simplerich

The latest sensational “The Internet is going to steal my crap” wave is here in the name of pleaserobme.com and no… I’m not linking there. I think the site is ridiculous as is the concept.

Here’s the idea. It harvests information off twitter from social sites like gowalla.com and foursquare.com that people use to “check in” to places when they go eat, shop, tour, whatever. The two sites use the phone’s GPS to show where you are and you can collect badges by visiting places. What pleaserobme does is gather into one spot when people FROM a certain area, say Austin, TX are checking into somewhere. The idea is if they check into starbucks then they are obviously NOT at home. So… using the gowalla.com and foursquare.com sites is the same as saying to the world, “please rob me.” Or at least that’s what the folks at the site want you to think.

They’re onto something. What they’re onto is that in the US right now, since 9/11, fear sells and business is good. The idea that Bad Guys are sniffing the twitter stream to see when someone goes to McDonalds’s so they can go bust into their house is ridiculous.

• It doesn’t say that NOBODY is home, just the one who is posting that they aren’t home.
• Bad guys have always been able to tell by if your sidewalk is scooped, grass mowed, lights on/off, mail picked up etc. if someone is home or not. This isn’t new or as effective as ANY of the old ways.
• If your twitter profile gives your street address you were an idiot before this site existed, and not because you’d get robbed but because you don’t put your real life address out there on the internet for safety’s sake ever. That’s just stupid. People who “check in” to their own homes… they’re the ones who are saying please rob me, attack me, go stare at my kid’s through their windows. Not the people who say “I’m at McDonald’s”

So, before you call all your relatives and tell them that the social GPS game sites are going to get their house robbed, calm down a little, take some deep breaths, go check in at a Starbucks and tweet them to meet you there. If they’re friends with you on foursquare or gowalla.com they’ll know where you are and can meet you there. If you’re worried about your friends breaking into your house while you’re away maybe you should get a better class of friend.

Commons sense tips for using the GPS enabled social-web.

1. Don’t ever GPS identify your house or your friends and families homes.

OK. Any questions?

This post prompted by the usually sane Solo-Technology blog and my guess is sometime this week he’ll not be home because he’ll be at work during the day while his wife is at work and his kids are at school… he lives in the Denver area knock yourselves out!

EDIT: I should clarify: I don’t mean to imply the author of Solo-technology is an old woman. I’ve met him and he’s an old MAN. lololol. His post about the site is what I’m referring to. I don’t believe he’s hysterical or over-reacty. (No, not a word I know.) But the topic he’s blogged about has been over-sensationalized by others out there and I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to give them any link-fu. I won’t link to hacks or nutjobs… that’s why solo-technology got the link.

Let that long tail wag! It started with TechCrunch then went to TalkingStory and then here. I’m pretty far out there so if you haven’t seen this topic covered already I’d be surprised. I’d also recommend you go read the source material that inspired this one.

I’ll break it down into Use Daily, Use Weekly, and Mean to Use But Forget. I almost included a “Can’t imagine a use for” or “Never use” but that just seemed mean. I’m going to include things I use for work and personally.

Daily:

