lifebsideben

FINALLY Clinton seems to have decided to stop brownnosing the prez… maybe he’s got a good whiff of Lame Duck cooking. Here’s some of the excerpts from this news story:

“What Americans need to understand is that … every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq,
Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts,” he said.

“We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else.”

Clinton added: “We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don’t think it makes any sense.”

Simple. Now if Kerry could have spoken anywhere near that plainly… well, at least he would have been less frustrating as a candidate.

Tags: politics

Check out OutFoxed, a video expose of Fox News (as if just watching it wasn’t enough to reveal its silliness and hipocrisy). You can watch the trailer, and download a bunch of clips, and they even support BitTorrent (yay!). Here’s my favorite still from the trailer, harking back Mike Moore’s ‘Bowling for Columbine’ premise about keeping the public in fear… “1) STAY INSIDE“!

Tags: big_business, politics

A few years ago I thought it would be great, with all this fileswapping going on (Naptser was new), it would be cool if there was a way to pay artists when you download and like their stuff. A site, where the funds would go to them, and it would at least go easier on your conscience, even if you didn’t receive any kind of legal right to the content you might have received. This is fraught with problems in the Real World, such as the record companies wanting no business in this, what to do with collaborations (divx movies?!), how to make sure the artists themselves get the money, and the ever-present micropayment dillemas. (There’s lots more problems, but that’s the starter kit.)

Lately I’ve been finding this is an attractive idea to me again, but the problems aren’t really solved (maybe SMS helps with the micropayment issue a bit, in Europe, sort of, OK not really.) This is because I realize that I am quickly becoming CD-free, or trying to.

What does this mean? I moved to Europe a year ago; one thing I wasn’t going to take schlep overseas was a few hundred CDs (and especially not their cases). So I bought one of those big album thingys for CDs, and stuffed it with about 100 discs, and carted it over–I also brought my PC, which already had a sizable mp3 collection (probably 80% of which are from discs I own.) My CDs went into storage in the brother-in-law’s basement (as well as the DVD cases, and roughly 100 other boxes of junk.) Once I got to Spain, the first place I lived didn’t have a CD player, so I couldn’t play the CDs… but I could play them on my PC, and also drop stuff onto my mp3 player (a 192MB flash-based thing, good enough for a week of tunes without reloading.) The CDs collected dust. Before I moved I listened to CD-Rs burned of mp3s I owned, in my Aiwa aftermarket car stereo; partly because of the 10-albums to a disk capability, but also because I didn’t want my “original” cds to get stolen.

Later, I moved to a real place, but was never motivated to buy a real CD player (although did end up getting an alarm clock one, but only use the alarm clock functions.) Anyhow, I have this stack of CDs in the cabinet that I never look at or play. The songs are all ripped to mp3s on my or the wife’s computer (she is an iTunes fanatic, I’m windows boy.) Now I pull stuff onto her iPod and listen to it commuting back and forth to work, and no matter what, I don’t really have any use for these plastic disc things. They just take up space. I don’t miss the 500 I have in storage in the US, especially the ones whose content I really like, because the content is duplicated (”backed-up” if you’re reading this from the RIAA) on my PC.

Last week I was watching european MTV (Spanish I think, but we get several variants), and they played a video by some group (turns out one guy) called Four Tet. It was amazing. I searched emule and yah, the latest album is available. The next day (patience with the mule!) I was listening to the album, and really dug it. Great stuff. Before winamp delivered the last track, I was leaving him praise on his website’s comment form, and trying to figure out how to buy the album. Turns out it’s a small indie label (yay) called DominoRecords in the UK, and they have a pretty nice site. Within 15 minutes I had purchased that CD, and one of his previous ones as well. (The Internet is a great thing.)

