We're sitting in the bottom of a gravity well that prevents us from our natural inclination - exploration and progress. And rather than look to resolve this issue through technology and grit, we spend most of our time worried about copywrite and God.

It's not fair to call police officers pigs. At least pigs are useful.

Autistic boy known to be autistic to police to be autistic shot for wielding butter-knife.

FBI enters wrong apartment with chainsaw on no-knock warrant.

In September last year, Xerox transferred me to HCL as part of a "partnership" which was really just a run-of-the-mill outsourcing arrangement.

There has been quite a bit of reporting on the deal on the Internet since it was publicly announced last May/June (2011) so I won't bore you with all the details. Needless to say, Xerox cut its Engineering budget substantially in 2011 (having become a service company after acquiring ACS) and needed a way to get more work done for less money, so it hired HCL, one of the top Indian IT and Engineering outsourcing companies.

At the time, Xerox employed 3600 full-time permanent engineers and it transferred 600 of us to HCL. Wim and Mark told us that this would be an exciting opportunity for us to find new ways of working more efficiently, that we'd get thousands of extra new colleagues to help us and that there would be great new opportunities working (on contract) for other non-Xerox customers.

You can pick your jaw up off the floor now.

What really happened was just what you'd expect. The new company told us in meetings that we'd be "empowered" and that we'd have to do more with less (especially time) so we'd have to become much more efficient, but not to worry since they were experts at it.

I've been "empowered" in the past, and it was PHB-speak for a disorganised free-for-all. I mentioned that to embarrassed silence in the meetings.

We were told by HCL a very different story: that as much of the work as possible would be offshored to the cheaper staff in India and that they'd try to find new work for "other customers" in exciting vertical markets such as "aerospace" for us. "Aerospace" kept being bandied about by PHBs to try to make us interested. I believe Aerospace is all about paperwork and "compliance." Still, it's better than having your house repossessed by the bank.

The outsourcing affected five sites (three in the USA, one in the UK and one in the Netherlands). Meanwhile, over in Wilsonville, Orgeon, some Xerox manufacturing staff were asked to take cuts to their pay and conditions.

There were a substantial number of contract staff (technical specialists) and agency staff (e.g. test auditors) employed by Xerox. During the outsourcing activities none of them received a single official communication from either side about what was going on.

A lot of CVs went on the job boards and a lot of recruiters were quite astounded and asked what on earth was going on at Xerox...

Just before the transfer, Xerox cut back our redundancy terms and conditions to not much above Statutory Minimum and then offered a Voluntary Redundancy package. HCL told us that this was to show us that we were valued because they didn't want people to leave! Of course, the experienced staff (in their 50s) who were also getting a bad deal on their pensions, took the VR anyway. Away went much institutional knowledge and a lot of current work in progress, which set things back months.

The Scrum system proved to be a very accurate gauge of staff morale. After the transition had been announced, nothing was delivered during the next 2-week iteration. To give existing management their due, they took notice and the pep-talks started.

As time went on, HCL's plans for the site and the staff kept changing. Meanwhile they started to send over Indian staff for Knowledge Transfer (KT).

HCL had sold themselves to Xerox as having the world's most modern management, having passionate and empowered staff, and having been involved in huge, important projects for the biggest companies in the world, including Microsoft, HP and Boeing (for whom they might have done wonderful job on the Dreamliner if the scurrilous rumors are to be believed). Their CEO, Vineet Nayar also once stated that American graduates are unemployable and listed a bunch of dubious reasons, which you can google. (Let's use "American" here to mean "Western" for the sake of this discussion).

Now, being a contracting company, HCL wants to keep costs to a minimum to be able to make as much profit as possible from its customers. So, not only does it expect its staff (who are "empowered") to work long hours away from home for months at a time, it employs mainly recent graduates and other people with very limited professional experience. They tend to stay with the company for a few months to a couple of years at a time and hop jobs to get salary rises. What's great about working for HCL is that they get to travel to the West and work on prestigious projects for all the big brand names, and build up an impressive portfolio of experience in a short period of time.