1. Android Phone – I switched from Blackberry to Android the day it came out for Verizon and was in love immediately. Personally and professionally it’s changed my work flow completely. The syncing with the Googleverse made using it immediately easy and seamless on and offline. I couldn’t imagine using a different phone. Just like TechCrunch‘ commented on it’s seamless integration with Google Voice was a huge plus. The transcription of voicemails to text messages and e-mails, even when not perfect, and it rarely is, is a huge time saver. Aiming it at whatever phone number I want to aim it at is a huge plus as well.
2. Gmail – I really don’t understand how anybody would use anything other than Gmail for their mail. I use it to grab my work e-mail from the work servers and still act as if it were coming from our work domain when I send mail. My bosses don’t know I’m not using their godaddy web-interface, they just know that I can find any e-mail they’ve ever sent me in seconds. They believe I’m very organized. I just know how incredibly useful the search function is on Gmail. The huge mailbox size is also a huge help. While my work mailbox could fill up (It doesn’t due to Gmail gobbling the e-mail out of it) my Gmail box doesn’t. Co-workers get full e-mail boxes. I don’t.
3. Kindle – Technically a kindle2, but that’s splitting hairs. The e-book reader from amazon has changed the way I read in the less than a year that I’ve had it. For one thing I read a lot more often now and a bigger variety of books. Now that they’ve added PDF support to it I have an even larger selection of reading material to choose from. I can carry enough books for months of reading in my backpack on a work trip. I can get more books while I’m in my hotel room without having to get out of bed. I can bookmark, annotate, search, highlight, and mark-up a book from within the kindle and nobody accuses me of tearing up a book.
4. iPod nano (and itunes)– I know I finally sold out completely and don’t just refer to it as an mp3 player. The features of the iPod and itunes together, and it’s the magic of the two of them together that I love mind you. One of the things I like personally about the iPod is that it works with the Nike+ site and the iPod doo-dad that helps me with my running. No other mp3 player does that for me. Audiobooks, audible.com, and podcasts are what I primarily use the iPod for. I have music on it, but I’m mostly a spoken word person and itunes is excellent at grabbing my podcasts and managing them for me on the iPod.
5. Dropbox – This one is surprising to me when everybody doesn’t use it. It’s a small program that sits in my taskbar and syncs some folders I aim it at with a site on the web. I can then choose to make those folders on the site public, private, or share them with only certain people. The default is to make them private. I recently went from a Macbook Pro to a PC Laptop and it was the easiest transition I’ve ever made. I had all my work stuff in a folder in Dropbox already (called “Workrap” respectfully enough lol.) Now, imagine if you have multiple computers… you install Dropbox on all of them, log onto them with the same account and suddenly your “Workrap” folder is on all your computers and if you update a file at work it’s automatically updated on your home computer and on your laptop as soon as they get on the internet. If you update it while you’re offline, when you get online it’ll sync up just fine. Seriously changed my workflow. Using another person’s computer? Log onto dropbox online without installing anything and get the file you want to show them and you’re set.
6. Evernote – My brain. I’m not exaggerating. I store everything on Evernote. It’s similar to Dropbox in that it’s “in the cloud” and I can keep things synced across multiple computers and my phone. I store all my information in there. Online, offline, on my phone. If I need to find Mom’s Gumbo recipe and I’m in the grocery store I fire up Evernote on my phone and grab it. If I’m on my laptop and someone calls I automatically open Evernote as my capture device.
7. OpenOffice.org – I haven’t paid for Microsoft Office since the early 90s when I bought Works. I’ve used the free open source alternative for Word, Calc, and Presentations. I love OpenOffice, couldn’t be without it.
8. Laptop – I use it every day but I don’t love it. I loved my Macbook Pro but it wasn’t working out for me at work. I found myself running in parallels all the time for stuff so I’m back to Windows. Now, I prefer Windows 7 to Vista, but it’s hard to come back to a PC after being a Mac user.

Weekly:

1. Google Docs – I should use this one more than I do. I use it weekly to save work documents that I get e-mailed to me by my boss. I open them with Google Docs to make sure there’s a copy out there in the cloud as well. Since I’ve started using Dropbox I’ve used Google Docs less and less. I use it primarily when I’m on the net tracking something a lot and don’t want to wait for OpenOffice to open up. I track my fitness stuff on Google Docs but other than that and the one work document that’s about all I use it for.
2. WordPress & Blogger – I’d like to say I use these two blogging platforms more often than weekly, but I’ve been a little slow lately. I’m getting better, but I love my blogging and both platforms offer something that makes me keep them both.
3. Digital Camera – I love my Canon Powershot. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most megapixels thing out there but it fits in my pocket and allows me to get the shots some of my friends with fancier cameras can’t or don’t get because their camera takes too long to prep for the shot. I enjoy taking pictures, and while I took fewer this year than previous years it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it as much as it was because I wasn’t as happy. Work was/is affecting my quality of life and one of the measures of how happy I am is how many pictures I take. The quiet months are unhappy months. I know, more than you wanted to know, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

Mean to Use But Forget:

1. Pandora – I love this music streaming service but I always forget it. Then I’ll remember it for a few days and then it falls off the radar again for another couple months.
2. Stanza – I’ve gotten so hopped up on using the kindle that I really like reading e-books now but sometimes I have my laptop and not my kindle and I sort of stare at the wall wondering what to do next. It’s only later that I remember I have Stanza on my laptop which will allow me to read many e-book formats. (It also converts between formats so I can get some things on the kindle that I couldn’t before.)
3. Windows Widgets – I keep meaning to turn them back on but I forget. Then I remember and turn them on for a while and then turn them back off. I want to like them but can’t find it in me to stick with them. I’ll try them every month or so.

