I Voted Today
I voted today at the old folks’ home. I’m glad I prepared last night because it went much quicker and I was more confident in my choices.
Job Search Update
Things are very bursty so far with the job search. One week of nothing. One week of solid activity. One week of nothing. And repeat.
More LinkedIn Useless?
Next, Scoble rang in with a link to the same article as my previous post and added his opinion that he hates LinkedIn.
The thoughts that spring to mind for me (since Scoble didn’t offer many in his post, we’ll talk about mine instead!) are that LinkedIn’s existence and use methods lead to this kind of spamming. I can see sending someone like Scoble, who has an online presence where his email and phone number are publicly available, in a LinkedIn connection request to just try and get in his (imagined) network. It could be quite a coup to get in that network, if it existed. Then again, when you think a bit more along these lines, you can see that if Scoble indeed worked that way and used LinkedIn that way, you would be in a network mostly populated with yahoos like you who don’t know him that well. That’s not an effective way to network at all.
LinkedIn Useless?
I’ve been using LinkedIn since I’ve been out of a job and it’s been a very interesting experience. I’ve found it useful, yet it seems like it should be more useful. I saw an article that talked about wanting to opt out of LinkedIn. I agree completely that LinkedIn benefits a lot from my membership in LinkedIn. They get ad sales from my eyeballs (though the AdBlock extension for Firefox takes care of most of them) and they get to sell my contact information to whoever wants to pay. I haven’t been flooded by link requests like the article’s author. I don’t think I’ve received even a single link request since I’ve been using it for about two months. I have 53 links and it’s going OK. Maybe after I’ve been on it for two years, I’ll think similarly to how the author thinks.
Birth of the iPod
Here’s a great article from Wired News about the birth of the iPod. Very interesting article that is quite short and full of good insights. It’s particularly a good article from a product management perspective. It’s about how they decided to make it and what choices they made that reflect in the “final” design.
I love to hear this quote: “[T]he iPod was truly a team effort.” That’s what I work for.
Google Notifier . . . Good for What?
I just had to post about this. I have had the Google Notifier on my MacBook Pro for about a month now and I’ve always been curious about why no calendar events showed up in it, although my calendar is extremely full. Well, I just figured out the answer. It only checks for events in my personal calendar that’s under my name. It doesn’t check for other calendars that I am subscribed to. This doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I keep no events in my personal calendar. I keep them all in a calendar that I share with my wife for our home. So the Google Notifier’s calendar notification feature is competely useless for me. I guess if I want to be notified about a Sharks game (they all appear in my Google calendar because I’m subscribed to it!) I’m fresh out of luck.
Same goes for the Google SMS calendar notification. If I send it a command to tell me what the next thing on my calendar is, it will faithfully tell me there is nothing in my calendar. Thanks a whole lot. Another feature that is completely useless to me.
More Mac Crash Experience
I just had my MacBook Pro do a spontaneous, unrequested shutdown in the middle of my work. Yikes! 3:20 in the afternoon.
Luckily, it came right back up when I hit the power key. Time to do backups and possibly hit the Apple store!
Finding WiFi Networks
Since getting a laptop and becoming a wanderer without an office, it gets interesting when I want to find a place that has WiFi that I can use. This little gizmo looks pretty interesting for such a use. Anyone have experience with it?
Moving to San Francisco
My family is thinking of moving to San Francisco and we found some very helpful links in our search so far. In San Francisco and in our price range and the types of homes we are looking for, we encountered many Tenancy In Common (TIC) living arrangements. We found some great resources at Andy Sirkin’s website and in a great article on sfgate.com about TICs.
Tool Concert Report
Over the weekend, my wife and I went to the Tool show at the Oakland Arena. It was really amazing. Compositionally, the music was out of this world. The performance was great to be a part of, too. Maynard (the lead singer) is a great performer in so many ways. I respect the guitarist, Adam, for staying still and getting such an amazing sound. The bass player, Justin, was great to watch and played extremely well. The drummer, Danny, won the respect of my wife, who called his performance the best drumming performance she’s ever seen.
The concert was four days ago and it’s still with me. The lyrics to Lateralus touched me like they always do. The song Aenima is a great experience to hear them play because the song and the lyrics are so aggressive, over the top, and unapologetic.
