From Phonescoop:

LG Extends “Push-To” Concept with PTB

April 1, 2005 source: LG Electronics

Following closely on the heels of the PTV (Push-To-View) technology it demonstrated at 3GSM in February – as well as other recent “push-to” technologies such as Push-To-Talk (PTT) and Push-To-Share – LG today announced a new “Push-To” technology designed to bring families and friends closer, faster. Based on the SIP protocol and IMS technology, Push-To-Bitchslap (PTB) is designed to enable a whole new dimension of mobile communication. PTB phones will feature a dedicated PTB side key, directly below the PTT key, as well as a special hinged keypad with a powerful spring, that flips up aginst the cheek when activated by the remote party. The company plans to launch at least three PTB phones by the end of the year, and is talking to several other major manufacturers about licensing PTB technology for use in their phones.

Marc Glazer has written a preview of the new Yahoo! News for Online Journalism Review. This is a project I’ve been working on personally for many months and it will be exciting to see it get out to the public.

He goes into detail about the product, the business and the process. I was in the meeting he attended, but just out of the camera shot. Darn.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of code to write…

Have you ever ordered something cool online and just couldn’t wait to get it? Do you agonize over when it will be in your clammy little hands and obsessively check delivery tracking websites?

Of course I certainly wouldn’t do such a thing, but just in case someone else has this “problem” I created an email alerting system for package deliveries. A number of people are offering RSS feeds for tracking packages, but that’s still the wrong model. Don’t make me check when my package arrives, push it to me.

It currently works for UPS and FedEx packages. (USPS already has a nice email alerting service.) You will get alerts whenever the status of a package changes until it is delivered. You could use this service to be alerted when a package is out for delivery so you can know when to be home to accept it. You can track packages you send too, as long as you know the tracking number.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

As a engineering manager in a quickly growing company, I spend a lot of time trying to hire people. I spend hours poring over resumes, talking to candidiates and trying to convince them why Yahoo! is a great place to work – especially if you aren’t spending all your time hiring. 😉

But apparently not everyone wants to work for Yahoo!. They actually expend a lot of effort trying NOT to get hired. I’ve seen a lot of examples of this. Just in case you too don’t want to work at a highly innovative, profitable and successful company, here’s exactly how to do it.

The Resume
You have 10 seconds to impress me. Better try your hardest not to.

1. Don’t put your resume anywhere. That’ll make sure I never find it. Also, don’t go to conferences, post to technical websites, or generally do anything of public significance.
2. Put your resume up on a site like HotJobs, but do absolutely nothing to make it readable. Leave lots of strange characters in there like %20=, ??, or u>. Include no line breaks and generally make it unparsable. Don’t include a link to a nicely formatted version.
3. Don’t include any experience in your resume. I’ll assume you have none.
4. List examples of websites you’ve built in your resume that are clearly broken or poorly built.
5. Include a “glossary of terms” in your resumes, defining things like “PHP” and “Oracle”. Since I’m just a dumb manager, I’ll have no idea what these mean or why I would want to hire for them. Make sure that some of the definitions are wrong.
6. Lie.
7. Misspell basic words like ‘Senier’.
8. Throw in random acronyms that have nothing to do with your skills. Make some up.
9. Don’t include a working email address in your resume. Maybe make it outdated, or protected by an overagressive spam filter so you’ll never see my email.
10. If you do get my email, don’t answer it.

The Phone Screen
Where you have your chance to get out the hassle of meeting me.

1. Don’t answer the phone at the time scheduled for your phone screen.
2. Answer the phone, but do it on a cell phone along a busy street. It helps if your phone loses signal a few times too.
3. Don’t shut up. Answer every question with long, irrelevent soliloquies. Don’t give me a chance to speak.
4. When I ask you to rate your skills, give yourself a 10 out of 10 on at least one. Be unable to answer even moderately complicated questions about that skill.
5. Get frustrated and simply hang up on me.
6. Say you have another offer and unless you get an offer from me tomorrow, you’ll have to take the other one.
7. At the end of the phone screen, reveal that you have no interest in moving or commuting to Yahoo!.

