Ah, finally have the full skinny on the free T-Mobile WiFi Hotspot offer for new Windows Vista Users. The offer is for 3 months of service only starting this Friday. While the rumor of this news was spreading around the web this morning, there was no additional information on the length of the offer.
Even for 3 months this is a great chance to try out the hotspot service at your favorite coffee shop.
Its a good question that, of course, I have no answer to having never really been a telecommuter. However, I have an intense interest in becoming one. 😉
In my pursuit to become a better blogger, there is always a thought in the back of my mind about being able to do more remotely. Becoming more focused on writing than on the “day job”. It’s always a temptation to move in that direction.
Some of the comments on the post at Web Worker Daily relate to experiences of lack of office politics, or more involvement by managers simply because you’re “out of site” and its not obvious what you’re working on. The aspect of lack of advancement to me is a non-starter as the farther up the ladder I move, the less interested in the ladder I become.
Personally I think that a person should find the right mix of work and life that is unique to them. While that should be obvious, it is way to easy to fall into the “corporate ladder” mentality. That is, once in that environment, it has the potential to become the most important aspect of your life. That’s something I’m struggling with at this stage in my career – what is more important, the career or simply doing things that you enjoy (and still bring home the bacon).
It could happen as early as this year according to this article in the NYT. While it would certainly take some time for the entire recording industry to come around to the idea, it sounds like at least one record company will try marketing tunes in unrestricted MP3 format in the next few months.
Again, I echo what I said in The Inevitable Death of DRM post, that DRM is doomed to fail. Give the users what they want – don’t keep trying to rape them on price and keep control of how they can use the product. Give your customers control and you will win accolades on usability and working with customers.
Set the user free and see how it pays you back in return.
I pulled the trigger this evening and upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.1, which you can download here. Along with a reported 550+ bug fixes, there are several new features built into the new version – some listed below.
Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
You can set any “page†to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
Pages can now be drafts, or private.
Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
While all tech users shun this kind of thing, I think CompUSA is taking a very proactive approach to helping users get upgraded to Vista. Of course, it won’t hurt their sales any to provide this service, but it’s the kind of hand-holding the general publ
