Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

I think maybe they were talking to the wrong people.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - One-quarter of the U.S. work force could be doing their jobs from home if all those able to telecommute chose to do so, according to a study on Wednesday which said many still elect to work at the office.

All those people working from home could translate into annual gasoline savings of $3.9 billion, according to the National Technology Readiness Survey.

The study found that 2 percent of U.S. workers telecommute full-time and another 9 percent do so part-time.

But another 14 percent of workers have the option of telecommuting, or have jobs conducive to the practice but choose not to, the study found.

The article goes on to give the usual reasons of schmoozing with the boss and the overwhelming need for water cooler time for this seemingly odd refusal to telecommute.

But there must be more to it than that: A lot of people are unhappy at home due to unruly kids or a termagant wife. Or both. But most likely the termagant wife. For them, the drudgery at the office is a respite from the worse drudgery of being at home.

I also think that those who do choose to work from home tend to alienate those co-workers who are not offered the choice. So it is not so much that they miss the socializing, rather they do not want to be ostracized.

The older I get the more adamant I become about not making a long commute during rush hour if there is no need. I have everything I need and more to telecommute to any location that has a 56k modem and a telephone. What equipment I don’t have and come to need, I acquire. Yet, over the last dozen years since telecommuting has become technologically feasible for even small companies and individuals maybe ten percent of my engagements have allowed for it. That equals about two or three. I haven’t turned down anything within 50 miles yet, but I think it’s coming. My willingness-to-commute-daily limit is about to come down to about thirty-five miles, I think.

That puts downtown Houston about twelve miles outside the limit which would probably force me to change professions. If you can c all computer programming a profession anymore.

For the most part I believe the reluctacne to let the contract workforce toil from the comforts of their own home is because they believe that if managers don’t watch contractor’s like a hawk they might bill for eight hours instead of seven and three quarters. Smoke on your own time.

Lastly, I don’t think this survey applies to those of us who live down here in the wide open spaces:

And with a median one-way commute of 10 miles and a median one-way commute time of 20 minutes, the daily trip for many workers is not that bad, he added.

“People actually prefer to go in, even though they have the option of telecommuting,” he said.

If all I had to do was drive to Richwood to make my money, I guess I wouldn’t bitch either.

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A LITTLE OVER TWO YEARS AGO I dogged Dell Computer for their money-grubbing ways. Well, now it seems that a lot of other erstwhile Dell enthusiasts are getting on the wagon.

What is becoming more evident as the decades slip by is that no computer maker can hold on to the top spot. IBM fell. Compaq fell. Gateway fell. Dell will fall. Smart money would look for the next up and coming PC maker who will eventually dethrone Dell. Will the next winner be Wal-Mart with their new self assembly kit?

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I just checked my email this morning and noticed the latest email from the most recent recruiter to jerk my chain. This time it was Maurice Boggs from Teksystems. He is about the fourth person I have spoken with from over there. Every time they call they say I was referred to them by the same guy from two years ago. They never bother to update their system to reflect that I even exist as a human being. Just someone who was referred to them a couple of years ago.

Maurice mentions he has a senior Lotus Notes/Domino developer opportunity available and asks was I interested. I give a big eye roll and mutter some curse words to myself and then work up the best smile I can.

“Hey, I’m always interested in any opportunities that come along,” I tell him. “Ya’ll should already have my resume. I’ve sent it about three times in the past four months. I recognize Teksystem’s phone number on the caller ID Ya’ll call so much. ”

“No I don’t think we have it.”

“Alright, I’ll send another one,” I say, still with the big smile.

“Great, we have a position…” and he reads off the standard job req for a senior Lotus Domino developer.

“That’s not for Very Toss is it?” I ask.

“Uh, yes it is,” Maurice says flatly, his hopes for an easy commission sinking before his very eyes.

“I interviewed out there about six, seven months ago. First with the HR lady, then with the young lady in charge of the Lotus group,” I tell him. “Never heard anything back, not even a no thank you. I think the last person from Teksystems who contacted me was peddling the same position, as a matter of fact. ”

“Really? Did you talk with so-and-so?” he asked, naming the young lady I interviewed with.

