Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Censoring Dilbert?

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, has started a blog to document his daily life. In this post, he describes the difficult censorship issues that Dilbert faces:
The problem is that there’s an unwritten rule in newspaper comics that you can’t show a gun being fired. I knew that, but my editor was new on the job and I thought it was the perfect time to try and slip one through. But his alert assistant thwarted my plan and brought it to the attention of an informal committee of executives to decide how to handle it. The group ruled that the gun could not be shown. The concept of a peace officer gunning down an unarmed suspect was okay, but I couldn’t show the actual gun firing. ... Luckily I have 16 years of corporate experience, and I know how to navigate my way around group decisions. What you need is a solution that could only appeal to a committee. I suggested a compromise. I would keep everything the same, except the gun would be replaced with a donut… that fires bullets. My compromise was accepted. Without explanation to the readers, this is the actual comic that ran that day.
I always heard that the Interweb would allow dissidents to route around censorship and I guess it's true!

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Tech Stock Diagnostics

Bill Burnham has a Top 10 list of signs that a software company is in trouble. Most of them involve analyzing the company financials (high DSO, declining deferred revenues, etc) although I've found this one is usually pretty close to the truth:
The head of sales and marketing leaves.
If the company fires the head of sales and marketing it generally means that he is going to or has been missing his numbers. If the sales and marketing head resigns on their own, it generally means that they think they are going to miss their numbers or can make more money working somewhere else. Either way, it’s usually bad news for the company over the next couple quarters.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Wordpress.com Invites

I have 2 Wordpress.com invites to whomever wants them - just send me mail at bajames AT gmail.com

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Wordpress.com

I've been evaluating Wordpress.com as an alternative to Blogger over here. I've used up all my Wordpress.com invites but if I get some more, I will offer them to anyone who is interested.