This is definitely my favorite article in today’s Globe: Hiring of HR professionals is soaring.

Employers optimistic about 2004 are snapping up recruiters, hiring managers, and other staffing specialists. Two Boston-area networking groups for unemployed HR executives report dwindling ranks as their members land jobs.

“If you’re going to hire, you need hirers,” said Nicholas Perna, a Connecticut economic consultant. “We don’t have to sit around and wait for the government’s next payroll survey to come out for me to add up the pieces that hiring is rising.”

Dr. Melpignano is no longer with the Holliston school system.

A Holliston High School teacher charged with giving “harmful” material to a student has quit.

Foreign language teacher Richard J. Melpignano resigned Monday “for purposes of retirement,” Superintendent Nancy Young said yesterday. Melpignano, who had worked at the school since March 1975, had been on paid administrative leave since Dec. 11, she said.

Here’s a long, interesting article from the Seattle P-I about the history of Amazon.com, and how it is now fully profitable.

This is my favorite line-item in the timeline:

[1999] July: Amazon.com opens its electronics and toy stores.

I’ve always really liked bears. Here’s a picture I took last week of a polar bear surfacing at the San Diego Zoo:

Ok, sometimes Tracy gets some really interesting pictures, like this one of a moose and a kitten.

We got home late last night from San Diego, where we had some quality time at the San Diego Zoo.

A woman came forward claiming that Dr. Melpignano did exactly the same thing to her twenty years ago, and that she still has the letter of apology.

The letter [from 1984] offers Melpignano’s “sincerest apologies for having overstepped (his) professional boundaries.”

“Through my unthinking and callous attitude, I have acted in a manner unbecoming and unethical for an educator,” the letter reads.

It’s sometimes very smart to read what HR professionals read, especially if you’re wondering in what cases they can fire you. We have a new article about the myriad loopholes in “employment at will”.

Sadly, not “sunny” San Diego; it is about 65 degrees, certainly better than 20.

Back home in a coupla days….

Clay Shirky on Many2Many writes a lengthy column on the inequalities inherent in any large system.

[W]anting large networks without inequality is like wanting mortar without sand. Inequality is not some removable side-effect of networks; inequality is what holds networks together, inequality is core to how networks work.

MetroWest Daily News follows up on yesterday’s story, describing his dedication to teaching.

Always available to speak with students for extra help, Melpignano was known for regularly being at school as early as 6 a.m. and as late as 4 p.m., Edwards said.

Two other female members of the Class of ‘03, who asked that their names not be used, said they were somewhat surprised that Melpignano was charged with distributing obscene matter to a minor.

Melpignano was involved in how his students were doing “overall,” both girls said. They said he would e-mail female members of his classes to ask how they were doing in school, but never mentioned romantic feelings.

My sophomore-year French teacher is in the news, not in a good way. Dr. Melpignano is in some serious trouble.

[Melpignano] has been charged with distributing obscene material to a minor after confessing his affection and saying he wanted to make love to her, police say.

I don’t have time this morning, but I have a couple of good Dr. Mel stories. Sadly, none of them involve poetry he wrote to me.

David Weinberger writes a thoughtful response to all the Hitler-comparisons running through the media these days.

[C]omparing Bush to Hitler is worse than stupid. But we forget the lesson that we should have learned if we don’t publicly notice that some steps our country has taken could lead our great nation into evil:

* Demonizing enemies
* Questioning the patriotism of dissenters
* Monitoring the political expressions of citizens
* Establishing a special class of offenders who are removed from the protections of the judicial system
* Lowering the intensity of the threat required to justify preemptive action
* Disregarding world opinion
* Playing on fear in order to sway public opinion
* Lying in order to get us to invade another country

[…] [W]e should take such steps with open debate and genuine trepidation. Shutting off the conversation does not help us preserve our genuine American values.

Branden sends along a link to equalmarriage.org, a site which enables you to easily send a note to your elected representatives urging them to vote no on the Defense of Marriage Act, and support the right for gays to marry.

If you think our government has better things to worry about, please consider telling them so.

Andres is mentioned in Scott Kirsner’s article in today’s Globe.

