And I’ve just now been invited to sit on Humber College’s industry advisory board. When I was a student I thought industry involvement in post-secondary education was pretty evil, because academic institutions really should not be outsourced technical training programs. However, the Computer Science community in Toronto is, frankly, in crisis. Large corporations (no names) have pillaged the “industry advisory” process completely, leaving it almost-impossible for startups and small companies to find people trained in open, or defacto, standards.

The local institutions seem to be teaching XNA/C# and Java almost exclusively now, even U of T. When you sit grads from these programs down with a memory bug they are utterly helpless: “what’s a memory? I forget.”

Anyway, I can’t take credit for pushing open standards, which is the approach I’m going to take. The nature of those systems, combined with Apple’s (and to a lesser extent Google’s, Sony’s, and Nintendo’s) support makes them extremely useful and flexible.

The phrasing we’ve been using around the office is: “if you learn XNA, you might get a job. If you learn C++ you will have a career.”

I want email money transfers, the ability to use the debit system, and the ability to use debit online. Let’s hope all those nice sloplosions signify that.

Here’s Kidd Kidd’s new stuff, which 50 is using as a promo. It’s embeddable…

… And just when it gets boring it turns into a call for violence to avenge Treyvon Martin.

She’s probably going to handle concept art and maybe final. I need to find a musician/sound designer.

I’m pro-crosstrain-ating by “slacking off” work — ie, taking breaks — to start my own company.

So there’s some not-being-aired-or-talked-about footage (via) of a bunch of swine cracking citizens’ skulls. You can hear the lack of police force legitimacy in the voices of the people.

I’ve said recently that I would have felt safer with the Fanshawe rioters than with the swine that showed up to stop it. I wonder when the violence started. I’ve met very few nice swine — mostly they seem like people who should be avoided. A large number of Fanshawe students are there doing Police Foundations, and mostly they’re not cool to be around unless they’re smoking weed.

I haven’t gotten to this point yet, but: is a background in policing a negative attribute of a potential hire? I might start factoring that in to my HR decisions — and, yes, I have interviewed ex-swine already. Even they want to escape their horrible jobs.

It looks like they — almost to a pig — can’t deal intelligently with high-stress situations.

At some point I should make a todo list, to leverage structured procrastination, but I’m currently procrastinating on that by actually doing things which would go on — OMG IT’S ALREADY WORKING. Kidding: I’ve been feeling pretty great recently* and am using the energy to make positive changes.

Your mileage may vary — just do the bare minimum you feel comfortable with.

* Sam Harris: “most people who smoke weed everyday would do better smoking less. Most people who don’t smoke weed would do better smoking more.” — I’m currently dry and I’m thinking about cutting back to one-to-five (major) sesh(s) per month.

Typically high tech companies need large cash reserves because their assets are all soft — smart people can’t be resold, so the only way for high tech employers to store value is to have big piles of cash. This also lets those companies move quickly to acquire new, smart, small companies before they become competition through growth or being acquired by someone else.

Typically, also, mature companies in mature industries can manufacture growth by returning value to shareholders with dividends and stock repurchases — they know when they need to buy a new widget press, roughly, and they know that having cash on-hand is no good to them.

All corporate decisions have information content. Apple’s move here is one, I think, of Tim Cook signalling that he’s a steady hand. That’s why the press release immediately goes into justifications: “we’re still confident”, “we’ve made some great acquisitions”, etc. But halving the war chest is a big strategic move. Announcing a stock rebuy at $600 per share, for example, signals that Cook considers the stock undervalued — I can’t comment as to the truth of that (it’s possible), but that’s power balling pretty hard: were they really unable to find a more innovative company to buy than themselves? PrimeSense, for example?

I’m weirded out because Apple plans this stuff, is conscious of it: Tim Cook oversees a big earnings and share price bump through the Jobs Transition — and the next MacBook gets an SD port. These bumps are engineered and the shareholder play is a definite signal, I just think it’s wrong-headed — a good play from the wrong book. Could that $45 billion really not have been better spent on an innovative new product?

Returning that much to shareholders signals that Tim is safe and industrial-minded. It signals that Apple is moving into a mature value-extraction phase for its markets. It’s worrying that this is the guy in charge of manifesting the future now, and the title may have to be stripped.

The all-in cost for a small universal (iPad and iPod) game is about $50,000. 30% to 40% of that cost is UIUX design (User Interface User Xperience), which I cut right off the top because that’s my responsibility. Project management is another 10%, which I cut out as well.

The estimated time we were working with was three months for one developer, or about 500 hours. This could be cut as well with a very clear design, and especially one focused on MVP: the minimum viable product. This is what I’m working on now. I don’t really believe this aphorism, but it’s catchy:

1 App 1 Feature 1 Dollar

After all was said and done I’d whittled him down to $8k-$10k, with the schedule of the work still TBD. I think I’m going to look at other firms to see how low I can get that — this was at one of the really high-end outsourcing firms, and they told me straight-up that they charge almost full North American rate.

Which ends up back where I left off with Jared: I’d like to find a good-enough coder at a good-enough rate, ideally below my own. However, practically, I won’t do these projects without help, so I can give on rate as long as the output of non-commodity coder-hours is of sufficient quality. There’s a fuzziness there around how much of my own time I’ll need to invest to complete the project, which’ll just have to be tackled as it comes up.