Firefox 1.0.1 is official

Download here.

Danger: Quicksand manifesto

I wrote a few weeks ago about David St. Lawrence's forthcoming book, but you can now download a manifesto version at ChangeThis.  You can still download the full book in PDF from this post on David's blog.

Technorati tags: quicksand, corporate employment

Firefox easter egg

Enter the following into your address area in Firefox:

about:mozilla

Courtesy of this post on Raman's Blog.

Technorati tag: firefox

Firefox 1.0.1 Beta

Be daring and download it here for Windows and OSX -- it's supposed to run faster than the 1.0 official release.

Technorati tags: firefox

HOB.com RSS calendar feeds

I noticed that the House of Blues website has added RSS feeds for their event calendars to their various regions and venues.  For example, here is the feed for events at the Las Vegas club.  Pretty cool way to get upcoming event information.

Believe in your prooduct

Then show everyone else you believe in it too . . .

Picture via this link on Boing Boing.  Initial reports when I saw this yesterday on 37 Signals were that the whole display was filled with real money; according to an update on the Boing Boing post, the tops of the visible stacks of bills are real, but the money underneath is fake.  Regardless, there's still a fair amount of money in the display and it's an extremely innovative way to "put your money where your mouth is" (so to speak) with your product.  As a side note, the Boing Boing post reports that the display is under video surveillance by the advertising company that is conveniently located directly across the street.

New iPods, new prices

Picture from this post on Engadget.

Annoyed with text messaging from your computer?

If you need to send text messages to people's phones from your computer and don't want to have to remember much beyond their phone number, you should check out Teleflip.  Teleflip works like this:

• Open an e-mail client.
• Put the address as <10 digit phone number>@teleflip.com.
• Type your message.
• Press send.

There's no charge for the Teleflip service and the site claims that it works pretty much everywhere in North America, regardless of the cell phone carrier.  Note that text messaging charges can apply to the people that receive the message, text messaging must be active on the phone your are sending to for people to receive a message, and there is a character limit as the message comes through as a SMS.

Congested while flying tip

If you find yourself to have any sort of head or sinus congestion and need to fly, I highly reccommend Sudafed Non-Drying Sinus.  Here's my little secret for flying with congestion:

• Do not blow your nose prior to the flight -- spit up any mucus.
• Take 1 Sudafed Non-Drying Sinus 2-3 hours prior to the flight.
• Get yourself a pack of gum and keep it in your pocket or carry-on for the flight.
• Take 1 Sudafed Non-Drying Sinus when they start boarding.
• Start chewing a piece of gum before they close the doors so that your jaw is moving during pressurization -- you will want to do the same when the captain announces that they have started the descent.
• For flights longer than 4 hours, take another 1-2 Sudafed Non-Drying pills at the 3-4 hour mark.
• Drink lots of water during the flight.

Note that I used to take regular Sudafed, but the regular stuff can dry out your nasal passages and sinuses and potentially cause infection.  I have found the Sudafed can cause dehydration, so it is important that you keep yourself well hydrated.  Further note that I am not a doctor and you should check with your physician before starting the use of any drugs; just because it works for me doesn't mean that it will work for you.  Additionally, I have heard of people that have used regular Sudafed in a similar manner and still wound up with a ruptured eardrum, so be very careful.

I am certainly not advocating that you fly when congested, only offering a potential solution if you find yourself in a situation where you have no choice.  Chances are that, after using this trick, your ears will become clogged for a day or two after the flight and it is best to let them clear on their own rather than forcing them to clear once you are at a stable altitude.

MythTV

Someone sent me this in response to one of my TiVo rants -- check out MythTV.

Tech bits

Network magic can help you easily create a home network; looks pretty cool if you want to easily configure a home network without much technical knowledge (basically adds a network management layer that, no surprise here, will have add-on applications in the future) | via this post on Engadget

More stupidity from TiVo -- the Series 2 players will now support 802.11g USB adapters, but you can't use any of the extra speed.  Keep your eye on the CompUSA mail-in rebates, get a 802.11b for free, and don't bother with the "g".  For that matter, just ditch the TiVo. | via this post on Engadget

DVI vs. HDMI vs. component video -- all I know is that both of my plasmas are running component, and while both have HDMI and there's currently nothing plugged into that port | via this post on Engadget

