Archive for the ‘General’ Category
When things get tough…
When things get tough, keep this little ditty in mind:
For every problem under the sun,
there is a solution or there is none.
If there is a solution, go and find it.
If there isn’t, never mind it.
Brian Tracy used this poem in his fantastic book, Crunch Point: The 21 Secrets to Succeeding When It Matters Most.
If you, your family, or your business is experiencing a ‘crunch time’, I highly recommend this book. There’s nothing fundamentally new in it, but it will help you clarify your thoughts and actions to get your where you need to go as quickly as you possibly can.
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Eat That FROG! Brian Tracy stop procrastinating US $1.29 (3 Bids) End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 15:00:46 PDT Add to watch list |
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Flight Plan: The Real Secret of Success by Brian Tracy US $9.98 End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 15:10:40 PDT Add to watch list |
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Dale Carnegie, Brian Tracy - Leadership Audiobook Lot US $34.98 (0 Bid) End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 15:10:47 PDT Add to watch list |
Posted in Bloatware sucks.
In preparation for my road trip next week, I picked up a new, what should be screaming fast, laptop yesterday. It was preloaded with Vista, which I’ll just have to suffer with for now since not all the fancy doodads on this thing have XP drivers, so I knew it wasn’t going to be quite as screaming as it would be with just XP, but I wasn’t prepared for the sluggish brick that all the bloatware turned it into.
The first thing I did was burn recovery CDs… after all, when you start wholesale deleting and uninstalling things, you never know what can go wrong.
The last laptop I bought required me to burn recovery CDs too, so I was prepared. I picked up a spindle of blank CDs but just about choked on my coffee when the program requested SEVENTEEN (17) CDs!!! I grabbed the spindle of blank DVDs instead, and burned the bloatware to three of those.
What the heck can they be adding to this poor laptop to fill 17 CDs! Even the most loaded up Linux distro, with Open Office, Gimp and seventeen million other applications I’ll never use, include only six CDs.
Ah well, after two and a half hours of burning, I finally started removing apps.
Norton’s gone, all of HP’s little helper apps are trashed, the lame game stuff is removed, and all of Microsoft’s little helpful ‘extras’ are eliminated.
And another two hours are gone.
Finally, I get around to installing my own apps: Firefox, Thunderbird, Homesite, Filezilla, Zonealarm Suite, Stylus Studio, Open Office.
Another hour and a half gone.
Another hour customizing everything and adding firefox plugins, custom home tabs in custom profiles in firefox, configuring email, bookmarking the important stuff…. and it’s finally done.
And this was the laptop that was going to help me be productive.
Sheesh.
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HP Pavilion dv9000 Laptop CMOS Battery US $1.99 End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:46:38 PDT Add to watch list |
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HP Pavilion Series ze2000 Laptop AC Power Adapter New US $11.16 End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:47:52 PDT Add to watch list |
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HP COMPAQ PRESARIO R3000 LAPTOP 40 GB HDD 1 GB RAM US $122.50 (8 Bids) End Date: Thursday Sep-09-2010 14:48:04 PDT Add to watch list |
Lizzie Borden Took an Ax
and gave her Mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done
she gave her Father forty-one.
Offer the name Lizzie Borden to the average person, and the odds are that those who recognize the name will immediately connect it to “ax murderer.â€
But, 114 years ago today, Lizzie Borden was actually acquitted of the murder of her father and step-mother in court. The case has never officially been solved.
Lizzie Borden was a respectable, church-going, Sunday school-teaching spinster. A daughter of a wealthy family, living in a prestigious neighborhood, with her perfectly respectable family. Few people of the day thought that such a woman could possibly be capable of such a violent murder.
The media, and much of public opinion, was on her side during the trial, even though she was ostracized by her neighbors after the acquittal.
But in the end, it’s the little sensational ditty that remains in our memory. Not the true story. The fiction is more glamorous, more sensational, and infinitely more memorable. There’s a marketing lesson in there somewhere.
It’s comforting to think that today, with our forensics and cynical attitudes, that the guilty party in this case would have certainly faced punishment. But perhaps not. The Borden’s, and by extension Lizzie, were at the top of a social tribe of their day. We still live in a world of tribes, and those connected to the leadership of each of those tribes is more likely to get a free pass than those on the outskirts of the same tribe.
A friend of mine recently pointed out a case that illustrates this in the Free Presbyterian church in Canada. A married Sunday school teacher who was a family relation of the church leader had an affair with a 13 year old girl from the church. Although, when it was revealed, the man was charged criminally, his punishment within the church was that he was stripped of his leadership position in the church, but was later fully forgiven. The girl and her family were kicked out of the church, cruelly labeled an “adulteressâ€, and has never been granted even a portion of forgiveness or compassion. That is the difference between those near the leadership of a tribe, and those at the bottom.
The same tribal structure appears in the world of Internet marketing as well. I’ve seen a few new players fall to the tribal punishment over the past year or so, as they rush to make a name for themselves by revealing a shoddy product or unscrupulous promotion by one of the marketers at or near the top of the tribal structure. Everybody knows, I believe, that these top marketers spew trash. But to say such publicly is to invite scorn. Most of those who have tried this have been banished from the best marketing forums, and blackballed by potential JV partners.
The world is full of such tribes. And each person in the world belongs to a variety of these tribes, and are at different levels in each.
If you can identify the tribes in your life, pay obeisance to those at the top when it counts (even though it grates), and understand the reactions of the tribe to praise or criticisms of the various levels of tribal leadership, you can be far more successful in life – and marketing – than if you plunge headlong into activities without that awareness.
This is, perhaps, a weird post for this blog. But I’m relaxing, thinking, and really not doing much in the way of marketing these days, so I can stand back and watch rather than participate, in the tribal activities. It would really make an interesting sociological study should someone ever decide to make an academic study of the online tribe called Internet Marketing.
Spam Ranger Finds the Source of Web Spam
Some Microsoft researchers have found a way to trace back redirection web spam to it’s origins. Apparently most of the web spam using this technique originates from just a few hosts, leading the authors of this paper to believe that there are a few syndicates creating most of the spam sites that flood many search terms.
The paper also lists the most commonly used free hosting/blogging sites of spammers, and a number of other techniques and tricks they use.
Behind the curve again… my first Google video upload
So, I suppose I’m behind the curve again…. I never figured it was as easy as it is to add a video to Google.
But tonight as midget was watching Little Einsteins on my main computer, I sat fiddling with the laptop that recently came with us on a visit to Edmonton, and as a result had some video clips on it from my camera.
Since I’m not quite ready to put video of my kidlet on a public video sharing service, I decided to upload this one: a clip from the Sea Lion show at West Edmonton Mall
