jobs

The problem with insidery satire is that you're leaving a good portion of your audience in the dark. Almost anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley over the past 15 years, however, will find something to laugh at in Options, the debut novel from Fake Steve Jobs due out November 1.

It's not The Bonfire of the Vanities or anything, but Daniel Lyons--the Forbes reporter behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog--has produced a delightful send-up of Valley culture, celebrity CEOs and the inscrutable mix of enlightenment and paranoia that's thought to inhabit the brain of the real … Read more

Apple even finds a hip way to make amends.

The company will send a $100 store credit for early iPhone buyers directly as an SMS text message to the iPhone. To be eligible, the phone must have been purchased before August 22 and service needs to be activated on the device to claim the credit.

The move is aimed at placating early iPhone buyers irked by the fact Apple shaved $200 off the price of the gadget roughly two months after its introduction.

Devices purchased between August 22 and September 4 are eligible to get $200 refunded because of Apple'… Read more

Remember the red paper clip guy?

Well, now there are two other guys using the Internet community to find not a house but a dream job.

Instead of reading Po Bronson or a book on metaphorical parachutes, wouldn't it be nice if you could try different jobs on for size--and meet the sorts of people who do those jobs--before you committed?

In exchange for what basically amounts to publicity on the One Week Job Web site, Sean Aiken asks employers to allow him to test drive a job for one week so that he can see if the job … Read more

I'm following the special "Beat Goes On" event being put on by Apple this morning in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Here are my first reactions....

Do-it-yourself ringtones for the iPhone. Great idea, but I want to be able to do it with any song in my iTunes library, not just songs I've purchased from iTunes. And only 500,000 songs are approved for this usage. And you have to pay an additional $0.99 per ringtone, in addition to buying the song. Kind of a snooze. I've seen people hack together custom ringtones from … Read more

When was the last time you said something but meant another, or embellished the truth just a bit? Even the most honest and straightforward of us do it from time to time.

Sometimes we're trying to save face or spare somebody's feelings. Other times we're trying to make ourselves appear better than we really are.

I suspect that most of the time we're trying to save ourselves from something unpleasant by telling ourselves it's for the other person's good.

Call them euphemisms, embellishments, little white lies, spinning the truth, exaggerations, whatever you like. They're common in the workplace and everybody's guilty. You can either admit it or not, but if you say "not me," we all know you're lying.

There must be thousands of workplace euphemisms; I invite you to share your favorites with us. Here are some common ones that come to mind, just to get us started:

Hiring and firing You said, "We welcome you to the company." You meant, "We can't wait to dump all this crap on you."

You said, "I've got offers from a few other companies." You meant, "I had one other interview but they never called back."… Read more

Miss out on that Lego minifigure of Steve Wozniak that came out a couple of years ago? No worries. Now you can buy a Lego-ized Woz and gets Steve Jobs for free.

The Young Woz and Jobs Playset, the latest limited-edition custom minifig product from Rockville, Md.-based PodBrix, goes on sale Wednesday at 9 p.m. EDT. If you're into Apple-related Lego tzotchkes, you might want to act fast. Only 300 will be available.

Created by an artist named Tomi--also of 1984 Playset fame--each $40 set contains a young version of Jobs and a super-smiley Woz standing beside … Read more

Monty Python couldn't have come up with a more annoying routine than the infamous spam sketch. But way back in the psychedelic 70s, the comedy troupe couldn't possibly have imagined the disgust and frustration the word "spam" would elicit today, especially among IT professionals.

I managed to defeat hordes of telemarketers by signing up for the national do-not-call registry. But when it comes to spam, I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm ready to throw in the towel and become a computerless monk. I feel like less of a man because I couldn't protect my family from this deadly menace.

Maybe 2% of my emails are actually addressed to me personally. The rest are garbage: spams and scams of every shape, size, and flavor. They run the gamut from those offering me supposedly hot stock picks, loans, and drugs, to others concerned with the size and effectiveness of my manhood.… Read more

What's so good about good sound? Who gives a crap? Strolling around Apple's oh-so-cool Fifth Avenue emporium in Manhattan, taking in the screechy din of countless cute-as-a-button iPod speakers, you'd have to conclude no one. Apple's temple is flush with style, but the sound is, in my opinion, flat out dreadful. OK, it's a showroom and hardly the sort of environment conducive to a quality listening experience, but even so, the priorities disparity is jarring. With most iPod speakers hovering around $100 to $200, you'd have to conclude that's what sells: a tinny … Read more

InfoWorld's Tom Yager tries his prima ballerina slippers on:

Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It's just a matter of patience.

Hubris, thy name is Yager.

Despite its successful initial launch, Yager apparently thinks the iPhone will fail if you just give it long enough. Well, good luck with that one, Tom. Although, the horned one should point out that only one of you and Jobs is going … Read more