DIY routes to stardom

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From today’s New York Times…

Cinderella is alive and well and living on Staten Island.

Ingrid Michaelson, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose self-produced album “Girls and Boys” reached No. 2 on the iTunes pop chart, is enjoying an enchanted transformation as a recording artist.

Ms. Michaelson’s climb out of obscurity started, as is so often the case these days, on the Internet. Now she is known to many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans for her quirky, heartfelt songs that were featured over the past year on the ABC television series. After a cross-country music tour, she is performing on Wednesday at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, and she pointed out that the concert sold out a month ago without any advertising. (She has added a concert on Feb. 15 at Webster Hall.)

Not bad for someone who, until May, was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born.

“It’s so uncool, it’s cool,” said her mother, Elizabeth Egbert, the executive director of the Staten Island Museum…

Happy Birthday ‘weblog’

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It’s ten years to the day since Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’. Now he offers Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers…

My favourites:

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

[…]

6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”

IBM now has 73,000 employees in India

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Wow! Technology Review reports that

IBM Corp.’s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year.

IBM did not provide updated figures for its work force in the U.S., which has held steady around 125,000 people in recent years.

Nor did IBM project its total head count. It had 355,766 employees worldwide at the end of 2006.

If the total has risen by the same rate as in 2006, almost one in five IBM workers now is in India, its second-largest center…

Google vs. Microsoft

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Useful New York Times review of the current state of play.

“For most people,” [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.

To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

The Wii. Popular, in demand – and out of stock

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This morning’s Observer column

Although there is nothing new about ‘must-have’ gizmos being in short supply, there is a novel twist this year. It is that the elusive object of desire was also last Christmas’s most desired object – the Nintendo Wii, the most innovative games console since the (Nintendo) GameBoy in 1989…

Desperate measures are afoot. For example, this source reports that

To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

”We expect this to be a great way for consumers who desperately want a Wii to have something to put under the tree,” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said Friday.

The rain checks will be available at the regular Wii system price, $249.99, on Dec. 20 and 21, and will entitle buyers to get the Nintendo console before Jan. 29. Fils-Aime said ”many tens of thousands of rain checks” would be available.

Harvard changes tack

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Interesting FT.com column by Christopher Caldwell about Harvard’s change of strategy on student support.

This week, Harvard announced a new financial aid system that will revolutionise the economics of American undergraduate education. Henceforth, students whose families earn up to $180,000 a year will pay no more than 10 per cent of that income to Harvard. Loans will be eliminated from financial aid packages and replaced with outright grants. Home equity will not be taken into account in determining contribution levels. It is a great step forward from the Harvard I attended in the 1980s. Whether it is a step forward for American society is harder to gauge.

The money needed to get this new programme up and running – about $22m – is a drop in the bucket for Harvard. Its $35bn endowment makes it (if we compare Harvard’s assets with various gross domestic products) a mightier economic force than Syria or Bulgaria or the Dominican Republic. Last year, the Harvard portfolio earned a 23 per cent return overall. At those rates Harvard’s largesse can be paid for with about four days’ worth of interest on the interest.

Classic images

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This shot of a cheeky lad snapped in the Rue Mouffetard in 1954 by Henri Cartier-Bresson is my favourite picture. Now I discover that it was the photographer’s least favourite picture! At any rate, this is what John Banville writes in his review of Magnum Magnum, the anniversary collection of work by Magnum photographers:

Taste is a strange thing, and again and again throughout Magnum Magnum one is surprised by what seem not so much contrasts as head-on collisions. In a brief introductory essay Gerry Badger wonders what might be the quintessential Magnum image. He decides on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s picture of ”that wonderfully cheeky Parisian urchin cradling two bottles of wine”. It is ironic, therefore, to recall that when, a couple of years before his death, I mentioned this very snapshot to HCB, he threw his hands in the air and cried out as if in pain: ”Terrible! Terrible! I should destroy the negative!”

Just goes to show: great minds seldom think alike.

The best medicine

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My mother used to say that ‘laughter is the best medicine’. This picture of a good friend in jovial mood confirms that. It was taken with my trusty old Leica M4. It’s astonishing how unobtrusive this ancient machine is: people genuinely don’t seem to notice it.

Review of the day

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From Matt Williams’s review of the Bic Crystal ballpoint pen that he purchased from Amazon.co.uk…

Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.

My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about – if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.

On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn’t have worried, this isn’t some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately…

Interestingly, “1,408 of 1,417 people” found his review “helpful”. Who said irony was dead?