Are you excited? This is my very first video Tech Tip. It’s a walk-through on importing photos from your digital camera or memory card into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Let me know what you think of it!

Some notes on the video…

• This took at least six “takes”. The first version was over 10 minutes long, which is just ridiculous. Lesson learned from that first take? Write down notes, or else you’ll start rambling. I think there’s at least 2 minutes in that version of me going on and on about the DNG format.
• I had quite a few takes that only got about 45 seconds into it, and ended with me saying “crap!” (or other words less pleasant).
• One attempt was interrupted by my wife calling me from downstairs because my son projectiled all over her and the couch.
• I’m really kind of annoyed by something I say towards the end of this video, but I was NOT going to start over. And then when I went to edit it, I didn’t have the energy to cut it out.

Today is my wife Carrie’s birthday. She’s a delightful woman, and I’m so happy that we’re continuing to build our family together.

Carrie and I first met on October 4, 2003 at my friend Lou’s 30th birthday party. She won a prize for a contest for kissing the most people at the party, and I was one of the organizers of the event.

Our first date (technically) was meeting for drinks on October 10th, 2003. My evaluation at the time was “we really don’t have much in common, but we got along really well, I think. Which is neat, but weird.”

This isn't from our first date, but it's shortly afterwards...New Years Eve 2003

However, I prefer the revisionist history of our first date being Game 7 of the NLCS at Wrigley Field on October 15, 2003. Our plan had been to go to a bar to watch the game together, but earlier in the day my awesome friend Heather called me to hook me up with press box tickets to the game. I called Carrie during the day and asked her if, instead of going to Parrots, she’d rather go to Wrigley.

“You mean, hang out in the neighborhood around the park?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “I figured we’d just go sit in the press box instead.”

Needless to say, despite being the beginnings of the relationship with the woman who would some day become my wife, it was the worst night of my life as the Cubs managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Despite the fact that I very nearly cried that night, Carrie still ended up wanting to date me.

This picture was not from Game 7, but several years later - and a much happier Wrigley experience

Carrie and I dated on and off for a few years. But then, for her birthday in 2006, (after much cloak-and-dagger espionage type planning) I proposed to her at the top of Rockefeller Center in New York City (full recap). We were married at Old St. Pat’s in Chicago a little over a year later on May 26, 2007, and celebrated our honeymoon in Costa Rica.

Almost immediately after this picture was taken, Carrie got stung by a scorpion. True story.

Kicking and screaming, we moved out of our beloved city of Chicago into the suburbs in September of 2008. We knew we would miss the city, but we wanted to be able to buy a house that would be big enough for the family we wanted to have, and the suburbs were the way to that. We also wanted to be closer to our family out that way, which we knew would be useful once we had kids (and we were right!)

After spending a long time trying, we finally were successful at getting pregnant. Our two beautiful sons Henry and Joey were born on December 30, 2009 (and they just turned 2 months old!)

The whole family!

I love my wife more than anything. I am wishing her a super happy birthday today (her first as a mom), and I know that this year will bring even more joy and happiness and awesome fun for her than ever.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY!

I’m going to take this opportunity to wish a super happy birthday to one of my best blogging buddies, the always awesome @curiousillusion!

Of course, you can’t talk about @curiousillusion without talking about her photography. So here are some of my favorite photos she’s taken (used with her permission of course).

All images are all rights reserved, and used with permission. Do NOT reproduce these images or use them without explicit permission.

If you’d like to know more about @curiousillusion, the Library of Congress recommends these links:

Blog - http://curiousillusion.com
Twitter - http://twitter.com/curiousillusion
Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousillusion/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/curiousillusion

The game Bejeweled is deceptively simple and VERY addicting. It is the single app on my iPhone that probably gets the most use, second only to my email inbox and calendar. Easy to learn, but tough to get good at, I’ve discovered that there are lessons in life that can be learned from playing this game.

Focus on what’s in front of you

It’s really easy to get distracted by the “multiplier” jewels in the game, and waste valuable seconds trying to figure out a way to match up colors to activate them. The problem is, by doing so, you miss easy opportunities to move the game along in other areas of the board, and chances are, clearing other jewels will eventually get the multipliers activated. Outside of the game, this holds true too - always be aware of the attractive goals, but pay more attention to what you can do now – and the pretty shiny will take care of itself.

