Is the Media catching up?
Last night, BBC2 started the third season of Heroes in the UK. This is less than two weeks since the show premiered in the US. This is great news for those living abroad who have less time to wait and avoid online spoilers until they can watch the show.
Previously, a show like this would take a few months to be shown in the UK. Typically, a show starting in the Fall season would premier here in January or February. I believe the motivation was to allow the show to run continuously without reruns. But this makes it difficult for fans in the UK when surfing the Internet and not wanting to find out too much before getting a chance to see the show. It's a lot like taping a sports event and then trying to avoid the sports news until you get a chance to watch it.
I think piracy has helped bring this about. The big assumption that people are trying to steal content without paying is not always correct. If more shows are managed like this, you would see a lot less illegal downloads. If networks offered fee-based programming online, pirated tv shows would dwindle. Even iTunes shows wait until the UK premiers before something is offered. But at least they didn't have to wait long for Heroes.
Still, it did take nearly two weeks to be shown here. I read a blog post from torrent freak a few days ago, 'Heroes' Causes BitTorrent Boom, which says that downloads of the show last week broke new records. Even two weeks is a long time on the net.
By releasing content earlier, the US TV networks can control their own content before it spreads via piracy.
If you use the Marware Nike+ Pouch . . .
. . . make sure the sensor is in the right way.
A few years ago, I started using the sensor with velcro strapped to my shoe. It worked great. I even wrote about it.
This week I got a new
pair of running shoes and started using a Marware pouch. I found that my three mile runs were being logged as two miles. I was gutted and the pouch was on its way to the bin.
Then I read the instructions more carefully. I had put the sensor in upside down.
Now I'm back from a run and want to post this before I forget. If you found this post because you are googling Marware pouch problems, I hope you find this tip useful.
My Hindi Course
On Monday night, I started a ten-week course in Beginners Hindi. I spend a lot of time speaking with people in India, and I thought it would be fun to learn a bit. After all, I'm pretty fluent in Mandarin and still maintain the basics of my quickly fading Vietnamese-- so I thought I would pick up some Hindi.
I'm taking the course at the Abingdon & Witney College in Abingdon. I don't know why I didn't just take a course in London-- I'm there every day anyway and could have just postponed the commute a few hours-- but the teacher seems nice and the class is small.
I have four new classmates. All of them are English and have very interesting reasons for learning the language. There's a lady who travels to India from time to time and wanted to use some basic Hindi. There's a young, free-spirited, student who travels all over the world and has fallen in love with India. There's also guy who teaches foreign languages and liked the idea of picking another one up. There's also a woman who married a man from India and would like to pick up some Hindi so she could converse with his parents. It's a nice group.
The class is not very structured. The teacher kept asking us how we prefer to learn? She handed out a vocabulary list with not very many words on it-- but all of the spelling were transliterations. I asked whether the transliterations were consistent (like the Pinyin in Mandarin) and always spelled the same way. Apparently they aren't. Several books spell the same word several ways.
I asked about the alphabet (Devanagari) and how long it would take to learn it. One thing we always said in any of the Mandarin courses I've taken over the years is "If it had an alphabet, reading this would be so much easier." Hindi is character-based, and I thought we would probably do okay learning to read it--despite how difficult it might look. If children could learn using Devanagari, surely we could too. We spent the second half of the class writing 6 of the letters and learning how to pronounce them. It actually is a lot harder than it looks.
Anyway, we'll see how this goes. This doesn't look like an intensive course, but it's a start.
What will it look like after?
Like a lot of people, I'm really concerned with how the technology market is going to look in the next year. While, at this moment-- with all that is going on in the financial sector, I still have colleagues that tell me that we should probably not be affected at all. But that's a crock. We're all going to be affected.
When the tech bubble burst in the early part of this decade, it nearly coincided with the release of the .Net framework. For some of us VB5/6-ers, it was a big learning curve and our companies didn't want to pay for it. Those who were really committed, spent their home hours writing messy demo application to get to grips the technology. When .Net open source projects like DotNetNuke became available, we got to see how others coded as well. At this time, a friend and former mentor of mine said, "this is when a lot of programmers will go off to be accountants or something." They did (however, it was more a move into project management than accounting). But a lot of people never really recovered.
The benefit of the bubble bursting was that it did thin out the professional developer industry. Those of us who wanted to stay in it, had to work harder to prove we were worthy and do more than was listed on our job descriptions. The moonlighting web designer (or "Web Masters"-- with their white font on tiled-gif background along with their enormous third-party hit counters) started to fade from existence.
Now, we are about to see upheaval again. When it really hits the fan in the next few months, contractors will feel it first, but permanent employees will be affected too. Those of us who will be let go, will be let go into a buyers market. It will even cause us to ask, "Do I jump (leave) before I am pushed (let go)?"
But the complacency of employment, I believe, has to end now. Save and study.
About Eric Wroolie
Eric Wroolie is a software developer specialising in project Outsourcing and Offshoring.
As a software developer since 1998, he has built applications for Barclays Capital, BBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Omega Logic.
In 2004, he founded Overpass, a company that provides offshoring services to UK and US organisations.
He is a San Diego native who has spent the last 10 years living in England and working in London.
Eric speaks Chinese Mandarin and served in the US Army as a Mandarin and Vietnamese linguist.
In addition to being able to speak Mandarin, Eric can juggle three balls for almost twenty seconds, and make fart noises using his hands only (this is more difficult than it sounds-- try it).
Eric has an MCSD in Visual Basic 6 and previous languages, but now works with .Net. He holds ScrumMaster Certification with Scrum Alliance.
Eric on Twitter
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