Archive for the ‘ Productivity ’ Category

Group projects are now slightly less awful

In school this year I’ve been assigned a very large group research project with four other students.  Traditionally, these kinds of projects start off pretty straightforward, with each person working individually to find data to solve a business problem.  But as the team gathers its research, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort though, organize, and actually use the myriad of stuff found by everyone.  This presents a significant problem when the project begins to take shape and the research everyone has collected needs to be applied to solutions dreamed up by the team after a lot of research has been done.

Luckily there are an increasing number of online collaborative tools that can be utilized to make collecting, finding, sorting, and editing online data found by a group of people easier.  My team has found Evernote and Dropbox to be extremely useful in helping us get through this process more efficiently.

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2009
10/07
CATEGORY
For Students
Productivity
Uncategorized
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My favorite useful 3rd party Mac tools

I like finding free little third party programs that add useful functions to the already great Mac OS.  I download lots of these, but there are only a few that I use on a very regular basis.  (Sorry PC users, these are predominantly Mac-only programs.  But I’m sure there are plenty of PC alternatives for all of these applications.)

iStat Menus: This application allows you to view information for 8 different processes in your computer right in your menu bar.  You can check out the status of your CPU, RAM memory, hard drive space, network connection, internal temperatures, fans and power and bluetooth connection.  It also gives you a great replacement for the default date/time display on the menu bar – when you click on the time, a small calendar pops out.

[update - 8.28.09] – It seems that the latest version of iStat Menus will not work with Mac OS 10.6.  Waiting for update…]

Skitch: I talked about this one in an earlier post.  It allows you to take a picture of anything that is on your computer screen.  It comes with some basic editing tools, or you can open any screen shots taken in any other image editor you wish.  It’s more useful than you might think.

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2009
08/27
CATEGORY
For Students
Online Video
Productivity
Social Networking
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Hard drives are not magic. How can you back up your data?

For a short while, I was the “Junior Service Writer” at Springboard Media in Philadelphia PA.  In this job, I dealt with everyone who wanted to bring their Apple computers in for repair.  I learned a few important things during my short tenure:

  1. Customer service jobs are the worst.  The. Worst.  When I took this job, I forgot the lesson I had previously learned both as a waiter and GAP employee: Daily exposure to the unchecked Id of the general public is a powerful corrosive to any optimism, idealism, or compassion one feels towards her/his fellow human beings.

  2. As a new low-level employee, it is extremely hard to change the culture or the ways in which more senior employees do their jobs.  It doesn’t matter how correct, brilliant, or “fresh” your ideas are – if people don’t trust your opinions, they will not listen to a word you say.  (And as it turns out, talking about your fancy MBA schoolin’ to make yourself sound smarter just makes you sound like an ass).

  3. Most people think hard drives are magic and will work forever.  Then when tragedy strikes and they learn that this is not the case, these people scream and/or sob at junior service writers who tell them they need to fork over a bunch of money for the possibility that their data might be saved.  (No, AppleCare does not cover the cost of data recovery if your hard drive fails while still under warranty.)

Of course, before this job I too was dragging my feet about backing up my computer.  But after watching a second unlucky graduate student completely fall apart at the thought of his dissertation being lost forever, I decided to purchase my first external hard drive for backing up my data.

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2009
08/25
CATEGORY
Productivity
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Textbook shopping is strangely really confusing

It’s August, which of course means an explosion of news articles about how expensive textbooks are and what poor college students are doing these days to keep these costs down.  Where people buy their textbooks and how they actually read them is becoming more and more varied and confusing, making bookselling the latest perfectly good business model to be demolished by the Internet.

Here are the interesting textbook-buying trends that I’ve been paying attention to lately:

  • Buying Used Textbooks – This is certainly not new and is now a standard way for students to get their textbooks each semester.  And as Internet search becomes more sophisticated it is becoming even easier.  There are tons of sites to buy used textbooks, but I found you can’t go wrong with amazon.com, bigwords.com, half.com, textbookx.com, textbooks.com, or good ‘ol craigslist.org.
  • Textbooks from other countries! – I recently received a tip about nbcindia.com from a classmate of mine.  The books are priced in rupees and the book you receive is reportedly a black and white soft cover copy of your textbook.  But they are really cheap.  This site recommends (among other things) checking out the foreign versions of American websites, like www.amazon.co.uk, to find cheaper versions of the textbook you want.  This blog post mentions two great sites for finding the international versions of textbooks: abebooks.com and textbooksrus.com.
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2009
08/16
CATEGORY
For Students
Productivity
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I love Facebook and Kool-Aid

I’m sure you know the kind of people this post is directed to – the annoying, snobby, elitist people who refuse to join Facebook. And if you are in this group, most of your friends think you are annoying, snobby, and elitist. All you anti-Facebookers need to get off your high horses and discover why Facebook is a great tool.

The dumb stuff I hear from these web 2.0 poo-pooing people includes:

  1. I don’t have the time or patience for setting up ANOTHER online profile;
  2. I’m afraid I won’t have many friends to connect with;
  3. Facebook is a stupid waste of time;
  4. Anything of importance that I can do on Facebook I can do though email or the phone;
  5. Facebook is just a fad, like Friendster (and MySpace. Snap.);
  6. I don’t wanna bother putting up little status updates, nor would I care about all the mundane crap that my various Facebook “friends” do all day.
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2009
08/15
CATEGORY
Productivity
Professional Development
Social Networking
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I Hate Paper (unless it has microdots on it)

I discovered the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen when my marketing class team chose to use it for our group project last semester.  After initially dismissing the device because it seemed like an expensive gadget (two versions for $150 and $200) that couldn’t do anything my laptop couldn’t do, I quickly changed my mind and bought one.  It made taking class notes and recording interviews for my summer internship significantly easier.  And I know this blog is for the broke, but this thing is totally worth the money if you’ve got it.

Briefly, the thing contains a small camera that records what you write via microdots printed on special notebook paper.  While writing on this paper and recording your text, it can also record any sound it hears and syncs this audio to what it is recording with the camera.  Consequently when tap your pen on the paper you have been taking notes on, the audio that was recorded at the time of writing will magically come out of the pen’s speakers!  All of this information can then be archived on your computer (Mac or PC) via software that nicely organizes your notes and makes all your crappy handwriting searchable!  To get a better idea of all this, take a look at this video from Livescribe.  If you’re still not getting it, you should try a little harder and search “Livescribe” on YouTube – you’ll find tons of video demonstrations of the pen.  Oh, and here’s an example of a “pencast” – Livescribe’s online tool for sharing your downloaded notes.  While I think these things are pretty useless in general, I really like this one.

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2009
08/14
CATEGORY
For Students
Productivity
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What’s My Point?

This blog is about my frantic sprint to a life where everything I do, write, read, watch, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1’s and 0’s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and be instantly accessible from my MacBook. All the stuff I discuss in here is really cool, (usually) really cheap, and make me more productive.