Reflection

Nigel James reflects on 20 years since he left school with an invitation to his 20 year reunion back in Australia. Yes I agree Nigel a 13 hour flight is shorter than 26, but when you are in the middle of a 9 hour flight anything over 2 hours makes you feel like a sardine! :-)James’s last paragraph made me think, very soon it will be 20 years since I left high school as well, what have I done?

All this sort of stuff can tend to make you a bit reflective and could tip one into a mid-life crisis if you let it! It certainly drags some of the memories back and makes you think about the next 20 years. This is a good thing. I certainly have lot to be thankful for and while there are good memories back there and it would be great to catch up with all the guys 20 years on, I am focusing on the next 20. There is far too much going on at the moment to be pining for the good-old-days. The future is bright…

Stop and reflect on the last 20 years give yourself a quick performance review.

Area

Rating 1 to 5

where 1 is poor & 5 is great
Finances
Housing
Education
Career
Friendships
Health

How did you go? I have put this reflection on the list to do during my upcoming weekly review.

Photowalking Hong Kong

I packed our digital camera for the trip up to Hong Kong, normally I don’t take a camera on business trips, not sure why just not something I have got into the habit of.

This time with the camera I am planning to do a photowalk in Hong Kong on either Saturday 19th May or Sunday 20th May. Over the next couple of days I will do some research and reflection on where and post later in the week on my plans. Initial thoughts jump on the Star ferry over to Kwooloon or through Wanchai and up Victoria Peak, in addition there will be an evening walk through Mong Kok or Temple St markets.

All welcome if you happen to be in Hong Kong.

On my way to Hong Kong

For the next 10 days I will be in Hong Kong, initially attending a week long residential leadership training course, then a day in our Hong Kong office. During this time things will be fairly busy so I won’t really be here, therefore I have decided to pre write a few posts on my flight to Hong Kong.

I left home at 6:15am this morning after getting to bed just after 1am, jumped the 8am flight to Sydney and transfered onto QF127 to Hong Kong. Over the last few hours I have been reading the May CIO Magazine and there will be some posts based on some of the articles “greening” of data centres, very important these days, covered 7 top tips in recruiting IT talent, what Gen Y really want written by Gen Y (this included a quote from Shannon Seery Gude and a reference to EXCELER8ion.com), and how to make an impact in the first 90 days of your new job. I need to read the Australian CIO score card for 2007, maybe another post, the article seems to highlight SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) very heavily, and indicate CIO who where using got paid more.

In addition to these posts I have an idea for a post on change management, more on SOA and a Web 2.0 coming to the enterprise which I have been mulling over for many weeks.

I have a fully charged iPod, 2 laptop batteries, feeds loaded and 9 hours ahead of me so let’s see what I get done.

Google searching trends

The Google Australia blog has an interesting post on the searching trends/patterns of Australians, the post provides some insight into what make Australian’s tick.

The way we search is in some ways not surprising. Proportionally, Australians do the most searches for meat pies, Aussie Rules, sunshine, sunburn, sea change, air conditioning, beer, Torana, snake, water restrictions, roast lamb, quit smoking, backyard, child care, kids and almost all of the searches for cubby house. Melbournians search for spring carnival, Sydney-siders search for harbour and red wine, and the good folk of Brisbane search for lifesavers and cattle dog. In Canberra they want a home loan and in Perth they’re all looking for mine jobs. 

Playing around with Google Trends I found some of my own interesting trends.

First up why is recruiting so popular in Iraq, or that job boards are so popular in Canada, and in Australia for that matter?  Even more interesting searching for human resources is most popular in Zimbabwe of all places, or what is in Johannesburg to make performance management so popular?  My take on this is if you are in HR and in the US, leave for the Middle East, or Africa or come down under.

On the tech side of the house, open source is very popular in Bangalore, the centre of the unified communications market seems to be in Singapore and frisco.  Where as Vista seems to be very popular in Portugal and Venezuela.  The PS3 most popular in Japan (no surprise), same with the Wii, however the UK and Puerto Rico have dibs on the XBox 360.  Finally Twitter is most popular in Italy.

