Coyote Prints

For better or worse (better and worse?), I've made the switch to Movable Type. If you're reading this on LiveJournal on your friends page, it (hopefully) won't look any different. If you're reading it on my LJ page, it's switched to a generic theme.

If you're actually reading this on my home page (http://www.ranea.org/watts/), though, it'll look a lot different. The new website design is up and apparently functional, although it isn't tested in all browsers yet (boo hiss), all the pages have been updated, and a missing novella (!) has been restored along with my article on kitsune from the defunct webzine Fuzzy Logic.

(For the record, I gave up looking for the LJ-to-MT script mentioned last post and wrote an XSLT document to do the work. I'll make it, along with the mirror patches, available soon.)

"In 2000, research firm EPIC/MRA...estimated that 41 percent of all Americans would be private contractors by 2010. But today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment numbers have not grown at all over the last four years." [Wired News]

This is a little article occasioned by the impending closure of "Guru.com," a freelancers' network I looked into a year or so ago and actually joined. It didn't lead me anywhere, but apparently some folks were relying on it for a substantial amount of their leads. It raises some interesting big-picture questions. A lot of us, particularly in the tech sector, have been encouraged to "go freelance" in this market, since the hiring by and large isn't there. If the problem is that the work isn't there, though, doesn't that make "freelancing" a synonym for "unemployed?"