s look at the data.

The growing interest in both the SPDY protocol and Node.js created the need for a stable Node.js SPDY module when the first version was released last year.

I decided to take all the blog posts, Twitter messages, and Flickr images I made this year, combine them, typeset them, and then get it printed in a hard-bound book. I wrote a bit about the reasoning here.

One of the most touted features of the iPhone 4S is the web-based voice recognition assistant Siri. It's interesting and sometimes powerful, but not always in China. First, it doesn't support Mandarin and China-based map and location services, which makes it somewhat less appealing than Apple's US-based advertising would have you believe. The good news is that Apple has said it will launch a Chinese-language version of Siri this year. Second, it can't always recognize words spoken in English. I tried it 10 times, and it recognized my words only 5 times. A Canadian native speaker who also tried found it worked seven out of 10 times. Still, it will give you results sometimes if it manages to catch only keywords.

Siri, c'est la personne qui vous répondra toujours au téléphone.

if carriers were to get their collective heads out of their, uhm, seats and start putting user experience first instead of going iteratively ballistic about controlling everything their customers do on handsets (believe me, Carrier IQ is only the tip of the iceberg), it might get the recognition it deserves next year.

Gone are the indistinguishable black suits requisite for interviews. Gone is the formulaic interview involving a table, a chair either side and rote answers. Gone is the hiring taboo on applicants who spent the year after college studying abroad instead of jumping into the job market.