Motorola is going to start creating a line of "Skype Ready" products.  No big surprise here and no mention of an exclusive deal -- I expect to see a lot more Skype Ready products from many more manufacturers in the future | via this post on Engadget

The Motorola iTunes phone (named "ROKR") will only be allowed to load a limited number of tracks to ensure that it does not bite to hard into Apple's iPod hardware sales.  No definite track number limit or storage capacity maximum at this point.  I'm sure that no one will be try to develop a hack for this | via this post on Engadget

Codename RAZRberry -- apparently Motorola is already working on a RAZR form-factor MPx.  Since they haven't yet released the MPx, maybe they'll just skip releasing it in the states and go straight to the RAZRberry or maybe they'll release the MPx and then release the RAZRberry 6 months later or maybe it's all a big lie.  Hard to tell, but everyone's been waiting for the MPx for longer than a year and we still haven't seen the thing in the US | via this post on Engadget

DRM pissing contest: iTunes vs. Napster.  Apparently Steve Jobs fired off an e-mail to record company execs, including instructions that allow you to work around the Napster subscription service.  Not to be outdone, the Napster CEO fired off a web link to the same group of record company execs that had software to strip the FairPlay DRM off iTunes songs.  As it says in the post:  This ignores the fact that in order to download 1000 songs from iTunes you would need to spend roughly $1000 whereas with Napster you just need time, a whole lot of precious time, to do it right. | via this post on TUAW

Got a PowerBook G4 already?  Don't want to buy a new one?  Download iScroll, which enables the same trackpad scrolling functionality that the new powerbooks have | via this post on jluster.org

Hack your Senseo coffee maker and make it so that you can use any coffee pods | via this post on Boing Boing

Try this when you are exhausted

I got this advice from someone I greatly respect and it works extremely well if you are tired and just need a little bit of sleep to keep going:

• Sit in a chair at a table.
• Clasp a quarter (other coins will work) in between the thumb and forefinger of your right hand (your left hand will work as well).
• Place the quarter edge onto a plate or saucer (basically on to any surface that will make a sharp noise when the quarter hits it).
• Close your eyes.
• The sound of the quarter falling when your fingers release it will wake you up and you will feel refreshed.

More MBA comments

Following on to my post a few weeks ago regarding MBAs, I found a lot of interesting information on this post at Heather's Marketing at Microsoft Blog.  Heather being a recruiter for Microsoft, I was very interested to read the following:

When I think of the value of the MBA to a potential job seeker, I think of 2 things:

1) the skills you learn in the program that may prepare you for the type of work you would like to do

2) the fact that the MBA (especially from a really solid programs) differentiates you from the masses of other folks that could be applying for the job

That's interesting.  In my previous post, I had figured that a MBA did the following for me:

• It gets the 3 letters on my resume that may be the difference between my resume going in a trash can or getting into the second round.
• If I go to a local university, it gets me more contacts than I have now.
• If I try to get into a top ten, it gives me the ability to apply to jobs that require a top ten degree and gets me a significantly more diverse group of contacts.

Then I received a comment asking whether or not I actually expected to learn anything, which was a great question and feeds into Heather's explanation of #1 above:

With #1, I definitely feel that there are opportunities for people to gain the same skills outside of an MBA program, through equivalent work experience. Typically, the latter is less theoretical, more practical (and of course, MBAs go on to jobs where they use their educations in practice as well). So for positions that require these specific skills, hiring managers should be willing to hire folks with or without an MBA; really focusing on the skills themselves, regardless of where they came from.

I would tend to agree with what Heather says about #1; the problem that I have is that so many jobs require a MBA in the "requirements" section.  With so many companies using automated resume readers and knocking out candidates because they don't have those magic 3 letters, it's hard to get in front of someone to show that you are qualified (more qualified?) because of experience.  If there are automated resume scanners that have some sort of fuzzy logic to calculate the worth of experience vs. the 3 letters, I've never heard of them.

For point #2 above, Heather says:

. . . there's a prestige factor associated with some schools and with the fact that you were disciplined enough to get through the program. I totally get that. And we absolutely value MBAs, just not to the exclusion of valuable work experience.

We all value brand names and MBA schools are no exception; this feeds directly into my third bullet above.