Is the IT job marketplace expanding or contracting?

There are 3 related articles in this week’s Australian IT on the state of the IT job market in Australia.

First up it seems since Easter IT jobs adverts have decreased across all IT sectors:-

Olivier Group director Robert Olivier said vacancies in all IT&T job categories fell last month, with the exception of desktop support and help-desk roles, which increased by 4.91 per cent. :

But it seems year over year the number of jobs

The IT&T sector recorded a total of 33,383 online vacancies in April, compared with 22,652 for the same time last year.

Let’s not forget the IT Graduate market which also seems to be growing:-

The IT graduate market continued to grow throughout last month, with vacancies rising by 5.92 per cent, compared with the overall average increase of 5.88 per cent.

Regardless of if the market expended or contracted last month it is going to grow. How? Well Google is looking to double it’s Australian workforce to help it hit $500 million in local revenue, and in the meantime probably send Sensis broke.

The company has a job vacancy list of more than 80, about 30 of which are engineering roles for the recently commissioned local research facility, Google Asia-Pacific chief Richard Kimber said.

The company wanted “a couple of hundred” engineers for the local facility, whose role was to develop Google Maps, he said.

Let’s not forget the Federal Budget being handed down tonight, many are hoping for a windfall in the government section. We all know the government likes to spend up really big on IT projects.

links for 2007-05-05

Interesting Letters

I Stumbled Upon a great rejection letter sent by a candidate who did not get the job they were applying for, who knows if it is true but is funny.  Have a read of the full letter but the first paragraph cracked me up!

Thank you for your letter of March 16.  After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.

For more funny letters, check out JobsJobsJobs.com.au’s spoof QuitQuitQuit.com.au.

Australia Top 100 blogs, I’m in the list

A bit of self promotion here.

The updated Top 100 Australian blogs is out and for some strange reason I have made #38 very surprised! Behind the likes of Ben Barren and Duncan Riley (no surprises there), but ahead of Trevor Cook #43, Frank Arrigo #89, WTF?? Must be a mistake in the calculations.

I’m fairly sure as Meg adds more blogs to the list I will drop out of the Top 100, but in the meantime I will enjoy the status. 🙂

More on the sale of jobs.com.au

In an interesting turn of events in the sale of the jobs.com.au domain.

The original post on the Now Hiring blog has been taken down, however the post is still available in Google’s cache.  In an email from Brett Iredale this morning he indicated that the post was removed at the request of a couple of the bidders as the process is still underway.  Brett indicated that he will most likely repost in a few days.

A comment made by Richard Ellender questioned if the domain name could even be sold.  I spent a quick bit of time researching this today and it looks like sale of a .au domain name is prohibited under the auDA rules, from section 2 from policy 2005-05:-

2.3 It is possible for a registrant to transfer their domain name licence to another party, but only in the circumstances set out in auDA’s Transfers Policy (Policy No 2004-03). A registrant who attempts to “sell” their domain name licence should be aware that such a transaction will not fall within the circumstances set out in the Transfers Policy, and therefore the domain name will not be transferred to the other party.

However the domain can be transferred as per policy 2004-03 section 3.1

(iii) where the registrant is a legal entity, the registrant is liquidated or enters into administration and the liquidator or administrator authorises the transfer of the domain name licence to the proposed new registrant; or

AND

c) the transfer does not constitute a breach of the prohibition on sale of a domain name by a registrant (auDA Published Policy 2002-24).

I am sure lawyers have ways of getting around this, it’s not really a sale of the domain name, more its the “sale of the IP around the name oh and let’s also transfer it at the same time”.

$200K+ for a domain name?

The NowHiring blog is saying (UPDATE: Blog post has been removed, see next post for why) that the value of the offers for jobs.com.au are over $200K!

I can confirm that yesterday we placed a last minute bid of $20,000 for the domain via an email to the administrators. They told me the bidding had been extended from Friday April 27th to COB last night (Wed May 2). This morning I called to see if we were in the running and was informed that we were not in the running and that we would need to get over the $200k mark.

I don’t know, I never bought a high profile domain but as I have been saying that seems way too much money.

Thoughts anyone?