TheGarage Tech Blog

When checking the Monster job boards, you will be presented periodically with a “Special Offer” when first hitting a page. Today’s Special Offer started:

Do you ever have that thought as you contemplate your current employment (or lack thereof) status?

You’ve worked your entire career to build the skills necessary to make you valuable to your employer. You work hard.

You keep thinking that once “this” is all over things will get back to “normal”. Or, if you’re not currently employed, you’re probably thinking that you can’t wait to get back to work, once this crazy recession goes away and the economy “settles down” and gets back on track…

So what exactly is “normal” anyway?

Many people are finding that there is no returning to the way things used to be. They also realize that now the timing is right for them to create their own “normal” and control their own destiny as a business owner. Many of them choose to do that through franchise ownership.

I don’t know if franchise ownership is right for everyone but the insight is dead on, I think. I came to the same conclusion two years ago: My normal IT career the way it used to be is gone forever–along with the earning capability.

Courtesy of BillShrink.com

Short and sweet: The multitasking is going to be an issue with the iPhone as well as the lack of expandable memory.  I would expect both issues to be addressed in a soon-to-be-released upgrade. I mean, they pretty much have to, right?

Also if you take photos with your phone 5 megapixels is a significant improvement over 3 mp. Don’t let anyone tell you different. There may not be a big difference between 12 megapixels and 10 but if you take a lot of pictures you will be happier with more resolution at image editing time,especially when cropping.  If you don’t take pictures don’t say you never will; camera phones take ridiculously good images in many situations.

Total cost of ownership is kinda surprising since I’ve never seen the figures before.  T-Mobile’s Nexus One  with its outrageous talk time seems to be the best deal if the network is decent in your area.

Seen on Twitter

Regular visitors know I love making fun of online job postings. Here’s a good one:

Responsible for complex process automation of the systems management applications as well as integration to create interoperability between other applications. The applications include; HP OpenView for Windows (HPOV) or HP OpenView Operations Manager (OVO) now called HP Operations Manager, software for consolidated event and performance management, HP Network Node Manager (HP NNM) now called HP Network Node Manager i-series which has embedded run-book automation technology for automatic data collection, state verification, and problem fixing, HP Service Center formerly Peregrine, HP OpenView for Internet Services (HP OVIS) now called HP Business Availability Center, HP Reporter for OpenView and HP Operations Orchestrator (OO) formerly known as PAS, formerly IConclude

Sounds like someone changes brands like they change underwear. Nothing like re-branding an entire product line once or twice to encourage confidence from your customers.

News Corp’s MySpace Google deal at risk. So, how much is your Internet traffic worth?

Google agreed in 2006 to pay News Corp $900m for the exclusive right to provide search advertising to the once-thriving site over three years if MySpace could guarantee a minimum volume of traffic.

A guaranteed minimum amount of traffic sounds like a guaranteed minimum amount of ad revenue for Google. No wonder Google is doing so well if they can consistently cut sweetheart deals like that.

Here is what Rupert needs to do if he wants to bring MySpace back to a competitive if not dominant position: Let the people creating the content share in ad revenue. The way it is now, users make the content and MySpace and Google make a fortune from people looking at it.

Content is king on the Internet. Want to improve your traffic, improve your content. Since users create the content at MySpace, it becomes essential to attract users who can consistently generate quality pop content. Even if you have to pay to get them.

A simple setup based on traffic should do it. Here is a sample:

# hits/mo     Stipend
1000          $5
10000         $50
100000         $750

MySpace could also give users the option of selling lucrative local ad blocks in addition to using pluggable ads from whatever provider they want. As with all things, free people being fairly compensated for their work is the best way to build a strong and enduring enterprise. Fall away from free enterprise principles in exchange for the easier softer way and you always get the same things: decay and tyranny, illustrated appropriately here by the MySpace Google deal.

Google is the only game in town because they have made it easy for content aggregators to make a gjillion dollars. With a little innovation and work the ad monopoly can be wrenched from Google’s iron grasp. The we’ll see how dedicated to ‘do no evil’ they are.

I haven’t seen this technique before but I already don’t like it. In my email:

MATRIX Prof Services (MATRIXpServices) is now following your tweets on Twitter.

MATRIX Prof Services may not appear in your follower list. MATRIX Prof Services may have decided to stop following you, or the account may have been suspended for a Terms of Service violation.

I added the emphasis to show why MATRIX Prof Services sucks so bad. Of course they are not following me. It’s all automated: Follow someone, autogen the email alert, unfollow. These sumbitches learn a little something about the Internet and they think they know something. What really sucks is they will get thousands of followers.

If you go to their site let me give you a warning: Many jobs listed by these staffing services don’t exist. You heard me. Vapor ware. A staffing service sells people and to sell people you have to have a big supply of resumes. To get resumes one needs to advertise jobs. To get the most resumes with the fewest ads is why so many job listings on Monster and such have so many buzzwords in them, and why you never get a job from them. No real job is going to have 50 proficiency requirements.

If you work through one of these agencies as a contractor, you need to know how much the contract is paying and how much of a cut the agency is taking otherwise you can’t negotiate a fair deal that compensates commiserate with your skill and experience. Most will not tell you; it’s a take it or leave it deal and that’s how you can know you should walk away.

If they do tell, you might be very surprised to find out you’re making $35/hr on a contract that’s paying $65, or more. If you are a straight up 1099 contractor paying your own FICA and have no benefits that’s a whopping shitload of money you are just giving away for nothing in return. If you are struggling to raise a family, $1200/wk for the length of the contract is a lot of dough to trade for someone running a key-word search on a bunch of resumes and making a few phone calls. $30,000 on a 6 month contract. Just half that amount is the difference between making a decent living and just making it. One person should not have to earn a living for 2 people.