Encouragingly, Heather says this about Microsoft:

. . . I rarely think of a good recruiter searching on a specific skill-set and ruling out people who have it just because they don't have MBAs (because of the equivalent work experience thing). Many MBAs do end up with backgrounds that we typically recruit so the MBA alumni associations are a good channel for us...but the MBA itself is rarely an absolute requirement. We really look at the work experience first.

Heather suggests that when evaluating different programs, you take the Tom Peters method of valuating the "wow" impact on your resume  -- good advice.

2 great shows worth watching

1. iDesign on Fine Living explores the design of products from names like Nike, Herman Miller, and Gillette.  The last episode that I watched featured Breguet watches (you've probably never heard of them, but they produce outstanding, handmade watches; Breguet also invented the tourbillon, which counters the effects of gravity on an automatic watch and the construction of which is considered the greatest test for a watchmaker).
2. Born American on Fine Living showcases successful products that are "made in America."

E-mail productivity tips

From this post on 43 Folders:

• Shut off auto-check.  Set the system to check for messages over a longer period of time or manually check for messages.
• Pick off easy ones.  Try to respond in 2 lines or less and 30 seconds or less.
• Write less.  Brevity is king, but do not forget to be polite.
• Cheat.  See the post for more information.
• Be honest.  If you are not going to respond to an e-mail, hide it from yourself.

Here's some Blackberry advice from me:

• Disable your e-mail notification.  Turn off the tone, vibration, etc. and only look at the device when you actually have the time to respond to an e-mail.
• Follow the tips above.  Using a Blackberry should make you want to be brief and to the point.
• Turn off the signature that says the message was sent from a Blackberry.  It is not in your best interest for everyone to know that you have a Blackberry; simply copy over your Outlook signature into the Blackberry redirector.  If you want to be even more sneaky, change your Outlook settings so that all the messages you send from your computer are plain text rather than rich text or HTML.
• If you can access your e-mail via IMAP or POP, consider ditching your Blackberry.  Why?  Because IMAP and POP are both pull methods of retrieving mail, rather than push, meaning you can set that software to only pull at defined intervals.

One more piece of advice on e-mail:

• Never discuss in an e-mail what can be easily accomplished via IM.  If you are on IM and the person you want to communicate with is on IM, use IM.

Self-awareness

I try to be aware of myself and my surroundings; lots of other people do not.  A few cases in point:

• A person our group of people will always get as close to an exit (top of stairs, bottom of stairs, top of escalator, bottom of escalator, etc.) and stop.
• People that rush on to an elevator when it arrives at a floor without waiting for people that are on it to get off.
• People that walk next to each other on a sidewalk, causing other people to have to step out of their way.
• People that hold things in their hands (i.e., skis, umbrellas, etc.) and spin around with them while conversing in a crowd.
• People that stop in the middle of a moving crowd to stick their finger in the air and point at things.

I am not saying that I never do any of the things listed above, but I try really hard not to; it's simply a matter of respect for other people and being aware of what I am doing.

Blackberry PIN-to-PIN FYI

According to this post on Canadian Headhunter, PIN-to-PIN Blackberry messages that are sent between Blackberries that are on your company's Blackberry Enterprise Server can be captured and archived by your company.  Not that this is surprising: if the company provides you with the server solution, they will monitor the communications over that solution.

The post suggests getting your own Blackberry through your own ISP that's linked to your private e-mail account.  While this is an ok solution, if you are going to do that, I would suggest going with a Treo 650 or other phone that is more elegantly designed than the Blackberry device because there's really no need for the Blackberry if you aren't using a BES solution.  Here's an even more novel idea: don't send messages via company communications that can get you fired.

Colorado = VOIP tax free

I was excited when I saw this post on Om Malik's blog -- Colorado voted not to tax VOIP.  I live in Colorado and I use Vonage, so I'll appreciate the savings.

Fake blogs wiki

I saw on this post at Cutting Through that they have set up this wiki to track all of the fake blogs floating around out there.  Check it out and be sure to add any intel that you have.

Are you a Dirk Pitt fan?

I am.  I don't know if I am necessarily looking forward to the Sahara movie, but the movie did spawn one thing that is really cool: the orange-face Doxa dive watch that Clive Cussler talks about in every Dirk Pitt book.

