I have had a Macbook Pro since the initial launch of the Intel based Mac. It has been a great laptop with my only complaint being battery life. Now some year and a few months later I find myself needing a replacement battery because my current battery will only hold a 20 minute charge. I logged on at the Apple Store website and coughed up $138.51 after tax for a new battery. Upon opening the box I was a little frustrated because of how nicely packaged my battery was for retail display. I mean come on Apple it’s a fricken replacement battery. It does not need to have store shelf appeal, you either need it or you don’t. My frustration comes from the fact that I had to pay $138.51 for a batter when I’m sure it could have been less had they sent me my batter in a sheet of bubble wrap. I have no problem with getting my hard drives and other computer parts from Newegg in bubble wrap rather then a fancy retail package. I like saving money. Apple you should give discounts to people who could give less of a crap as to what their batter comes wrapped in as long as it arrives save. Rant complete.
Leading a group of any size small or large is difficult. Each group having it’s own dynamic, each individual having their own reason for being a part of the group. To make it even more interesting, people will team up together with in the group whom they feel more comfortable with, sometimes making it harder for you to lead effectively. No matter how many times you have led said group before, different people add different flavors to the mix. As noted before, each person has their own agenda, a reason for being there. Even you the leader having your own agenda. Often we get mixed up in our own passions and our agenda becomes more important then those obtained by the group. By group it could be your marketing team, management team, leadership team or any other group/team for that matter. Depending upon the genre or our leadership sometimes our passion can over power our ability to decipher wether we are leading or dictating.
A dictator, sounding worse then it really is, often has passionate ideas that are good ideas. In most situations the idea will work and sounds great to those outside the group or team. The dictator consumes him or herself in the idea planning it from beginning to end, having the entire process ready to execute at the moment everybody is on his side. The difficult part lies in winning the group/team over to the leader’s side. The leader loses much sleep over this. The dictator worries that the team will not like the idea and will revolt against it. Never the less a dictator knows that the ultimate power lies with in his power, the team is marly a formality. A good dictator will not pull rank. He will continue to work on the group to win them over to his side, a complete power trip would send his team running. The dictator needs his team because the simple fact of having the team allows him to justify his decisions. With out a team there is nothing to hide behind. If there are people above him then he will use them as leverage to his way of thinking rendering the groups perspective helpless. Even if there is resistance to the idea he will continue to work toward total acceptance of his idea, even if there is a better idea in the group.
Virtual tours help share the experience and paint a good picture of what a potential customer could expect. MGM has a flash based virtual tour that paints a perfect picture of an experience. I highly recommend that you take 90 seconds and check out this website.
Not only in my own life but seemingly in the life of many other friends of mine I find heavily overwhelmed. Much life change has happened this year for many of us and April seems to be the month in which it has became enough to express frustration of it. I have friends that have broken engagements, lost jobs, had kids, moved away, lost a parent and the list goes on. I myself have lost a Grandparent, gotten married, experienced business growth, moved (again), and even my own list goes on. I can’t say that I am overwhelmed with every aspect of my life because not every aspect ads fuel to the fire but certain aspects of those aspects do, does that make sense?
Take for example me getting married this year. I am now part of another family. I am close with my own family but all of us enjoy a certain distance we have from each other. I love the time I visit with my family because I don’t get to see them every day or even each week. Not enough happens in a week to talk about so it’s often that I don’t even talk to a family member but once a week and not all of them each week. All of us are grown up and have our own lives apart from each other. When we all lived under the same roof it was different but as I have grown up and have now lived on my own for 10 years have a different relationship with my family then I did when I lived there.
Do you ever notice how often people sell themselves short? All of us know someone who is preforming well below par when you know they are capable of so much more. Perhaps even we do it to ourselves. In business meetings I attend and classes I have taken I notice that there are always people in attendance who go out of their way not to be noticed. I never used to pay much attention to it because I myself would hover below the radar when I didn’t feel like contributing but there are those who are always dodging any shard of public attention. I believe that many of us do this out of fear of being shot.
We are scared that life will get us. In the movie 300 there was a scene where the spartans were finishing off the enemy. Any 1/2 dead soldiers from the persian army that moved got finished off. My guess is that there were probably a few who just “played dead” to avoid getting stabbed. I believe that many of us do that in life. All of us have been wounded in the battle to show that we matter. Some dust off, get up and jump right back in the fight, others stay down play dead to avoid getting hurt again. I can’t lie and say that this world is not a brutal place, it is. They say it’s a dog eat dog world. In retail you are fighting for sales, in politics you are fighting for votes, in high school you are fighting for popularity, or even just to get noticed.
Regardless of what you think people don’t care about you. All of the books you have read on How to make friends and win people over to your way of thinking is not working. There are many good reasons for this in which I will explain as you read on.
