All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.

Prioritizing Your Projects

April 9, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 21 Comments

Well, this is rare for me. I haven’t written a new blog post since Monday, and here it is Friday. What’s going on?

I have many projects going on at this time, so much so that I’ve neglected this blog for the time being. As some of you know, I was out of town many days last week, even though I was able to keep up with blog posts at that time. I wrote a few posts ahead of time so I could concentrate on my big paying project.

Time Flies

Well, this week I’ve been working on catching up on all my other projects that bring in money, along with trying to finish up the big project so I can get paid for that and move on. Many of my other projects involve writing, which means research at the same time, and while researching that stuff I was able to keep up, to a degree, with my other blogs in some fashion. But I’ve kind of missed out on this one, so I apologize for that.

However, it brings up the point of how people prioritize their projects. For me, it starts with what’s paying, and how much, and how fast. Just to throw some false numbers out, if it comes down to working on the project that not only pays multiple thousands of dollars, but faster than the multiple hundreds of dollars, even if the hundreds has been more consistent money, I’m going with the big bucks first. Next is the consistent money, because one doesn’t treat anyone as second class clients. After that you take care of yourself, because, if you’re me, taking care of myself could end up bringing in money also.

Right now where I’m lacking is that I don’t have my PDA anymore. It broke, and I haven’t purchased a new one yet. I’ve been balking because when I bought the thing two years ago it only cost me $130, and now that they’ve discontinued it, but still have it on the market, some places are charging upwards of $399 for it; no way! However, I used to use it for all my planning and note taking and portable record keeping and address book, and now I have none of that. It makes doing much of what I want to do harder to keep up with.

How do most of you handle your projects overall, since I assume most of you don’t have a PDA? Or do you just work haphazardly? Something to think about, and I’d love reading your answers.

Product

My First Look At MS Office 2007

April 5, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 38 Comments

Three years ago I went to a presentation at a company that was showing some brief clips of the Office 2007 package items. I have to admit that it looked alien to me, and I pretty much told myself that it was something I wasn’t going to be considering at any time soon.

Fast forward to now. I’m presently working on a big project, and, of course, many of the files I received were in the newer format. I actually had the program laying around for about a year that someone had given me, and I figured it was as good a time as any other to load it to see what it was all about for myself. I loaded it into a totally different directory, though, so it wouldn’t erase what I already have.

Then it was time to go, and I pulled up Excel first, since most of what I was going to be doing was on that. I can’t lie; it still looks alien to me. Microsoft decided to go with what they call a “ribbon” look rather than the words we’re used to seeing, and man, was I confused! I couldn’t even figure out how to open a file, so I double clicked on the file and had it ask me if it could connect to this new program, which of course I agreed to.

Working within the spreadsheet itself is just like it’s always been, but after that it takes time to figure some things out. For instance, instead of headings I know very well like “file”, “edit”, and “format”, they now use “home”, “page layout”, “formulas” and “review”. They kept “data” and “insert” and “view”, thank goodness. When you click on one of the headings in Excel 2007, instead of a list of stuff you get the ribbons. But there’s a lot more stuff, and it might not be worded like what you were used to. It took me almost 30 minutes before I could figure out all the basic things I needed.

The same thing occurred with Word, but not to the same degree. That’s probably because I’ve never quite known how to do all those things that Word supposedly can do for you; I’ve always been more of a numbers guy, so I use Word mainly just to write.

I haven’t even tried to open PowerPoint or Access yet; no need, since I rarely use either one. I will say this, though; I do believe that once I’ve had more time with Excel 2007 that I’ll like it just fine. I assume the same might be true for Word 2007 at some point as well. Thing is, there’s supposedly an Office 10 version coming, and they’re not going backwards, which means the ribbon is going to be staying. This is one of those times where we’re going to have to change our technology at some point, kicking and scratching if necessary.

I know many of you have already switched, but I’m betting the majority haven’t, which is why I’m writing this now. If anyone else has positives or negatives they’d like to share, by all means please do. And this points out why it might be a good thing to at least pop in to the webinar I’m doing with my friend Renee, as she talks about Excel 2007.

Microsoft Store

Blogging

Is Your Blog Successful? My Version

April 2, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 22 Comments

I’ve often said that you can get inspiration for writing blog posts from anywhere. In this case, I got the inspiration for this post from a blog called One Cool Site Blogging Tips (not to be confused with Sire’s blog tracking site Cool Blog Links, and this post titled Is Your Blog A Failure Or A Success? The conversation on that post wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be based on the title, yet it made me want to throw the question out to everyone else, so it did its job.

How does one decide to measure success? I think that’s the most important question for everyone to answer for themselves. It all depends on the reason you continue to write your blog. I say that because I started this blog for a much different reason than why I write it now, and as those parameters have changed, so have my expectations for it.

My original reason for creating this blog was so I could say whatever I wanted to say without worrying about being filtered or worried about how it might impact my business. I also had high hopes that I would make some money from it. So, when I first started writing it, half of the posts were geared towards talking about something that I thought I’d make money from, and the other half talking about some things that were on my mind, though not necessarily personal.

