Monthly Archives: July 2008

I guess bolter is my word of the month. The last couple of weeks have been crazy! I have been trying to complete two projects on a very tight deadline and keep one other project going while helping three other people launch projects of their own.

It has been a bit like traffic control on an aircraft carrier. I have to be very careful that the planes I am bringing in for a landing do not crash into the ones that are taking off.

I predicted last week that one of the projects was going to bolter, and it did. But we brought it in full throttle like you’re supposed to and brought it back around for a second landing. The second try worked, and now I am trying to rescue another boltered project that did not turn out quite as well. The one plane that I was trying to keep in the air is still flying, but I am going to have to give it quite a bit of attention next week.

The big lesson learned from the project we were able to land on the second try was to never give up even when it is too late. We literally had things coming together at the last possible hour. A week ago, I did not even think it would work out, but with a bit of persistence, it did, and I am glad we kept working on the project as if it was really going to work. If I had given up last week, my part of the project would not have gotten done.

Moral of the story, when you are landing a project, land it full throttle. Don’t give up even when it is too late. You will need the momentum to go back around for a second attempt.

Image by labanex via Flickr

I needed some brochures printed tonight. The catch was that I did not have them layed out where they would fold correctly. I was out of time and willing to pay someone to do them for me.

Since Staples decided that their employees needed sleep, they closed at nine and lost my business. Kinko’s was open to eleven but by 10:30 the last employee standing was desperately in need of sleep. He totally missed the opportunity, and told me that I could come back in the morning after I figure it out.

It is not really a big deal, just something to think about. We lose a lot of revenue to a thing called sleep.

Good night.

Image via Wikipedia

I usually try to avoid controversy. Most times when I get in an argument, I eventually find out I am wrong anyway. But, supposedly one of the best ways to draw a crowd is to start a good fight. (Another way would be with a pencil). Anyway, I did not have to start one this time. My brother-in-law started it for me. Thanks dude! You have brought a moment of laughter in my overly serious, deadline driven, high-speed, no-time-to-laugh, life.

Here is how it happened. I wrote a post last night and fell asleep several times while typing it. It wasn’t even that long. Take a look at it. While I was sleeping, I failed to notice a little red line underneath the word “orgaisation.” Yep, almost a British spelling, but I didn’t even get that right. I read a lot of British writing so that part is no surprise, but I totally missed the dropped letter and consequent red line.

Paul decided to take advantage of the mistake to promote his advertising client Microsoft. But the attempt quickly back-fired. Without even realizing that he was talking about my post, I commented on his post, explaining that the best tools are useless if you do not take the time to use them. The spell-check built into Firefox works great if I take time to glance back at what I typed. Life is moving a bit fast at the moment. I am doing good to keep up with the post-a-day routine. This is where the trouble began.

Paul replied to my comment by saying that he uses Word to write his comments (not WLW), but did not explain why. He did mention that IE does not have spell-check yet. I thought they put that in IE7 but I guess not. It was nice of him to put in a plug for Firefox. So far, MS is down by two points. Then he tossed in a spelling/grammar error of his own just to prove that the MS checker is not good enough. In his comment back to me he said, “At to spell check in the browser….” obviously meaning to say, “As to….”

Tabetha actually saw that one first, and then a few seconds later noticed the title of his previous post, “Juno, A Post Modern Movie, and a Waist of Time.” This was also a case of correct spelling of the wrong word. We had a bit of a laugh at that.

The moral of the story is that you should only throw stones at your neighbor’s house if you live in a glass house that you want a few holes in.

Kudos to Caleb for being the first to catch on to Paul’s initial stone toss.

Image via Wikipedia

In a for-profit corporation, the board is made up of people that represent large investors and large groups of investors. This could also be the case in non-profits (called donors, instead of investors), but more frequently in non-profits, the board members invest time instead.

Volunteers are a very important part of most non-profits. The problem with volunteers is that they normally jump in to help with a specific problem, then they are gone. Board members are in it for the long hall. They are ones that keep the organization going day to day.

Here is a list of things board member can do to help. The list comes from Guidestar, an organization that connects people with opportunities that match their interests.

1. Make Friends for the Cause
2. Identify Your Organization’s VIP Friends
3. Open the Door with Advice Visits
4. Gather Friends with Small Socials
5. Become a Tour Guide—And Show How We Change the World
6. Acknowledge Donors’ Generosity

Have you ever noticed the relationship between colors and various concepts? I am not sure exactly how it happens but there seems to be some color associations built into the culture. Some of the associations may even go across cultural boundaries. I am not sure. Anyway, the color associations that are used by a program called Moody really make sense to me. I haven’t used the program but I like the meaning they assigned to the colors. Here a screen shot (originally posted by someone else).

