Recipes and tradition

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Wes Johnson

Reminiscing

The other day, my wife and I were doing our weekly menu planning.  We try to balance the cooking effort to match our activities of the week.  So when one of us needs to be at a meeting or other event, we usually plan out something quick and easy.  We save the more involved dinners for when our time is not so limited.  For some reason, the conversation we were having triggered a memory of one of my Mom’s casserole dishes in my mind.  The smell and taste I remembered was wonderful.  It was a casserole my Mom used to make when I was still living at home.  I remembered parts of the recipe, but not all the ingredients.

The tragedy is my Mom passed away around 10 years ago, due to Ovarian Cancer.  She was an amazing woman and a great cook.  Unfortunately, I never asked her for my favorite recipes.  Just as I was thinking all is lost and I would never taste those memorable dishes again, my wife suggested I ask my sister if she remembered the dish.

Re-Creation

So, I called my sister and described the casserole I was thinking about.  To my delight, she said yes, she had the recipe.  A few minutes more and I had a copy of the ingredients with cooking directions.  The next day I made that casserole.  The moment of truth was with that first bite.  My wife asked if it tasted the same as I remembered?  To my surprise it tasted exactly how I remembered.

I was thinking.  If my sister has this recipe, maybe she was the smart one and recorded these recipes from Mom.  So, I contacted my sister again and asked if she had any more of Mom’s recipes.  She confirmed that she had them and would get them together for me.  I am so lucky my sister captured this knowledge.

Advice

Never take your loved ones for granted.  You may be used to seeing them on a semi-regular basis.  Don’t forget to tell them how much they mean to you.  If any of them are great cooks you might want to capture their knowledge before you realize one day that you don’t have access to it anymore.

My wife and I are planning to compile a book of our family’s favorite recipes this year.  The kid’s might not appreciate the book right now, but they will a few years down the road.  They’ll be saying wow, I’m glad they wrote down some of their knowledge for us.

This year we’re planning to start a tradition of sharing with our kids the recipes and show them how to make their favorite dishes.

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Personal Marketing Strategies Seminar

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Wes Johnson

The Seminar

I have been developing a Personal Marketing Strategies Seminar and Workshop with my friend Jeff Martinez.  We met through a Social Network group called Professional Resource Network.  The seminar covers important steps everyone should consider before and during the development of their Personal Brand and then covers the aspects of Personal Marketing your Brand.

Why we did it

I never thought I would be teaching a class on Personal Marketing or Personal Branding.  In our group we saw a need to get our members up to speed on the subject of Personal Marketing and Personal Branding.  We decided to fill that void.  The question was where to begin.  We didn’t know anybody personally that could teach a class on this subject, so we decided we would develop our own class. 

Developing the Seminar

We started kicking around some ideas, we started with sketches on napkins, made lists in our notebooks, then expanded to developing the seminar using mind-maps on butcher paper.  Finally, after alot of discussion, we decided on the content of the seminar and committed it to a PowerPoint presentation.  While developing this presentation, I learned a lot.  You should understand the subject better than your students.  As we developed the Seminar, I became more aware of the things I needed to do personally to prepare myself for Personal Marketing and Branding.  Of course, you need to practice what you preach so your students will learn by example.

The Presentation

We did the introductory presentation, then a workshop to give our students more time to explore the subject being taught.  The feedback we received help us to understand our next steps in developing the class.  The introductory presentation has been re-arranged to flow better.  The workshop will most likely be broken into two parts.  The first part to help the students get their focus.  The second part to start applying that focus to action.

Accidental Expert

Because of this seminar, I think I have become an accidental expert on the subject.  Attendees of the Seminar know I’ve been developing this class and that I try to stay current on all the latest developments in Personal Marketing and Personal Branding.  I have started to develop a reputation of not only being the answer guy for Personal Marketing and Branding, but also for helping others get ahead in their careers.  I don’t mind the recognition, but it is kind of scarey at times.

I need to remember this.  No matter how much I learn on the subject, I don’t know what I don’t know, so I need to keep on learning.

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Christmas is coming, be ready

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Wes Johnson

Get Ready

I hate to break it to you, but this year Christmas is coming in December.  It always seems to sneak up on us.  Everybody seems to forget about it until just before Thanksgiving.  That’s when most of the stores dress up their aisles with decorations and start playing Carols over the PA system.

During the week leading up to Thanksgiving, many avid shoppers are planning out their bargains and schedules for Black Friday; the crazy day after Thanksgiving when people get up at ungodly hours to fight insane crowds to get unheard of deals.  People start rushing about trying to get all their shopping done in one day.  

Get Set

Now that you’ve remembered that Christmas is coming soon, the question is what are you going to do about it?  Are you going to repeat history, have another stressed out Christmas?  Perhaps you might try something different, have a plan to get all or most of your shopping done before Thanksgiving comes.

  I decided a few years back that I wasn’t going to participate in the madness of Black Friday.  My wife and I used to brave the crowds to save a few bucks, then I started to realize that my time is worth much more than the money I saved.  Instead of trying to get the bargains on that one day, we make a list of each present we will make or buy and started saving for each of those presents.  We also start doing shopping research, so we will know a good value when we see it.

Do you know what you’re going to get for family, friends or colleagues?  Have you given it much thought?  Did you know you could buy or make your presents early?  You can take advantage of when they’re on sale early and in stock?

