Continual Improvement

• Canvas Press : Organizing pictures
  CanvasPress published the blog entry I made on organizing pictures. Doak’s company continues to make progress.
  (tags: doak pictures canvaspress directory folder)

• Determining your calorie needs
  These quick equations give some good insight why eating is the key to being fit. It only takes 5 minutes to consume 1000 calories, but it can take 2-3 hours of exercise to burn this off. Eating - the most addictive habit allowed by law…
  (tags: exercise fitness weightloss calorie)

• KillerStartups.com - The Next Big Thing on the Internet is here. You pick it.
  There are several interesting sites here. It’s hard to imagine this many startups are beginning each day.
  (tags: startup internet web2.0 business entrepreneurship)

• The Trouble With Enterprise Software
  “Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?” - Discusses the general gap between business and the technology that runs the business.
  (tags: technology software business SOA complexity BSM)

If you are like me and capture digital pictures in almost every circumstance, the frustration of organizing all of these has crossed your mind once or twice. Two common options are (1) installing software on your computer to help keep track or (2) uploading all your pictures to an Internet site like Flickr. With the first option, the software to organize your pictures is likely to require you to open its user interface (i.e. application) to manage your pictures, and you will be responsible for transferring this application to another computer when you upgrade. With the Internet upload option, which I partially use, the idea of having all your pictures labeled, grouped, and constantly backed up does have its advantages; however, I’m not a big fan of uploading every picture I’ve ever taken out on the Internet. (Call me old-fashioned.) In both cases, there’s likely to be a license or subscription to purchase.

To alleviate this image nightmare, I’ve created a simple and free system for organizing and tagging pictures that allows for easy searching and backing up. This involves creating a directory/folder structure in Explorer similar to the following.

Each year has a folder, and within each year, there are groups of pictures with keywords as the name of the sub folder. Note that the beginning of each sub folder is a number, which indicates the month the picture was taken. This provides chronological searching, since the folders are sorted in order.

To group the pictures in Explorer, you can see a small preview of the picture on your hard drive or the memory chip from your camera by setting Explorer to show the Thumbnails view. If the preview isn’t enough to determine which folder to place the picture, moving your mouse pointer over the picture in question will provide additional details. If you are like me, I often have a set of pictures with the same date and relative time, which makes it easy to figure what goes where.

The benefits of this system are that it’s super easy to do while moving the pictures from the camera’s memory chip to your computer. Just create the folder on your hard drive with some memorable words, and drag the pictures into the folder. In addition, it makes backing up the pictures easy as well, since you can backup via the date/year. This is especially important once you have more pictures than can fit on one DVD. What’s best about this model is the ability to take the system to different computers without additional software or Internet access.

I was planning to grill some fajitas, but we decided to let the meal come to us. Click on the picture for more details.

• Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser
  With Picnik you can quickly edit all your online photos from one place.
  (tags: photo edit photography tools online photos)
• Gapminder - Home
  Anything and everything you wanted to know about the world.
  (tags: gapminder statistics information politics data economics)

I’ve been playing around with Jyte, and it seems like a cool way to do some simple reader polls on my blog. This is my first one, so we’ll see how it goes. Click on this link to vote, or click on the widget below, if visible.

• Thinking of retiring? Austin’s ideal for retirement, according to AARP Magazine - Austin Business Journal:
  I had never really thought of Austin as a retirement magnet, but compared to the rest of the country, it looks pretty good.
  (tags: austin retirement 50 AARP)
• Welcome to MyOpenID
  If you haven’t signed up for an OpenID, you will want to. After hearing a lot of hype about this over the past 6 months, I finally jumped in, and it is very cool. We should be demanding that all sites use this method of authentication.
  (tags: OpenID authentication via:bwhichard security internet)

Can the simple rules of capitalism help you with life’s predicaments? In both family and business, all of us are forced into situations where we have reached an impasse with someone else. Often the “facts” favor each party’s perception of the conflict. Before entering into a conversation that can become heated, one simple rule of thumb to remember is the supply and demand mindset. On the demand front, it’s important to never demand anything during the conversation. The goal should be to determine what the goal is and work towards an action plan that is acceptable to both sides. This is not easy to do when we think we are “right”, but it’s a simple rule to remember once the emotions start flaring.

On the supply front, it’s a good idea to start the conversation by admitting what part of the conflict you have supplied. This is the most difficult but most important part of resolving the problem because we often think in terms of facts and evidence, but the only reality is that both sides have contributed some part of the awkward stalemate. This also requires serious self-examination as the contribution may have been doing or saying nothing for too long of a time. When having difficulty identifying what your contribution may be, viewing the situation from the other person’s point-of-view can often help. In many cases, the admission of what one person supplied to the problem will result in other person following the same course, and in the end, the conversation has a much better chance of both parties having their demands met.

• Jyte: Spread the Cred
  Claim anything! Yes, anything. If you have something to say, then make a claim and let the community vote on it.
  (tags: jyte vote community claim social claims)

• Psychology: Humans Will Justify Almost Anything
  This is an excellent article on cognitive dissonance. Frued had it slightly wrong as this is what really drives behavior.
  (tags: cognitive dissonance psychology emotion happiness)

• Impact of Overtime on Productivity
  “More features will always bring more revenue, more customer satisfaction, other good things. Therefore there is always pressure for people to work harder, longer hours. This is demonstrably a Bad Idea. Here’s some evidence, and some ideas about how to kn
  (tags: jeffries agile management leadership productivity programming software coding business via:klobetime)

• 40 Fastest-Growing Software Companies
  BMC, Openwave, Red Hat, and some other interesting software companies listed here…
  (tags: via:mrchippy via:cote software company fastest growing BMC Openwave Vignette Oracle Microsoft)
• Alistair Cockburn on what’s agile, what’s not
  Ouch, by Alistair’s standards, most companies are not agile; however, I do agree with him that the word is way over/mis-used
  (tags: cockburn agile software crystal scrum)

• Top 50 analyst bloggers « Technobabble 2.0
  Some nice Internet notice for the Redmonk guys…
  (tags: blog analyst redmonk cote via:bwhichard blogging ranking analysts)