Today's song: “Oh the weather outside is frightful..”

Computer rendition of Let It Snow. “;->”

Domain Names Once Again Fetch Top Dollar (AP). AP – One more sign the technology sector is rebounding: An Internet domain name is again commanding seven figures.

Santa-tracking Web site takes up the watch. Some people no doubt raise an eyebrow that North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, for the 49th consecutive year is undertaking the annual task of tracking the global progress of Santa Claus starting Dec. 24 and continuing through the early hours of Christmas Day.

Final challenge for the morning — hooking up a Ceiva digital picture frame. It has to connect to the phone line. The phone cable they gave us with the unit, with standard phone jacks at either end, doesn't fit into the back of the unit. We spent a half-hour trying different angles, it just doesn't fit. Then we tried taking the cord that connects the base unit of an old Princess-type phone to its handset, and that fits. Unfortunately that won't fit into the wall. I'm afraid this one has me licked. (For now.)

BBC: No Mars signal from Beagle probe.

Channel Z status — I'm using it every day, in fact I'm using it to write this post. At some point I plan to put in another month or so of intense work, not sure exactly when. Now I'm gaining experience as a user. And my experience as a developer with thousands of users of new Web authoring software has taught me to go slow at this stage. Once deployed, the demands of users get overwhelming quickly.

MyWireService “delivers the headlines and summaries to you in an easy to scan page.”

The RSS-User mail list is off to a great start with 79 members. It works because it's moderated. All the posts have been about feeds and howtos, no politics, no personal attacks.

Small Company Hiring Picking Up.

After a long dry spell, hosts of small firms across the country are starting to take on workers again — a significant step in an economic recovery that hasn't seen much job creation. The nation's 23 million small businesses employ an estimated 57.1 million workers — more than half of all private-sector employees — and create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product, according to the Small Business Administration.

A wave of small-business hiring could help sustain consumer confidence and tide the economy over until larger companies regain the will to significantly boost payrolls — and begin restoring the 2.4 million jobs lost nationwide since the recession began in March 2001.

The hiring has been spurred by Bush administration tax incentives and a new eagerness by banks to court small firms. But the biggest factor is improving sales. Low interest rates have kept home sales high, meaning lots of work for the small construction companies that make up the bulk of the industry. Baby boomers are retiring and laying out lots of money for specialized health-care services, which are mainly the province of small clinics. And as big companies shed jobs, they outsource more work. Even with productivity gains, small companies are finding they simply can't meet escalating demand with the workers on hand.

“Smaller companies have less of a cushion, so when demand picks up, they have so little fat there, they have to hire. So they will be the ones to generate jobs,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., research firm. 

WSJ    December 4, 2003

<!–
if (!GetCookie("fastlogin")&&!GetCookie("ERIGHTS")) {
document.write(' Online Journal Subscribers LOG IN');
}
//–>