The Design Of Voting

Design Institute: project: The Design of Voting: One Year AfterAfter the November 2000 election, politicians, designers and public institutions began exploring the relationship between design and the election process in America. Never before has the entire election process received so much scrutiny and never before has the role of design as an agent of political change been so clearly defined. A number of voting design projects have been launched since the election; all trying to solve similar problems and asking the same question: How do we use conventional design practices and methodologies to improve the experience of voting in America?

IBM to Export Highly Paid Jobs To India, China

WSJ.com - IBM to Export Highly Paid Jobs To India, China In one of the largest moves to "offshore" highly paid U.S. software jobs, International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere.

The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S. Already, the managers have been told, IBM has hired 500 engineers in India to take on some of the work that will be moved.

IBM calls its plan, first presented internally to some midlevel managers in October, "Global Sourcing." It involves people in its Application Management Services group, a part of IBM's giant global-services operations, which comprise more than half IBM's 315,000 employees.

Bought a new stinkpad (in theory)

I bought a new IBM Thinkpad X31 today, in theory. I write in theory because I can't get any status on the order (the IBM order status page times out with a server error 400 after about 30 seconds). The receipt I received was misclassified as spam ('cause it looks like spam) so I didn't even see it initially, and it took me three tries to buy it in the first place.

Good thing IBM pushed a bunch of us through the paces in 1999 with the "bullseye" redesign.

Anyway....it's a Thinkpad X31 with 1024Mb of memory and 40Gb of dasd. Built in wifi and bluetooth. I should have seen if I could buy more mouse button thingamajigs since that's the major problem with my current stinkpad.

When I placed the order everything was listed as "in stock". The receipt I received in mail made it clear that in IBM lingo, "in stock" doesn't mean "in stock". I'm not sure what it means, however my system won't ship until January 2004. Funny thing is, if it doesn't ship before the end of the year I might as well cancel the order since the whole point was to get a tax writeoff this year (and based on past experience, IBM won't charge the card until they ship the system, which is the right thing to do, except not what I need).