Review of "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi

The book brings out a number of great ideas for introverts that are interested in expanding their social networks without having to become a relentless schmoozer. "Never Eat Alone" walks through a variety of steps that offer some solid tips in terms of meeting new people and establishing a lasting dialogue both personally and professionally. While this book likely falls in the self help category at your local or online bookstore it actually has a very heavy marketing flavor with the focus on building your own brand and network (this fits given Mr. Ferrazzi's background as a Chief Marketing Officer for several major organizations).

Here are some of the top tips that I felt "Never Eat Alone" offers up:

Plan out business trips and conferences with precision. The point is put forward that you want to maximize your time on the road and having a quality contact list for personal and business purposes that you can quickly access ahead of a trip to develop a list of people to contact once you reach your destination. One good suggestion is to drop in messages to your contacts in a city saying that you were in town and while you couldn't meet up on this trip you were thinking about them and would like to touch base on your next trip. On the conference side of things the suggestion involves targeting not necessarily the passive sessions you want to sit in but the presenters and other key people you're seeking to meet - basically you create a top 3 list of people you're targeting to meet at the conference and plan around these targets.

Get active in your community. A number of solid tips are offered up in terms of getting out and getting more involved in your community as a means of meeting new people.

He also covers a number of things NOT to do while networking here's the abbreviated list:

• Focusing on collecting business cards like they're baseball cards - the message here is simple "its not a race the person with the most cards doesn't get a free t-shirt" the purpose is to actually make connections at events;
• Ignoring or being rude to gatekeepers - this one falls in the category of good manners and common sense in treating everyone you meet with respect

Overall, I'd had "Never Eat Alone" recommended to me by a contact and thought that it sounded like an interesting read and must admit that while not all of the tips are for me I definitely got value out of reading it. In fact, this is one of the few books that I'm likely to add to my permanent collection by picking up a gently used copy on Amazon. This is likely the highest praise I can give a book since I'm committed to not add to the clutter at our house with new books unless I plan to use them multiple times.

"Journey to the center of the Earth and beyond!"

I'm a big fan of the videos that come out of the TED conference (see this post for background) and have been slowly working my way through their library of content. One vodcast that stood out for me from an impressive group of throught-provoking presentations from a variety of innovative and interesting individuals.

Is this presentation from Bill Stone titled "Journey to the center of the Earth and beyond!"

As with many TED videos it opens your mind to some interesting ideas and in this case discoveries.

He starts by providing perspective on some of the most extreme deep earth caving expeditions that have been undertaken on earth such as:

Prof. Stone then highlights the technologies that his expeditions have developed in order to safely enter and explore the last major unexplored locations on Earth (have a look at some of these photos).

What makes this presentation stand-out from the crowd is simply his BOLD and audacious goal that Prof. Stone lays out at the end of the video. I must admit that I was riveted for the last few minutes of this video as he outlines the potential of a unique mission to the Moon designed to prove that you can process and harness sufficient energy to return to Earth. He committs to his broader goal at the end of the presentation to lead this project.

I encourage you to watch the vodcast and think about what your own bold goal is...

Check your child's toys for recalls & lead

Given all the recent attention on various toy recalls from major manufacturers relating to toxic chemicals in children's toys I wanted to post the following links that help parents determine if the child's toys are safe:

Healthy Toys a volunteer organization that is doing testing on toys and reporting the results on their website.

US Consumer Product Safety Commission The U.S. government agency charged with testing and regulating consumer products where you'll find the official announcements regarding mandatory toy recalls.

Mattel Product Recall page. Mattel lists the various products and product numbers from its brands that have been recalled and what consumers should do.


Let me know other sources and I'll update this list.

What Mac apps broke under Leopard?

I started thinking about which applications broke under the migration from Apple's Tiger operating system to the newest release Leopard. In general my transition to Leopard has been fairly pain free given past operating system migrations that I've undertaken on the Mac and under Windows.

At this point there are still a number of applications that I use that haven't fully made the move to Leopard including:

• SuperDuper! While I am running TimeMachine, there is still a place for ShirtPocket's SuperDuper! backup program. This is the program that I'm looking forward to having updated by far given the importance of having full back-ups.
  
  
• FetchArt - This is a freeware program that allows you to automatically update your iTunes library for missing album art automatically from Amazon's music store.
  
  
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 Lots have been said about this elsewhere in the blogosphere in terms of Adobe's lag time in releasing this application suite.
  

I'd blame most of the lag in having applications Leopard ready on Apple since it sounds like they made fairly major changes to the final gold master release from prior developer releases. It seems from reading most of the sites of the affected applications that the independent development community is hard at work seeking to address the changes required to run under Leopard.

What apps do you use that didn't make the journey to Leopard yet?

Addicted to iMovie08

As I mentioned in an earlier post I've started to experiment with iMovie '08 and have been having a blast editing and building my own videos. At this point I'm using short video clips taken from our camera (a Canon SD800 IS - the image stabilization is well worth it). While I know that some traditional iMovie users are less then thrilled with the 2008 version I must admit that it seems like a great application (albeit this is the first version I've used).

I wanted to highlight a few of the features that I've been spending the most time with outside of editing

• I'm by no means a master video editor but the ability to quickly drop in a nice title, create slick transitions between clips and overlay music or sound effects (either from iMovie, Garageband or iTunes) is a winner in my books.

• The synchronization feature with iTunes which enables the user to select the quality of the output and enables you to export to an iPod Touch or iPhone. Previously I'd used iSquint to convert the files from .avi files to movies that could be played on my Touch.
  
  
• The built-in synchronization with either YouTube! or .Mac for video sharing that enables one-click publishing to the web is a major plus when you just want to create the content and push it out there. I am currently testing YouTube! as an alternative to .Mac given the relatively hefty price $109 that Apple wants for a one-year subscription. There have been a myriad of complaints from people about the hefty price tag and relatively light feature set for .Mac. My take is that after trying the .Mac trial for the past 60 days they're justified complaints since the service is of limited value to those of us that already have alternate email addresses. I will admit that the one-click publishing from iPhoto and iMovie are the main reason that I'd consider signing up for .Mac. Drop me an email and let me know the online services you're using for photo and video sharing and your experiences.

For those that want to get into iMovie in more detail have a look at Unlocking iMovie '08 a great site with tons of tips and tricks for producing your own movies.

My machine does lag a little when importing the video from my iPhoto library and this may be helped by bumping the RAM on my Macbook Pro up to 4GB. I'm planning to upgrade over the next month and will post an update on the improvement in video processing that bumping the RAM makes. Given that video processing is fairly processor intensive I'm hoping that extra RAM will help free up some more space in managing the conversion process.