Brandon Wirtz's Digital Mix

BBC is reporting that Indian rail will offer Wifi, free at first but after it has users hooked it will up its rates.

ZD Net has a great video on what the future of Photo Management looks like. Notice the 3d, and the Metadata interface.

What if you could sue anyone who made a product that could be used in a crime? If a drunk driver gets in an accident is that Ford's Fault? If your neighbors glue sniffing son breaks in to your house with a hammer, is Craftsman liable?

Currently the answer is no. If you make a product that has even one legitimate use, that product is legal. So the idea that the Induce Act might make it possible to sue makers of Portable media devices, CD-R's, and other devices that could be used to disseminate pirated content, is stupid. I use a lot of DVD-R's and none of them get used for pirating DVD's or MP3's. The same is true of my Dell DJ.

When I use my Craftsman Hammer it is not to rob my neighbors, and while I do use my Jeep a few miles per hour generally less than 5, over the speed limit, I don't generally set out to break the law, and Jeep shouldn't be liable for my actions.

You think the above ideas are possibly defendable positions? Try this:
   Clothing manufactures liable for pockets because a Shop lifter was able to use them to hide merchandise.
   Flight Simulators for training terrorists to fly.
   Mc Donald's for Obesity.
   Mt. Dew for tooth decay.
   Klipsh for Hearing loss.
   White Snake for hearing loss. Skip that... RIAA for Hearing loss. Ok. Now maybe I can be for this bill after all.

I was reading an article about Automation after seeing a piece on NBC last night about robot house construction. You have to wonder if Automation is a bigger threat to jobs than India is.

Will we end up with a society where the upper class owns the machines, the upper middle designs things for the machines to create, and the Middle class performs maintenance. There is no Blue Collar workers, and huge numbers of people are unemployed?

While history shows that the Cotton Gin, helped the economy not hurt it, and that the assembly line also helped, it is easy to say that automation will further help the economy, but it seems at some point things become automated to the point that you only have professionals, and unemployed. I think we are still a long way from that right now, but look at the wonderful world of star trek where food prep is automated, agriculture is not needed becuase you just re sequence raw materials to create food. You don't need a car because you "beam" from place to place. So what does every one do for a living? Lounge on the beach and the government gives you a Soy Lent Green pellet and a Unitard so you can do what ever you want the rest of the day?

At Griffin we built an automation system that lets us process Video Capture, Compression, and Cleaning at 4x realtime. With some practice a worker can expand that to 6-8. The studio down the street works at .75x realtime, and doesn't have the ability to expand that to even reach realtime. They employ 4 people and do less than we do. Because one person does the work of 6 does that mean I cost the economy 5 jobs? I'm not sure. But as far as a good corporate decision goes I don't think we'd turn off the automation in exchange for giving those workers a job.

Carter is talking about how Microsoft is forced to ship a boat load of PC's to a tech conference because they aren't sure they will have Broadband at the venue. It still amazes me that we don't have some sort of access that works anywhere in the US for broadband. Before you say DirectWay, the latency on it is 3000ms Minimum, many network demonstrations time out before that. The Idea that fast internet via cellular towers, or DSL that works from any phone line doesn't exist yet is mind boggling.

Dad lives with internet that is lucky to break 33.6 because phone quality is so poor in his area. I can't imagine having less than 300k of upload.

One of the problems with 4 year degrees today is that they take 5 years to get. A big part of this is the result of colleges and universities trying to cover all of the information for all of a given field, rather than tailoring the degree to waht a student actually wants to do with their life. A good example of this was Angela's situation. Angela wants to work as a Camp Director. Typically people in this field get a Recreation and Leisure degree, where they would learn about facilities management. The problem is that a Summer and Outdoor Education Camp aren't like managing a conference center, because you manage the Program as well as the facilities. A camp director is 1 part Teacher, 1 part Manager, and 1 part Sales / Marketing. A director weak in any of these three area's won't be successful. But you can't really go to school to get the experience you need, although you should be.

There are a lot of jobs that require cross disciplines. Especially with more and more organizations swithing to a customer oriented model that has more midlevel managers, or workers who self manage. While the current logic is that you either pick the additional training up in the field or you go back to school to get additional training, it seems that with the nearly $100k that a degree from anywhere reputable costs that you'd have to have a pretty large pay increase to make the additional schooling pay off.

One of the things I really dislike about the statistics that we are often presented with about the difference in income between those with and with out a degree, is that they include those who didn't even qualify for college. If you looked at the numbers for people who scored 1100 or better on the SAT and how they faired with and with out a college degree I think the numbers would be a little more fair.

The idea that you come out of college ready for the work place is absurd. You can't prepare a student for everything with curriculum, most of your Prof's haven't been in the work place in so long they don't even know what the current trends are. There isn't a college in the World that offers a program for my current position: Encoding Gorrilla. Which requires Video Engineering, IT Infrastructure Management, Automation Programming / Scripting, and Audio Video Compression. As I add monkey's to the ranks below me Management and Instruction will be added to the list of requirements. As I attempt to add customers Sales will be important. To get all of this trainging in a classroom I'd need about 10 years of college.

