Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Better laptop safety on the road

I’ve found a couple of good utilities that can help you improve the security and safety of your laptop while you’re on the road (and one of them will help around the office, too).

Hands off, bud

laptoplockThe first one isn’t free after the trial period, but it’s pretty useful.  It’s called Laptop Alarm, and it’s from Syfer in The Netherlands.  Once you’ve installed (sorry Mac – it’s Windows only) and activated it, Laptop Alarm sits there quietly until someone does something to change the state of your laptop, such as unplugging the power cable; removing the mouse or another USB peripheral; or shuts down the laptop.

When one of the offending events occurs, it make a loud noise to alert you that someone’s messing with your laptop.  This can be handy in an airport lounge, library, or other venue such as that where you may need to walk off for a few minutes to get something.  [BTW – a laptop cable lock might be a good idea if you do that a lot]

You can download a free, fully-functional trial version if you’d like.  The full version is 10 Euros.

Automatic locking

The next one is pretty cool.  BtProx Screen It’s called BtProx and it’s a free utility that can automatically lock your laptop (yep, Windows only again) when you walk away.  This is handy if you often forget to lock your computer when you walk away for a meeting (by the way, the shortcut <Windows Key>+L will do it quick if you remember).

How does BtProx do its magic?  Well, it uses Bluetooth (which means both your phone and your laptop must support Bluetooth for this to work).  When your computer loses contact with your phone via Bluetooth, BtProx locks the system for you after a preset time.  Pretty cool.

As an added bonus, you can configure BtProx to automatically launch a specified application when it locks the system.  That could be handy if you combined it with other security programs (such as Laptop Alarm) or wanted to trigger a backup or antivirus scan when you are away from your computer.

So, laptop users – check them out and let me know what you think.

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Road Rules (are you the truck or the squirrel?)

Andrew Sherman recently released a book called “Road Rules:  Be the Truck.  Not the Squirrel.” which uses an interesting approach to explain some powerful business and relationship principles.  The book relates life concepts to driving rules, which I think are an excellent memory aid.road_rules

In the book, there are 12 “essential rules” to help you share the road of life.  This book is an easy read, as the material is relevant and the writing style is very engaging.  A lot of the advice is very common sense kinds of information, but the metaphors in the book provide new triggers and different perspective on when, why, and how to use certain techniques to better interact with the world.

Signs of life

Want a taste?  Well in the chapter “Pay Attention to the Road Signs of Life,” Sherman uses common road signs to take us through a number of critical skills.  Here are 2 examples from the chapter:

lane_ends  Pay careful attention to changes in your roadway of life that are truly inevitable.  You may be cruising along in your lane of choice, only to learn that you will be out of runway sooner than you expected.
caution Don’t speed past and endanger people working in teams when they are trying to be productive.  If you cannot add something to the process, do not interfere, impede, or endanger it.  Be respectful to those that are trying to make your pathway more passable.

Keeping it between the ditches

I liked the whole book, but there are a few chapters that really rang true for me.

  • The first is “Embrace Your Dashboard,” which is about determining the indicators, metrics, and “gauges” that will help you monitor your progress, live a more balanced life, and keep yourself on track.  There is some good advice in here.
  • The second is “Be Guided By Your Navigational System,” which is about planning your trip so you know where you want to go, being ready to take a detour if you get blocked, and listening to advice and feedback (like traffic reports).
  • The third is “Accidents Can Happen Even to the Best Drivers,” which provides tips to handle life when things don’t go your way.

In summary, this is a fun treatment of some serious content and is a good resource for honing your skills so you can be a better driver on the road of life.

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Get out of your own way at work

I just finished reading one of the best “coach in a book” type of books I’ve read in a very long time.  The book is Mark Goulston’s, “Get Out of Your Own Way at Work...And Help Others Do the Same: Conquer Self-Defeating Behavior on the Job.”

