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I finally found it! The “site” I’ve heard lots of people at IBM tell me about. Any time I mentioned anything to do with a Mac to an IBMer, I was told about the “IBM site for Mac users.” Up until this evening, I didn’t think it existed.
Now that you’ve seen it, I feel a bit like Bono from U2 … I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. But I know that wasn’t it.
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Last year, I frequently posted my two cents on that season’s Apprentice show. This year, I’ve been quiet on the whole topic.
Simply put: this season bugs me.
In the last few years, its clear that another source of the show’s income has been through creating challenges that highlight products of various companies. And why not! Its a great way for these companies to have a 60 minute advertisement about their product! However, in the last few seasons (and especially this season) those advertisements mean that the challenges are much more loosely connected to “tests” that will help identify the best Apprentice candidate.
For example, this season we’ve had a selling task at Pollo Loco (which had a slight amount of marketing and pricing but was much more about selling) and a car wash task (which was pretty much all about pricing and selling).
Sure, those are important business skills, but one of those types of tasks would do. If I were the PM on either task, I would have defined the product by looking at the existing “menu” and creating a combo or slight varaition. I would have priced it by looking at the same menu and finding a price-point that looked reasonable compared to the other products, but was slightly a better deal to encourage people to take advantage of the one-day-offer.
That’s it. 30 minutes tops! - Where’s the challenge in that?! From there on, its all about hustle and selling. Again, sure those are important skills, but not really ones that define a world-class Apprentice.
Beyond challenges that aren’t nearly as interesting as the first episode, by far the reason why I fast-forward through most of this season is the whole “living in tents” thing. Its just lame.
I ‘get’ the struggle between the have’s and have not’s, but I just don’t think it fits for this show. I find myself wondering how much living in a tent affects their performance instead of how their personality and background affects their performance.
When the first seasons aired, I found myself watching and re-watching (sometimes even re-re-watching) each episode to pick up on every detail. I thought it was a great learning experience and very interesting to see progressively more difficult tasks each week that were all designed to weed out people and let the best rise to the top. And I thought Trump’s tidbits were interesting as well. After all, he’s ridiculously successful, I want to hear lots of what he has to say!
But this season has none of those things. And when you factor in the tent thing, I’m left with a show that I think will soon fall off my TiVo list. What a shame.
As a side note, I am impressed with Ivanka. Either its a lot of editing or she’s really that sharp, but she seems to have good, succinct insight.
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… is how to call for help. No, not a phone call, exactly. Here’s the deal…
I’m playing around with the Nokia SCCP client which (in theory) should allow me to connect my Nokia E61 to my Cisco call manager (VoIP) system to get phone calls from my office extension (which, obviously, uses a Cisco VoIP system) right on my cell phone. I’ve seen it demo’d by our Cisco BP and it looks COOL!
So last night I attempted to perform the installation. Against my better judgement, I did it when I was out of the office (getting a car wash - in MN, which was really my first lack of good judgement) and when I didn’t have a WiFi connection. The install worked fine but when I went to reboot the phone, it just showed the Nokia startup screen and the phone wouldn’t enter into the O/S. I said outloud “uh oh.”
I fought it for a bit last night and decided to leave it off for the evening (thinking it might work again when I was connected to our office WiFi, since it needs that to operate correctly … based on how I initially configured it during the install). That didn’t work either. So I went to my GoTo phone (Moto Razr V3i) and stuck a different SIM into the E61 and headed straight to Google to find someone who could bail me out.
The problem is that Nokia phones reset (hard or soft) in the O/S. Since I couldn’t get IN to the O/S, that posed a problem. Until I found this post which showed me exactly what I needed.
So, if you found this via Google search, don’t worry. Just click the link above and check out the section on holding down the Green key, the “3″ and the star (”*”) key all at once to get your phone back. The article says you will get a prompt, I didn’t. I waited until I saw the opening animation and then let go and was fine.
Doing this does take a while and it also will delete everything on your phone. But if you’ve gotten to this point, that’s better than the idea of forking out a few hundred dollars (US) for a replacement phone.
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This isn’t new technology but it continues to be amazing to me. My wife is flying home today from a business trip and I need to pick her up at the airport. I wanted to see what the flight status was and I couldn’t remember the flight number.
I opened up my Mac dashboard and added the Flight Tracker widget (which comes standard) and entered the airline and departure/arrival cities and found her flight information … and the arrival time estimate … and that they were running early … and what gate they’d be at … and their current altitude … and their current speed … you get the idea.
