Payscale is going after salary freaks with a vengeance and as if to rub salt on some sore wounds, it won the top HR product of the year award for 2006.

Just as restless employee eyeballs are scourging the internet for better pay packages and greener pastures around, employers are ‘known’ to be looking for ways to keep themselves competitive in the package arena by not only meeting the industry standards but also offering ‘french’ compendiums (mostly enmasse through things like say, discounts on their products or free food ) that help them stand apart.

Payscale promises to take the game to the next mini-step by providing extra attention to minutae such as certifications for software engineers (like they matter), fill-ins for employee names and Employer’s product besides a nifty column, section for intangible perks such as …

Bringing together a community has become very important these days. Simpley because ,in a community you might have a lot of like minded people and others expressions might be important to others.But asking everyone to write at one place can not be always possible.The planetplanet offers a wonderful yet very very simple solution. The rss aggregator with a templating engine.
What planet does it ,it simple fetches all the contents or feeds from various blogs (All blogs do have a rss feed basically a simple XML file with predefined or globaly used tags ,so that it can be easy to parse) .and when the content is fetched just use a simle html template generator,and put it on to the web .A solution that i applied to my institute wherein we fetch all the blogs by students and it provides an amazing read to look what our own friends have to say about things happening in and around us. Same solution can be applied to projects especially when they are colobarated over the internet.Where all the developers blog can be read at one single place and it does not take much space too ,as the engine does not save pages or images it simples keeps them in static html file overwritten everytime a feed is fetched.
Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) a project that i have been working with for 4 months now uses planet to read all developers blog ,given we have people from china too. you can check them at ldtp planet .
Unfortunately it doesnt come with a installation manual on the web although they have put in a READ ME in download directory .
Although you can check out a installation READ ME here

Now a lot of you must have seen Microsoft launch its live local service that lets you obtain images of most locations in the united states. I definitely liked the ideas like bird’s eye view and scratch pad that they came up with. Chandu Thota has written some more details about this service on his blog but there was a lack of information in the launch that caught my attention!

I tried getting bird’s eye view of some locations in and around mountain view…service did not work for me … now I know that microsoft is trying to get more than just a bird’s eye view of the mountain view folks these days!! struck me as quite an Irony that their new maps service did not offer them in my first attempt though

After a few minutes, it was back to normal again and I could see some good 40 degree views of the san francisco downtown! I like this service!

What is the worlds deadliest job? Is it fire fighting those deadly forest fires and homes ? Is it highway patrol? Is it hunting in Africa? Is it cleaning the mosaic of a sky scraper or radio towers on top? Is it owning a fortune making business in latin america with the potential to get kidnapped and killed? It is drug dealing? or is it preaching gospel in the third world ?

If you saw the stream of discovery episodes on Thanksgiving atleast for a few minutes, you know the answer by now! Apparently, it is Alaskan crab fishing !!

More than once, I found myself sitting at work and wondering what could be more demanding than this while I knew I could not be more wrong!

Alaskan crab legs are a delicacy known throughout the world. Few people know, however, that an year’s worth of Alaskan crab supply for the world is caught in a week’s span. The location is the freezing deep sea waters of bering sea (between Alaskan islands and russian peninsula). Its winter time. Temperatures are below freezing. Its time to catch the King crab and rake in $5 per pound!! crab fishing teams are getting ready to sail into the fishing grounds some 100 miles east of King cove, AK!!

They know that if the 19-40 foot rogue waves of the sea did not sweep them off the boats and hypothermia did not kill them in less than 2 minutes, they are 100% likely to suffer injuries while handling one of the 800-pound steel cages called crab pots that they use to trap crab! Oh, and medication is not far away…they will get medical help once they get back to the shores which is not before the hunt ends!!

Still, the bounty is big enough to entice a hand few fishermen every year to try their luck in this risky proposition! Nearly one man (out of the hand-few on those boats) dies every week but those 5-days of work at sea could be worth upto 10-20 grand per deck hand!

Its kind of disheartening for these adventure lovers that the ration system will kick in from next season. So, every boat gets a pre-fixed piece of the pie, thereby reducing the risk that these people tend to take to grab as much as they could.

Next time I get my work jitters, I can take respite in the fact I am not an Alaskan crab fisherman who spends that week of deadly winter in Alaska on one of those boats that rake in 2 million pounds of Alaskan crab in a week’s span.