What Ralph Knows

This is a great little video on the causes and solutions to resistance to change in organizations.   It is quite simple, but logical and makes a compelling point.

This post is slightly off topic for this blog, but I need help.  What is the best way for me to develop and embed a gallery in a Movable Type site.  My wife's site is http://www.bfelt.com.  We would like to present a gallery of my wife's work, rather than just slide shows. I want to present a more graphic site than we currently present with more dramatic pictures of the work.  Since it is in Movable Type I would like the best options for that platform.  What are your best recommendations?

Clay Shirky in his recent post "The Collapse of Complex Business Models", describes a well known business concept: substitution  Companies always face the threat of substitute products and this is what is happening in media.  Substitution, as Michael Porter describes in his book "Competitive Advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance" is one of the "five competitive forces determining the profitability of an industry." A complex business model is unsustainable in an environment in which the economics have changed so completely.  We have created a new delivery infrastructure for media and traditional media companies need to asses how big a threat YouTube and other delivery channels are to their current business.

This video provides an excellent and simple introduction to the Semantic Web and at the end provides links to additional sites for more information.  Since I am working in text analysis and exploring how to add metadata, taxonomy, and more descriptive data to content this is very helpful.  Manu Sporny is the co-chair of the RDFa working group at the World Wide Web Consortium. Interestingly, “RDFa helps bloggers and website authors make their web pages smarter by adding machine-readable information to a site. RDFa gives hints to web browsers, which give people more options when interacting with a web page. RDFa enables new interactions such as automatically adding people to address books, adding events to personal calendars, getting directions to a place described by RDFa, or searching online bookstores for a book marked up using RDFa.”

I finally figured out how to make this little application work and it is really cool.  Once you install the Synergy+ app on your main computer and install the same app on your other computers, you can share one mouse and keyboard between multiple machines! 

Interesting features include:

• Move your mouse easily between computers
• Requires nothing other than existing ethernet
• Copy and paste between your computers
• No need to press any buttons (unlike KVM)
• You can still use multiple monitors on the same computer
• Lock the mouse to one screen temporarily (useful for games)

I am always inspired by the simplicity of Agile software development concepts.  From my perspective, the constant conversation with the customer makes this process work.  It was written in 2001 but is still relevant and it takes a lot of work to get good at it.

I manage a number of sites and I have lots of images that I use. I have, until now, stored these photos in my computer on my hard disk and uploaded them to the various sites when required. Now I am creating of online stores on Etsy and eBay and I think it would be simpler to store the photos on a site that would assign a URL, so the image could be reused on a number of different sites.

Here is what I have done so far, I have three possibilities that I am experimenting with: Picasa, Flickr and Box.net. Each assigns a URL so that I can reuse the asset. Who has experience doing this? Are there other suggestions for sites that have greater flexibility???

Disk Cleanup has probably always worked this way, but I have been having fits figuring out how to get rid of Windows.old, which contains the previous operating system and files from my Vista implementation.  I got some things I needed from the .old directory, but administratively it is very difficult to delete.

Disk Cleanup a utility that comes with the operating system works.  I got the directions from How to Delete and Remove the Windows.old Folder.  Here are the instructions:

 

Step by step use of Disk Cleanup to Remove Windows.old Folder

Click on the Start button on the task bar for our task to windows.old removal.
Follow the "All Programs - Accessories - System Tools" path on the Start menu.
Click and select "Disk Cleanup".
When the Disk Cleanup Options dialog screen is displayed select Files from all users on this computer option.
Select the hard disk Drive where the Windows.old folder resides.
The Disk Cleanup utility will scan the driver for not used and unnecessary files.
When the scan is completed check the "Previous Windows installations".
When the wizard requests your confirm to delete the Windows.old folder and its content files, select Delete.

In discussions about social media and its value, the question of the business case for social media often comes up.  This short presentation form SpinWeb describes the benefits of social media for business.

 

FT.com: Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world – this is an excellent article on how to fix this financial system by not resorting to the solutions of the past which failed.  It makes perfect sense but is largely ignored.