Trick or treat!!! How about some treats? As part of my website and blog redesign, I’m using today to kick off my new feature “Friday Freebies”. Every Friday, I’ll be posting links to good, free webcasts, seminars, ebooks, whitepapers, videos, and cool downloads that I find interesting or useful. I hope you’ll enjoy Friday Freebies. Here’s the first batch of treats for you to enjoy:
Earlier this month, I was relatively unimpressed with Microsoft’s new ad campaign I’m a PC. I thought it lacked originality and really was just trying to play catch up with Apple. It seemed like an attempt to candy coat the issues Microsoft is having with Vista by using clever advertising. Apparently, the folks at Apple thought the same thing. This week, Apple released two ads poking fun at Microsoft spending $300 million on their ad campaign instead of fixing the problems in Vista. Here are the two ads:
These days, it’s not unusual for development or product teams to be geographically dispersed. It could be that your team members work on different floors, in different buildings, in different states, or even in different countries. Although I believe that collocation provides the greatest advantage in terms of high performing teams, it’s a reality that we have to find ways for distributed teams to become just as productive as collocated teams.
Ronica Roth, one of my colleagues here at Rally, recently suggested that our team try using Second Life to provide our team with a sense of collocation. Our team has several “remote” team members, and those that are “collocated” are frequently on travel. We rarely get to see each other in person. So, I find the idea of using Second Life for virtual meetings and collaboration intriguing. From the looks of it, we’ll probably give it a try and see how it works. I’ll keep you posted on our successes and/or failures with Second Life.
Do you work from home a lot? Have kids that like to sit on your lap and bang on the keyboard? Yup, we’ve all been there…it’s fun. Well, now your little developer can really do something cool when he bangs on your keyboard. While working from home today, I discovered the latest cool thing created by Scott Hanselman called Baby Smash! According to Scott:
“As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen. Baby Smash will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can’t get out of the application. I wrote BabySmash! for my 2 year old and 5 month old so they could bang on the keyboards of my Windows machines without hurting anything.”
