January 2014 Archives

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Have you ever had a job or a task that was beneath your skill level, doing work that contributed less value and used less of your creativity than you knew you had to offer? If you're like me, you will underperform at that lower-level work.


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If you’re just joining us now, be sure to check out Part 1, where we explored the inherent optimism of designers, developers and managers, and what specific elements of our professions increase our sense of optimism.


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First the snowballs flew. Then the bullets.The University of Tennessee's deadliest snow day started with a crowd of students laying out of class to throw snowballs at passing cars on the Cumberland Avenue Strip. It ended with one student dead, a trucker accused of murder and a city enraged.


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You have a few minutes of unexpected down time. Do you make use of it?


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I started a new game with the kids recently: collecting photos of historical markers. It’s fun for everyone, rather educational, and has opened my eyes to a few other things as well. Day One is a perfect match.


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I am not a mind reader, but I’ve tried playing one at work. I think we all have. I used to imagine that I could peer into the silent void of a discussion with an employee and their thoughts and feelings would magically pop in my head. It never happened. We are in the feedback business.


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Mindfulness is not just a meditation, it’s a way of life.


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This is a contributed post by Jamie Todd Rubin, Evernote’s Paperless Ambassador. Between meeting agendas, minutes and printed slide decks, each meeting can leave you with quite a stack of paper to deal with.


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Over the years, jQuery became a must-use for every web developer. It is simple to use, fast and very powerful. In this article I have put together a series of 10+ handy jQuery code snippets you may save and copy to use at your own discretion.


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As you may know, last summer we made the difficult decision to stop selling OmniGraphSketcher and focus on our other applications. As part of this decision we elected to remove the app from our website instead of continuing to offer it as a free product as we have done with other apps in the past.


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Interruptions are one of the biggest sources of inefficiency for programmers. Now, to be fair, they’re probably a big source of inefficiency for everyone, but relatively speaking, they’re worse for programmers. To understand what I mean, let’s take someone whose job is in sales.


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The natural tendency of growth is towards specialization. When you only have a few people, they must by necessity do everything. When you have more people, there’s enough room and slack to let people build specialization kingdoms that only they have the keys to.


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There are some bloggers who seem to have a natural gift when it comes to writing. Some bloggers seem to be naturally gifted writers. They manage to get their ideas across clearly and economically, which means that readers can easily follow what they write.


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We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours.


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I've been reviewing session proposals for Agile 2014. I'm a reviewer for two tracks: Culture, Collaboration and Teams, and the Project, Program and Portfolio tracks. I knew the work would be challenging, especially as we got to the end of the submission deadline.


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If you read the series up to this point, there is a very good chance you are already pretty much up and running with journaling. You figured out why to journal, what to journal, and when to journal.


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Once you have a solid reason to journaling and quality content to write on it about, the only thing you need is to actually start journaling. However, as I illustrated in part two of this series, starting a journal might not actually be as easy as it seems.


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One of the hardest things you face after starting a journal is figuring out what to write. I’m not going to lie, my first week with Day One was an utter disappointment. I was tremendously excited to start a journal of my own; however, once I sat down to write, not a single word came out.


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I’ve always wondered why so many notoriously famous people kept journals. It is no secret that people like Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Winston Churchill were famous for walking around with notebooks and pens, recording things they thought were of meaning to them.


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Support Slogger by contributing to my GitTip fund. If you are upgrading from a version prior to 2.0.12, please remove the RSSLogger section from slogger_config and regenerate it by running slogger again. A new section will be added in addition to RSSLogger called Bloglogger.


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It took me a long time to accept the fact that adding structure and routine to my workday was not the equivalent of giving up the freedom of entrepreneurship that I had longed for throughout my years as an employee.


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Organizational change is always at the top of the C-suite agenda but if you're looking to improve operations across a number of areas where do you start ? Here's a couple of suggestions. Your operations need radical improvement. You have no idea how much work actually comes into the organization.


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Who doesn’t want to be comfortable? I love it when I have everything I need, when I’m relaxed, when I’m sitting in a cozy chair and I feel at ease with the people I’m with. All is well.


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The Science of Technique Analysis At the time I began karate study of potential technique applications was not a study in our group. Over the next few years it was very much the same in other karate style dojo I visited.


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“We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.