The Interview
This is your big chance to prove to us that you don’t want to work here – in person!

1. Show up late or not at all.
2. Don’t even attempt to answer questions, just say “I don’t know” and stare back blankly.
3. Refuse to go up to a whiteboard and write code or draw architecture diagrams.
4. Mumble. Use incomplete or incoherent sentences. Engineers don’t need to talk to anyone anyway. (Except in interviews.)
5. Don’t make eye contact with anyone while you answer their questions.
6. When asked why you want to work here, give an answer like “it’ll be a shorter commute” or quote verbatim the company mission statement.
7. Don’t bother to familiarize yourself with the product beforehand. Have no suggestions about how to improve it.
8. Insist on continuing on with a problem, even when it’s clear you have no idea how to solve it.
9. Provide a code sample that is easily proved to be plagarized with a quick web search.

The Offer
Uh oh, this is your last chance to do something stupid.

1. Demand a ridiculous salary, say twice what you are currently making.
2. Ask if there are higher-level or higher-paying positions available.
3. Say you’re going to take the offer, then change your mind.
4. Actually sign the offer, then change your mind!
5. Take weeks to decide.
6. Disappear completely!

That’s some pretty valuable advice. Now as practice, please don’t read this job description and whatever you do, don’t send me your resume. You’re doing great!

“It’s unbelievable,” he said of Fenway, “and I still have the best shower in the league. I don’t want them to take that away.”

— Terry Francona, Manager of the Boston Red Sox on the recent decision to stay at Fenway

I don’t surf the web anymore.

When the web was young, people would spend hours just visiting random sites on the web and seeing what’s out there. For some reason that’s become boring, or maybe the sites have just become less novel and boring.

In any case, the only time I visit sites is when people pass along links to them. This kind of social sharing of URLs is not a new concept, but the linkblog is yet another way to do it.

There’s many webites and pages that I’d like to share, but they’re not quite worthy of a full blog post (read: I’m too lazy). But a linkblog is just right.

Since all the cool kids are doing it, I set up an account on del.icio.us (I really hate that domain name; I never remember where to put the dots) and starting bookmarking links.

So there we go: http://del.icio.us/boulter

And of course, there’s an RSS feed.

Enjoy, or if that is a bit too presumptuous, at least click.

It’s a good thing I’m not a doctor. I would suck at it.

I had to go to the doctor’s office this morning for some blood work and that went quicker than expected, so I went upstairs and got an appointment to have someone look at my rib. My doctor wasn’t in today, so I got random doctor X, but he was fine.

He asked me if I had experienced a number of horrifying symptoms, all of which I did not. He felt around and concluded I had a chest contusion, meaning that I tore or fractured some cardilege in my chest. It would heal, but it would be painful in the meantime. He told me to take Ibuprofen. That’s it.

Well, I feel better about that.

Back to the usual stupidity, there are spiders living in my car. There are spider webs all around the corners on the windshield. I’m not sure if you can get an exterminator for your car or maybe I should just wait until the stupid spiders die of hunger. There can’t be much to eat in my car. Then again, this might be a clear sign that I should clean it.

Sometimes a good proxy for how much fun you have over a vacation or even just weekend can be measured by how many injuries you inflicted upon yourself.

By that measure, I had a LOT of fun last weekend.

On Saturday, we took a long drive from home through San Jose, up Mt. Hamilton, down Mines Road all the way to Livermore and then back home. It was a nice 116 mile drive on a really beautiful day. Of course we picked up some caches along the way.

At one particular cache, I was doing some completely unnecessary rock climbing and I slipped and fell about about two feet. I fell on my chest and got up immediately. I felt a little funny after that. I figured I just knocked the wind out of myself. Eventually I found the cache and we headed on, with my chest feeling a little sore.

