This past week has been a very Jewish one for me, in so many senses. In Jewish tradition, there is no such thing as joy without the element of sorrow, nor sorrow without the element of joy. The most famous example of this is the breaking of a glass during a wedding, to remind us of the breaking of the temple – as well as to signify that this newly created house is another stone of the rebuilding.
(more…)Category: Opinion
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SmartHalo2 review: Update
Since I published my two-part review of SmartHalo 2 back in the beginning of October, there has been a bit of a development – and not in a positive way. The SmartHalo team has made a long post over on Kickstarter, announcing that whoever hasn’t gotten their device won’t get it, and that they are shutting down their servers. In their own words:
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Low-skill recruiting is spam
My experience with recruiters has become somewhat of a recurring theme here on the blog, and for good reason. For some reason, my LinkedIn profile attracts a relatively regular stream of them. Here is one example that I would like to draw your attention to – identites hidden to protect the inept:
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Ethics: Intention versus consequence
When getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, public officials tend to offer their good intentions as a defense. I don’t understand why we keep accepting such defenses. Who cares that your intention was to ensure proper tax planning? You still lied about whether or not you were domiciled somewhere else. I don’t see a valid argument that your so-called “good intentions” – an appeal to the ethics of your intentions, rather than the ethics of your actions – is relevant at all. It is certainly not a mitigating circumstance.
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Expanding on the digital divide
This week’s post follows on to last week’s to talk a little about the digital divide. It is adapted from a paper I wrote back in 2017 as part of my Bachelor’s degree with the Open University.
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Ensure redundancy for critical systems
As I’m sure you noticed, Facebook suffered massive downtime to several services last week, including Messenger, Instagram and so on. Such events often serve to highlight what services we have rely on. While I’ve been (at least attempting to) phase out Facebook for some time, there are still some things that I actually need it for.
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Reviewed: SmartHalo 2 displays and touch interface
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Reviewed: SmartHalo 2
This is part one of a two-part series on my experiences with the SmartHalo 2 bike computer. It’s no secret that I’ve backed a few Kickstarter projects over the years. Some have entirely failed to deliver, some have delivered products so atrocious that it doesn’t bear thinking about, and some have delivered a product that delivers (and sometimes well and truly overdelivers) on the pitch.
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A further metric for support
I have previously written about key metrics for support departments – and I stand by everything I said then. I have, however, come to the conclusion that another metric should be placed under consideration. A quick recap, however, of the metrics I proposed then, as well as what they are intended to measure:
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