I live in a house that is isolated. Surrounded by trees away from my snobby neighbors. But we are going to move. The place we have our eye on is a community. It has poker nights and icecream socials, and a swim team, volley ball tournaments and more. It is called the Village of West Clay, and it is an interesting setup. Rather than living in a place where you try hard not to know your neighbors it is a place designed to help you meet your neighbors. I like the idea. Apartments may not have a front porch, but the local poker night might do just as well.

The midwest is an untapped resource for labor, tech support and a lot more. Everyone is looking to India, Mexico, and other places where labor is cheap, but the truth is labor is cheap in the midwest. In my home town if you make $40k a year you are at the top of the heap. People would line up and thank you for a $15 an hour job and would work hard with little complaint. It is the difference in work ethic between the East and West coast and the Midwest.

I come from a community where for the most part you are a Farmer, or a Factory worker. If you live in Branch or Hillsdale county Michigan chances are you either work the land, or work the line. There are few IT jobs in Hillsdale county. And in Reading my home town, there are only about 4 IT jobs. 2 for the school, 1 for the factory, and 1 for the rest of the town.

I'm working with a company that is based in California, and I don't think they fully get the difference in price.

In Indy I don't have AC, and only wish I had it 4 days a year.
My Electric bill is $120 or so a month.
Rent is about $.50 a square foot.
I can get a college educated Semi-technical laborer for $10 an hour.

In California you can atleast double all of these numbers.

So why outsource overseas when there is so much untapped potential in farm country?

I have Road Runner Cable from Bright House. And My service was down... I hate "We will arrive between 9 am and 1 pm" especially when they arrive at 1:10 But it gets worse.

Pulls in to my drive way a Tattooed guy wearing a Wife beater, in a Blue Pick up with its bumper bungie chorded to his truck, being cheaufered by his tattooed Girl Friend. Nothing says "Boy I want to let this guy in my house like this guy does" Even the neighbors dog didn't like him.

So he wanders around for 3 hours and then announces that he and his supervisor found the tap at the road, and that the "tap is bad"

90 minutes later (5 minutes ago) a much more proffessional looking guy in a cherry picker shows up and tells me it is fixed. Has me verify that it is working and wishes me a good day.

Some say Americans will find a better economy by outsourcing things we can get cheaper elsewhere. The problem is that if we outsource all the Labor intensive jobs, and all the Intelectual jobs, and leave only the Services jobs the US will be Jamiaca in no time. What I mean by that is that only jobs requiring physical proximity are left. The truth is Americans are lazy, and we are cheap. We don't want to do the manual labor, and we don't want to deal with customers with problems so we out source IT, Programming, the manufacturing of Soccer balls, and any other job that we view as tedious to countries where people are anxious for work and greatful to have a job.

That isn't to say that some of the sweat shops that American companies run under the guise of providing for those nations are a good thing... But in many cases American's aren't greatful for alot of jobs that we should be happy to have. Having worked in a Call center doing Tech Support I can tell you it beats factories and it beats McDonald's. And actually I could teach any McD's worker to do it.

American's believe we are the best at everything. And that we are too good for a lot of these jobs. The Truth is when you outsource to India with the possible exception of some difficulties understanding the accent on otherwise beautiful English, the work is done better, more consitantly and with more respect to the customer. I'm not for outsourcing mind you. There are lots of times a better product at a cheaper price is not what I buy. I buy local. When my local economy thrives I thrive. If we didn't have Silicon junkies flipping burgers because the Tech industry isn't generating enough jobs, I'd be all for outsourcing, but we don't and I'm not.

Boston Globe is reporting That MSFT will offer free licenses for Machines used only as fail overs. This is great! It makes what a lot of IT department do with having a ghost machine ready to go at a moments notice legal.

I'm not necessarily one of those people who thinks you should ignore the guy looking to spend $5 in your store, but I'm certainly one of those people who think that if a customer has a cart at the CompUSA you should be considering assigning someone to help them.

I was shopping for some upgrades for my farm of computers the other day. I have a big project and need a little more beef if it si going to go well. So Ang and I grab a cart and start shopping the CompUSA. We've got some UPS's, Several Gigabit Nics, a Gig Switch, Cat6 cables, and an External Hard disk. And we needed some ram. The store was empty except for us and two other shoppers. So it wasn't like they were busy but we stood at the Counter for 5 minutes while an associate looked for some one to open the case that was unlocked. Then it took 5 minutes to convince the service manager that a 200 pin SoDimm would not work in place of the 184 Pin DDR Dimm that I wanted to buy. Then 5 minutes to explain that the item was non-returnable and that if I brought the machine in with in the next 14 days they'd install it for free.

Ang hates the CompUSA, but loves Game Stop where we got 3 used titles for $22. So her hate of CompUSA has nothing to do with her Geekiness.

Screen shots of the new Codecs.

The Player the SDK's

What Am I missing? It seems to me that c# is so close to VB that I can scarcely tell them appart. Yeah there is that nasty Having to treat variables as what they are... so you have to know if you have a String or a Long, or a TimeSpan. But other than that and the whole case Sensitive thing they are practically the same.

I think I might like c# better if it was Smart enough to know that For, FOR, and for are all the same to me, and that I'm never going to be dumb enough to name my variable "for". Yeah Some Idiot might decide that he needs to name his variable the same as it is in the database and the idiot who named the Client column "For" as in who the work is For, might want to name a variable for, but that would be dumb.

In that same vein I really like whidby. I wish I could be running it now, but I need to develop for now machines and not soon to be.