Tom Printy’s Blog

A recent video that featured David Heinemeier Hansson from 3t signals talks about having a business with being small as the main goal. This is a business that will sustain you and the people that work for the company. It it a company that you can have for the rest of your life and be perfectly happy with. This type of business will give you the freedom to live comfortably while still being able to pursue your interests. I am happy that this philosophy is being put out there. I think that this business philosophy more closely resembles what I would like to achieve and the types of companies that I would like to work for

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The short answer is yes, you can make money taking surveys online. You won’t make a ton of money, but you might make enough to buy yourself lunch. I use these surveys as part of my mutiple streams of income approach. Let me review the two survey companies that I have had the most luck with.

Pine Cone Research: This was the first survey company that I actually joined. I learned about it on another website and decided to give it a try. They generally pay you 3.00 per survey. You end up filling out a lot of qualification surveys but once you are qualified you are directed to a more in depth survey. Survies generally take between 10 to 20 mins.

MySurvey.com: This was second survey company that I have joined. They don’t pay you per survey but instead award you points per survey that you take surveys range from 10 points for qualifying surveys to several hundred for a full survey. Surveys take anywhere from 10 mins to 45 minutes to complete. I have learned about some interesting new products on this site. As a bonus they also offer a monthly prize of $10,000 just for logging into the site and checking to see if you have any surveys. Sign up and try it out!

So while it isn’t going to make you rich I think it is a fun little thing that you can do in your spare time.

UPDATE: You can signup for Pine Cone research at  http://www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/ds500Referral1.asp

About two weeks ago I worked a booth at recent Chicago Dice Career fair. There were may 15 other companies with booths there. This fair was devoted towards job seekers who considered themselves technical or software development related. This fair was interesting to me because it gave a real sense about where the economy is and what types of people are looking for jobs and what types of people are not looking for a job. The good news is (based on my observations) is that if you are a good solid software developer you are employed and not looking. Te bad news is that if you are a Project Manager (PM) you are out there looking for new gig and you are not alone.  I must have had at least 80 people in a 4 hour period ask if my employer was looking for a Project Manager.  I would tell them that we are looking for developers or sysadmins and they would frown. I guess they were hearing that a lot.

What does this say about the economy? To me it says that we are in the very early stages of a slow down or  recession. It seems that companies are just starting to trim the fat (Project Management) and have decided to keep the meat (developers).  This also means that there possible could be more fat trimming and even meat trimming in  the near future, and that we haven’t even started to see the effects of this recession or coming recession.

As always keep your resume polished and ears to the ground.

When the Google Charts API came out a couple of weeks ago I mention that I thought that writing reports would now be fun.  I had an opportunity to try out the api in a real world situation and it still isn’t fun. The problem is formating the data such that the chart api can accept it. The API has a limited range in which you can represent number. Depending on the representation you are limited to 100 or 4096. Therefore you have to take your raw numbers and devide them by 100 or by 4096 and then convert them to some whacky two character representation. Personally I think this is stupid.  Why can’t the api just know that a number like 206 means draw something that represents 206, or better yet it should figure out the range of the numbers and then figure out the scale by itself.  Besides these things the api works but it was annoying enough for me to just not put charts in the reports I wanted to generate, at least with the Google api.

I am happy to announce that we made our first little bit of money from Beaver Books.  There are now 60 users of the application and one of them bought a book for $47.00. While this isn’t really the results that I was looking for, ( I would rather it make a couple hundred dollars) it does confirm that Facebook can be used as a platform to make money. The hardest part now is trying to get more users. We have some other ideas for Beaver Books that we would like to implement but are crunched with time at our day jobs.

Today is a glorious day for perl developers everywhere. After 5 long years of development perl 5.10.0 has been released and updating to all the CPAN mirrors.

The official notification can be found here: http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2007-12/msg00414.htm 

Happy Hacking!!!!!

In college I used to work in the shoe department a Kohl’s department store. I learned a handy little trick there that you women can use when buying shoes. If you like a style of shoe that is only offered in Mens then you can subtract 2 sizes from your shoe size and find that size in the shoe you are looking for. Say for example you are a woman’s size 8 then you would buy a men’s size 6. This however will not work if you are smaller then a woman’s size 8 since men’s 6 is the lowest that you can find. Happy shoe hunting!

I wanted to try out the Yahoo! Shortcut app for Wordpress. It is really a neat little plug in. As you type your post a widget or slug on the side of the editing window shows you how may items it finds that relate to your post. It is really a clever idea and should help you make blog posts more interesting. I am going to try out some of the features in this post.

So I live in Chicago IL. Yahoo Short cuts is able to identify this as a location and display a map of it if I choose to do so. This might be nicer that mapstraction plug in that I am using already.

If I decided to Blog about a company like Yahoo! or Microsoft or Google the shortcut tool will suggest links to these companies stock tickers.

I can also talk about products like a Palm Treo or BlackBerry Pearl and the shortcut tool will give me product links fro these. Although I think I should get a refferral fee or PPC payout for that.

Lastly the tool will allow you to find and enter Flickr Photos into your post. This is a very handy  way to add photos to your post instead of linking to them

One thing that I don’t like is the the lack or a way to exactly position the size or location of the widget. Your are at the mercy of the tool as to the size and your are limited by the editor on location.  If you only plan to use one or maybe two widgets at a time this is a cool little tool. I plan to keep using it for now but would like to see Yahoo! implement some type of revenue share with the tool especially if it pushed paid for content.

I get Tiger Direct deals in my email inbox once a week so I thought I would post them here to share with everyone.

Here are this weeks deals:

SAVE $50 - eMachines Intel Desktop 3.46GHz WinVista Home Basic Refurbished $199.99

Photoblitz 7″ Wide Screen Digital Picture Frame $59.99

I-Inc iW171ABB 17″ Widescreen LCD Monitor Black $139.99

Optiquest Q19wb-2 19″ Widescreen LCD Monitor Black $169.99* Price after $20 MIR, rebate expires 11/04/07

ViewSonic Refurbished VX2235WM-s 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor Black/Silver $199.99

Intel D945GCNL Motherboard w/Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz processor $249.99

Enjoy the deals!

For the second time this year I am headed out to California. The first time was for Where2.0. This time it is for a company meeting and to celebrate our 10th anniversary. We will be in Anaheim CA and will be going on a boat cruise Friday night. The other time will be spent meeting new people and normal company meeting type stuff. Maybe this time I will at least get to see the ocean.