Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Reading the IT Leaves
October 21, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreEconomic activity is notoriously difficult to predict because it depends on the daily decisions of millions of individuals who themselves are difficult to predict. Behavior can often be capricious, and the money guys who manipulate markets are even more uncomfortable with uncertainty than a nun opening an attachment from Carlos Danger. Consequently, any time the needle moves in the wrong direction, hand wringing and consternation are sure to follow.
So when Gartner reported that IT spending would fall $74 billion below predictions, the sky wasn’t exactly falling, but it teetered ominously. Granted, $74 billion is not pocket change, but the
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As I See It: Virtual Pheromones
October 7, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreHelen Morrison was a single woman with an age-old dilemma. Entering midlife, she wondered if she would ever meet a suitable partner and, frankly, she was getting lonely. But although Morrison longed to be married, she had no acceptable way of meeting men socially. Respectable women did not frequent taverns, nor were desirable partners likely to be found loitering over pints at the nightly watering hole.
But Morrison found what would become a visionary solution to her quandary: She placed a personal ad in her local paper, the Manchester Weekly Journal. Her “Lonely Hearts” ad was the first of
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As I See It: In Search of the Technology-Free Vacation
September 23, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreJust before we headed off on vacation, my wife, who never strays far from computerized devices, made a bold, unprecedented suggestion. “Let’s also have a vacation from technology.” I was pleased but dubious. Like Charlton Heston, who planned to have his gun pried from his cold, dead hands, I sort of figured the wife would leave this world clutching her smartphone. But her reasoning, she explained, was economic, not an unexpected lack of interest in all things with screens.
We planned to go to Washington (the state) to visit the in-laws, and then on to Canada to visit the Rockies.
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As I See It: Motivate This
September 9, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreI’m about a week away from heading up to Banff and Jasper for a little mountain madness and, as departure time draws near, my motivation to work is draining faster than sinuses under a pollen attack. Like God, motivation is a universal concept, individually applied. With the exception of survival, few, if any, motivators can guarantee to consistently move the productivity needle. And those that do, won’t necessarily do so for long. For people who have already achieved a comfortable baseline and don’t aspire to piggish levels of consumption, motivation is like the tide–it comes and goes.
Mine was waning
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As I See It: The Rats Are Coming
August 26, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThere are many good reasons why a pack of rats is also referred to as a mischief. They are opportunistic, breed like Kardashians, can chew through just about anything including steel, and host some nasty pathogens including Yersinia pestis, a micro-organism found in fleas responsible for the Bubonic Plague.
Rats jump, climb, swim, and can hold their breath for up to four minutes. They’re tough enough to have survived 10 years of atomic testing on Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. And if that’s not enough, they’re quick learners. They can learn to navigate a maze, solve problems, and
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As I See It: Hot Fun In The Summertime
August 5, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreAh, summer! The weekends are yours and they’re finally worth having. Guys are manning their BBQs, watchful as captains at the helm, and the siren scent of burning meat is wafting across the land. Coolers stand packed with iced beer, shoes give way to flip-flops, and the couch competes for lounging time with the patio furniture. The travails of the workplace fade until they become little more than necessary annoyances that put meat on the grill.
Women often mistakenly believe that summer is the time to tackle that long list of home improvement projects put off since the Pleistocene. But
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As I See It: Searching for the Perfect Question
July 22, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreLying to get a job used to be a lot easier. There was a time when a fluffed-up resume was enough to get you an interview. A proper display of earnestness, a dash of personal charm, and a retelling of your exaggerated accomplishments would pretty much guarantee that you could keep living indoors. Back then, resume claims were seldom checked, and what checking occurred was not very useful. By law, companies could only verify employment, and unless you could cajole someone into speaking off the record, you learned nothing illuminating about the applicant.
At the end of the day, hiring
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As I See It: Co-opting The Valley
July 8, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreSingularity is so passé. At least the variety that proposed to meld a single individual with a machine. How small, how private, how self-absorbed. Dare to dream big. Why join with a single system when you can meld with the entire Silicon Valley?
Co-opting the Valley appears to be the latest not-so-secret strategy of the National Security Agency, whose interests and methodologies increasingly overlap with those of technology firms. By definition, a surveillance state plans to live forever. And, for the NSA, eternal life requires uninterrupted access to galactic flows of data. But why go through the trouble of stealing
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As I See It: Looking Through the PRISM
June 17, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreChristoph Meili was a security guard who worked the night shift at the Union Bank of Switzerland. One night while making his rounds, he discovered that the management of UBS was doing naughty, naughty things in the dark. There’s no pretty way to put this: they were working overtime to cheat the families of dead people. But not just people who died in the normal scheme of things. Oh, no. These people happened to be Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. UBS probably didn’t want to disturb their descendants by digging up all those painful memories, so
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As I See It: Compassionate Computing, Or Dalai On The Desktop
June 10, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read morePhowa is a Sanskrit word meaning “the transference of consciousness at the time of death.” The intersection of science and religion, technology and spirituality, forms an uneasy junction, often distrustful and frequently violent. Historically, science has been derisive of faith, and believers were naturally suspicious of science. Thus, for centuries, few things have been more intransigent to change than religion. It came, if at all, at a glacial pace, resistant to modernity, impervious to reason. And perhaps that was as it should be.
If you believe you have a pipeline to the divine–that revelation is yours alone; and that your