“Yes, that’s her. I heard the job was cancelled.” I said in a deadpan.

“Oh,” Maurince deadpanned back.

“A friend of mine said he interviewed with the same person about nine months before I did, for the same position. He never heard anything back either. I know he’s a very good developer because I did a big job for him while he worked at Enron.”

“Well, uh, I think they at looking for a specific type person for the position.”

Huge eye roll. More mutterings. That is called discrimination when a white guy does it, I’m thinking. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“If they are still looking to fill the permanent position, then obviously I am not the right type for that. If they need someone to come out for a couple of months on a contract basis and knock out some work, tell them I’m available for fifty,” I tell Maurice and terminate the call.

I have had exactly one deal work out with these nitwit recruiters in the last two and a half years and that was from an outfit in New Jersey. I wont hardly deal with them anymore. But I am not through with Maurice yet. Or, he is not through with me. He calls back the next day.

“Hey, Don, I have another ‘opportunity’ at Exxon-Mobile.” Maurice then proceeds to re-read the standard job req for a senior Lotus Domino developer. “Do you have those requirements?”

Big fucking eye roll. He has no clue that he just read an almost word-for-word job description as the one for Very Toss. Not only that, there has been a standing Exxon-Mobile job req out there for as long as I can remember. Which is a long damn time.

“Yes, I meet those requirements.” I said with no trace of a smile. I asked a few questions about the “opportunity”. Maurice knew shit. With the corners of my mouth beginning to turn down just a bit I say, “Okay, I guess just send the resume.”

Usually I just tell them no thanks. But now I figure, what do I care? The knock on Exxon-Mobile is that they don’t treat contractors very well and that they want really cheap labor. Like $30-35 per hour for the senior position. I don’t mind getting treated like shit, but I wont do it for less than $45 and I always ask for fifty first. Even at that rate it is 2/3 what I used to make.

I have heard people say and I have probably said it myself, the days of making the big bucks in the consulting/contractor business are over. That may or may not be true. It is probably true for the near future, especially in the Houston market. But, if it is true that those days are over, it is also true that the days of having Don Callaway sit in a cubicle figuring out how to write sophisticated software to solve complex problems are over as well.

We are still not done with Maurice though. He calls again the next day. Before he said a word, I almost asked was he calling about an opportunity for AIG? Of course he was. He read the standard job req for a senior Lotus Notes position.

“Yep, that’s me,” I assure him.

“This job is a six month contract and it requires CLP or PLCP certification,” I’m informed. “You have that?”

For a brief moment I stand there in stunned silence. Obviously he hasn’t even bothered to read my resume. “Yeah, I’d probably have that on the resume if I had it,” I tell him. “I’ve been working with Lotus Notes/Domino since Beta 3, before it was even a viable commercial product. Twelve years. Anything that anyone wants to do with Domino, I’ve probably already done it twice.Tell these people if they need someone who knows what they are doing and who can knock out a lot of work in a short period of time, I’m available for fifty.”

“Can you send some references.”

“Goodbye.”

And therein lies the problem. Either they don’t need someone like me. Or they don’t know who I am. With idiots like Maurice and Teksystems representing me on the majority of work that comes availble, it could just as likely be either case.

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Can you relate to Kerri Skarfe ’s experience with Spider Solitare? And I thought I wasted a lot of time! Whew!

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Someone over at Hewlett-Packard has seen the light.

The tech industry is undergoing “a massive wave of innovation as people start to program the Internet,” H-P Chief Technology Officer Shane Robison told reporters during a briefing Friday morning. This innovation is a natural piece of HP’s overall puzzle.

Start? Start to program the internet? Change the last word in the above quote to ‘puzzlement’ and I think you have the truth of their strategy.

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The Chron’s Business correspondent Loren Steffy seems to think there is no way for the X-Box marketing strategy to succeed. I tend to agree.

