Be yourself - Everyone else is taken (Oscar Wilde)
I never ceased to be amazed at the resources that are available on the web. I just came across this one. How to learn a foreign language.
Mango is a great too to be able to pick up some of the basics of a foreign language. Remember those tapes that you could buy years ago. They were very expensive. I was going to learn Japanese. I think my 7 year old daughter has surpassed me now.
A quick update on my use of Hoopaa.
During the first few days of use I couldn’t work out what was going wrong. I registered, downloaded but kept getting an error about a mismatched password. So I uninstalled, deleted my account and tried again. Still the same error. I checked again my password, tried to reset it but still kept getting an error message.
I sent an email to their support centre. Evidently it wasn’t just me that was having problems. Hoopaa had been overwhelmed with new users and as a result their servers had crashed.
Then a couple of days later I got an email saying that the problem had been corrected.
Ever since then it has been working perfectly. Every day I get an email report of where my kids have been on the internet. I can choose to rate the site. At this stage of life they are perfectly happy for me to set up the sites that they visit. But I am sure there will come a day when I don’t have as much say in what they do but I will still want to keep an eye on them.
Even though Hoopaa says that they only track Internet Explorer browsers it seems to be working when we use Firefox.
I had to laugh the other day when my 5 year old son Toby googled his name. He came up with hundreds of images. He called his mother over and told her to look at all the pages that were written about him
. 
This is just in case I am wondering where it is. The other day my phone went flat and I couldn’t work out how to turn it back on. The usual Nokia process didn’t work and I spent a desperate half an hour or so pressing and holding various keys on the phone. Nothing worked. I couldn’t find the manual so I had to go online to find one.
I went online and found one. If I lose it again I know where to go to straight away.
And also here for a live manual from Panasonic for my cordless home phone
I spend a lot of my time working at a computer. Most of the time I really enjoy it. I was just thinking about the many tools that I use that enable me to get my work done and I thought I should acknowledge some of them.
All of these contribute to what I do online and they do it for free. Because they have a belief that life is about contributing to others. The more that I use the web the more that I see the extent of this commitment and the benefits they bring to other people.
I was sitting here thinking and just wanted to say a quick thank you.
and do you want to get it for free……….
Then this is a great program for you.
The old way of using PrScr and then pasting into an editor is too slow. To meet this need there is a great range of screen capture software out there. You can do it online or you can download a number of programs.
This one is working for me. It is the Gadwin PrintScreen. I like it because of the hotkey function that allows you to select an area of the screen by pressing a hotkey and then capturing that area. You can then adjust the picture to the size that you want using a simple interface and there you have it. A very simple solution to a common need that I have in my computer use.
Great value all round in my opinion.
I have been using WordPress for quite a while for blogging. But more recently at another site I wanted a simple Content Management System this site. There are lots of options out there such as Joomla, Drupal and so on. But WordPress was more than enough to meet my needs to provide a simple publishing platform. Here is the simplest way that I have found and the procedure that I used:
Step One: Download the static front page plugin from here (http://www.semiologic.com/software/publishing/static-front/). And then upload it into your plugins directory.
Step Two: Create two pages. (Not posts). Called Home and Blog.
Step Three: Activate your plugin in your wordpress dashboard.
And its all done.
What happens now is that the “Home” page is the permanent front page and you will have another link to your blog that will display you blog posts as normal in reverse chronological order.
A couple of things that I went on to do:
Create a new home template. I did this because the one used from my blog posts still contained a date marker. I didn’t want this on my front page. I deleted the scripts that fetched the features that I didn’t want and then uploaded that into the theme directory.
I copied the blog template and then pasted it into notebook, (any text editor will do) and once I had changed it i saved it as home.php.
This is also a place that you can add the features that you want to your front page as well.
If ideas are the currency of our times then this is, undoubtedly, the Age of Conversation, for without the art of dialog, the cut and thrust of debate and discussion, then the economy of ideas would implode under its own heavy weight. Instead, the reverse is true. Far from seeing an implosion, we are living in a time of proliferation ideas build upon ideas, discussion grows from seeds of thought and single headlines give rise to a thousand medusa-like simulations echoing words whispered somewhere on the other side of the planet. All this in an instant. In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page 400 words on the topic of œconversation. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the worlds leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication.
All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity. The proceeds will be earmarked to help children in the authors home countries.
