Meine Strengths

Your Top Strength
Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.

Your Second Strength
Self-control and self-regulation
You self-consciously regulate what you feel and what you do. You are a disciplined person. You are in control of your appetites and your emotions, not vice versa.

Your Third Strength
Curiosity and interest in the world
You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.

Your Fourth Strength
Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

Your Fifth Strength
Zest, enthusiasm, and energy
Regardless of what you do, you approach it with excitement and energy. You never do anything halfway or halfheartedly. For you, life is an adventure

Duchenne for Longevity

If you crinkle your eyes when you smile, you'll live past 50 :

When Harker and Keltner inherited the study in the 1990s, they wondered if they could predict from the senior-year smiles alone what these women's married lives would turn out to be like. Astonishingly, Duchenne women, on average, were more likely to be married, to stay married, and to experience more personal well-being over the next thirty years.

Story and Symphony

More aus Meister Pink :

To master story, digest these books :

Robert McKee : Story - ppl who've taken his $600 course have won 26 Oscars!
Bonnet :
Atkinson : Powerpoint
Garth Reynolds : Presentation Zen
McCloud : Comics (Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, Surface - a meisterpiece! 741.5 MCCL)

To master symphony :

Beethoven's 9th
Mahler's 4th - my verdict - crap
Mozart's 35th - Haffner - my verdict - crap. Shame on you Mozart.
Haydn's 94th - my verdict - crap
Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture - now you're talking!

Better Design aus Daniel Pink

Read the following mags, for your own good :

Ambidextrous
Dwell
How
Print Mag
Real Simple
Oprah
ID Home
Metropolis

Also, check out Robin William's book for CRAP - Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity. (www.ratz.com)

HowTo from the Phoenix Master of Comedy

The masters spracht : "Everyday, write something that's like a joke."

Get out of bed, think Setup, Twist, Punchline, write something. What's the setup? What does it mean? What else could it mean? Report it.

In the last couple of months alone I've come up with 20+ jokes. Think about it. In all the 10 years before, each time an original joke occurred to me, I gave it its own post on this blog.

Designer's Toolchest

This'll be a full-fledged presentation in the upcoming days, but for now, to boost your productivity, consider developing expertise/familiarity in/with the following :

Perl, the swiss-army knife of scripting languages. Once you have savoured perl, you will see that you must know your data. And, when you internalize the fact that you must know your data, you will be more organized and start spotting patterns and solutions much faster.

perlTK - rapid fire GUI development for a better user experience. This is for those once-a-year times when your project will go much faster if you just had a better way of doing something. User experience is king. You must enjoy what you do if you do a lot of it.

AutoHotKey, the shortcut to Windows scripting. For all the hype about Linux, it has failed to deliver a method of scripting routine interactions.

HTML/Word/Powerpoint - when you have to sell yourself. Most things you'll want to do to make yourself look better only take a few minutes and most of the answers are already online.

Excel - Dashboard your way to success. We are all drivers or pilots all the time. Having access to the data that matters to you is the key to your success.

Cadence - The IC design suite with a user interface that could stand to lose a few pounds.

People skills - get the ball running faster and smoother. Politics is a fact of life. Get with the program. Be upbeat. You can make anyone's day with an uplifting remark or a joke or a witty observation.

Mindset : Think innovation, think victory, think initiative, tenacity, proactivity. Look for worthwhile things to do and do them without being told. Make things happen - where there's a will, there's a way - look online, participate in forums, make a nuisance of yourself till you've found the solution. Use paper - write down the possible outcomes and get to the future first!

ALT-ESC - The third dimension in productivity. It's amazing how many people (including my nice IT support guy) don't know about this trick in Windows (you can set your keyboard shortcut on Linux to do the same thing). How many times have you seen poor people click on the title bar and move the window to see what's beneath it? All you need to do is hit ALT-ESC and lower your window. Save yourself time, energy, money, hair, seed, etc.

Enjoy!

Essential All-The-Time AutoHotKey

Have you noticed that tables are so much nicer looking when cells are filled according to a theme? This is trivial to do with HTML, but Bill decided to make it really hard to do with M$ Word.

With Word 2007, all you do is select the cell, which Bill also decided to make hard to do (the trick sometimes is to just drag the cursor precisely to the boundary of the cell and hope for the best. With the leftmost cell, triple-clicking usually works. Then, you should see the Table Tools menu button on the very top bar, click that and you should now see Shading and Borders menu options surface. Anyhow, I just found that out, and the AutoHotKey snippet I have here doesn't apply to that unfortunately.

