Category: ranting

I will be embarking on a new adventure soon. On May 1st I will begin employment with a new company based in Boston, and I will be relocating, with the family, to Boston two months later.

Going back to the US was always part of the plan — mine at least, maybe not the wife’s — but not so soon. However it was time to find a new job and the prospects in Singapore have been as exciting and numerous as authentic American sushi.

It’s a bad time I guess, it’s always a bad time in Singapore due to the ‘normal’ career path of engineers — let me just say that they don’t do much engineering for long — and the fact that most companies come to Singapore for cheap labor. So, unless you have ample experience in the banking sector it’s mostly cheap, entry level jobs. My best Singapore option was to run the technical operations of a certain cloud computing company… but they decided my lack of System Engineer experience was a non-solvable problem. C’est la vie, I want to program anyway, but management is the only real option for well paid techie jobs in S’pore.

So I widened my search to include other places in Asia. China offered a couple of interesting positions, but I could not get a house I was willing to keep my family in for what they want to pay a month. Unfortunately I am not a local and don’t live with my parents or 10 other guys. A real place to live most likely with gated access is required. And then there is private school. Too bad then, I would like to work in China now, I think it can only help long term. But no luck. Maybe next time.

I had a long shot for Taiwan, but that didn’t pan out either. Again, it would have been fun. People I’ve worked with before. Good people. Would have loved to work with them again. And I’ve had fun in Taipei so I’d be willing to go there.

Too many unemployed techies in Aus. Not even worth applying really.

Europe is out. I have a US passport, so no right to work anywhere in Europe. No company wants to take on the headache and paperwork.

So I spent a lot of time looking in the US. Got a couple of decent offers, a few what-the-fuck-happened disappearing HR people and lots of cold shoulder.

In the end Boston won. It’s a start-up with a lot of work in Mobile, so I can utilize the wealth of random industry info in my head, but at the same time they branch out in to some other related spaces I have less experience with that could offer a new challenge and learning opportunity. Location seems good, Boston is a decent tech town and seems to be a good place for a family. And, of course, most of all, the people seem good. Good as in a hard to find quality that I need to feel is there in people I work with—especially in a start-up situation. Hard working, smart, fun-loving. We’ll have to see about piercings, tattoos and blue hair (I’ve only see one guy, spoke to everyone else on the phone/email.)

So, the countdown to the big move has started. Plans are being formulated, evil plans devised and coup d’état’s plotted. It’s exiting and scary. Wish me luck… and wish my wife sanity… living in a foreign society for the first time is a mindfuck, from working professional to house-mom will be a big transition.

Now, last thing. Anyone want to buy a condo in Singapore? No? A car? Washing Machine? A sofa? Call me. Let’s discuss. Over kopi!

An ode to long flights March 2010

Boarding in Singapore
Hurt locker... Check
Cold Souls... Check
Law Abiding Citizen... Check
Sleep... Is for the weak
Deplane
Starbucks in Dubai... Will you pay in local, euros, dollars or pounds?
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3... Check
Sleep... I am weak
Welcome to Athens
Three day turn around... What to watch?

Yea, I just got back.

According to Google Analytics, the top content on my site is /categories/goodies/ [confusion.cc]. Which I guess is better than the second place /2004/09/26/four-floors-of-whores/ [confusion.cc].

Then again, the top entrance keyword — in fact the only entrance keyword with more than 1 hit in the past month — is “1280*768 fucking”.

What?

I have no idea why this is. But if you do a Google image search for “1280*768 fucking” [images.google.com], you don’t get much porn…

The third and forth images are porn related but nothing else on the first page is naughty. Three of my images make the first page though; “Simian Eyes” [confusion.cc], “Yellow Jacket” [confusion.cc] and “Have you seen my keys?” [confusion.cc].

Now, I understand the “1280*768” keyword, as all the images in “goodies” are available in that size. But… While I have a potty mouth, the word “fucking” does not appear on the goodies page at all. So how is it that Google has associated “fucking” with my photos of monkeys, yellow jackets and my lost keys?

Came across this quote on Gizmodo [gizmodo.com] yesterday:

My expectation is that there’s not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription.

We’ll it’s how Gizmodo quoted him… not quite what he said, see the Gizmodo article for the full text of the quote.

This apparently is how the CEO of AT&T covers for the fact that there is no subscription for 3G data on the iPad. I agree with Gizmodo — it’s more likely that Apple dictated it this way. But on the other hand I think it would be easy to get people to sign up to pay more each month just not a totally new contract.

See, one of the best things that my operator here in Singapore (that’d be Starhub [starhub.com]) has going is it’s Dual-HLR option. Without going into GSM network design this is what the consumer gets out of the dual-HLR option: a second SIM card, with the same phone number that works at the same time as your current SIM. This works because you nominate one of the SIM cards to be your “primary” and that is the one that rings (in Starhub’s case it rings first then, if you don’t answer the call rolls over to the second SIM where you can answer or let it roll over to voicemail.) All the features of your existing contract are active on both SIMs, both can consume data from the same data plan, etc. This is actually the reason Starhub launched the service. There are a lot of business types who have a Blackberry and an iPhone, but don’t want two contracts. This costs the consumer SG$10 a month as opposed to the cheapest two year contract here for about SG$35 a month. All it costs Starhub is a some configuration and whatever additional data the user would not have consumed otherwise, but I doubt that’s a big cost.

Of course you can do this with two SIMs that have different numbers — “family plans” have shared resources for years. But this makes more sense for a single person with multiple devices.

I think that for US$10 or US$15 a month to have this dual-SIM option users would agree to add this to their existing contract. Not just for the people with an iPad but for anyone with two data devices. US$10 or US$15 is low enough compared to a whole new contact that it’s almost an impulse buy, and as it is tied to the existing contract there would be, I think, less psychological aversion.

Catching up on my RSS reader I ran across this post from Gizmodo titled Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple.

Oh. Provocative. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Back? Ok then. Now, opinions are like ass holes; everybody’s got one (well, not not everyone [wikipedia.org].) but I want to poke fun at the author, Jesus Diaz, opening opinion:

Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Jesus Diaz, in Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple [gizmodo.com] on Gizmodo.

Yea the Windows Phone 7 UI looks cool, and it remains to be seen if users will actually like it when it gets into the hands of all those people with ass holes opinions. But I’m going to bet on the oh-so-boring Palm Pilot-esque grid layout the iPhone uses.

Why? Same reason I don’t think everyone will be sitting on a Feel Seating System Deluxe [animicausa.com] sofa. The tired old sofa that your parents have might be musty and hold too many memories of the 70’s or 80’s to be healthy but there is a reason it looks like almost every other sofa in every other normal house in the world for the past, oh, I don’t know, 1000 years or so.

The basic design of the sofa —as used in the real world outside of the Milan furniture fashion show world— hasn’t changed much over the years. That’s a testament to one thing: it works. And while every furniture designer out there wants to do something new and original, so they make crazy sofas [freshome.com] (or crazy chairs, tables, etc.) their designs don’t change our platonic ideal of the sofa because they just aren’t practical in the end. Um, that’s why we call it fashion, different doesn’t mean good.

So, unless the Windows Phone 7 UI breaks down to a grid layout (or list layout) in the end, with some funky cool icons, I’m betting it eventually will by hook or software update.

Then again, this is just my ass hole opinion, feel free to ignore it. Oh yea, and I’ve been itching to use that sofa metaphor in a blog post for about a year.