Search results matching tag 'Personal'

Going around again...

James — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:15:00 GMT

I started Telligent as a PM, then went into product, then moved to the Microsoft-specific "sites" team where I wrote and maintained the http://silverlight.net site.

But that ended last week as the sites team transitioned onto other projects inside Telligent. Terri wrote about it here.

So, I'm back into the Services dept as a PM now and looking forward to it. I believe that being a developer gives you a big insight into the development process that "regular" PM's don't have. Telligent has awesome devs, so some of the advantages are moot, but being able to sense developer BS and create requirements that can actually be implemented would be advantages in other companies.

So, I've been reading a lot of articles on PM and Scrum too. Most of these are posted on our intranet (kudos to Evolution) but some are simply referencing public articles.

One in particular this morning I found particularly interesting: User Story Estimation Techniques

BTW, don't write me off just yet, I'm still developing..someway, somehow I'll always be tinkering!

Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist Todd Chism

James — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:57:00 GMT

One of my fellow moderators on an Entrepreneur forum we both spend too much time on,Todd Chism, just got nominated by his colleagues for Entrepreneur of the Year - and made it to the final!

Todd's a great guy and has built a great company selling patio furniture amongst other things.

Why am I telling you all this? I need your votes to help a friend!

It's very simple, just go here and click the vote button
It requires no registration
You can vote once a day

Caricatures

James — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:45:00 GMT

As I was walking around the local Geranium Festival at the weekend (they completely shut down the center of our sleepy little town for a bunch of vendors to set up stalls) I came across a guy doing caricatures. We've had them done for the kids a few times but this time I stepped up for a laugh! I figured I could use it as an avatar if it looked anything like me. It was only $12!

The family thought it was hilarious, so here it is. What do you think?

Personally I think I have a lot more hair.

Dealing with Mrs Jobsworth

James — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:55:00 GMT

From wikipedia:

A jobsworth is a person who uses his or her job description in a deliberately obstructive way, "a minor factotum whose only status comes from enforcing otherwise petty regulations". The term comes from the phrase "I can't do that, it's more than my job's worth."

You may not be familiar with this term in the U.S. but in England it's a very common phrase. My wife's been involved with one of these people for a few weeks now and this morning I think we're close to seeing a meltdown. Soon this "official" is going to be feeling the wrath, and I'm staying in my office until it's over, thankyouverymuch.

My wife wants a part-time job. She figures the school system is a good place for this, so she applied to the local county school system. After submitting forms, applying for open positions, etc we get this email.

"Dear Mrs Shaw, We need proof of your graduating high school" or words to that effect.

Aaah, well, you see in England we don't graduate high school. You just kinda..leave. You take exams, sure, but no-one here knows what a CSE, GSCE, etc are. Or cares.

So, we contact the old school. They send emails and finally a fax on headed paper to the county saying that my wife had left high school with good grades, passed exams and could have gone to college.

(Apparently, "could have gone to college" is a key phrase here, because only people who graduate high school can go to college)

None of this helped, unfortunately.

Mrs Jobsworth at the Henry County School Administration says that the correct words weren't used. The FIVE emails and letters that have been sent from the English school JUST WON'T DO. Sorry, she spoke to her supervisor but they still need a certificate or something.

We don't want to cause the poor woman in England any more grief, so we're probably going to drop the whole thing. But as you can imagine, my wife is pissed.

It got me thinking though, isn't this a subtle form of racial discrimination? Aren't schools the world over going to have trouble producing a high school diploma?

This is the problem dealing with jobsworth's - you are almost always better off just walking away before you say or do something you regret later..

Today's not the day to read blogs

James — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:20:00 GMT

Don't believe anything you read today. I know better, but I still forgot the date and believed Daniel had sold his company.

His post was very well done, but I still think my old April Fool's Joke was better. Back in 2005 it was more believable I guess. I had a load of congrats emails that day, and I felt quite mean telling people I was only joking.

Hell, I was quite sad myself.

What he said

James — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:27:00 GMT

Rick Strahl: What can you keep in your Head?

What's for dinner?

James — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:22:00 GMT

LOL, the best use yet for our awesome shared family calendar(s): the answer to the age-old question..

"What's for dinner, Mom?"

Tara created a new shared calendar called Menu and added "all-day" appointments (just because they are at top and bold like she wanted) that contains our evening meal! (Note: Tara likes to plan the week, shop once and cook every night - ymmv!)