Andres Rodriguez, cofounder of Abuzz Technologies (sold to The New York Times in 1999) and Memora (a now-defunct start-up that sold digital media servers to consumers), has a new company — this one dedicated to helping maintain large archives of static information over the decades.

The idea, he says, is to keep an archive online using an array of standard Web servers, rather than committing the archive to a particular storage medium like tape or CDs, which eventually become obsolete. Originally called Reference Information Systems, the Waltham company is changing its name to Archivas. Funding came from North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Ventures.

Here’s my shill for the morning: Go to the store and pick up today’s Boston Globe. Inside, along with the Patriots coverage, is over 60 pages of The Big Help.

This is our biggest section of the year. Go get it.

This is obviously a virus. If you get any email from security@microsoft.com telling you to install a patch, don’t. God only knows what this thing will do to your computer.

Lamo Suspected of Several Computer Break-ins

Man, I don’t even remember Syracuse being this cold.

Here’s a snapshot of the current weather.com page for Cambridge. I am so glad I’ll be watching tonight’s game snuggled on the couch instead of popsicling in Foxboro.

I had to clean all the frost off my car this morning, for the first time this winter. Brr. Grr.

I missed the last storm. While Boston was being buried, I was snorkeling off the Similand Islands near Phuket, where I took this picture of a lonely longtail.

Looks kinda nice, eh?

I don’t miss Thailand at all. Not at all. Not even if it’s 85 degrees warmer there.

Which it is.

Ok, so I seldom write about political topics, but I ran across this story — thanks Anil Dash — and the commercial a conservative advocacy group is running in Iowa is just hilarious.

In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading …” before the farmer’s wife then finishes the sentence: “… Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

So, here’s my score:

Tax-hiking:
Not as a rule, though trillion-dollar budget deficits aren’t much fun either

Government-expanding:
Again, not as a rule; but it’s a complicated world and there may be times the government is needed

Latte-drinking:
Sure, though I generally prefer mocha if I’m going this way

Sushi-eating:
Hell, yeah. Yum!

Volvo-driving:
Nope, my car’s German, not Swedish

New York Times-reading:
Well, I work for them. Is that worse?

Hollywood-loving:
Naw, nothing good on TV now that Firefly got cancelled.

Left-wing:
Perhaps. I’m more attached to my personal freedoms than to my checkbook. Maybe Dan’s right and I should vote libertarian.

Freak show:
Guilty

Hmm, maybe I should check out this Dr. Howard Dean, he seems like a hell of a better guy than this bile-spewing farmer. Why does he hate America?

As I’m working on the Thailand travelogue, I’ll post some of my favorite pictures as a tease

Here is a baby elephant, just eight days old at the time of this picture. We saw him and his mother at an elephant show in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

If you like this photo, please check out the rest of my elephant photos.

Collecting Dead Presidents from Dead Peasants.

Didn’t Rush Limbaugh used to be pro-law and order?

Social networking sites are not very secure.

Matt Haughey has some ideas for new types of social software.

Craftsmanship is, of course, incredibly expensive.

The left-blinker is perpetually activated on this VW Microbus.

We have an article this week talking about how some folks’ blogs have cost them their jobs.

Michael Hanscom learned the hard way. Hanscom worked at a printing shop in the Redmond, Wash., headquarters of Microsoft Corp. He’s an avid ‘’blogger'’ - one of about 2 million people worldwide who publish Internet diaries about their activities and interests. Bloggers write about every imaginable topic, from politics to religion to sex. But some bloggers tackle perhaps the riskiest topic of all - their jobs.

That’s how Hanscom found himself unemployed. Last October, he published in his blog a photo of a pallet of Apple Macintosh computers being delivered to Microsoft headquarters. The following week Hanscom was fired for allegedly violating a confidentiality agreement he’d signed when Microsoft hired him.

Most of this falls under the rubric of common sense — it’s not overly smart to complain about your job in a heavily indexed environment.

You’d think Hiawatha Bray could have plugged the Job Blog in the piece, though. Damn editorial integrity.

Operation Better Jason continues.

2003 was a year of transition, bringing closure to old parts of my life while setting the stage for new adventures.

2004 is looking like a momentous year. I can’t wait.