This book provides very clear guidance on 40 different problem areas that can limit your success at work, each covered in a separate chapter.  index_goyowaw The topics covered include

  • Being Competent but Out of Touch
  • Procrastinating
  • Being Afraid to Fire People
  • Quitting Too Soon
  • Not Forgiving
  • Expecting Your Boss To Appreciate You

and many more (you can see the entire table of contents which includes all the topics in Amazon’s preview of the book).

Chock full of goodness

Each section provides a clear description of how each of the self-defeating behaviors might manifest itself, some specifics about the “damage” the behavior can cause, great quotes, and many of the sections include stories from Goulston’s research to further illustrate the point.

The things I liked best were:

  • “Usable Insight” observations sprinkled into the text (example: “You have more control over trying or quitting than you do over succeeding or failing”).
  • The specific, usable “Action Steps” at the end of each of the 40 chapters that provide real (not idealistic or unrealistic) steps you can take to try to improve.

It’s like self-service coaching

I think anyone can benefit from this book.  When I read through all of the sections, I definitely recognized quite a few areas where I could improve and the advice in the book felt just like it was coming from a wise business coach.  Not bad for a book that costs around 10 bucks.

Go check out the topics in the table of contents.  If any of them sound familiar (and you want to improve in any of those areas), then pick up a copy of this book.

You can also find some good information and inspiration at Dr. Mark Goulston’s excellent blog.

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DIY with expert guidance

My wife and I are having some remodeling done to make our house more hospitable for her father, who can no longer deal with stairs.  We’ve had some excellent assistance from a contractor for “big stuff” like adding a shower on the ground floor. 

In addition, we’re taking the opportunity to perform some other maintenance and updates, but are doing those ourselves to try to save some money.  One of the projects was to repair or replace a pocket door in one of our rooms, and it wasn’t obvious to me just how to do the job.

In the process of researching the topic, I came across “Ron Hazelton’s HouseCalls” site.  This is an excellent resource for do-it-yourself home repair jobs.  I started with “How to Repair and Replace a Pocket Door,” but you can search the site and there are tons of relevant, practical tutorials from Ron.

Each one has very clear, step-by-step instructions (with pictures), tells you what tools you’ll need, and offers printable instructions.  Most of the topics even include videos you can watch online to see how things ought to be done.

This resource is a real time saver and confidence builder.  If you’ve got home repairs that you want to tackle on your own, check out Ron’s site.

What about you – any favorite DIY resources to share?

iPhone Productivity Apps

There is a great list of 20 iPhone productivity on the Web Design Schools site that should help you weed through the many choices you have on Apples App Store.jottiphone

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I used one of the 3G iPhones for a while and I think they are awesome devices – and part of the allure is the robust (and growing) set of choices for applications.  I used some of the apps mentioned in this article but many were new to me, and they may be new to you, as well.

Why am I not using the iPhone any more?

A friend of mine reminded me yesterday that I never wrote anything here about why I dropped my iPhone 3G and went to a Blackberry (I’m now using a Blackberry Bold, which I really like).

Here is the short reason:  Many of the business-oriented tasks I perform frequently were very difficult to achieve on the iPhone since it’s not tailored for business use.  Here are my top 3:

  • I couldn’t cut & paste.  I often send excerpts from articles, emails, etc. from my mobile device so this was very inconvenient.  This is very easy on my Blackberry.
  • I couldn’t invite others to appointments (i.e. initiate meeting requests).  Sure I could create an appointment, respond to calendar invites, and such on the iPhone but I could not invite others to meetings.  In contrast, on the Blackberry I can do all of this and I can click a button to find the next available time slot in which all of my invitees are available.
  • I couldn’t attach / forward contact information to others.  I often need to send virtual business card information (mine and others’) to people and this couldn’t be done on my iPhone.  This is a long-time function on Blackberry devices.

So that’s the short scoop on why I no longer use an iPhone.  I can still use many of the cool apps, by the way.  I upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest firmware which allows me to use any app in the App Store that isn’t exclusively for the iPhone.

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