www.flickr.com
|
All Your Base are Belong to Google
Woop-woop!
That's the sound of da police!
Woop-woop!
That's the sound of the beast!
-KRS One
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow. -Hunter S. Thomson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Ron Burgundy: I love scotch. Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down, down into my belly...
So the beginning of this blog concerned my job seach in the valley. I should announce here that my job search is temporarily on hold. The reason is simple, the financial status of my company was significantly improved based on the following announcement made early this month:
Nuasis 3Com Deal
So, job security is no longer such an issue here at Nuasis and I believe I'll be sticking around for quite some time.
On an unrelated note, I've just reached the three months of continuous training in Wing Chun Kung Fu. Wing Chun is a Chinese marital art based on economy of motion and using your body as an efficient weapon. Here's a good rundown on what Wing Chun is all about and a shameless plug for my Sifu and his class.
Wikipedia on Wing Chun Kung Fu
Wing Chun Dynamics Sifu Ken Chun
Thanks for checking in!
Have you ever tried to hit www.google.com and gotten a 404? Me neither. But check this out:
Brief Outages at Google, eBay Make Headlines
Now I've been to Google and I've talked to their DNS guys. I know they use BIND as well as djbdns. For those of you who don't know, BIND sucks, but that is another story. Still, I have to wonder whether there was some kind of hack on Google's DNS servers or whether to attribute this to human error.
Some supposed answers to this question:
Google-hacked
I guess this post could be considered a follow up to my Job Hunt in the Valley. I secured an oral offer from Cosmix today. They sure tried really hard to beat me down. First, they had the senior recruiter from their headhunter call me. He was trying to convince me that salary offer Cosmix was about to make was their best. He went so far as to bet me a lunch that I wouldn't get a penny more. I told him to clear his lunch calendar.
Then, this evening, I got a call from Cosmix co-founder, Venky Harinarayan. He is a nice enough guy and I thought we were getting along quite well. The conversation was frank and I got the chance to pick the brain of a bona fide Venture Capitalist. The gist of his argument was that I should join his company for the "equity," to the tune of 50,000 stock options. My problem with the offer? I have no idea what Cosmix does. Ok, well, I know they want to build a search engine, but come on, hasn't this already been done? So they want to build a better search engine? Well, okay, I suppose but how are you going to make money doing that?
The salary was decent and could be characterized roughly as "market." The problem I saw was that the responsibilites they were looking for me to fill were far greater than those associated with any position in the "market." Here's a partial list of the responsibilities I would assume:
I work with VoIP every day. My current employer sells a VoIP based contact center solution. The more I think about our business model the more concerned I get that open source is going to leapfrog us. Lately, my concern has been focused on the huge popularity behind Asterisk, the open source PBX solution from Digium Corp.
Hit "*" for More Options
My concern is this: we employ 20 engineers of average skill and ability to write and maintain code for our product. By last count, Asterisk developers number over 1000, most of whom are open source experts already. It is not going to take long for the Asterisk folks to tap into our market. Once they do, I believe they will be able to surpass the quality of code we are producing in fairly short order. From there, the rest of our system is fairly trivial, a backend database (MySQL anyone?), a mail server (take your pick), JBoss (already open source) and some web collaboration. This is really not such cutting edge technology and putting it together wouldn't be that hard at all.
Yep, Asterisk is troubling indeed.
My job hunt is in full swing. Yesterday, I had a second interview with a company called Cosmix. From the sound of it, they are interested in hiring me. When the topic of salary came up I knew it was time to bust out the negotiation skills I worked so hard on in law school. Aparently the interviewer could tell as he complimented me on my stance and said it would come in handy after I was on board. We'll see
Today I got a call from a recruiter at VMware. It's always funny to talk to recruiters because they can talk the talk but they have no clue whether you can. I think if I had told this guy I installed Linux on a network of 1000 flux capacitors he would have kept going right along.
