diplomatic-immunity.dk

Well, it is finally sinking in. Unemployed again. I knew it would come to an end, as I had only been hired for the semester. Still, it comes as a bit of a shock after the first week. Vacation turns into idle hands and mind. I’ve been spending my time revising the contents of my resumé to more clearly reflect the skills that my latest job was interested in.

The majority of job opportunities in Denmark come through personal and professional contacts and not through job ads. That really blows when someone with international experience and fifteen years living abroad tries to find a new job. I tend to get slightly manic and try to analyze the job situation and develop new strategies for marketing my skills. I go through a stage where I revise my resumé and web sites. Then I try to draw on the networks of friends and contacts. Interestingly, this can quickly lead to embarrassment for all parties.

It is acceptable according to Danish social norms to be looking for employment. If however, you mention that you don’t have much of a network because you have been living abroad, or that you have been unemployed for a period of almost three years – despite unemployment in Denmark being at the lowest point for many years, embarrassment creeps in. Resumé forwarding not withstanding. In reality, the embarrassment couldn’t be more palpable if I had announced that I was starting my own harem and moving to a deserted island.

What is the cause of the embarrassment? People view their contacts as part of their own personal sphere. People need privacy, not because they are going to overthrow the government or plan a terrorist attack, but because they don’t want their wife to find out about their mistress, or they don’t want their employer to know about their gambling. We don’t like to reveal our foibles to just anyone. We also view our friends and contacts as assets that can support and help us, not someone else. Being unemployed, in a way, is like being socially dysfunctional or having the plague. Most people are afraid that it is somehow contagious.

By the way, I could still use those contacts…

“Could not activate EDGE: You are not subscribed to EDGE.” I just got an iPhone from the US a month before the new 3G model should be arriving here. There is a degree of culture shock when you first get the iPhone in your hands, even for an Apple device. I first came across an Apple computer when I was working for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. They had a whole office full of the original Macintosh computer, running System 6. The Macintosh made everything so easy. Everything was graphically oriented. No obscure key combinations with a blue screen.

I purchased my first Macintosh the first chance I got. That was a year or so later and the Mac had moved on to System 7. Despite my Mac (model IIsi) and my Apple licensed laser printer having cost a small fortune, I could do amazing things with it that wasn’t possible at the time on a desktop PC. I eventually purchased a laptop version of the Macintosh – a PowerBook. I was ready to become a road warrior. I was usually even able to keep my contacts, documents and various other files synced with my desktop Mac without much of a problem. Then came the so called “clone wars”. My desktop Mac had become a little long in the tooth, so I opted for a UMAX S900 running System 8. Steve Jobs had left Apple and founded NeXT Computers. Apple was foundering due to lost market share and tried to regain former glory by Apple licensing the MacOS operating system to other manufacturers such as UMAX and Motorola, in much the same way as Microsoft does. With the return of Steve Jobs after the firing of CEO Gil Amelio, a new operating system was rolled out (OS X) that only supported Apple made PReP or PowerPC Reference Platform based computers. This alienated many Mac users (including me) and is the root to Steve Job’s insistence that Apple maintains both full hardware and full software control over its products. This has been taken to a whole new level in the case of the iPhone.

The iPhone has up to this point only been for sale in some countries, the US, the UK, France and Germany among them. The phones have been tied or locked to one carrier in each country. Anyone that purchased an iPhone in one country and either worked or lived for a while in another country would be forced to unlock or “jail break” their phone, if they didn’t want to spend money on exorbitant roaming charges. Unfortunately, jail breaking an iPhone is like trying to perform voodoo on a moving target as firmware upgrades tend to render jail broken iPhones useless (known as “bricking”). After having received my iPhone,I have discovered that locking a phone to a carrier is common practice, but a practice that I have never experienced before. Anyone that travels a lot (either business or pleasure), which includes most people, should be able to use a local phone card to avoid exorbitant roaming fees.

Apple has been indecisive with regards to initial policy on third party application development. Apple originally took the stance that only programs created by Apple or its partners (such as Yahoo and Google) would be able to be used on the iPhone. Apple has since reversed this stance after hackers started developing programs and installing them with “installer.app”. Apple now has a developer kit that will allow third party developers to create programs for the iPhone, apparently through the iTunes store.

Apple’s recent policies on hardware and software has driven one of my colleagues to exclaim in frustration that Apple has become the Big Brother that they warned against in their famous “1984” Macintosh advertisement. While I understand that Apple doesn’t want to end up with a buggy operating system like Microsoft Vista, I tend to agree with my colleague. After all, I have as of yet been unable to use my carrier*s EDGE with my jail broken iPhone.