Make no mistake, if you take my attitude, you will find it hard to get work because the corporations who use the agencies, which is almost all of them, care more about saving a dollar than they care about the people who work for them and the agencies have a big, big stack of resumes, remember. Whether the next person is half as qualified doesn’t matter to the agency if next person will take $5/hr less, or even a dollar less for that matter. All they have to do is tell the customer the top candidate became unavailable, but they have these other candidates available, many of whom they may or may not have spoken with in months, if ever.

Given the current economic environment and high-profile business failures, corporations might want to take a closer look at how they staff their technical positions. Continue to let morons staff your critical business functions, such as IT, and your enterprise could fail. Just think, a company using Matrox Professional Services might get their next .NET engineer come from a Twitter spam.

I guess there are some reputable IT employment agencies out there but many, if not the majority, have nothing to offer except for taking a huge cut of what YOU earn. Read this earlier post to get a further idea of what I think of I.T. staffing services, and by extension the companies who rely so heavily upon them.

Related posts:

• Hey, psst, do I have an opportunity for you
• AIG bites the dust but is “too big to fail”
• A Great Opportunity
• ROI Best Metric in Measuring IT’s Value

From FT.com, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch on paid content:

“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” Mr Murdoch said.

“If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media,” he added, predicting “significant revenues” from charging for differentiated news online.

He warned that “the big competition will be coming from the BBC,” which offers online news for free, but said: “Our policy is to win.”

Mr Murdoch said News Corp was highly unlikely to develop its own electronic reader, but took aim at Amazon’s Kindle device by praising the rival Sony Reader.

He insisted that News Corp would retain a direct relationship with its subscribers to its content via e-readers, information that Amazon has refused to hand over.

Chase Carey, who recently returned to News Corp as chief operating officer, said the online charging policy would extend to cable networks such as Fox News.

Just because the current advertising model is in a slump doesn’t mean charging for content is the way to go. That would be like raising taxes during a recession.

Mark this as an example where the decision of one powerful, but misguided individual can wreck a billion dollar company.

I don’t care how many top ten lists are posted and couched as invaluable, insider how-to advice on how to blog and make money, it’ still just SPAM. I don’t care how good your SEO is; I don’t care how visually appealing your theme is; I don’t care about anything except that if your content sucks I’m not gonna come back. And neither is anyone else with any sense. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a lot of people not come back over the last many years.

Of course your theme  and search engine optimization are very important, but the bottom line is that any blog about how to make money blogging = SPAM! If you read those sites you are reading spam. No matter how much you want to believe, it’s still spam.

It’s like a wiener in a bun advertising how much money can be made from selling chili dogs. Put some chili, cheese and onions with mayo and mustard and some dill relish on that wiener would you? If you can’t dish out some relish, you are in trouble. If you get into blogging solely as a means to make money, you are a silly fucker; you have bought into a scam. You probably already have paid someone some money, I bet, to learn how to do it. You think you are getting in on a scam on a bunch of idiots when it is you who are, in fact, the idiot. Now I may be mis-underestimating things, but the pool of available idiots is not big enough to sustain all the other idiots trying to sucker them. See pyramid scheme. See Maddoff. See Social Security.

People who write a blog because they love to write and have always wanted to write, and they somehow wind up with a big audience and are able to make some money, those are the guys who inspire me and I am simply amazed by all the fucking morons who buy in to the idea that they can throw up a web page using this trick or that strategy and that they will somehow rake in huge amounts of money–or even moderate amounts of money. These people are likely the same ones who purchase hair transplants or male enhancement pills. Call ‘em a bunch of Smilin’ Bob’s. Such pie in the sky delusions makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seem pragmatic. Come off your trip already!

Want to know how to make money blogging? I’ll tell ya. This is the best advice you’ll ever get: Consistently provide a bunch of great content that people want to consume and that people will want to come back to consume more of. Consistent means over the course of months and years, not days and weeks. See InstaPundit. If you can throw up decent content week after week after week, a Google blackball can’t stop you. You could serve the dish from a 28K dialup line and people would figure out a way to get it.

A series of never ending top 10 lists on how to create a blog to make money, on the other hand, bores me to tears and tends to make me belligerent.

You know who you are.

And don’t we know to whose advantage Windows Genuine Advantage is. But what happens when Windows Genuine Advantage doesn’t work?

Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service.

We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. The Windows Genuine Advantage support forum has exploded with complaints, as a result, and Phil Liu, WGA project manager, says that he won’t sleep until the problem is fixed. Windows Vista and XP are affected, 32- and 64-bit versions.

I bet Phil Liu is one very tired son of a gun.

The Internet is Dead. So says Dallas Mavericks owner and erstwhile internet tycoon Mark Cuban.

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home wont increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

I think we may have a slight case of sour grapes here and what Cuban really means is that he has come to the realization that his business efforts surrounding the Internet are dead. Ironically, later in the article we found out the Internet is about as dead as the telephone:

Answering questions by email from the Cayman Islands, where he was vacationing with his family and recovering from hip-replacement surgery, Cuban also shared his views on Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo versus Google, day-trading, his personal investment strategy, and why he won’t pull the plug on his much-criticized business journalism operation, Sharesleuth.com, in which he shorts companies that the site plans to trash-hoping to turn a tidy profit on his pre-publication insider knowledge.

Yes Mark, there are other things to do with the Internet than make Billions of dollars on a gimmick. I could have told you five years ago streaming hi def video to the home was not going to be doable any time soon. Not because I am so smart or anything, but because it is just common sense to look at the size of file that contains a full length movie and then look at the pipe available to shove it through and anyone can see that it will take forever.

Why is it that when people are sitting on top of the world they aways reach for more? Is it just Human Nature? Add Steve Jobs and Apple to the long list of back-grabbing money grubbers.