You can find the watch right here on the Doxa site and it is a full reproduction of the original 1966 model of the watch.  Actually, you can order the reproduction direct from Doxa and save 30% off of the projected retail price ($1,249.00 from Doxa direct plus shipping, which is actually a pretty good price for an automatic Swiss watch with a good depth rating).  Note that Doxa is doing a limited production run of only 3,000 pieces.

Are you a Dirk Pitt fan?

I am.  I don't know if I am necessarily looking forward to the Sahara movie, but the movie did spawn one thing that is really cool: the orange-face Doxa dive watch that Clive Cussler talks about in every Dirk Pitt book.

You can find the watch right here on the Doxa site and it is a full reproduction of the original 1966 model of the watch.  Actually, you can order the reproduction direct from Doxa and save 30% off of the projected retail price ($1,249.00 from Doxa direct plus shipping, which is actually a pretty good price for an automatic Swiss watch with a good depth rating).  Note that Doxa is doing a limited production run of only 3,000 pieces.

NanoChromics

Imagine a display that looks like words printed on paper and can stay in place for weeks with little to no power draw.  As evidenced by the name, the NanoChormics accomplishes this through the use of some sort of nanotechnology.  Check out this post on Engadget for more info and pictures.

Getting rid of passwords

This post over at Slashdot references some items written by Robert Hensing of the Microsoft PSS Security team.  According to the post, Hensing suggest "passphrases" -- sentences and quotes that are easy to remember, but exceed 30-40 characters in length.

It's certainly an interesting idea considering how companies require employees to frequently change passwords.  If your company requires you to frequently change your password and not use any of the 10 passwords previously used, do you just modify your password each time with a letter or number rather than coming up with a new one?  If you don't do that, I bet your password is written down somewhere in your office.

I'm certainly not a hacker, but I wonder how long it would take to brute-force a password in excess of 30-40 characters.

Product not to check out

Please do not visit http://www.klogger.com (that's right, you can't link through to it from here, you have to copy and paste it into your browser, meaning that it makes it not worth your time) -- they have been continuously comment-spamming my blog and it's pissing me off. 

For the Klogger folks -- I can shut my comments off at any time, so don't increase the volume of span simply because of this post.  Also, had you sent me a note about trying out your product and writing about it, I probably would have; now I won't.

XP Tweaks

Tweak away with this guide that I found via this post The Tablet PCs Weblog.

Submit your blog

This post on A Little Joy for Today has a link for 55 places your can submit your blog/RSS feed to.

Crackberry for your Treo 650?

Looks like it's coming soon according to this post on Gizmodo.  Apparently there is a "final beta" of the software floating around, which is really no big surprise considering many companies have invested lots of money in Blackberry server hardware and software.

Business deifned

Got this from this post on Bus1ness Th0ughts:

Business is simple.  Management's job is to take care of employees.  The employees' job is to take care of the customers.  Happy customers take care of the shareholders.  It's a virtuous circle.

It's from John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods.

High-tech chips

According to this post on Slashdot, Steve Wynn's new casino in Vegas will feature chips embedded with RFID to eliminate the possibility of the casino cashing fake chips.  I'm sure that the casino will find no other use for the RFID chips in conjunction with security operations.

Tom Peters Success Tips

All are available online:

Success Tips 1 - 25

Success Tips 26 - 50

Can't beat the price.

Podcast popularity

Look at this graph via this post on Micro Persuasion:

Wow.

iDash

According to this post on Gizmodo there's a group of developers that are working on an open-source front-end AppleScript library for the Mac Mini that will allow you to install the Mini in your dash, put in a touch-screen and be good to go.  Still in the early stages, I'm sure it will develop quickly.

Analogs

Newspaper -> Radio -> TV

Blogs -> Podcasts -> ? "Videocasts"

The price will continue to drop on personal video players, so does that mean that we will soon start seeing "videocasts" that you can subscribe to via RSS?  Probably so.  Grab your Mac and your iSight and go make some visual documentaries; what would be really cool and something to think about would be publishing both the video and audio from the same content as both video- and Podcasts (you'd have to give some though to the fact that people listening would have no visual cues to what you were talking about).  Perhaps a video conferencing add-in to Skype would drastically improve the speed at which this happens -- imagine posting a recording of the company videoconference call on the internal website.

All I know is that we've seen this before as evidenced above.