Lists and Reference:

There are four classic personality types. These correspond to four passions:

1. Power
2. Pleasure
3. People
4. Progress.

Anyone care to match them up? Which one(s) are you?

Comments on other blogs:

I read an article this week and commented on it, but apparently the comment handler is broken because no comments have gone through.

China does have a way of showing the West how ugly our preoccupation with ourselves really is.

The billions that China is pouring into African dictatorships came from greedy westerners who like to talk tough when making loans to poor nations and to “punish” dictators with sanctions that starve the common people. We constantly do what feels good, makes us look good, and is good for our wallet, then we attack other countries for publicly saying what we privately practice.

We attack China for only caring about Africa’s resources, but China needs those resources to make stuff to fill our stores so that we can keep our jobs. Whether, directly in retail or in retail support (jobs like design, distribution, sales, construction, adverting, finance, and most other jobs) our jobs are financed by the movement of Chinese made products through our economy.

China publicly says they only care about the money. We talk a better talk, but the bottom-line is still the bottom-line.

Quote of the Week:

Real living starts when you have something greater than yourself to live for.

Twitter:

	gedeon Going to have to trim the Twitter followers fat tonight. Some of you have got to go. Sorry but I’m trying to cut back. about 5 hours ago from twitterrific
	pwilson 2 out of 3 boys are in time out right now. Brewer is napping but as soon as he wakes I’m sure he’ll join them. about 5 hours ago from web

This article was sent as a series of jpgs. Seems a bit strange to me but I guess that is one way to make sure the text and the images line up. Let’s see if I can get this to work.

First let’s start with a quick definition since I am not sure how many of you are familiar with this term. From Wikipedia: A killer application refers to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it provides the core value of some larger technology, such as a gaming console, software, operating system, or piece of computer hardware. In this sense, a killer app substantially increases sales of the hardware that supports it.

So for MS Office, Excel was the killer application. It was the one part of that suite of applications that every business needed, and it was far better at the time than any of the competition. I still use Excel occasionally, even though Google docs and Zoho have more convenient alternatives. I have not used Word or PowerPoint in a very longtime. Anyway, now that you know what a killer app is. Let’s talk about advertising.

Advertising on the web is one of the most annoying parts of the whole online experience. It gets in the way of common sense things like full-text RSS feeds and useful outside links. Pop-ups and pop-unders, flashing lights and all kinds of other junk get in the way and make what could have been a nice design look awful while at the same time slowing things down horribly. But, advertising has a good side. It pays for all kinds of great software and content to be put online for free.

The problem with most ads is that they are irrelevant and poorly done. Poorly done because designers have to produce so many so fast and because they are not targeted at all. The reason there are so many is that advertisers have no way of getting the right ad to the right person. So they try to make sure everyone possible sees the ad knowing that some percentage of them will be interested. It is a numbers game – played at the expense of our tired eyes and scattered attention.

Google is making some progress by gathering huge amounts of information about its users and scaring the fool out of (if that is possible) people like my brother-in-law. Amazon may be doing an even better job in a narrower market, and many niche sites have found sponsors that are very relevant to their guests. But getting users to allow you to essentially build a dossier can be difficult and opens you up to law-suits, and finding relevant sponsors is very difficult.

Adverting that works and is acceptable, even useful, to the consumer is a tough problem, but I think Facebook has found the killer application.

They now allow you to rate the advertisements on their site. THIS IS HUGE. It is 100% without question, opt-in only, data sharing. They do not collect data on anyone that does not want to be spied on. For those who do participate, they at least imply that you can eliminate whatever types of ads you personally find annoying, (Obama ads in my case – I don’t care who the next president is – the next four years are going to be rough) and maybe even trick the system into showing you interesting ads (Like the best new, free, online applications).

People are very likely to provide “personal” information on their preferences if by doing that, they can make their life better. Also, who can resist the temptation to blast a really bad ad? There is an old saying that goes, “What you say about others, says more about you than it does about them.” The rating system makes you think you are getting rid of bad ads and promoting okay ones, but in reality you are telling a lot about yourself. Still I would much rather rate an ad than fill-out a survey.

I bet they get a lot more thumbs-down responses than thumbs-up at first, but you can still learn a lot about what people might like by looking at what they do not like. You might be wrong at first, but over time the user will set you straight. I am probably going to be seeing a few extra McCain ads now, but after I thumb those down too, maybe they will get the idea that I am really not that interested in the presidential epic marathon. You could about make a career out of campaigning now that they are starting to run so early.