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Benjamin Franklin made sure to end every day by asking “What good have I done today?” Maya Angelou only wrote in tiny hotel rooms. Jack Kerouac made sure to touch the ground nine times before writing.


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CIO — On average, Google makes about 500 adjustments to its search engine algorithm every year.


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Tamara Franklin, who has been guiding distribution of the company's lifestyle content onto emerging video platforms and services, has been named executive vice president of digital for Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. (NYSE: SNI).


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We've all been there — yelling at a computer screen or particular website because the antiquated design prevents you from getting where you want to go. But outdated features on your company's website can do more than annoy — it can cost you potential clients or customers.


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Yes, I realize this makes for roughly $7.50 dinners.


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If there is one setting inside your camera that allows for photographing a wide range of amazing effects in your images, it has to be the shutter speed.


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This question from Jennifer: Sure can! I’ve written a post on the same topic for managers: How to Have an Effective 1 on 1. So, I’d suggest starting with reading that in order to get an understanding of what your boss is looking for. However, let’s assume most bosses haven’t read that post.


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Over the years of learning about photography, certain lessons stick out in my mind. One of these was the Mailbox Assignment. The assignment was simple: take 36 shots of a mailbox. It had to be the same mailbox. Oh, and by the way…each shot had to be unique.


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Late last week, Google set off the most recent of America’s periodic online-privacy freak-outs.


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SAN FRANCISCO — Call it Lean In, the sequel. Lean In For Graduates, an updated version of Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book on empowerment, is coming to bookstores in April, Facebook's chief operating officer told USA TODAY.


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Despite constant encouragement these days to push our valuable data into ‘the cloud’, there is still a genuine need for offline backups. Apple continues to support this with OS X’s brilliant Time Machine facility, making file backup and retrieval as intuitive as it gets.


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CIO — Outlook connection problems? Salesforce.com system crashing repeatedly? Trouble connecting to internal human resources systems? You're not alone.


via Pocket http://www.cio.com/article/745780/Tech_Performance_Issues_Plague_IT_and_Businesses?source=CIONLE_nlt_insider_2014-01-13

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The net’s been buzzing this week after a hunter based out of Texas (a weird enough state already) announced he’d accomplished the seemingly impossible task of killing a Sasquatch.


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Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye is a great guidance book for technical craftsmans. For me the main doctrine of the book is walking the long road.


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Top commanders in the U.S. Army have announced publicly that they have a problem: They have too many "toxic leaders" — the kind of bosses who make their employees miserable.


via Pocket http://www.npr.org/2014/01/06/259422776/army-takes-on-its-own-toxic-leaders

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Winter driving takes special skills and often a modified setup for your car. Prepare for the season, think ahead and don't panic. And for starters, avoid the following ten mistakes. Empty parking lots. Mountain roads. Without endangering anybody including yourself, go out there and practice.


via Pocket http://jalopnik.com/the-ten-worst-things-you-can-do-while-driving-in-winter-1498639091

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I’ve been pushing this branching model for something like 14 years now. It’s nice to see Facebook say a little more about their Trunk Based Development.


via Pocket http://paulhammant.com/2014/01/08/googles-vs-facebooks-trunk-based-development/

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Online business card manufacturer Moo has headquarters that are as vibrant as the cards it prints. The offices, located in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, boast an open floor plan with colorful accents -- plus plenty of baked goods on hand for the employees.


via Pocket http://mashable.com/2014/01/09/playful-workspaces/

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You could say Chris Fry has a pretty big job. As Twitter’s senior vice president of engineering, he’s the guy who makes sure the trains — or rather, tweets — run on time.


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Two weeks before I had to leave for Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, I decided it was time I built an enclosure for the PiPad. I’d been helping a guy in the Shed Tech Support queue that needed some help with his Maker Faire project, and thought “You know, I want a Maker Faire project too.


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When you want your team to work together in Evernote, it helps to give them specific ideas to get them started. Here’s how our Ambassadors got their teams excited about using Evernote at work. Lindsey C.


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Technology has become an everyday part of our lives. At work, on vacation, and even out in the car, we use mobile devices and computers for everything. We can even use technology to help us organize our home. In this article I’ll show you 10 ways to organize your home with Evernote.


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They're bosses. They're in charge. They have the power. Make employees feel they should attend “social” events.