Work from the bottom

Your chances at multipliers are increased by the more jewels that clear in one move. Clearing jewels at the bottom of the board will cause longer drops, which have a greater chance of firing off bigger chain reactions. This extends to non-game tasks too – dig down to the root of an issue, and it will have positive repercussions higher up in the chain.

Use two hands

This really only applies to the iPhone version of the game, where you can make moves with both hands at once, increasing the amount of jewel swapping you can do at any given time. Efficiency is key in a game of speed, and it’s key in the game of life as well – working efficiently saves time and allows more energy to be focused on the things that are important to you.

Start early

One trick that most players might be aware of is that Bejeweled will let you get in a good two-three moves before the game even starts. While the starting countdown is still running, a quick player can swap several jewels, and might even triggers some power gems before the minute timer is running. Plan to start activities and projects before their planned time when it makes sense to do so, and you’ll literally be ahead of the game.

Defriend anyone who is better than you

One of the “strategy” suggestions from a lot of Bejeweled tip sights is to simply delete better players from your Facebook friends list. This is definitely easier than getting better at the game. One might say the lesson to be learned here is “only compete on a field where you’re the best”.

But I disagree with this tip. I think it’s amazing when I discover friends of mine who have scores that double or treble my highest effort. These competitors give me something to shoot for. And I carry this over to my professional life as well – the best job I ever had was the one where I worked with people who were smarter and more talented that I was. You can’t get inspired to excel without surrounding yourself by people who are excellent.

When I first came up with the idea for this post, it was intended as a joke – but as I thought through it more, I saw the actual value in some of the ways that a simple game can reflect upon larger things. We all want to improve at something – and maybe the first place we start is by scoring over 300,000 points in Bejeweled. But the challenge is taking the same energy and focus and applying it to something more tangible.

Unless you are a professional Bejeweled player. In which case, I have nothing to teach you.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve blogged before about time management, especially my fascination with strategies/systems like Getting Things Done. The trick is, a lot of that stuff is geared towards individual time management…but what happens when you manage a team of people and need to keep track of what they are working on?

I’ve devised a system for tracking this using a combination of Microsoft OneNote and Outlook. Bear in mind that I just invented this today, so a) it’s not really a proven system yet, and b) I’m VERY open to feedback and suggestions for how it can be improved.

The Problem

I manage a team of three people – two sysadmins and one DBA. Their time and tasks are a mixture of day-to-day support, planned projects, and “unofficial” projects. Since it’s my responsibility to do resource balancing across the team, I need to know at a glance who is working on what, so I don’t over-allocate a resource.I also need to be able to go back at review time and easily list out all of the cool things my team did for the year.

Day-to-day

In some ways, this is the easiest area to manage, simply because it defies management. I’m not a micromanager, so I don’t need to track every small task that my employees perform that is in response to a support ticket or system issue. There is time carved out for this type of activity, so I simply trust my guys to manage those types of requests themselves – and I don’t need to track this over time.

Planned Projects

For me, “planned projects” are either business projects that my team is supporting, or infrastructure projects just within our team. These are activities that span over multiple weeks, might have various phases, and (this is the key part), were planned. I knew there were coming and when they were coming (for the most part) and already resource-balanced for their requirements. For this type of activity, I want to a) know who is working on which project, and b) capture some basic status/activity information. For example, if Business Project X required my sysadmin to design and implement a cool new single-signon server farm, I want to make sure I capture that, so I can brag about it in his review.

“Unofficial” projects

Ah, the nefarious “unofficial” bucket. What goes here? Well, this is pretty much anything that doesn’t fall into the above categories. A “project” is anything that really takes more than a reactive response (for example, a break-fix issue in production is not a “project”). And “unofficial” really means “unplanned”. Most “unofficial” projects tend to be things that I have assigned to my team to follow up on in areas like process improvement or system efficiency. One example would be “implement a 3G modem on our monitoring server to send us SMS alerts instead of email on critical systems”. That’s a project, sure, but it wasn’t in our plan.

The Solutions

I’ve tried three different ways to manage this (including the one I just came up with this morning), and they all have varying levels of effectiveness.