People today have so many things coming at them, from advertising to expectations in the home and the workplace. Our time and attention is spread so thin that we can go weeks with out even thinking about things of usual importance to us. As we get busier it seems that we fall further away from those we wish to get some form of attention from. We get so wrapped up in our day to day, just to survive that we forget about everybody else, until we start to notice that they are beginning to forget about us. In the midst of it all, we have our opinions, our suggestions and thoughts for the way the world and other people should work.
I have been using Joomla since it’s debut into the Open Source world. It is a great content management solution with mass flexibility. I have implemented Joomla into many solutions I have set up for clients of mine. I provide complete training on Joomla for all of my clients so they always have me there to teach them should they need a reminder.
For those of you who have a Joomla website but don’t know how to use it? I put together a comprehensive 18 part tutorial on how to use Joomla. The tutorial titles include: Intro, Admin Login, Creating a new Article or content item, Inserting an image into an article, article manager, frontpage manager, section manager, category manager, media manager, menu manager, language manager, user manager, global configuration and more.
About 30 days ago I ordered a Drobo. Until then I had 2 hard drives I had been swapping back and forth between my available USB port. I had wanted a Drobo for months since I saw it at Photoshop World last year. Basically a Drobo is a 4 bay hard drive rack that uses it’s own technology to backup and secure your data, so it is always safe. It’s not like RAID. I currently have 2 x 1TB drives and 2 x 250GB hard drives in it which pans out 1.42TB of usable space. The Drobo will notify me if one of my drives is about to fail. When it senses that a drive is going it will move all of the data off of it and let you know so you can remove the drive and replace it with a new one. I don’t trust harddrives any farther then I can throw one, which is probably pretty far. I will have to say that I wish the fan on the Drobo was a bit quieter. I have it sitting next to my G5 Tower on the floor, during normal operation I can hear the Drobo, when I start to render in After Effects I can’t hear it over the G5 but it’s still louder then I wish it was.
If you are looking for a good data storage solution for your home or office I recommend the Drobo.
I hate junk mail, and I hate the fact that companies waste money marketing to me and use up natural resources to promote something I could care less about. One other thing I can not stand is telemarketers. My favorite call is the one I often get explaining that they can refinance my home and save me money when I have never owned a home. I came across this helpful article with three ways to put a stop to your junk mail and telemarketer calls.
Life has been so busy lately with business picking up and getting married. Life has definitely changed a lot this year. This blog has seen a lot of it. With all of this I have been putting a lot of areas of my life through some priority testing if you will… I have broken my life up into categories and put many of the things I have given time to in the last year into these categories.
I posted an article a while back of some awkward images from Google Street View. Today, I came across some more thanks to a blog post on KensingtonVictoria.com.
Leading a group of any size small or large is difficult. Each group having it’s own dynamic, each individual having their own reason for being a part of the group. To make it even more interesting, people will team up together with in the group whom they feel more comfortable with, sometimes making it harder for you to lead effectively. No matter how many times you have led said group before, different people add different flavors to the mix. As noted before, each person has their own agenda, a reason for being there. Even you the leader having your own agenda. Often we get mixed up in our own passions and our agenda becomes more important then those obtained by the group. By group it could be your marketing team, management team, leadership team or any other group/team for that matter. Depending upon the genre or our leadership sometimes our passion can over power our ability to decipher wether we are leading or dictating.
Not only in my own life but seemingly in the life of many other friends of mine I find heavily overwhelmed. Much life change has happened this year for many of us and April seems to be the month in which it has became enough to express frustration of it. I have friends that have broken engagements, lost jobs, had kids, moved away, lost a parent and the list goes on. I myself have lost a Grandparent, gotten married, experienced business growth, moved (again), and even my own list goes on. I can’t say that I am overwhelmed with every aspect of my life because not every aspect ads fuel to the fire but certain aspects of those aspects do, does that make sense?
I have been using Joomla since it’s debut into the Open Source world. It is a great content management solution with mass flexibility. I have implemented Joomla into many solutions I have set up for clients of mine. I provide complete training on Joomla for all of my clients so they always have me there to teach them should they need a reminder.
About 30 days ago I ordered a Drobo. Until then I had 2 hard drives I had been swapping back and forth between my available USB port. I had wanted a Drobo for months since I saw it at Photoshop World last year. Basically a Drobo is a 4 bay hard drive rack that uses it’s own technology to backup and secure your data, so it is always safe. It’s not like RAID. I currently have 2 x 1TB drives and 2 x 250GB hard drives in it which pans out 1.42TB of usable space. The Drobo will notify me if one of my drives is about to fail. When it senses that a drive is going it will move all of the data off of it and let you know so you can remove the drive and replace it with a new one. I don’t trust harddrives any farther then I can throw one, which is probably pretty far. I will have to say that I wish the fan on the Drobo was a bit quieter. I have it sitting next to my G5 Tower on the floor, during normal operation I can hear the Drobo, when I start to render in After Effects I can’t hear it over the G5 but it’s still louder then I wish it was.
