My day did not start well. On the morning of the launch of the web application I have been working on for the last few months…I sleep through my alarm. I arrive at work late to find that my boss has also told the senior leadership that I would be migrating a mission critical server that day. While migrating the server, another production server went went down. You get the picture.

As my day went from bad to worse to holy crap, I didn’t let it get me done. I spent the morning whistling and attacking the situations with gazelle like intensity. Even after putting in a 12 hour day, I’m still in a good mood.

It’s important to take stress and uncertain situations as they come at you. If you buckle, you only fall deeper. Smile and meet the challenge head on. Life doesn’t give you success, but only opportunities to be successful. It’s your choice: run and hide or embrace the chaos.

I have a difficult time remembering what my role is. I guess I have a take charge type of attitude and want to fix things if I see issues. The problem is I’m not a decision maker. I follow orders and provide recommendations, but am unable to just take charge. If my recommendations are ignored, I have to be content with watching things being done incorrectly.

Because of this, I am coming up with some ways to make sure that my recommendations are considered. I finished reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I’ve been thinking about reading this book for a long time, but the title is a big turn off for me. It sounds pretty sleazy. Nonetheless, Mr. Carnegie does have some great advice on how to win people to your way of thinking. This isn’t an detailed list, but these are the ones that stick out to me.

Ask Questions Instead of Giving Orders I’ve seen this done before and didn’t even realize it was the person’s motive. Instead of telling someone to do something, ask them a question. If you tell someone what to do, they have no ownership of the idea. It’s better to plant a thought and then let them draw the conclusions so that they feel it is their idea. When people are the owners of an idea, they work harder to see it through.

Appeal to Noble Motives Want to get something done? Connect the idea to a goal that the organization is trying to meet. For example, customer service. We will never make all of your customers happy all of the time, but we resolve to make most of them happy as often as possible. This is noble and everyone wants to see it happen. If you can show that your idea will increase customer satisfaction, then you have a good chance of seeing your idea implemented.

Dramatize Your Ideas If you want to convince someone, go the extra mile to prove your idea. Whatever the norm is at your organization, exceed it. In my organization, the norm is pretty low. So if I want to increase the chances my ideas will gain acceptance, I do more research, produce nices metrics, and do everything to show how my ideas will benefit the organization. But don’t over do it. The trick is to do just enough that they can make a decision. Don’t make the decision for them.

Even though I was initially turned off by the book title, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with this book. No wonder it stayed on the New York Time’s Best Seller list for 10 years!

Over the Memorial Day weekend Revision 3, an online video provider, got a little more than their usual traffic. In fact, their servers were unavailable from Saturday until Monday. They experienced a Denial of Service (DoS) attack first hand. Usually when you think of DoS attacks, you think of malicious hackers or a botnet taking a network done. When Revision3 traced the packets, they were linked to an American company called Media Defender. Media Defender is a company that provides “anti-piracy” services to movie and records companies. So why did they DoS R3 into oblivion? The plot thickens.

R3’s CEO, Jim Louderback, contacted Media Defender to get some answers. In a conversation with Dimitri Villard, CEO of Media Defender, he revealed that his company had been uploading illegal torrents to the R3 site to attract pirates. R3 noticed to funny business on their servers last week, so they disabled the illegal torrents. This caused the Media Defender servers to try to reconnect…8,000 times per second.

Astonishingly, R3 does not plan to sue. I guess the cost to litigate outways the loss in revenue. If a hacker had done this, instead of a corporation, there would be a witch hunt…

It’s the first day at your new job and you need to make a good impression. One your first day, everyone is making an assessment of you. While you can’t control what people think of you, you can do your best to portray an image that will make a good first impression.

Punctuality
Being late sets a really bad impression. To avoid being late, allocate plenty of time to get to your appointment. It’s actually better to be 10 minutes early than to be 10 minutes late. If you’re going to be late and it cannot be avoided, call ahead and let the person you are meeting with know that you will be late. You still might take a hit on the impression, but it will be better than being late with no warning.