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What’s the big deal with the new X-Box 360? Is the technology improvement such a leap that even those who are merely occasional game players must have one as soon as possible else cease to exist? Or is it that the time of year is that of giving and many folks would like to give one of the technological marvels to a loved one?

I read an article in the paper on Saturday that a Circuit City in an upscale area of Houston had quickly sold out of their initial shipment of twenty systems. First I thought that must be a misprint. Only twenty new X-Box 360 systems to a single store. The manager of the store was noncommittal but did say she was expecting at least one more shipment before Christmas–which will likely be the real shipment of 300 systems arriving a week or two, or three late.

On the other hand, there are plenty of accessories available which are reportedly being snapped up. Probably on fears that the accessories will soon be sold out as well.

First and foremost my comment is that it is a monumental blunder not to have these gizmos readily available on the shelf for the Christmas buying season. However, having said that…

Microsoft has not quashed its competition over years by accident. To me it seems that some marketing geniuses in Redmond turned a failure to meet production quotas into a mastermind marketing campaign to lock in consumers to the X-Box 360 even when there are no X-Box 360 systems actually available.

First, spread the available systems thinly in the upscale urban markets where they will be missed the most. Be sure the press knows there is a limited supply of systems and is on hand for the Black Friday onslaught of overwrought computer gamers.

Second, be sure to have plenty of X-Box accessories on hand for those who are looking to buy the X-Box system as a Christmas gift for someone else.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

After someone has invested a hundred or so dollars in games, rumble packs, memory sticks, or whatever comes on an X-Box 360, they will be very unlikely to buy a competing product even if they have to wait until the first week of January to get the actual system.

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Earlier this year Microsoft hired Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes, and now they have hired Burton Smith, the head scientist at super-computer maker Cray. I wonder what evil trickery Gates is up to now.

Ozzie was named Chief Technology Officer, but there has been no word yet on what Burton Smith’s duties will be. Color me intrigued. I would expect something very powerful and very innovative.

Read this Forbes article for a glimpse at what Ozzie has in mind for Microsft and the obstacles he faces to achieve his goals.

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I heard on the radio yeaterday that NTB was giving away free Blackberries with the purchase of a complete set of tires. After the commercial, the DJ’s were talking about what they paid for their blackberries: about $300.

So I am wondering how can a set of tires installed with all the bells and whistles that will cost about three hundred bucks, or less, offset the cost of giving away a free blackberry? Then the small print at the end of the ad (or would that be small talk?). One year subscription to blackberry service required… or something like that.

So it seems we are about to see the same model that made the cellular phone ubiquitous do the same for wireless PDAs. Once about a gazillion blackberries are dropped on the market behind this promotion, others will follow suit. Marketers are like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Almost worse than lawyers.

Let’s face it. With the miniturization and convergence of technology happening at such an astonishing rate, in five years we will be wearing the equivalent of a small computer room on a wristband.

EvilWhiteGuy points out that you can also get a free blackberry with a pizza order. He also noticed the NTB give away.

And you can get free iTunes with a Fruit & Salad purchase

The dot com bust in 2001 had nothing to do with the Internet revolution that everyone used to rave about. It is still coming. Most everybody just had it wrong in the nineties.

(Thanks to Basil for the open trackback)

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A Dell “Super Computer”

Dell Super Computer with Eight 20 inch Flat Screen Ultra Sharp Monitors with 1600 x 1200 Resolution and 5.1 Cambridge SoundWorks Speakers with Bass Cube. Windows XP Pro Operating System. The Computer items were purchased new from Dell in 03/2004. The Computer is a Precision Workstation 450 with Two 3.20 GHz Xeon Processors with 2MB L3 Cache 533FSB, 4GB 266 MHz Double Data Rate SDram , Two 146GB SCSI U320 10K RPM Hard Drives, 8X DVD+RW/+R and 16X DVD, Two Colorgraphic Xentera GT 4 Video Cards to run the 8 Screens, Cordless Mouse, Cordless Keypad, Dell 3 in 1 Printer/Fax/Scanner, 3 Ergotron Adjustable Monitor Stands, Surge Protectors, 3 Sets of Smaller Speakers for watching TV or Security System on Individual Monitors. The Monitors can be arranged in any configuration. Over $20,000 Invested. Works Perfect. Great for Photos, Charts, Graphs, Trading Stocks, Security System. I should have all the original boxes for shipping.