At some point, the blog focus changed to talking about affiliate programs, blogging, and writing for the most part. That was fun to a degree, but there wasn’t anything personal in it. Well, I have my writing style, so I guess that was personal, but I almost never talked about anything I was feeling, never taking a real stand on anything, just doing reviews. The thing is, to do a legitimate review takes some time to investigate, and, well, like everyone else I needed to make money, thus I was draining the bank account while doing a lot of that stuff.

Then in September, I changed once more. I decided I was going to start talking about a few more personal issues, more of my beliefs and the like, while still keeping up with some of what I’d talked about in the past. Though I’d still like to make money with this blog, the focus definitely moved from that direction a long time ago. I still put up products and the like, just in case someone has an interest, but mainly I just like to write, share my thoughts, and see how others respond.

So, based on all of that, how successful do I view this blog, which certainly can’t be called a niche blog? Overall I think it’s a fairly successful blog for what it is. I’m certainly not at guru status when it comes to internet sales, but I think I have a nice loyal group of folks I get to interact with here and there. And it’s changed a lot; the people I was talking to a lot between the middle of 2008 through the middle of 2009 has drastically changed. Many of those folks either stopped blogging or their priorities changed.

New folks have come along, in higher numbers yet, and that’s pretty neat. And I know when people comment here, they’re not doing it just to get a link onto a popular blog that offers them nothing except an opportunity to maybe steer people to their blogs by kissing up to the owner of the blog, who most of the time doesn’t even see their responses. Oops, let’s not get into that discussion again! 🙂

Yes, I think this blog is a success, and I’m happy with it. What say you about your blog?

Product

Apricorn Biometrically Secure Hard Drives

April 1, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 15 Comments

You see the hard drive that I’m advertising below? I’m buying that bad boy in a couple of days. The maker of that external hard drive is a company called Apricorn, and I just learned about them on Tuesday while I was out of town.

Here’s the thing about these drives. They have two ways of securing the drives so no one else can get into them if they happen to snatch them. One way is to get a drive with a keypad on it. You create a numeric password, and you go on from there. The other, which I’m showing below, is something called “biometrically secure”; in plain terms, there’s this pad that you run your thumb across, and that’s how you get into it. There’s no guessing what the number is; if it’s not your thumb, there’s no accessing your data by anyone else.

I hear someone saying “so, we’ll just crack open the case.” Nope; if the case is cracked, it automatically shuts down because all data is encrypted. At that point, it’s of no use to anyone. And, with this method, you can pop it onto any computer you’d like, and just run your thumb over it and you’re good to go. All your information, and anyone else’s information, is secure and safe; no stolen laptop worries. Makes me wonder why the government hasn’t been using these things all along instead of leaving them on laptops that continually seem to be getting stolen.

Oh yeah, the one below is a 500GB drive, but you don’t have to get a drive that big. I’m just being greedy; it will be replacing my 300 GB drive that’s in my enclosure, the one which, right now, is telling me that it only has 95GB free, which I’m trying to figure out. No matter; this type of secure data is imperative for someone like me, who travels to do some of my work.

Oh yeah; they have other drives that aren’t as secure, and drives that are solid state drives, which means they don’t get as hot as other drives and run much quieter. Lots of choices, lots of different prices; check them out, because they look pretty cool. But I’m buying the one below; yeah!

Business

Different Degrees Of Gaming The System

March 31, 2010 Mitch Mitchell 14 Comments

Suffice it to say, many of us write our blogs and hope to find a loyal audience. To get a portion of that loyal audience, something else we do is visit each other’s blogs and, when we can, we write comments on those blogs. It not only helps us in potentially getting people to follow the link back to you, but it helps them because not only are you contributing to the community, but you’re also helping their community grow. It seems that people love commenting on blogs that show some kind of activity.

If you wanted to, you could say that’s a way to “game the system”. I don’t necessarily believe it, but the truth is that it’s nice knowing there are some people who have your back from time to time.

However, I’m betting most of us can’t compare to what’s been reported about the Chinese government. It seems that China wants to change its reputation around the world in the worst way (so many ways to go on this one). So what they’ve done is hired 280,000 people to write good things about the country. Not only on their own blog, but on other websites that even mention China:vacation sites, political sites, product sites… you name it.

This isn’t new, really. How many folks remember the tale of Belkin, a company that was caught having its own employees review their products in many places, including eBay and Amazon, favorably, until someone found an internal memo and leaked it? It’s that sort of thing that brought about the FCC’s new policy on disclosure.

At the same time, who can compete with 280,000 people being paid to say nice things about you, other than India? That’s really gaming the system, and that’s just not right. I mean, almost no one here would be upset to get that kind of great press for their blogs or websites, but at the end of the day, it’s disingenuous, false, and no one benefits from it, including the person being talked about.

How do you feel about this one? Am I wrong?

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