Corporate culture when it comes to layoffs

It's silly season again. Our company just laid off 10 more people. One of my closest friends who has bailed us out of many a precarious situation and has led the way on a bunch of new development work - he was deemed expendable. Obviously no managers were touched. As of this exact moment in time, I still have a job but it's not 11am yet. When the middle managers swan in to take lunch, I'm sure there's going to be more moronic decision making. It just wouldn't be corporate America if any logic or business decisions were used to determine the people to be laid off.

"Drive" - so-so movie, awesome soundtrack.

I like moody movies and I like car movies. "Drive" seemed like an ideal blend of the two from the previews. In the end the movie turned out to be a bit of a letdown. Dark and moody yes, but the driving scenes were laughable, from the screeching rubber on dirt, to the sound of the gears obviously being changed but the in-car camera showing the actor with both hands on the wheel. Cheesy and low-budget for sure, and oddly for me, a little too violent. But the real star was the soundtrack. It's amazing. Watching it for the first time I was 100% sure the soundtrack was by Tangerine Dream. It sounds so much like their album Le Parc (from way back in the day) that I was convinced they'd been talked into doing a movie soundtrack. Turns out it wasn't - it's a guy called Cliff Martinez. Never heard of him but I'll be watching for his name on movie soundtracks from now one. Bloody brilliant.

Technology is wonderful when it works

When you send an SMS from your cellphone, the carrier company is making pure profit from you. The SMS travels in the carrier identifier signal that has to be present for a cellphone to talk to a cell tower. It costs the network nothing because without the signal, there's no cell network. ie. the presence of your cellphone on a tower means you can text and it costs nobody anything. The carriers don't want you to know this which is why they charge extortionate rates for SMS plans - it's pure profit for them. However you can get around this with device-to-device messaging. If you have a Blackberry (I feel sorry for you) you have BBM - Blackberry Messenger. It's a texting service that uses your data plan to send messages directly to a device using the device's unique ID instead of your cellphone number. Apple has a similar thing now - iMessage works in the same way, device-to-device. It's why you can now text someone with an iPod from your iPhone (as long as the recipient is on WiFi of course). Device-to-device texting does use your data plan, like I said, but it's such a fractional amount that you'd need to be a teenage girl on speed before you'd see any noticable dent in your data usage because of it.

Which leads me to whatsapp - an app for most smartphones that does device-to-device messaging but it works between any two phones. So I can use whatsapp from my iPhone to message someone on an Android device as long as they also have the same app. Uses the data, not SMS, so the carriers can't charge you extra for it. The best part though is when you go international. I'm currently working on a contract for a friend of mine in S.Korea and when we're going through changes in the various items I'm working on for him, we use whatsapp to 'chat' in near realtime without incurring long distance phone or texting charges. Coupled with DropBox on my desktop, he can ask for a change, I can make it straight away, dump the updated file into my DropBox and he sees the change almost instantly. It's geekishly awesome.

Now I'm tech-savvy and moderately well educated, but things like this still make me smile. That I can do device-to-device messaging in realtime to someone on the other side of the planet and he can see the graphical changes I'm doing to his project at almost the same speed.

It's the same grin I get when I watch a Boeing 747 take off. Clearly that thing shouldn't be able to fly but it does.

Walmart isn't exactly customer friendly.

You can tell Walmart isn't set up for tech savvy shoppers. Because the
other nine places I tried were out of the item I wanted today I ended
up at Walmart for only the third time in ten years. To minimize my
exposure to the hateful place, I ordered online for an in store
pickup. Mistake. Their employees have no idea how to deal with this.
Well. When someone turns up and bothers to help. I stood waiting at
the pickup area for 15 minutes ringing the bell and trying to get
someone's attention. Then it took another 15 minutes for them to
figure out what was going on. Im sure if id walked in and just picked
the item off the shelf it would have been much easier but in theory
that would have taken longer. So much for that great idea. Their
prices aren't brilliant either. They were a good 30% more than
everywhere else which I guess is why they were the only ones with
stock left.
If I hadn't need the item today, and had anywhere else in town had
what I wanted, I would have been happy leaving my exposure to Walmart
at just two visits. But sometime you can't win and today was one of
those occasions.
I feel dirty just having been in the place :-(

Less than stellar skiing conditions

Well so far winter has been a bit of a bust this year. Sure it's nice and cold but it's dry. Way too dry. We've barely had any rain or snow and the resort bases are pitiful. My go-to resort barely has 2ft of snow and it's all rocks and buried trees right now. The 10 day forecast doesn't look much better either. We ought to be knee-deep in snow by now but I guess we're getting the same deal we got 10 years ago when the Olympics came to town - dry start, wet end.

Why speech recognition is a novelty.

I have an iPhone4S which means I have Siri, their voice-activated assistant. Sadly, like almost all speech recognition software, Siri is still largely a novelty, and I've all but given up using it. I suspect most owners have. There's only two things I can rely on it getting mostly right - setting a countdown timer and sending the most basic "leaving work now" text to my wife. The problem is that it's not bombproof and until speech recognition can be relied upon 100%, to the point where you don't have to read what it interpreted and double-check it, it will remain firmly in the novelty category.
Last week for example, I needed to dictate a simple text while sitting at some traffic lights. I said "I'll suck up the leaves when I get home" referring to a conversation talking about leaf blowers and clearing away the autumn debris. What Siri put in my text was "I'll fuck up the girls with my get boned". Had I just sent it, that would have been a problem but Siri has trained me to double and triple check everything it interprets.
The same is true for Xbox Kinect. It fails to recognise, reliably, even the most basic commands and all it's trying to do is play games.
My car can't understand the word "dial" when talking to the phone and consistently thinks I'm saying "cancel".
My friend's Ford MySync system can't get any of the names right in his phonebook, much less understand street addresses for the onboard GPS.
Automated airline flight information lines are a nightmare. They can't get the flight numbers, dates or airports correct so in trying to get the arrival times for Amsterdam for today, you'll be presented with the departure times for Hamburg tomorrow.
Throw in an accent and the already sketchy detection rates can drop to almost zero. I have trouble and I have a relatively flat, unaccented British voice.
You know things in speech recognition have gone horribly wrong when you see people having shouting matches and arguments with their electronic devices.
And that's the point - speech recognition systems cannot be relied upon and as such, they take more time to use than conventional techniques. Typing this blog entry, for example, I'm error-checking at a basic level as I type. If I was speaking this, I'd have to speak a sentence, wait for the interpretation, then go in and hand-correct all the mistakes, which ultimately takes more time than just typing in the first place.

Cyber monday doesn't exist.

I do wish the press would stop perpetrating the myth of "Cyber Monday". Black Friday has long been known about here in America - it's traditionally the point in the year where big retailers go into the black for the financial year. I prefer to think of it differently - black Friday is like a war zone with rampant shoppers trampling each other into emergency rooms to get 99c off something in SprawlMart. I think the 'black' refers to how grim the shopping experience is on that day, but I digress.
About four years ago, someone in the media made up "Cyber Monday" and claimed that it was the single biggest day of the year for online shopping. This is simply not true - there's statistically no more or less activity at most online retailers on the Monday after Thanksgiving than any other day of the year. I wish they'd stop trying to invent another reason to spend money - it's retarded enough already that Christmas stuff appears in the stores at the beginning of September.
Apart from anything else, "Cyber Monday" just sounds stupid.