slamboard

A 2006 study said that 2% of the American workforce telecommutes full time while 9% do it at least part time. It went on to say that 25% of jobs could potentially be carried out at home and that the savings related to less commuting would be a whooping $3.9 BILLION. Since fuel prices have skyrocketed, it is safe to assume that the potential savings are much higher today.

George Bush asserted that reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil was an essential part of it’s plan for a more peaceful world. I think his angle was to press for more drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico so his buddies could get richer. I don’t pretend to be an expert on US energy or environmental policies I just think he’s a weasel.

Governments could easily put legislation in place that would incentivize companies and employees to embrace telecommuting. They could probably glean the best strategies from companies like IBM.

Just last week I sat in the car waiting for a ferry while Catherine sat beside me working on her laptop with a newly purchased 3G connection. It’s pretty cool. Since we work at home, taking a laptop on a trip is a carefully considered decision. If there are no anticipated waits, if there is no pressing business, then it could be like carrying around an 8 1/2 pound, three figure brick.

iPhone could go 3G soon and Nokia may beat them to the punch.

Source for this post: Washington Post

Blogging during a long flight may soon be commonplace. Several airlines are looking into the idea of offering wireless service to its passengers. At the moment it will be limited to email, instant messaging and Blackberry services. If the level of service that they are talking about becomes an industry standard, I would expect developers to create applications that piggyback on the enabled services and allow you to do more. You can already send blog posts through email with some services. I have never done that because I have never needed to do it.

In the USA, there are some pundits who hold outsourcing as a major pet peeve. They are voicing a popular opinion. Americans don’t like to see skilled work being sold to the lowest bidder outside their borders.

Big business feels some pressure to apease this peeve as much as possible. Yesterday I noticed a transcription company that employs people both domestically and in the Philippines. They offer their clients a choice of employing a blend of both. I have to wonder if some large clients have a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy with regard to outsourcing.

The best thing about broadband phone service from Comcast is that you get a ton of features.

Every package includes unlimited local and direct-dialed long distance calling. I have a service that includes this feature and it saves me a lot of stress when my teenage kids are talking on the phone for hours.

Call waiting is a feature that come in pretty handy as well. We occasionally use three-way calling for business reasons. We are in a very different timezone from most of our extended family, so voice mail saves us a lot of missed calls.

All the other features like speed dialing, auto redial, call return, standard and selective call forwarding, caller ID, call waiting ID, incoming call block, anonymous call rejection and caller ID blocking are nice to have just in case you need them. I don’t have caller ID with the service that I am presently using. That is frustrating sometimes. We run a small business out of our home and even though we live where we work, we don’t want to give any clients the impression that we offer 24/7 support. It’s bad enough that we work 18 hours a day sometimes. I should work on a script for a voice mail message that is polite and business like. It would be much better than answering the phone when I am half asleep and mad at the caller even though I don’t know who it is.

Something else that is great for Comcast customers is the savings that can be had by bundling telephone service in with other services that Comcast offers.

We rely on our VoIP service for some business communications. If Skype had been our chosen provider, we would have had a BAD day yesterday. Some Skype users are reporting 14 hours with no service.

I had just written a fairly positive sentence or two about customer satisfaction. I then went to Wikipedia and saw that Skype is under some heavy criticism by some people for unresponsive customer service and other issues. That is understandable for such a large service. My only complaint as a non-Skyper is that Joost didn’t work for me.

Another public domain picture to brighten up my blog. Departure of the Amazons, a painting by Claude Deruet from 1620 isn’t very bright and it doesn’t look as much like a screen shot from Xena as I had hoped.

Amazon is departing from their tried and true business model by offering to process payments for other websites. You might think this is tantamount to a declaration of war against PayPal. In reality the entry of Google onto the payment service scene was more of a driving factor, according to people who know more than me about this stuff. I earn some revenues that come to me via PayPal, but I hardly ever buy anything using their service. I awarded a $10 prize for a contest on my personal blog this morning. It is shocking just how quick and easy it is to give people my money.

Source: LapTop Logic

The field of medical transcription is an interesting job market. There is a huge demand for qualified people. There is a huge supply of qualified people. The catch is that not everyone who takes a course and gets a certificate has the skills and aptitude to become an accomplished transcriber. Additionally, there are many health care professionals who want to make a lateral move into medical transcription jobs for personal reasons.

MedicalTranscriptionJobs.org is a blog that features legitimate employment opportunities and job hunting advice for people who are looking for works at home medical transcription opportunities.

Having a To Do list that is specifically for things that can be performed without internet access is a very smart thing to do. I haven’t done this yet. We actually had a 14 hour power outage recently and my wife and I did a lot of filing and organizing. I prioritized list is useful, especially when you do not know how long you will be without internet and/or power.

If you are at your place of work and an ISP outage disrupts your work, think about whether there are any documents that you should read. Consider some hard drive housekeeping. Planning or training meetings are an option.

If you works at home, actual housework, sleep, personal hygeine, playtime, sexual relations, phone correspondence etc. are just a few of the things to which you could devote some extra time.

DON’T PLAY SOLITAIRE.

The solitaire game that comes with Windows has a measurable effect on GDP. I AM serious.

I am not going to get into specifics and name names with this post. I just want to relate something to you in the form o a story.

I spend part of my day looking through a plethora of WAH job postings and publishing suitable ones on a website. Some posting that show up in the feeds are obviously scams. Exclamation marks are usually a dead giveaway and, sadly the word legitimate is also a red flag.

Some postings look perfectly good and I only find out when I follow the links that they end up at a site that is just designed to generate adsense money. I was suspicious that some of these postings were copy and pasting text from real jobs elsewhere to be more effective. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw one with a paragraph from OUR site. Grrrr…