Question of the day: What was the first thing you did when you heard you had been laid off? Post in today’s discussion forums, or let me know by email, or post on your own weblog and link here so I can find you through my referer logs or DayPop.
I bring this up because Paul Boutin announced yesterday that Friday will be his last day as senior editor of Wired magazine. When I read his announcement, I noticed that his tagline, just below his name at the top of the page, was missing. It used to read “senior editor, Wired magazine”, but now it’s just blank space, which means that one of the first things he must have done when he heard the bad news was go into his Manila template preferences and remove that tagline. That must have sucked.
I was working remotely when I was fired, “connected” to the office by phone and Yahoo Instant Messenger. YIM, like other instant messaging clients, has status messages which show up next to your name: “I’m available” (the default), “Busy”, “On the phone”, “On vacation”, and so forth. After hearing the bad news, the first thing I did was go into YIM and create a new custom status message: “Fired”.
The Register: iPod for Windows coming. From the company that makes a Windows product to read and write Mac-formatted hard drives and other media. Makes sense, since the iPod is nothing but a Mac-formatted hard drive with MP3s in a hidden directory. Two weeks ago I predicted that there would be a Linux version, since Linux has kernel-level support for reading and writing Mac-formatted disks, and the latest kernels have support for Firewire hard drives. I haven’t seen anything yet; maybe Linux geeks just mount /dev/sda2 /ipod and cp *.mp3 /ipod/MagicHiddenDirectory/ or whatever.
iPod Free File Access. Mac OS 9 (or Classic under Mac OS X) system extension that shows the hidden directory where the iPod stores your MP3s. This is no doubt illegal under the DMCA, as I’m sure setting the “hidden” bit of a directory qualifies as copy protection these days. Luckily, the author appears to live in Germany, so the only one going to jail here is me for linking to it, or you for downloading it. I await the jack-booted thugs with breathless anticipation.
