Category Archives: Ranting

Core Dump

Just to get some stuff out of my head and on paper–

A coworker passed away this Tuesday. He was young and healthy, and what took him was a bacterial infection. It struck him relatively suddenly; he was still at work last Friday and left early to go home, and then was carted off to the ICU later that day.

It’s tragic beyond these petty words, and my prayers go out to his family and friends, and the affected coworkers here. The whole start-up-ish mentality we have at work necessarily means those who’ve been with the company from the beginning or early on are really close to each other, and this guy was one of the more generically likable guys we have on the team. Plus the stuff he was doing at work is relatively irreplaceable!

Anyways, with that out of the way:

It was a lot of fun going out and drinking away at a yakiniku place. Too much fun perhaps. Definitely more fun than spending more money at Book-off. The only thing to make it better is to go at it @ karaoke.

Really busy these days. We really need to hire more people. If you want an exciting job working in QA working with some pretty cool folks (ie., me) let me know? I’d even give you a cut on the referral bonus lol. Because we really need more people. Probably 2 more headcounts. Basically looking for people with some software QA experience, who can get around in an unix environment. 2-3 years experience minimum, unless you are awesome. Well, at least for the first position. The second one can probably be an entry level thing, for new grads, etc.

Still making good use of V’s single dig, I hope he doesn’t mind (at all).

I probably would be less busy if I didn’t catch shows like Explosion in the Sky @ Radio City Music Hall. That place is pimp, and the acoustics is awesome. In fact I think it makes them sound like better than ever.

Time flies. It’s almost con season already. Paranda’s got his lined up. Danie is going to up to 9 shows in May. I’m just going to chill a little. Still up in the air in terms of Japan trip, and what have you. Sigh.

EVE addiction robbing my blog time, and I’ve made no progress on the blog migration. That will come soon enough.

Android and Nokia and Windows and Microsoft

Full disclosure: I run Kaspersky Internet Security on my home LAN. [Maybe I should scrub it for hidden backdoor used by KGB-types or something. Joking.]

So I was like, LOL, when I read about what Eugene Kaspersky had to say about Android. I mean, he said that if HP/Palm, MS, RIM and Apple don’t change their ways in the future, eventually Android will dominate 80% of market.

I think this is what a fair number of us are thinking when we see Android’s adaptation approach. At MWC this year the word “ecosystem” is thrown around a bit, and I think if we were to compare ecosystems, not OS, I think we would be left with just 3 real players: WP7, iOS and Android. Once we realize only one out of the three are free for manufacturers to make (if you think the Java suit in Android is a problem, wait until Microsoft jacks up the cost of their walled garden), it does smell like the 1980s all over again, with those IBM PCs running DOS…

Now this is just one opinion, but I feel in Europe where people care a lot more about this sort of “freeness” that Android offers, the opinion Kaspersky offered is a popular one. It is no surprise one of the more renowned Russian hacker-types would say exactly this. Europe is also Nokia’s biggest stronghold, at least if we talk about their high-end devices (to cop Elop’s 3-tier division in his leaked memo).

I’m sure we can make an OS-war analogy to what happened in the late 80s. Will Microsoft (now devoid of Gates) strike gold again? This is quite an exciting era for mobile computing because things could very well play out exactly how it did with PC computing…

All this is to say, yeah, I would have sold my Nokia stock too if I had any. 25%!