My new blogs

I have created two new blogs, replacing this one:

• Yet Another Opinion is a blog containing more “serious” writing (RSS feed is here)
• My personal blog, in which I write about whatever I feel like writing (RSS feed is here)

See you there, or there, or wherever.

Changing things up

I’ve decided to retire this blog, as I want to separate my writing into fun stuff and more serious/informed writing. This blog falls, uneasily, between the two. Besides, I want to come up with a better name for a blog than the one I’m using here.

I’ll be creating one or more blogs very soon to replace this one – as soon as I do, I’ll post a link here.

Thanks to all six (or so) of my regular readers and commenters – I appreciate your taking the time to add your views.

“Perspective career for your”

Here’s the first few paragraphs of a spam message I got today (reprinted verbatim):

Hello!!!

I am manager of “Trust Expert Company”

We work since 2004 with most of the popular worldwide companies.

Our clients sell or order from eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, walmart and other suppliers and auctions. But unfortunately Russian sellers can’t receive PayPal money for sold items to United States and many US sellers not offering shipping to other country then USA.

We would like to offer perspective career for your.

The average salary will be around $1000 / Monthly. We suggest you to familiarize with our current vacancy. We invite citizens from other countries for cooperation. Functions of the regional agent: receiving and cashing out payments from our customers and then transferring funds to our clients.

Obviously, this is another variant of the Nigerian bank scam. When I searched for “Trust Expert Company” on the web, I discovered that these scams are called “419 scams”. This is because Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code deals with fraud. I didn’t know that; live and (occasionally) learn.

Maybe they do get paid

A followup to my last post: out of curiosity, I searched for more information on IBM’s student intern program, and found this page.  According to this, “Competitive salary is paid based on the number of credits completed toward a student’s degree.” So maybe the student who gets hired for this job will get paid after all.

But now I’m confused. (Which is not that hard to accomplish, actually.) If the job pays money, why are they looking for an “intern”? Don’t interns work without pay?

Then again, according to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary (I love Firefox’s search capabilities!), an intern is “an advanced student or graduate usually in a professional field (as medicine or teaching) gaining supervised practical experience”. This definition does not imply that the intern always goes without pay.

The morals of the story? Words can have multiple or ambiguous meanings. And, sometimes, I don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about. (You have been warned, dear reader.)

16 months for free?

I’m looking for work again, which means that I’m receiving regular email notifications of job postings from many of the leading job sites. One of these job postings is from IBM – they’re looking for a student to serve as a 16-month web developer intern.

This intern must be registered with her university or community college and must have completed at least two years of school. He must also be planning to return to school immediately after completing the internship.

According to the job description, the intern’s duties could include:

• Web development for internet and intranet sites/portals
• Consultation with the customer on requirements and website design
• Performance and usability optimization
• Development or enhancement of website graphics/animations
• Development / update of website documentation

And the qualifications are:

• Operating Systems: Unix, Windows
• Programming Languages: Java, JavaScript, SQL, Perl, CGI, HTML
• Applications: Flash, Dreamweaver, Front Page 2000, Adobe Photoshop
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

I can’t help but think that a person with all those qualifications would be able to find work somewhere that actually pays real cash money.

 

Of course, there is the following carrot:

 

One of the purposes of our student programs is to identify students who, based on mutually satisfactory work term experience, would be suitable candidates to join IBM and start a career following graduation.

 

I don’t know much about IBM’s current employment practices, but I’m assuming that IBM does not guarantee jobs for its interns – or, even if they landed jobs, that they would get to keep them if there was a market downturn.

 

Don’t get me wrong: I can see how an internship can be mutually beneficial, under the proper circumstances. Learning things in a real-world setting is often better than learning in a classroom. And an organization that takes on an intern often has to spend time teaching this person – there is a real cost there. But asking someone to work for 16 months for no pay seems a bit much to me.

 

Even more disturbing: suppose this becomes an industry-wide trend? In this nightmare scenario, no one would be able to get hired anywhere without being willing to contribute a few months of free labour up front. And why would anyone want to hire a contract writer, programmer or web designer if a large pool of free talent is available?

A random act of kindness

I was at the corner of Broadview and Danforth at about 6 pm today when I saw a woman rush up to a man standing at the corner. She was carrying an umbrella – the man had left the umbrella in a restaurant on Danforth Avenue. The woman was clearly a waitress who worked at the restaurant, and she must have run about half a block to catch up to the man and give him back the umbrella. She then sprinted back to the restaurant to get back to work. Wow.

