So I was playing with google earth a little this morning, looking for my house. As I moved up bloubergbeach (which is the biggest landmark right nearby) I spotted a picture entitled lovers at sunset which sounded nice. So I looked… and I’ll be damned but I think that couple looks kina familiar… 
I can’t be certain, but it’s very close to our house, and we do sometimes take sunset walks on the beach… it just might be…
As you may recall, in April I gave a talk at the UWC Digital Freedom Exposition entitled "Since when is freedom rated ‘R’". Which sparked quite a debate both at the conference and here on the blog. At the time I promised that at video of the talk would follow,but unfortunately that took quite a long time to get ready. However, thanks to UWC’s efforts, the video is now published, and here it is.
Ow 
According to Wikipedia computer programmers and assembly workers are by far the most likely candidates for repetitive stress injury. And those jock’s think they are the macho ones eh ? The only way they’ll ever get RSI is from excessive mast… well anyway I am in severe pain from too much typing on a laptop where my wrists aren’t fully supported, I think a few day of rest with minimal strain on my hand, arm and wrist is crucial if I am to regain the ability to type without wincing in pain. So no more blog updates until I’m better…
Arr me mateys – it be talk like a Pirate day. That be a hallmark holiday apparently created by internet memetics… but since according to the RIAAAAAA we are all evil Caribean Pirates f’r listening to mp3′s let us be off an’ talk like pirates all day long.
Come matey’s, let us sail the seven ISP’s and capture the files of doom !
But more than that, I have been informed that today is also the birthday of
Very nearly a year after I left, [tag]OpenLab[/tag] posted three job ads on Tectonic this week. They are looking for one lead developer and two juniors. I had a look after somebody told me. I was quite shocked as the salaries advertised are massively below market averages for people with the skills that job needs. The lead developer is obviously meant to take my job – dunno what the two juniors are meant to do because OL has hardly ever had more than me on their staff.
If anybody at OpenLab reads this – hint: double every figure and you’re getting realistic for the skills you really need.
They look like what was good salaries when I joined OpenLab – nearly 7 years ago. Now, it’s peanuts and sadly I must wonder what kind of an idiot would work for that anymore.
Something must have happened at my former employers though, because after having not done so much as a website update in nearly a year, they suddenly advertise for three new programmers.
Of course I have no contact whatsoever with them, and my last attempts at communication was entirely ignored (many other people reported the same to me) so I don’t know what that something might be.
All I do know is that I pity the fools who take the jobs, not just because of money, but because ultimately my time at the company was the single biggest nett loss in my life. I did learn a lot of skills but with zero training budget I never got another certification so my only proof of it is by writing free software to show off with. Sure I would have done that anyway, but how sad that there are still companies that do not have training budgets ? Free training and education is practically a standard benefit in the corporate world.
Since the deadlines were always impossibly tight, and all indications of the requirements of a project was summarily ignored (the project was force ably fitted to the budget, instead of (as it ought to be) the other way around), I worked 20 hour days almost always.. I hardly ever saw my family, lost contact with most of my friends… oh and did I mention how many times I didn’t get paid for as much as 3 months in a row ?
On one contract, I made certain agreements to the customer after I was designated to do negotiations – I agreed on certain deadlines based on the agreement from OL that three more developers would be hired -and I could spend my full time on that project. Instead, not even one developer was hired, and I was bound on a different (non-paying) project for almost the entire period … then expected to fullfill the requirements in under 3 weeks. By that time I had already started preparing my new business, though so (for the first time ever) I never even tried (what would be the point ? it was humanly impossible to do a job that required 4 people over 3 months by myself in 3 weeks), I just spent my time until I was ready to quit. some 14 days later.
Do I sound a little bitter ?
I guess I am. Looking back at my time with OpenLab – it started out amazing, but ever more it turned into one empty promise after another, and I stayed loyal and worked myself to death and believed and very nearly lost everything I cared about. Even Silvia almost slipped through my fingers…
In the end there was on decisive moment when I saw through all the bullshit. The boss had seen only half of a certain event – and accused me in public of having acted wrongly. I responded that he could not make such a judgement without at least knowing the whole episode – he refused to listen. The next day, I received a written warning for questioning him in front of other staff (nevermind that he unfairly accused me in front of them in the first place).
I responded in shock:”I thought I was a partner in this business, not an employee”
The answer came:” I am still your boss”
When I realized that for all my sacrifices, all my loyalty – all the effort I put in as a partner, I was still just going to be seen as a worker, I was furious. Especially because that made me the biggest idiot in the world. I was having all the responsibilities of a worker, and none of the benefits. I was never an employee when it came to budgeting to have salaries paid on time. I was never an employee when it came to health benefits or pension plans or training or overtime pay – THEN I was management, but when it came to authority (even just over my own way of working) I had zero…
At that moment, I chose to quit and began the processes that would lead to the foundation of OutKast Solutions.
