Dec 20, 2006 | blog
My blogging gloves that is. Its not that I’m going after anyone or anything in particular, but I’m going to be tackling more blogging content. I’m after expanding my writing and content creation skills in 2007 and I’ll be starting during the Christmas & New Years holiday break (I’m taking two weeks off of work).
Things to watch for in the coming weeks will be tweaks and improvements to my blog, with more opinion oriented comment on my favorite topics of blogging, technology, mobility, and leadership. The goal, quite frankly, is improving my marketability ending ultimately, in a career change sometime in 2007.
Frankly, the corporate technology environment that I’ve been working in has become way too stagnant, redundant, and predictable. I’m interested in finding more fast-moving, nimble solutions to the current problems that corporations are experiencing. This means more items along the line of “Enterprise 2.0” or enterprise solutions based off web-based, AJAX, centralized service-oriented software.
I’ve got to admit up front, that the company I work for (Michael Foods, Inc.) is a great place to work, really focusing on and supporting employees and their career development. This is one reason they have really smart, creative, go-getters working for them.
For me however, technology is no longer the end-all be-all thing it once was. Its still cool and fun to work with, but there are bigger challenges and more entertaining opportunities in other areas.
So that’s what I’m targeting in the coming weeks, a change from the casual blog that you’ve been reading to a more focused, more content-rich (dare I say professional) blog. Have an opinion? I’m interested in hearing it!
Dec 20, 2006 | blog
Here is a great new service that I found – FLV Online Converter! The trick it does is convert a YouTube (or similar service) video into a downloadable file in the format of your choice! A screen cap of the conversion process is at right.
Although I’m a strong believer in online services, this is one neat tool that I’ll recommend to people who need an offline version of a YouTube video.
Of course, a prudent person would observe the rights of copyrighted material – right?
Dec 20, 2006 | blog
So how have I been doing in my month-long quest to be Linux-only user for all December 2006?
Not as well as I had hoped.
Mainly its my fault for trying this in the wrong way. Instead of backing up my data, wiping my Windows partition and loading up Fedora Core 6 (FC6) like I had originally planed in early November. I simply installed FC6 in a VMWare instance on my Vista laptop. It works quite well all around, but it is not as “convenient” as it should be.
The fact that I’m already booted to my Vista desktop and then need to launch my FC6 virtual machine to do my work. Compounding this is my workload — at work. I’ve been so inundated by work that I have little time at home to get the things done that I had planned, so when Windows comes up, I plain forget to launch into FC6 to get my work done.
Now all this is all excuses and we all know it. So my revised plan is to do a little more learning in FC6 to get a better feel for the OS and to search out some of the tools I need in a Linux environment that I enjoy in Windows. Also, I’m going to revisit this trial in the New Year – probably February – and I’ll do it the right way by installing Linux on my hard drive, and put Windows in a virtual machine, so there!
Dec 19, 2006 | blog
I’m starting to finally (after several decades) getting past the idea that I need to figure it all out. Every time I try to do something new, I immediately start “diving deep” trying to solve the first puzzle, problem, or question before moving on.
One of the biggest things I’m learning in project management is that I don’t need to do it all. Moreover, that I can’t do it all or shouldn’t even try. In fact I don’t even need to come up with the idea, just be able to implement it – whatever “it” is.
Its a really difficult concept for me – mainly because I’ve been a great problem solver for most of my career. To get my head around this one concept has (surprisingly for some) taken me an enormous amount of thought.
The reason this was important enough for me to blog about is that it is a key pillar to me taking my career to the next level. The hard day-to-day part will be remembering this fact as I do different things that are outside my comfort level and stretch my skills in new ways
So I’m going to be looking for ways to apply this new found idea, mostly how to apply it to my personal benefit. That has always been a stumbling block for me moving forward. I think that will finally be one less thing in my way.
Dec 19, 2006 | blog
I’ve been adding a lot of “stuff” to the blog lately, lots of widgets and such that seemed like they added value. I’ve made use of a lot of services like digg, NewsVine, ClipMarks, and del.icio.us, but I’m not sure if they add value to the reader or just more visual clutter.
So I’m going to post a few polls to see if there is any value to some of the things that I’ve added – starting with the ClipMarks scriptlet shown on the right sidebar. It lists the latest “clips” that I’ve added to my Clip Marks account.
One of the bad things of so many services like ClipMarks (and digg, del.icio.us, News Vine, etc…) is that you can only clip or tag so many articles to each service in a given week. I’ve found that, personally, I make much more use of the del.icio.us service than any of the others – mostly because it works as a good bookmark service for my own future reference.
ClipMarks is unique in that it allows you to actually select snipits of a web site and have them be added to your account. The service allows you to make them public similar to NewsVine and digg, but the neat part is actually recording things you find for your own reference. Neat stuff – but I don’t use it as much as I had hoped.
So, should the ClipMarks sidebar list stay or go?
