Today I saw a champion share his passion with the world. Not just a champion, but the 2004 Toastmasters International World Champion for Public Speaking – Dr. Randy J. Harvey. Randy shared his methodology and tactics for crafting amazing speeches as the keynote speaker for a Toastmasters Learning Institute event that I attended today, and he shared a wonderful line-by-line analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysbu
In my role I deal with a lot of diagrams and presentations. There is an unfortunate trend amongst IT professionals, manufacturers, and resellers to fail to communicate properly using both diagrams and presentations. This miscommunication stems from the inclusion or exclusion of text. Sometimes you need to read text to explain what you are looking at, and at other times text gets in the way. It all depends on the pu
“Listen, you work for me, okay?”
A prospective client said this to me recently, and at that moment I knew that the deal was not worth pursuing. Forget the money and forget the size of the deal, because if you enter into such a relationship with a customer things will eventually end poorly for everyone involved including the customer.
Good sales people and consultants do not work for their customers. Good sales
I recently attended NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, and I was hoping to write a daily blog article while at the event. That plan was quickly replaced by the reality that I was going to be working each night from my hotel room. Despite my attempts to have all projects in a stable state before leaving for the conference unexpected needs arose and my agenda had to be put aside to deal with these new workloads. The result
From today until Thursday I am attending the NetApp Insight partner conference, and I will be blogging each day about what I have learned and discovered while here. Of particular interest to me is news surrounding NetApp and Cisco’s FlexPod validated designs, further enhancements to NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP operating system, and the roadmaps for NetApp’s various filer models.
While that is the plan, what
This week was not a pleasant one. My father was in the hospital until Friday (he is now home recovering from surgery), many different projects escalated to priority status simultaneously, and the kicker to this week was that as of Friday evening my home has been without power due to a severe storm knocking out power lines. Sometimes the road gets a little bumpy, but for this week it seems that the road was paved wi
Following a successful conclusion to an important project at work I decided to treat myself and my family to a new home entertainment system. I purchased a new 3D television with Google TV, a new home theater surround sound system with an integrated 3D Blu-ray player, a new home theater PC, and a new stand with which to store all of these gizmos and to mount the television onto. On top of all of that I added two ne
Out of respect for those that we in the United States remember this Memorial Day holiday I will not be posting the next part in my series on cloud computing until next week. Please join me in remembering those members of our armed forces who have fallen in the service of our nation and the defense of our U.S. Constitution. Thank you.
This week’s article is not about IT, but about being a professional in general. This Thursday I failed to meet my deadline to post an article to this blog. Instead I was at the office late working in order to complete several projects before another deadline: the end of a manufacturer’s fiscal year.
I hate missing deadlines. Absolutely hate it. The problem is that as you move up in responsibility and burden you
Fair warning. This one is a rant! 🙂
I recently installed a blu-ray drive into one of my Linux systems. I then learned more about blu-ray media than I ever cared to know. The “protection” features placed in blu-ray makes it difficult to play a blu-ray disc on a Linux distribution that one installs on their own.
Now I know that Linux has its issues when it comes to ease of use. I base that statement up