With M$ Word 2000 or older, you select the cell, then, Alt-o to go into the Format menu, then b, to pick Borders and Shading, then s to get to the Shading tab and you can then pick the colour you want. Which lends itself to this snippet that you should probably add to your Johnny-KDE-Style-Easy-Window-Drag script. Man, how much have Johnny and Rajat contributed to the well-being of the human race by just boosting my productivity?

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
; default is 1

; This is the setting that runs smoothest on my
; system. Depending on your video card and cpu
; power, you may want to raise or lower this value.

SetWinDelay,2

CoordMode,Mouse
return

^!RButton::Suspend

; M$ word, send key/mouse sequence to get the borders and shading menu on
; a table cell. Note, cursor must remain in the cell!! :)
$!b::
IfWinActive, - Microsoft Word
{
 Sleep 200
 Click 3
 Send !o
 Send b
 Send s
}
Return

Enjoy!!

Six Keys to Excellence

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

How to Create Comedy

Never forget : Craft and Technique will trump Talent. If you rely solely on talent, then, one fine day, when you lose "it", you won't be able to create anymore because you don't know the underlying process.

To write a joke, start off with words at random. For those words, find more than one meaning. Write a sentence using the word. What do people normally conclude when they hears this sentence? This first sentence is the setup.

Written jokes work best with twists and punchlines. Performed jokes can depend solely on exaggeration.

Unix Directory Recursive Copy File Damn the Link

cp -L -r

will copy the actual file instead of the link. Sometimes, the links will persist and annoy you ad nauseum.

Vancouver-Seattle Border Crossing Tips

Friday afternoon - bad idea - expect 2 hr wait in the heat while you inch along in your car. Canada is idle free - so I had to keep shutting off and restarting - almost 20 times total. Engine off means no AC. Go figure.

Get plenty of drinking water on hand unless you want to pay multiple dollars per bottle to get some from the guy with the pushcart.

Then, inside the building, no restrooms, no water, go figure.

That's Educational Art - Super Art

What do you think of Allan Gilbert's masterpizza? (1873-1929) "All is Vanity"

Ask Me about the MatchFaker

Can't lie. Things aren't going particularly well with this expense account. At the happy hour where we first discussed the prospect of business, all I heard was "We have to work together. The best thing about you is you've got good teeth." The teeth thing kept coming back again and again. Once she had me committed, it was, do sessions with Joann to develop "edge." No matter how nice you are, there needs to be that se.ual tension otherwise, there just isn't that chemistry. Really? If you knew this much, why not tell me this upfront so I could save the money I gave you and spend it on that instead and then I might be able to do without your services?

Anyhow, one of the early emails was :

I feel my service is well worth
My cost and I have offered you a discount and allowed payment arrangements
And we are still negotiating ?? This is not car sales and I feel like I have
Come down on my service above and beyond. I hope you understand where I am
coming
From. I really like you and want to represent you and I look forward to
talking:)


My take : honesty is the best policy and what goes around comes around. I haven't given substantially to charity in a while, so I can take a hit on writing this off. All part of the recent lifestyle upgrade I did. I did have second thoughts when I first visited her office - folders with peoples' names scattered on the floor near her computer. "My boyfriend wants to organize my computer, but I'm clueless about that." 


I probably should have been firm on the trial. Well, that's what I'm going to tell people from now on. If you get an email like this one, beware :


 I also really like you and feel confident that
I can
Get you in a relationship. I already have a couple of great girls picked out
and we
Need to move on this soon.


My experience - all three intros so far have been huge disappointments. One no-show, one really mean and one golddigger (it's always the one you least expect.) The "need to move soon" should have really given me pause.

Bossidy and Charan on Leadership

In a good evaluation, the leader looks closely at how the people under review met their commitments. Which people delivered consistently? Which ones were resourceful, enterprising, and creative in the face of adversity? Who had easy wins and didn't push for better results? And who met their commitments at the expense of the organization's morale and long-term performance.

Tamara Loew - The Ultimate Transformation

Going from 10 years of drugs and dealing to a motivational speaker who hobnobs with successful celebs and world leaders. How's that for a comeback?

Question is - how did she do it? The short answer is she started with helping those she understood best - people with her problem. First, she got motivated. Rest is H.

Adler - The Key to Business Success

1) Get a group of motivated, team-oriented people

2) Have a clear vision of where you're going.

I would add Jack's 2c : Establish a fair system - In a fair system, everyone knows where she stands and what she can do to improve. Metrics are the key. When you're in school, you have your GPA. But, how do you measure social success? What is a person's social GPA? Then, after school, what is your GPA? Salary? Maybe that's why recruiters want to know what your salary is.

