Santa Monica Content Provider Goes Public

Demand Media, an internet how-to and general information provider with headquarters in Santa Monica, went public Wednesday to the tune of some $1.5 billion.

The more time goes by, the more companies I was salivating over working at last year turn out to look pretty crummy. In 2010 they invited me to interview for the position of SEO Technical Manager at the eHow.com property.

The office was all a-buzz because they’d just made their SEC filings for the IPO in the previous week. Everyone I met with was quite nice. The managers were all intelligent, competent, and polite.

With one exception.

The gent who’d been hired to fill the position was working as a contractor: no stock  for him. This “Senior Technical Recruiter” was warm and engaging and demonstrated great personnel skills during my three interviews.

It became quickly apparent, however, when the management decided to pass on me. The “Senior Technical Recruiter” – let’s call him RT – dropped the conversation like a hot potato. No responses to phone calls or e-mail.

That is, until, a few weeks later when a close colleague mentioned he’d be heading over there for an interview. I fired up Thunderbird and sent RT another e-mail, mentioning that I’d heard from my friend that he was interviewing over there.

And I got a response! Imagine that!

Anyway, this article is pretty anti-DemandMedia. It says that it’s not such a great company from the perspective of the freelance writers that make $5 per article.

via Santa Monica Content Provider Goes Public.

China State TV News Uses Top Gun Footage to Fake Fighter Jet Story

This is the best story I’ve heard all year.

A net user who went by the name Liu Yi pointed out that the jet that the J-10 “hit” is an F-5, a US fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5. Looking at the screenshots juxtaposition, one cannot fail to find that even flame, smoke and the way the splinters fly look the same.

via China Central Television news suspected to have stolen jet fighter scenes from Top Gun | Ministry of Tofu 豆腐部.

Sprint CDMA Rev. A in Santa Monica

If you don’t look at the latency (“ping”) this could be an old school ADSL on copper – pretty cool.
I hope to soon go back to the intersection of Fedora and Olympic (in my previous tests the strongest WiMAX signal between downtown Los Angeles and the beach) to see how the signal is with the Sprint SmartView on Windows XP. I’d checked it out using the “roll your own” Intel WiMAX software compiled for Ubuntu. It took two weeks just to get the drivers and HAL operating in Debian. And I had to run a nightly Linux kernel.
One interesting observation was that CLEAR (the actual service provider) was operating three other channels in addition to their own. Obviously, Sprint was in there, and, not surprisingly, Verizon had a channel. But what was shocking was to see that there was a listing in the for TimeWarner Cable!! Apparently TWC plans to use CLEAR WiMAX private label service at some point. How weird!

Yellowstone Magma Pocket Swells

Sometimes you hope you’re wrong.

The simmering volcano has produced major eruptions—each a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens’s 1980 eruption—three times in the past 2.1 million years. Yellowstone’s caldera, which covers a 25- by 37-mile (40- by 60-kilometer) swath of Wyoming, is an ancient crater formed after the last big blast, some 640,000 years ago.

via Yellowstone Has Bulged as Magma Pocket Swells.