Camcorder

I may find myself in the market for a camcorder sometime soon.  This post on Engadget detailed some information on the JVC GZ-MC200.  I certainly like the form factor, the storage capacity, and the fact that it can record so much HD content.

Certainly I am open to suggestions on camcorders if any wants to share -- I'd like to keep the form factor similar to the JVC listed above.

White Paper on Word of Mouth Marketing

You can find it here at this post on the CorporateBlogging Blog.  Certainly worth downloading and reading.

Get rid of the annoying Windows crash message

Although I've done this myself, I found a very succinct way to disable the silly error reporting dialog boxes at this post on Jeremy Wagstaff's Loose Wire.  From the post:

• Open System in the Control Panel (or right-click on the My Computer icon and select Properties.
• Choose the Advanced tab, and click Error Reporting.
• You can disable error reporting entirely here, or enable it selectively for certain programs. Click Ok when you're done.

This is an easy change that does not involve having to edit the registry or any of the other silly things that I sometimes post about.

Google Maps

Does what it sounds like it does and can be found here.  Also provides directions -- look out Mapquest.

Firefox security alert and fix

I'm a big Firefox user and I know a lot of you are too, so I wanted to share this post on O'DonnellWeb that details a Firefox security vulnerability and how to fix it.  Note that this fix is very easy, but you are screwing around with configuration settings of the browser, so be careful.  From the post:

This is scary, Firefox is vulnerable to a specific type of phishing attack. See demo at http://www.shmoo.com/idn/

Here is the fix.

1) Goto your Firefox address bar. Enter about:config and press enter. Firefox will load the (large!) config page.

2) Scroll down to the line beginning network.enableIDN -- this is International Domain Name support, and it is causing the problem here. We want to turn this off -- for now. Ideally we want to support international domain names, but not with this problem.

3) Double-click the network.enableIDN label, and Firefox will show a dialog set to 'true'. Change it to 'false' (no quotes!), click Ok. You are done.

4) Go check out the shmoo demo again and notice it no longer works

Do you work with smart people?

Then it's important to know how to manage them.  Read this manifesto by Scott Berkam, a man who spent 9 years at Microsoft managing smart people.

Craigslist

I love Craigslist (don't misspell it in your browser, though); I've purchased a bunch of stuff from people that have listed items there and have yet to have a major problem.  With all that said, I was very excited to see that this month's ChangeThis had a manifesto by Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist that explains "Why Craigslist Works." 

iPod Shuffle RAID

Lots of posts on lots of blogs about the guy that used a USB hub, 4 iPod shuffles, and the RAID software in OS X to create an iPod Shuffle RAID (i found the first note of this at this post on Boing Boing).  The full instructions can be found here.

While this is kind of cool in a novelty way, the more important thing to consider is that you could do this with 4 big USB 2.0 hard disk drives.  Imagine 4 200GB+ USB 2.0 drives cobbled together with the RAID software -- I think you could get out of this kind of configuration with a $40 USB hub and 4 $120 USB drives, so about $520 (I guess I'm assuming that you already have a Mac running OS X). 

It makes me think about wanting to set something like this up to ensure that all my MP3s are backed up.  Then I think about why this couldn't be achieved with some sort of firewire hub.  Then I wonder if the drives are technically hot-swappable.

Map your blog

Here's my blog geocoded to the nearest city and you can do the same with yours (if you want) by clicking this link.  Note that for Blogger users, you will want to input your URL like this:

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bloglines to be purchased by Ask Jeeves

Napsterization is reporting in this post that Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines; Bloglines being the RSS aggregator that I primarily use because it allows me to access everything on the web regardless of platform.

Russell Beattie has this to say in his post on this topic:

Dear Jeeves:

I heard you're buying Bloglines, that's pretty neat. But please remember how important this service is to a lot of people out there. I spend more time on Bloglines than I have on any other web site *ever*.

I use it day and night, at home and at the office, on my Mac and on my PC, on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I refresh like a crack monkey looking for the next hit. I use it for my news, I use it to look for houses, I've used it to look for jobs, I use it to hear PodCasts, I use it for my favorites page, and I use it to keep track of what people are saying about my weblog (which it does quickly and efficiently). I use it constantly and incessantly and if it went away or was changed drastically, I would be very unhappy.