Solution 1 – The Mental List

Frankly, this is how I’ve been doing it most of the time for the past two years, and I think it’s a very common method. It’s just like it sounds – “keep it in your head”. I generally know what we’re working on, so I can have a pulse of who is really busy and who has spare cycles.

The problem with this solution? It totally sucks. There’s no method for follow-up, and it relies upon my memory. It means that every time a new request comes in, I have to go to my team and basically say “Hey, who is really busy right now?” That’s not effective OR efficient. So this solution gets a D-minus grade.

Solution 2 – The Whiteboard

I picked this up from a fellow manager. He has a big whiteboard in his cube, where he lists out all of his team members, and underneath them, lists the stuff they are working on. It’s a good solution because it’s super easy, and VERY visible. The visibility is great for the manager, since he can just glance at the big honkin’ board in his cube/office and see who has a lot of stuff under their name. And likewise, the entire team can quickly see what everyone else is working on.

So what’s the problem with this? It’s ephemeral. It doesn’t last. When things get completed, they are removed from the list, so it’s not good for a tracking archive. Additionally, it’s a freakin’ whiteboard. They get erased.

Solution 3 – Electronic List

My solution for this uses Microsoft OneNote and Outlook (the Outlook part is a “nice to have”, which I’ll get into when I describe the solution in depth below). Fundamentally, I have a bucket in my list software for every team member, and then a bucket for each team member as “archive”. When a task/project is completed, it’s moved to the archive bucket. There’s nothing “magic” about using OneNote for this – you could use another note system like Evernote, or even just track it in Excel with multiple tabs.

The beauty of this system is that everything is captured, and it has an archive. Additionally, since it’s electronic, you can edit the information (in a paper/whiteboard system, it’s a lot harder to make changes to it after the fact without being destructive). You also can include a lot more rich content, such as links to documents or diagrams, etc.

How I’m Doing It

As I mentioned, my new solution uses OneNote, so that’s what all of my examples will build upon. You can easily extend the same principles to any electronic organization system though, but you might miss some of the extra cool integration points by doing so.

OneNote Configuration

At a high level, the first step is to create a dedicated notebook for your team. This notebook will contain all of the lists you will use in this example. Inside that notebook, create a section/folder (hereafter referred to as “section”) for each team member, and then another section for each team member’s archive – as displayed below:

In this example, there are three employees named "Barry", "Chris", and "Ray"

Inside each of the “main” sections for each employee, I’ve created pages for the “planned” projects, as well as a page for what I call “Activities/Tasks”, which would be “unplanned projects”.

Barry is working on three projects, plus Tasks/Activities

The Plan In Action

It’s pretty simple. Once this is set up, for every project, I simply input status and information on the associated page. Once a project is completed, I move it to the “Archive” section for that team member (in OneNote, just right-click on the page and choose “Move”).

I’m still working out the “Tasks/Activities” section, however. I’m expermienting with creating sub-pages for each task, which makes them easier to move around (the current plan would be to simply strikethrough the task on the page when it is completed; that doesn’t really get it into the archive, however). This is how the subpages would look:

Each task has its own page inside the section, which makes it portable

More to Consider

One neat thing about using OneNote is that it has awesome integration with Outlook. For example, if I get an email that generates an activity for a team member, I can easily send it directly to OneNote from Outlook, which will create a page with all the info in that email.

I also haven’t really looked into the tagging features in OneNote; by tagging things, I can easily search and filter on certain kinds of tasks/projects. I need to be careful to not make this system too complex – so I’m starting out with this very basic structure, and I’ll see where it takes me.

As I mentioned before, this is a work in progress. It’s NOT a complete solution yet, but I’ll keep revisiting it and revamping it…and posting as I polish it. But now I really need feedback from my readers on how I could be doing it better. I’m not necessarily looking for OneNote specific tweaks (although I’d love any you have), but more about how to organize this information in a useful way. Do you manage a team of people? What are you systems for keeping track of resources and task-followups?

First of all, a thank-you to Matt for letting me rent some of his blog real estate space for the day! I’m here because I’m looking for feedback and opinions from my network and their network, and know that Matt’s got a great network of brilliant minds I want to tap into.

