There's no need to mention the importance of a good network of contacts when it comes to looking for job opportunities. One of my student jobs I got through a friend (for his father's company), as he knew a bit about what I was doing as a part time job then, and they required someone to help them in that area.

Another job at SAP I got through my former flatmate. He did some Java programming there, and as he was going to Australia for an internship for a few months, they needed a replacement. I just came back from my internship in Singapore and was looking for a new student job, thus it was a perfect timing, and I took over from him.

These are cases where a network of people that I had close contact with in "real life" helped me. However, I also have two examples (my two most recent jobs) that show that it's also possible to find a job through one of the social networking websites. I'm sure that there are people who found a job through, for example, facebook or studiVZ, but the more important networks for these 'business-related' activities are LinkedIn and XING. LinkedIn has a lot more people on it, whereas the XING interface is a lot more usable in my opinion.

As for the job before my current one, I got it through XING. I contacted some people in Singapore through it, as I wanted to find an internship/thesis job here. One of the people I messaged replied saying that there might be an opportunity for me. As it turned out, I asked just at the right time, as they were looking for someone to help them with an IT project, and were considering hiring an intern for it.

As for my current job, which I started recently,  I was contacted by a headhunter through LinkedIn. As I always keep my profiles as much up-to-date as possible, the headhunter saw my SharePoint experience, and as it matched the requirements nearly 100%, he contacted me and asked if I was looking for a job (which I actually also was at that time).

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For a few days now, I'm using Dropbox. It's a service that lets you store your files online, but with a really great integration into your operating system (they support Windows, Linux, and MacOS!), so that you can access them nearly everywhere very comfortably.

I'm using it so that I can now easily access some shared files on my netbook, my laptop, my office laptop, and even my iPhone without having multiple copies floating around! Before that, I always had to copy a document on my thumbdrive and carry it with me (and no, I did not always have the latest version with me, and yes, I sometimes had a few copies of a document....)

The 2GB version is free (which can be slightly expanded, please see the end of this posting for more info), if you need more space they offer a 50GB and a 100GB version for a monthly fee.

Their Features page gives a good overview of their service:

File Sync
Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.

File Sharing
Sharing files is simple and can be done with only a few clicks.

Online Backup
Dropbox backs up your files online without you having to think about it. 

Web Access
A copy of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers. This lets you access them from any computer or mobile device.

Security & Privacy
Dropbox takes the security and privacy of your files very seriously.

Mobile Device Access
Free Dropbox iPhone app

 

Also, if you edit or delete a file, a history of the change is kept and you can go back to a previous state within 30 days:

 

You can also see what was changed when in a nice overview tab (web version):

 

Files can be stored within folders (web version):

 

Here's the menu for a file as seen on the web version:

 

As I said, Dropbox can also be tightly integrated into your operating system. As I'm using Windows, I'll show some examples of the Dropbox Window 'client' here.

During installation, you can specify where Dropbox should store the documents. Yes, that means a local version of the documents inside your Dropbox will be available!
After the installation, you can find the Dropbox symbol in the taskbar:

A single click opens the settings for it:

 

Double-clicking opens the location that you specified during the installation (of course you can also simply navigate there through Explorer):

 

Additionally, for the folders within your Dropbox, you get the following menu for viewing deleted files and sharing the folder when you right-click:

 

This is how the contents of the folder look like. Not much difference to a regular folder in Windows, but the difference is that any changes made here (e.g. copy&pasting a document into here, or editing a doc) will be synchronised to the Dropbox server, and from there then to all other locations that you set up. For example, if I upload a document via the web interface from my office laptop, I can later on access that document on my laptop, netbook, AND iPhone.

 

 

The difference between the Windows version and the iPhone version is that the documents in the iPhone version do not get synchronised immediately, but only when you access them. But you have the option to set favourites, which are documents that get downloaded immediately and are available for 'offline access'

Startscreen for the iPhone application

 

Overview of all folders inside my Dropbox:

 

Inside the 'SharePoint' folder:

 

Viewing the document list:

 

My favourites (documents that are stored directly on the iPhone):

 

Here's how an Excel spreadsheet looks like on the iPhone (in landscape mode):

 

And this is the internal PDF viewer (portrait mode)

 

 

As I said before, the service is free for the 2GB version. Additionally, if you refer a friend or sign up through a referral, you get an additional 250MB:

 

So if you're interested in testing or even using it, here's my referral link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI4MzQ1ODQ5

PS: If you complete the first 5 steps on the Getting Started page, you'll get an additional 250MB:

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Nine years ago, my English teacher (I "majored" in English & French in my last 2 years in school, which means that those 2 classes had a bigger weight than the others on my final grade) asked me to give a short summary of a TIME magazine article about Napster in class. I still remember how fascinated I was with this story at that time, as it provided a good view into the background story of the initial development of Napster.

