I’ve been out of work since September. I may yet be reinstated (the decision-maker has been stalling since November), but supposing otherwise, I need advice.

My one known marketable skill is wordprocessing, which will eventually be obsolete as voice recognition improves (or more people do their own typing). It has been suggested that I try telephone tech support; but the suggestion did not come from someone with any idea how to seek such a job. Other ideas?

It seems not unlikely that the San Francisco Bay has an excess of people like me, while some other place (perhaps with cheaper housing) has a deficit. Where might that place be?

Some years ago I took a Unix admin course; insomnia and a series of colds (it was a chilly November) conspired to prevent my absorbing anything. I might try again. My One True Ex thinks I ought to learn accounting. What other skills might I acquire in less than a year?

We’re miffed that our favorite catfood, Fancy Feast, has apparently changed its formula: both Fluffie and Pillow, who formerly ate it eagerly, now turn up their noses. To our relief, they’re usually content with Trader Joe’s tuna.

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly eccentric (n=23). Several of the results are rather pretty.

Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book:

. . . excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – which surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

Does anyone else find it suspicious that the magic number does not depend on the field? Perhaps it does not measure the amount of study necessary for expertise, whatever that is, but a point beyond which improvement is much more difficult because a brain’s capacity is finite, which then becomes our definition of expertise.

Abercrombie & Kent, a travel agency that uses a Times Roman ampersand as a trademark, sued andBEYOND, a travel agency, not for the tacky capitalization but for using a Gill Sans ampersand as a trademark.

I doubt that such a suit would succeed if the marks in question were very different graphic treatments of the same letter, say an angular S forming a thunderbolt versus a more stolid sort of S in a ring. How different would the newcomer’s mark need to be, and is the necessary difference greater for quasi-letters such as ampersand?

Someone considered this passage, in “The Night of the Legion of Death” (an episode of The Wild Wild West), worth quoting on IMDb:

You’re not the Governor. Your one of the down faith, commandor present, your value silver voice! Your a howl chain faint fraud Brubaker! I am the Governor, I made you, I put you in office, I create your faint legion, I writing speech for you, tell you what to said, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward or execute your greek mass! It’s I speak proof and don’t ever forget that.

Ya gotta wonder about the person who transcribed this: did they think it made sense, or find it an admirable piece of nonsense?

Well, I hope I improved it some:

You’re not the Governor. You’re a wonderfully endowed face, a commanding presence, a bell-like silver voice. You’re a hollow tin-plated fraud, Brubaker! I am the Governor. I made you. I put you into office. I created your Black Legion. I write your speeches for you, tell you what to say, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward, who to execute. You’re a Greek mask that I speak through. Don’t ever forget that.

I wrecked my blog in trying to cure a Unicode display problem, and restored the site from a backup of December 11. A few posts and comments were lost.