Ubuntu on the Phone, Ubuntu from the Phone

I have dabbled in the Ubuntu and Linux environment on and off throughout the past few years. I always get excited when they have a new product coming out and I am certainly excited about this here. There are 2 things that Ubuntu wants to do, first is to provide the Ubuntu Phone, which looks like it's built for multitasking which is pretty exciting. The next thing is to allow you to maximize the use of your phone by allowing you to connect it to the Monitor and Keyboard and having the Phone do the heavy lifting of the actual Ubuntu OS running.
This would allow potentially to have just one device for everything, which is kind of mind-bending.
Here's a few vids that I found on YouTube.

It's a celebration People :)

Underemployment just became more popular

How Employment Insurance changes will affect your job search | CanadianBusiness.com

Recent changes to EI eligibility made it compulsory for people to seek low-paying jobs aka McJobs before filing for unemployment benefits. This is the wheel that new Graduates often get stuck in: “Part-time job or 2 part-time jobs to offset the amount of hours that was available to you on one job. “ This may severely slow down the suitable job search for the candidate and result in a longer professional work break between jobs, which increases the risk of having to change career-path, regardless of how unwelcome it may be.

This is highly alarming, as I would expect to have some kind of benefit after I pay for EI throughout my employed period. Looking at this policy change in combination with the abolishment of the mandatory retirement, I am becoming concerned about the financial ability of the government to pay what they “owe” to the working people. You pay for what you don’t get it’s becoming like yet another insurance scam – auto, extended warranty and now employment insurances.  

If this was not the push to treat oneself like a business I don’t know what would do it. I feel like the most appropriate strategy in this job market is to take on finite employment obligations like contracts and always stay looking for the next opportunity, or even open up your own business/practice.

Coming Back

 This past weekend I came back home after being away for almost 7 months. It sounds pretty unreal just thinking about it, but this is yet another testament to the fact that time flies, as I certainly didn’t feel like it was 7 months maybe 2-3 at the most. 

I felt euphoric after my plane landed in Pearson International this Saturday, and I had imagined that coming home would be magical and exciting. It wasn’t that at all. I found that people had lives regardless if I was there or not. I didn’t expect people to drop everything and welcome me back, so this wasn’t as much of a shock for me. The thing that got me the most is the speed of this city.

Everything here just happens fast, especially downtown. I felt a little bit out of sync walking around the city.

A lot of things seem old but unfamiliar, it’s really a unique feeling that you get, I don’t know if there is anything like it. I imagine it would be much more distinct if I travel back to the town that I was born in, as I wasn’t there for 7 years already.

In other words, I am back I want to try to get some writing in so keep an eye out if you are reading this.

Changes to future workspaces?

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/16/2503904/big-changes-coming-to-future-workplace.html

Interesting article that to me read like: “Watch out campus life is coming to work”. This is probably a way they can sell this idea to the decision makers. We tend to forget the negatives from our past and in perspective what was already done seems incredibly simple. Luckily I graduated York University not too long ago and I have a few concerns about the possible trend.

First and foremost, this sounds like it could further endanger work-life balance, even more-so than flexible work schedule. The problem here is that people are given an option to schedule their own time when work is clearly the more important priority because everything depends on our income, hence it would always take precedence. So whenever it gets busy, guess who is sleeping less? Imagine what happens if you have someone pushing the team to achieve more to make themselves look good. The only way this would work is if the corporate structure would change and perhaps more flat power structure, where work could be collaborative and project based.

Now with the 20/20 hindsight would you honestly say that you have been your most productive at school? Not many people can. For whatever reason it may be, this work style certainly didn’t make us more productive.

Do you remember how “awesome” it was to try to align schedules for group work or meetings? I hated that the most about group work. Then you learned that sometimes you have to have group majority meetings and fill someone in after. 

Ergonomics must also be considered, Having a big open space for people to work in creative ways can work, but working on a bean bag chair for 8 hours would quickly make your back hurt.

I do agree that with the environmental push, there is an opportunity to make as much digital and allow for this kind of flexible workspace. I could see myself working in this kind of environment. 

How @safinr watched #PayItForward and wanted to do it with small deeds

Pay it Forward is a movie that has an interesting idea in it: to initiate 3 significant non-reciprocal good deeds. And then ask the people that you have helped to do the same. Pretty much a pyramid for goodness. To critic the movie I'd say that it's a bit too preachy and not really my cup of tea, which did not entice me to watch it until the end. Nevertheless, the idea behind the movie is interesting and is worthy of a post. Especially when I'm feeling guilty about becoming very sporadic with the content on the site.
I am not convinced that this significant deed part of the idea would become adopted, so I am making a compromise and downgrading the significance of the deeds to favor-worthy. So if you help someone out and they pronounce the polite "I owe you one", hold them to it and ask them to spread the compassionate nature and help out 3 other people with the same premise.
If anything this will bring up the conversation about genuine goodness and the innate nature of people. That's one of my favorite topics to discuss.
I believe that this idea is based on Kant's Idea of

universalizabilityThe applicability of a moral rule to all similarly situated individuals. According to both Kant andHare, universalizability is a distinguishing feature of moral judgments and a substantive guide to moralobligation: moral imperatives must be regarded as equally binding on everyone. The force of this principle, however, depends upon the generality of the judgments and the particularity of the situations to which they are applied.