The result of this for the companies that contract out to HCL is, that they get young, inexperienced temporary staff who maybe stay on the project for 3 months, after which they are replaced by more new, inexperience staff...

This is exactly what happened. HCL tells its customers that it can transfer knowledge from the acquired experts, who have maybe worked on something for 10 or 20 years in large, experienced teams (10+ people), using one or two young Indians at a time for a few weeks. After all, Westerners are "unemployable" whereas HCL staff are passionate and empowered.

Can you see the problem?

This is how Indians get a bad name.

The Indian Engineers are not stupid and they are not ignorant. The ones that we see are young and inexperienced and are working under deluded stick-wielding PHBs (non-technical managers living in fantasy-land who have no understanding of the projects they're involved with) who are asking them to do person-years worth of work in a foreign country, away from their families for months at a time on pitiful expenses (barely able to afford any accommodation) on systems they are totally unfamiliar with to cuckoo-land deadlines.

There were even instances of a single person being sent over to learn an entire project in three months, going back to India and being assigned to a different project for a different customer. The work went offshore and nothing happened because no one knew how to do it.

A while back, Ursula said in an interview that Engineering was now a commodity that could be bought in when required on the open market. That's fine if you don't need any continuity of knowledge of your projects and products in your staff and the Engineering you need doing is very simple (very shallow learning curves). Multifunction office products with 20 years of history are a completely different kettle of fish (but Xerox seems to be getting out of that business anyway).

Meanwhile, she's trying to tell youngsters to study to become Engineers...

So today is Black Wednesday. Wikipedia, Google, EFF, a host of webcomics, Mozilla and others have blacked out their websites. I am very proud of the Internet and humanity today. Also, apparently Zombocom's infinite possibilities are threatened by SOPA/PIPA.

All you Apple fanboys prepare to gnash your teeth, rip out your hair and throw tantrums, the Woz has spoken.

Essentially, Android is more versatile and does things better than the iPhone, including Siri which apparently has problems connecting Woz to one of his favorite steak houses. Woz also doesn't like the fact the you need a connection, at all times, to get voice commands to work.

In short, the iPhone seems to be a violation of Rule #1 of the Three Rules of IT That Should Never Be Broken: never let programmers design your applications.

Woz also isn't thrilled about the short battery life, though Android has its own problems with battery life.

What with spending the last 6 months looking for a new job and having a small Turgid to supervise, I haven't listened to any music properly in months. I'm feeling tired and burnt-out, and lack of music is part of the problem.

I've got one week left at my current job, then a week off and then I start my new job.. :-)

Mrs Turgid and I are both great music lovers and we can't go any length of time without music. We got a digital radio in the kitchen so that we could listen to Planet Rock.

Planet Rock is the best music radio station in the UK. The only other one I listen to is Radio 4 which is mostly speech. I really can't stand mainstream music radio (e.g. the barftastic Radio 1 or the soppy old goats' Radio 2). Classic FM is too lightweight and for Vicars and their families. Radio 3 is for the undead.

Planet Rock is OK since they often play some good music. You do have to put up with dross such as Def Leppard, Bon Jobby and Motley Crue and old git music, even the odd bit of drippy hippy stuff and non-Dio Rainbow, but they do play Motorhead on a Sunday morning when all other radio stations are doing their best to boost the nation's suicide rate with vacuous old chart music, religious twaddle and omnibus editions of the Archers.

Radio is convenient, but it's not nearly enough. They never play what I really want to hear.

Last year I got three new albums (on CD) that I haven't listened to yet: I just haven't had time. They are the new Primus, Megadeth and Mastodon records.

We're going to see Mastodon (and Dillinger Escape Plan!!!!) in London next month, and Primus some time later :-) We saw Primus last year at Brixton. They were superb!

I believe Smashing Pumpkins (minus Jimmy Chamberlain and the other two originals obviously) are playing too, but money's a bit short these days and I reckon fond memories should not be interfered with (not that I got to see them first time around but that's a story for another day).

