"12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO" by Jason Goldberg

Excellent post about startup strategy. Keep reading!

12 Learnings From My First Turn As Startup CEO - socialmedian: "In December 2003 I decided to take the plunge and quit my corporate job to start a new company from scratch.  Believe it or not, it was an easy decision.  I had an idea and a certainty that there was a valuable company to be built around it.  That company was Jobster, where I served as CEO until January 2008 when I helped recruit my successor, transitioned to vice-chairman of the board of directors, and turned my attention to starting a new company.

Back in December 2003 I had no reasonable idea of what was ahead ... what i did have was passion for the idea of Jobster and for the pursuit of starting and growing a business.

I learned many valuable lessons at Jobster which I will take with me as I start my next company and my next and my next. 

Here are some of the key learnings that I hope will benefit many..."

ImageWell & Marsedit

I am trying this tiny little ImageWell program to quickly create and send images. I tried it for an hour, then decided to buy the license, since these are 20 Canadian Dollars well invested. I liked the ease of use and configure of ImageWell almost immediately.

So here is an example of picture, quickly made using (1) Photo Booth application that you get with Leopard and created that nice background (2) ImageWell to crop, shadow and resize the original picture.

Nothing fancy, but takes a couple of minutes to create pictures. I'll look more into the additional features provided with the license, and will update this post. By the way, I am also using MarsEdit for my blogs. It's really nice!

I read there's also a blogging plugin with my favorite text editor - TextMate - but I have not been able to figure out yet how it works; so I decided to go ahead and give MarsEdit authors some of my money. Have you tried?

How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire - Ode to Apple

Good article about blog reading, and setup. NetNewsWire is great! I still use the online Google Reader, but am getting back to a local RSS reader as well. NetNewsWire is a slick one. Running Intel and VMware Fusion, I can use NetNewsWire when either working on my Windows or my Mac interface. That makes things more appealing since most of my work needs Windows and I still want to be able to read some feeds sometimes during the day....

I just hope that making NetNewsWire free doesn't mean that its support and upgrades will disappear.

How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire - Ode to Apple: "Ode to AppleDedicated to Apple - Mac, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Quicktime, Apple TV and all the awesome softwares for the Apple Mac.

A day before Newsgator made their RSS Suite totally FREE, Amit did a review of Newsgator’s FeedDemon (Windows RSS Feed Reader), which got me thinking about NetNewsWire. Let me give you a brief about my RSS Feed Reader usage before suggesting ‘How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire’.

I have been using RSS Feed Readers in a way or the other ever since the hay days of the blogging revolution in the early 2000s. While on Windows, I graduated to a full fledged RSS Reader with Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon ever since its very early days. Bradbury Software, Nick’s company that made FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator Technologies in May 2005 (I think Nick works with Newsgator at present). "

How to Command Respect

I found this post useful; we're not always aware of how others perceive us beyond the quality of our work itself. Many things participate in the idea of what others think about you and me: body language, odor, voice!.... It's good to work a little in improving these things. Nothing works better than rehearsals and self-consciousness. It's not really (for me at least) about mirror sessions or tape recording, nor becoming obsessed to a point where you feel embarrassed and afraid of your next move - "should I uncross my legs?" LOL - that post is worth reading.

How to Command Respect: "

Some people are always listened to. What they say matter, and everyone pays attention whenever they speak.


Why is that so? There's an air of authority about their every words and actions, which helps them in getting their point across, when others would not even be heard.


In short, they are who you and I would call ‘Natural Leaders.'


I am not one of those people – I wasn't born super-confident – so I took some time to study man and women who naturally command respect, in order to learn their secrets and get the results I wanted in my own life.


The experiment has worked well: today my behavior has changed - though I'm still me - and I have finally been offered the job I had been wanting for the last three years.


I should come clean with you – I haven't discovered any secrets… – only well known habits which increase their effectiveness exponentially when applied all together.


If you are not a ‘Natural Leader', the good news is that a confident behavior can be learned: read the tips below and start immediately to practice those which feel ok with you. Results will soon follow...



Posture


- Stand tall: keeping your shoulders pushed back will lend you an air of confidence.

- Spread your weight evenly on both feet instead of leaning only on one.

- Try standing with your arms crossed behind your back. Your shoulders will get pulled back automatically.

- Don't stand with your hands on your hips if you don't want to come across as confrontational.

- Don't lean against walls or tables. You'll appear tired and lazy.




What are you looking at?

- Look directly at the person you are talking to in order to exude confidence. If you turn away from the person you're talking to in the middle of the conversation, you'll show you're not interested.