Need a few ideas on what to get for Christmas, here are some links from Dave Ramsey’s website:

Go

You don’t have much time, you need to decide what you’re going to do about Christmas.  It’s coming soon.

Why not join me and plan to have a stressless credit-free Christmas.  Do your shopping early and do it using cash only.  We’ve been doing it since 2006.

For the last 2 years, my wife and I have spent Black Friday sleeping in, then waking up and going to a pancake or waffle shop.  They’re kind of empty because almost everybody’s out fighting the crowds.  Later, we might do some finishing touches on our presents, we get them wrapped up and get them mailed off for our loved ones who live out of state.  Then we’ll get the Christmas tree out and start decorating the house.  Of course we’ll have the music of the season playing.

Till then,  I hope you’ll have a credit-free Merry Christmas

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Which social networks should I join?

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Wes Johnson

Decisions, Decisions

You have been asked to join a social network.  Maybe you got a hot tip from a book or article that sings the praises of the next best social network to join.  But how do you know for sure?  How can you find out about the true popularity of a website?  How do you know if this social networking website will meet your Social Networking criteria?  I have found a few online tools that may help you make that decision.

Evaluating Websites

The first online tool I discovered is www.Quarkbase.com – their tagline is Everything about a website.

Quarkbase.com provides you with information like:

  • Traffic Ranking (relative position to last time)
  •  Similar and related sites
  • Domain information
  • Sites with competing traffic

The second online tool I discovered is www.Alexa.Com   – their tagline is The Web Information Company.  They provide the user with website popularity ranking.  They determine this by the Traffic to the website and how deep the user digs into the website.

Alexa.com provides you with information like:

  • Avg time on site – this tells a lot about how interesting and useful the site is
  • Sites linking in
  • Traffic Stats
    • This feature also allows you to compare traffic with 4 other websites.  Very useful, if you’re comparing traffic trends
  • Contact Info
  • Reviews
  • Related Links – this tells you who they think the competition is
  • Demographics – this tells you a lot about who’s using it

Making up your mind

At the time of this article, these were some of the latest Alexa Rankings.

Alexa Rank Domain
4 Facebook.com
11 MySpace.com
20 Twitter.com
30 Bing.com
81 LinkedIn.com
2259 ZoomInfo.com
64941 BrightFuse.com

Your final decision of which social networks you will use is based on:

  • Recommendations from trusted industry leaders
  • Recommendations from trusted colleagues
  • Trusted Website Evaluation tools
    • Traffic
    • Traffic trends
    • Demographics
  • Trusted Social Network Reviews
  • Social Networking criteria verses actual website performance
  • Industry adoption – Are your colleagues in your chosen field using it?

Bottom line

Your ultimate decision to adopt or reject a social networking site will be based on your gut feeling.  You’re going to know pretty quickly if a social network is going to meet your social networking criteria.  If you have to work too hard at convincing your colleagues to adopt it or nobody in your industry seems to be using it or even worse abandoning it, then maybe that’s a sign of trouble up ahead.

If you’re feeling like these are some tough decisions, I feel your pain.  If you’re like me, your time is limited, so you can’t adopt all of them.  You need to make effective use of your time, so choose wisely.

Till next time, I’ll be making careful choices about which social networks I join.

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Your camera date really does matter

Posted on August 6, 2009 by Wes Johnson

Camera Timestamp

In the past, I never bothered with setting the time and date on the camera.  I never printed out the timestamp of the camera on the pictures.  So what was the point?  It just seemed like a waste of time.  Today, I had a revelation, the date really does matter.

Flickr cares

I joined flickr today, I posted some of our recent photos from our vacation.  When I did a search for “Sundial Bridge” to see the most recent pictures I posted along with the others, my images didn’t show up.  I was perplexed, I knew I should see them at the first of the list when I clicked the most recent link.  I had to figure out why these pictures weren’t showing up.  I went back to my photostream and clicked on one of the pictures that should have shown up, then I clicked on the more properties link.  The properties is the EXIF data embedded inside the JPEG file. 

EXIF data

 The EXIF (Exchangeable Image File format) data is used by digital cameras to embed camera and image information inside the JPEG file.  Just a few examples of the kind of data stored is Image  (Height x Width), Resolution, Image Description (Camera), Software, Compression information, GeoLocation and last but not least the date the image was taken and digitized.

The Timestamp fix

The problem was my images were timestamped with a date of 2000.  This date corresponded to a default date of the camera.  1/1/2000.  It had never been changed, so it kept it.  NOTE to Camera User Interface designers, if you’re going to store the date in EXIF data, then set the default to a year before the software release and have your users set the date at least to a year software is released.  ie. If your software was released in 2009, you would set the default date to 2008.  Then remind them every time the camera is turned on to set the date to a date beyond your software release date.

I eventually fixed the EXIF problem by using software to change the date taken tag.

Problem resolved

Unfortunately, I had to delete then upload these pictures again.  Fortunately, there was only a dozen of them, so it didn’t take too long.  I executed a search as I had done a few hours before and got the results I had originally expected.

I have learned my lesson, loud and clear.  I have set my date and time in the camera, and will do so forever more.

Till next time, don’t forget to set the time and date in your camera.

 

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