People want to be “awesome”. As a leader, you should have a clear pictures of what the goal is, that goal should be awesome.
Give your team the right tools and resources to achieve that awesome-ness and let them get after it.
Everybody wants to be awesome or to be known for achieving awesomeness.
This post is intended to be a no-nonsense guide to setting up a functional and convenient usenet service on any platform. Although there are already numerous FAQs, tutorials, and how-tos on the subject, there seems to be a certain level of ambiguity in these papers based on either an assumption of technical background on the part of the reader or the desire that ambiguity will provide a greater audience using various software and services.
Last night I found myself looking through Sprint and Verizon’s websites. I was looking at the latest crop of BlackBerrys and other smart phones running the Android operating system. Why? Because my iPhone is on its proverbial last leg and I’m not sure the newest version (yet to be released as of this post, but still receiving plenty of coverage) will have the same level of quality and performance that I require.
I can rationalize my failing iPhone. It’s about two years old if not more and just recently started “Searching” for a signal more then it reports picking one up. What I cannot rationalize and is a greater cause of panic for me as a bonafide Apple fanboy is the latest MacBook Pro that I’ve been using. My company issued me a unibody 2.53GHz MBP with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. It was given to me with a company built image of Mac OS X already installed on it. I don’t have a problem with that, but Mail.app kept crashing and half the time I would wake it from sleep the keyboard would be semi-unresponsive.
After rebooting 2 or 3 times a day for a few weeks I finally decided to backup all of my documents and reinstall a clean copy of Snow Leopard. While going through the process of setting up the new machine I kept running into lagging instances of spinning beach balls. Having setup literally hundreds of Macs for different purposes, this was the first time I recall a MacBook Pro beachballing as much as this one did.
To be fair, an iPhone that can barely make phone calls and a MacBook Pro that seemingly struggles to install some basic applications is not entirely indicative of an overall decline of Apple’s quality. However, for this fanboy, it’s enough to make me reconsider purchasing Apple’s new iPhone in lieu of another device that I can rely on.
As though there needs to be yet another blog post about initial impressions of the iPad, I thought my $0.02 is still worth $0.02.
I will admit that I didn’t plan on buying an iPad, at least not on the launch weekend, but the excitement got the better of and my bank account. An early morning trip to Best Buy got me a “right to purchase” ticket since UPS hadn’t delivered the goods yet. I picked up the iPad later that day, but since they didn’t have any accessorries, Liz and I drove to the Apple Store anyways.
So how it is? After using it for a week I was surprised at how in tune I was with the design philosophy of the iPad. When it was first announced and everybody was saying how it was a “fail” and “just a big iPad that didn’t multi-task”, my only response was that if that’s how you saw it, it probably wasn’t for you. And I think I was pretty accurate.
The iPad is a utility computer. It’s a marvel at accomplishing specific tasks that we all use a computer for, but in no way does it try to take the place of a desktop or a laptop – although it does come pretty close.
The Monday after buying it I brought it to work, curious to see how much of my work day could be accomplished using just the iPad. I was able to sign on my office’s wireless network and use the built-in VPN client to access the entire network.
Email was a breeze. Taking notes in meetings was very easy. Although in one 2 hour meeting my fingers did start to go a little numb after typing on glass for that length of time.
Keynote and Pages allowed me to get ready for other meetings. The only thing I wasn’t able to do was to sign onto my companies Jabber server. Although I will admit this might be possible and just off my personal radar for the time being.
There were only a couple of downsides. First, being the hottest gadget on the market, I was swamped by people wanting to try it out anytime I pulled it out of it’s neoprene case. This caused some serious lag in productivity. Second, Safari is still seen as a mobile browser and some sites redirected me to a minimalist version of their content. And also it’s a little heavier then I expected and so holding it and typing o it simultaneous is precarious at best. But other then that, I was able to survive an 8 hour work day on the table.
Elizabeth and I have been fans of Kevin Smith since before we ever met each other. We’ve seen all of his movies so many times that it’s become second nature to work some of his more arcane quotes into our everyday conversations. (i.e. “You’re a cigarette”)
When I heard Kevin was coming to Austin to do one of his infamous Q&A sessions I knew we couldn’t miss it. We drove to Austin last night expecting Kevin to be rampantly uncensored about everything from the politics of Hollywood (Tim Burton is an idiot) to his movie star buddies (Ben Afflek is a sycophant) to his personal sex life (or lack there of). And he didn’t disappoint.
First off, the elephant in the room. Yes, he did spend about 30 to 45 minutes telling his side of the story about when he fell victim to Southwest Airline’s “Fatties Can’t Fly” rule. To sum it up, Kevin’s story is that 1) he is fat, 2) he fit, albeit not perfectly, in his seat and 3) he thinks he pissed off an already irritated employee with a bad joke and subsequently incurred the wrath of the menially employed. I know it’s only one side of the story, but it’s coming from a guy who recounted the first time he ever had sex with his wife in all of it’s embarrassing detail and distributed said events internationally via DVD. He can laugh at himself and walk away a better man. I don’t think he would have any reason to let overt pride get in the way of coming to reality with the situation.
Alright, some of the questions that were asked in all their paraphrased glory
Q: Do you play WoW?
A: No, Jason Mewes tried to get me to play the Lord of the Rings game, but it was all about growing crops, selling them so you could finance protection against Orcs. It was too much like a class in finance to hold my attention.
Q: What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash?
A: Kevin recounted the time he broke a toilet while dropping a deuce.
Q: Kevin, you’ve made a deal with the devil and your most sincere wishes have come true. Now, in return, you have to direct the final chapter of the Twilight movie saga. How would you do it?
A: Kevin recounted that that was the installment in which Bella gets pregnant and her vampire boyfriend has to eat the baby out of her. He would spend 15 minutes on just that seen and shoot it like a low-budget porn. He even offered what sounds might be heard from the chomping and slurping Edward.
Q: Would you call my friend and tell him happy birthday?
A: A little flabbergasted, Kevin relented and called some stoner’s friend. The crowd was pretty bored.
I don’t remember what the question was, but Kevin spent the final part of the session talking about his experiences directing Bruce Willis in his latest movie. He described it as his most difficult directorial task and detailed how Bruce made him “earn” the respect that a director usually garners on a movie set. At one point, Kevin was going to shoot a close-up of Bruce. Bruce asked him what size lens was going to be used to capture the shot. Kevin used his hands to frame his own chest and face and asked his Director of Photography what size lens would he need to get “that much” of Bruce. Apparently, Bruce rode Kevin’s ass hard explaining that a director has two jobs on set and knowing his lenses should be one of them.
Bottom line, Kevin did not disappoint. In a single thought he showed equal ease referencing the signature minimalism of Samuel Beckett’s writing style as dissecting the surreal dynamics of Bear/Cub sexual congress. However, be warned that if you ever plan to attend one of Kevin’s Q & As that you will be entertained, but it can run like a veritable marathon of humorous and self-deprecating anecdotes. Last night ran right about 3 hours long with no intermission. By the time he said good night my tail bone was numb and I was about to chew my own thumb off for want of nicotine. Although brevity and succinctness are in stark contrast to his signature story telling style, he would do well to edit down some of the stories for the sake of the audience’s attention span. I mean, keep in mind that his core demographic are young, male, stoners who primarily digest their entertainment in small, well-measured comic book portions.
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