How amazing!
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Here’s a gallery of pictures from Lotusphere sessions. For some odd reason, they compiled in reverse chronological order. However, since I didn’t realize it until it was all uploaded to my site (and since EVERY internet connection I can find in the area is S.L.O.W.) I’m going to leave it as-is.
You’ll get the idea. 
Lotusphere 2007 Pictures
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I’ve got a very short break between sessions so I thought I’d recap a few of the highlights I took notes on from the Lotusphere 2007 Opening General Session. More details (and pictures) to come.
Business Stats:
Attendees:
Sametime
Notes 8
Calendars ( Notes 8 ):
Mail ( Notes 8 )
New Software: Lotus Quickr
Newish Software: WebSphere Portal Express
New Software: Lotus Connections
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I’ve read a lot of articles lately that discuss various blogging frequencies and patterns. They all dance around the same topic: what kind of blogger are you? The answers vary from sites that have frequent updates by many authors each day like engadget.com or tuaw.com, to people that post once in a while, if ever.
I’m what I like to call a “random blogger.” I used to post an entry once a day but found my posts were often re-hash of someone else’s. I tried to do it once a week, but found I had more to say. Now, I do it totally random, whenever there’s something that strikes me as interesting, important or requiring my commentary (b/c I tend to have an opinion on almost everything).
That being said, I’d really like to try to blog more this coming week during Lotusphere. I always take notes and produce a document (trip report) for my office that reviews everything I learned. I give it to my boss (who has to sign off on the expense report) and the rest of my staff (who, I think, find some of it interesting).
So that’s the goal … blog more. Let’s see how I do, shall we?
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My wife and I had dinner at UNO pizza last night and when the bill came, they also dropped off a (very large) survey machine. Its basically a big chunk of plastic with an LCD screen on it and some buttons to fill in a short survey about the food and service.
Its a very cool idea, even if it looks like a “new” technology that has been around for about a decade. The most interesting part about it was the last question where they ask if you want to be on their e-mail list. In order to get your e-mail address into the system, you have to use the numeric keyboard to enter your address “text-message” style, but without the predictive text.
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I got a call from my office last night: “Hey, we got it working! Sametime, with video and audio … its working!”
Quite exciting news for sure! We are on the cusp of sending many people to China over the next few months in support of launching our new facility there … so the ability to have Sametime with audio/video at the desktop level is quite appealing. I’ve seen $900 cell phone bills (one person, one week) from persons who have visited China; and everyone seems to return with a $9 camera and Skype on their system… which if fine, except its hard to keep track of user names with that. Oh, and no one can read what the camera’s driver disk is doing … since its all in Chinese.
So the idea of having our Sametime Clients now support audio and video over the web is very cool and already lots of people have signed up for a client license of this tool.
Being selfish for a moment … I knew the Sametime Client was mainly a Windows thing. I can’t seem to find any way for my Parallels instance to pick up the built-in iSight camera (or microphone for that matter) to allow Windows to use these devices.
So I thought I’d check out our Sametime site, to see if, by very unusual chance, there was a Mac version of the client on it. — Notsomuch. But what really hurt was seeing that there IS a Linux version of the client! DOH!
And yes, if we all had Macs, then we could use iSight and iChat to have uber-cool conferences. But we don’t … yet.
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The default URL’s for WordPress are … how do I say it … ugly. But, you can fix them. Simply go into the Admin area and select the URL type you want, OR create your own using variables.
I prefer to have some of the links on my site actually look like clean URLs. For example:
http://www.dominokeys.com/blog/helpcenter/faq/
Looks nice, doesn’t it? Since I always forget how to do set WordPress to do this AND I can never seem to come up with a search string that is straight forward, here’s how:
1. Create an .htaccess file in the root of the WordPress installation directory
2. Give the file “666″ permissions (via chmod, or your FTP program’s access settings) — or do what I do: open it up for full access “777″ until you’re done w/ the next step, then go back to the default
3. In the WordPress Admin area, go to the Permalinks section (Under “Options”) and press the “Update Permalink Structure” button. If you do it right, you’ll get a confirmation at the top. If not, you’ll get some kind of error with further instructions.
What does this have to do with Domino or a Mac? Not much. — Other than you have to manipulate Domino’s URLs too (unless you like typing in DocIDs).