Last year, I had the privilege of speaking in a Promotional Communications class at The College of St. Catherine’s in St. Paul, Minnesota. The class was mostly comprised of working women returning to school, and covers more traditional marketing than new media and social media. I was asked to come share my experience with some of those pieces.

A conversation

It was a blast. I’m one of those “I don’t love public speaking!” people, but it was FUN, for one thing, since the subject matter is something so ingrained in my life – personal and professional. For another thing, it was conversational, because I prefer speaking with people rather than at them.

This year, they’ve asked me to return (:::picture my happy dance here:::). I honestly didn’t think I’d make it back there, seeing as it’s THIS weekend in Minnesota and I’ve run out of my “relocation savings” and am just now starting to get paychecks coming in; I didn’t think I’d make it because of the airfare. Fortunately, that all worked out and Boyfriend and I will BOTH get to hang out in Minnesota this weekend!

I’m excited because 1) I can’t wait to get back to St. Kate’s and talk with Melinda’s class again; 2) I miss my family like whoa and I can’t wait to catch up with them, even if it’s just for a couple of days; 3) Boyfriend got to spend all of a couple of hours with my parents when he came out to Minnesota in January to help me pack up and move out to Colorado; I’m excited for them all to get to know each other better finally!

I want to pick YOUR brains

All that being said, I got some great feedback from my own online social network, and figured I’d tap into that again.

So here goes! It’s a fun presentation, and I’d love to include some quotes and notes from you. Below are the questions I’m going to be discussing, and your added perspective is greatly appreciated!

Ok, folks – in YOUR experience, perspective, and just plain ol’ opinions (there are no wrong answers here, obvi)…

1. How do you use social media, either personally or professionally? Are you working with a company that uses social media to build their brand? If so, what’s awesome about that? If you’re using social media purely as a personal tool, how are you using it? Self-promotion? Relationship-building?
2. Name a brand, campaign, or company that used social media in a way you thought was brilliant, engaging, or just downright interesting. Or completely flopped.
3. What do you think is the biggest change in the social media landscape in the last year? A new product? An acquisition? What has been the biggest change in YOUR use of social media?
4. What’s your favorite online social network or application?
5. What do you think is the Next Big Thing?

Thanks for your feedback, folks!

Time to revisit a feature  of Good Old Rock – the RSS Recommendations! In this section, I share with you a choice blog that I follow in my feed reader.  For the time being, I focus on blogs I already follow, but if you really truly have some amazing recommendation, you can feel free to share it with me – but please do not suggest your own blog. I have over 200 blogs in my feed reader, so it will take me some time before I need new suggestions. Enjoy!

Blog Name: Life Without Pants
Tagline: Perspective on Life Less Restricted
URL: http://www.lifewithoutpants.com/
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lifewithoutpants
Category: Lifestyle/Blogging

Today’s feed recommendation is Life Without Pants, a Matt Cheuvront joint. I’ve been following LWP for quite a while now, and in addition to being a major Thesis guru, Matt’s content is really the king here. He has phenomenal insights on building community inside a blog, but also touches on “big picture” subjects as well. One of my favorite posts discussed the fact that life and success is not a zero-sum game.

Matt’s got a really fresh voice and the comments on his posts are almost always lively and educational. In addition to a powerful social media presence on Twitter, Matt looks at his blog as a conversation, not a platform, which makes reading it much more rewarding.

You may not be a blogger and you may not care about “building an audience” or marketing a blog or a brand, but even so, Matt has a lot he can teach you about the New Media approach to life. Regardless of what you learn from his blog, you’ll come away with a smile on your face, and maybe, just maybe, a call to your OWN action.

Subscribe to Life Without Pants

RSS Recommendations are in no way, shape, or form the result of any payoffs, kickbacks, or other such nonsense. All RSS Recommendations are based purely upon my interest in the recommended blog, and I assure you, all recommended sites occupy a space in my Google Reader. Suggestions for the Recommendations are welcome, however, no site will be added to the Recommendations until I have followed it in my reader for a minimum of six months.

Image via Wikipedia

Despite falling off the wagon a bit in Week 2, I returned to Week 3 with new motivation, and didn’t skip a beat. Week 3 also featured a huge explosion of traffic, which happened early in the week, but had nothing to do with the content of that week.

