The Lair

I work for a company which has offices in other countries. Since most of the business is provided by people writing software for companies outside Sri Lanka; there is a reasonable amount of travel involved.

As is usual, people have a wide spectrum of reactions to being sent onsite.

Most like the idea of going out of the country for a while. Away from parental supervision, completely different country/culture, sometimes a bit of distance from the humdrum activities of living here. People like the idea of going on short term visits even more. All the fun of international travel, but none of the long term hassle. (Of course, there are those who demand long term placement in another office too. Different story).

However, international here means … umm.. Europe or the Americas. While we love India (we do, really), travelling there seems insufficiently exotic to appeal to many.

So in about two weeks, a bunch of people need to travel to India to meet and greet a client. Because you know, explody buses and other stuff make this country a bit unsafe so the client is refusing to turn up here.

I need to find a creative way to break the news to the folks who’re going to travel. I initially thought of a tasteless American Indian pidgin greeting to let them know that, yes, despite their hopes to the contrary - travel they must.

Any other creative ideas?

Yeah, so new job. And I thought that my days of reading near-incomprehensible papers was at an end. Little did I know. I am currently suffering from acute brain hurt after reading tons of incomprehensible spec sheets (Web Services, WS-Addressing and WS-Policy among many others).

It’s fun stuff. As in grad school, I start with a vague idea about the thing, read the spec (paper) and emerge completely confused. Sometimes near suicidal. And then I get to make (hopefully) intelligent recommendations about how such things can be implemented in a crippled braindead and completely obsolete product used by the client. This is easier than you’d think because most often, the answer has been - “um. yeah. So we can’t do that with your product. Perhaps you’d like to move to some other product and save us the pain of going through these meetings?”.

Client responds with “Uh. No. We wants. Make happen. Here. Munniez.”

As a result, I’ve had nothing approaching a life for the past month or so while I’ve been trying to figure out how to uh… do the equivalent of bailing out the floods of Ratnapura with an ice cream cone. Yeah, one of those crunchy cones that goes soggy after a while.

But there is hope yet. During bouts of feverish reading of specifications, I have also started re-reading the Wheel of Time series. Confessor (read on Saturday) was, by the way, horrendous. I will now wait for the Terry Goodkind detractors to say “I told you so“.

This story I read today possesses sufficient qualities of awesome to be blogged. Yes, they let me off the work treadmill and allowed the hamster a go - so I caught up on some of the webby reading that I’ve been missing for the past couple of months.

The short version - Chairman of regional political party in the US was/is a warez d00d. Story via slashdot. In even bigger news, the evil work proxy does not block Slashdot. I’m not sure what to make of this, personally - but I digress.

This is only a story because this guy is the regional chairman of a US political party that people love to hate. Oh, and there is a good conspiracy theory.

More seriously, people sometimes forget that the stuff done online doesn’t really go away. Ever. Not that Tony Krvaric seems particularly disturbed about people knowing he used to distribute cracked software in the 80s. Commodore International (the makers of the Commodore-64) doesn’t actually exist as a company anymore; so I presume no one really cares about the commercial value angle.

Wonder what would happen if someone ‘fessed up to illegally distributing copies of Windows 3.11? Would Microsoft sue? Or send the chap a plaque for services above and beyond the call of duty?

Even when I started on Usenet in the mid 90s, people used to periodically post dire warnings about potential employers and other people reading these posts, so be careful etc etc. I don’t think many people paid heed. That’s why archives like this one still crop up from time to time. Should there be a statute of limitations on things written and done online? But then again, there is no statute of limitations on things done in real life, so why should things written online be different?