Another good quote from Lou (paraphrasing someone else) : Work on your department, not in it. That's management - game plan and team building is management. How many times have you seen this being violated? The manager has to get in the lab and show the guy how to do something? Coaching is one thing - you have a training session where you point out common mistakes and ways to work smarter. Fixing problems on a live project is not coaching and it's not managing.

Lou Adler - Hire With Your Gut

Team skills, organizational ability, commitment, technical competence. Winners have a consistent track record of success.

There is nothing more important to your success than hiring great people. Even if you're not a manager, "hiring" is winning people over to your side, getting them to join your team.

Hire smart, or manage tough. I've never met anybody who could manage tough. No matter how hard you try, you can never atone for a weak hiring decision. A weak candidate rarely becomes a great employee, no matter how much you hope for improvement or how hard you try to train the person.

Reminds you of Jim Collins in "Good to Great" - the right people don't need to be managed. Guided, led, yes, managed - no. You need to get the right people on the bus first. Else, nothing matters.

Everyone Working All the Time

Eliyahu Goldratt : A plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.
(The Goal - A novel about the theory of constraints)

"A" Players, and B and C Players

We will see more hiring in 2010 of "A" players, but the jury is still out on when hiring will improve in great numbers and companies will consider hiring B and C players to round out their teams. You can't only have teams of superstars as the work that needs to be done in many cases does not warrant being done by high achievers. 

Become What You Were Born to Be - Brian Souza

My latest audiobook, and it's a good one.

Analyze your life patterns.
Develop a burning desire for something or to get away from something.
Inspirations : Slavimir Rawicz (internet accounts are controversial, but Souza makes him sound like a hero. Definitely, the story is a bit on the fantastic side. He did on land what Capt. Bligh did on water - I guess), Momma Walker - first self-made millionairess in the US, Franklin Chang-Diaz (first Costa-Rican space shuttle astronaut). Good stuff, in general.

Souza spent tens of $k on seminars after he quit his corporate ladder job to find out who he was.

Installing Perl Modules as Non-Root : If You're Not in bash

What if you're in csh? (to Mr. X who wrote : http://linuxgazette.net/139/okopnik.html )


setenv MANPATH ${MANPATH}:~/perl_modules/man

if ( $?PERL5LIB  ) then
        # PERL5LIB not previously defined, so set it..
        setenv PERL5LIB ${PERL5LIB}:~/perl_modules
else 
        setenv PERL5LIB ~/perl_modules
endif

verify with 

perl -wle'print for grep /myperl/, @INC'

That's a bit of guru-level perl right there. Deadly one! (not mine:)

Autohotkey Eases Command Prompt Navigation

You're looking at a folder with Windows Explorer. Can you click in the path (which means windows will now select it) and hit a hotkey combo to open a Command Prompt window ready at that path?

With Autohotkey, yes.

(without AHK, it's this incredibly complex procedure)

But, we're saved :

Windows 2K :

#c::
Send ^c ; copy the text
CoordMode, Mouse, Relative
Run cmd.exe
WinWaitActive,cmd,,0.5
Send cd{Space}
Click right 110,70
Send {Enter}
CoordMode, Mouse
Return

Windows XP :

#c::
Send ^c ; copy the text
CoordMode, Mouse, Relative
Run cmd.exe
WinWaitActive,cmd,,0.5
Send cd{Space}
Click right 110,70
Send {Down}{Down}{Down}
Send {Enter}{Enter}
CoordMode, Mouse
Return

It's not pretty:) but it works. Sure, there's more than one way to do it.

MyFav : AHK : Suspend

That's a really useful hotkey - suspend all the other hotkeys.

If you're using the Easy Window Drag (KDE Style) script, be sure to put this line after the "CoordMode, Mouse" segment, or you'll see some funny stuff.

All you need is

^!Rbutton::Suspend

Just one small line for you, one giant leap for your productivity. Choose any other key combo you like - I picked CTRL-ALT-RIGHTMOUSE here.

Another one to consider :

#c::Run calc.exe

See, that's the smart way to launch the calculator when you need it. Cavemen go through the Start menu, to accessories, then whatever. Same for Paint. All you have to do is launch the task manager and find out what the name of the program is - you usually can find it because it'll be named meaningfully.

C.a.r.e.s.s. the Art of Listening

Day eight of the mastery course.

C : concentrate
a : acknowledge
r : respond
e : emotional control - don't get your buttons pushed and tune out
s : sensing the non-verbals - vocal and visual
s : structure - paying attention to the verbal