Category: All Posts

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.

Header or Tales

At the moment, this is the header image:

Click to enlarge

In case you’re wondering, that’s the Music Shed at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA. I’m not sure yet what the next header is going to be. I have a couple of different ones ready, so maybe I should flip a coin. Or maybe not, because one of them is K3!

A V-J Record

I missed noting V-J Day back on August 14, but I’ll do it now. It’s hard to believe I was born only ten years after the end of the war.

The famous photo taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square wasn’t the only view of the sailor grabbing the girl and kissing her. From a different angle, Navy photographer Victor Jorgensen also caught the moment.

A song that’s strongly reminiscent of World War II is “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Don’t confuse it with “We’ll Meet Again,” that’s heard at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Liberace renewed the popularity of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and stressless songstress Jo Stafford recorded it in ’58.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/AUG/IllBeSeeingYou.mp3]

RNC — Real Nut Cases

D.F. Rogers has provided a copy of a mailing he received from the Republican National Committee. If you want proof the GOP is still infiltrated by the extreme Neocons spouting their nonsense, this is it.

RNC MailingRNC MailingRNC Mailing

With more than 80% of Americans supposedly feeling the country is on the wrong track, why vote for McCain? Just because Obama is black? C’mon, we’ve got to be bigger and better than that.

The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine

There is precious little about humorist Jackson Paine available on the Internet. In fact, there’s nothing at all. Everything that I know about him is on the back of his 1961 LP, “The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Humor in its Newest Form.”

Jackson Paine liner notes

My dad got this record when he bought a stereo in 1963, a big GE tabletop console. The turntable had an automatic changer that swung down on a hinge, and it included stereo FM, which was quite new at the time. In fact, my father first brought home a GE stereo radio without a record player, but exchanged it. A wise move.

The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine

“The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine” is one part comedy record, one part sound effects record, and one part stereo demonstration record. I have very fond memories of listening to it when I was a kid, along with the Audio Fidelity Stereo Spectacular record that I featured over a year ago.

I think a lot of the humor holds up pretty well. It’s a real artifact of its time, created by a New York ad man working in the JFK era, as depicted in Mad Men. Each side is about ten minutes long.

Side 1
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine1.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 1]

Side 2
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine2.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 2]