John Hesch

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If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

Anne Bradstreet, ‘Meditations Divine and Moral,’ 1655

CSS: Resizing Large Images to Fit in Containers (also work in MSIE!)

All of that data flying at you by e-mail, instant message, cell phone, voice mail and BlackBerry–it could actually be making you dumber.

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who’s studied attention deficit disorder for more than a decade, has identified a related disorder he calls attention deficit trait, and he says it’s reaching epidemic proportions in the corporate world.

Unlike attention deficit disorder, or ADD, people aren’t born with ADT. It’s the result, he contends, of the modern workplace, where the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers.

So that explains it

Creating Passionate Users has a good article about how do you thank your loyal users?

So, how are you thanking your users? How are the companies you do business with rewarding or at least acknowledging you for your loyalty? Next time you think about how to thank your users, see if there’s a way to do something else for them, in the context of showing your appreciation. See if you what you do for them makes them have more fun.

I know I tend to get so busy that I ignore the important things. Like recognizing the people who matter most.

On a similar subject, I was thinking the other day that even if a customer has a poor experience with your company, you can overcome it by acknowledging the problem, apologizing and offering to make it right. Nothing makes me more upset than to encounter a sales associate or company representative who doesn’t care about me. When something goes wrong, I just want someone to care, and try to rectify it. Even if there is no way to fix the problem, if the associate shows me that they tried, I’m fine with it. Customer service all boils down to, do unto others…

CSS trick: Same link text - different colours

I found a couple good articles worth taking the time to read.

Management Craft has a two part series on planning for team greatness. I’ve been mostly on my own since the mid 90’s and one of the things I miss is working as a team. There is so much synergy to be created when working with other like-minded individuals. Part two will be published tomorrow.

The other interesting article is Determining How Much to Charge by NFIB. In fact the whole NFIB website is chocked full of information and resources directed towards small businesses.

Motivational Quotes of the Day

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

My new hard drive is going to have as many open source or freeware programs as I can find. It’s not that I don’t mind paying for a good product, but I don’t like paying for upgrades and it seems like I have been hit with a bunch lately.

My first victim was Microsoft Office. I am now using OpenOffice which is a semi open source office suite including Word and Excel compatible programs. It has taken me very little time to get used to OpenOffice and when I opened my existing Excel spreadsheets all formulas and computations worked perfectly. Open Office is a project of Sun Microsystems.

OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

I replaced Remote Admin with TightVNC, a desktop remote control application allowing me to control other computers on my network. You can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.

I have a new image editor too. I replaced Macromedia Fireworks with The Gimp. The Gimp is a photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program that is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

I have replaced a few more programs that I’ll write about soon.

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Button Maker

Button Maker by Kalsey Consulting Group

With my recent hard drive crash and subsequent new hard drive installed I have a fresh drive to try to organize in a more efficient way.

On my old hard drive I cataloged my music by artist name and then I dumped all the tracks into the folder. My new system will be set up differently.

First I partitioned my drive into several smaller sized partitions. One of the partitions is called Media. Within the media partition I have Music, LDS Music, and Videos. Since storage has become so cheap I am going to begin encoding all the music that goes onto KZION in both FLAC and MP3. FLAC is a lossless format but is compressed similar to an MP3. If I encounter a corrupted MP3 on KZION or I lose an MP3 I can encode quickly from the FLAC file without having to dig through my CD’s. FLAC can also be played in many different music players.

So my catalog looks like so

1. LDS Music
1. – Artist Name
1. – Album Name
1. – MP3
1. – MP3 version of the files go here
2. – FLAC
1. – FLAC version of the files go here

I do have quite a few compilation CD’s and its always been a struggle to know what to do with them. I think this time I will use the same naming scheme as above and break up the compilation albums.

As soon as I get some spare change I’m going to purchase another 160 GIG hard drive and create a back up to clone each night.

Preople - Its about who you are

Preople is the ultimate ego booster or perhaps the ultimate ego buster. Preople shows you what you are really worth in the digital age. Get your Preople ranking and let the world know were you stand.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

Browse through 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.