I decided to use a photo of Mark Zuckerberg for this week’s wrapup, as Facebook was the theme for the crazy amount of visitor my blog received.

Post Recaps

Monday – Tick, tick…boom

As I mentioned above, my traffic went through the roof in Week 3. And it was all due to a post from the week before…which got picked up on Reddit and blew the pants off any high visitor day I’d ever imagined. In this post, I talked about how that occured, as well as got nerdy on the subject of cloud computing and the changes I’d made to my blog to use Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

Total Pageviews – 45

Tuesday – A short story with no ‘L’

I’ll admit it. This was a total “oh, crap…I have to post something today” post. I thought the smart move would be to use Plinky, since, well, that’s what it’s there for. The suggestion I got was to write a short story without using the letter “L”. I attempted that for this post. And not only was it dumb…I failed, and used an “L” after all.

Total Pageviews – 16

Wednesday – Wednesday Web Wanderings

A themeless set of links, which is actually how I imagined the Wanderings at first (before I decided they all needed to be themed). Posts like this tend to be somewhat throwaway, but can be really easy to write. I’m always glad when I’m having trouble coming up with a post, and it’s a Wednesday.

Total Pageviews – 7 (???)

Thursday – How to rock Facebook but maintain some respectability

This is an update to a post I wrote over a year ago about Facebook Friends lists and privacy. That original post was WAY out of date as Facebook has made many changes to their privacy settings, and for months I’d meant to ‘get around to’ updating this post. Spurred on by a Twitter message from a friend of mine, I hunkered down and updated the post.

A friend of mine posted this link to Reddit, and I got some interesting traffic from that (nothing like Monday, but still a banner day for me), hence the giant numbers for this post.

Total Pageviews – 2,714 (actually, total since the rewrite; does not include the previous year’s pageviews of the original post)

Friday – Fussy Follow Friday – @jenniferalaine

This week saw a return to my Fussy Follow Friday posts. Since my Twitter buddy @jenniferalaine had been causing me no end of amusement lately, it seemed fitting to plaster her pretty face all over the front page of my blog for a day. Which was pretty cool, since it resulted in this:

Total Pageviews – 16

Saturday – Henry in his towel

The last “cute kid” Saturday photopost was Joey, so it seemed right to feature Henry this time. He didn’t mind.

Total Pageviews – 5

Metrics

As mentioned before, everything blew up on Monday. Get ready to see some REALLY skewed numbers for this week. And I’m just going to compare to the same week period for the previous year, as my attempt to show “last week, plus a year ago” in the last recap was too hard to read. We’ll see a lot more slice-and-dice of numbers in the final recap post. Number in parentheses is from the same week in 2009

Visits: 32,366 (1,803)

Bounce Rate: 94.8% (87.6%)

Pages Per Visit: 1.07 (1.3)

Returning Visitors: 914 (484)

What are we learning? Well, one thing is that when you blow up on a site like Digg or Reddit, your bounce rate and PPV goes into the crapper. Mostly because you start to have REALLY targeted visitors. Those guys come in to see ONE post, but they tend to not stick around and see what else you have to say. Which, in a nutshell, means it’s not terribly helpful for building RETURN traffic.

This week’s Fussy Follow Friday recommendation is the always amusing and exuberant @jenniferalaine. In addition to being a prolific and hilarious blogger, Jenn will add value to your Twitter experience by constantly reminding you that Twitter can be FUN.

Yes, I said fun. Forget about “brand building” and “joining the conversation” with all your social media strategies. Sometimes it’s okay to just flat-out enjoy yourself. And tweets from Jenn will definitely make that happen. Besides a proliferation of “that’s what she said” references, Jenn’s tweets range from snarky observations about social interactions to a professed love of pancakes (especially from Egg Harbor Cafe). She is interactive and definitely doesn’t see Twitter as a “one way” communication. Which, for me, is pretty awesome.

So unless you only use Twitter to “enhance your brand’s social media presence”, you should follow @jenniferalaine immediately. I promise you will come away feeling satisfied with a big smile on your face (twss).

Fussy Follow Friday is based upon the concept that instead of a glut of Twitter follow recommendations, I will make one, and ONLY ONE, follow recommendation per Friday. For more information, the Library of Congress recommends this blog post.