That’s how I got back to the pay-the-artists-directly-website-is-a-great-idea (but really isn’t) idea. I want the music, and maybe the booklet would be cool, but damn, I don’t want more of those stupid prerecorded CD things. I would be much happier, and I suspect the artist would have been too, to just download the music off their site after I paid, and maybe pdf’s of the booklets. Virtual is good. I have lots of virtual space. Bandwidth is infinitely cheaper than pressing discs, printing booklets, assembly, packing, shipping, etc. I can’t be the only person who is willing to make the change (and if I could get a slight discount on the “license”, that would be great–but the 10 UKP was perfectly reasonable for the great music in this case, anyhow.) There’s no easy way to do this in aggregate, though. Maybe ASCAP and BMI could handle it for some music, since they already pay the artists, but that’s just a start (and methinks the RIAA would squelch this immediately anyhow.) And how do you pay painters, scultors of public art, dancers, and other people who you might want to?

Dealing with the status quo, I believe artists should probably all just have their own websites and accept Paypal donations or similar. It still leaves me with the problem of how I pay Bravo for the episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I’ve downloaded. I guess there will be a DVD set released at some point and I’ll buy that, just as my way of saying ‘thanks’. I can’t get Bravo in Spain, at all, but on the other hand, I had Bravo legitimately for years in the US and there was hardly ever anything decent on the channel, so maybe I’ve already “paid” for it. A problem for another day, and a more creative solution than I can devise now, to be sure.

Tags: big_business, Music, Spain

For whatever reason, I’m fascinated by scams, swindles, grifters, and all that jazz. Always have been. I’ve often thought a great movie could be made about this, with kids being the conmen and perpetrating a myriad of schemes as a way of life. Of course, this really does happen, but the film wouldn’t be ‘realistic’; it would be more as if there were no ‘honest’ jobs, and society (at least for kids) was a constant con game. Read whatever you will about me, from that.
How I got onto the topic most recently, is that I was reading Russell Beattie’s weblog as I ocassionally do, and he had a bit about the Rich Day, Poor Dad author. I knew when I read the book, the guy was less than fully truthful, but John T. Reed really exposes the book’s inaccuracies well. Good reading, wasted a lot of Friday night on his site. (Apparently I’ll do anything for entertainment when the wife is out of town!)
Returning to the generic sham motif, I was completely captivated by the stories of “magazine crews”, about kids that sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door, they are often basically indentured servants and controlled essentially as a pimp controls his stable. Great site to read about it here, specifically the ‘true stories’ pages. About 18 months ago when I was still in the Bay Area [Burlingame], I kicked one of these kids out of our “secure” apartment complex because he was harassing the (mostly elderly) neighbors. He definitely wasn’t on the up-and-up, although now I really feel sorry for the kid, considering what he was probably going through. Here’s some more good links to read up on scams, if you’re also into that kind of thing.

Another thing Beattie’s site makes me think of a lot, is moving back to the Bay Area. Like him, I moved to Spain (me Barcelona, him Madrid) for opportunities here, to learn the culture, live a bit different life, etc. I know I wanted to learn more about myself, too, and definitely have. But the job market here is fairly depressed, and we both have families to support. I miss my adopted home, the Bay Area, and all my friends there; but I love Barcelona. It’s tough. If my contract doesn’t get renewed soon, I may not have a lot of options, however. We have plane tickets back to Detroit (family there) for December, and now I’m really considering buying more tickets to go from there right to San Fran, and see what we can drum up. I’m starting to send feelers out to friends I trust there, too. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say too much in case my current co-workers find my blog! But it’s defintely weighing heavy on my mind now. My apartment lease is also up in December. The prospect of trying to scare up a job in the Valley or SF, from thousands of miles away, is also pretty daunting. I’ll see how things shake out in the next few weeks at work, in the meantime I think I’ll update my resume…

Tags: burlingame, Spain

It seems like a lot of coders I know are pretty worried about the trend of outsourcing programming talent from the Bay Area (typical destinations: India and Eastern Europe). This is a troubling thought for a lot of software developers, I suppose. My last job managed to set up a development shop in Romania, and we made it work quite well–for over a year, all my projects were successfully and fairly efficiently built by guys in RO–but I think that was largely a fluke. If we hadn’t had a VPE that that studied there, spoke the language, and had the contacts still, it probably wouldn’t have been possible. Still, it’s a trend, and probably won’t stop anytime soon. Why is this happening? And why am I not afraid? Why doesn’t this make me shake with fear for my future employment?

