The Things We Do For

The Things We Do For Money - I meet people - socially, on dates, at family gatherings, wherever - and they ask what it is I do for a living.

And it's always hard to explain. So I'll give you an example; today's Bleat from James Lileks:

Jean-Charles, my French brother-in-law, asked me for some PC help - he wanted to make a home movie of his daughter’s birth, and just couldn’t seem to get anything to work. So I went over to his house to take a look. If I knew then what I knew now, I’d have brought a pistol and put a bullet through his PC. The movie-editing software was aimed at the consumer, much in the same way that North Korean artillery is aimed at Seoul, and it’s fairly recent. Apple’s iMovie has been out for a couple of years, so the PC boys have had ample time to study it, see what makes it work. And did they learn? No. There’s no incentive to learn. They developed an interface based on iMovie - clips on the right, editing line on the bottom, viewscreen in the middle. And then they PCified by adding seventeen icons and check-box options that had nothing to do with anything you wanted to do. Still, I figured I could help.

He’d plugged in his camcorder, let it roll, and downloaded 25 minutes of video. As with iMovie, the program cut the video into separate clips, depending on when he paused the camera. But whenever you clicked on an individual clip to edit it, the clip went back to the beginning of the movie. Each clip had an icon that showed how the scene began, but each clip started at 00:00:01. Huh? I hunted around for the location of the clips, and found the right folder. There were no individual clips. The program recorded the video as one gigantic bolus, and pretended that the clips were discrete files, which they weren’t. So when you edited any portion, you were working with the entire 3.3 gigabyte file. I cannot begin to describe how farked this is. Trust me.

You've all worked with software like that, right? Especially (but not exclusively) in the Windows world?

I fix that. I work with projects to help them design software that is not, to put it in Lileksian, "farked" to use.

All by way of kicking off the second week of my job hunt. Nine interviews last week, one confirmed and one probable this week. Seriously need something to drop in the hoop. Wish me luck.

Posted by Mitch at January 13, 2003 07:53 AM