These are statistics compiled by Protectkids.org.They highlight the dangers that our kids face while online.
These statistics reflect the use of the internet in most developed countries. The increasing use of the internet as a place where young people meet and communicate socially has introduced a range of new opportunities for them to be exploited. Most parents are unaware of the dangers faced by their children online.
What is needed is for parents to provide their children with the resources to be able to guard against any unnecessary danger. Just like we teach our children at a very young age not to cross the street without an adult, then as they get older to look both ways before they cross and then we allow them to venture out on their own as they mature the same applies to web use.
At a very young age it is very important for a parent to be in total control of their children’s online environment. But, as they mature it become more a matter of supervised learning. Children don’t know what they don’t know.. Hopefully by controlling the level of risk and implementing the appropriate safeguards children can use the web safely.
Hoopaa (http://www.hoopaa.com) comes from a Polynesian word that means safe or keep secure. The idea of hoopaa is to keep your kids safe while online because you are aware of where they have been and what they are doing. There is a range of programs available to purchase that allow you to keep track of what the kids are up to online.
Hoopaa is free. And it boasts and impressive range of features:
The main downsides of this program is that it runs best on Internet Explorer a program that I don’t like because of its security issues. And, it only runs on Windows XP. For most users this will be ok for a while but I expect that as more users move to Vista hoopaa will be upgraded to that OS.
I plan to use it on my children’s computer over the next week so I will keep you up to date on how it goes. I also plan to review a couple of the more popular commercial programs over the next few months and we will see how they stack up against this free service. At first glance hoopaa seems to provide most of the resources that you would expect from the commercial software that is available.
CyberPatrol, NetNanny and CyberSitter are examples of filtering software. http://www.cyberpatrol.com , http://www.netnanny.com and http://www.cybersitter.com
This is a very important aspect of keeping your children safe. Don’t just rely on monitoring software to keep your children safe online. More and more of our lives are going to be spent on the web and we need to make sure that the web world is as safe for our children as the physical environment that they live in.
from PC Magazine 2006
Just like the real world there are lots of hazards that face our children online. But with good management these risks can be minimized.
The first step is to create a safe environment for your children to use the internet. As I have mentioned my children are quite young so I need to recognise that at this stage in their life this is primarily my responsibility. Again life online closely parallels the principles of good parenting in the real world.
Make sure they use the computer in a public area. Don’t allow them to use the internet unless you are prepared to supervise them physically. Most parents wouldn’t send their children to another suburb to use a playground by themselves. The same is true of the internet, don’t let them go to an internet site unless you are aware of what that site contains.
Get familiar with the web yourself. Do a bit of research yourself about what are the best sites for kids and set up the computer so that they have easy access to those sites. Firefox has an excellent system for creating bookmarks in a toolbar near the top of the browser. Use this to provide sites that will keep the children’s interest. We tend to use the same sites over and over. I know that I have my favourites that I use to help me in my work and in creating my blog. This also applies to kids, they will mostly want to use the same sites over and over so make sure that you play a big role in choosing those sites.
Set up your search for safety. There will be times when children will need to go outside their familiar areas. This may be for a school research project or they may just be curious about what else is out there. Google has a number of options that you can choose to create a safer search. To do this in Google go to preferences and then choose safe search filtering. You can then choose the filtering level to stop explicit images and text at the extremely safe level. Google is the search engine of choice for most internet users today.
Educate your children about the web. Communication about what is going on is vital. Make sure you talk to your children about some of the dangers of the web. For example by nature they are trusting souls but make sure that they know not to give out their personal details to anyone. Make them aware of the dangers of opening files that they don’t know anything about. Talk to them about the sites they are visiting and let them know that not all websites are good.
Check your browser history.This is not as effective for older children but most younger children will not be aware of the trail they leave in their browser’s history. Even if you have minimal monitoring software you can keep an eye on where they have been by simply clicking on the browsers history button and having a look at all the sites that have been visited. Get to know where you children go on the web.
Set guidelines for their time on the web. Monitor the amount of time they spend on the web. Just like watching too much TV, too much time on the web is not healthy for a child’s overall development. They need to have time to do other creative things as well.
For many parents this is a big concern. We have friends who have banned their children entirely from the internet. They are not allowed to email, search or even play on designated kid’s sites. This will definitely keep their kids safe from any harm on the web but it certainly create problems for the way that they are able to deal with the modern world.
