After more than a year of evaluating, debating, discussing with friends and colleagues, I bought my first Mac – a MacBook Air. I must say, I love it already!

I was a PC. Now I'm a Mac.

I was a PC. Now I’m a Mac.

TED.com has some great videos. This video is just one of them.

The speaker in this video – Jason Fried – gives a refreshing take on getting work done at work. Most of the ideas presented here are from his book, “Rework“, which I recommend as well.

Recommended TED Talk

Just a quick note to highlight the proliferation of Google throughout my life:

• Home – I use gmail like an addict
• Home – All of my contacts are synced up with Google Contacts
• Home – My wife and I use Google Docs to help keep track of the family budget
• Home – My wife and I use Google Picasa to store all of our photos online
• Home – My wife and I use Blogger to…blog
• Home – I subscribe to several RSS feeds and use Google Reader multiple times a day
• Home – I recently set up a Google Voice account for call-forwarding and voice mail
• Work – I use the Google Data Visualization API at work to generate graphs
• Work – Of course, I use Google Search hourly
• Work – We will be using Google AdWords to manage our PPC campaign in 2010 
• Work – Several of our videos are hosted on YouTube
• Work – A large section of our corporate website uses Google Maps
• Work – We use Google Analytics to track stats on our website

No wonder they are slowly taking over the world.

Google Products

I’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 and modified the theme.

There is a project at Digital Realty Trust that we are developing and will use WordPress as the selected platform. Now, I’ll have more working knowledge about WP while I manage this project.

So far I like 2.7. I’ve since downloaded the WordPress app to my iPhone and am writing this entry from my iPhone.

I encourage you to upgrade if you’re running WordPress.

Recent upgrade

Link to article by Salesforce.com CEO – Marc Benioff

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/08/01/welcome-to-web-30-now-your-other-computer-is-a-data-center/

The following is just a bulleted list of responses to both the article and user comments.

Agree – Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate

* A lot of people use it. It becomes a plague. Then people don’t use it. Look at the number of blogs that have the digg, reddit, stumbleupon, bookmark and delicious icons at the end of each post. Do you really use those links?Untethered Innovation = del.icio.us then digg.com then reddit then stumbleupon then buzz up. How many of those do you use to its fullest potential?
* Look at SFDC. I run an org of 70 users and it is amazing how people will sit in a meeting and stress how important an app like SFDC is to our company as a whole, then not use it. The only way employees end up using it is when the executives hold a gun to their head or their salaries are tied to the data in the system.
* We in the development and IT world need to get over ourselves and realize the day-to-day employees making the world’s largest companies run do not know what RSS is, don’t know how to post to an ftp server, will have a completely different definition of the term “cloud” than you might expect, have never heard of any Web 2.0 app, don’t know that an app running Ruby, AJAX and XAML can help anything or even how to insert a picture into a Microsoft Word document. They don’t understand the name of the application – joomla!, xoop, twitter, mint, jiglu, drupal, doof, iubo – much less how to use the functionality offered by such an app. Even if you do get them to use it, they inevitably come to one thing – one tiny, tiny obstacle – in the app they cannot overcome and they completely abandon it; give up on it and say “its too hard!” Innovation, therefore, becomes a vicious cycle.
* Marc is right, Web 3.0 is “the stuff of revolution.” Out of chaos, will come order (because someone will see profit in bringing order). Then there will be chaos again, then order.
* We end up with a very, very crowded marketplace. Look at this Web 2.0 directory – http://www.go2web20.net/ – and think about how many of those little apps do something very, very similar to the next only slightly different. In the end, we are going to get a ton of apps that do one thing slightly different than the next. They become a solution looking for a problem and that, my friend, is not innovation.
* We only buy the “shiny thing”. SaaS was, and is, the latest “shiny thing”. Business executives who don’t understand the cloud, what it takes to develop apps or the damage that can be done to thier company if the app is not properly used, feel as though they must have these technologies running their companies and, if not, they are considered ‘innefective leaders with a lack to innovate.
* When the world was small, we could understand it. I don’t like the way people can anonymously sit behind a computer monitor and tear apart someone eles’ attempt to make things understood; like Benioff is doing here. We in the development and IT world are the main culprits. But, then again, that is Web 2.0, isn’t it?

