People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.

At the moment there are three methods that I have used or know of.

goosync

I use a Nokia N95. It synchronises it’s calendar with Lotus Notes using the standard s/w that came with the phone. I use a product called goosync to synchronise the phone with my google calendar. They provide a free trial period, and various levels of service / payment after that.

For those using an iPhone the 3g is supported by goosync, but without one myself, I can’t help you getting the lotus notes calendar to the phone.

Device setup guides are at http://goosync.zendesk.com/forums/31074/entries.

awesync

awesync is (currently free, due to being in beta) software that synchronises your Lotus Notes and Google calendars. Some of the features include:
- Automatic scheduled synchronization at defined intervals of time, or manual on-demand synchronization;
- Full two-way synchronization, or one-way with defined data source, i.e. either Notes to Google, or Google to Notes;
- Comprehensive conflict handling – newest wins, or defined data source overwrite;
- Selection of one or more Google calendars for synchronization.

lntogooglecalsync

An entry on Intoiphone talks about an open source tool, hosted on sourceforge, called lntogooglecalsync that synchronises directly from your Lotus Notes Calendar to Google Calendar. The original web page is quite old, so I checked the Intogooglecalsync site and its still under development (for example, the original release didn’t support auto-sync, but it now does).

Summary

I find the combined method – Lotus to Nokia, and Nokia to Google to be sufficient for my needs. However, this is because 99.9% of my calendar originates from Lotus. The other pieces of software may be more relevant if you have updates flowing both ways.

Please feel free to add any other utilities (free or not) for synchronising Lotus with with Google calendar or any other Google products in the comments.

Microsoft will also continue providing free security-related hotfixes to non-subscribing customers. So unless you frequently make calls to Microsoft support, the April 14th deadline might not really affect you.

via April deadlines loom for Windows XP, Office 2003 product support.

Generation Y also have little job loyalty.

….

‘There can be a sense of “I am better than that” or, somehow, what you asking is beneath them. …. They don’t volunteer, or the ones that do really stand out,’ complains one senior accountant…

…Karen Young, business director for Hays Senior Finance, concedes this clash of expectations can be cause problems. ‘Often the managers or partners will have worked really hard to get to the top and these guys seem just to want a fast track,’ she says. ‘Often they do not fully realise the value of core work experience on their CV and, on top of this, have a very strong concept of work-life balance.’

However, as Dennis Howlett points out:

senior partners and staff in large firms are so busy running around to meetings, making sales and keeping clients happy that there is little time devoted to skills transference. That leaves less senior (and by definition less experienced/skilled) staff to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. Worse still, supervision that would act as back stops for errors or omissions are eroding. Is it therefore surprising when young hopefuls simply shrug, pack up their bags and move on to the next opportunity?

via The greasy pole | AccMan.

But a do-it-yourself planner brings customization and scalability. Examples of this are when you don’t want to have to order a new set of custom-print pages from your store-bought planner’s manufacturer every time you run out of one pad. Or maybe you’re thinking about test-driving a paper solution, so you want to test before you pay.

With a D*I*Y Planner, you can add, replace, and reshuffle pages very easily. Refills are a matter of printing a new set of pages.

The D*I*Y Planner system is an extensive library of PDF templates from which you can pick and choose. Then, print the pages you need and assemble your planner. You can also easily make D*I*Y Planners for you or your colleagues that cover custom timelines such as the duration of a particular project.

Because it is yours, you can streamline it by, for example, carrying around only the next couple of weeks’ worth of information (to help keep it thin and portable).

To build your D*I*Y Planner, perform the following two steps:
1) decide on the size and type of planner you want to create. The D*I*Y Planner site has templates available to print in several sizes:
* Classic (half pages of 8 1/2×11-inch paper, quite common in North America)
* Letter size (8 1/2×11-inch paper)
* A4 (the equivalent to letter size in pretty much every country outside North America)
* A5 (half of A4 size)
* Hipster PDA (index cards)

2) Download the template kit you need from http://diyplanner.com/templates/official. It will be in PDF format, so you can use any PDF reader (i.e. Adobe Acrobat or Foxit )to open and print the templates. Of course, depending on the size you choose, you may have to cut the paper in half (for Classic and A5) and punch holes in it to fit it inside a binder. The Hipster PDA index-card–sized version can be held together with a small binder clip.

Since its your planner, you print only as many pages of the forms as you need. If you decide to change the planner size you use, or if you need to add pages for certain kinds of information (another address-book page, or a financial ledger page for a particular project, or even just larger daily calendar pages to write your appointments), simply print the appropriate pages and reassemble or add them to your planner.

The system offers a wide of templates, including :

2) Dancers tend to approach the same type of men. This is more pronounced by the race of the dancer.

Know your market. Explain your value in an easy way, that is understood by the market you are selling to.

3) Every action, including feigned interest, is designed to generate revenue.

Always be generating internal value. I used to tell people that worked for me that for every dollar I paid them, they should generate three.

4) Customers that are cheap or refuse the company of a dancer, will soon find themselves completely shut out.

Dont waste time on customers that will not generate revenue or internal value. ‘Nuff said.

5) Customers that feel special will spend more money.

Make the right customers feel special. Have a VIP list. Be transparent about the value specific customers bring.

via The Economics of Stripping.

It is the destiny of one browser to serve as the nemesis of web developers everywhere. At the birth of the Web Standards movement, that role was played by Netscape Navigator 4; an outdated browser that refused to die. Its tenacious existence hampered the adoption of modern standards. Today that role is played by Internet Explorer 6.

………

JavaScript genius Dean Edwards wrote a script called IE7. This amazing piece of code uses JavaScript to make Internet Explorer 5 and 6 behave like a standards-compliant browser. Dean used JavaScript to bootstrap IE’s CSS support.

Because the script is specifically targeted at Internet Explorer, there’s no point in serving it up to other browsers. Conditional comments to the rescue:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE7.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->

Standards-compliant browsers won’t fetch the script. Users of IE6, on the hand, will pay a kind of bad browser tax by having to download the JavaScript file.

Why bother, when the power to offer your readers a more appropriate view of your material is no further away than a well-structured document and a media-specific style sheet?

You can take any (X)HTML document and simply style it for print or iphone or other mobile device out having to touch the markup. Worries about version skew between the web and print versions suddenly become a thing of the past. Best of all, it’s simple to do.

Here’s a link to an article by Eric Myer on CSS Printing. And to make it even more user friendly, take a look at this one that uses a printer preview to let the user see what they’ll get.

Many products can only reveal Windows product keys. However, as long as the software is storing its license key in the Registry it will be discovered by the License Crawler. It s compatible with most versions of Windows, starting from Windows 95, right up to Windows Vista. It is a portable application that can be run from any location, which makes it a perfect fit for an USB stick – usefull for tech support staff wanting to find serial or license key data from a users machine.

UPDATE:

Another usefull tool is keyfinder. You can download it from SourceForge.. It is free, totally safe and something that now lives on my memory stick (it’s a portable app). No need to install it – just run the ‘exe’ from inside the zip file.

The Free Edition can copy the contents of a hard disk to up to three client computers with a maximum speed of up to 9 Gigabytes per minute which should be more than enough for home usage. It does have some other limitations in place: Only IDE and SATA hard disks are supported but files can be copied from all filesystems.

The professional disk copy version has a wider range of supported hardware (Firewire, USB, etc>..), a maximum transfer rate almost 7 times higher and a maximum client limit of 20.

The copy is driven by a very specific Live CD that is used to boot the source PC and distribute the data to the other hard disks. Those can be on the same computer or on computers connected over the network.