Techcafeteria - Welcome

Losing Facebook

Where do you live? Where do you hang out? Does your social life revolve around a particular location? Presumably, your social life is only as geographically restricted as your travel budget allows. You can meet your friends at a coffee shop, mall, park or home. You don't always meet them at the same place; and you don't go to that place to call them.. So why should your online social life be any different? This week, Google announced that their internet portal page, iGoogle, would be incorporating widgets, or, as they call them, Gadgets that perform the type of social networking functionsmore

Avalanche!

I took a trip up to Juneau, Alaska last week (April 16th, 2008). Didn't get too many pictures, but the ones I did included an avalanche in motion - we had a foot of snow while I was there (very late in the season). So, here's a good test of Wordpress 2.5's new Gallery feature. These shots were taken while driving around Juneau checking out potential office spaces for the Earthjustice office to relocate to during a potential renovation. The avalanche starts in the second row, coming down the mountain and then billowing up in a gray cloud over the building on the right. The second to last shot - the one with the colorful houses - is the view from outside of our office (which is in an old house). Beautiful place, Juneau! [gallery]... more

Fair Pay

A sad, but all too common problem was presented on NTEN's main discussion forum yesterday: An IT Director in New York City, working for a large nonprofit (650 people, multiple locations, full IT platform), got approval from his boss to hire in a Systems Administrator (punchline here) at $40,000 annually. Understand, System Administrators rarely make less than $75k a year at similarly sized for profits. The boss pulled that number out of a salary survey, but, given the quality of it, I say he might as well have pulled it out of a hat. Determining what's fair -- or, as we call it "market" -- pay is an art in itself, and good salary surveys, like the one NTEN produces, offer far more than suggested wages - they provide context, like location, industry standards; they discuss trends, and the best ones f... more

Random Identity

I took a brief trip to Second Life the other night, yet another web 2.0 trend that, like Facebook, sends my normally open-minded and curious instincts running for shelter. I've never been into gaming, and I obviously don't use the internet in order to do things anonymously - my username is based on my real name just about everywhere. But I'm looking for any means possible to improve communication at my geographically diverse company, and to do it while reducing our carbon footprint. So that's quite a challenge - how do we improve communication while cutting down on flying, when we have offices in Honolulu, Juneau and D.C., among other places? So it struck me that Second Life, as a virtu... more

The $10/hr Dilemma

Everybody who enjoys calling tech support, raise your hand. No one? As a long-time IT Director, who came up through the system administration ranks, I dread those situations where the deadline is near, the answer is far, and the only option is to call the company's support line. Mind you, it's never my first option - a well-phrased Google query, first sent to the web, then to Google Groups, is far more likely to get an answer quickly. And there are those application manuals, gathering dust - the best ones will have good indexes. Also, decent applications have online support forums, and the best ones let you search without joining first. What makes me crazy is this: the chances that the $10/hr front line support person answering the phone will know more about the application than I do are slim. This isn't arrogance, it's e... more