- Look straight in front of you: looking down might be interpreted as shyness, looking slightly upward could be perceived as arrogance. Finally, if you wear glasses, don't look over the rim. It makes you look condescending.


- Don't look at your watch unless you want to appear as if you're in a rush.

- Don't rub your eyes with your hands: it signals disbelief at the situation.

- Keeping your eyes on the door will show that you're ready to leave the room.




When you are sitting…

- Sit straight so that your shoulders almost touch the back of your chair.

- Rest your hands on the arms of your chair, place them on your knees, or fold them on your lap so that they are not a distraction.

- Make sure your chair is positioned so you're facing the person you're talking to. This will show that you're engaged in what they are saying.

- Lean slightly forward to appear interested in a conversation and stress what you're saying.

- Don't tilt your chair back so that it's standing on two legs. This shows a very casual, laid back attitude and does not earn you respect. You also run the risk of looking silly when you accidentally fall backwards.

- Stretching your legs out shows you're too relaxed and may also invade others' personal space.

- Never put your feet up on the desk in front of you. You don't want to come across as condescending.





Head and Face

- Tilting your head to one side during a conversation shows you're interested and thinking about what's being said.


- Be sure to nod your head so the person you're speaking with knows you're listening and interested.


- A blank face conveys either disinterest or a lack of understanding.



What are you doing with your hands?

- If seated, place your hands on armrest or on your laps ; if standing still, try holding your hands behind your back. Break such standard position whenever needed, and then return to it as soon as you can.
- Open, face-up palms signal honesty and straightforwardness.

- Gesturing with your arms can help you making a point, but doing it excessively can became distracting.

- Make sure your palms are clean and dry. Sweaty palms indicate nervousness and are a turn off for most people.

- Never point at someone, be it the person talking to you or anyone else in the room. It's rude.

- Don't scratch your head. You'll come across as being unsure of yourself.

- Don't tap your fingers on a table or arms of a chair; you'll seem anxious.


- Don't run your fingers through your hair. It shows frustration.

- Never bite your nails. It will make you seem nervous.

- Don't fidget with objects lying on the table in front of you.

- Don't sit with your palms on your cheeks. It shows you're deep in thought about something else.


- Do not wipe your palms on your clothing. Use a handkerchief instead.

- Don't play or fidget with your mobile phone when someone's talking to you. It shows avoidance and a lack of interest.

- Don't touch your nose, play with your hair, or rub your eyes when you're being asked for an honest answer. They're all signs that say you're lying.


- Keep your fingernails clean. Close cropped nails show you're neat and orderly, but if you prefer to wear them long, make sure they're groomed neatly.




Last but not Least…

- If the situation calls for paperwork, be sure to keep your papers in order with easy access to avoid looking disorganized.


- Removing your tie, top button, or jacket to indicate you're getting comfortable in your surroundings.

- Open doors and allow others to walk before you.

- Cough and sneeze into your hands or a handkerchief, not into the face of the people around you.

- Additionally, try videotaping your actions so you can find out where you're going wrong. I know, it sound weird, but it is amazingly effective.


- Look good. You don't have to be conventionally handsome or beautiful; it's enough to dress neatly in clothes that suit both you and the occasion.

- Smell good. Use deodorant and perfume, but go easy on it. You don't want to overpower the room with your scent.

- Wear footwear that allows you to walk comfortably to avoid making a fool of yourself.

- Avoid revealing, dirty or wrinkled clothing.

- And finally, remember to smile. Smiles are contagious :-)



Adapted from www.insidecrm.com/blog
"

(Via Even Happier.)

50 Ways To Increase Your Productivity - lifehack.org

I am quite adept to lists; this one (50 ways to increase your productivity) is, I believe, a really good one. Among the listed items, I have these ones that I really value since they work for me: take breaks, love what you do, use background music, complete most dreaded things in the morning, use a text editor like WriteRoom on the mac to avoid visual distractions, keep a notebook and pen handy, plan your meals, step away from the computer, write a daily to-do list, exercise, turn off TV, learn to say "No", use a calendar, get up real early, reward yourself, speed read, hibernate your Windows station.

What are your own best tricks to get organized? Have you read Allen's book "Getting Things Done?" and what's your opinions about a formal methodology? What are the tools you use personnaly that made a difference in your productivity?

Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

The whole world of information is getting better day after day. Try Jott.com, and you'll get a new very cool way to enter information, via a phone number. Speed dial yourself something important, and forget it. The transcribed message will get straight into your email mailbox, ready for processing. We love it!

So far the service is totally free --- till when?

Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X

Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X: This is a great alternative to the simplistic Locomotive. I see Locomotive as a quick way to run Rails applications you want to evaluate, but this tutorial goes much further. It walk you through the installation of each component, whiich will make you feel a tad smarter at the end. The installation took quite some time on my G5 but was a great insight. And I could upgrade to the latest just by using the curl -l ftp:/each_website/each_path/* wisely. Great springboard to Ruby on Rails. Also the usage of Textmate in this development environment is precious, but that'll likely be another blog entry.

Taking My Gmail Offline

Went through an interesting article about GMail email storage and privacy and security concerns. What's the best and most secure way to keep all your emails? Is it to leave them on the GMail server or take a local copy? Well, talking about my own experience, local copies are good as long as the hard disks last and we all know they don't.

But still, read on, it's goood stuff... Taking My Gmail Offline

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center

Excellent article about the extensive usage of GMail. These last years have seen so many products becoming mature and moving users from pc-based data to internet-based data. That was a concept we were envisioning one decade ago as Sci-Fi when here and now, it is happening. Great stuff.

Apache - mod_rewrite not working

Here's a pretty trivial case I faced; the resolution is interesting:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteLogLevel 3
RewriteLog /path_to_log/rewrite.log
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /somestring
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://some.server.com/somestring/$1 [R]

If RewriteCond trigger /somestring conflicts with some tomcat JKMount setup (or other trigger like for instance WebLogic), make sure that the mod_rewrite library gets loaded AFTER mod_jk library.

How to filter out Spam on the Mac?

I have been using OSX Mail application since years now, I have been activating the Junk filter also since all that time, and, as much as I can recall, I have been happy with it... a long time ago. But these last years, as the spam got really out of hand, I ended up using up most of my email-reading time in email-deleting and email-searching. Piles of junk at the door every morning, every night. Piles and piles. I tried to define additional rules to kind of nail this terrible thing. With no real success. I understand a few reasons why spammers can still spam us: they spoof other people email addresses, they set many random words in the email bodies, and use images as spam contents. All this is very annoying.

Then I discovered, now a few days ago, SpamSieve for the Mac. This plugin takes the same training approach, where you are the one defining the good emails and the spam emails. It then builds a Corpus, which is a list of words, appended at each new email qualification, and associated with a probability for each word to be part of a spam email. Then this probability can be used to move automatically an email to a Spam folder - when greater than 75%. Between 50 and 75% you will have to choose and tell SpamSieve which is which. Everything that comes out with a probaility lower than 50% will remain in your mailbox or go to whichever folder your other Mail rules define.

That's the principle, roughly. What makes SpamSieve appealing to me is:

• its simplicity to operate and make changes in configuration
• its speed of execution
• its apparent efficiency
  

I am running a 30-days trial version for the moment, but will definitely purchase a license if the program is as good as it already seems. Will keep you posted on this.

Note taking, information processing

We daily face lots and lots of information. What computers were supposed to manage for us in fact flood back to us perpetually as a virtual boomerang. The information flows non-stop. When at your desk, facing your mail program, news reader, internet browser, you're already filled with information. Stuff for which you need to take rapid decisions. From which you also generate action, like spreadsheets or emails.

We need tools to handle these heaps. So store, sort, make searchable. To create other actions. Just to keep up and still be productive. Be faster, as fast as the flows towards us. I have been looking for a long time for these, which would increase my productivity, and my overall performance in the work field.

Here is what I have found:

• Microsoft OneNote on Windows is quite the best I could find overall. To create 1-click away notes and screen captures it's a great tool. The way you organize everything within that program makes things easy to look back in. Also the way all external documents (emails, files..) can be dropped to create explicit links. Dearly missing on Mac.... Commercial.
• For the Mac I just discovered Yojimbo. Not as good as OneNote but usable, still. More on this later. Shareware.
• QuickSilver on the Mac also. Dearly missing on Windows :-) Allows you to operate many tasks with a few keystrokes. From google searches to running programs or email people or (again) set new events in iCal. Freeware.
• TypeIt4Me on the Mac: set text snippets (essentially used in emails for me, but could be anything else) through predefined key sequences. Takes away the load of repetitive typing. Shareware.

To make OSX look and feel consistent: UNO!

For those of us who ever "switched", we know that OSX is a great (if not the greatest) and sexiest OS around. There's a little caveat though: for some reasons the design of the interface windows has been taking multiple routes that sometimes make it a bit difficult to the eye. To remediate this problem, interacto.net came up with UNO. This freeware safely changes the look and feel of all applications, into a UNO style, that I personnaly like very much. Try it!

