aqumada

The software industry has been going through a drastic change during the last few years. There was a time where even English majors were jumping on the IT bandwagon [no offense to English majors]. Not anymore…! IT recruiters have become a lot more selective and the number of skill sets they require has been increasing. The success of the American worker has always depended on how well one adapts to the new trends in the economy and perhaps it is time for many to get off this bandwagon and find another path. Although at the moment, IT jobs in the NYC metro area are not scarce (thanks to the strong financial sector), the honeymoon of the nineties is beginning to end. This is mainly due to the booming off shoring phenomena.

Most fortune 500 companies have already off shored some parts of their IT operations to countries like India and they will continue to do so. Not only programmers in the third world countries can do the same work as well as a programmer in the United States; they can do it for a lot cheaper. Countries with reliable telecommunication sector, power sector, and, competitive educational system have been able to leverage this trend to their advantage. Meanwhile countries like Ethiopia are failing to get a piece of the action. Although the current government claims to spend some 10% of its GDP on the development of ITC, Ethiopia has not been able to gain any ground because of certain basic policy related problems. In my opinion the main reason for the failure has been the government's intransigent position on the privatization (semi-privatization) of the Ethiopian Telecommunication Agency (ETC) and the Ethiopian and Electrical Power Corporation (EEPCO). These two corporations have not even been able to keep up with the local demand let alone to offer the 24x7 reliable services the off shoring business requires. Someone who has tried to make a phone call to Ethiopia or try to use an internet service in Ethiopia clearly understands the extent of the problem. Then again, in a nation where the economic policy is centered on the so-called “Agriculture-led industrialization”, I am not sure if improving the efficiency of the two mentioned corporation is a priority. The lack of quality educational institutions [science and language in particular] is also a major hindrance for the growth of the IT sector. India is ripping the benefits of the heavy investment it made on education since decolonization. I do believe, however, given the opportunity there are limited number of highly trained Ethiopians who can do small scale projects and kick start the growth of the IT sector in Ethiopia..

As for those of us who live in the states, it is time to jump to a different sector or acquire the necessary application knowledge that are difficult to dispose as the IT part of the business is being shipped to some distant land. Our jobs may not stay around in the present form.

By Wegesha

How great it is to finally put a face to a fairytale-like character. No wonder why he was so quick-witted. It probably turned out to be his best defense against a barrage of belittlement (No pun intended. Yeah, right!). Anyway, this picture is from a book I recently acquired:

By Wegesha

Blog de kolotemari got a request sometime last week to post a classic POEM by Mengistu Lema. We found it very hard to put aside our big egos as self proclaimed poets and give way to a literary giant until we picked up our bible.  The Kolo Bible (its first edition came out shortly after the King James Bible) has only two commandments:

1)Better late than never

2)Thou shall give respect when respect is due

Normally, given the slightest leeway, we would first bore you to death with biographical information before giving away the poem. We found no need to do this in Mengistu’s case because his autobiography has been published. He started writing it while he was a student in London and for some unknown reason he stopped writing it after his death (our blog is investigating this strange phenomenon). As the quintessential Mengistu, he wrote it to be a fast read, entertaining, funny and informative. We highly recommend it. Below is the title of the book.

By Wegesha

Guarantees are rare to come by. Taxes are guaranteed in life. So is academic boredom, if you remain a student long enough. To me nothing was more painful and boring than the excruciatingly long laboratory hours I had to endure in college and thereafter. While a wegesha apprentice few things made the 4 hour long cadaver labs bearable, least of which was not the location of the lab on the 12^th floor of a Manhattan building overlooking central park. Once in a blue moon, however, while dissecting through the minutiae of anatomical information and preserved flesh sheltering the tiniest of nerves, I used to come across some of the most intriguing facts. Here is one that made me question the basic foundation of my sexual understanding.  During one of those seemingly never ending lab sessions, sharp blade in hand revealing the hidden beauties of the female pelvis anatomy, I read this line on the book I had laid on the torso of the cadaver:

“The vagina is about 7 to 8cm long. The vagina also traverses the urogenital diaphragm.”

If you haven’t forgotten how to convert from centimeters to inches, the above statement is telling you the vagina is only 2.8 to 3 inches long. I know it is capable of stretching but that mostly happens circumferentially because length wise it is limited by the cervix (the door to the womb). The fancy term, urogenital diaphragm, is the name for the muscle women squeeze to stop the stream of urine in the middle of peeing. Enough said.  

By the way, my penile enlargement operation has been put off indefinitely until I come across something to refute the above statement which is found in the Twelfth Edition of

Grant’s Dissector

By Eberhardt K. Sauerland

1999 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Page 109

Second column, third line

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Wegesha

By Wegesha        

            Lie or no lie, I’m still destined to go to hell. It’s a disgrace to note the number of Luciferian temptations I had avoided and yet succumb to his famous premarital-sex bait. As they say “misery loves company” and I am elated to be in the company of such a great person as you. It’s too late to start your penance now. Just hope you get stuck next to me in purgatory. Like the once infamous president I will defend myself (and possibly you) on the grounds of semantics questioning what “sex” really entails.

            What sex entails to each gender is quite different. Hoping women will speak on their own behalf I will venture off to the guys’ take on sex which is seldom about the intercourse and a lot about the conquest and the right to brag; neither of which we do well.  

            Our miserable failure at conquest is self evident at every bar, night club or any other venue that customarily provides ample opportunity for a hook-up.  A friend once gave me a baseball analogy that should suffice here. He said “no matter how poor your batting average is, after 200 tries, you are bound to hit a home run” and so we move on, sheepishly from strike one to strike two and to the next strikeout until we finally come across the one chick who is not automatically turned off by our lame opening line of “Enante bet laam alech?”

            The bragging, on the other hand is more boisterous and menacingly irritating to women. The feminists will always be quick to respond by putting you down while the others (women not yet indoctrinated) will take it with a smirk and leave it at that. There is no limit to the different versions of the same joke you will hear. “Oh, you will understand my problem if you only had a third leg to deal with like mine” says one as he takes the entire space that would seat two at a crowded table. “You know how I make mine 12 inches long?” asks another without giving anyone a chance to answer his question. “I fold it in half.” These bravados are endless albeit benign.

            The more insidious ones are those that lead innocent folks (myself included during the pimple-harvesting teenage years) astray, rob them of their confidence and expose them to a world of shame they will harbor until they see the light. How naïve must I have been? And more importantly, who would have guessed one would need a good understanding of physiology to brag without making a fool of oneself?

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Here is the response I received from one of the "qonjits":-)