Thursday, June 11, 2009

The sorrows and...something...of work

Via Heather Havrilesky at Salon, it looks like Alain de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is well worth a read. A quote: "Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party."

I write this while waiting for Dreamweaver to "clean up Word HTML" on a 41-page article with 167 footnotes. I've waited at least 30 minutes so far, and that's before the real scouring even begins.

Some graduation advice for young people: do not learn HTML. If you are going to learn how to write any kind of computer code, learn the hard stuff so people will have to defer to your expertise. If you only learn a little of some easy scripting language, you will be drafted into production tasks, no matter what kind of job you hold, or think you hold.

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