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I believe in being nimble. Being small and light allows you to move more fluently and act faster. Being light also allows you to be more efficient. You don’t need a large team to be successful, you simply need the right team.


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Who doesn’t want to figure out how to get more done? Or get things done more efficiently? We asked some of the most productive people we know how you can tackle the New Year’s work.


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Luckily for the not-so-natural speakers among us (in other words, most of us), speech coaches say the most important presentation skills can be learned.


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Earlier this week, Google Voice opened to everyone in the U.S.. The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood. Here are our favorite tricks every Google Voice user should know about.


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Some apps do one thing, and they do it well. Others have a host of clever, hidden uses that you might have never thought of on your own. Here are our favorite clever uses for popular apps.


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As we get back to work in 2014, it makes sense to reflect a bit on how we manage our work lives and our work-life balance. I may be the worst person to give advice about this as I have always loved my work so much that it seems I seldom totally withdraw from it.


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This post originally appeared on the ooomf blog. I remember trying out my first hour-by-hour schedule to help me get things done when I was 10. Wasn’t really my thing. I’ve since retired the hourly schedule, but I still rely on a daily to-list.


via Pocket http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2014/01/05/write-list-wont-hurt-productivity/

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This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of C programs - manually repacking C structure declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.


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I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was 14 years-old. These aren’t diaries or journals, just the workaday jottings of stray thoughts and “brilliant” notions, occasional phone numbers and grocery lists of the past 26 years.


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Okay let’s face it, the internet is full of advice, how to’s, best tips, and all the rest, this also includes being a leader of people. I often see posts and articles that reference being an effective leader in your company/business.


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“Stay glad. Keep hoping machine running. Love everybody. Make up your mind.” Writing in A Tale of a Tub in 1699, at the age of 32, Jonathan Swift — best-known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels — compiled a list of 17 aspirations for his far future, titled “When I come to be old.


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Rules TIps Focus More Focus More tips! Exposure Tempurature F-stops Modes Shutter Histogram Shooting faces LIghting First photograph a girl you like.. …then her body… ..naturally the wedding next.. ..


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Yikes! You’ve got your first DSLR! Now what? One of my friends recently received a DSLR from her husband for her birthday. She was over the moon! One afternoon over coffee, she asked if I had any advice to help her get started with her new camera.


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When I started my career as a Project Manager, I too was convinced that following a plan was a mandatory requirement for project success. As I tried to manage my first projects, my emphasis was on making sure that the plan was known, understood and then followed by everyone involved.


via Pocket http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-projects-fail-is-why-we-think-they.html

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When you are eyeing the latest DSLR camera on the shop window, a virtual camera application isn’t going to draw your attention. But if that dream camera is still some dollars away, the Outside of Auto from Canon could be the thing to give you a gentler introduction to the basics of photography.


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We’ve spoken to the folks from Kiwi Wearables before: Back in September we caught up with them at the Disrupt SF Hackathon, when they were preparing their platform and demonstrated what it could do with a sensor-laden prototype used as a gesture-based musical instrument.


via Pocket http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/kiwi-puts-its-all-purpose-wearable-up-for-pre-order-aims-to-be-everything-to-everyone/

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As with a lot of Apple products and services, iCloud’s simplicity is a gift and a curse: This built-in syncing and backup system works in the background without a lot of tinkering on your end, but you’re probably not entirely sure how it works.


via Pocket http://recode.net/2014/01/03/seeing-through-the-haze-of-icloud/

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I don't know what to think about this: Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation.


via Pocket https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/military_style.html

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Coders make resolutions, no? If your to-do-better list is still empty, consider these ideas from other programmers to put to use in the New Year. Even the smartest folks have room to grow. The following excerpts are contained in the book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know edited by Kevlin Henny.


via Pocket http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/01/7-ways-to-be-a-better-programmer-in-2014.html

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Since starting The Simple Dollar (and discovering, when it became successful, that it required constant attention) and having two children, I’ve found that getting financially ahead and finding the time to get everything done both became significantly more challenging than before.


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I have an account at StackOverflow.  Follow the link and check out a few stats: I've been a member for almost four years at the time I'm writing this. I've scored over 14,000 points in their gaming system. I'm in the top 3% of their contributors overall as of this writing.


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We all have things that we want to achieve in our lives -- getting into the better shape, building a successful business, raising a wonderful family, writing a best-selling book, winning a championship, and so on.


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