Later on my chest, paricularly my left bottom rib, still hurt. It got pretty painful and sleeping was tough. I think I actually broke a rib or at least bruised it pretty badly.

Everything I read about broken ribs says that there’s really nothing a doctor will do for you other than tape it up unless you’re having trouble breathing (which I’m not). So for now I’m toughing it out unless it doesn’t go away.

On Sunday Anne was busy, so I went for some hikes by myself. It was another great day, so I headed up to Skyline Boulevard, hooked up my headphones to my Treo loaded up with a Gig of music, and hiked in a part Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve of that I hadn’t been to before. The a cache was way at the end of what used to be Page Mill Road.

The trail near the end was pretty overgrown and had lots of poison oak. I tried to avoid it, but didn’t worry about it too much. I know I’ve touched the stuff a bunch of times in a the last few months but haven’t gotten any rash. Maybe I’ve become immune?

Fat chance. Today I’m feeling itchy all over, especially on my legs. Yes, I was wearning shorts and I didn’t bother with Tecnu. Dumb. Tonight will an exercise of trying to sleep on my back while trying not to feel itchy. I should probably just find a book.

OK, local television background extra is probably more like it, but I was on TV.

On Friday night, Bay Area Backroads aired their segment on Geocaching. A bunch of my friends were on it and I was in one scene at a dinner. I barely recognized myself in the quick pan of a dimly-lit room. The restaurant was Harry Hofbrau’s in Redwood City on August 15th, 2004.

I was disappointed that my other “special guest appearance” was cut. On the day they drove around in the Jeep, I happened to call Lee as he was driving around with Doug. I needed a hint on a cache that I was at on Maui. (It was actually missing and I replaced it.)

My TiVo recorded the show (as it does every week) and I took the opportunity to install and try out tyStudio, a video extraction tool for TiVo. It took a very long time to download the video off my TiVo, but that turned out to be the easy part. I cut out the segment and saved it as an MPEG2 stream. From there I had a hard time reencoding the 178MB file to a size appropriate for streaming on the web. I tried a bunch of utilities for several hours, but then finally got WinAVI to convert it to a Windows Media stream that looked pretty good.

I uploaded the segment so you can watch the whole thing or you can read the transcript. I guess this means my 15 frames of fame are all used up.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my Geocaching tools recently.

First, I rewrote most of the JavaScript for my GPS Coordinate Converter. It’s not a nasty mess anymore and it works for more funky ways that people type these things. Most obvious is that Firefox now works when you use negative signs. I actually took the code from the PHP version of the coordinate parsing code I wrote. It’s amazing how similar these languages are. I wrote a dozen or so regular expressions and the port was 90% was done.

Second, I’ve been working a lot on my Geocaching Quick Search. Alex de Vries has created a Firefox plugin for it and also collected a lot of good ideas for adding more functionality. I even updated the documentation. This is definitely the tool I use the most for myself as I use it to quickly look up stuff on my Treo from the field.

Third, Geocaching.com has redesigned their site and added some heavy-handed frame-busting code to just about every page. The result is that my Geocaching Express Logger doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to because it uses frames. I’ve retargeted the links to use a new window (which is pretty annoying) while I await a response on the forums. Meanwhile I added support for uploading MapSource files and a DHTML smilies menu.

I made some minor changes to Geocaching Leaderboard as well. I added another digit beyond the decimal point to the stats, changed the N/A indicator to ‘–‘ from ‘-‘ since some people thought they were negative signs, fixed some x-axis problems with the graphs and changed them to use PNG images because somehow GIF stopped working.

Recently I uploaded a bunch of new maps to my ExpertGPS Calibrated Maps page. Pretty soon I think I’ll have the whole Bay Area covered.

Lastly, I convinced BeachBuddies to add links to his Locationless Cache Checklist for every cache so you can click right into my Coordinate Distance Calculator to check if your LC has already been found. Very handy.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff. Now I know where all my free time goes.