This is ZX81.org.uk

I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man. (Those that know me should stop nodding their heads and agreeing now, please.) This is another “things were better in my day” post.

As I previously mentioned, both graduates and companies are complaining that university courses are not vocational enough. I personally dispute that. However I am generally in agreement with Joel Spolsky when he says that “Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.”

Apparently web users judge sites in the blink of an eye — potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds. I hope you took just a little longer checking out my websites!

We normally see employers complaining that recent graduates don’t have “relevant” skills. This article is an interesting twist on that, with the job-seekers themselves complaining about their courses.

The Register: IT grads damn university courses

I think both employers and job seekers are missing the point. There’s a difference between “education” and “training.” University degrees should not simply be vocational training, they should teach principles that can be applied throughout a career and not just specific technologies that might well have a shelf-life of only a few years.

When it first happened I was irritated. A few days later I was irritated that I was still irritated. It didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t a big thing and it shouldn’t have bugged me at all, much less still a few days later.

After a while I realised that my irritation was more rational than I initially thought so I started to write them down as a way of structuring them. And here they are.

I though I’d start the new year with an unusual, for me at least, positive message. The message: we’ve never had it so good technology-wise and often we forget that.

I started thinking about this when I realised what I was doing with my computer. Right now, for example, I am typing this into Emacs. In the back-ground I am scanning in some film and burning the previous scans onto CD. Only a few years ago any one of these activities would have been more than enough for a simple home computer. A joke at the time was that Emacs stood for “eight megabytes and continually swapping,” and now my iPod has thirty-two megs of memory as a convenience, basically to avoid letting the battery run down too quickly.

This links in with my earlier post about good technology being invisible. Fonts and typefaces have a far bigger impact on the readability of text than most people think yet you almost never notice their design unless it’s bad enough to make it difficult to comprehend.

This blog, “Quality in Typefaces & Fonts,” by Thomas Phinney, an Adobe employee, doesn’t discuss the design of typefaces — which is an interesting area in itself — but does give some insight into how much effort goes into making a good electronic font.

You’ve already seen once my disdain for Christian extremists. This week I found one more reason when we went to see “La Marche de l’empereur (2005),” or “March of the Penguins” if you, like me, can only read English.

As you may be aware, the Christian Right have adopted this movie as an example of both monogamy and Intelligent Design. If you’ve seen the film you’ll realise that it’s neither.

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

I had a small birthday celebration last weekend and, to my surprise, a number of people have been asking what music I was playing. The answer can be found as an iMix on iTunes.

My friend has created a website to document her negative experiences trying to take advantage of the “money back guarantee” that Anthony Robbins offers on his motivational courses. Let her know if you’ve experienced anything similar!