Going Corporate for just a moment

While I try to aim this blog at individuals and small and medium sized business, sometimes the corporate person in me comes out and whats to be heard.

In my corporate life we are doing a lot of interviewing. Yes we are hiring as some parts of the economy are doing OK in these overall tough times. But this article is not about my companies good fortune, but more about how people need use technology to prepare themselves to be hired when they want to or need to change jobs

As I was typing that last sentence, I was listening to Rod Stewart's' version of "You've Really Got A Hold On Me", talk about direct inspiration.

You've Really Got A Hold On Me...

Sorry about the musical interlude ... back to getting hired

Each time, I got notified of a new candidate being presented by our recruiters, I would quickly scan the attached resume and then just as quickly jump to LinkedIn and see what information I could view about the person, including the groups they belong to, the number of connections they had and if I knew any of their connections, recommendations, etc.

In addition to LinkedIn, I would also do a Google search to see what else might pop up such as an unprotected Facebook profile (you don't have one of those, do you?).

I am now getting as much information about a candidate from my on-line search as from the person's carefully prepared resume. By the way having the resume does help to confirm what I am finding on-line does indeed belong to the same person.

As my own candidate review process has evolved, I found good article by Meridith Levinson on CIO.COM titled "Personal Branding Really is the Key to Finding a New Job" telling people to make sure the LinkedIn profiles were as reviewed and prepared as their resume.

So let me add my own experience to Meridith's story to convince you to get your on-line world in order and working for you so you can find that next job whether it is in the corporate world or with a small / medium business.

Power ... What is it good for

The title has nothing to do with the Edwin Starr Song or the Lord Acton quote about absolute power. Instead it is catchy (I hope) intro to start a conversation (which requires you to comment) about power.

In today's post I am going to talk about 3 "powerful" stories:

David Greenfield published an article titled "Is the Smart Grid a Dumb Idea" and the answer is of course not. The question is do we have the discipline to replace our historically haphazard electric grid with something that can transmit our ever increasing need for power (the current economy excluded) in a much smarter fashion with much less loss and much greater awareness and management of the power we are using.

Windmills - I have a fascination with windmills, not the old fashion type, but the large modern windmills that are sprouting up in places such as North Central Indiana. My fascination comes from combining something old with technology to create green. Green power for consumers and green cash for the farmers who are turning their farms into homes for hundreds of windmills.




Indiana Windmills

Big Brother Fan | MySpace Video

Drying my hands - I have written about the pros and cons between paper towels and hand dryers, with high efficiency hand dryers carrying the day. When I wrote that, it seemed like high efficiency hand dryers were pretty rare, but in my recent travels I have noticed that Excel Dryers are becoming more and more common. While it may appear that we are actually using more power than "just using" paper towels, the reality is this kind of trend is good for power conversation when you factor in the power required to make, deliver and dispose of paper towels.

There you have it. I have "powered" through some ideas on Power and ways to use it more efficiently. I will continue to come back to the power topic from time to time because as a technologist I understand that I am very dependent on power for technology to work. For that matter, all of us are dependent on having clean, reliable, renewable power to make our livings and our families comfortable ... and that is a powerful statement to make.

Read about these products and ideas and contribute your own ideas to the conversation.

Technology Across The Pond - Part III

In part II of my series on Technology Across the Pond I talked about my first day in the UK and technology in and around the hotel.

Today, in the last part of this series on UK Technology we talk about technology in the office and away from London.

First I want to mention the nice little power adapter I picked up right before my trip. My regular adapter mysteriously went MIA, which I noticed as I was packing up, so time for a quick run to Best Buy. I wasn't expecting much, but when I found the Targus APK01, it was more then just enough, it was actually a very nice design. Now before everyone gets too excited, it is still just a power adapter and that is all it does. The specialness is all about the way the various country adapters are nested into each other making it easy to carry and hard to lose the individual adapters (which is probably what happened to my last adapter. The adapters themselves are no bigger then they need to be, which has sometimes been an issue with other adapters I have seen. Bottom line is this little device will live in my briefcase along with the other handy devices like the Belkin mini-surge protector

The first day in the UK office is always fun. First of all getting through building security is much more of a challenge in the UK then in the US. Most offices the in the US have virtually no security outside of the big corporate offices in NY. While in the UK they take it very seriously, checking IDs, getting folks properly signed-in and making sure a credentialed employee escorted us to our companies location. A pain to be sure, but it does give you a good sense of security.

Once to our companies location, in addition to seeing people I haven't seen for a while, it is time to grab one of the open cubes and get connected. The concept of Hoteling is a fine one, but the shared cubes are seldom maintained and are often a source of spare parts for the permanent cube dwellers. We (there were 4 of us) each grabbed a cube, but only 2 of the 4 first cubes we grabbed were fully functional in terms of power and network connectivity. After playing musical cubes we were finally able to get everyone connected. Wireless networking would have made things better, but large companies are still challenged by the security issues of wireless making its adoption quite slow. Wireless power is still a pipe dream of mine, but its day will come soon. I wonder if security issues will slow its deployment as well. Check out this video on wireless power to see what the future holds.



Once everyone got connected, the day in the office, at least from a technology perspective, was fairly normal, though London's fog and rain made it so humid, it felt like my glasses were fogging up.

The rest of the trip followed similar themes of getting connectivity (never as easier or as inexpensive as the US), getting through security at our client's site and finding our way around via Taxi. Note: While the London Taxi drivers know how to get anywhere in London, when you get away from London, the Taxi drivers often don't know where anything is.

With our business finished, we headed home on our various flights to our various home cities. Now normally, international flights are seldom delayed any significant amount of time, but unfortunately, this was not a normal flight. We had two minor mechanical issues, neither of which would have kept us from taking off, but in combination, they kept us grounded. After a bit of a keystone cops act in determining which of the two issues to fix, both got fixed and we finally took off from London 4.5 hours late.

Back in the US, ready to continue my focus on the day to day technology challenges we all face.

In case you missed them here are links to the earlier posts in this series:

Part 1
Part 2