That Thing In Your Hand Is A Phone

February 8, 2010 | No comments

With all the technology advances and the “latest toys” being touted everywhere, the telephone has become everything to many. It’s a camera, a music player, a web browser, a connection to social networking sites, a portable file cabinet for information, and all sorts of other applications. But here’s the thing — underneath all the fun stuff added on, it’s still a communication device to use for one on one personal contact!
With all the pressures of Social Networking — Facebook, Linked In, Biznik, Ning, Xing, Twitter, Plurk, and more than I can list here, how many times do you just pick up the phone and call someone to touch base and tell them you’d like their business?

For years it was the only way to do that, now it’s foreign to many. I have one client who tells me that although they MUST have the latest and greatest phone out there, they never make any calls on it. They wouldn’t know where to start if they had to talk to someone on the phone! Have we lost that skill?

Oh, and another thing to think about – with all the phone services offering free national calling, do we still need 800 numbers? They cost us for every minute used. A few years ago, they were required as a business tool but now seem pretty superfluous and an earmark of a bygone era. What do you think?

Need to know versus reply to all

February 6, 2010 | No comments

Help stamp out “Reply To All”. I’ve been reading a number of articles lately about this subject. This has long been a closely held belief of my own. It wastes time, bandwidth and frustrates the heck out of the receiver when there’s no need for it.

The latest is a video by Tim Sanders from Yahoo who says,

The more inexperienced you are on email or the more senior you are at a company the more likely you are to use “reply to all” to reply to every email you get including ones from one person in the first place!

Replying to all has been a dangerous practice for many years as has blatant forwarding. How many times have you received an email that has been forwarded to you and it contains every email address from everyone who has ever seen it as you scroll down to find the original message? This is a spam goldmine, folks! Not only that, but back in the early days of email (waaaaaaay back in the late ’80’s) I remember reading an article about a really cool way to build your list – just add a “bcc” to yourself onto an email that has an intriguing story, offer, ad or picture, and you will be forwarded on along and receive any and all addresses that the other people send your original message to.

Believe it or not!

Now, this particular function in email has been outlawed, though, if you can read through the original headers to your emails, (in some programs it’s called show full headers”) you can occasionally still  see where an email has been as well as where it hopes to go.

Another blogger, Jake Kuramoto on AppsLab,  says

So, today, my inbox was choked with about 30 messages all in the same thread. It was one of those ironic spam threads where at least 75% of the replies were unsubs or stern reminders not to reply to all, some of them in all caps, sent of course, to the whole list.

As far as I’m concerned, receiving emails that do not require action on my part or teach me something is a waste of my time. I average 400 emails a day as it is that I need to stay on top of. I’d much rather receive a couple of lines updating me on the final result of a conversation than all the chatter along the way.

So the next time you’re tempted to hit the “reply to all” button on your email program, think twice and resist the urge!

DES: A Not So Silent Danger

February 1, 2010 | No comments

Were you exposed?

I just lost another friend of mine to ovarian cancer. She was also a DES Daughter and we had shared and commiserated for many years.  DES  continues to steal away women and now men whose mothers took DES to maintain problem pregnancies.

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is a synthetic hormone that was given to women from 1938 to 1971 who had issues with pregnancy and infertility. The children of those women run a high risk of reproductive tract cancer. When I was growing up, they talked about the DES daughters, but now they have found that the sons are also affected, as are third-generation. There may even be some effects in the fourth generation. The mothers who took it are not safe, either. They run an enhanced risk of breast cancer (like 2 1/2 times higher). I lost my own mother in 1997 to brain cancer, but it began with breast cancer before spreading and her oncologist has said DES was probably a major factor.

Not Just A Human Thing

The worst part of this whole scenario is that even once they found out how bad the effects were from the drug, they continued to inject it into farm animals to encourage them to eat more so there would be more meat. I worked in a feedlot in the late 70’s in Arizona where they regularly gave it as an injection until the cows reached 700 pounds then switched to a different one after that, and all so the cows would be heavier when slaughtered so the people who invested in them got more money. And I’ve heard it was given as late as the 90’s! The results of this hormone are so far reaching, that there have now been correlations discovered between obesity and sterility in humans who ate the DES enhanced foods! Watch for an update and I’ll provide the links to the studies.

No known medical test (such as blood, urine or skin analysis) has been developed that can detect DES exposure. However, the Interactive DES Self-Assessment Guide is designed to help you assess whether you might have been exposed to DES between 1938 and 1971. Just click on the graphic above to be taken to the assessment site.

Go Ask Your Mother

I encourage you all to speak to your mothers, your doctors and your friends. Have your mothers get their pregnancy records because in the early days, women didn’t question prescriptions and may have never known they were given this potentially deadly drug that has had deeper effects than even Thalidomide!

Firefox 3.6 launched – finally our loyalty rewarded

January 14, 2010 | No comments

If any of you are fans of Mozilla’s Firefox browser (I most certainly am), the upgrade we’ve been waiting for is just around the corner. The beta version is out, and the final version is said to be just about ready.

The choice for many bloggers, power users, and WordPress fans, Firefox 3.6, code named Namoroka, resolves a lot of the issues many users and bloggers were having with the most recent update, and adds some fantastic features that will benefit all users.

Among the changes, according to Mozilla’s site are:

Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

The final release of this version is due out in a few more days, but I just had to download the beta.

One of the things I really liked about installing/upgrading to the new version was the communication available. It stopped and let me know which add-ons probably wouldn’t work before it installed the upgrade. This is different from the last two updates and I liked it. Not only that, but I didn’t need an IT professional standing over my shoulder or a how-to document the size of the Los Angeles phonebook to do it. Super easy, two clicks, anyone can do this.

I’m also thrilled with the Personas option they’ve added. Not that this is an option critical to the running of the browser, but I’m really happy to find a way to skin the browser to reflect me and my tastes. The only downside I found was that with some of the gorgeous designs available, you can’t read the rest of the stuff on your browser bar, so you have to be careful which one you use.

Mozilla also has released a new version of Thunderbird. So far the jury’s still out on that one. I’m still exploring the changes.

Lexicon For You

January 7, 2010 | No comments

Where do we come up with these things? From our own fertile (and I do mean fertile not feeble) brains.

Here’s a quick CLS Lexicon so you can look up words you may not recognize.

I love the English Language and take incredible delight in tearing it apart to look under the hood!

Oughta-Pilot(TM)

An Oughta-Pilot(TM) is that control mechanism that tells you what you “oughta” do. It can come from inside or outside, but it’s always up to less than your level of magnificence.

Planifest

To planifest a dream is to create  a structure or a plan of action that calls a dream into being. When you planifest a dream, you begin with your vision of the dream already created, manifested and real and you look backwards to see what you did to make it so.

Dreambuilding

Dreambuilding is the process of experiencing what it is you dream of first hand.

And more to come!

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