In a way, Napster changed the world. Peer-to-Peer networks are more than common nowadays, filesharing is an issue more than ever before. That's why reading this article again made me see it in a different light, at that time I did not fully understand the impact that one teenager would have on the content industry.

The article from October 2000 can be found for free on the TIME magazine website under Meet the Napster.

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During the past 7 or so days, I was ocassionally working on some changes to the blog here. Besides several minor modifications (mostly to the CSS stylesheet, some corrections in the lifetype templates), I also added 2 slightly more important functionalities.

1. I removed the old Archive links on the navigation to the left (they were pointing to individual months), and replaced them with a single page that contains ALL entries that I've ever written:
   
   
   In order to get this done, I first wrote a small (ok, tiny! just a few lines of code in the end) plugin for lifetype, that fetches and returns all blog postings (somehow I couldn't find this in the existing functionality, maybe I just overlooked it). This was my first PHP coding in a long time....
   Additionally, I then created a Custom Template for this new Archive page, that applies the viewing logic to the long list of entries, and displays it as it can be seen above.
   
2. The second addition to the blog are 'previous' and 'next' links in the viewing page of the individual postings:
   
   
   This makes it a lot easier to navigate through the blog posting by posting.
   

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Click image for more background information!

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If it rains in Singapore, then usually quite heavily. My small umbrella is only a small protection from all the water, especially my shoes & pants are usually quite drenched.

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Yahoo closed the internet dinosaur GeoCities. To commemorate this, xkcd redesigned its website yesterday slightly:

Today, it's back to normal again:

I never had a site on GeoCities, but I have to confess that once upon a time (end 90s) I also had a website with eye-cancer causing colours, annoying animations, fonts that no sane person would use, and some text within <blink> and <marquee> tags....

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No, I didn't feel the earthquake, and I'm fine.
Apparently, there was an earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia (see http://m.spiegel.de/article.do?id=652351 ), and people in Singapore also felt it, among them my girlfriend and some friends.
I was in the mall and felt nothing, I probably wouldn't even know if my girlfriend and some friends on facebook had not spread the news.

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I discovered that my blog entries could not be found in the various search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo), however the main blog site could be.

In the Lifetype forums (my blog software) I learned that under certain circumstances the person/bot/client/etc accessing a blog entry gets redirected through the error page (error.php), which will send a 404 Error (file not found) first and then redirect to the corresponding correct location (or at least deliver the content).

This means: everyone was able to access the blog entries here without any problem, however in the background they always showed up as non-existant to the browser/other software. Thus, the search engines didn't crawl any further and treated the links to the individual blog entries as dead links.

I changed the URL generation method from custom url to apache mod_rewrite, which basically changes all the individual urls for the blog entries, but the benefit now is that all pages appear now as existant!

So dear search engine bots, please come again and reindex the blog :)

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I was just testing Microsoft's newest search site, Bing. One of the first things people usually are looking for is themselves, and so did I. But the search for 'rene modery' did return one relatively weird search result. The second site Bing suggested is my blog here, however it gave it a weird title:

A rough translation of 'Das Kilo von Rene Zum Abspecken' for all non-German speakers:  "The Kilo Of Rene For Slimming"

What The...? I have no idea how they come to that title?! I never ever wrote about losing weight/slimming, and my recent blog posts were about the swine flu, tax, the iPhone, SharePoint, and Singapore.

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Mobile Blogging from here.

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Found on slashdot

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It is now possible to manage a tasks list from within Gmail. To do so, it first has to be activated under Settings and Labs, then check Enable for Tasks:
 

After saving the changes, a new link will appear on the left-hand side under Contacts:

And here's how it looks like:

Read the official announcement here.

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This is what happens when one person uses Gmail for long email conversations (in this case the other person uses yahoo):

Small preview:	Longer version (but still not the whole thing):

And it really slows Gmail down when you want to reply to that...

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...when you visit this site and you know that the pics were taken in Singapore because you think the first picture looks like a HDB void deck, you recognise the powerplug in the 2nd picture as one from SG, and the sign on the third picture is in English, Chinese, and Malay, but you should know it because Anything and Whatever are a Singaporean brand...

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