In other words, please don't fuck it up.

Thank you

I concur: please do not fuck with or generally fuck up the Bloglines service.  I realize that it's free, but I will stop using it in a heartbeat if you make it less useful or even a little bit annoying to use.

 

Patching your VOIP box into your home phone wiring

I found this really useful post on MediaBlab that has complete instructions and pictures for wiring your Vonage service into your home wiring (complete with pictures and a supply list) via this post on Gizmodo.

Napster vs. iPod graphic

The first place I found this today when I was going through my RSS feeds was at this post on Gizmodo, so they get the link love.

They forgot the part of the equation that show where the music on your Napster-to-go device expires if you don't keep paying for it.  If you actually wanted to own the music on your Napster-to-go device, it would probably also cost around $10K.

MPx220 ROM silliness ends

Motorola has finally released the MPx220 ROM update so that consumers can update their phone themselves according to this post on msmobiles.  This is certainly better than having to return your phone to Best Buy or do an exchange with Cingular Exchange by Mail.  Here's the official Motorola link for the update, but be sure to read the msmobiles post because they've got lots of detailed information for a successful upgrade.  Note that this upgrade only works on the North American MPx220.

MP3Tunes

According to this post on Om Malik on Broadband, Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com is starting a new service called MP3Tunes.  Although there's not much up on the site yet, Malik says that Robertson's site will be selling DRM-free MP3 music for $0.88 a track and is working on a service that will allow you to stream music from your computer to home stereo system.

Hopefully Robertson is trying to ressurect something similar to the MP3.com service where you used to be able to pop in your CDs and access your virtual library from anywhere with an internet connection.  Although that service was found to be in violation of copyright laws, the service was very cool and was totally hardware independent.

Dropkick the Faint

Best album promotion ever can be found here.  A few tips:

• There's no panic button for work.
• Manipulate the speed.
• Jump early.
• Only hit the spacebar once to start running and once to dropkick.
• In the upper right corner is a virtual CD control -- listen to it while playing.

Found this on this post at Screenhead.

TV show downloads

Like this wasn't inevitable.  According to this post on Gizmodo, CinemaNow has negotiated with most of the major television networks (Paramount/Viacom being the main holdout) to provide per-episode downloads (maybe even before they are available on DVD).

This service would be way cooler if you could buy the episode without commercials right after it aired.

Gmail going live in a soft way?

I don't know, but if you don't have an account, send me an e-mail because they suddenly bumped up my number of invites to 50.

Amazon.com Prime

Here it is: $79 for 1 year of unlimited 2-day shipping.  I'll have to check my shipping history, but it seems like I should sign up for this based on what I remember paying.  Also, it's great that I can share it with 4 other family members (I'll have to look up their shipping history too).

Where do great ideas come from?

More importantly, how do you stack up?  Take a look at this post on David Pollard's Business Innovation.

Cartoons

Yes, that's right: cartoons!  My favorite is/was Family Guy, so I was excited to see this video of a reading for Family Guy 2005 that premieres May 1 on Fox.  Oh, and check out the official Family Guy site on Fox, it has a RSS feed -- can your cartoon do this?

Oh, and American Dad starts Saturday, so hopefully it can hold up to the high standards set by Family Guy (note that this site also has a RSS feed).

Job Reality

Seth Godin has two posts (one and two) about the current state of the job market.  From his first post:

1. The traditional way to get a job is to send a boring resume in response to as many posted jobs as you can afford. Your resume will be scanned, culled and if it doesn't stand out too much, a person might look at it.

Then you go for a job interview and try to be coglike in your malleability and desire to fit in. If random acts are working in your favor, you get the job.

2. Then, the big Fortune 1000 company that hired you complains that all their people act like cogs, don't care enough, aren't creative in solving problems and don't push the status quo.

3. Then, the big Fortune 1000 company realizes that as long as they've got interchangeable cogs, they ought to just move jobs offshore, cause that's cheaper

or

3.a. The company doesn't do that, succumbs to Wall Street pressure and either cheats (and gets caught and tanks) or doesn't cheat (and gets bought or folded and tanks).

Even worse in this process is that many big companies will not let employees give recommendations to anyone anymore; you can verify length of employment, dates of employment, and whether the employee is eligible for rehire.  Any other comments that you make could potentially open the company up to litigation.  So it's best to build a network of people that are willing to provide glowing endorsements without fear of litigation.

