In my building, I work on the 3rd floor, and the corporate HQ of Opsware is located on the 2nd floor. In my web searchings yesterday, I came across an interesting article about Marc Andreesen, the chairman of Opsware, and his opinion on outsourcing. Summary, he's for it.
Me, I still need some convincing.
-Andy.
Thanks to Chris for recommending "American Splendor" to me -- I watched it with Mike and Sheila over the weekend (because we were unable to rent "Kill Bill: Vol. 1"), and I was pretty happy with it. I thought that all of it was well done -- the acting, scripting, directing, set design, etc, etc. But beyond that, I thought that the movie was a great "nerd triumph". I think that sometimes, America gives people the space that they need in order to be themselves, and to find their own niche. In this case, for Harvey Pekar and his friends, this happened.
But of course, America isn't perfect, because we still have our Columbines, our racially motivated murders, and what have you.
My only complaint is that they didn't show off Cleveland enough to my liking (there were a few shots that let you know it was Cleveland, tho).
-Andy.
Shortly before Easter, I found out from my bosses that half of my job is being outsourced to India.
I'm serious. I can't make this stuff up, people.
So, let me elaborate. As a Field Engineer with EDS Automated Operations, I have a dual role. Two weeks out of every six, I am "on call", which means that I carry the pager, and am available 24/7 to solve any problem that occurs with any of the systems that my team supports. The rest of my time is supposed to be spent doing development -- adding new features to our existing tools, creating new tools, implementing someone else's tool -- you get the idea.
Recently, however, the volume of support requests has been increasing, and we are also getting tasked with more projects. In short, we've got way more work than we can handle. And the solution that management has chosen is to hire some additional help, in India.
So, this was all announced, and then I didn't really hear anything about it for awhile. Then today I found that interviews are on-going, and that I'm going to be asked to do some phone interviews sometime this week (at a very inconvenient time -- like 7:00 PM on Sunday night).
My feelings on outsourcing our mixed. After reading the big Wired article, I came away with the sense that outsourcing is pretty much inevitable, good for developing countries, but I'm not so sure what it's going to do to America. The article points out that this isn't the first time we've had widespread outsourcing of jobs to other countries -- the manufacturing jobs have already bolted over the course of the last several decades. But that was okay, because the white collar jobs showed up.
So, what new class of jobs are going to show up onto the scene in order to keep folks like me employed? Wired argues that America will still be a source of innovation. I don't know that I agree (hence the mixed feelings) -- these is no reason why the next "big thing" can't come from India. The human spirit and the drive to innovate is just as alive over there as it is over here. Another idea is that new industries, like Biotech and Nanotech, may be a source of jobs here. A recent Slashdot post, though, seems to cast some doubt on that.
So anyway, I'm still sorting out my feelings on outsourcing. I tend to think that "everything is going to be okay" -- I'm just not sure how.
As for the less theoretical form of outsourcing, i.e., what's going on with my current job, my feelings are mixed there as well. One one hand, it's going to be great to have the extra help, and to get rid of the pager duty. On the other, it is going to be difficult to overcome the communications barriers imposed by distance. I think that it's going to be a lot of work so that we can have outsourced helpers. But, it will be interesting, too.
And maybe I'll get a free trip out to India, in order to do some training.
-Andy.
So, let's say you have a bunch of DivX 5.0-encoded AVI files of a live concert. And you really like these files, and have them playing all of the time -- not so much so that you can watch, but so that you can listen to the music. Well, at that point, it sure would be a lot more convienant if these files were mp3 files, instead of DivX video files.
And let's further suppose that this very situation happened to a certain someone who owns this blog, and that he decided to hack his way out of it. This is what you might do:
ffmpeg -acodec copy -i Denali02-Blackcat-Apr2003.avi 02.mp3 -map 0.1:0
The 'ffmpeg' command is an open source project for recording, encoding, and slicing video and audio files. I had a vague notion of this program (I remembered installing the FreeBSD port as a dependency for something more interesting, like VLC I think). But a little googling brought be back to this program, and the above command line (applied to each of my video files) was exactly what I wanted.
I know that I could have used some program like "Audio Hijack" in order to get the raw audio, but then I would have had to re-compress it into mp3 format, and that would have been too lossy for my tastes. Instead, I wanted to simply demux the video files, stripping off the audio stream and saving it to a separate file. Which is exactly what the "-acode copy" flag did -- it specified that the audio codec to be used in the transcode should be a straight copy. The other bit of magic is the "-map" flag, which performs a one-to-one mapping from a stream in the input file to a stream in the output file. VLC said that the audio stream was stream #1, but according to ffmpeg, it was stream #0.1. Go figure.
But anyway, now I have my mp3 files, and they are in iTunes, and based on the lyrics, I am figuring out which song is which. Awesome!
-Andy.
I don't normally plug commercials, but I just saw Jerry Seinfeld on the Daily Show (I think it was a re-run from last week), and he is plugging some new web-only commercials that he did for American Express. Well, I checked the first one out, and it is pretty funny.
And so now, by way of blog, I'm plugging it too.
-Andy.
Here is the ain't-it-not-so-cool news.
Bitches.
-Andy.
I went and saw "A Perfect Circle" at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco this evening. I haven't been in the best of moods lately, but I have found that really, really, really loud rock music tends to improve my state of mind significantly. Either that, or it was the 2nd hand marijuana smoke -- I suppose that I have to concede that I don't have 100% certainty in this matter.
But still, the concert was pretty great. APC certainly knows how to put on a show. I was quite pleased with how "The Package", "Weak and Powerless", and "The Outsider" turned out life. Even the songs that I am done with and tired of (i.e. "Judith", "Magdalena") still went over pretty well with me. Plus, the opening act, "The Mars Volta", didn't totally stink.
There was a crazy line to get into the venue. So, by the time that Sara and I actually got inside (and I went to the bathroom -- I had a heroic amount of tea at the restaurant that we went to with Stan), Mars Volta was already a fair amount into their set. The song that they were playing when we arrived, was absolutely horrible, and I thought it was another "once again" with the opening act. But it was not to be -- they spent the next 30 minutes digging themselves out of a tremendous hole (at least, in my esteem for their music). The lead singer wasn't really doing it for me, though, so I don't think that I'm going to be rushing out to the CD store for this one.
Back to A Perfect Circle, the only negatives for me were that they didn't play two of my favorite songs -- "Brena" and "Gravity". Plus, there was absolutely no encore -- they took the stage, played for about 1 hour and 20 minutes, and that was it. But, I can't really complain -- they had to cancel the last several dates due to illness -- so, at least the show transpired. That is what's important.
I'm still undecided if I'm going to buy tickets for the June show in San Jose. Maybe I will, in hopes that they will at least play "Gravity".
-Andy.