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October 2009

Real, Authentic and Sustainable

by JimRaffel on October 14, 2009

Incidents over the last nineteen months have lead me to a new philosophy of life that spreads across my family, spiritual, and business existence. This philosophy is so obvious I sometimes forget to look at situations utilizing this new and powerful tool I have at my disposal.

Ask yourself if what you are doing right now or planning to do; is real, authentic and sustainable? If you are unable to answer yes to all three of these questions then stop what you are doing or planning to do. For me life has become that simple. I now hold all decisions in my life up to this simple barometer.

Recently a very large computer company tried to place an order with me on their terms. I took one look at their terms and decided that if I had to process every order their way I could not stay in business. The order was real. The order was authentic, but taking many orders on those terms would not make my business sustainable over time. I refused the order. With the simple real, authentic and sustainable criteria the decision took about 60 seconds.

I have become more of a homebody over the last several months. I still travel for business when it’s necessary, and life on the road is always real, frequently authentic and rarely sustainable. For me it was a simple matter of comparing the way I eat and drink on the road with business associates compared to my eating and drinking habits when at home. At home almost all our food is real. We start with raw ingredients and cook or bake with no preservatives. We drink wine in moderation. We eat reasonable size portions and skip or eat small deserts. (If you have eaten a business dinner with me I am sure you have seen me devour a crème brulee – I love ‘em, I just can’t eat ‘em very often!). Yes, I exercise a little in addition to the new eating habits but the result is fitting into pants sizes I never thought I would wear again!

My most striking business example of; real, authentic and sustainable is a customer who recntly turned down a discount I offered on a fairly large order. He said to me; “Jim, price is not the only consideration, your ability to support us in the future matters. You have proven over the years that you are worth the price you ask.” That customer, my friends, is one who understands that all things in life that matter should be real, authentic and sustainable.

Give it a try and please let me know what you think.

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Stuff I Like About My Mac

by JimRaffel on October 13, 2009

A little over a month ago I purchased a new MacBook to use as my primary computer. While I have worked with and around Macs since 1985, this is my first Mac as a primary computer. There is a G5 iMac on the desk next to me that our family has used as a household computer for several years, so I am not without recent Mac experience.

The migration from my ThinkPad has been painful at times but I have managed to find new and in most cases better ways to do things on the MacBook. There are still some business processes I am working on, but that is OK too because as my brother Bob says “you need to sharpen the saw” every so often or it gets more and more difficult to cut down trees.

So here are some or the applications and features that have stuck out for me over the last month or so.

OSX – Since 1986 I have been working with many different flavors of the Unix operating system. I am not an expert by any means, but being able to tinker around in Terminal when I am not able to figure out how to do what I want in the GUI is nice.

Cmd-F3 – I have some pictures I really like that I use as desktop wallpaper, and it sure is nice to be able to seem them with a single keystroke. Well, that and I keep documents that I am working on and need to access quickly on my desktop, so getting to my desktop quickly is nice.

JungleDisk – A software utility that allows me to back-up to the Amazon S3 cloud. The cool part is that the back-up is then accessible just like a local disk. With a fast internet connection and reasonable sized files you hardly even notice the lag. Because I used JungleDisk to backup the old ThinkPad I have been able to not move all “My Documents” files to the MacBook. This way the MacBook Documents folder is a fresh start and finding things is much easier.

VMware Fusion – Being able to run a virtual Windows session that actually works and allows all the programs that have no Mac alternatives makes it possible for me to carry only one computer. I still sell a fair amount of ColorMetrix software and that runs only under Windows. I use QuickBooks to run my business and while there is a Mac version, that version does not have the ability to export a file for sharing with my accountant. I program dongles and as of now the dongle provider only has a Windows based program for doing the programming. I build custom reports for my ColorMetrix customers and that process requires a version of CrystalReports that runs only under Windows. Without a robust virtual machine emulator like Vmware I would still have two computers and sometimes have to carry both of them.

Blackberry Desktop – About a month after I purchased the MacBook RIM released the Mac version of their Desktop software. It just works and seems to work faster and more smoothly than the same package on the old StinkBook.

SplashID Desktop – I have about a bazillion passwords to keep track of and for me nothing works better than SplashID which I have been using for several years going back to my Palm Treo. These guys have kept up with the times and now have a Mac Desktop to go with the Blackberry version of the software. Sync’ing the two is a bit tricky at this time, but it works. It’s nice having access to all the passwords on my desktop or anywhere anytime in my Blackberry.

iCal – The connection with Google calendar which I have depended on for several years now is amazing. With proper sync’ing on my part my calendar is up-to-date and viewable just about anywhere.

I am sure I have missed a thing or two, but this pretty well sums up the things I like most at this point.

What do you like about the machine you are using?

 

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