Keeping your children safe on the internet is not a one step solution. It takes a range of strategies to ensure that they are as safe as they possibly can be online.
What parents have to realize is that there is no silver bullet,says Herbert Lin, senior scientist at the National Research Council of the National Academies, where he directed a 2002 study on protecting children from sexual exploitation and online pornography. Filtering software has certainly gotten better, but do parents rely on it too much? In my opinion, they do. A filter is brittle. Even if it stops 90 percent of the bad stuff, what
do you do about the other 10 percent? You still have to have a thorough educational process.
I use my computer nearly every day for work. But more and more my daughter was wanting to search for things online for school projects or because she had heard about a particular subject. When I wasn’t busy I would let her use my computer to google the subject that she was interested in. However I could see that this was less than ideal because I wanted to work on my computer and she wanted to explore the web.
Recently we acquired a second computer specifically for the kids. I had a number of reasons for this:
The trouble with the internet is that it is full of unknowns once your kids are out there. The question that many parents ask is what can I do about this? What do we need to protect against?
There are the obvious and not so obvious things that we all know about like:
With my kids out their on the web I felt that I had to do some things to ensure that they were as safe as I could possibly make them without wrapping them up in a protective cocoon that didn’t allow them access to the resources and fun that they could have on the web.
The two main steps that I took were to:
How I went about this I will outline in some coming posts. I will also take a look at some of the more popular software programs that are on the market ie. NetNanny and the like and see what you get for your dollar.
I actually installed a program called Naomi that has the following features:
And, its completely free. You cant get better value than that.
My kids are quite young and this system works just great I don’t want them to even get a glimpse of any pornography. Naomi does a great job in shutting it down very quickly. What all this means and how this compares to other commercial versions I will outline in the coming posts.
I realise that this is a bit of a diversion from the normal theme of ChrisGribble.com but I really want to be a responsible father and ensure that my children are safe. I am sure that there are plenty of other people who feel the same.
No this has nothing to do with living in one of the seedier areas of a city. This post is what we can do about having to continually work in in your red light area. Where every day you are doing things that aren't your strengths and where you have to deal with the insecurity of not looking your best. In my previous post I mentioned that one of the effects of working in a red light area was that negativity could become a part of your input into the rest of the team. I would like to look at ways that you can still be positive when having to work in a red light zone.
We will all have times when we have to work in a red light area. Use these times as a motivation to push forward. They can help to clarify what your green light areas really are. They can motivate you to do something that may be the next really big opportunity for your life. Don't fall into the trap of negativity. You will end up just feeling sorry for yourself and the only one who can do that properly is yourself so it can be a very lonely place to be.
In answering this question I would like to firstly define exactly what a team player does.
“A team player is one who responsibly carries out their share of the work load to expectations while contributing to the team’s goals. They have a positive, constructive attitude, and function co-operatively with team associates.” Richard Hagstrom
So I would think that you would expect to see some of the following things coming from a team player.
This is a short summary of some of the things that I would be looking for in a team player.
How do I understand this in terms of someone who has completed a Green Light Profile. Just in case you have forgotten here is a brief summary of the GLP.
Green Light Profile
The Green Light Profile (GLP) will help you form realistic expectations of your performance and facilitate the realization of your life purpose, career values and goals. It highlights areas in life and a work in which you will tend to be most effective and less effective. It helps assess present situations and sort through decision alternatives to maximize life satisfaction.
Work is a major contributor to our sense of identity and can allow us to feel like we are making a positive contribution to our families and community. Life satisfaction is influenced by the content of your work and how much it contributes to the achievement of your life purpose.
A traffic light is used to illustrate performance standards. Your Greens include responsibilities that give you the greatest job satisfaction and allow you to perform to the best of your ability. Yellows include responsibilities that you may perform effectively for short amounts of time. Reds cannot be avoided but awareness of them can remove the guilt for not being able to perform perfectly in this area. Reds are more palatable if they contribute directly to your life purpose.
Each of us has a set of core values that guides our perception of the ideal job. The GLP will help you find yours and apply your conclusions to your current or future roles.
Successful career choices are difficult to make if you don’t have a clear idea of where you want to go. Without a vision of a desired future state even a good career choice can end in confusion, weariness, burnout and powerlessness. The GLP will help you identify your strengths and view new possibilities for your future.
What is the Green Light Profile
The Green Light Profile (GLP) involves viewing activities and responsibilities through traffic light lenses.
