These are the people in your neighborhood

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

Bleurgh

Hiding in the Diesel with a nice green tea after getting dragged over the coals by one of our new business contacts. I am so glad that we brought daerr along, and regret not trying harder to get him to come to earlier dates with new business contacts. I can put together a mean argument in writing, given a day or three to grovel over it, but Andy's on-the-fly rhetorical kung-fu is so much stronger than mine.

The take-away from this is that our business plan - the written document, that is - still conatins some fairily hectic weaknesses and oversights. This guy's prognosis is actually similar to one we've already heard, from the angel who hasn't quite deleted us from his Palm yet: We talk and talk and talk about our wonderful tech, and that's great, everyone is sure that our tech rocks, as does our ability to make good on future tech plans. But we're still not clear, it seems, about how this translates to a massive ROI for the targeted reader. Where, exactly, do all these users come from? Why doesn't one of our competition take all our open source code and make their own Volity without out consent? How come we're not obsessed with exclusivity? We have answers to all of these but apparently they're not communicated very well in the document.

Very well. I shall have to fix it, along with the other 1000 things I have to do before August 1. Line em up

First I shall order a sandwich. And um... I probably need to look in another place for jobs today, too, since I have so far gotten only one non-negative response to my Sunday emails, and it is from the sketchiest-sounding company. (A "biomedical" company with a yahoo.com email address and no Google presence. Riiight.) Andy also gave me some good advice on looking for work that won't kill me. I can, in an instant, get a full-time job. I might even find one that I enjoy. And it will probably leave me with 2 hours per day left for Volity. So, this is not my number-one choice, no. There are other job morphologies, though...