Third-person pronouns and gender equality

I’m going to put my technical writing hat on today – I hope this won’t be too boring.

Today, I was reading a Ruby on Rails tutorial, and found the following paragraph:

Controller classes handle web requests. The URL of a visitor’s request maps to a controller class and a method within the class; not to a static web page. When a visitor starts the request-response cycle by entering the URL of a Rails app in her browser, the app’s controller method gets invoked, typically gets or saves some data using the app’s models, and then uses the app’s views to produce the HTML to send back to the visitor’s browser.

The reason I noticed this, and am writing about it here, is that the third-person pronoun used to describe an application visitor is female: the URL is entered into her browser. Even nowadays, when more women are going to university than men, and women are starting (albeit slowly) to make their way into positions of power, this is still somewhat unusual. Don’t get me wrong: I think that using the female third-person pronoun is a good thing; but it still seems somewhat unusual to me.

When I was in high school (which, admittedly, was a long time ago), third-person pronouns were always “he” or “him” or “his”:

When a driver starts his car, he puts his key in the ignition.

English teachers would have marked it as an error to put “she” or “her” in this sentence, unless the context made it clear that the driver was female.

Over my adult lifetime, this construction has become less acceptable – since, obviously, if you use “he” for the neutral pronoun, the reader will naturally assume that the person in question is a man. But there hasn’t been an elegant gender-neutral solution to the problem. Some alternatives have been suggested, such as:

When a driver starts his or her car, he or she puts the key in the ignition.
When a driver starts his/her car, s/he puts the key in the ignition.
When a driver starts their car, they put the key in the ignition.

The first sentence is clumsy, the second sentence contains ugly slashes (or virgules, if you want to get fancy) and is even more clumsy, and the third sentence is grammatically incorrect. So what to do?

The solution I’ve started using when writing technical documentation is: use the female pronoun in one paragraph or example and the male pronoun in the next, alternating between them as needed. (I make a point of starting with the female pronoun, to get the reader’s attention.) This approach, I think, solves both problems: it treats women and men equally, and is easy to read.

Yep

I was looking through Bushwhacked, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, and found two paragraphs that pretty much exactly match my views on politics and the economy:

Capitalism is a marvelous system for creating wealth. On the other hand, unregulated capitalism creates hideous social injustice and promptly destroys itself with greed. A marketplace needs rules. From the very beginning, capitalism has required careful regulation. In the market towns of medieval England there were as many as twenty or thirty laws governing just the balance scales, and whether you could put your thumb or any other digit on the scale. Mostly what we’ve learned from the American experiment is that competition is good, but we need rules because people cheat. And there are some natural monopolies that need regulation or they end up in cartels that rip everybody off.

Government regulation and the much-maligned trial lawyers are the two instruments by which we control corporate greed. It seems to me government is neither good nor bad but simply a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build with, or you can use a hammer to destroy with. The virtue of the hammer depends on the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used.

Annoying corporate newspeak #2

Yesterday, I got this in the mail from RBC Visa:

Take a break this month

No minimum payment required this month

Because you are a valued cardholder, we would like to offer you an RBC Royal Bank “Visa” payment holiday by waiving your minimum payment this January. Of course you may still make a payment if you wish. Please note that interest charges will continue to accumulate and the minimum payment shown on your next monthly statement will be calculated in the usual way.

So what they’re offering is an opportunity to pay them even more interest. And it’s not as if minimum payments are very large, anyway – I think mine is usually something like $10. Hmph.

Conversational topics

According to the dating site Plentyoffish, here are women’s ten favourite conversational topics:

1. Hopes and aspirations
2. Hobbies/interests in general
3. Music
4. Dreams
5. Romance
6. Friends
7. Travel
8. Vacations
9. Movies
10. Entertainment

And here are their ten least favourite conversational topics:

1. Politics
2. Other dates
3. Past relationships
4. Science fiction
5. Religion
6. Celebrities
7. Science
8. Antiques
9. Money
10. History

I’m surprised that #8 is on the list. Are there a lot of people who talk about antiques on first dates – enough to include this on the list?

And the fact that #4 is on the list says something about the gender to which I belong. I’m not sure what.