26 Mar 2007
Honestly, I really don’t care about new cell phones. I’m the guy walking down the street with the 4 year old dual color Samsung (yes, that’s blue backlit and black text, no graphics here). It’s a tad scratched but it works.
All that being said, Telus Mobility did call me the other day and try to get me to buy a new phone. They offered $150 discount and I (supposedly) wouldn’t even have to lock myself in to a plan. The trouble is… all their phones are boring. I can’t think of a single compelling reason to upgrade. It’s not just Telus either, every phone I’ve seen in Canada is boring.
Maybe if they had the new Helio phone?
Too bad it’s not (and won’t be?) available in Canada.
24 Mar 2007
Interesting article from the Wharton School of Business about company perks.
The article was interesting more of the same w/ regards to the perks provided by companies like Google.
I’ll draw attention to discussion of Integrators *and *Segmentors.
Perks like Google’s appeal to integrators, people for whom work life and home life have little distinction. These are the employees who like to plug into the wi-fi system on Google’s commuter bus and do work as they ride to and from the office; who check office e-mail frequently at home on nights and weekends; and who like child-care facilities at or near their office so that they can bring a part of home with them to work.
Segmentors, by contrast, like to maintain distinct walls between work and home. These are people made uncomfortable by a workplace filled with perks related to one’s personal life. Even employees with children can dislike the fact that their employer provides on-site childcare.
It’s important to note that an integrator is no better an employee than a segmentor. There’s a time and place for both.
Personally, I’m an integrator.
I’m young and enjoy what I do but there are plenty of times when I wish I could easily separate my home and work lives, it’s difficult. And that’s just me being an employee of a Company that doesn’t provide a lot of perks. A laptop and free pop/dinners (if you’re there late) is about as far as it goes, but I’m happy. I couldn’t imagine being in such a perk-filled environment as Google (or companies like it) provides.
21 Mar 2007
Previously my developer-centric (aggregated) feed of choice came from javablogs.com. However it’s signal to noise ratio has been on a downward spiral as of late. It’s increasingly difficult to find any useful nuggets amongst all the foreign (and graphic/non ascii character posts) and the off-topic ‘this is what my life is like’ posts. I want concise, to the point tech discussions and *java.blogs *isn’t cutting it (I’ve been reading it less frequently the past couple months, perhaps it’s gotten better?).
Enter the DZone.
I’ve been a subscriber for since it’s inception and although it got off to a bit of a rocky start, I’m quite impressed with the quality of the feed now. It’s doesn’t specifically target Java and perhaps it is a bit too focused on ‘framework X vs. framework Y’, but it does generally deliver interesting aggregated content.
Check it out.
According to my Google Reader trends, java.blogs still has far higher daily traffic. ~156 items/day vs. ~29 items/day. In fact, that’s even higher than the digg feed (~103 items/day).
*UPDATE: *As pointed out by Rick in the comments, DZone is a community, not unlike digg, where users submit links and are able to vote on submissions. Higher votes translates to a front page spot. Java blogs is a basic aggregator where it will implicitly pickup all posts from any feed you provide. Thanks Rick and Tim for commenting.