Manage Your Life One Domain at a Time

Whether it’s ourselves, family, friends, or a child, there’s nothing more frustrating than watching someone we care about compromise their potential because of a lack of self-control.

Whether it’s a matter of not enough time, not feeling like it, or being too tired, we all run into situations where we try and fit too much in at once, or make habitual excuses for why we can’t do it.

Fortunately, this can be resolved. We just need to start organizing the environment around us, and learning skills for self-management.

Developing self-management skills is essential to becoming a peak performer in life. Everyone has high aspirations that they would love to accomplish some day, but without self-evaluation and self-control it becomes nearly impossible to follow through on goals.

By understanding the areas of congruence in our life, we can start to specify and understand where improvement is desired, and then develop a plan to make the change. Below are some important areas for self-management, followed by steps to begin the process. [read]

The paradox of promises in the age of word of mouth

Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart to the right—>).

The thing is, if you promise very little, you don’t get a chance to deliver because I’ll ignore you. And if you promise too much, you don’t get a chance to deliver, because I won’t believe you…

Hence the paradox. The more you promise, the less likely you are to achieve delight and the less likely you are to earn the trust to get the gig in the first place … [read]

Have you ever been a victim of photo piracy? [photography]

Back in February, I posted about watermarking and how I use this opportunity for advertising. I mentioned briefly the idea that if someone was going to steal your images, you may as well make them work for you with watermarks that are attractive and don’t get cropped out. At least then when Tight Theresa steals my images, her friends will know where they came from and hopefully get in touch. Although on second thought, do I want all her tight friends also scamming me for freebies? A subject for another day. But I digress.

I also mentioned in that post that I couldn’t believe the lengths people go to in order to steal my images and that watermarks make no difference when someone has their heart set on stealing your stuff. Ironically, it was only a couple months later that a friend many hours away called to say she’d seen some of my stuff being displayed on canvas in a printers near her. After some investigation, I found that the images (stolen off Flickr, cropped to oblivion) were being distributed on canvas by a large warehouse in this country. And they weren’t just any old images, they were four images of my son. [read]

Synthesizer Basics – Lesson 2 [music]

Lesson 1 went over the common components of a synthesizer, explained the functions of the Oscillators, and the mixer sections.
Now let’s have a look at the Envelope and Filter sections.

Envelopes
The envelope section allows you to modify the shape of the waveform when a note is played. Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release are the controls you’ll find.
Sometimes there are more than one set of envelope controls. There is usually a dedicated envelope for the amplifier, and then the other can be assigned to filter or something else.

• Attack adjusts the start of the waveform, this will allow you to fade the sound in over time. Think of this as a way to control the volume of the tone from zero to full over a short period of time. From instantly on, to a very slow ramp up in level depending on how this control is set.
• Decay is a time control to set how long before the sustain level is reached.
• Sustain is the level the sound will be while the note is held.
• Release is the opposite of attack. When a key is released the sound fades out over a period of time set by this control. [read]

File Archiving Strategy – the Bucket System [photography]

Using metadata correctly means that images can be fully catalogued and images can be retrieved at any time without necessarily knowing which folder the file is in. King Penguins, Macquarie Island – Canon 5D MkII, 300f2.8L 1/500 second @ f5.6.

Filing

Where do you actually put your image files?

Do you file images in folders with meaningful names like “Sydney 01-01-2010” and “Perth 11-03-2010”, or “Flowers” or some such. What if it’s a picture of a flower in Perth; which folder would you put it in? Or would you put it in both? This is a physical filing system, not unlike literal files in a literal filing cabinet. It can serve as a filing system but it neglects the single most useful aspect of digital imagery – metadata. [read]

Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere [Hardcover]

“Causing a Scene” catalogs some of the work of Improv Everywhere, a group of people devoted to, well, causing a scene–in a word, pranks. What if, for example, 80 people showed up at Best Buy wearing blue shirts and khakis? Or suppose seven people on a subway train weren’t wearing pants? What if the next year there were year there were 30 and then 40 and the number kept growing each year? These, apparently, were the sort of questions that the authors thought needed answers. So they set out to answer them.

The book describes thirteen missions, devoting around 20 pages to each one. The authors share the genesis of the idea, the planning, the execution, and the reactions. This project–by which I mean the book, not the missions–strikes me as a risky proposition. Describing jokes never works, so would describing pranks? The answer is a resounding yes, at least for most of the chapters. My particular favorites were the Starbucks mission (in which the same five-minute scene is repeated twelve times in a row à la Groundhog Day), the live book-signing by the great, great, and dead Anton Chekhov, and the synchronized swimming tryout.”

BUY – Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere

Official Sony NEX-VG10 Sample Video [Video Camera]

Sony has released an official sample video shot on a Sony Handycam NEX-VG10 large-sensor interchangeable-lens camcorder, announced yesterday. The five-and-a-half-minute sample movie, entitled ‘Beautiful Bali’, was captured using a variety of lenses.

Beautiful Bali captured with the Sony NEX-VG10 Handycam camcorder from SonyElectronics on Vimeo.

The History of the Shure SM57

Wouldn’t it be lame if I said, “The history of the Shure SM57 is the history of rock and roll itself”? It’s a good thing I’m not saying that.

The Shure SM57 is one of the most popular (these most popular) microphones in the world. Virtually everybody that has heard a recording since 1965 has heard the sound of an SM57; on snare drums, on guitar cabinets, and on the Presidential Podium (that recording of Nixon saying “I am not crook.” was recorded by the SM57). So how did this cheap little microphone become so prolific? Let’s take a look at where it came from:

Before 1965, Shure had already made quite a name for itself in the audio industry. It was the most popular maker of cartridges for record players and had found microphone success in everything from securing the contract to make throat microphones for the US Air Force (allowing pilots to speak to each other over the roar of engines) to miking the man who brought rock and roll to mainstream America, Mr Elvis Presley. [read]

AmpliTube iRig Review

AmpliTube for iPhone is a collection of five virtual amplifiers, clearly based on (but not licensed versions of) classic tones by Marshall, Fender, and Mesa/Boogie. Each amp suits a different tonal purpose–clean, crunch, lead, metal, or bass–and offers your choice of cabinets and microphones to tailor the sound. You also get a collection of 10 stompbox-style effects, including specialized units like an octave pedal and an envelope filter. As on real stompboxes and amps, the controls are clearly labeled and easily tweaked: Tap the knob and adjust the volume or intensity by sliding your finger up or down. AmpliTube offers a surprising amount of tonal versatility; it’s easy to save presets along the way. Most impressively, whereas PRS Jam Amp featured noticeable latency, AmpliTube passed our signal along with almost no lag, and even has a setting for even less latency at the cost of fidelity. The best praise we can offer is that we quickly forgot we were playing guitar through a phone. [read]

The scholar your man could be like [video] OLD SPICE

I came across this funny video on Holy Kaw.  Thought you might enjoy it. Capitalizing on the popularity of Old Spice’s viral marketing campaign, Brigham Young University students created a pitch-perfect parody as a promotion for the school’s Harold B. Lee library.