I recently discovered that I had left the changer for my BlackBerry Tour behind (I’m in the process of moving, and left my changer at the old house), and needed a new one that night. So being late in the evening, my only option was a trip to the local Wal-Mart where I found the typical cheap off-brand charger for a somewhat pricey $15.
Had the quality been better, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought – but I’ve purchased a number of those changers in the past and they are poorly made and it never fails that they break within a few months.
Looking around I noticed a Tracfone package on the shelf that included a LG420G phone, a micro-USB wall charger (LG branded), a micro-USB car charger, and some other things (phone case, etc.), and all for $15. So for the same price as the cheap off-brand charger, I could get both a car and wall charger (both of better quality than the off-brand that Wal-Mart sells).
So it’s a better deal to by a cheap pre-paid phone and toss the phone than it is to just buy the charger. Kinda crazy, but true.
Last week Brandon Wilson and I were honored to speak at DerbyCon, on the work we’ve been doing on the Phison controller found in many USB thumb drives. This was my first time speaking at DerbyCon – it’s a great event, with a fantastic team making the magic happen.
Slides:
Video (which I’ve haven’t been able to bring myself to watch):
Now that the dust has settled, I would like to provide some updates, thoughts, and extra information – and maybe correct an error I made during the presentation.
It wasn’t long after Google went live that they became my search engine of choice – with the only other (somewhat) viable option being Yahoo, it was an easy choice. In the years since then, I’ve not questioned that choice, but now that Google is focusing on killing features and building little-used social features, the time seemed right to see if there are better options.
So a month ago I began an experiment, I committed to using DuckDuckGo for a month – here’s what I’ve found.
There are hundreds of guides on how to get more traffic directed to your blog, and most are wrong. Seth Godin recently posted on this topic, and I have to disagree with most of his points. While there are a few basically good ideas, there are many more that I just don’t see holding up.
Here’s what I look for in the blogs I visit:
Writer is an expert in the field.
I’m a developer, and I love what I do, it’s a great industry, and a very exciting field to be in. If you read my blog often, you’ll see I take every opportunity to mention how great this line of work can be, today I offer a somewhat different, less sugar-coated view.
The Pressure There is a constant pressure on developers to be better, to do more, to produce more, sometimes more than is possible.
