The comic story Stephen wrote and I drew for HONOR, the 2004 Fake Middle Names Collective comics anthology, is finally on the interweb! Please enjoy A Modest Proposal, and share it with your friends and legal acquaintances.
Category: Pulverbatch
Aww man. A job at Blizzard has been a dream of mine for years, and now, suddenly, it’s really not anymore.
If you monitor human-human interaction, you do it on your own time, understand?
I’ve been thinking about my performance evaluations class (which I’m failing, but still find interesting, except for the math), Leonard’s comment on bad metrics and the concept of keystroke counters and loggers (thanks to spam). There’s a quote in the textbook for the aforementioned class, “that which is monitored improves,” attributed to “Source Unknown.” So I can’t call out the person who said it for being wrong, which it is.
Here’s a handy set of heuristics for deciding when to monitor. For you! It would be better drawn as a flowchart or tree, but I’m lazy.
Good Things To Monitor
- Efficiency of system-system interaction, based on system output
- Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the system, based on user-satisfaction output
Bad Things To Monitor
- Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the human
- Quality of human-system interaction, based on system output
Incidentally, this also covers the basis of the problem I have with standardized testing. Or the lecture-test educational system as a whole, in fact.
Update 09.25.2004 1054 hrs: Leonard has pointed out to me that I somehow copied the wrong Crummy hyperlink. It’s fixed.
Oddly, today is the third anniversary of NFD. I still like this thing, although its relevance to my life is decreasing; Anacrusis is a better place to go if you’re interested in the text I output.
Really should update the IdiotCam, though.
I realize that technically there are fractions of days but I don’t care
Today NewsBruiser tells me that Anacrusis has 261 entries. That’s not a particularly impressive or symbolic number, but it’s still a big deal, because the idea behind Anacrusis is to write and post a story every weekday. There are (two times fifty-two) 104 weekend days in a year, and 365 – 104 = 261. I have an official year’s worth of Anacrusis, and if all goes well, September 13th should be the anniversary for at least the next few years (until it ends up falling on a weekend too).
I actually posted the very first story on July 18, 2003, but then I missed all of September due to webhost issues and skipped a couple more weeks here and there, too, because nobody was reading it and it didn’t matter. I’m better about that now. I figure a couple more years of this, and I should have something worthwhile.
I feel like getting arrested
Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)
I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.
I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!
Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!
I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.
My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?
Yesterday I received two things in the mail for which I’ve been waiting all summer: my first student loan residual check, so I can pay my roommate for back rent, and my new credit card. My new credit card is interest-free until May, and its credit limit is three times as high as my previous credit card.
You know what that means? After nearly six years of life with my beloved, battered P2-450, it is time. I’m going to buy a new computer. It’s going to have two monitors. It’s going to dual-boot XP and some distro of Linux (any recommendations, by the way?). It’s going to have some insane beastly muscle under the hood. And I’ve finally decided–I’m going to build the whole thing from the ground up, or processor out, or whatever. I am going to purchase thermal grease.
“So let’s say it does wreck newspaper comics. I’m on board with that. I want to punch a hole in the boat. I want to see the whole thing flush like an animal carcass down a toilet bowl, and the carcass is on fire.”
Brouhaha brews between the big and the bitter! Tycho actually has the best summary of the whole thing, so read that too, but here’s the bullets:
- Scott Kurtz has a very popular daily webcomic, PvP. Not the most popular strip in existence, but vastly more popular than most other webcomics–popular enough that he lives on its ads and his print deal with Image.
- Now, he wants to see his comic in newspapers.
- Many newspapers aren’t doing that well, because not as many people read newspapers as used to do so.
- To reduce costs, these newspapers are continuing to cut print space and funding for syndicated comic strips, something they’ve been doing aggressively for over a decade; some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Enquirer) have asked syndicates (like Universal Press) for a year of free strips, or demanded (like Knight-Ridder, which owns 31 large papers) a price reduction in strips across the board.
- Scott has siezed on this opportunity to leverage his strip’s popularity, offering PvP, free of charge, to multiple newspapers and newspaper conglomerates. It’s a smart deal for him–he gets huge exposure, and he’s already doing the strip anyway–and for them–they get a new-to-them comic with an established audience for free.
- Newspaper cartoonists who are aware of this are rabidly hating on Kurtz, while secretly urinating in their Depends.
Now, Scott’s success in this arena is hardly guaranteed. Newspapers are paranoid about comic strips, generally preferring the most sanitized, humorless pap available, as a sop to their demographic (which, I’m sorry to say, skews more and more to “old” and “boring”). This is why things like Cathy and Marmaduke and (hideously) Family Circus continue to exist. PvP has cussing and violence in it sometimes, and it might get angry letters, and it’s four inches of column space that could be used to squeeze in another ad.
Regardless, there are going to be alt-weeklies and college papers that take him up on it. They’re all going to profit from the deal. And Kurtz won’t be the first webcomic to jump to newspapers, but he will be the first one to do it for free, and bigger papers are going to look at that and start asking questions.
“Hey,” they’re going to ask, “why are we paying thousands of dollars for comics that could be generated by a monkey on lithium? Why are we getting exactly the same comics as everyone else, when we could be making exclusive deals to get a comic nobody else in the region has? Now that the Interweb allows millions of people to read any paper they want, can we use comics to leverage our success in that arena?”
The answers might be “because, because, and no,” but they will ask, and that’s a change. You remember the last time things changed in the newspaper comics industry? In a good way?
Me either.