In the latest Liverpool match (against Newcastle), Luis Suarez was unavailable due to an illiberal expression made some matches previous and frowned upon by the FA. And without Suarez as a striker, instead using Carroll and Bellamy. Liverpool goes on to win 3-1, with that 1 being an own goal in an unlucky touch off Aggers. Gerrard was also fantastic after being substituted in.

Is Suarez too small to play central striker in the Premier League? Should he instead be moved into a winger position, where he can drive into the goal in the way that he does so brilliantly? People accuse him of taking dives, but the fellow is small. Wikipedia lists Suarez as 5'11", though I suspect his actual height is a lot closer to 5'9". With the hits a central striker takes in the EPL, it is not realistic to expect Suarez to be able to maintain ball control in the center of the goal box.

Wouldn't it be great to exist entirely for yourself? The objective of life would be to achieve zero pain and suffering and as much "pleasure" as possible at any cost since we are not considering the effect of our existence on other human beings.

Just think of a life with absolutely no consequences, because you just don't care. You take whatever you need or want. You eat, drink and consume anything you desire. You will not be short of heat and shelter, because you will just take it at will.

Why?

Suppose you had decided to arbitrarily limit your life to the time that the consequences got to you.

I am not asking this question because I am considering this course of action ... no, I don't have the courage.... :-) I intend to live as long as possible in as curmudgeonly a way as possible... and I want to live long enough to see a fellow human being walk on Mars.

This is an attempt to solicit some input to answer an important moral question.

Aside from the Beatles, I have never heard anything positive about Liverpool without searching for it. In fact, I would like to point out the rampant racism that exists in Europe and the UK against Scousers, people from Liverpool. Example the first: I mentioned to a friend online that I would like to visit Liverpool to see a football (soccer) game and asked what I should see while there. She said I should keep an eye on my wallet. Example the second: There was a terrible crush at Hillsborough. 96 Liverpool supporters (fans) were killed. The Sun newspaper reported despicable lies about the Liverpool supporters. Example the third: Some Italian soccer supporters were killed when a stadium wall fell on them. The Europeans blamed the Liverpool supporters and banned Liverpool from European competition for years, despite very strong evidence showing that the Italian supporters attacked Liverpool supporters, causing a crush. Example the fourth: Urban Dictionary. EDIT - Example the fifth: http://www.sickipedia.org/subcategory/view/1317.

The issue is either bigotry against class or bigotry against cultural origin. In this case, I find that cultural origin in the source of the bigotry. Basically, there is a strong bigotry against people from Liverpool, otherwise known as Scousers or Liverpudlians.

I've been offered a new job, and it's a good one. It will be much harder technically, but much more interesting and I'll be developing my skills accordingly in a growing company on high-tech products. Better still, it's mostly all Linux and other embedded OSs, very little Windows at all and probably no C++!

Our poor Indian at work thought I was going to work for a different customer on a different project. When I explained that I was leaving the company, he was very surprised.

I later found out that he and his Indian colleagues have a very different perspective on what's going on, especially regarding the future of the acquired staff and the reasons for the deal. No one has told them that they are involved because they are cheaper to employ than us, and that our future is very uncertain as our existing work is offshored.

A small handful of staff have started to work on projects for new customers, but that has meant travelling long distances to customers' sites and being away from home for long periods. No one asked for this, but they're doing it because they have nowhere else to go yet.

And go they will as soon as the opportunities arise.

In the olden days, your Linux (or whatever) distribution used to come with several desktop environments and plain window managers to choose from.

From what I can see from reading the comments in the peanut gallery these days it seems that a distribution comes welded to a particular desktop environment and that one changes distribution in order to use a different desktop environment...

*Sigh*

This is not How it was Meant to Be.

Apparently, my lawyer had convinced the Active Historical Council that the death penalty could not be applied. I did not alter the timeline for fiscal gain. I suppose there was nothing monetary about getting Wilberforce so drunk that he converted to Methodism and thereby altering most of the early 19th century. The guy had really good Madeira, what can I say? Anyways, it didn't alter the timeline much. There was only a couple of frigate actions and a sea battle during the American Civil War that were prevented. I don't think anyone would miss the battle between Milne and Farragut. I know I didn't.

