Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The "joys" of running a company

One of the many "joys" is dealing with "service providers."

Currently we are in the process of choosing a vendor to outsource our HR to. Having talked to multiple vendors, I realize that this is one of the industry that thrives on obfuscating the obvious. Everyone in this industry loves to wrap words in yarn out of management handbooks. Here's an example I pulled from one such site: "Our PEO services allow you to systematically and strategically enhance the total quality of your organization, which results in greater efficiency and productivity." WTF?

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Sometimes it's the years and not the mileage

I've been a huge fan of the Indiana Jones movies, and I had been waiting for the latest movie to come out for more than a year now. One word: FAIL.

What a dumb, stupid mess. Everything seemed so unnatural. It seemed as though they had run out of all ideas. Low on entertainment. Low on fun. Low on creativity. Sometimes, the years do start to count more than the mileage.

That said, it seemed to borrow a few things from Tintin. There were at least a couple of references that I noticed. The notion of aliens was referenced in Flight 714. Though, I wouldn't say that's necessarily where they borrowed it from. The second reference was the scene where Harrison Ford is crawling in the cave... it seemed to have been framed right out of the Prisoners of the Sun.

I hear Spielberg is working on a Tintin movie...

Monday, June 02, 2008

FriendFeed picking up at Twitter's expense?

I've seen several messages flow today on Twitter that people don't tweet that often because they are on Friendfeed instead...

I recently installed Twhirl and it's great that the most recent version supports both Twitter and FriendFeed. I tried Alert Thingy, and it was terrible on the Mac. Twhirl on the other hand worked a lot better.

Talking of Friendfeed, it is a much more open version of the Facebook news feed. Facebook has clamped down quite a bit on what shows up in the news feed. In fact I hardly see any updates from apps in the news feed any more. All I see are updates from Facebook and its own applications (Photos, Wall, Video, Posted Items).

If feeds are here to stay, Friendfeed and its api can become powerful developer tools for growing web applications.