So, what technology do you use to make your job/life easier.

The Daily Five Minutes (D5M) as talked about, shared, given away for free on the Internet, by Rosa Say is the single most important management tool I’ve run into. I found it on her blog, bought her book, and have built a relationship (online only – no jealous husbands coming after me please!) with her almost entirely because I fell in love with this practice of hers.

I don’t do it often enough. I intend to, but I get busy and I forget. I do it more than I used to. I need to do it more. Here’s the thing. Doing it mostly is better than doing it never. Doing it all the time… I can’t imagine how powerful that will be. She’s starting a program, this is an alpha run of the program in conjunction with Ruzuku.com (A site I’ve never heard of until now).

The shortest one-liner version of The Daily Five Minutes is to listen to your employees with active listening and find out what’s important to them. (Go read more about it here, even if you’ve done this before, bear with me. I’ve got a point to make here.) This is huge. It’s me shutting up and letting them talk. It’s me getting out of their way and letting them have the talking conch for a while. That’s hugely important at work right? It helps build relationships. It helps us their bosses find out what they’ve got going on in their lives and what they’re struggling with and gives them a chance to feel safe and ask for help without feeling like they’re whining. It allows them to bounce ideas off us.

If it’s that great for work think of how great it would be with your friends and family! Seriously. Pay attention on the next phone call to a friend or family member. How often are you planning your next thing to say or looking at the Bush’s baked beans wondering which ones to get while Aunt Mable tells the story about how her Beagle Indiana Jones (We named the DOG Indiana!) got into the garbage for the fourth time this week? How often are you talking about your day and not asking and listening to theirs? Seriously? At dinner how much time you do you spend listening, really listening, and engaging the person talking? If it’s a great idea for us and our employees it’s an amazingly super-fantastic idea for family and friends.

So, join us November 2nd, whether your manager or not, in the Alpha test of Rosa Say’s The D5M Challenge: 15 Days to Build your Daily 5 Minutes Habit online coachy thing. Rosa Say is an author, coach and speaker who has been making her living doing this stuff for a while now. She knows what she’s talking about and if you do it… I mean really do it and find at the end of the fifteen days  that you didn’t get anything out of it. I will personally return every dime of the cost of the program to you myself out of my pocketsess…

PS: If any of you say “Why Richard, this is simply Dale Carnegie with leis and words I can’t pronounce!” I’ll say it again slowly… go read the link I gave you and come back. My abbreviated version doesn’t do it justice. I’m abbreviating. There’s more to it than my thumbnail OK? OK. Mahalo, punk! (That was in my Clint Eastwood voice. I even squinted some when I said it.)

I’ve talked about SparkPeople.com before, but for some reason I stopped using it. I’ve got a focus problem sometimes. I wander off and then never come back to things. It’s why I’m addicted to the Moleskine Cahiers to keep my brain on task at work. See, I just did it again! Sparkpeople.com is not a diet site. OK. It is a diet site, but it’s a diet site in the same way google is a company that does search. Sparkpeople.com is much more than diet.

One of the things that helps me with focus was recently mentioned by Walletpop.com here where they talk about sparkpeople.com believe it or not. It’s the Seinfeld calendar. The idea is you get a big honking calendar and every day you work to your goal you put a big X through the day. Soon you’ll have a small chain and you won’t to break the chain. It’s a constant visual cue to get going on the goal, and anything can be done if you do a little every day. At least that’s what the folks said who built the pyramids, dug the Panama Canal, and got men on the moon.

But back to fitness! When you’re done with this article go check out walletpop’s five mostly free fitness tips to jumpstart your fitness mission.

