What's The Diff?

The things Quicken Loans team members care about and want to share with the world

Nobody Does IT better…

Monday, June 30, 2008

Computerworld picks Quicken Loans as the #2 place to work in ITBy Joy Fair

Well, the results are in, only to confirm what I already knew…WE ARE THE BEST! 

The Quicken Loans technology team has done it again, we have earned the bragging rights to say that I do indeed work for one of the best places to work in technology.  And that isn’t just me bragging, this comes straight from the folks at Computerworld Magazine, who ranked Quicken Loans the second best place to work in IT in the entire country. 

This isn’t the first time we have been recognized by Computerworld, in fact, we have been their top company the three previous years.

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Remembering George Carlin

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Love him or hate him, George Carlin changed comedy (some would say in a bad way) and inspired thought and conversation for nearly five decades.

He died last Sunday of heart failure at the age of 71, after a very controversial career that began in 1959.

I thought some of his stuff was very funny. I disagreed with a lot of what he said. Sometimes, listening to his routines, I got the feeling his was just as much of a philosopher as a comedian.  Most comedians today have been influenced, one way or another, by Carlin.

He was over the top, often, including one well-publicized incident where he insulted visitors to Las Vegas as being "people with very limited intellects."  The problem was that he was performing at the Vegas MGM Grand. MGM didn’t like that and fired him on the spot. He immediately entered drug and alcohol rehab.

He certainly had his troubles, but I doubt he’ll be remembered for that. I think he’ll be remembered as a funny man who had few boundaries. A man who made us think and discuss and disagree. That’s why I like him. He made us think.

That’s why I’ll miss him. Goodbye George.

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Getting from A-Z in Japan is as simple as trains, buses, subways and streetcars

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Japan leads the way with outstanding public transportationHere I go. Part two of my "why I love Japan" series.

I talked about their outstanding energy saving programs in my last post. Now, let me tell you about their public transportation. Relating to public transportation, if I was a teacher, I’d give Japan an A+. If I was an actor, I’d give them an Oscar. If I was a singer, I’d award them a Grammy. You get the point. They do it right.

I literally spent three weeks over there and never once did I HAVE to have a car to get anywhere. I admit, a few times we were driven around by family members. And we took taxis twice as a convenience.

But we didn’t need to.

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Saying goodbye isn’t always as bad as you think

Friday, June 20, 2008

Patrick the guinea pig's urn on the Quicken Loans blogBy Christy Brewer

I hate saying, "Goodbye." In fact, my husband and I make it a point not to say that when signing off a phone call with each other. It’s always, "See you soon," or "Later." (After the gooey stuff, of
course!) It’s not really "goodbye," anyway.

Unless you really have to say it.

Which, is what we recently had to do with our family guinea pig, Patrick. She fell ill and the ending for her was going to be really hard. So we spared her some of that and had her put to sleep.

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Stanford Hospital Employees are the $14 Million DIFFerence

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Quicken Loans says Stanford Hospital is the DIFF! by whatsthediffblog, on Flickr Quicken Loans blog

By Jen Romanowski

I think I may have mentioned before that my morning routine consists of the same thing.  I wake up, get ready for work and then sit down with a cup of coffee to read the news online. 

This morning I followed the same routine and came across this amazing article that is the perfect example of The DIFF.  Stanford Hospital found themselves with a need to cut costs in order to finance a $2 billion Hospital Renewal Project – so they reached out to their employees and asked them for their money-saving ideas. 

Which makes complete sense.  The big guys at the top of a company are never close enough to the day-to-day operations to see those small things that may add up to be a big difference.   And boy did they add up…

Check out these savings -

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Nobody does it better (than Japan – when it comes to recycling and energy conservation)

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Japanese recycle bins from the Quicken Loans blogI just got back from three eye-opening weeks traveling across Japan. I have a few things to say about my trip, and I won’t bore you with one super long post. Instead I’ll break it up into a few topics.

