Bnpositive's Blog

Ahh it seems there’s always a new story popping up about some company’s CEO’s or other executives being scrutinized and critiqued for their way of doing business. Most of it comes with the bailout right? I mean if the government is going to give you all that money, they want to know what it’s being used for and who’s doing what with what right? Funny, I don’t get the same transparency with my tax dollars now do I?

What we’re looking at though is a huge problem for these executives. The world as they know it is drastically changing and they’re going to be lost without their normal methods of accomplishing daily activities. Activities like getting from Point A to Point B quickly.

Snagit of Welcome Bigwigs website

Luckily JetBlue has stepped in and made this little instructional website that should help out in this situation. They’ve provided “The CEO’s Guide to Jetting“.

If you know a CEO, or perhaps even an ex-CEO, let them know about this website so they won’t be lost in the near future when they need to do some air travel.

Uncovered by Xemion on twitter

Aaron Brazell, aka Technosailor, just shared this video of the US Airways Hudson River crash landing that occurred January 15, 2009. This 3D animation was professional done by Scene Systems.

The event has been accurately reconstructed by Scene Systems Inc., 3D Legal Animators based in California, USA. Scene Systems turns complex scene data and expert testimony into powerful 3D animation that helps legal professionals prove their case in court.

The animation was produced at very short notice, immediately after the real-life event. This included data sourcing, analysis, modelling, animation, rendering and post-production. This was made possible due to our unique forensic animation engine capable of extremely efficient, high-quality animation production.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imDFSnklB0k]

I spent today at a productivity summit that talked about a variety of ways to increase productivity both personally and in your company as a whole. The first session discussed “Managing Email Productivity”. One of the methods shared was to reverse the composition of your email messages.

Reverse Your Email Composition Sequence

In the standard model we normally write emails in this order.

1. Input recipients
2. Write subject
3. Write body of message
4. Attach files

Robby Slaughter, the presenter of the summit shared his preferred method of reversing this process flow and the reasons behind each. I’m significantly paraphrasing but this is the basic premise.

1. Attach files – how many times have you sent an email and forgotten to attach the files? Attaching the files first also reinforces the purpose of the email which will be important in the following steps.
2. Write Body – The body of the message in this case with attached files should be a simple statement of what action you would like the recipient to take on the attached files. Should they review them, are they to be printed for the upcoming seminar? State specifically what you want the reader to do in your email.
3. Write Subject – Write the subject after the body because it should be a simple, stripped-down restatement of the body of the message. Clear and concise with key words at the beginning of the subject.
4. Select Recipients – Choosing the recipients last performs a couple of helpful functions. First, if an email doesn’t have a recipient specified, you can’t accidentally send the email without the attachments or pausing long enough to make sure you actually want to hit “Send” on that email laced with your frustrations. Secondly, if you wait till the end you can further clarify exactly who needs to be included based on the actions and requested tasks specified in the email.

What processes do you use to stay on top of your email or to more effectively manage your email productivity?

Today at the Indianapolis Productivity Summit with Robby Slaughter I learned of a really cool website that let’s you do quick and casual mock-ups. The website is called Balsamiq and the example used in the session today was for mocking up a quick idea for a website with general blocks of content, navigation and image placeholders.

Snagit of Balsamiq website

The idea presented in the summit by Robby Slaughter was that part of the benefits of loose mockups of user-interfaces, websites and more is that when you keep it casual and quick you don’t get mired down in the details.

The balsamiq website from what I saw today gives you exactly that functionality and more.

Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

The next time you need to get a visual of what something will look like, how exactly how you envision that user-interface working, go uncover Balsamiq for yourself and see if it doesn’t help you get your ideas communicated to others in a more clear and helpful manner than just words or your own efforts at business Pictionary on a cocktail napkin.

I couldn’t guarantee it, but there’s one thing that seems to be getting developed much more rapidly than anything else. Sure Intel and AMD are in a huge race with each other to keep developing faster processors. Game consoles like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii are always competing with each other to be the next best thing. I think storage space is growing exponentially and with the greatest impact to end-users at an attainable level.

Jason Bean Photo of USB Thumb Drive and Hard Drive

That picture you see (sorry it’s so small) is of an old hard drive. What you can barely see on top of it is a 32MB thumb drive. Now, at the time, which was about 3 years ago, the 32MB drive was your above average USB drive. I can’t remember what I paid for it, but I know a few months after I purchased it there was double that capacity available for less price.