Bid on it or you can buy it now for ony $10,500.

Way back in the early to mid-eighties, when PC’s first began to take off on a massive scale, I worked at a local computer store in the small town where I atteneded university. Ten to twelve grand is about what one would pay for a fully souped IBM PC or Apple II. Half the price of an Apple Lisa II was for the ProFile II 5 or 10 meg hard disk subsystem, which was a huge box bigger than an entire PC is today.

Didn’t sell too many of those. Most systems still came in at three to five thousand dollars, though. Ahh, those were the days…

I wonder why the automobile has not become a commodity-type product like the computer? I think such a transition may already be under way, but it wont come full circle until the unions are all bankrupt, which foriegn competition will bring about eventually. When there is very little distinction between products, price determines the purchase. When price is the only deciding factor, a company will not be able to compete paying inflated wages due to strongarm union tactics.

Unions have more to do with sweatshops and outsourcing than cheap labor overseas.

[How do you start daydreaming about super computers then end bitching about unions? -Ed]

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Seems there is still a problem with the foam debris falling off the shuttle.

NASA officials said today it would ground future space shuttle flights because foam debris that brought down Columbia is still a risk.

A sizable chunk of foam insulation that came flying off the shuttle Discovery’s fuel tank during Tuesday’s liftoff did not hit the orbiter and does not pose a risk to the seven astronauts.

But it is a problem NASA thought had been fixed, and represents a tremendous setback to a space program that has spent 2½ years trying to rise from the ashes of Columbia.

Here is what I think. Foam debris has always been a problem. The first flight shed foam debris on take-off. The second flight shed foam debris on take-off. Every subsequent flight shed foam debris on take-off. No one was ever aware of the problem until a piece of foam debris knocked a small hole in the orbiter’s outer protective coating causing the thing to burn on reentry.

The force required to lift that much weight into the air and accelerate it to 15,000 mph is tremendous. Of course stuff falls off it all the time. Any owner of a Harley-Davidson will immediately understand this.

Maybe NASA should look at lubricants or superconductivity instead of shielding as the primary method of protecting the shuttle from heat on reentry.

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And return on investment is certainly the better metric when compared to measuring IT value by the dollar amount saved on resources. After all, what is more important: the cost of the project? Or the ultimate value (as measured by ROI) of the project?

The best talent doesn’t usually come cheap. The best, most successful projects are not usually completed by low-cost, inexperienced IT drones.

If a company is not getting a good return on investment (ROI) from technology, perhaps all the money saved through purchasing the cheapest IT resouces is actually a huge opportunity cost.

For example, what if CSX Corp had not chosen to implement its wireless dispatch system? Sure, they would have saved $400,000, but the cost of not doing the project would have been in the millions. A cost that would repeat itself every year until it converts to a missed opportunity as a competitor eventually gets it done.

JULY 11, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - One year after spending $400,000 on a wireless project designed to speed up communications with 450 independent truck drivers and cut costs, CSX Corp. reported last week that it may have hit a bonanza.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX said the wireless notification application from Air2Web Inc. in Atlanta has cut the number of phone calls truckers make to the CSX Intermodal call center from 20,000 a week to 11,000, said John Dugan, technical director for intermodal applications at CSX Technology Inc.

And because drivers can now send short text messages and e-mail via Research In Motion Ltd. BlackBerry devices, they each save about an hour per day that they once spent waiting for a dispatcher, Dugan said. That alone improved driver productivity by 400 hours per day — a major reason why driver turnover dropped from 80% to 50% in the past year, he said.

Holding off on investment in IT projects are likely costing corporations far more money than they may be saving by not doing innovative new projects. Failed projects cost even more.

The good news is–as illustrated b the CSX project– that other trucking companies who utilize independant operaters will have to come up with some ways to accumulate a corresponding amount of value into their products in order to stay competivie with CSX.

