Some of my more "usual" posts are coming later this week, but here are some updates following a whirlwind travel schedule these past two weeks. I've gone around the world (Australia, Singapore, Amsterdam, Madrid, then back to the U.S.), done a great job beating jet lag, but fallen mightily to a bout of food poisoning on my flight between Sydney and Singapore - yuck.
Here are some updates, observations, and learnings from this trip:
Some economic / immigration concerns span the globe.
- I had conversations on every continent where people were concerned about workers from other countries coming in and working for less money, refusing to learn the local language, and jeopardizing the local culture. You could do a "search and replace" to adjust the conversation to reflect the local "invading culture" and the arguments sounded identical.
- The US is still missing the boat on the Metric system.
- Man, I wish the US would convert to Metric standards. I remember reading that this was "on the way" in my Weekly Reader back in 1976, but it doesn't seem like it will ever happen.
- Kensington has great support for its customers.
- I've reviewed my travel adapter in the past. On this trip, the part of the adapter that lets me run my laptop off the power jacks on airplanes decided to quit working. I emailed Kensington's customer service and they zipped out a replacement right away, with no hassle. Gotta love that.
- Robert Ludlum books are a great way to entertain yourself on long flights.
- I had a number of business-oriented books along with me, but I kept gravitating back to the late, great Ludlum. Great stuff. Even some of the newer ones that they are 'ghost writing' under his name (such as The Ambler Warning, which I read on this trip).
- Sometimes, more business gets decided over drinks and dinner than in formal meetings.
- People do business with people. Never underestimate the power of a little social time after the formal meeting. Just don't go too wild!
- Time zones can be tricky to figure out.
- Dutch coffee is my favorite in the world.
- Lots of places have good coffee, but I think Dutch coffee is the best. I brought back a kilo of Douwe Egberts' Aroma Rood. Lekker!
Those are a few things I've learned on my recent trips. Looking forward to sharing a little more frequently in the coming days!
Read MoreI recently discovered a free app called NetJaxer that provides an easy "home base" for all your Web 2.0 / Ajax apps. I've been slowly (but surely) taking on more web-based apps for collaboration, productivity, and fun, and NetJaxer makes it easy for me to use them.
One launchpad
NetJaxer provides one place to go and organizes my web-based apps into a launchpad kind of view (see my screen shot - click to zoom). Within this view, it can store thumbnail views of your web-based apps to make it easier to find what you're looking for.
NetJaxer also provides an icon in the system tray to make it easier to launch my apps. This feature, in particular, is making my web-based document sharing a bit easier to manage (I'm doing quite a bit with Google Documents these days).
Suggestions and ratings
Another thing that is very cool about NetJaxer is that it provides a dynamic kind of "directory" of Ajax apps, complete with categorization and user ratings. I've found some very cool new tools this way. Check it out!
Read MoreYou may have noticed the lack of posting the past few days - I'm just wrapping up a very busy week in Australia, so I haven't had the cycles to do any posting, of late.
More to come, including how I whipped jet lag on this trip. Meanwhile, enjoy this picture from the Melbourne zoo!
Read MoreA lot of folks gripe about "death by PowerPoint" (often appropriately). However, I want to share a way I use PowerPoint as a focuing tool. As a "trivia collector" I have a tendency to go a bit heavy on data when I'm communicating. This can be a problem if I have a tight time frame within which to deliver a message (i.e. "You have 10 minutes - go."), or if I'm dealing with a senior audience with short attention spans.
I've often heard that the more senior the audience, the more value there is in small numbers and primary colors. PowerPoint is a great tool to help focus your message to a simpler level.
There is no "one way" to do this, but here is a technique that works for me:
- Pick 3 to 4 points you want your audience to remember.
- Create 1 slide for each major point.
- Create 3 bullet short, crisp points for each slide (yes, get it down to 3 - not 4 or 5).
- Practice using these slides as a sort of "teleprompter" to deliver your message and test the soundness of the message:
- Does each point add real value to your message?
- Is each point essential in achieving your communication objectives / desired outcome?
- Do you have the fact to support each point, if questioned?
- Is the order / flow correct?
- etc.
- When you formally deliver your message, you can either have a "6 up" handout view of the slides as a guide, or print the Outline view.
I find this helps keep the message tight and on-point. Got other tips? Share away.
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Read MoreI read lots of PDF files, but I've been annoyed lately by some glitches with Adobe's Acrobat Reader software. Among the reasons the Acrobat Reader annoys me:
- It's huge by any measure. It's a large download, it takes lots of memory, and has a large disk footprint.
- It's not very stable. When I open PDF's from within my browser (any flavor of browser), Acrobat reader often misbehaves. Sometimes, it causes my CPU utilization to spike to 100% (with the AcroRead.exe process taking 99% of that). Sometimes, it grabs a hunk of memory and won't let it go. In either case, I have to forcibly terminate the process with Windows to recover.
- It "phones home" all the time. Adobe installs an update checker that constantly bugs me to update the software (and no, these problems don't seem to get any better even after the updates). Along with that, it recommends a bunch of other products that it thinks I might want to download.
A few weeks ago, I went looking for a better alternative, and I think I've found it. The alternative is called "Foxit Reader v2" and I've been running it for about 3 weeks with none of the problems I used to have with Acrobat Reader. It's free, and there are versions for Windows, Linux, and Windows Mobile use.
If you're a Windows user and you've seen some of the clunky annoyances I describe above, check out the Foxit Reader.
- It's a smaller download (1.65 MB for Windows).
- It takes up less room on your hard drive.
- It's very stable.
- It checks for updates when you tell it to (via a menu command).
- It has all the functionality you need to read, print, fill out forms, etc. with PDF files.
- And, again, it's free.
How can they offer this free? Foxit apparently has some additional utilities they sell, such as those for creating, editing, and otherwise manipulating PDF's - they use those utilities to pay the bills.
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