Now, what can really blow your mind is that the giant hard drive it’s sitting on provided less than the 32MB I believe.  Story is now even more relevant to me because of my task recently of collecting and organizing all of my family’s photos. What’s enough space to keep everything together? How long will the current method of storing .jpg’s on a standard hard drive be viable for the technology that’s coming down the road?

Here’s a fun a little website that lets you morph your face or the face of one of your friends. I believe there’s an application called Goo or something that lets you do this as well.  However, with Moron Face you can do it all for free.

Snagit of Moron Face homepage

Might be an interesting little tool to give yourself a unique new avatar for your Facebook profile or twitter account. Of course it will be unique until everyone asks you where you got your cool new avatar and they make one for themselves.

Either way, have a little fun and freak out your friends with a little binary plastic surgery at Moron Face.

One of the challenges experienced today was to move all the photos around on my family’s PC and aggregate them on a single partitioned drive located on the secondary hard drive in the system. For some reason I could never really get the access to the photos I wanted. I could see them, but couldn’t move copies of them to my local laptop for editing or use as I desired.

After I moved all of the photos and images to the new drive I couldn’t get my local machine mapped to the new drive so I could access the photos as I had hoped. The problem was that I kept getting an error that I couldn’t connect to the share because there was already a connection made using the same login.  I couldn’t find the login for anything thought, not sure what was going on.

Snagit of Mapping Network Drive in Windows XP OS

Eventually I did what I end up always trying in events like this. Reboot. I did a full shut-down and reboot of the desktop computer along with a full shut-down and reboot of my laptop as well. Figuring this would close any existing connections using a login I was using, I would be good to go after the reboot.

I was right. Everything is good now.

In a recent post I asked what you readers chose as your preferred security and maintenance tools. These are the applications you consider indispensable when trying to keep your systems in top running shape and secure from the variety of potential attacks and intrusions from nefarious entities found on the intarwebs!

Here’s my list of applications that I used even today as I was cleaning up my family’s desktop PC.

CCleaner which is short for “CRAP” Cleaner. It does a great job of finding all the hidden pieces of installed applications that sometimes don’t get removed with the program’s default uninstall function.

Revo Uninstaller is very similar to CCleaner, but I choose to take advantage of both as an option in case one just won’t get rid of something. I usually run one, followed by the other to just insure that there are non remnants of anything I’m wanting to make sure I get rid of in the end.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free is a great tool for finding any malware, trojans, hijack apps and other annoying little critters that love getting into our systems and mucking everything up.

Windows Live OneCare has been my preferred option for real-time antivirus and malware protection on my systems and others. Recent news that Microsoft will be nixing their OneCare product may lead me to be looking for a replacement and free alternative in the future. Microsoft will be releasing a free option of their own, but I’ll wait and see how it looks before making a choice. I’m interested in what free antivirus applications you all recommend.

Belarc Advisor isn’t a tool to remove much of anything, but it provides a great resource for quickly cataloging and finding out what’s on your system and how you stand on a variety of security fronts.

Images: Various logos from application pages downloaded

In my last post I shared an extremely helpful, but very low-tech tool I use to help keep the various computers I manage running in tip-top-shape. I regularly serve as “tech support” for a variety of friends and family members and I have a thumb drive that I carry with me with a variety of little apps on it to help clean-up and service those computers.

Image: Stock photo from Stock Photo Exchange

Before I share my list of tools with you though, I’m very interested to see what you all are using in your own software toolboxes. What apps do you use for anti-virus, spyware, registry clean-up, defragging? We’ll not limit ourselves to just those items either. Any tool you use to help service computers or keep them running smoothly, I’m interested in hearing about it.

I’m sitting here on my couch this evening feeling absolutely horrible! Over a week ago I was sick, fighting off colds my kids had including strep throat with my daughter. I finally recovered and have felt okay the past 4-5 days, but my wife has still been fighting the strep throat. Last night, I got the strep throat back and am absolutely miserable now.

Through the usefullness of twitter, a friend of mine recommended that I gargle with cayenne pepper to help get rid of the sore throat. I didn’t really flinch because I enjoy spicy foods and regularly sprinkle cayenne pepper on a variety of lunch and dinner dishes. It’s the regular sprinkling that has caused me not to have any available pepper this evening.

Image: Snagit from Earth Clinic webpage

The link my friend provided me though uncovered the Earth Clinic website. The Earth Clinic website provides a database of folk remedies and treatments for a variety of ailments and challenges you may come up against.