The Hand Shake
You can tell so much about a person by the way they shake your hand. That’s why it is important to give a good hand shake when you meet someone. The hand shake should be firm, but not too firm. Keep the arm straight; do not twist it to the side. That might sound odd, but I have seen it done. Look the person in the eye when you shake their hand. Two shakes is enough, afterwards let go. Nobody likes those people that try to hold your hand in a pseudo shake while you have a conversation. Don’t grasp their elbow or cover their hand with your spare hand. That is uncomfortable for some people.

Smile
Some people get so nervous about meeting other people that they forget to smile. Smiling sends a message that you are nice and approachable.

Relax
Think of the person you are meeting as an old friend that you have known for years. They are probably a little anxious about meeting you too, so if you’re calm it might actually make them feel better. Don’t worry about making a bad impression. It’s not the end of the world. Impressions can be changed over time it just takes some work.

Follow Up
Many people forget to follow up with someone after the meeting. Since this is not normal, it usually impresses people. After a job interview, send an email to the person you interviewed with thanking them for their time. If you meet a new potential customer, shoot them an email or a card saying it was great to meet them and you hope to do business in the future.

It’s the common life - get up, drive to work, come home 8 hours later, eat, watch TV, then go to bed. Rinse and repeat. The majority of us do exactly this. We’re lucky if we can have some fun on the weekends. That time when you would watch TV or your weekend time is perfect for some community service. I know people cringe when they hear that word, but getting involved in your community is great networking. As always, networking is a numbers game. You’re not meeting anyone if you’re at home watching American Idol.
The first step is getting an idea on how much time you want to commit. On weekdays, I top out at 2 hours per week. The rest of the time I need for me. On the weekends, I’m willing to go a little longer. If you’re looking for some service that doesn’t take up much time, volunteer at your local Red Cross or a mission. They are always needing volunteers for small projects and you can pretty much drop in when you like. For non-profits, finding volunteers is the hardest thing to do. Most people aren’t willing to give up there free time for others.

If you have more time, try volunteering with the Boy/Girl Scouts or be a mentor for a young child. There are many young men and women out there without proper parenting. By offering them guidance and some quality time, you’ll be giving them a gift that will last a lifetime. If you mentoring doesn’t sound fun, get involved with a church. Churches are constantly reaching out to the community in different ways. Even if you’re a non-believer, its still a great way to meet other people.

I hate moving. I can’t really sugar coat how I feel about moving. We’ve moved 4 times over the last 4 years. As a consequence, we’ve become expert movers and I would like to share some of the best practices that we have learned.

Budget Plenty of Time
When you look around your house, it doesn’t seem like you have that much. Believe me, you don’t find out how much crap you have until you try to move it all. If you wait to the last minute to start packing, it’s going to be a long ride. My wife and I don’t have much, but we budgeted 2 weeks for packing. That way we could pack in small increments of time so that we didn’t get overwhelmed. Even with packing in small chunks, we still pulled an all nighter before the day of the move. Our shortfall was that we had most of the rooms packed except for the “little stuff”. Even after 4 moves we still had not learned that a room isn’t packed until EVERYTHING is in a box.

Horde Boxes
Having everything in a box makes a move easier, so get every box you can. The best boxes are egg boxes that grocery stores use. They are large and usually have handles on the side. Most grocery stores will hold some back for you if you ask. The next best place is package stores. The boxes are usually a little small, but most of them are the same size so it’s easy to stack. We lived in a college town for 2 of the moves, so the package store went through a lot of boxes. You could also try asking friends and family. Our best boxes came from some friends who had used a moving company to move. The last resort is buying boxes from a moving company, like U-Haul, but getting all of your boxes this way can get expensive.

