Peterbe.com

Sorry about the cryptic title. My actual salary has not gone down but if you are to believe this chart the salary (in the US) for "Web programmer/developer (back end systems)" has gone down with 2.2% in the last five years but actually gone up by 8.2% in the last year.

What is quite interesting is that of "Content developer" which has seen a rise of 6.5% in the last five years. I guess that's the blogging. More and more people get employed now just to blog about a particular industry. This seems to be a modern trend that we'll see more and more of now that setting up a blog of your own is so much easier (I wrote mine from scratch :). I wonder where these "content developers" come from; their individual technical industries such as programming or design or if they come from literary background like book writing.

Anyway, looks like the general trend is that all salaries have gone up from 2004 to 2005.

A new feature has just recently been added to MOBi Phonebook that I developed for our client (the owners of MOBi) for free in my spare time.

The reason for this is that I use MOBi myself a lot and I needed an easy way to export my contacts and later be able to import it again. So I used the Excel HTML solution and simply added a bit of formatting to it. It opens in right up in Excel (or like in my case, OpenOffice oocalc) which makes it damn easy to edit the contacts.

If you need to put this back into MOBi you have to save your spreadsheet as a comma separated CSV file. Fortunately that importing is pretty smart. It can add and update new data and everything it can't handle (conflicts) it shows you for manual editing.

My kind company just gave me a little gift to make our office environment less noisy. A pair of Bose noise reduction headphones. Click here for a picture

I was sceptic at first thinking that noise reduction will work but only in such a small way that one might as not bother. Boy was I wrong! It actually only really works if you play music through them. Unsurprisingly the sound quality is stunning (wouldn't expect less for that price :) and when you play music it starts to look like people are miming and you stop hearing little noises like tapping the keyboard, distant phones ringing and air conditioners. From now I'll have to keep my mobile in my pocket so that I can feel it vibrating because I've missed a call when the mobile was on my desk and I didn't notice at all.

They really work! A word of warning though, not having music is pointless. Noise is reduced but you can actually hear the headphones themselfs in a strange way. It's difficult to explain but it sort of rings in your ears like when you exit a nightclub and come somewhere it's quiet. If you don't want music and just quiet, just buy some ear plugs

Last week we had a company meeting to talk about all kinds of stuff. I raised the issue that I wanted the company to pay for my phone usage and SMS I send. I followed up by saying that I will get the itemised bill from Orange to estimate how much of my phone bill is work related (i.e. that Fry-IT should pay for). My boss then said: "Don't worry. Just give us the bills and we'll pay for the whole thing." But I chose to reject that saying that I only want Fry-IT to pay for work related calls and SMS; not private stuff.

So I was offered to have a "free company contract" but I chose not to. That's company loyalty.

I've just uploaded a picture I took yesterday of my collegues at Fry-IT.

The Fry-IT website is found on: www.fry-it.com