Work - Life balance in a connected world

A friend of mine posts a blog entry the other day about work-life balance and it got me thinking. These days, competition is fierce, the Fortune 500 companies are locking down their employees as if they own them. State and Federal governments are even worse! This really breeds a workforce that is pretty separated from their employer. We are pretty much locked into a 9 to 5 world when we are living in a 24-7 world. Not the best for morale, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and motivation.
With me being a geek's geek, I have the answer. A 24-7 job. Now stay with me here, this is where it gets complicated. We all have the tools to go mobile; laptops, iPhones, Blackberrys, Windows Mobile smartphones. Some of us even have other tools that are pretty cool; cellular "network" cards for the laptops, cool bluetooth accessories that help us out, GPS units, multi-mode phones that also connect to Wi-Fi hotspots. Now taking all this into account, you are virtually connected anywhere and anytime, right? Why would your average CEO not leverage this technology to allow their workers to work from anywhere?
Let's think this scenario all the way through. We have Average Worker X. Let's make it complicated and let's say he's an IT worker. I'm going to use the IT worker example since there aren't that many roadblocks to encounter when your function exists in marketing, sales, accounting, or a few other places. Manufacturing would be an exception to this idea. If you give the worker the tools to connect from anywhere, you might not get all the "face time" that we are all accustomed to, but in turn you have a worker that is more willing to devote time and effort into their workday because they are allowed to have the day to day distractions of chatting with friends, attending other things that are part of their personal life, and the general satisfaction of that if something comes up, they aren't "chained" to their desk. This means you're not working the traditional 9 to 5. You're working 24-7. You have a better ROI on your employees since they are more willing to stay with your company. You have less costs in searching for new talent and you have the tools to retain your top talent. Is this not a win-win for everyone?

Web 2.0 Mobile

I've always been a geek. I'm geekier than most geeks, but I'm a man's geek. Lately though I've been ashamed of my geekiness. I'm lagging behind in the mobile world. I had mobile internet before there was mobile internet. I'd hook my old Palm 3C up to my Nokia 8210 via infrared, have the palm dial up some numbers and viola... mobile internet on my Palm 3C! A few phones later, I have a Palm Treo 680. This thing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but because I'm a loser lately, I haven't done any customization.
Now that I'm moving my life to Google, I need to do mobile too. Now with the palm, I get the Palm Desktop, but I want to do everything over-the-air. GMail is easy. You just create the Versamail account according to the instructions found here. Now for the calendar, I use GooSync. Pretty easay to set up, not alot of extraneous features and pretty straight forward.

Next up, to-do's, memos, and other trivial things that I can sync.

Stay tuned.....
Average Guy X~~~~~

I am a slacker

Now that I have started all this Web 2.0 and social networking/media stuff, I am a total slacker. I started out hot and heavy, but have been sputtering off. Only one post last week? I even chastise myself. Stay tuned.... more stuff to come though.

Moving my life to Google: Part Deux

I have successfully transferred my email to Google. I've configured GMail to check my "old" email accounts and let me send email as my "old" email addresses. Good. Now for the bad. It only checks the email accounts at certain intervals which is determined by some algorithm that takes into account how much mail you get through that account. Well, it's not all that bad until you see the connection interval time being an hour. Now I don't call myself popular, but I'd like to see that configurable, but I can live with it. I still need to reconfigure my Outlook client (yes, I still like to use outlook) to use it exclusively and not check my other "old" email addresses.

I've got my calendar in Google Calendar. I'm using this nifty sync tool called RemoteCalendars which has two-way sync between Outlook and any other iCalendar compliant calendar. This takes care of my personal calendar, but what about my work calendar? Do I want to combine them? Do I want to keep them separate? I'll have to look into that a little more.

To-dos are non existent on Google. There's been a few suggestions and add-ins available to compensate. The one that I found most useful is Remember the Milk. It actually integrates with the Google Calendar. Now to try to sync it with Outlook.

Stay Tuned....

Social networking & privacy?

When you register for just about any website it asks you for a real name and a username. Even on blogger, you have a profile with a real name and a username and even your GMail address can reveal information about you. Now I consider myself a professional worker. I work in a corporate-type environment where business casual dress is required, some days I might even need a tie depending who I'm meeting with. I've started blogging, have GMail accounts, started with a bunch of social networking sites (twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and am wondering a few things.... How much is too much?

How much information should you be revealing online about yourself? I've created this persona for this blog "Average Guy X". If you search hard enough, you can probably find out my real name, but how does all the stuff I do online affect my value at work or even my prospects for furthering my career?

Have you ever been around the office water cooler having a conversation with some co-worker that you've known for some time and then he/she tells a story of something they did over the weekend and you say to yourself "Wow. That was a little too much TMI and now I can't really have the same relationship with them anymore!"? Most of the time, it's harmless information about religion or politics that you find out, but sometimes there can be lifestyle, work habits, personal opinions, or even the occasional revelation about how they make money with some "scheme" that really make you see this person in a different light. I'm wondering how much of this social networking can contribute to that.

Stay tuned.

It's Friday

It's friday and time to enjoy a cold one.

Cuil is not cool

All this buzz about the new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") going on perks my interest. Now, I'll give anything a chance once. I go there and search for myself. I have a few hits on Google, and maybe a few on Yahoo, but most of the time, I get the results for someone else with the same name as me. So I search Cuil for my name. The results are a little goofy looking for me, but I'll play.
First of all, this image this is ANNOYING! Every search result I have comes up with the same 2 or 3 photos which is really distracting. Now why do they think that I need a random picture to identify my search results? Not very helpful.

-10 cuil points

Next, I add it to my Firefox search bar so that I could use it throughout the day instead of my usual Google, or some other random engine. I'm doing some coding for the sidebar I use in XP; Desktop Sidebar. I need to do some regular expression parsing. So I use Cuil to search. I put into the search bar regular expression debug or something similar and I get 0 results. That's right. nil, zip, zilch, nada, niet, nothing, bupkiss, the big goose egg!!! Now being the proper geek that I am, I should have found out why, but I'm too busy to be bothered with it. DOH! But still, I gasped. No results! FAIL!

-100 cuil points

Now I'm exercising a few searches in Cuil and I'm looking for the next pages. Let's see.... Oh wait... there it is. It's in the black "frame" on the bottom.

-5 cuil points

I found the pagination links. Great. Now lets go through the results. Page 2... hold on... it looks like page 1. Well,.... it's the same as page 1 with the order changed. (well almost) But still, no really new results. All the same images too.

-5 cuil points

Go on to page 3 of the results. Good, there's some different links in there. But all the images are the same. Why? If you MUST have images linked to search results, why not go the ask.com route and take a screenshot of the web site? And why does it insist on putting a picture for a website that's a mailing list archive (read: text only) site?

-5 cuil points

Now the category thing pops into the rightmost column. Do any of the categories have anything to do with the search results or the search term itself? I'm not really sure, and I'm not sure if it's even useful.

-5 cuil points


Total: -130 cuil points

Sorry Cuil, that's a fail!