Source: https://blog.miproconsulting.com/category/nerdery/page/2/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 19:44:59+00:00

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Posted May 16, 2014 by Jeff V.
Posted May 14, 2014 by Jeff V.
This is fantastic on so many levels. Be sure to check out Vigen’s other examples. Great stuff. This is an idea I wish I had.
Posted April 30, 2014 by Jeff V.
I first heard about personal outsourcing in Tim Ferriss’ book The Four-Hour Workweek. The idea is simple: take certain parts of your life and outsource them to a digital assistant overseas at an almost negligible cost. This frees you up to learn something, start a side business, or travel.
This idea taken another notch further is called ‘personal shadow outsourcing.” This is essentially where someone takes their entire job, outsources it overseas, and collects a paycheck for doing essentially nothing except for the bare minimums to keep up appearances that they are in fact doing their job. Neat idea, but nobody actually did it. It’s all been the stuff of lunchtime rumors.
“As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average 9 to 5 work day. Investigators checked his web browsing history, and that told the whole story.
Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area.
What busted Bob? Browser history.
Kevin Kelly, in his blog post, attaches a Dilbert strip from August 3, 2003, and it couldn’t be more apropos.
Posted March 17, 2014 by Jeff V.
Increasingly, I have taken to using Google Drive for document creation and collaboration. Last week, Google announced add-ons for Google Docs (text documents) and Sheets (spreadsheets).
What’s interesting to me is that we’re now at a point where web apps are more easily extensible and customizable than desktop apps. Way of the future.
Are We Close to a Cashless Society?
I can remember my parents telling me that someday we would not use cash. I can remember people telling me that pennies would be obsolete (I can also remember my accounting teacher telling me that every penny counts). Yet these all seemed about as far away as some of the things I saw in an episode of the Jetsons.
But today, I think we are reaching that point, and I might be one of the first to hop aboard that train. I remember the days of direct deposit. Just let payroll put the money in your bank account? You still dont have Fitfth Third checking account? Oh boy. Then we encountered electronic bill payments. You are going to trust the internet? I don’t. And of course the credit card changed how we did things. I can use a credit card at the gas pump? All by myself? And now we have the debit card. I can charge things directly against the same account that receives my paycheck and without writing anything. Oh, and who can forget our new ability to scan and deposit a check from a smartphone?
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I bet you are.
All of these are great, and clear signs of technology changing our lives, but I found something new. I routinely travel for work, so keeping separate credit cards so I can segregate my personal and professional life is just part of the routine…until now.
Watch this video from a company called Coin and tell me if you could not only sense your wallet getting thinner, but a revolution taking place. I still think the cashless endgame will be apps for the smartphone that eventually take over the concept of swiping a card, after all, those same apps are the ones that can invoke advanced security (like a fingerprint), but for now, this may just be the next step. A digital credit card, massively expandable, that replaces every single magnetic-striped card you have in your wallet or purse.
Personally, I don’t think I can be totally cashless because I still feel obliged to tip the bellman, but who knows…maybe someday he’ll have a card reader for his smartphone like Square.
Now, when do I get the flying car, George?
Posted January 27, 2014 by Jeff V.
If you’re about to buy a new hard drive for whatever reason, Backblaze (the online backup company…which I highly recommend, by the way) has published an excellent roundup of hard drive deployment and reliability data. It attempts to answer the question, “What hard drive should I buy?” and succeeds spectacularly.
Don’t miss the whole article. Very well done, and super informative from a buying decision standpoint.
When people talk about operational transparency, this is a great example of what they mean.
Posted January 17, 2014 by Jeff V.
A little while ago, I told you about a device that brought some super useful data to my health and fitness awareness: the Fitbit. I won’t go into it again, but suffice to say that nearly a year later, I still use the Fitbit every day, for nearly every activity.
Today, I’d like to tell you about something else I like that’s very much in the same category as the Fitbit.
I train with an online coach, and he requests body composition data from time to time. So to make that happen, I bought a Withings WS–50 Smart Body Analyzer, which is a very fancy way of saying WiFi-enabled scale. But it’s more than a scale: in addition to weight, it tracks bodyfat percentage (using bioelectrical impedance), heart rate, indoor temperature and air quality (measured in CO2 parts per million, or PPM).
For $150, you have the ability to collect data that five years ago would have cost you hundreds of dollars per month to obtain.

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