Category: All Posts

Doug Pratt is not DOuG pRATt

Of the numerous Doug Pratt’s out there, the best known is the Doug Pratt who edits and publishes The DVD Newsletter, which he started as The LaserDisc Newsletter. When I first got on the Net from home, almost fifteen years ago, I was on Usenet a lot, and I posted comments to LaserDisc newsgroups. Because I was very knowledgeable about the format, everybody assumed I was Doug, so I added a disclaimer insisting I wasn’t him.

Doug can be heard in a recent 90-minute conversation on Blog Talk Radio, at this link. Maybe later the host can figure out how to level-match the loudness of the phone calls.

Meet Joe Motocross

Meet Joe Motocross

Monte Schulz pointed out here on DogRat last year, that his brother Craig — and only Craig — was a dirt bike rider. Once again I refer you to the Coffee Lane portion of the documentary “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” where you can see both Craig and Monte.

Craig has an article in the October ’08 Racer X Illustrated, and he tells about riding dirt bikes.

The sound would travel for miles, and like a mating call, it would summon my buddies to head on over to my place to practice. My parents must have received plenty of phone calls, but I never heard of any complaints.

I’m struck by the fact there is something of a similarity in the contrast between Monte and his brother Craig, and me with my brother Jeff, who also rode dirt bikes. This picture of Craig could almost be one of my brother from that same period of time. Maybe I can get him to send one so you can see what I mean.

Craig Schulz

Offshore ‘Drilling’

Computerworld tells of a study that you’ll find here, confirming the impact of offshore outsourcing on American tech jobs.

The survey, conducted by researchers at the New York University Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, also backs up the long-standing view that IT employees in purely technical jobs — computer programmers and software developers who have little customer interaction — are at the most risk from offshore outsourcing.

At work I’m involved with EMC, the big data storage company, and I can confirm that a lot of their software development is now being done in India. If somebody goes to college in the United States, and completes a degree in computer science, and they want to remain purely technical, they should be able to work in America and get paid well; otherwise, future students will feel hard work isn’t rewarded. On the upside, this is good news for technical workers who want to go into management, or want to work with people as well as computers.