Plan the Finances
Moving can get expensive, especially if it’s a long distance move. If you want to do the moving yourself, U-Haul is a great place to rent a truck. Be wary of the size estimates they have on their web site when deciding what size truck to get. Getting a truck that is too small requires you maximize your vertical space usage. If you don’t plan well, you’ll end up not getting everything on the truck. If you are moving yourself, consider hiring a moving company just to move the big stuff. In our last move, we used a moving company to unload the truck for us. It was the best $170 I’ve ever spent! We sat and watched the movers unload our U-Haul, and they had it done in exactly 2 hours. The only bad thing is that we didn’t try this on the previous 3 moves! If you want to find a moving company in your area, try EMove.com. This site is provided by U-Haul and is a directory for movers. You can find reviews, get the hourly cost, and also pay online. This was our first time doing this and I would highly recommend it. If you have the cast, you could also have the movers to everything. Some of the larger moving companies will pack your house, load their truck, drive to your new home, unload the truck, and help you unpack. That would be great, but I’m cheap and don’t want to pay the money required.

Plan for the Worse
No matter how much you try, not everything will go exactly to plan. When you are scheduling the move, leave plenty of buffer time to avoid a time crunch. We had a slight problem during our last move that could have been disastrous. The movers were scheduled to meet us at our apartment at 12pm. I budgeted 5 hours for a 3.5 hour drive, just in case. Sure enough we had some weather issues on the way and got there at 12:15pm. Luckily the movers were running a few minutes late, so no problem.

Do you have any others tips?

There’s a great article on Dealing with Bully Bosses on cio.com. Not everyone has dealt with a bully boss, but I think it is pretty common in the job world. When it comes down to it, these people should not be managing people. I’m had my share of bully bosses, so I can relate to this article.

For the most part this article is spot on. My only issue is they recommend not standing up to your boss. If you do it the right way, you might actually be able to gain the bully’s respect. It’s like when you got in a fight at school, if you won the other guy respected you a little more. The key is to be diplomatic.

If anyone has noticed, this blog has been down for awhile. Last spring I got a job with a smaller company that liberated me from my cube. We have to relocate, so I’m leaving my current job for a new cube in Montgomery, AL.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in” ~Michael Corleone, The Godfather III

Lifehack has a great article on relieving eye strain. As a programmer, that is something that I suffer from, especially during the winter when the air is much dryer. The humidity in my cube went down to 26% on Friday. The acceptable level of humidity in an office environment is 40%-60%.

One of their recommendations is to use artificial tears. Visine Tears seem to work okay, but my eye doctor told me they are too thin to do much good. The tears roll off your eye too fast. She recommended Allergen Refresh Liquigel. It’s thicker and stays on the eye much longer. It is much more helpful than Visine Tears!

We work 60 hour weeks in our cubicles. We put our family on the back burner because after all, you’re doing it for them. We devote our lives to trying to get ahead. We put everything else aside so that we can be successful. But what exactly is success? Success should be determined by the individual, but that is usually not the case. Our society labels success as having money and living an extravagant lifestyle. Success is being in the news and people knowing your name. The sad thing is that we neglect the things that are important so we can be labeled as successful by others.

After fighting and becoming successful, you die. Depending on your level of success, your memory might last 30 years, but eventually all that you worked for will be forgotten. Your expensive things will end up in someone’s garage sell or be donated to Goodwill. You might get a plaque on a wall that will eventually tarnish become illegible.

The people who are remembered long after their death lived a life of significance, not success. These people realized that its not about how successful you are, but how much you do for others. Why do you think Bill Gates, Paul Newman, Bono, and many other successful people give so much to charity? They realize that their success will be forgotten and that they are in a position to do much more.

You don’t have to be rich in order to live a life of significance. Start with your family and spend as much time with them as possible. Make sure that you are raising your children to be good people. Reach out to people in your community who need help. Many just need someone to talk to because they feel alone. Volunteer at your county prison or take some sandwiches to people you know to be homeless. There are many people around you that could use your help. The help that you give them will mean more than any award or mark of distinction that you receive from the world.