Seth continues:

It turns out that 100% of all job growth is now coming from small (under 500 person) companies. In fact, the big companies are shedding jobs, not adding them.

Also true: more likely than not, the best jobs, the most interesting jobs and the most secure jobs happen in small organizations.

Do you remember the vibe and feel and energy of the startups in the 90s?  Where everyone had an Aeron chair?  Where every minute of work that was done was directly contributing to the value of the company and therefore to the value of the stock or options?  People had a lot of fun at those jobs and made a lot of money.  The jobs weren't necessarily the most secure, but a lot of those people are still working in jobs at small companies that we have not yet heard of; still having fun, still doing interesting things.

In the second post, Seth asks and answers:

. . . what's wrong with the current system?

In my experience, little companies are rarely so organized that they know just what slot to fill, what to call that slot and who to hire for that slot. In all the fast-growing companies I've encountered, a new job is just that... new. More often than not, companies bump into someone cool and find a job for them. Or, even more likely, they see someone really cool at ANOTHER company, wish they had that person and invent a job that they hope someone like that will fill.

So what is the new medium for finding really skilled, genuinely intelligent, enthusiastic people?  I don't think that the traditional resume really fits the bill.  Maybe you evaluate people based on their blog -- look at what interests them, look what they write about, read their opinions.  Job titles in resumes can be nebulous and it's hard to document everything that you do in a position, especially if you are "following the rules" and keeping your resume to 1 or 2 pages.

Maybe we stop following the rules.  Maybe we need to start publishing our resumes as Flash animations.  Maybe we need to write songs about ourselves.  Maybe we should present ourselves in the setting of a fable.  Maybe we stop using bullet points and just tell our stories.

Of course all of the above is predicated on the small companies hiring "talent acquisition" people rather than "HR" people.  Part of the change has to occur on the company side.  Because if we are forced to look like cogs to get in, why would you expect us to act any differently?

Danger Quicksand

David St. Lawrence, author of Ripples has posted a link to a free pre-press version of his book Danger Quicksand: An Unconventional Guide to Surviving Corporate Employment; you can access the download through this post on his blog.

I've briefly browsed through the book and it looks like a great read (and you can't beat the price).

thepodcastnetwork.com

Check it out:

http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com

Check out the blog of one of the creators.  Happy podcasting.

Evacuating Connecticut

I saw this on my local news yesterday, but you can read about it in this article on Newsday: apparently there was an accidental activation of the emergency broadcast system yesterday that called for an evacuation of the state of Connecticut.  Apparently a worker "entered the wrong code" into the system.

It worries me less that it happened and more that there is actually a code in the system that calls for the evacuation of an entire state.  I would think that a evacuation of the state code might bring up some sort of "Are you sure?" warning.  Guess not.

Treo 650 for Cingular

Just got the e-mail today:

Preo-order
http://web.palmone.com/products/smartphones/treo650/index.jhtml?cid=ace_cing_order

Upgrade:
http://web.palmone.com/promos/treo650_bluetooth.jhtml?cid=ace_cing_order

Considering a MBA?

Consider this post on Management Issues that states:

Having an MBA boosts your average salary by 18 per cent upon graduation and more than 50 per cent thereafter. But the premium placed on the qualification has fallen sharply.

So here's my question: If you are young, working, and making a good salary, what exactly does a MBA do for you?  I've figured out the following:

• It gets the 3 letters on my resume that may be the difference between my resume going in a trash can or getting into the second round.
• If I go to a local university, it gets me more contacts than I have now.
• If I try to get into a top ten, it gives me the ability to apply to jobs that require a top ten degree and gets me a significantly more diverse group of contacts.

Then the question is whether or not I can afford to not work for 1-2 years to go to school full-time, or if I enroll in an executive MBA, I can continue to work and earn a salary, but have little to no free time and restrictions on how much I travel.

Anyone want to weigh in?

Is Windows Media 10 DRM cracked?

It wouldn't really surprise me.  Check out more at this post on Engadget.

Serious protection

Check out this article on Business 2.0 about the Lincoln Bulletproof Sedan (BPS).  Basically the car costs around $150,000, can stop a big rifle bullet, and if you need one of these, I don't want to be your friend.