I’ve read books about what makes employees happy. If you manage people, I recommend reading the book First, Break all the rules – What the world’s greatest managers do differently. In that book, they surveyed tends of thousands of the best managers and employees. In their extensive research, they were able to come up with the 12 most important factors that make employees happy, increase productivity, and decrease turn-over.

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel like my work is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, have I talked with someone about my progress?
12. At work, have I had the opportunities to learn and grow?

A major point of the book is that managers are able to read employees, and treat each of them in a way that makes them happy and productive. That may mean that one person gets 5 monitors, and another gets an Optimus keyboard. Another employee may have to move into the basement, and give up their red stapler.

My opinion is that managers work for their employees. It’s the managers job to make sure the employees are productive, and to provide the right environment. If they can’t do that, they shouldn’t be a manager.

Lately, I’ve began wondering why managers don’t ask each employee this simple question:

"What do you need from me?"

If you’re manager doesn’t ask this, are they just guessing? In some cases the answers may not be incredibly useful, but in most cases you could learn a lot from the answer. For example, someone might say they need it to be quiet, and another might say they need a lot of background noise. A person might say that they need flexible hours or more desk space.

If you don’t ask that question, you may never know the answer. If you’re lucky, you’ll eventually be able to figure it out, but can you afford to take that chance?

If your manager doesn’t ask this question, why don’t you answer it anyway? Even if it doesn’t help your manager, it will certainly help you understand what you need to accomplish your goals. You may be able to find more creative ways to help your manager understand what you need to get your job done.

I’ve settled on a new backup solution. I’m going to be using Amazon’s persistent storage solution called S3. Amazon provides a virtually infinite, scalable storage cloud that allows you to store files indefinitely. You pay a small fee to get the data there ($.10/gig), a fee to store the data ($.15/gig/month), and a fee to retrieve the data ($.17/gig).

Features I was looking for:

• Reasonably Priced
• Automatic
• Reliable
• Scalable
• Well performing
• Easy

Price

To automate my backups, I’m using a product called JungleDisk. You can purchase it for $20, and you get free upgrades for life. I love products that have free upgrades for life, since I don’t have to worry about when buy it. They also allow you to use it on unlimited computers, which I definitely need.

JungleDisk by default talks directly with S3, so they don’t need to run any servers. You’re counting 100% on the reliable storage provided by S3.

Organization

Amazon stores your files in "buckets", which you can think of as a single level folder/directory structure. JungleDisk can easily connect to multiple buckets at the same time. You configure each bucket independently. JungleDisk can automatically detect all of your buckets, and you can easily create new ones.

I highly recommend creating buckets for each logical group of files you want to back up. Try to avoid sharing a bucket between computers when possible. If you tell JungleDisk that a bucket is only used on one computer, it doesn’t have to query S3 to determine what needs to be synchronized. The default is set to multiple computers. This setting is under the "Bucket Settings" for each bucket.

Each bucket also lets you choose what to back up. Of course there are extensive options for backing up subfolders, excluding files, etc.

You can even set up how your local folders get mapped to the remote folders. This lets you do multiple folders in one bucket. On my laptop, I have a couple of folders that get backed up to a single bucket, but are organized into different folders so that I could easily restore them independently.

Scheduling

Setting up a schedule is very easy. For example, on my laptop, I have it set to synchronize my files every hour. It uses the timestamp’s of the files to determine if there are any new, changed, or deleted files. Since I’m not sharing this particular bucket between machines, it can instantly determine if anything needs backed up.

Security

JungleDisk has all the security options you would expect. You can communicate with Amazon over port 80 unencrypted, or use SSL. I actually turn off the SSL option, because I use the JungleDisk encryption. I don’t see a reason to do double encryption.

When you create the bucket, you can specify a custom key that encrypts your data. I like this option because I am the only one that has access to the data. Even Amazon can’t tell what I’m storing on there.

Performance

Since Amazon is providing the storage, they’re able to scale indefinitely. You can be confident that they can handle whatever you throw at them. They had no problem letting me upload at over 56,000 kbits/sec from my dedicated host. I backed up 4 gigs in about 10 minutes.

Other Features

• Bandwidth limiting – If you don’t want to use up all of your upstream or downstream bandwidth, you can limit it, and even schedule when it’s limited. This could be useful for limiting the connection during the day. However, I much prefer a QoS solution since it will maximize the amount of bandwidth I can use.
• Previous versions – There are extensive options for storing previous versions of changed or deleted files. This option is very impressive, and great for documents.
• Network drive – You can make a bucket show up as a drive on your computer, which allows you to drag and drop files to and from the bucket.
• Jungle Disk Plus – For $1/month extra, you can get JungleDisk Plus. They use an Amazon EC2 server to proxy your data to S3. This allows you to resume large file uploads, and also lets you send just the differences. If you’re backing up large files and/or files that may have sections change frequently, this could end up saving you money.

According to the official Google blog, they’re now officially indexing flash content. According to my SEO expert, they’ve been doing this for some time. However, I wonder if making this official is a good news.

One of the big arguments against heavily using flash on your site was that it certainly wouldn’t help you in Google. Now, many will see that argument as being gone. We can now look forward to more annoying flash content, and maybe even some flash that is used correctly.

With great power comes great responsibility

-Stan Lee

If you think you can now cheat and use flash content instead of HTML, you’re probably wrong. There are many questions that have now been raised (some have been answered):

• Does each flash file count as a page?
• Do links to and from flash content count for PageRank?
• Do you really want ALL of the text in your flash files indexed?
• Does the SWF get executed in any way, so that the generated text can be indexed?

It’s going to take a while before Google gets good at indexing flash files. It’s also going to take some time for people to really understand how the process is working. I wouldn’t be too quick to convert something to flash just because Google can see it now.

Only use flash when it makes sense to your users. For example, Choice Shirts has an HTML website, but their shirt designer is flash (Flex actually). If their designer doesn’t get indexed, it’s not a big deal. The designer is there for usability, not for the search engines.