Technology Blog

Last week, and internet junkie friend had the “wisdom” to introduce to me a game that has kept me up at night. Err, or should I say many nights. Every once in a while, a game will capture my interest.

Flash Element TD is high addictive. It’s a flash game inspired by World of Warcraft. I’ve never played warcraft personally but something about the simplicity of this online version stuck with me.

The second part of this story fascinated my somewhat fledging internet marketing heart.

Critters aka David Scott, the creator of this game also decided to keep his fans apprised of his webserver stats, requesting donations to offset the bandwidth costs of keeping this game up. Given the obvious popularity of this game, that’s not surprising. The stats alone fascinated me The number of hits went from 13,000 the first day to over 1.5 million hits about 2 weeks later. WOW! Talk about a killer app!

There’s rumours about a newer version coming out in March. Until then, I challenge anyone who suffers from insomnia to beat my score. No, I didn’t cheat, but I’m sure if you google for tips you’ll find a ton of blogs offering lots and lots of tips on how to get top scores in this game.

Check out my best score.

Welcome to Tech Jobs. I’m adding this blog to the site mostly for fun, to write about anything technology related. The main website is mostly a listing of the latest job opportunities found on the internet.

A Brief History in Time: I’ve been telecommuting on and off since 1997. My first real venture into this foray started after the first dot com company I worked for, was sold to another dot com company in Toronto in 1997. Back then, the concept of telecommuting was hardly something that companies really embraced. In fact, the company I worked for made a friggin JOKE out of the concept of “outsourcing”. Their version and vision of outsourcing was not about branching out into the global economy. In fact, outsourcing for this company meant hiring a more expensive marketing firm from the United States. The result of this move, practically bankrupt the company (resulting in a buy out). Although I didn’t lose my job as a technical support analyst, I was “encouraged” to move to the new company, a full 4 hour daily commute, with absolutely no new compensation in terms of salary.

I put my foot down and requested that I telecommute from home. After all, with the internet, and my abilities to answer technical questions via email with positive results from our clients, it made sense. The new company agreed however within a few weeks, I was encouraged to come into work more often than what was agreed.

I quit with no regrets.

Since 1999, 2 years after I first quit my job I’ve been telecommuting with mixed results, not to mention mixed opinions! At university, one of the first snarky comments I received from a fellow student after I told them I was going to get into internet marketing was: well if it is that easy why doesn’t everyone do it? I wasn’t impressed with her to say the least.

8 years later, I do have an answer: telecommuting is not an option for everyone. I hardly thought it was an option for me on a fulltime basis but if I’ve been at this thing this long, I must be doing something right. But can anyone do it? The old adage “your mileage will vary” is certainly applicable here.

More on this another time. Enjoy the site.