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New job
As some of you that follow my blog have inferred from my posts, I have a new job. I started with alwaysBEthere, Inc. as Director of Technology. alwaysBEthere was a client of mine for several years, and I was offered a full time job. Switching from a contractor (I was a contractor for over 5 1/2 years) to an employee again wasn't that hard for me. As part of joining the company, I made it a requirement that I be able to work for home, so that part didn't change. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis with a small office here in San Diego. So while I have the option of going into our office, I only do it now and again; I find that I can get much more work done at home without having to commute.
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Paperless 1.0 Shipped
Mariner Paperless (the new name for ReceiptWallet) 1.0 shipped last week! I'm quite happy to see ReceiptWallet moving forward. While this 1.0 version of Paperless has mostly cosmetic changes, I'm sure that more changes will be coming soon.
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The disposable society (or $35 to say it is broken)
Our washing machine started to become quiet noisy during its spin cycle, so we had a repair guy come out to give us an estimate. Knowing that our washer is 8 years old and a front loader, I suspected that the bearings or motor were bad as the whole drum rests on bearings and puts significant weight on them. So, I hoped for the best, but prepared for the worst; the worst being replacing the washing machine. The guy came out, listened to it for about 2 minutes and said that it will cost about $500 to replace and pretty much he wouldn't do it (he's only done a couple because most people replace them). Of course, this visit wasn't free; $35 to tell me that it was broken and had to be replaced. So we have maybe 6 months left before it blows. A new front loading washer with a warranty runs around $800. While not what I want to buy right now (not after my plumbing fiasco which turned into a bigger mess as I had to redo sprinklers in the back as well), but it makes little sense to put $500 into a machine without a warranty which could go at any time.
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Is push email really useful?
The holy grail of email seems to be push email where you instantly get your new email as it arrives. For years which my NotifyMail program, I basically had this as well on my desktop, but not on mobile devices. With IMAP idle, NotifyMail is obsolete for the desktop, but push email still seems the rage on handheld devices as everyone wants to be like RIM with the BlackBerry. I didn't think much of this until last week when I saw someone say that the iPhone can't be an enterprise device because it doesn't have push email and you can only have it check email automatically every 15 minutes. To that, I respond, so what? Is email all that important that I have to get messages instantly? Of course not, if something is all that important, people can get me with SMS, IM, or can you believe it, the phone. Why does everyone think that push email (and for that matter constant connectivity) is the only way to work? I think that this causes too much stress and is not needed.