When the songbird sings

I’m retiring this blog in favor of a new one, hosted on Blogspot. Go to www.iamkarla.com.

“Whenever there’s a downturn people outsource more, not less. Organizations want to take costs out wherever they can,” says Gartner analyst Linda Cohen. While outsourcing deals slowed down in 2008 and (early) 2009, a lot of work still find their way offshore. Some analysts even suggest that businesses don’t decide whether they should outsource work anymore; what can be outsourced will be outsourced. It will be a tough time for both buyers and vendors, but don’t write off the industry yet. Hat tip: raise the cap on H1-B and retain talent and taxes.

EB’s fearless forecast for outsourcing in 2009: it’s all about cost-savings. From plateauing pay scales to consolidation, money is a major–if not the only–consideration. Oh yeah, there is also the Obama effect.

The view from my window

What would have been a long, cozy, relaxing, and stress-free Christmas in my hometown turned into a frenzy of packing, stuff, scheduling, rescheduling, going back and forth, and finally moving to the new apartment. Our lease on the previous place expired and couldn’t be renewed anymore because the landlord decided to sell the unit. I received the news quite late, so there was a mad scramble to find a new place lest we wanted to be homeless come New Year. Good thing, my sister’s contact gave us a slot in one of the rental condo units she (I think) owns.

We cut our vacation short by two days to move into the new apartment, a 25th floor affair which we share with other renters. Think of it as a flat–everyone has her own room (or share rooms), but there are spacious fully furnished common areas. I love the view and I love my own room, with its huge window overlooking the Makati CBD skyline. It’s not exactly EM Forster, but the phrase does come to mind, considering the cave where I spent the past year and a half. I had nice memories of the place at Makati Prime, though. I enjoyed the pizza-and-beer get-togethers with friends before I went to the States in November ‘07, the dinners with my sister, just hanging out watching Mega Thursday and Air Crash Investigation on NGS, and my then newfound way of coping with stress: scrubbing the apartment squeaky clean, you could perform surgery on the floor. OK, I’m exaggerating.

With a bit more of furnishing, I should be all set. Sky cable transferred my connection to the new address with a pay-through-the-nose fee of 1K just for the 15 minutes it took to connect the cables. At least I can watch the Australian Open next week (good luck, Rogi!) I still have no internet connection, as I have given up my old internet service for a hopefully better package. PLDT DSL takes forever to install my network, but I don’t want to have to cough up P1,450 just to have my Bro antenna transferred. Plus, the quality of the wireless service has been absolutely horrible since November.

So anyways, writing gigs are slow and it’s only this week that I’m working on the backlog that has been on my plate since the start of the Christmas break. So dear clients–please bear with me. I will send you all the lovely writings and grand plans for world domination within the week.

My sister and I were walking out of the Makati Prime compound yesterday evening when we smelled something that resembled burnt wires, and then saw dark smoke coming out of a fourth floor unit of the building next to ours. There were only three other people on the street, and one of them was a clueless guard to whom we pointed out what was initially just a slightly ominous dark smoke. He didn’t respond.

I found another security guard and alerted him about the smoke from the unit, and luckily, the guy had a working panic button. He ran immediately to the building and asked for help from the now not-clueless-anymore guard whom we first alerted.

About 5 minutes later, we started to see red flames inside the unit. Someone managed to hose the flames out with a fire extinguisher, but the stubborn flames re-emerged, and by then everybody knew that professional help was really needed. A full 10 minutes passed after the fire was reported when two fire trucks from nearby Makati Fire Station arrived.

I decided to hang around and make usi a little to see if the firemen would be able to put out the flames and stop it from spreading to other units, as well as the nearby building where our apartment was. After knowing that I wouldn’t have to pack my stuff (basically, my entire life’s worth of whatever are in our apartment) and taking a footage of all the excitement with my phone, my sister and I decided to go ahead with our shopping plans. Order was restored in the universe.

Inquirer came up with a slightly inaccurate report about the incident.

The film is not bad at all. It’s the kilig movie of the year aimed mostly at teenagers, but mature moviegoers can also find it entertaining at the very least even if only for the fact that even when news of depressing economic developments, terrorist attacks, global warming, and the forthcoming season of craziness that cause taxi drivers’ horns to reappear, romance happens among the living and for the most part, the undead. But because I’m the type who misses an entire movie for one frame, here be the notes. I will take time to enjoy the film when I watch it again because I missed a couple of key scenes.

• Pacing is too fast. There is not enough time to establish story lines, sub-plots and characters. Could it be that because the target audience for this film are teens and tweens whose attention spans are too short that the filmmakers had to make sure the plot moved at a hundred miles per minute?
• Bella is pale, but Edward and his clan is pale in an obviously “I am wearing ten layers of cake foundation” way. And why in the world is Edward wearing much, much redder and thicker lipstick than Bella? I’m predicting a jump in glutathione sales because of this movie. Met should have made an advertising tie-up with Twilight distributors.
• Edward is handsome, but is less than what readers had in mind. However, Rob Pattinson’s screen presence made up for what fangirls had initially hated him for.

More at iamkarla.com.

Oh how I survived! I didn’t realize it has been a year. Yay!

Dark Sonnet
Neil Gaiman

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such
although I liked a few folk pretty well
Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch
for brave men died and empires rose and fell
for love, girls follow boys to foreign lands
and men have followed women into hell
In plays and poems someone understands
there’s something makes us more than blood and bone
And more than biological demands
for me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown
I see the trees are bending where it’s been
I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown
I really don’t know what I love you means
I think it means don’t leave me here alone

Photo by Silly Woman {little bug}

“Beyond contact centers, the Philippines is also making waves in IT, particularly software development. In recent years, the tech sector has embraced a more robust IT consulting, which includes implementation, deployment, and administration of IT systems.

“Analysts project that the total size of the Philippines’ ICT sector will increase from US$1.2 billion in 2005 to US$2.3 billion by the end of the decade. The Philippine government recently unveiled a five-year program, which it hopes to generate up to US$12.8 billion, from the combined contact center and IT services sectors. Out of the projected worth, it is not known how much software development will contribute. But with satellite development centers for leading technology firms opening on these shores, it is safe to say that the application development outsourcing industry is on a growth path.” More at Ideyatech.

“I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it’s the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.”

–“The archetypal heroine” on Globe and Mail