The Eight States of America, courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele. Click to see it at full size.
I’m in Santa Clara, California, attending the ISPCON Fall 2006 conference, where I’ll be moderating a panel discussion called “What the Web 2.0?” at 4:15 Pacific Time. The conference has been keeping me busy, so blogging might be light for the next couple of days, depending on what happens to my schedule.
Yesterday — Sunday, November 5th, 2006 — I turned the ripe old age of 39. We celebrated at a dinner party at Mom’s house along with my cousin Saturnino Carlos Faustino Ador Dionisio III, whose birthday falls on November 4th. Last week, Mom asked me what I’d like on the menu, and I asked for “Filipino comfort food”. I feasted on sinigang, chicken and pork adobo, pancit, vegetables and rice; this was followed by chocolate truffle and caramel latte cakes. Thanks, mom!
The night before, we had a party at our place with about 30 guests, a lot of booze, Swedish meatballs, some nice cakes. some very nice cheese and our homemade ice cream (our flavours: mint chocolate chip, vanilla, cookies and cream and mango sorbet). Lisa Goldman won this year’s “Phineas Fogg” award for the being the person who travelled the longest distance to come to the party; she’s visiting from Tel Aviv. My thanks to all those who came!
People keep asking me if I have any thoughts as I enter the last year of my thirties. I’d have to say that what I came up with at the age of 19 still holds true. Back then, my pal Henry Dziarmaga and I, having consumed too many zombies and read Space-Time and Beyond decided that in the infinite number of parallel universes, there must be one in which our lives arebeing watched as television shows. We must therefore live to keep the ratings up.
Nobody writes a marketing slogan like my buddy George. His catchphrase for our tech blog, Global Nerdy, is “You’ll come out of pity, but you’ll return out of mild interest”. Why this guy isn’t the Wizard of Madison Avenue, I’ll never know.
Some of the recent stories on Global Nerdy:
In the International Herald-Tribune, there’s an article on the social situation in Beirut, where young women outnumber young men by a ratio of five to one. The sex ratio skew is the result of the dire employment situation in Lebanon: the educated and ambitious men to seek their fortunes abroad while the women stay home (apparently the guys who stay behind are the dolts, the shiftless and the local equivalent of Ned Flanders.)
The practical upshot of all this is that when the men come home, they return to “one of the world’s most aggressive cultures of female display”. Simply put, the entire place turns into Coyote Ugly.
Thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for the photo.
Yesterday, I was asked to post a job announcement on the Tucows Blog and this blog. I did it near the end of the day by cutting, pasting and then applying a little formatting for the web. I didn’t pay much attention to the copy and got called on it by an eagle-eyed reader:
I love you, but please don’t be part of using the word “incumbent” that way.
Incumbent got started in job ads as a way to describe what the old guy did when you didn’t really have a good handle on what the job should be called: “The incumbent drinks a lot of coffee and fills out TPS reports. He’s retiring next month and we need to hire someone to sit in his office.” Now every HR person in the world seems to think it is a synonym for “job-seeker”, which is precisely, exactly, wrong.
Stop it. Please.
After calming the Ginger Ninja down (she read the comment and asked “Who is this person who loves you? And a grammarian too! Who is this person?!”), I looked at the copy of the job posting and there it was — the word “incumbent” used in the wrong way:
The successful incumbent will have the challenging opportunity to work on Tucows’ vast and complex high availability system spread across multiple data centers, servers and operating systems.
This is embarrassing. I should’ve caught that one. I must be slipping in my old age.
I find it hard to believe that someone can fail to understand what “incumbent” means at a time when the news, both local and international, is saturated with stories about upcoming elections. The United States has midterm elections next Tuesday, and Accordion City will have a mayoral election on the 13th. I’m almost certain that the word “incumbent” is being used — complete with context — in those stories.
Let me make it clear: “incumbent” refers to the person who currently holds the position.
Here are some examples: George Bush is the incumbent president of the United States. David Miller is the mayor of Toronto; in the mayoral election, he is the incumbent.
Perhaps it’s the use of the word “incumbent” in elections that has led to confusion. Maybe people think that it’s synonymous with the word that should’ve been used in the job posting: candidate.
I decided to see if what the commenter said was true: “Now every HR person in the world seems to think it is a synonym for ‘job-seeker'”. I entered the terms job, posting and incumbent into Google and found job posting after job posting that used the word “incumbent” when the word “candidate” should have been used instead:
Those were just a few example from the first page of Google results. It seems that HR people all over the ‘net are making the same mistake. I’m going to set our own HR team straight later today. (I’ll do it nicely, partly because I’m a nice guy, partly because I have to hit them up for my job referral bonus for bringing in two employees.)
To the alert anonymous reader who spotted the mistake: thanks, Vocabulary Ranger!
The company for which I work, Tucows, has a job opening for an Integration Engineer. Here’s a very quick description of the job:
The successful
incumbentcandidate will have the challenging opportunity to work on Tucows’ vast and complex high availability system spread across multiple data centers, servers and operating systems. You’ll work with a dynamic team of Integration Engineers to develop, deploy and maintain components of a large scale hosted messaging platform. In addition, you will develop software components for our hosted messaging platform; liaise with third party suppliers in customizing applications for deployment on our high availability production environment; as well as contribute to ongoing process improvement of the SDLC.
For a full description, see this entry in the Tucows Blog.