Being an American guy married to an Italian woman and living in Austria, I don’t really have a problem with “globalization”. Actually, I’m something of a fan, which is one reason I’m disappointed in the globalization of Amazon’s services.

If you order a book from Amazon.com in the US, it will be shipped to you from the nearest shipment center. If you go to a large site like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, it’s quite likely that they provide services in your language.

Amazon, however, appears to be completely split up along country lines. Your amazon.com account is completely seperate from your amazon.co.uk account, and amazon.de isn’t even available in English! This completely violates the sensible reasoning behind the two features outlined above. If you’re somewhere like Italy or Denmark or Eastern Europe, you should be able to log in to amazon.com, in your language, order a book, and have it shipped from the nearest shipping center. Instead, you have to log in to each site (they don’t share account info), which is only available in one language. So, for instance, an English speaking guy in Austria wanting to order books from the nearest country with an Amazon site goes to amazon.de and finds that there is no option to get the site in English. If I want to order from amazon.co.uk I have to enter all my login information from amazon.com again, and don’t get the same recommendations and other features that come from Amazon knowing about my purchasing history.

I’ve long had the sneaking suspicion that, from the “free software” point of view, the most “threatening” proprietary software systems were not the most tightly locked down ones, where it’s difficult to do anything without paying a fortune and control is absolute, but rather those that coopt as much as they can from the open source world. You get source code, you get an open and hackable system, you get to talk with the people who wrote the code, who will tell you all about it if you want to know. You can recompile it for different platforms, or tweak it how you want. You get to talk with other users of it, and maybe even share hacks and additions you’ve created. Just that you still may have to pay for it, and you don’t get the rights to redistribute as you see fit.

Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense, speaks very well of Atlassian and what they’re doing with systems like JIRA, which is a very open commercial offering:

http://boldlyopen.com/2008/09/11/sustainable-software-look-down-under/

With the challenge “Can your Open Source vendor do this?”. I don’t think he’s far off the mark; the fundamental problem with open source businesses is finding a way to introduce scarcity, as I’ve talked about before:

https://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

That’s not to say it’s not possible (it is, obviously), or that open source doesn’t work (it has, beyond my wildest dreams), just that we still haven’t figured out the part that connects developers with money. One of the most successful (in terms of making Linux user friendly) companies to date is basically running on the “find a guy who already made a bundle elsewhere and is a good patron” model.

I found this here:

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=291

It’s particularly entertaining for me, as I started my programming career at an ad agency.

http://view.break.com/542649 – Watch more free videos

Since we’re considering a move back to the US, I’ve been idling perusing job ads; a number of which seek “rock star” this and “ninja” that, which sound ludicrous, to put it in polite terms. On the other side of the coin, once an HR department has you in their clutches, you cease to be a person, and are a “resource”, as in “we had two resources working on the problem”.

Maybe they should just come out and say they are looking for “rock star resources”.

I’m back to working at home after completing a recent contract, much faster than the client expected, I’m proud to say, as I was able to leverage some open source software to do exactly what they needed.

While I love being able to see Helen and Ilenia more during the day, it also brings up that old question of Adam Smith’s: the division of labor. It’s pretty difficult to concentrate at all with a baby in the house, despite having an office with a door. When she’s noisy, she’s really noisy, and there’s nothing like the yowl of an unhappy baby to get a parent’s attention, even if he’s not the one currently taking care of her. Also, perhaps most importantly: she’s adorable and full of smiles for me, and loves to play… as do I, certainly more so than working! Since she won’t take a bottle yet (well, I did succeed once, but it’s not easily repeatable), my wife is still the one Helen’s primarily attached to, but even so, needs some time when I take care of the baby so she can do her stuff too.

I’m curious what sorts of arrangements other people have worked out? Fortunately, one option would simply be to spend the time with Ilenia and Helen and forget about work for the most part, but that’s pretty extreme. It’s not as if I don’t have computer time, but the biggest problem is the constant interruptions, which make it difficult to do more than read and write a little bit. Serious coding requiring concentration is pretty much only for late at night or early mornings these days.

If all goes according to plan, Helen, Ilenia and I will be in Vienna, Austria sometime in the next week or two, to register our daughter as a US citizen. As always, we’re interested in meeting anyone local for alcohol/food/coffee/whatever, within the limits of our time there. Send email with a mobile number if you’re interested in meeting up at some point.

I’m not exactly a frequent traveler, but Ilenia and I both really enjoy meeting people when we go places, so I signed up for this to see if it helps put me in contact with people, either in places I go, or people visiting Innsbruck:

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

I’ve never been a fan of the word “blog” – I believe it sounds like something one calls a plumber to deal with. Even worse is “blog” as a verb. “I blogged it yesterday”. Did you really? Was it expensive to get cleaned up?

Here are some alternatives that I came up with:

• Write. It’s been a pretty effective word for hundreds of years, over the course of many, many new and varied technologies.
• Affirm
• Announce
• Attest
• Aver
• Chronicle
• Comment
• Communicate
• Divulge
• Document
• Express
• Inform
• Make known
• Narrate
• Note
• Notify
• Outline
• Pass along
• Proclaim
• Pronounce
• Publish
• Record
• Recount
• Relate
• Report
• Reveal
• Speak of
• State
• Wrote up
• Report
• Recount

I’m sure I’m missing some good ones…