In laymen terms something should be considered moral if you can live with everyone doing it. In this case the movie Pay It Forward tries to create this ideal universalizabal (Emmanuel Kant decided to create new words, so I'm not too certain about how I should use it) Utopian shift in the society. I applaud big and brave ideas, so this is right up there.


Til next time

Competitive use of social media

Competition, survival of the fittest, that’s the essence of business. It inevitably spreads to everything that is associated with business, and with social media being new, it’s about to start appearing there. I would love to see that happen and you should be excited too. Imagine a world where your complaints that are made in the “privacy” of your phone are heard and answered. Imagine writing a quick restaurant review and being invited to a competitor down the street to dine for half-price.
There is an abundance of advocates of social media in business and they are a resilient bunch. As an example,  a few months back I was expecting a delivery from Purolator during the Canada Post strike and I needed to contact customer service. I was dreading the call to the service centre and having to deal with the automated machine and waiting on hold. On their website I have noticed the option to contact their customer service on twitter and I tried it. It was pretty great, I got the answer that I was looking for without using the phone. Here’s the transcript of the interaction  
          

                safinr: @purolatorhelp Can you please tell me where is Toronto (North) depot located?  
                PurolatorHelp: @safinr This is Vincent. To avoid making a mistake, can you email me your tracking number and I will verify? customer.care@purolator.com          
               safinr:  @PurolatorHelp Hey Vincent, it's been awhile what's the status on the Toronto North Location?  I received the needed response shortly after.

Customer service is awesome, but marketing is another area that is great with social media. One of the ways that you can use it competitively is by contacting the dissatisfied customers of the competing business. For example, if you are Second Cup, and you want to offer product to the angry Starbucks customers. What you do is jump on twitter search (I recommend using Hootsuite.com) and look for someone mentioning Starbucks and one other word (damn, messed up, ruined, pissed of, fuck). There’s a good chance that someone will post this disgruntled tweet right after negative experience happened so emotional words are very likely don’t be afraid to search for it.
Here’s an screenshot of the search that I did.

Take a look at the tweet circled in blue, she seems like a great candidate for a competitive marketing campaign. Why not contact her and give her a free drink coupon to Second Cup? She might end up switching to Second Cup for coffee, or will tweet about this positive experience, or will come to Second Cup with other paying customers.

Now take a look at the tweet circled in red, she is talking about intention to switch, why not give her an extra incentive to switch to Second Cup instead? Send her free coffee too, and good things will happen.

I personally don’t have a preference for any coffee dealer, mainly because I make a mean coffee at home.

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New Blogger Interface

Just opened up my dashboard and was prompted to try out the new interface. I see that they are trying to streamline all the Google products to have the similar design, and I love it. Google+ has influenced plenty of pleasant changes. Google Docs's interface is particularly spectacular. I have long been an early adopter of the Google products. I am excited to see the Google Reader update, which is screaming for an updating, knowing that there are plenty of other services that have better interfaces. El Goog!

Top 5 reasons to join a professional student club council.

1.       Opportunity to meet people. University may seem overly task and grade focused if you don’t find ways to enhance your University experience with other activities. Student club is a perfect place to meet people that you may otherwise not meet on campus. They may be from different majors or from different years and overall just people that you do not gravitate toward naturally. This is a great opportunity to meet people based on your interest, and develop these interests into passions together.

2.       Develop your soft skills. Yes you can make an argument that being in university alone develops your soft skills and perhaps many things that involve dealing with people develop your soft skills and that you don’t really need to join a professional student club to improve them. However, being involved in something that you are passionate about and that you enjoy doing and learning about will certainly give you motivation to participate and get the most out of your involvement. For example, you can certainly exercise at home, but being in the gym will give you extra motivation for reaching your set targets. That’s an interesting slogan: “Professional student club, it’s like a gym for your interests”

3.       Crystallize your interests and career objectives. Building on the previous point, leaning into your interests would enable you to find out more about the profession. The more you learn about different specializations of your profession the more determined you become as your goal in your career becomes clearer. You are starting to paint a big picture perspective for yourself, and most of all you start to figure out which place you would like to fit yourself in after graduation.

4.       Network with people in your industry. Professional student clubs are usually somehow connected to outside organizations, either through personal connections or more formal sponsorships and partnerships. This is a good setting to meet the people from these organizations. Also, and perhaps more important are the connections made at the council, as your colleagues have seen you in action and likely have plenty of good things to say about you. Also they are likely to be in the same field of work as you, so that just increases your network of professionals.

5.       Improve your grades. Although surprising but virtually guaranteed correlation exists between being involved in a student professional student club and the scholarly achievements. Usually people that are involved with professional student clubs are the people that prefer to stay busy and hence are good at prioritizing their tasks. This quality is certainly developed rather than innate, as I can say with certainty that I have developed that trait myself when I was involved in the professional student clubs and studies and worked part time. The key here is to find the balance and maintain the focus on pursuing your passion.

To find out more about the clubs that I was involved in you can view my LinkedIn profile, which is connected to the badge on the right hand side of this page. Feel free to connect with me over LinkedIn if you wish.

Daily Wave, April 6th

The Human Resource Manager Movie
So there have been a few movie out there that have HR manager or someone doing HR related task as the protagonist, but this movie is titled the HR manager, which is pretty new to me. It's also a foreign film, which usually means that people likely put in effort to make this movie. Since there are more hurdles for foreign movies to show up here (Canada/US), we really get just the best from the best. I found this movie here http://hrauthority.ca/human-resource-management/the-human-resources-manager-trailer

For quick access: