Sod y’all
I’m only jealous as I wish I was going to The Irish Blog Awards 
Sitting in with the kids is just as good. Honest
I’m only jealous as I wish I was going to The Irish Blog Awards
Sitting in with the kids is just as good. Honest
The messaging/status service I want is somewhere between a blog and the status message in an instant messenger application.
After a quick slap on the head, I’ve finally signed up to Twitter. I’d have preferred Jaiku but like so many Google acquisitions, I have no idea if it’s going to be killed or whether tomorrow we’ll all be using it and wondering how we did without it.
To be honest, there’s a significant amount of navel-gazing when it comes to Twitter. I want to capture my moods as well as my blog posts. I’m also using PocketTweet to update it via iPhone as $BIG_CORP thinks that status messages sent in short bursts is bad for security.
(Seriously, it’s like IBM in the 70s here. They’d really like us all to be wearing shirts and ties)
Any readers out there care to mention people I should be following stalking?
Here’s a lazy moment while I just post some links, all from the BBC, and add pithy commentary.
Netscape dies tonight. On March 1st, AOL Time Warner is killing off support for Netscape which basically means that everyone who is still using Netscape from day to day will probably not notice a thing. Opera should be right in there.
Microsoft is cutting the price of Vista after more or less admitting it’s a performance hog, that they lied about Vista compatibility with low end or older machines in order to make a few sales (for themselves and Intel) and that everyone hates it. There will still be people who will laud it as an improvement. We call them idiots.
It would seem that girls are more skilled than boys in the creation of documents and fewer girls lack confidence with computers. But in my experience, girls are shit in first person shooters. I know I’m going to get completely pwned by female gamers now…
In my experience, this is wrong. Nurses are not usually grubby. Drunken and promiscuous, yes, but not grubby. I am basing this on a sample size of one however so it may not be exactly statistically sound.
That’s enough for now. I’m signing up to Twitter.
Joel Spolsky on lessons learned from the Army applied to Corporate Culture:
After several years of working days, nights, and weekends to build a company, after scrimping and saving and making a desk out of a door and two filing cabinets, business owners often forget that the employees they hired are not co-founders: They’re employees. When you give them a door for a desk or ask them to work on weekends, they’re not going to see it in the same way as you.
This is so obvious when you think about it but it bears repeating. Employees have contracts and they are entitled to keep to them. They’re usually reasonable and won’t mind being called at 6 am for an emergency but they should reasonably expect to be allowed to leave early as a result. This is the difference between employee and founder for sure.
The difference, however, is when you have an employee who wants a slice of the pie. They have to put in the effort that a founder put in. This means going above and beyond the salaried employee. It means working more than the contract, coming in early, leaving late and showing results from it. I busted my balls getting the company running, you can at least make the same effort if you want a percentage of the pie.
As a founder you’re going to have to have a way of measuring this performance because it has to be more than just turning up early and leaving late – especially when there’s people idle during the day because you’re in a support function and everything is working fine. It’s not about how early your bum goes on the seat but the output between those hours.
Does an employee deserve rewards because sales increased by 25%? I don’t think so, that’s them just doing their job and justifying their paycheck. Increasing by 200% and requiring additional staff makes a difference. I’ve had previous employees that worked 3 hours out of 7, pissed about on MSN for the rest, griped if their music wasn’t playing through the Airport Express, took extensive smoke breaks and turned what was previously a 2 day job into a full week of work with no return. This sense of entitlement is why they never went anywhere in the company. Anywhere other than out.
Some people will never be ready for founder culture however. I think that they’ll know who they are. They’ll always expect more (pay, time off, free stuff, dancing girls) and you’ll never be able to make them wholly happy.
That the “roadmap” to be announced for the iPhone software will not, as previously thought, include the release of said SDK just yet but may include the release of some third party software whivch has been in development for some time.
Of course, the responses were typical.
What a tease. It just seems like Apple can’t get anything fine anymore. There getting more and more like Microsoft.
well that sucks
what’s going on over there in cupertino?
What you know for sure is that neither of these retards is actually a developer. A developer doesn’t really want to wait but at the same time they don’t really want a beta SDK.
From the same page.
The comments above typify the reaction by those who have literally no idea just how much work goes into developing such an initiative. Apple is taking baby steps here, and an SDK allowing third party development is a massive undertaking if you want to have an element of control over the process, and the beautiful integration people have come to expect, overall, from Apple products.
Indeed.