Greens are your strengths, things you will tend to do well, these are the areas that you will excel in and find the most satisfaction in performing.
Reds are your limitations or things you will tend not to do well, a job that requires that you mostly work in your red area will not be as satisfying and can result in poorer performance.
You may perform Yellows somewhat effectively but should only do so in small amounts. Long stretches of Yellow work usually becomes distasteful resulting in a less effective performance.
Someone engaged mostly in Green work will tend to be a self-starter and great team player who is full of positive energy. Their work is meaningful and satisfying to them.
I believe that most people desire to be team players. After all we are very social creatures. The dilemma that we may discover in our work lives is that we can find that we are mostly involved in work that is in our red areas. After a while we will find that such work will suck our energy and we can begin to take from the team rather than give to it.
Someone performing mostly Red work may have a negative attitude and tend to procrastinate. They may be a reluctant team player experiencing only erratic energy spurts. They find their work meaningless, stressful and/or boring.
The effects of someone working mainly in their Red areas will be felt by those around them. It will impact on the team. A person who is a great team player when working in the Green Light area may become negative and begin impact on the overall effectiveness of the team.
So what do I do?
Sometimes you have to make a decision to look after the overall welfare of the team and disregard your personal Green Light areas for a while. This can only ever be a short term strategy. Anyone who has to work for too long in their red areas will stop being a team player.
Sometimes you cannot change your circumstances you have to change your attitude. I remember a several years ago working in a job that I didn’t enjoy very much at all. Every day while walking to work my head was saying, “I hate this job, I hate this job, I hate this job.”
Needless to say this effected my attitude and what I said to others. I had to make a decision about my attitude. First I realised that I needed a job to support my family. Secondly I needed to treat those around me with more respect and become aware of the team’s needs as well as my own. Thirdly I had to put in place the facility to eventually change my circumstances.
The solution short term was to change my attitude. The solution long term was to look for something to do where I could be more in my Green Light Areas. Interestingly at this point in my career I hadn’t come across the Green Light Profile but it all makes more sense to me now after understanding the Green Light Concept.
Yes it’s true. I recently went to Holland for a conference and on the flight I watched the movie by Chris Rock, called “I think I love my wife”.
The basic premise of the movie was about a family man with a beautiful wife and great kids who was dissatisfied with his life. It was a boring. He allowed his mind to wander. The result was that he had all sorts of fantasies about women.
Then one day a fantasy walks into his life. She is available and beautiful and much of the movie is spent in watching him slowly take steps towards being unfaithful to his wife.
Near the end of the movie is a pivotal moment in his life when he realised where his fantasy had taken him. He sees himself in a mirror and runs from the compromising situation that he is in. He realises what the cost of living out his fantasy would mean in the lives of his wife and children.
He ran from that situation to his wife realising that love was more than the momentary pursuit of pleasure.
When I was away I missed my wife. I had left my best friend behind and I was the poorer for it. Returning to my family after even such a short absence made me realise how much I love my wife and to never forget what a precious gift I have been given.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
– Steven Weinberg
From the affluenza website
“Never before have our emerging environmental crises been laid out so clearly before us. Rather than shouting from the fringes, respected economists, scientists, and politicians are sounding the warnings in high-profile journals and the halls of government — warnings that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we are setting ourselves up for the most massive and devastating market failure humanity has ever seen.
So we recycle our garbage. We vote greener. We buy sleek, new hybrid cars and fill our houses with energy-efficient light bulbs. And we put our money and faith in the brave and ingenious technologies that will rescue us from the whirlwind.
But it won’t be enough. Because this is not, fundamentally, a technological problem. Nor is it, fundamentally, a political problem. This is a problem of appetites, and of narcissism, and of self-deceit. The planet is breaking, and it is breaking under the weight of our hunger for more. To reform the world, we must first reform ourselves.“
An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”
The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution.
You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”
“But what then, senor?”
