Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: technology

  • Laying down the law on bulk e-mail

    I get too damn much email I didn’t ask for.

  • Blocking ads on the Internet is ethical because the business model is broken – but I hope you whitelist Down the Road anyway

    I use an ad blocker in my browser, but lately I’ve been unblocking ads on the small-time sites I follow. The old-car site Curbside Classic was first to be unblocked, when the site’s owner explained last year how ads kept the site barely afloat. It’s one of my favorite places to visit on the Internet, and…

  • The hot girl at the dance

    “Oh my gosh, Jim, you’re the hot girl at the dance!” A former boss called to ask about my week on the job hunt, and that’s what she said after I told her. What a week it was! I landed a short-term consulting job with a startup software company. It starts today. An interview with…

  • LinkedIn, are you trying to drive me away?

    I’ve changed jobs frequently during my career – eight companies in 25 years. That’s not unusual in software development, which is my line of work. Because of my nomadic ways I’ve worked with many fine colleagues, and LinkedIn has been a great tool for keeping track of them. (If I were only better at keeping in touch…

  • Much ado about Flickr

    I was shocked when I logged into Flickr last week and found an entirely new interface. My shock turned to disappointment and sadness that some of my contacts were super angry about the change, left strongly worded comments on their photostreams, and immediately moved their photos to other services. I make software products for a living;…

  • I believe in A teams over A players

    I’ve heard it again and again at work. “We need to hire a real A player for this job, a total rock star.” This statement usually comes at a time some critical task or function isn’t being done well (or at all) and it’s causing projects to fail. “If we can just bring in a…

  • Lamenting Google Reader

    When I opened Google Reader Wednesday night and saw a pop-up message announcing that Google would retire the service on July 1, I actually gasped and felt dizzy. Reader is Google’s feed-reading service, which is a way of following blogs and other Web sites. Most sites offer a feed in a format called RSS, which…

  • Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer says no more working from home – and I say, “Right on!”

    They say that the first secret of success is simply showing up. For those of us who work in software development, I say that means going to the office every workday. Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo!, seems to agree. She recently told the Internet company’s employees that they would no longer be allowed…

  • Film on Instagram

    I feel like such an Internet curmudgeon. In my day, sonny, we used Netscape 1.0 to surf static HTML Web pages that were coded in Notepad, and we liked it! I try all the new Internet gewgaws and gimcracks but don’t like most of them. Twitter? What’s the point? Pinterest? Wow, what a colossal waste of time! Instagram? Crappy lo-fi…

  • Even a mediocre plan will work if everybody follows it

    I have been astonished in my life by how few problems are truly unsolvable. I have also noticed that, most of the time, when a problem ends up not being solved it is for one of two reasons: people deny the problem, or they won’t work together on the solution. I make software for a…

  • Laying down the law on bulk e-mail

    Have you ever signed up for something online and then started getting e-mails from that company – special offers, newsletters, and the like? That’s bulk e-mail. The software company I work for offers its customers a bulk e-mail service, and so we send lots of promotional e-mails to our customers’ customers. I’m usually reluctant to admit that because…

  • The pinnacle of my career

    Not long ago I wrote about a time I was fired under some pretty stinky circumstances. And then there was the time I worked under the CEO who lied in court about having sexually harassed his assistant. And I still haven’t told the story about the company owner who went to prison. Fortunately, my long…