Apache - how to load balance across multiple hosts (using mod_rewrite)

Here is a nice way to load balance requests using Apache and mod_rewrite.

All it takes is a text file with the different targeted servers, and a "load balancer instance" getting the initial requests. This is a nice way to create sticky sessions to different load-balanced back-ends.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteLogLevel 3
RewriteLog /var/opt/logs/rewrite.log

RewriteMap servers rnd:/opt/apache/servers.txt
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://${servers:mylist}/$1 [R,L]

with servers.txt:
mylist server1.mydomain.com|server2.mydomain.com|server3.mydomain.com

NewsFire news reader

NewsFire a the best news reader for the mac. I have used both NetNewsWire for mac and the bloglines website, but now that I've tried NewsFire, I must tell that it's for me the easiest and most practical tool to remain on the top of the many news I collect.

Also if you purchase NewsFire this week end, you will get Inquisitor free! Yes, the author will send you a free license.

How to overwrite a php.ini setup

Often ISP's don't let people change a php.ini setup. Nevertheless, you can programatically change some of the setup.

This can be really useful, for instance to disable the display of some useless warning messages:

ini_set("display_errors","Off");
(... do some stuff here ...)
ini_restore('display_errors');

As you could see here, the error messages were then re-enabled.

Apache - Reverse Proxy to a backend server running https, warning message

If you ever set some https reverse proxy server to hit a backend through https as well, i.e. set something like (in Apache):

ProxyPass /abc https://abc.somewhere.com

You will likely get some browser warning complaining that the names don't match. To prevent this, simply request your backend SSL certificate with a subject alternative name = your proxy server SSL name, along with your backend common name (here abc.somewhere.com). Then users won't get warnings in their browser. 

QuickSilver!

I wrote an earlier blog about LaunchBar and Butler, as the most necessary binaries there is on the Mac. I am rarely an early adopter of new tools  and usually the first experience is not very positive. You know, we already have it all, right? 

Well, I re-discovered QuickSilver a couple of days ago; I was prepared to a little learning curve, and decided to go through a couple of tutorials that night, to help get to the sugar cream layer directly. To sample the great stuff. I did, and I now I LOVE IT!

I love it so much that I simply decided to get rid (i.e. not launch automatically at login anymore) of LaunchBar (had been my sweet sweet friend since years) and my recent adoption (Butler). It's great! It's amazing!! More than anything I had encountered before. Was a paing to work on XP earlier, now it it HELL! 

QuickSilver probably is what can be best (or at least close) for human keyboard/screen ergonomy. It emcompasses keyboard shortcuts, spell guesses (not as good as LaunchBar I think, though), contextual menus, notepad interactions (great to have the possibility to type some text on the fly BEFORE picking the program that will use it, whether it's a calculator, a text editor, a browser, a mail program, etc etc). It also offers a shelf, persistent place where you can store all kinds of things (text strips, files, images....) and use them later. Also of course all the buffers are kept (could be hundreds).  Also it interfaces very well with iTunes, so any other binary which controls songs and volume were removed. I keep a simple DashBoard widget to keep the album covers visible, and rate the tunes on the fly.  Also QS allows to browse and play the tunes. 

Many plugins are already available, making this free engine a marvel. I'll likely get back on this at later time.  Without programming you can still create your own tools (macros?) to add functions and help in common tasks. 

Apple and the world of developers who adhered to this platform, makes the rest of them (the computers) gray, conform, boring, difficult. Elegance and simplicity, again. 

Playing tunes wirelessly all around the house?

YES! Incidently I discovered that iTunes can now play on my Airport at the same time as it blows from my G5!!! I can buy a couple of more Airports later on, hook them up with speakers, and PARTY!!!! Music everywhere! Hiya!!!

Reference here

Butler on Mac OSX

At first I didn't really look into it. After all, having the excellent LaunchBar and SpotLight tools handy was making me really happy already. Butler seemed like just another goodie in my menu bar, one among the multitude of tools that try to complement each other, without really making your life that easy at all.

Then I started playing with Butler. First of all, yes, it's a great interface to configure, with a good help section too. The kind of quality we love, and it's even free...

So I played with it, making most of my setups (directories, applications, web bookmarks, even keystrokes macros for my Mail application) invisible from the Finder interface. And I defined some shortcuts to activate all these. Plus shortcuts to rate iTunes songs!

It worked so far very nicely! Sometimes I noticed some delay in the initial caching of Butler, but this will be likely tuned later. Butler is becoming my favorite tool to gain speed in my work. Does what an expensive QuickKeys does. Probably not the most sophisticated of its category but it's really, really great!