Sub Prime - starter kit

I found this presentation via Presentation Zen
Quite good really.
Subprime Primer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: subprime mortgages)

email - keep it short

On any given morning I receive quite a number of emails that, on the face of it, require some attention.

I prefer to actually get on with doing my day job as opposed to attending to an email inbox as my boss appears to want me to actually achieve certain things for the business rather than simply work in a glorified mail room - the inbox. Luis Suarez is a good example in that he has actively stopped (that can not be good grammar) reading his email - I don't believe that course of action is likely to work for me just yet.

I keep my "email time" to a minimum using a few tricks such as using Notes to highlight mail sent to me only and colour coding mail that comes from customers or management. This works pretty well.

One of the biggest factors on how much value an email has is the content - and how it is written.

One of my management team tends to analyse things for a while and send out the odd blockbuster email which starts of with a paragraph of "scene setting" for the rest of his email which will be the equivalent content to a couple of sides of paper. When I was unaware of a request he had made he stated it was in an email - which I then retrieved from an archive. After reading the email I told him that the first paragraph contained no real information and that having reached the end of it I had archived the email (luckily I hadn't deleted it) and missed the pertinent content.

Some longer emails, such as the one mentioned above, need to be written in the form of a news story with Title, Synopsis and then Detail (or something to that effect) where the synopsis gives me the pertinent detail pretty early on in the narrative.
Shorter email should be no more that a short paragraph.
Preferably email should be as short as a Status update in Twitter or Facebook.

You could, of course, just use the phone.

You will be pleased to know that the colleague concerned and I came to an arrangement - he writes his email as normal and I read them - he is after all a manager.

On a similar note - IBM are noting the same things here

Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T60p (Part 6)

I have a Logitech Orb webcam which I use to demonstrate Lotus Sametime video for customers. Recently it has been sitting in the corner ever since I moved from Windows to linux and as there is a demonstration due next Wednesday I decided to see what effort was required to get it working on Ubuntu.

After the usual investigation of the support forums I realised I needed to install a UVC (Universal Video Class) driver. Finding the right one could be tricky - however just like envyNG there is a utility to do this for you called EasyCam. the install instructions are here.

As I already had the camera connected via USB the EasyCam software detected it correctly as a "Quickcam Orbit/Sphere MP (2006 model)".

EasyCam then, when prompted, installs the correct driver. Once that has completed you can click "Execute - Webcam" from the EasyCam menu to start streaming video.

Skype picked up on the video straight away.

Removing Grafitti

I think this is superb - Banksy has created art that is some of the best around.
From Flickr

Email becomes a dangerous distraction

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on the effects of email on a persons productivity and had this to say.

"In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before."

There is more to life than email - but I do wonder about all those Twitter and IM interuptions. :)

drthomasjackson.com
The related study, at least I think it's the one, is here

iNotes in Domino 8.5

I really like the idea of being able to work without relying on email.

To a large extent I rely on sametime and my mobile phone (a really dodgy old nokia - kudos points only for the antique value).

However for those times when you do need to access email - I thought this looked kind of cool.

Domino 8.5 beta 2

Interestingly I composed an email using Chrome and could see th received email in Lite and Ultralite mode - but not in Full mode. Then again it was in a win2003 vmware

Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad T60p (Part 6)

I already had Notes 8.5 beta 1 installed on Ubuntu 8.04 and wanted to upgrade to beta 2. As this is at beta stage there is apparently no upgrade from beta 1 to beta 2 so the first thing I did was backup my Notes data directory which was in /home/myname/lotus/notes/data.

Secondly I used Synaptic to remove “ibm-lotus-notes”.

Once this was successfully completed I closed Synaptic, opened a terminal window, and ran the following commands in this particular order...

sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_activities-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_cae-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_sametime-8.5.i586.deb
sudo dpkg -i ibm_lotus_symphony-8.5.i586.deb

I was then able to start Notes from the Applications menu - There was a license agreement to accept – otherwise straight in.

It is fast – really fast.

Thanks to Ray for the pointers.