But I was stuck. I am a historian, not a temporal engineer. So I did what any mad social scientist would do in those circumstances. I found a plain old mad scientist.

Nick and Sam were a gas. By that point, Tesla had more or less stopped any inventions that would have relevance to the information age. Most of his notes by that point were indecipherable to someone who subscribed to the theory of the luminiferous aether or Einstein's understanding of relativity. But it was Sam that focused Nick. A few jokes and Nick could work for hours.

Well, we never did get the transport strap to work. Instead, after I explained micro-chips and took a brief trip into the late 20s to get the circuits mapped, we reverse engineered it into man sized box. If it's good enough for Bill and Ted and the Doctor, it's good enough for us. Beats getting hit on the head with a hammer and waking up at some random time in history.

We played around for three years of our personal time. By the end, we were thoroughly sick of each other. Sam, for all his talk, can be a prude, and Nick can be pretty unstable at times. He would insist on visiting Hawking over and over, just to laugh at him. Sam went home to his family and Nick to his lab. I kept the box just long enough to get a new transport strap.

I read an article today explaining why Liverpool needs a new and better striker than Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez. Certainly, a new striker would improve LFC. Carroll doesn't exactly move with grace, and Suarez is too small to control the area in front of the net or move the ball around in the EPL with dominance.

However. Liverpool's biggest problem is moving the ball up to the offense. For that, Liverpool does not need striking, but rather passing. Although I have not watched soccer (football) for long, I have become convinced the team that passes best will win.

No football team can survive on defense against a ball that is fluidly moving across the field when that ball also remains in control. Instead of spending money on a striker and becoming good football team, Liverpool could get a passing center midfielder or winger and become a great football team. It would also serve to cover some of Lucas' deficiencies and thereby cause LVP fans to groan less in games.

Ingredients:

One goose breast, cut thin for stir frying.
One sweet onion, cut thin for stir frying.
Cranberry jelly
Cranberries
Soy Sauce
Olive Oil.

Stir fry onions in olive oil until onions turn semi-transparent.
Add everything else.
Serve with lots of sauce from the cooking process.

Our Indian has been with us now for nearly 3 weeks. He's a very friendly guy but he's very shy and nervous. He also looked very sheepish and embarrassed when I introduced him to other people not in the team as the guy who was learning our project to ramp up the off-shore team that would be taking over from us.

The outsourcing company that now owns us has completely under-estimated the time required to assimilate our knowledge and I know for a fact through the grape vine that our project is going offshore very soon i.e. at the end of the 3 months that our motivated, empowered and passionate colleague will be with us to learn.

He now knows how to compile our code, but he has no idea what all the builds are for (same questions asked every day despite it being explained and documented). He hasn't really cottoned on to the idea of using bookmarks or favourites in the web browser to remember useful web pages. Every time I tell him to go to such-and-such a page, he goes to his email an looks for the particular email with that link in it...

Progress is slow, tea-breaks are long and clandestine meetings with offshore managers on the phone are frequent and long. He doesn't feel like part of the team.

The poor soul is drowning in our (not very good) internal documentation.

Some of our PHBs told me that for this outsourcing deal to be financially successful, at least 50% of us have to be off our current customer's (i.e. former employer's) projects. So half of us have to be replaced by Indians in the next few months.

Never mind: there are Exciting New Possibilities of Interesting New Work(TM) for "other clients." That could involve travel and staying away from home for weeks or months at a time, and the new employer is notoriously stingy about travel and accommodation allowances.

But, hey, the staff do it because they are so enthusiastic about what they are getting to work on and the company is so great!

Our Indian has a son who is not quite 4 months old yet, and he will be here for 3 months, away from his family. The stingy slave-driving so-and-sos will not pay for him to go back to India to see his wife and child during that time.

What a lovely bunch.