The grass is not greener

James — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:33:00 GMT

I came across some great quotes this evening from a business forum I recently joined..think about them.

When you complain..

"80% of the people don't care about your problems, and the other 20% are glad you have them"

Another..

"People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in five years."

But my favorite, one I think is quite profound..

"The grass is not greener on the other side. The grass is greener wherever you water it most."

Oh, I forgot synching..

James — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:57:00 GMT

To copy your personal calendar to google, use their new synch tool...

..and then uninstall it.

It crashed my wife's Outlook 2003 almost every hour when it synched up, and I'm still finding strange entries in my Deleted Items folder in Outlook 2007 from when it was running - every hour it would create a few dozen empty appointments from 1979..

If like me you decide just to move over, then it's no problem. Just let it synch once, and uninstall. But if you're trying to sit on the fence then be aware there are issues with this tool.

Living in Gworld

James — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Dan asked me to post an update as I explore deeper into the Google forest. I'm now fully committed to Gmail and Google Calendar (why isn't it GCalendar?) and Outlook is now purely an evil tolerated for work purposes only.

And with Rob Howard's tweet this morning about Google Apps for business, perhaps that's only temporary! Go Rob! (lol, while searching for Rob's blog URL, I found that he's already blogged it too)

Gmail

Using Gmail is great - it's everywhere I am, unlike Outlook that tries hard but is never going to be as ubiquitous as a browser. I continue to love labels over folders, i don't miss the heirarchy simply because all mail is there, never deleted and SEARCH ROCKS. It turns out that I was filing things away in folders in Outlook really only so I could find them quickly. If finding them is super quick, that issue goes away.

So labels rule.

Filters rock too - my aim is to keep everything out of my Inbox that isn't urgent. Therefore every time I get an email I think "is this important enough to interrupt me?" and if it isn't I create a filter to move it out of the Inbox and to a label. I can leave it unread or mark it read depending on if I ever *need* to read it. Some emails are just for filing, so I don't even see them. Perfect.

Some I label, but leave in Inbox because they are something I want to deal with today.

Regardless of the filter, the end result is the Archive button. I don't plan on deleting anything. Spam will delete itself. In fact I posted a suggestion to the Gmail team that they should replace the Delete button that is sitting in prime real-estate with a Mark as read button - something that I think is far more useful. I subscribe to a few mailing lists and want to mark as read all the time.

I setup my Gmail as follows. I have two POP3 accounts that I want sucked into Gmail, so I went to Settings > Account > Add another mail account. I entered the POP3 login info and told Gmail to delete the email from the server (by unchecking the "leave a copy" box). That's it. Gmail sucks in my email in a clever way - if you get a lot of email from an account, it checks more often. Quiet accounts it checks less often.

The only other trick I can pass on is the "Send mail as" option. I noticed that some mailing lists only accept mail from a specific email account (others don't seem to care). Plus I use a lot of email aliases (e.g. dell-at-shawthing.com I use with dell, but it's really just an alias for my real POP3 account). It's nice to reply to some people using the aliases they send to, so for my most popular aliases like @coveryourasp.com I set those up under "send mail as".

Just click "Add another email address" and type in the email address. You have to verify it of course. I also check "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" so that most of the time people aren't even aware that I'm using Gmail. If you send to james@britishinside.com, that's who the reply comes from.

Oh, and don't forget to click the Chat tab and move it below the labels.

Google Calendar

I love the calendar too. I like weekends together so I set Monday as start of week.

Setup is much easier - I created a gmail account for my wife too, so she uses calendar as well now. We share our calendars with full privileges ("Make changes AND manage sharing") so she can add to mine and vice versa. Our calendars are not public though. But I see hers and she seems mine - in pink and blue so it's easy to tell what's what.

This morning Tara created more calendars on her account for our kids, and shared those too, so now I see calendars for the kids baseball, softball, teacher conferences, etc. I chose that sandy color for those. It's awesome. We all see everything at once and can search for events easily.

Note that you won't need to invite each other to family events any more! Just put them on the calendar. if you invite your spouse you'll end up with two of them on there, in pink and blue.

Creating events is great too - it's so clever that you can just type "7pm Maisy softball at Alex field" and it picks out the time, description and location automatically. You can choose which calendar you are creating it on.

Wow, I'm kinda pissed actually that this was out here and I was stuck in Outlook all this time. Guys, when you find stuff like this, tell me!