The American laughed and said “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”
“Millions, senor? Then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
Sometimes I feel like the biggest failure. Thankfully I am not a depressive personality so this usually doesn't get me down. But, it does affect the way that I see myself. This week I have failed. Stuffed up, mixed things up and generally fallen far short of my own expectations of myself. "You won't get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it." I am not sure where I got this from but it is very true. Whatever we do will never be right the first time, or sometimes the second time or the third time. In these situations ,"Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". If we think we got it right the first time we are probably wrong. I have often fallen for this. I have done something that I have thought was pretty good but hadn't realised that it still required more work. This is a mistake that we can all fall for, the belief that we have arrived in some way. When we do this we preclude the possibility that there may be more for us to learn. And, there is always more for us to learn. "Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". I was talking to a friend today who told me that the person who said those words suffered from depression. Winston Churchill's legacy as a great politician was the image of tenacity. He was the true British bulldog who worried away at his task until he got what he wanted. There will always be things that we will fail at in some way. It's important to be able to live with that lack of perfection. Learning to live with failure is one of the most important lessons that we will ever learn in life. It is a character lesson that will stand us in good stead to live in this less than perfect world. Once we learn the lesson of living with failure it frees us to be able to see glimpses of perfection. It opens up possibilities of greater love – because one of its fundamental requirements is the ability to overlook minor irritations. It opens up our personal potential and allows us to generate a positive influence on others around us. It always for greater possibilities for satisfaction in every area of our lives. It releases new opportunities to conquer new frontiers in every area of our lives. So when things go wrong some of the best advice ever is to, "Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give up". I found this riff from Seth Godin,
"Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that's a good thing, even when they fail. It's frustrating for me to hear, "stick to your blogging," when people criticize a project created by a blogger–because it's part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what's unfolding. I'd rather read a book that's informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I'd rather read a blog that's based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger."
I think that one of the major weaknesses of society is the emphasis on me.
Of course there are elements of truth in all of the above list. We do need to have a certain level of self care. We cannot ignore some of our basic needs. But any system of self help must include the question how do I find my place among others.
Humans are social beings. We live in societies, we work in teams, we have families, we join groups. These are all important parts of being human. We cannot find ourselves until we are able to deal with the realities of living in a community.
One of the fundamental weaknesses of democracy is its insistence on the rights of the individual. This is because to a large extent we have failed to discover a common set of values that can bind us together as a community. We see the effects of the breakdown in community all around us. Broken families, depression, anxiety, stress, physical distress are all evidence of a breakdown in our wellbeing.
But the real outcome of this is that people become lost. When we no longer are able to function in community or find a community that we can function in and so we lose our way.
I have worked with people for a long time and over and over the story I hear is one of people trying to discover their place in the world. They ask the question, from where do I get meaning? And as much as self help can be an aid in that journey its not the destination.
Any journey of self discovery must take you to a place where you are able to meet with others. A place where people know your name, where you are valued because of who you are and not what you produce, where you begin to see yourself clearly through the eyes of others. It is only when we begin to realise the impact that we have on others that we can begin to change. If we only ever look at ourselves we will lack the impetus to make life altering changes in our own lives.
Criticism always seems to be unfair. Even constructive criticism my have a barb to it and even though it may be intended for my good there may be a prick as the point is made. Because I have often held positions of leadership over the past 15 years I have often been the target of criticism. I have seen people want to inflict damage and hurt upon others and myself because of their perception about what I should or shouldn't have done or what I did or didn't do. My conclusion – I will never make everyone happy all of the time. And I will make most people unhappy some of the time. It is very important for me to know who I am if I want successfully lead, take the initiative and be a positive influence on my world. For some reason there will be people who will want to criticize even my noblest efforts. Why, I really don't know. I can't understand such a mentality that seeks to destroy and tear down. But they will are a part of my reality. Therefore to face this I need to have a solid sense of my own reality. I need to know who I am. Or in the words of someone else, "know thyself." Otherwise I will wrongly draw my self concept from the criticism that I face.
Who am I? I am Chris. I am over 40. Going a bit gray. Father of 4 kids. Husband to April. A bit intense in personality. I have some obsessive traits but I try to control them. A bit useless practically. But someone who cares deeply, tries to be a good friend to others and tries to make a positive contribution to other's lives. Thats me. Welcome.
I know that we all have the feeling sometimes that our circumstances are overwhelming. There may be too much happening in your life or there may be unfortunate events or we may just be having a really bad day. All of us face problems, some because of our choices and others because of what's happening around us. Life is often a struggle. This is the universal state of mankind. "suffering is universal." This struggle is often the reason why we call out to God for help or get angry or depressed. Here are a few tips that I try to live by when trying to gain perspective on some of the problems that I face
So life is just a little bit overwhelming for me at the moment. Lots of changes are happening that are beyond my control and I need take a bit of my own advice.
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