Saturday, January 31, 2004

Survival

So I was talking to this recruiter in California earlier this week, who has his work cut out for him: for a startup in the SF Bay Area he's looking for a senior software engineer who has gone through full commercial product cycles on Symbian Series 60 (Nokia's smartphones OS). Good luck: I know of around four people who could possibly qualify on the whole continent, and that's because they all work for Nokia, and they are not going anywhere. All the Symbian programmers with commercial experience are in Europe, where there is a market for programs on Series 60 phones.

So we were talking around because he wanted to know what I liked for gigs -- he does some international placement -- so I asked him how long he has been a recruiter. Recently. Before that? Two year hiatus after being a project manager. So what did you do in the meantime?

"Well, you know these Aeron chairs--" he starts and I shriek with laughter.
-- "No way. You sold leftover .com Aeron chairs?"
"eBay. I mean, when the company folded that was 800 alone."
-- "You must know shipping rates to every zip code."
"Oh, FedEx and UPS make it so easy these days."

Now he's a survivor. Company crashed? Find the cash.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Best use of 35 Businesscards Ever

When I came accross the site, I somehow couldn't help but print it out. Then, noticing there's scissors and tape amongs the supplies here in my cube, I couldn't help myself but build it. It made me feel 7 again, all safe working in my own room on origami, and took my mind off many annoyances that are making this a bad day for me.




It's bigger than I thought.

Dead Again

Ugh. Hit a powerstrip powering a USB disk just as the laptop was writing to it. Now when I attach the disk to a machine the result is the same: all the drivers get mounted, the hardware is recognized, the read light on the disk lights up for what seems a lot of accesses, but the end result is that the volume does not show up either under My Computer or any of the administrative disk tools. Thus I can't even scan for errors. My data was backed up, but I fear we'll have to re-rip all of Dean's CDs, and we now have a very expensive doorstop. I am so tired.

Thursday, January 08, 2004

Play Music

The joke used to be that every program expanded until it could read e-mail. Now it seems no piece of consumer electronics will rest before it can play MP3s and MPEG2s off your network's harddisk.

[Cloned from my Slashdot blog]

Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Macworld

Am watching the webcast from Macworld, mesmerized by how beautifully Quicktime is streaming this to an incredible amount of viewers, more probably with every webcast. Yet this is the smoothest Macworld Keynote I have ever watched. Steve has spent most of his time talking about iLife so far: integrated apps to buy/organize music, organize pics into slideshows with your music, edit videos with your music, burn the slideshows and videos to pro-looking DVDs, and a virtual studio to record your music and mix it with other tracks you record or pre-made loops. And they all work together to end up with a video, a track, a presentation of your pix. And upload it to your personal .Mac webpage.

Obvious but as yet missing link: make your project on iLife, and then one-button upload it, not to .Mac homepage, but to iTunes, for sale. No publishing intermediaries except for Apple's website. All royalties yours.





(He's about to announce something new about iPods.)