jpreardon.com

New York bar goers will be having disjointed text conversations with other like minded singles soon. Time2flirt allows people to flirt, via SMS, with others in the same bar, without revealing their phone number. Time2flirt is all the rage in the UK; it is expected to hit New York City as early as spring.

From their site:

In four quick steps you can be sending messages back and forward to anyone you see in the bar!

From this point forward it’s up to you! You’ll be totally in control of your messaging, choosing who you text with and when you want to stop. When the night’s over, time2flirt stops and your phone will get a rest!

Get your texting thumb ready! If you need some help, pre-program a few lame pick-up lines into your phone; you’ll be the life of the party…

via textually

The New York Times reports that an internal Wal-Mart audit showed violations of child-labor laws and regulations requiring breaks. The audit of the time card system at 128 stores was performed in July of 2000 and has been under court seal.

“Our view is that the audit really means nothing when you understand Wal-Mart’s time keeping system” stated their VP for communications. No one can accuse Wal-Mart of ignoring this audit. A few months after the completion of the audit, they stopped requiring employees to clock out for their breaks. According to the company, this is for convenience of the employees.

Policies like this are also convenient for the employer, no messy paper trail when thousands of employees work through their breaks. The magnitude of this is almost unimaginable. In only one week at 128 stores there were thousands upon thousands of possible violations. Some of these violations are mistakes in clocking in or clocking out, but the volume seems to indicate that they can’t all be mistakes. Think about how many violations would be found if all 3,500 stores were audited.

I have written about my search for an online RSS Aggregator before (twice to be exact). RSS2Email was working well, but the volume of email I was receiving through the feeds was quite unwieldy in my webmail interface. Not checking email for a day or two just made the problem worse. Sometimes I had to delete large swaths of messages just for lack of time to read them. This was frustrating since I knew there was stuff in there I wanted to read but was missing due to info overflow.

Enter bloglines, a web based RSS aggregator which I had evaluated several months ago. The interface has been changed; it is much nicer to look at. Its design makes moving through the content of several blogs a day much faster. While my RSS to email script was creating a message for each post on each blog, bloglines simply presents all the posts that have not been read on one page for each blog. Originally, this was one of the reasons I chose RSS2Email, but the bloglines method seems to work very well in practice. Bloglines also has a handy notifier that can be installed on a local mac or windows machine. An HTML notifier is available for those who can’t install software on their OS.

Currently the service is free and the site is without advertisements. Surely a service like this will attract more and more users. Eventually, some money will need to be made somewhere to support the site. It will be interesting to see how long it will last in its current (free) form and how it will be supported in the future.

c|net offers an interesting look at what Apple uses to run their business. It’s nice to know that they use their own products extensively in the back office. Xserve is the server of choice in their data center; there are some Sun and IBM servers as well. Over half of Apple’s storage is housed on IBM Shark and FastT boxes. EMC and Xserve RAIDs account for the rest of the storage capacity. Apple claims they will have more than half of their data stored on Xserve RAIDs by the end of their fiscal year.

Apple claims that Macintosh based servers are easier to administer and secure than the alternatives. The proof is in the in help desk in this case. Apple has only 27 people on the help desk. That works out to 433 employees per help desk person. So either the Macs run fairly trouble free, or people wait on hold forever when they call the IT department.

George Harrison’s estate is suing a Staten Island doctor. Two weeks prior to Harrison’s death, the doctor allegedly forced him to sign a guitar. The suit claims that Harrison said “I do not even know if I know how to spell my name any more,” but Dr. Lederman offered some of words of encouragement: “Come on, you can do this.”

What bedside manner!

via The Big Smoker

The New York Times reports that the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition jury has selected a design for the World Trade Center Memorial. Reflecting Absence by Michael Arad and Peter Walker was selected from over 5,000 entries. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation stated that the formal unveiling of the final design will be delayed until next week due to significant changes in the original design.

Bangalore now employees 20,000 more engineers than Silicon Valley. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the trend in offshore outsourcing of IT jobs.

In a related story, Christopher Kenton writes about the changing face of offshore programming. He observes that the difference in price between US and Indian programming is shrinking. This is due to the fact that competition for experienced IT talent in India is heating up while there are many people with similar skills domestically that are looking for work. He also points out that hidden costs like additional project management and quality assurance can affect the bottom line significantly.

Increased project management and quality assurance tend to add costs to any outsourced project whether it is offshore or not. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for offshore outsourcing of technical jobs. Obviously, it will continue, but will this trend plateau in the near future?

via slashdot

Update: Don’t you hate it when you read an article only to forget where you read it a short time later? Well, maybe that only happens to me. Slashdot linked to an interesting article about how offshore outsourcing could stifle innovation. I wanted to post a link to it earlier but I… um… forgot where it was.

For all those nursing their first hangover of the year, Gothamist has some suggestions on how to cope with it.

Have a happy and healthy 2004…