I think I’ll write about the food, some cool stuff I saw, the great public transportation, and finally (or I should say firstly) how impressed I was at Japan’s absolutely top-notch energy conservation and recycling programs that I became familiar with. They got it down, folks. I ain’t lying. (check out the pic of the public recycling refuse bin that’s common all over Japan – you separate paper, metals, plastics).

I want to touch on the public transporation thing a bit here also. I’ll expand later in another post, but I can’t impress on you how much I was impressed by Japan’s world-class public transportation. It ran like clockwork and took you ANYWHERE you wanted to go. Amazing. We can’t even get buses to run on time on our major streets here in the D. If you’ve ever taken a bus here, you know what I mean.

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Kendall Bailey – the world’s fastest disabled swimmer

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Listening to my beloved NPR, I learned about a very inspiring and interesting story today in the NY Times about Kendall Bailey, a mentally and physically disabled swimmer competing in the paralympic games (paralympics are not the same as the special olympics – paralympics are extremely competitive and expensive – basically the top disabled athletes in the world compete).

Bailey has celebral palsy, mental retardation, autism, among a few other disabilities. Yet in the water, he flies. He swims the 100-meter butterfly in a minute or something like that. Amazing. The article talks about some controversy he’s had with the paralypic commitee (hopefully that’s all worked out), but his story is totally inspirational.

Enjoy!

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Lee’s Chicken rocks my world

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Lee's Chicken is the DIFF Ninja's favorite - Quicken Loans blogBy Amy Prior (Former DIFF Ninja)

I LOVE chicken. So much so, that if my doctor were to tell me that I had to give up eating chicken, I would probably have to strangle him. More importantly, I love fried chicken—it’s my favorite food in the whole world. It was the first thing I learned to cook when I was 12 and I must have made it 4-5 times a week. No joke!

That brings me to Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. This place totally rocks my world! I discovered this little fried chicken haven thanks to a construction detour on my way home. I’d stop by before my martial arts class to eat so that my blood sugar wouldn’t go wonky during my two-hour class. Let me just say that when it comes to fried chicken, forget about KFC, forget about Popeye’s, forget about even Church’s. Lee’s is where it’s at, man!

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Carpooling to work makes really good sense – Divide the Ride and go green

Monday, June 16, 2008

With gas prices now over 4 bucks a gallon and speculation that prices are only going one direction in the near future (can you say "up"?), we’ve (Quicken Loans) just launched  a new carpooling program called Divide the Ride. Divide the Ride is a great idea and couldn’t come at a better time. Kudos to our guys who put it together.

Here’s how it works: Quicken Loans team members go to an intranet site that, using maps and other data, matches them up to other interested Quicken Loans folks living in their area. So let’s say I want to find out who else in my area wants to carpool, I can go to our Divide the Ride site and click on a map of my neighborhood or enter my zip and all folks close to me are returned as results. I then contact them and work out the car pool details. If no one else has yet signed up in my area, I enter my info and wait until others near me also sign  up. It’s simple to use. I like it.

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Look, Ma: No Hands!

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Hands-free sinkBy Meghan Busch

There’s nothing quite like a cross-country road trip. You can almost smell the chronic indulgence of fast food and the waft of ammonia that hugs your nose as you pull into the rest stop.

"Welcome back", it says, like an old, smelly friend.

And as if true sanitation isn’t scarce enough in local public restrooms, you can
just imagine the germs that piggyback those of us traveling from state to
state. Particularly for ladies, a simple potty break turns into some awkward
acrobatic trapeze act: dancing around wet-spots, twirling into a stall, locking
the door using forgotten parts like femurs and elbows. So you eventually
dismount from the stall of steeping un-sanitation–slyly unscathed by germs–and
skittleedoo to the sink where you’re plagued with the task of hand washing.

A
sink surely extracted from some remote 5th-grade sleepaway camp. So much for
elbows. Where’s the 10-foot pole in this place?

Well here’s the good news. There is a DIFF in sight. On our travels through the great state of Missouri last
weekend (err…pre-tornado whirlwind) I discovered a rest stop sink that is indeed The DIFF; like a beacon as bright as Mr. Clean’s bald head, this thing.

Continue reading “Look, Ma: No Hands!” »

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Thursday, May 17, 2012