Work for Amazon from home

This seems to good to not pass on.  Amazon's customer service department (supporting everything from digital products like the Kindle to more standard order questions) has "work from home" openings in both agent and management positions for both part time and full time.  Check out http://www.amazon.com/csjobs.  While I'm not involved with the customer service side of the business, I'm happy to speak the many merits of working for Amazon.  Seems like could be a great opportunity for college students out there and/or stay-at-home mom's.

Microsoft Document Connection's Cache Location

If you are in the rough place of having to engage with Microsoft SharePoint on a Mac, you're hopefully at least using Microsoft Document Connection (MDC).  While this is still much improved over checking documents in and out from the browser, the experience isn't flawless, and I've had cases where after saving and closing an Office document, I get some error message that my file wasn't saved back to the server.  When this occurs, I have wanted to hunt down where MDC is caching files to hopefully recover manually.  Quick Google searches yielded no results, but found this through Activity Monitor.  MDC caches files at:

~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/14.0/Document\ Connection/Document\ Connection.mdccache/sharePointHostName/subDirectory/fileName


Hopefully this can help with your recovery efforts!

Recommended Android apps

My brother and Dad just got Android phones. Here are my app recommendations:

• Adao File Manager
• Advanced Task Killer
• Bible
• Chrome to Phone
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Flashlight
• Google Reader
• IMDb
• KeePassDroid
• MapDroyd
• Missed Call
• Movies
• My Tracks
• Pandora
• PdaNet
• ScoreCenter
• StopWatch & Timer
• ThickButtons Keyboard
• Google Voice

A couple of great links about work in the community

I came across both of these this week, and liked what I saw in both:

1. A few vignettes on how the internet has helped 6 people on the street: http://www.ranker.com/list/6-awesome-homeless-people-saved-by-the-internet/joanne
2. The Bicycle Shop - a Whatcom County non-profit that is using as a place for kids to learn responsibility and healthy living.  I really admire what they got going, and will inquire to see if can be of assistance for weekend rides.

Stock advice

Great quotes/ideas from Jeff Bezos:

• "In the short term, a stock is like a lottery, but with time, it becomes a scale."  He's quoting someone when he says this, but I couldn't find the orignal source.
• "Our biggest competitor is the corporate no."  He discusses how when organizations get big, it's easy to settle and compromise.  You lose the truth-seeking determination that you have when starting out on the brink of being bankrupt any day.
• "Use prediction models on the things you can, but don't apply it everywhere.  Areas where you can model with accuracy, figure out ways to reduce the initial costs and then experiment so you can start to get data and make projections."

Back on campus

It's been 4.5 years since graduation, and aside from sporting events, I haven't really been back on UW's campus much, at least when students are there.  I got to be part of the Amazon team working the career fair targeting UW's computer science/engineering students.  A few observations/thoughts:

• It was fun to be on the other side of the table.  I can remember 5 years ago passing out resumes and talking with company delegates.  It was in one such conversation that my resume got passed to an ex-classmate who had started at Amazon, which got me in their interview tract.
• I'm certainly biased, but what a great major to have all these cool (in my opinion) companies eager to hire you after an undergraduate degree: Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
• UW is still pumping out good candidates.  Many of the people I spoke with and gave a small coding problem did quite well.  
• Does the construction ever stop?  The HUB is getting massacred right now, it seems like you can never be on campus without avoiding a construction site.

This past week included 3 days in Dallas doing campus interviewing.  This was a first for me, but a valuable learning experience.  Interviewing during the regular work week feels like more of a distraction, but to get to devote 3 days to back-to-back interviews definitely increased my chops and observations on how strong candidates answer questions.  Good times!

JavaScript validation in a Java project with Eclipse's JavaScript developer tools

I'm not sure how may people this applies to, but I ran into the case where some of my web application packages have both Java and JavaScript files.  I use Eclipse, and wanted to be able to take advantage of Eclipse JavaScript Development Tools (JSDT) that provide rich JavaScript functionality within Eclipse. Unfortunately, JavaScript validation (e.g., catching syntax bugs) only occurs by default if you create a "JavaScript" project. Since many of these projects have both Java and JavaScript code, I had to work around this following these steps:

1. Ensure you have JSDT installed
• Top Menu -> Eclipse -> About Eclipse -> Installation Details -> Installed Software
2. Exit Eclipse
3. Add the org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.core.jsNature:
• vim $ECLIPSE_PROJECT_ROOT/.project
• To the natures section, add org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.core.jsNature
4. Open Eclipse
5. Enable the preference: JavaScript -> Validator -> Errors/Warnings -> Enable JavaScript semantic validation
• Adjust the validation preferences as needed.
• It's usually a good idea to set all of the "Resolution" preferences to ignore. 

I couldn't find this documented anywhere on the web, so passing it on here in case it's of use.