Facebook also has the advantage of combining all of your ad ratings with other personal info one the site. Putting all of this together they can make very good use of very limited advertising space and even more limited attention. The benifit for them is increased revenue. The benefit to the users, is less ads per page, and less annoying ads. It’s a win-win solution.

Image via Wikipedia

China has discovered the power of ambiguity.

Read any book on business, politics, or leadership, and a major theme will be the importance of clarity, transparency, openness, honesty, integrity, justice, equity, or consistency – all of which are antonyms of ambiguity. While ambiguity seems to stand in opposition to the very essence of positive leadership, it can be a very powerful technique for influencing others to help you achieve your goals.

In psychology we learn that an unpredictable pattern of behavior reinforcement that trails off over time is more effective at achieving long term behavioral change than a consistent pattern that suddenly ends. This technique is frequently recommended to parents as a way to teach children good habits. So I guess you could say that the Chinese government is trying to be a good parent to the rest of the world.

As part of its preparations for the Olympics, the Chinese government is expelling many foreign workers. Meg Stivison tells her story and links to quite a few other people from the US and Europe who have been teaching English and doing other types of work or study in China that, over the last year, have been denied visa renewal. This has been getting increasingly more difficult over the last few months. The interesting thing is that instead of denying the visa outright and giving a reason, they have just created a lot of arbitrary rules that vary from office to office and make it nearly impossible to meet all the requirements. Many people just give up after a couple of months of trying, others ran out of time on their old visa and are now waiting back at home.

Unpredictability is very effective because no one ever “learns the system.” You can eliminate everyone you want, plus a few random others and no one will ever know why they were sent home or even whether it was intentional. Whenever the international community catches a nation systematically picking on a certain group the results are not pretty. It works much better if you camouflage it with a stack of confusing regulations and paperwork.

Another area where the Chinese government is using ambiguity to great advantage is on the internet and other places of public communication. If the Chinese government had a clear list of topics that are not acceptable, people would quickly find ways to get around the system. When you do not know what is okay, though, the safest course is to only talk about how wonderful China is. China is wonderful, but even China has room for improvement. Many organizations and even nations are so concerned about not offending China that they are going to extremes they would not do if they knew what actually would offend the Chinese government.

For example, the government of Nepal is attacking it’s own residents in order to please the Chinese government. If the Chinese government were to send an ultimatum to Nepal detailing exactly what they wanted Nepal to do, I am not sure how Nepal would respond, but the rest of the world would definitely call foul. Nepal is a sovereign nation and no other nation is supposed to be able to direct its actions. Through ambiguity and vague hinting, though, the Chinese government has managed to achieve a degree of influence much higher than it otherwise would have. Many nations and organizations are going far out of their way, trying to avoid stepping on an invisible land mine.

So even though most leadership experts would agree that ambiguity is antithetical to good leadership, the Chinese government has proven that it is quite effective.

Image via Wikipedia

It just occurred to me that I rarely ever blog about programming. That is mostly because I assume if you are into code you probably would not be reading this blog anyway. It is a self-perpetuating myth, but coding is a big part of who I am, and since this blog is at least nominally about me, here goes.

One project I built in Excel several years ago requires occasional updates. I am doing one of those updates this week. It is a really cool project. I basically sent out a spreadsheet template that dials home occasionally to pick-up the updates. I deliver the updates as code snippets. The new code replaces old code if necessary and makes updates to the template.

In this update, I am temporarily disabling a feature, that I am very suspicious my client will want to return to later. So I am removing the formula(s) that call this feature, but I also needed to mark a few cells as inactive.

One easy way to do this is to add comments that hide the cell behind a notice. This involves creating Excel comments using VBA, and moving the comment relative to the cell they reference, and resizing the comment box.

Here is a bit of code to pull this off.

With Sheets(“DetailSheet”)

With .Range(“A1″).AddComment

.Visible = True

.Text “Currently” & Chr(10) & “Inactive”

.Shape.Left = .Parent.Left

.Shape.Top = .Parent.Top

.Shape.Width = .Parent.Width – 2

End With

End With

There is a lot of cool info in this post by Harry Lynch. One thing that really stood out to me was the following paragraph:

These days you’re more likely to reach grandma than grandson via email. Study after study confirms that email is increasingly a medium of choice for people over 50 … and even over 65!

It is funny that now when I am trying to make something work for people who do not like new technology, I try to make it work with or just like email.

Blogs are like emails that anyone can read so no one gets left out.

Twitter is like email only really short and you do not have think of a subject-line.

I email links so that you do not have to bookmark them.

You get the idea. Email is now easy enough for Grandma to use.

Email is old.