I found an interesting article a few weeks ago over at Expat Software discussing how 2 weeks vacation time is simply what your employer will pay you for, but not what you are limited to. If you’re willing, taking an unpaid vacation is always an option. If you play it right.

As a business owner, I want someone to LOVE working for me. I’d give (do give) my employees every benefit possible. Making that extra $200 or $2000 dollars just so my employee is miserable is no way to go. So that said, I’d completely respect someone taking time to pursue something they felt is worthwhile, so long as they don’t leave the company at a major loss. There’s simply a balance to be made — one that larger companies without a startup mentality might never come to see.

But that luxury comes at a price. You have to be respectful of the company you work for. Time away isn’t simply time you aren’t being productive on whatever project it was you were working on. Even if it’s unpaid, you’re still receiving health, dental, vision, 401k, and other benefits. That’s when things start becoming a little less fair to your employer, so be mindful and respectful of the costs of simply having an employee — we’re not just paying your salary.

Using Apache’s mod_deflate module, I’ve significantly lowered page size and load times on a few Fusion Bay projects and my personal website. Some load times have more than doubled in speed, from an intense loading time of 4-5 seconds to a measly 1 second.

The crazy thing about the pages that used to take a while to load was I always assumed it was the computer slowing things down due to a large amount of text to be rendered, not the size. I simply never paid attention! How silly.

I understand there are some issues with HTTP compression and older browsers that don’t support it properly, however I think this is a very unlikely scenario for 99.9% of our viewer-ship.

For more information on mod_deflate you can check out the Apache Documentation.

I personally used the simplest configuration possible, opting to do the following:

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    SetOutputFilter Deflate

The staff here at Fusion Bay read a lot of blogs. A few we read are written by popular Venture Capitalists — not because we’re looking for investments, but because they’re interesting to read and seem to have breaking news about new web services and technology companies.

I came across an article today on “The Penny Gap” which I thought was worth a mention: It talks about consumer based web applications and the difference in free vs paid-subscription revenue models.

The article talks about the negative trend of price vs adoption… the more you charge, the fewer subscriptions you receive. That seems logical: fewer consumers can afford your service the more expensive it is. But I wonder: Is there a price point that might increase your adoption? Will more consumers subscribe to something priced higher because they perceive it as higher quality? Or are higher quality things just more expensive?

In my last post, I briefly mentioned that I modify hotkeys for my applications in OS X. If you have ever wondered how to do this, it is quite easy assuming the item you want to create a hotkey for is in the main menu of the application. If it is in the main menu (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) the file you’ll edit is usually called MainMenu.nib.

There is one caveat to this process. You’ll have to have the Xcode developer tools installed. I don’t know a way around this, but as a power user you should probably have this installed anyway so you can compile programs and do other nifty things.

1. To begin, right click the application you want to modify and select “Show Package Contents.”
   
2. Navigate through the Contents, Resources, and English.lproj folders.
   
3. Double click MainMenu.nib. It should have a pretty icon. If it doesn’t you don’t have Xcode installed.
4. Double click the MainMenu icon in the Instances tab that comes up and you’ll now see the menu as it appears in your toolbar in OS X.
   
5. And you’re done! You can navigate through the menu and double click any hotkey to replace it with something else. Just remember not to set two hotkeys to do the same thing! You’ll confuse yourself and your computer.
   
6. Oh, and don’t forget to save before you quit.