Our readers have been testing and developing these folk remedies, with contributors from every part of the world, since 1999. We’ve been sent some of the most exciting remedies to date – dozens of restorative remedies, plus natural cures for cancer, fibromyalgia, back pain and better than 350 other diseases and conditions!

From ailments to pets to mind and body tips and tweaks, I’m sure you’ll at least find something interesting if not completely helpful on the Earth Clinic website. Now excuse me while I go figure out some other alternatives to my sore throat treatment with cayenne pepper.

If you follow me on twitter, you may have remembered me tweeting about an interesting email I received a couple weeks back.

The email was about some changes taking place at b5media that directly impacted me and the writing I was doing on Microsoft Weblog and Uncover the Internet.

They had made the decision to terminate a number of their blogs and to aggregate the content and various writers into their new tech/sports/men’s interest portal at EveryJoe.com.

Due to the changes in market conditions and advertisers, b5media has been launching a variety of portals to make deeper, more content rich sites as opposed to their original model of numerous niche blogs on a variety of topics.

b5media is still sticking with the variety of topics, but keeping them in portals based on general ideas of interest and topic. For instance, EveryJoe.com has categories or topics like:

Baseball, Basketball, Cars, Computers, Electronics, Fitness, Football, Gaming, Golf, MMA-UFC, Movies, Music, Racing, Spirits, Sports Rumors, Television, Tennis, Weight Lifting.

Some of the higher traffic blogs under the original blog structure have been maintained as "Featured Blogs" in the new portal. Proudly my Uncover the Internet site was one of those blogs kept in this method.

So, if you’ve enjoyed my writing on my other blogs for b5media, stop on over at EveryJoe.com and catch me there along with some other great writers and topics.

Oh, and if you’re interested in some of the other b5media portals, check us out at:

Splendicity for beauty and style

Splendicity is the third portal in a series designed for easy access to the specific themes that may capture a reader?s interest, as well as discovering unique content in other splendid topic areas. Splendicity covers everything from luxury fashion to bargain choices and cosmetics reviews to celebrity style. With Splendicity, visitors can enjoy all the latest and greatest information and advice about beauty, fashion and accessories.

Bizzia for business

Following the successful launch of b5media’s first portal, Starked.com, Bizzia covers themes such as finance, leadership, e-commerce, small business, sales and marketing. Bringing together the latest news coverage on breaking topics and popular business discussions, Bizzia makes it easy to access the specific themes a reader is interested in, as well as discover unique business perspectives around other topics.

Starked for entertainment

Starked covers themes such as celebrity gossip, TV show topics, music tips and movie reviews and is the first of b5media’s blog portals to go live. Bringing together the latest news coverage on breaking topics and popular entertainment discussions, Starked makes it easy to access the specific themes a reader is interested in, as well as discover unique featured entertainment stories.

Of course you can also continue to stay in touch with what I’m doing and where I’m writing by keeping an eye on my sidebar over there on the right. I bring in links for all my posts on my most popular blogs right there. I’m looking forward to seeing you visit and reading your comments on what I’m writing in the future.

This Friday I will be celebrating my 10year anniversary of being married to my wonderful wife. Interesting feat considering I asked her parents for her hand in marriage a mere 30 days after meeting her for the first time.

As I’m prone to do, I look for ways to do just about everything online. Making reservations for dinner was no exception and I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. Plus, the other benefit was that I uncovered another new and helpful website during the process.

Image: Snagit of OpenTable.com homepage

I jumped to the McCormick and Schmick’s website because I’ve got a gift card that I’ve been saving for this specific evening. Initially visited the site to check-out their menu and get the phone number for our local restaurant here in Indianapolis.

After finding the local contact information I noticed the “Make Reservations” feature and immediately jumped on it. Although all the functionality was nicely embedded and presented on the McCormick and Schmick’s website, it was all being powered by OpenTable.com.

OpenTable.com powers a large list of restaurant reservation websites:

With more than 10,000 restaurants on OpenTable.com — and new additions every day — you’re sure to find a place to please your palate. Next time you’re contemplating dining out, we hope you’ll visit OpenTable.com to make your reservations.

The entire process was painless, straight-forward and really couldn’t have been much simpler. I was able to select my date and time and confirm the reservations with no problems. I was even able to provide a message to the maître d’ letting them know we were celebrating a special evening together.

Aside from just making my reservation, I also signed up for the OpenTable.com website which was optional. I figured it would be a good way to stay in touch with what’s happening on the site and pay attention to any future developments and feature releases.