Author: Mark

Human Resource

What is a resource?

a useful or valuable possession or quality of a country, organization or person

Cambridge University Press

a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively

Oxford English Dictionary Press

To many, the understanding of resources has been in the context of raw materials: oil, minerals, currency and other tradable commodities. The definitions above appear vague enough to accommodate both the traditional idea of resources and more modern appreciations. If we take some liberty with the definitions I could, in fact, be “a valuable asset of an organization”. Unfortunately, the word asset itself is tricky, referring to either positive virtues and strengths or conversely, property and goods. A “useful possession drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively”? Less appealing.

In conversation, we speak of needing “[x amount of resources] for [a particular task, function or result]” eg “one barrel of oil for production of twenty gallons of petrol”. Accordingly, we could assign “eight developers and one designer for completion of this project”. This likely has roots in labor as part of the factors of production, the idea of human capital.

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Closed doors

Home Secretary Theresa May announced on 23 November that the United Kingdom’s Tier 1 General Migrant visa route will close April 2011. The decision is one of many changes to immigration policy under the new coalition government. The justification is such that one-third of migrants accepted for a highly skilled visa actually end up in low-skilled work. In 2009, the UK approved my Tier 1 General Migrant visa application. It is a lengthy, difficult process aimed at drawing so-called highly skilled workers to emigrate to the UK. I have made a decent time of it so far; I am in the two-thirds percentage who have successfully found highly skilled work.

Immigration policy is an incredibly complex issue and I suspect living through an upheaval of the law will affect my own views concerning immigration in the United States. There are, of course, fundamental differences between migrants living in a country legally to those who have made a life illegally. However, the issue becomes clouded on both sides in calling for deportation or stricter rules whilst already trying to make a life for yourself in a country you aren’t a born citizen of.

It’s unsettling to see the door I walked through sealed off behind me. This isn’t the first change to the application. One month after my approval, the government set the visa skill requirements to a level I could never have applied to. I felt extraordinarily fortunate at the time — now, all the more.

Vanilla soy milk powder, nutmeg.

I’ve always felt that repetitive writing is one of the more effective methods for quick memorization of information. In reviewing a cooking recipe, I wrote a list of the necessary ingredients. Comparing against the stock in the cupboard, I then made a checkmark next to the items I already had available. There were nineteen ingredients total; twelve were missing. In my haste to go the shop before it closed, I forgot the list. Halfway there, in a moment of decision on whether to push forward or turn back for the list, I quickly typed out the ingredients I could remember into Simplenote on my iPhone. Confident that the list was fairly complete, I continued on.

Returning to my flat afterwards, I compared the two lists fully expecting a few discrepancies. Remarkably, there were none.

I suspect this method is not bulletproof — accuracy would likely drop with larger and more detailed amounts of information over a longer span of time between writing and recall. However, perhaps worth consideration on your next trip to the market.

Warmth

I remain unconvinced that connections sustained online can ever hold real value.

There are extraordinary cases, as with anything. Largely however, we are building and maintaining superficial and haphazard relationships.

I have more often found inspiration in fleeting, chance encounters; moments of genuine intimacy. We are pouring our lives into empty boxes.

Knowledge sharing is something altogether different.

Excessive voyeurism and exhibitionism building towards a sort of paranoia and neurosis, primal need for acceptance.

We forget warmth and affection.

Input buttons and CSS3

CSS3 brings a wealth of new properties to the web and to modern browsers. There is a greatly reduced dependency on images in creating rich, stylized content. I’ve used a few of these new properties to render the submit buttons throughout this site. It’s a basic solution to a common request that was previously only possible with imagery.

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Revisions, a flower shop

Regardless of the thousands of breadcrumbs we have crumbled in the wake of our ever-present, ever-tracking digital world individuals are still blank canvases. If you have exercised any modicum of privacy in your public life it is still remarkably easy — last stop, this town — to start over.

…that isn’t necessarily the point. We take the words of others for granted. Yes, over time we expand our understanding and solidify the histories we’ve learned. Largely, however, we accept what each other say as truth.

She was a florist — mostly arrangements, not so much reselling. She freelanced, odd jobs here and there. Most of the flowers came from local markets. I first saw her picking flowers from the bodega on Spring Street — or was it Prince? They were a brilliant yellow. I was wearing headphones (as always) and Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” was playing — cheeky I know, but it’s true. Songs are rarely random anyway — large bundles of songs curated to appear at seemingly opportune times, eventually. I remember it was pissing down rain, windy. New York pulling out of winter, pushing into spring. I didn’t talk to her that day, just watched.

We ended the relationship in the same shop, arguing as we moved through the aisles; throwing words at each other as we tossed avocados and tomatoes into a hand basket. It felt like a cliché, a heated public discussion that only seem to happen in films. She left, I finished and paid at the checkout. The cashier, slow and apathetic.

Not a word of this is true.
The imaginative amongst us construct fascinating, intricate stories. How often do the mundane details of a day resemble fiction?

October

I’m intrigued by coincidence and parallel events, markers in a life otherwise lacking in obvious direction.

Two years ago today I began a holiday without any expectation or serious thought. I left after ten days full of possibility and uncertainty.

Twitter, 4 October 2010

This week I learned that the artist that had unknowingly provided me the soundtrack to what would prove to be quite an important holiday to the UK had since released a new album. I discovered this two years to the day of the trip. Whether that is coincidence or a plea for significance is left to question. Either way, the music I listen to this week will be the continuation of those moments in two thousand and eight.

Nostalgia is often a sentimental desperation, a dwelling on the past that creates regrets and unnecessary analysis of what may or may not have been. However, I think there are moments worth remembering; milestones for comparing past expectations against current reality. It seems that we are always pulling aside the branches, trying to reconcile our expectations with the present, when largely nothing matches our expectations. Perhaps there is wisdom in reading the differences; clarity through the choices made.

The music reminds me that I ambled towards this present with little idea of whether it was possible — or quite often, whether it was a good idea. There may comfort in the reminder that there is often possibility in uncertainty.

iPhone: Threading the needle, and the joys of restraint

Apple released the iPhone 4 on 24 June in the United Kingdom. The morning of the launch, I took a train to Victoria station and submitted a pre-order. A few days later, I returned to collect the phone and sign a new eighteen-month contract. Orange declined the contract on the basis of a nondescript, empty-box credit check. Dejected, I returned home. Determined to get ahold of the new device, I placed an order directly with Apple and forfeited the subsidized price of a contract phone. Two weeks later, the phone arrived and I made plans to return to Orange the next day to purchase a month-to-month SIM-only plan. Orange declined the second application on the same arbitrary, non-specific grounds as the first. I walked across the street and with little fanfare signed up for a plan on o2.

The resolution to own a new iPhone wasn’t entirely an effect of the massive media hype surrounding the launch. I purchased the first generation iPhone in October 2007, and used it for nearly three years. The last year of use was without mobile broadband. The product lust seemed, for once, entirely justified. The decision to upgrade came on the heels of a prolonged and unusually complex evolution of Apple, the iPhone, the iOS (as it’s now called) and the concept of mobile computing.

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Flickr

After a few months of sorting through my photographs — and a fair bit of editing — I have completed the slow migration from arcade.withoutnations.com to my account at Flickr. There are a few reasons I felt this was necessary:

  1. Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
  2. The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
  3. The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
  4. A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.

The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.