"IN the summer of 1983, the United States was just starting to come out of a brutal recession and the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, twice what it is now in a recovery that has gone on for more than four years.

But men in the prime of their working lives — 35 to 64 — were more likely to have jobs in the summer of 1983 than their successors in that age group are to have jobs now.

The Big Picture: Unemployment: Then versus Now

I am now officially launching TimeCert which is a trusted third party service for proving the existence of a file, object or document at a certain time.
Applications

Lets say your application managed confidential documents or emails. You could use TimeCert for maintaining a proof that a document or email existed at a certain time. As this timestamp is generated outside your own server, it is evidence that you did not manipulate say a contract after the timestamp.

Launch of TimeCert a public timestamping service

Easter has risen high in the candy hierarchy over the years. It is now the second top-selling candy holiday, just barely behind the glorious ode to sugar that is Halloween. Of the estimated 8 billion pounds of candy consumed in the United States each year, Easter makes up a very large portion of the pie.

Easter BunnyAmericans spend an average $1.9 billion on Easter candy every year, just behind Halloween which consists of $2 billion worth of candy spending. Christmas and Valentine’s Day bring up the rear with $1.4 billion and $1 billion respectively. So how has it come to be that so much money is spent on sugary colored marshmallows?

A Glimpse into the History of Easter Candy

You may never have been inside a server farm (aka: “data center” or “colo” for co-location facility). If you don’t have responsibility for maintaining a website or work as an industrial electrician, cable stringer, HVAC professional or NSA stenographer, you don’t have much reason to ever step inside one of these cavernous worlds of computers, cables and cages.

Imagine an enormous, extremely well-kept zoo, with chain link walls draped from floor to ceiling creating lines of large fenced boxes vanishing somewhere in the far, dark reaches of the Matrix. Inside each cage is a mammoth case (or several mammoth cases) constructed of stylish black metal and glass, crouched on a raised white tile floor into which cables dive and resurface like dolphins. Sometimes glowing green and red lights flicker as disks whir and whistle. Often the machines operate silently as frigid air pours out of exposed ceiling vents and splashes against shiny surfaces and around hard edges.

The overwhelming impression, as Dr. Jim led us past cage after cage of cooled processing power, was of fetishistic efficiency. Clean, pristine and smoothly sculpted, these were more than machines, they were totems of the Internet economy. Here was eBay. Here Yahoo. Here Inktomi. Welcome to Stonehenge for the Information Age. The common design element seemed to be a machine monolith centered in each cage, surrounded by ample space to set up a desk and a few chairs, with enough room left over for a small party of proto-humans to dance about beating their chests and throwing their slide rules into the air.

Xooglers: Let’s talk about U and me

First, GM’s invitation to the world to “make your own” Chevy Tahoe commercial spawned a slew of Chevy-bashing spoof ads with copy such as “Our planet’s oil is almost gone. You don’t need G.P.S. to see where this road leads.”

Then several prominent publications profiled the campaign as an unintended disaster.

But, finally, the consensus at many of the leading tech weblogs was, brilliant move, GM.

Metrics, successes, & flaming disasters in online marketing

Yay, monkeys. This is not autobiographical, but I did indeed used to have a job writing software. VB! MS SQL! I affectionately referred to myself and my co-developers as code monkeys, especially when a client asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer (”What do I know? I’m just a code monkey.”).

Neat premise, neat song. Musician posts a new track each week, for free or for pay. This one is about being a code monkey.

Jonathan Coulton | Thing a Week 29 - Code Monkey

UPDATE: I know a lot of folks are coming here from DIGG and other memetrackers. The $72M someone told me at BarCampLA and I have no idea if that is true or not. If you reblog this (or report it) please make sure you make that clear.

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?! - The Jason Calacanis Weblog

The Big Pharaoh is moving up to a bigger pyramid. One of the most interesting (and funny) ME bloggers now has his own domain safely off of splog-ridden blogspot. (Can we give Google a prize for worst-follow-though-on-a-smart-acquisition yet?)

Due Diligence: Roaming Eye: 04/13/06

My experience managing large IT systems, I know that my hard drives fill up quickly with log files and databases. I know that my networks are flooded with activity. I can roughly measure that there is a huge amount of information in my data-center, but like the “visible” mass of the universe, i can really only see a small fraction of it.

Erik Swan | IT dark matter

Back to the deal at hands, I can't understand Unilever for wanting to outsource their entire I.T. but, what I really can't understand is why Accenture. I wouldn't trust those guys with the keys of my house to clean it, much less my company strategic assets.

Fun stories of Accenture

Jaime Cardoso's Weblog : Weblog