By the way boss, you always misunderstood something completely. An employee relationship is not a slavery relationship. There is a submission to authority – but it is a completely voluntary submission – and highly conditional one. It is conditional on the employer fulfilling his responsibilities – if at any moment the employer misses even one – the employee is freed from all obligation – especially the obligation of obedience. To challenge me for questioning an unfair accusation… when I had no received my (pathetically low) salary that month was nothing short of a serious workers rights violation.
Sorry about the rant, but I hope everybody who is considering applying for that job reads this and changes their minds – this is a company that boasts about it’s charity work, describes itself as social entrepeneurs, but the truth is, it’s a company that exploits it’s own people to the maximum – that takes everything from them, and somehow still manages to make them feel guilty about wanting the things they were promised.
Yes there were great times at OpenLab – but all in all, any job where when you leave you are financially worse off than when you started (without any fault of your own except perhaps staying too long) – is a rip-off, perhaps the worst kind of ripoff there can be.
Yes this is a very emotional post, it’s a rant. But it is also a dire warning. Don’t work for those thieves. They will steal more than your money, that will just be the start, they’ll steal your soul, your personality, your health and your entire life and leave you nothing so that one day – you have to rebuild it all from scratch.
I dare you, to sue me. I can prove every line in this post. It’s not libel when you can prove it.
PS. Just a bit of unbiased evidence, I have contact with a number of people who worked there as well over the years, every single one of them has at least tripled their income since they left – and most of them did it in less than one month.
It’s funny how things work out. When I left OpenLab, I thought my jetsetting days would be largely over. How wrong I was, in fact I am spending far more time traveling now than I did back then. The big difference is that now I mostly travel within South Africa and not so much abroad anymore.
So here I sit, at Cape Town International airport, my flight boarding in 30 minutes, writing a quick blog for the hell of it. While the northern parts of the country is in the midst of a heatwave and I’m expecting some serious heat when I land, down here we got more typical spring weather. The mornings are still freezing but I can already feel a hot day coming on. Not a scorcher yet, it’s too early for that and the nights are too cold still, but a 25+ at least.
Up north I’d be very surprised if I don’t get 30+ again, that we won’t have down in Cape Town for another month at least, but when we do – we’ll have all the bikini’s a city could want so that’s alright then.
Okay, so Saturday morning started an experiment that took much longer than initially anticipated. It began when ChloeJones (my big development box) complained of overheating yet again.
The time was clearly at hand for the old girl to receive some emergency surgery. She’s getting a little older and with age the hot flashes were hitting her hard whenever I had a big job for her – so I needed to give her some serious TLC.
The process began with opening her up, and giving her a massive dusterectome. PC’s are dust collection houses and when you haven’t opened one up in a while you can expect to find huge loads in there. I took bits appart and cleaned out until she was almost shiny again. Next step was her fans. Now back in the days when I built her custom case, I spent a fortune on materials and lighting, and even though I designed her to hold a total of no less than 7 fans, I couldn’t afford new case fans, so the five case fans (+1 on the power supply and 1 on the cpu) were hand-me-downs from old cases.
Sure it worked, but those fans were already old and by now most of them hardly worked at all. So I drove to the nearest PC shop and bought five new case fans, coming in at around R125. Got home and gave the girl a complete fan-transplant.
That done, in theory she was ready to roll.
Nope, something wrong – there was just no signal from the VGA to the monitor. At a loss for ideas, I went digging, I swapped out video cards, I reseated memory. The process took two days, for quite a while there I had my hard drive in the silentwife’s box (no puns intended) just to be able to get some comics done for next week. Eventually we found it, the AGP card wasn’t quite making it into the slot. In fact it never had, but with age it had gotten just that tiny bit more sensitive.
To get it deeper in, I had to remove the face-plate. But with that done, the old girl finally booted. I could reconfigure grub again to boot in the real box, and finally, here I am, writing this blog on a now much happier ChloeJones with her fans running at full capacity for maximum well designed airflow, and no dust to clog her heatsinks and airchannels.
ScarToonz has become one of the founding members of Insignificant Comics a comic collective specifically focussed on smaller comics. I think it is a great idea. There are loads of comics on the net that are really good, but have serious trouble getting noticed. I always said getting return visitors is a matter of the quality of your work, but that first visit is not – that is a matter of the quality of your marketing. Most of us smaller guys, who do this for a hobby have understandably smaller budgets. We’re not making a living out of this, and we cannot afford massive ad campaigns, but we do want to be read. A collective that focuses on helping us do that – well I love the idea.