This is what grinds my gear

So there I was on a Friday afternoon having a discussion with a co-worker about articles, subject-verb agreement and other arcane aspect of grammar (we were arguing over the help text on a report). As these things sometimes do, it bogged down to an understanding of rules of English grammar. He said one thing was right and I said the other was right. Then out of nowhere he goes "let's get a 3rd person in here to break the tie". Great, I thought thinking he was going to suggest someone with a BA in English Literature or something like that (lots of disciplines end up in IT). But no, he said "let me get someone that was born here". And thus ended my productive time that day. What the heck do you mean get someone that was born here, I wanted to say to him. I had to study for years and take multiple exams to be proficient in this language; why would you assume someone born here is automatically better than me (I wasn't interested in his estimation of his own proficiency at this point). Arrgggghhh.

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InfoPath & SharePoint (Part 1)

A departure from sports and politics. This one is about technology.

InfoPath sucks and SharePoint is the most expensive piece of crap ever. InfoPath, as a development environment, has absolutely no redeeming value. It's worthless and if your boss ever thinks of using it, you have three options:

convince him not to (not easy once he's been brainwashed by the Microsoft marketing presentations)use one of Al Gore's lockboxes to store away your sanity 'cos you'll lose it. Also, pad your estimates very generously. You'll need every bit of time you can get.
quit immediately while you still have your sanityFirst, InfoPath:

To me InfoPath is like programming in assembly language. Sure it makes it easy (too easy in fact) to bind data to controls. But it doesn't provide you with easy access to your controls. Why is this important? Say you want to disable a button:

in most technology: buttonA.enabled = false (or something similar).

In InfoPath, you simply can't do this.…

Career 101: Dunk, layup or dribble out of bounds?

Saw this on Whisper:

The way I see it, this dude has 3 options:
Reject the $55K increase and stick with his old job that he loves (dribble out of bounds)Take the $170K to his current boss and negotiate for a raise (layup)Take the $170K job, stick with it for a year and then bounce (dunk) The first option is what I call a poor person's advice. It sounds very noble...very "get a job you love and you'll never work". Well I am here to say that's bullshit (mostly). This is business; you should always get the most you can. Besides, this is a chance for this dude to change his baseline salary for future jobs. At his current job, getting that $55K will take several years because corporate America isn't going to offer you more than a token raise each year.

My advice would be to take the $170K offer to his current manager and get him/her to match it or raise his current salary. That's the layup option. It's not too money-hungry and doesn't summarily leave $5…

What to do?

I recently bought one of those wireless earbuds from Amazon. I spent some time researching all the available options and finally picked this particular one. It was highly rated on Amazon 5 stars from 54 reviewers (most of them "verified purchase"). Not great but not bad. Anyway, the earbuds arrived and I found this in the box:

Hmm, OK. Very mysterious. As instructed, I sent them an email for further information. Here's what I received:

Funny thing is I really like the ear buds. Excellent build quality and thus far, great performance. They reconnect to my phone 2-3 seconds after taking them out of the case. It's easy to create a good seal...sometimes so good I get that underwater feeling one gets with noise cancelling headphones. Even without the 40% incentive, I would have written a review...that's how much I like the ear buds. But now I feel weird about doing it. I wonder how many of those 54 5-star reviews were motivated by a 40% discount.

As for the 40% discou…

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