Posts from October 2003

Notice Periods and Resigning

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll tell you about what a ‘notice period’ means to you if you are planning on resigning. I recently found this out (yes, personally), and I can tell you that it doesn’t leave the nicest taste in your mouth, so be careful.

Situation: You are employed in one position in a company where your contract details a 1 month (4 week) notice period. You have been offered a job at a different company, but they require you to start in 3 weeks (from now, which makes it 1 week short of your notice period).

Options: At this point, your options would be something like;

  1. Resign from your current position and tell them you are leaving in 3 weeks (see below for consequences)
  2. Negotiate with your potential employer to start later (hopefully)
  3. Decline from the job and stay where you are

Now, assuming that you want the job, and that you have already discussed the start date and the 3-week start is required, that basically leaves you with the first option (not much of an option is it?). So – what happens with that 4 week notice period on your contract if you leave 1 week short of it?

In this situation, some people will attempt to apply for leave for the final week of their notice period, which will mean that they won’t actually have to go to work, but they’d get paid as if they had (accrued annual leave and the relevant authorities permitting). If this is not an option, which in some companies it won’t be, you will find that you are lopped into a situation where you will be financially penalised for not giving full notice.

When calculating your final payouts after resignation, everything your employer owes you is added up into a ‘kitty’ of sorts. This might include accrued annual leave, final salary since your last pay date, owed company expenses etc. In the case that you leave before the end of your notice period, this kitty is reduced by the amount of salary that you would have otherwise earned if you had stayed. So in our example, that kitty would be reduced by a full week’s salary before you got your final payment.

Think about whether or not you can afford to take that hit – it can hurt at the end, and will leave a pretty bad taste in your mouth, unless where you are going really makes up for it!

Why MP3s Are A Good Thing

I have (had) a relatively small collection of CDs, to be honest, I’m more likely to obtain copies of CDs from friends than I am to buy them. This is not because I’m a cheapskate or because I’m a pirate (mateys), it’s mostly because I don’t like most music enough to warrant buying it, but I like a lot of music enough to listen to it.

There are times (like when I get gift certificates) that I do purchase CDs though, and through these times, and just along the way, I’d collected about 30-40 CDs that I would call “worth listening to regularly” — so I did, in a CD stacker and a CD wallet which were in my car.

My car got broken into.

My CD stacker got stolen.

My CD wallet got stolen.

Therefore, all of my CDs got stolen in one foul swoop, and I was tuneless… without tunes. MP3s saved the day. Since I always left those CDs in my stacker and wallet in my car, I never got a chance to listen to them anywhere else. Since I almost exclusively listen to MP3s on my laptop and Nomad, somewhere along the line I had luckily gotten around to ripping most of those CDs to MP3 and saving them to my hard drive, which now lives in an external, portable USB drive enclosure. Thanks to the ability to back up my music to MP3, I now can retain copies (and even burn a new CD if I want) of the music that I legitimately purchased, where otherwise I’d have to go and buy it again (which would be difficult because some of the disks were quite obscure). Yey MP3s!

Ideas For Earners

Interesting list of potential ways to make money on the ‘net using micropayments, from Scott McCloud, one of the advisors to BitPass.

There are some quite good models in there, and if nothing else it’s a good summary of what a lot of people would come up with if they sat down and defined all the ways that they could think of to model this sort of thing. It will definitely be interesting to see where (if anywhere) micropayments go.

Modification to Permalinks

I’ve modified the format of my permalinks so that they use the dynamic, blosxom-controlled, date-based URLs again, because in the near future I will be completely re-arranging my structure, since unfortunately it is proving to be inadequate for the range of topics I’d like to post about.

More information to follow regarding the changes, but I don’t imagine it will cause too many problems with too many people 🙂