One company’s innovation is the rest of the market’s inspiration. The lesson being: Keep up with technology advance, of die on the vine.

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…but are still higher than they were last year

In its latest quarterly job-cut survey of the telecommunications, computer, electronics and e-commerce sectors, the New York-based company reported 39,720 lost jobs for the quarter that ended June 30. That’s down 33% from the 59,537 jobs lost in the first quarter, which ended March 31.

The job cuts for the second quarter, however, were still 16% more than the 34,213 cuts announced in the same quarter a year ago, the company said. For the first six months of the year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 99,257 tech job cuts; That’s up 56% over the 63,726 cuts recorded in the first half of 2004.

So… basically the tech job market still sucks, it just doesn’t suck as bad this quarter as it did last quarter. But the market still stucks much worse this year than it did last year. To someone who has been in the tech industry for twenty years, this is a far cry from a feel-good story.

“The economy is growing and many sectors are adding workers at a steady pace, but the technology sector has been conspicuously absent from this job creation,” Rick Cobb, executive vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement. “Some blame high oil prices — as one industry insider recently told USA Today, ‘Every dollar that goes into the fuel tank is a dollar that is not going to Best Buy.’”

“The other problem affecting the computer and electronics industries is that corporate customers have accumulated a large reserve of cash, but instead of investing it in new technology, they seem content to just hold on to it,” Cobb said. “The good news is that we had a significant drop in tech-sector job cuts last quarter, which could signal a return of better times.”

That is some pretty shaky “good news”. Relative to the past few years though, I guess some optimism in the market is some good knews.

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From a column called “Help Line” in the Houston Chronicle:

Q: I somehow ended up with an annoying downloaded file/program/pop-up, Aurora. I tried to delete it using Add/Remove programs on Control Panel. It takes me to the Web site www.mypctuneup.com and says that I have to download the uninstall program from them to get rid of it. It looks like they want you to take down your firewall and anti-virus first, so I’m naturally concerned. Is this safe to do?

A: The makers of spyware and adware are making it more and more difficult and involved to remove their parasitic malware.
I have seen required steps that involve having to fill out questionnaires and/or enter specific key codes all the way to what you are seeing, a need to download and execute a third-party uninstall application.

I don’t like this at all. I have used it, as it seems to be the most effective way to remove this particular piece of spyware.
I would not disable any firewalls or deactivate your anti-virus right off the bat. Try using it with those tools still enabled and see how it goes.

Lets see. We have an unauthorized, malicious piece of software on the PC. The maker of said software wants you to disable your firewall and anti-virus to remove it. Yeah, right! Do they think you are some kind of schmuck like Jay Lee of the Chronicle’s Help Line?

I would definitely classify that as some bad advice.

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Finally, something NASA can excel at:

PASADENA, CALIF. - NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft completed a flawless journey to oblivion early Monday, slamming into an onrushing comet to vaporize itself in an Independence Day blaze of glory.

When it comes to building a device that is supposed to fly in to space and then destroy itself, NASA should have no peer.

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But, alas, so it is:

“Yes, it’s true,” Jobs said. “We are transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors.”

The transition to Intel will take two years. Jobs said Apple will be shipping Intel-powered Macs in mid-2006, with higher-end machines following a year later.

I would think the recent story of laptops outselling desktops for the first time ever may have something to do with the decision. Or, more likely, there was no decision. To stay competitive in the growing laptop space, Intel is currently tho only real choice.

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A good idea:

WASHINGTON — The Internet’s primary oversight body has approved a plan to create a virtual red-light district, setting the stage for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses ending in “xxx.”

The drawback, the xxx domain for porn is not mandatory. That would be too much like a real solution.

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Some interesting Enron trial news:

Enron Internet executives sought another company’s network to sell broadband services on because their own was incapable of delivering such services, a former computer troubleshooter for the company testified Friday.

[snip]

Enron’s network, at the time, could not direct “traffic” or track customers because it did not have the necessary software, Bloomer said in his second day of testimony.