I’m forty at the time that I write this and being fit isn’t as easy as it used to be. It takes some effort on my part. Not a supreme amount of work honestly, but it isn’t something that just happens. I’m not the most disciplined person you’re likely to meet and I need reminders. I need something that keeps my focus on task. It’s like the Moleskine cahiers I was talking about earlier that I use for work. They’re low-tech, but they’re fast, easy, and cheap. All things I need in a system for me to stick with it. Sparkpeople is a good system for tracking fitness and things that impact fitness.

I’m not that hung up on weight. I’m technically overweight for my height (10 lbs), but I see me in a mirror and I’m far from a house. I could stand to lose a few pounds. There’s no way I’m in need of a diet site. I’m in need of a reminder that vegetables are edible, exercise won’t kill me, water is free and I don’t drink enough, and all sorts of things I’m willing to do ARE exercise. I don’t have to own elaborate weight machines, and walking, which I love, counts. Not as much as jogging or running, but it counts!

If you’re of a mind to try and get some fitness focus give Sparkpeople.com a look. It’s got a heck of a lot of information on there which is both nice, and supremely distracting at times. Use it for a week or two and see if you don’t like it too. If you don’t, and have a better site you use that’s free please, let me know in the comments! I’d love to try it.

I was at someone’s house recently and it was time to eat and their son was playing a video game like Mario or something… it was a game with a save point. You couldn’t just save it wherever you were and if you turned it off you lost all your work since the last save point. I’m not a fan of those games and honestly wish they would make an emergency shut off function. The Mom, hereafter referred to as The Evil One, said it was time to eat, and within a minute walked up and turned off the console. The kid was really upset. I didn’t blame him. I reacted as if it’d been me that was kicked in the stomach. That was a massive loss of work and time on his part. The Evil One… she didn’t get it at all. I didn’t argue with her in front of her son. I’m not that stupid. But I did bring it up later. Her response was that it was just a game and he could do it again.

The part where he was doing everything he could to get to the save point, going backwards to save his progress was lost on her. The part where the game was something he cared about and put a lot of time, effort, and practice into didn’t matter because it was “just a game.” I got it though. I understood why he was upset and sullen through the meal. I kind of was too.

It’s just a job. She’s just a clerk. What she does doesn’t matter. If her boss gives her a project to do but doesn’t follow up on it, recognize her good work, and show areas where she could improve or maybe do it differently that would either make her job easier, faster, or more efficient she’s going to notice. She’s going to feel like her job doesn’t matter… like she doesn’t matter. All of that she agreed with, and when I put it in that context she understood that respecting a person’s time, effort, and work was important. She didn’t play video games, but recognized that it took skill, time, practice, and work to achieve anything.

The whole thing brought the idea of respect to me. Not respect for people over us or who have control over us. That can be fear as much as respect and it’s often something that people KNOW they are supposed to do. Respect for people who work for us, and over whom we have some power is vitally important for managers. I’m reminded of the USA Today article CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character. It’s one of my favorites. I have it saved as a file on my desktop to read once in a while. But it’s more than that.

My goto book for things when I’m formulating a post is often Managing with Aloha by Rosa Say. I read her take on it first and sometimes it kills a post because she’s already said it so well I’d just mess it up, or I find that I’m about to write a post that is almost just like something she has said so I don’t rather than appear to be plagiarizing her. To avoid that happening this time I didn’t refer to her book. I really wanted to make this post. What I did find on her website though, about respect, is a great list of things employees want from their employers, and I would argue it’s things that anybody would want from anybody else, and the core of the things is respect for them as a person, an employee, and for them and their work and time. Here’s the post on Rosa’s site. It’s certainly worth a read.

The Mom in the story above, I won’t really refer to her as The Evil One, did recognize that she could have asked him to switch off the TV, or get to a safe spot and turn off the sound and join us. She did recognize that she’d shown him disrespect, and that wasn’t a lesson she wanted to teach her six year old. She didn’t want him to feel like what he did didn’t matter. She didn’t like it as an employee, wife, or daughter, and didn’t even realize she was doing it to her son. She apologized to him and they hugged and it was very cool.

Pokemon Platinum does allow me to save it at any point, which is nice. I play it whenever I get a minute. No save spots for me!