Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Monday, March 28, 2005day link 

 Automatic Resume
ZoomInfo is a brand new site that claims to produce people's resumes automatically by crawling the web and figuring out what information is relevant. Article here.

Now, that's rather amusing. I try with my own name, of course. It has 12 entries, all of which are me. The first one isn't half bad. Well, it is. It would be useless as my resume, but it is intriguing what it found. It identifies me primarily as a Board Member of "Web Angesl". Should be "Web Angels", I'm sure. Not that I remember joining any such thing. I guess that is is a workgroup within NCN that wanted to give me an honorable mention. Maybe more appropriate it also identifies me as founder of NCN, although it is as my "Past Employment History". And, quite impressively, it identified me as an Advisory Board Member of the Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change. I had forgotten all about that. Anyway, it also found some other snippets of biographical information about me. And an interview.

Amusingly, it labels all of these sites as "companies" and everybody it finds related to them as "employees".

I don't think this is really going to work. But I'm impressed that somebody will try to do this and that it is even partly in the right ballpark.
[ | 2005-03-28 01:20 | 5 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Like you need a hole in your head
picture Trepanation was quite popular in the middle ages, and even in pre-historic ages, as a supposed cure for an assortment of ailments. It is essentially that one drills a hole in somebody's head, or cuts out a triangular piece of their skull. Which there could be some legitimate use of, if your brain is swollen, for example. But nowadays there are people who advocate it as being good for somehow increasing your consciousness. So, read the story of this guy who thought it might be a good idea, and did the operation with the help of a couple of friends, a trip to a medical supply store, and some instructional videos. He survived alright, and was happy with it at first, but ended up concluding it probably wasn't such a good idea. Yeah, well, it probably wasn't.
[ | 2005-03-28 02:00 | 6 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Commerce Jamming
picture An assortment of troublemakers have fun throwing wrenches into the wheels of commerce. To make a point, I guess, about commercialism and consumerism and big corporations. Like there's gatt.org, a parody of a World Trade Organization website, so well done that they've accidentally been invited to speak at WTO conferences, which they exploited to the hilt with outrageous performances. Here are some other exploits:
A group calling itself Whirl-Mart infests the halls of commerce with site-appropriate dance: The ritual consists of interested humans arriving at a predetermined Wal-Mart at 12 noon on the first Sunday of every month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the different departments of the store for about an hour. Overall, it is a soothing and fun experience for the actors, and perhaps a memorable spectacle for shoppers. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology. And, it is a living, breathing, moving, evolving sculpture.

A parody group calling itself the Organization of Corporations Against Coöperation staged a protest against small business and in favor of giant corporations. They picketed a small bookshop with signs saying things like "Size Does Matter" and urged passers-by to patronize instead huge chain bookstores. The same group later managed to get a branch of one such giant bookstore chain to close for one day - they masqueraded as a pro-corporate taskforce who was monitoring local anti-corporate activity and said that a planned protest might get out-of-hand, recommending that the bookstore close up shop for the day of the protest.
Or, how about the guys who create prayer services where they gather in supermarkets to worship the wonderful products that we're presented with. "Praise the fresh chickens and their fleshy whiteness!". Yeah, halleluja.
[ | 2005-03-28 14:11 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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