I was the architect and programmer of an important piece of this “necessary software” when the company suddenly folded in 2001. In a period of one week Enron Broadband Services went from hyper-growth to hyper-layoffs. I stayed about a month longer than most of the consultants at EBS because I think they were still hanging on to the hope that one of the big deals they had going could be salvaged. In which case they would need the piece of software I was working on, which was called “Deal Launch”. Heh, heh. Kinda hard to launch a big broadband deal without the piece of software called deal launch, huh?

Funny thing is that the software was basically completed according to the original specification, except the daily meetings kept changing the spec. In other words, they hadn’t quite figured out how to do what it was they needed to do in order to pull off one of these deals if it did land. The last piece and most crucial part of the deal launch puzzle was how to capture and log the actual metrics from the physical execution of the deal, ie, the transmission of content through the EBS network, and compare them against the contractual terms of the service level agreement (SLA) captured in the deal launch database.

We are talking about millions of pieces of information recorded from routers and other network devices for parameters such as latency, throughput, packet lost, etcetera. Very complex, but straightforward in my opinion, which I was giving to them in four hour doses every day in never-ending meetings. Unfortunately for them, they just ran out of time. That last week I was there, it was like walking around in the catacombs of some modern day pharaoh.

Which seems an appropriate analogy for the demise of one of the world’s largest, nongovernmental pyramid schemes ever foisted on society.

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Is this typical,or what?

Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.

Only the government could screw something up this bad. Regardless of what proponents of this legislation claim, the proof is in the pudding. Only the government could describe a twenty to thirty point increase in spam traffic as anything but a failure.

One young entrepreneur who was recently hit with a judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million has this to say:

“There’s way too much money involved,” Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. “And if there’s money to be made, people are going to go out and get it.”

Well, yeah. If you are willing to be a criminal there are many ways to make big money. But like the old saying goes, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. But supposedly these guys are hard to catch due to the layers of anonymity built in to the spamming process.

Even if only 2,000 of 200 million recipients of a spam campaign - a single day’s response rate for some spammers - actually go to a merchant’s Web site to purchase a $50 bottle of an herbal supplement, a spammer working at a 25 percent commission will take in $25,000. If a spammer makes use of anonymous virus-enslaved computers to spread the campaign, expenses like bandwidth payments to Internet service providers are low - as is the likelihood of anyone’s tracking down who pushed the “send” button.

The overlapping and truly global networks of spam-friendly merchants, e-mail list resellers, virus-writers and bulk e-mailing services have made identifying targets for prosecution a daunting process. Merchants whose links actually appear in junk e-mail are often dozens of steps and numerous deals removed from the spammers, Mr. Jennings said, and proving culpability “is just insanely difficult.”

But wait. Didn’t we already crack this nut over fifty years ago when Al Capone was successfully prosecuted for tax evasion? Follow the damn money. Even if the merchants can not be held liable for the spam, they should damn sure be made to disclose who were paid commisions.

Until these anti-social anarchists are hit with penalties that match the magnitude of the loss caused by their illegal activities, estimated at about $50 billion, this scurge will never go away and the wonder and promise of the internet will fade into the realm of what could have been.

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Dvorak is calling for the outright banning of cookies. He always tries to lean a little bit past the mainstream in the name of being controversial. Which is good for circulation, I guess, but really does nothing to solve the problem.

About a year ago–during the lead-up to the passing of the anti-spam bill–I wrote an article with a slightly different take on cookies.

It just seems to me that writing a cookie protocol would be too easy. Set the browser to first and foremost reject any cookie that isn’t compliant with the protocol. Then cookies can be identified according to type and dealt with according to a rules-based system based on cookie type.

Cookies are a serious problem if you have any concerns about individual privacy. More importantly, the blatant win-at-all-costs attitude of the marketers needs to be checked.

Furthermore, as an aside, is hyper-consumerism really in our best interest? Buying all this crap we dont really need is as much a cause of the two-worker family as is over-regulation and over-taxation.

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