On Web 3.0

I must say, I didn’t know there were so many political moves one must make to upgrade a web hosting environment.

Technically, it is a sound move. Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 and .NET 3.5 are the latest generation Windows OS and web hosting environment. The site I am managing isn’t even that complex of a site.

Politically, it seems there are so many people you have to “sell” in order to make the move.

That’s fine, but it is teaching me a skill I didn’t think I would learn while trying to upgrade a web hosting environment – create a win for a customer, create a win for someone internally, and create a win for myself.

All good skills, I must say, but I never would have thought I would be honing the above skill this way.

Maneuvering political waters

Vendors are something we all have in our departments, either to a great extent or minimally. I’ve been on both sides of the vendor coin as vendor and vendor manager.

Here are my keys to the vendor relationship.

=== Regular Communication ===

A systematic and regular form of communication is important to establish early. This is important for two reasons:

1. Reduce Anxiety : As a vendor, I knew that my point of contact at the client’s office was being measured by how I performed as a vendor but, most importantly, they were being measured by how well they managed me. Every vendor should realize that they need to make their client point of contact look good. One very easy way of doing this is by reducing anxiety. Having a systematic and regular form of communication forced me as the vendor to “think ahead” of what the client is going to ask me and it allows the client a medium to release any anxiety they may have about the success of the project or ask a question of you that they were asked and did not have an answer for.

Everyone wants to look good to their boss, everyone wants to look like they are under control and that the project is being managed well. Boss’ secretly believe that if those three things are happening, then the project will have a successful outcome.

“Wait! I hate weekly meetings!” – Me too, primarily because people do not think them through, prepare for them, or realize the opportunity they have to promote/sell a new idea, create synergy as a team, etc. Most often, those dreaded weekly meetings are never prepared for because vendors think they can just “dog and pony” their way through the entire meeting and update. Not true.

As a vendor, I created a list of ideas that I wanted to implement. Some very minor in terms of changes, some were pretty radical. But I had ideas. So on a regular basis – probably once a month – I would pull out a new idea. It would surprise my client, sometimes they would react positively and grant my wishes to implement the idea and sometimes they wouldn’t. With either outcome I win because it showed the client I was thinking about them strategically, or I was giving them ideas that they could take back to their boss and – here it is again – look good to their bosses. It is a mutually beneficial situation; I get a longer life as a vendor and my client point of contact has no anxiety, looks good to their boss and feels that they are managing me very well.

=== Crisis Management ===

2. Increase camaraderie : We all have those YIKES! moments where we think the world in crumbling in on top of us. When something in the project does go wrong, if you don’t have the documented outcomes of #1 above then guess who gets the bear the burden of the fall – the vendor. I’ve managed a vendor where we had a crisis and all I wanted was to be in constant contact. I got nothing from them. They knew things were wrong, I knew things were wrong and they were not responding to phone calls or emails.

To me, as the client in this scenario, I thought I was going to be fired because – here it is again – it didn’t look like I was managing my vendor well, I didn’t look good to my boss and I was full of anxiety. I was “contents under pressure” and hardly anyone makes a good decision under those circumstances.

I wasn’t keying in on the mistake, I was keying in on the complete lack of information coming from the vendor. That is what made me the most angry and is the reason that we will no longer work with that vendor.

Vendor Management

A different way of serving ads to me

I really like the way Google does business in many regards.

One of my favorites is the way they change their logo according to the holiday. Here is the Google logo for Independence Day: click here

One of my favorites

Happy 4th of July everyone! Enjoy this great country we are blessed with…

Independence Day