First, a couple quick thoughts on why this is feasible. Programming has always been as much an art as a science, but there exists a lot of development these days which is simply not as creative as the kinds of projects I want to work on. I believe now that massive frameworks (libraries) of relatively robust code, such as the java classlibs, and .Net runtime, provide such a comprehensive base, that many mundane software projects can actually be fairly easily developed by a good architect, a couple talented guys, and perhaps a lot of less skilled workers. This hasn’t always been a formula for success. Modern languges like C# and Java ’round out the sharp edges’ enough that it’s easier to trust a less-experienced (read: less expensive) developer to work on it, if the design is decent. I think the same goes for better object design methodologies and tools, such as UML and well-documented Patterns. Few worthwhile apps are a truly simple assemblage of library calls and a couple well-chosen patterns, but we’re a lot closer to that being a reasonable modus operandi now for common business software development than at any time in the past, I think. On the one hand this is too bad, because it can remove some of the fun from coding. Implementing a really tight circular list ADT in C++ on a new platform, tailored to a specific app can be mentally stimulating and rewarding; but these days it’s not typically the best way for a developer to spend his employer’s dollar. Many “mundane” apps are likely to be on ‘recognized’ platforms, well-understood, and not terribly architecturally challenging. The execution therefore, can be more easily sourced somewhere offsite from the main office where labor is more economical. Problems are rarely critical, this-minute situations; timezone differences are painful at first but can eventually work to the company’s advantage. For this kind of development, outsourcing is a viable option. I just don’t want to have to manage to develop these kinds of apps, there’s just not much personally-satisfying challenge associated with it.

That gets to why I’m not worried–because I’ve never had a lot of joy working on those kinds of applications. I was driven to do web development because I wanted to create apps that were immediately useful to people, and I’m a sucker for instant gratification. Built it this week, launch it the next. A few jobs ago, I worked on a product with roughly 12-month minor version release cycles. It was challenging coding (enhanced by Win32/*nix/VMS cross-platform C issues) but the pace was nearly unbearable. There were a lot of interesting problems, though, and the apps were mission- and life- critical. Large customers would demand small changes and bugfixes weekly, and custom builds. Our Chief Architect was presenting and debating weekly. Code reviews were brutal out of necessity. This is the kind of development that is not as easily done offshore.
More recently, I worked building large websites. While we did make it work with offsite team members, we often collaborated heavily on design, and traded team members back and forth for critical periods. Creativity was important, responding to competition quickly was important, and solving problems [scaling, concurrency] in new ways [commodity hardware, free software] was a major part of our strategy. Our process wasn’t extremely formal, which was nice (and necessary), but didn’t comfortably lend itself to the dev team being thousands of miles away. We struggled for a long time with this, and I don’t think it would have been possible without really talented people on both sides. And to get people that talented, we didn’t save as much money as one might expect outsourcing. Over the long run, it still helped the ‘burn’, gave us “free” 24 hour coverage during the week, and taught us all a lot. If we could have done an accurate ROI for the first year, we probably wouldn’t have bothered outsourcing it–but I think now, it’s paying off. I still think it’s a bit of a fluke, and a lot of companies would probably have failed trying to replicate our success, though.

It really doesn’t make sense to pay programmers to sit on the most expensive real estate in the US, to code mundane or ‘typical’ business apps. But if you need to solve new problems creatively, efficiently, and the talent that can perform this wants to live in those areas, you’re going to staff there. A lot of coders for Wall Street apps honestly like it in Denver, apparently. A lot of people writing the highly-scalable, low-TCO rapidly-developed apps that make the internet useful (and biotech work, and microchips get smaller) want to live in California. And they want to work with other like-minded, highly-motivated, talented people. Right now, a lot of those people are still in the Valley. Probably in Seattle, too, but that’s a whole different blog entry I count myself as one of this group of people, and while I made a yearlong jaunt to Barcelona to experience challenges here (certainly not all of which are technical), I miss my comrades and that buzzing intellectual, workaholic community. I’m convinced I’ll find another place among them when I return one day.