This is a guest post from Ade McCormack
How many IT people do you see holding court at parties? How many of us hope to be seated next to a technical architect on our next flight?
Introduce yourself as an IT person at a party (I know, I’ve done this) and they all start telling stories about how IT has let them down. When you try to defend the IT industry by explaining that there are, for example, limitations to IP addressing, or that distributed databases lack mathematical rigor, they just laugh, if they’re even listening at all.
Such encounters create resentment, …read more

How do you search? Most of us use Google yet how many of us will advance our search with one extra click to get the results we are really looking for.
Perhaps you are looking only for PowerPoint presentations or you want to find some free music that you can use without any restraints on copyright or royalties.
There are so many ways to search for information yet most of us default on searching by typing our word or phrase into the Google box and hitting the Google search button.
How about using this week to transform weak searches into strong outcomes? Just …read more

My laptop was running slow (as usual) and I was cursing Microsoft – usual too :) .
I tried various tweaks including turning off fancy graphics and deleting temporary files.
Final step – defragment the disk.
This is where i met my nemesis – it took 4 hrs and 26 minutes to defragment a 40GB disk – something was wrong!!!
Enter WINDIRSTAT. The software obliged me with a “treemap” which is a pictorial representation of the space in my hard drive.
I was looking at acres and acres of browns and blacks and had absolutely no idea what they were. Away I went, …read more

Like the post title says, I’ve sold Slacker Manager and the blog needs a new author. Which story do you want to hear first, the one about selling the blog, or the one about the search for a new author? Let’s start at the beginning…
It’s been a good few years and Slacker Manager has served well as a creative outlet for me. But my interests have shifted. I’m a decent manager/boss and I definitely continue to think about how to do better. But I’m just not interested in blogging about it any longer. I’ll keep blogging at my personal blog …read more

I’ve got 5 invites to Skitch for the first five commenters. Skitch is a Mac-only image tool that rocks pretty hard. It’ll do quick screenshots, framegrabs, etc. It also hooks into iPhoto nicely and has all the basic image editing tools you probably need. And it’s pretty.
Leave a comment if you’d like to check it out.

The iPhone launched yesterday and, predictably, it’s already hitting the secondary market. It’s hilarious to scroll through eBay and read some of the listings for iPhones. As I’m writing this, the prices range from $20,999,999.00
downward. Some of the auctions are pure satire, others are pure greed (Buy It Now price of $5,000? Gimme a break.), but most are regular folks looking to flip the phone for a few bucks, letting the market set the price by starting at $.01. Seems to be working, too. The successful auctions look like they’re ending with sellers gaining $200-$300 in quick profits. I don’t …read more

This is a question for any fountain pen aficionados out there: how do you jumpstart your ink flow after letting your pen rest overnight (or a couple of days)?
This has always bothered me, and I’ve tried a variety of solutions. The “lick it” trick (over and over until the ink flows freely); the dip in water trick; the clean-the-nib trick; the work it with tissue paper until the gunk is gone trick; etc…
Is there a one size fits all solution for getting your ink flow moving in the morning?

Aside from the questionable practice of hooking into another product’s name to promote your own business, TwitterLit (and here) is one of the coolest Twitter uses I’ve seen. Twice a day, this person posts the first line of a book to Twitter, with an affiliate link to the book on Amazon. The site describes it as curiously addictive and I have to agree. Also remarkably clever.
With over 2,000 800 people listed as TwitterLit friends followers in Twitter, I wonder if book publicists are already pinging TwitterLit with the first lines of the books they’re pushing?

digg_url = ‘http://slackermanager.com/2007/05/how-i-increased-my-linkedin-connections-by-167-in-48-hours.html’;

I was messing around with LinkedIn the other day and ran into a utility they provide for examining your webmail addressbook for other LinkedIn members that you might not have connected with. I pointed the tool at my gmail account and found a bunch of people in my adddressbook that were LinkedIn members but not connected to me. I combed through the list for dupes (same person with two email addresses) and for people I didn’t want to connect with (very few). The thing I struggle with was connecting with people that I didn’t know very well. That’s …read more

I’ve been using Jott.com for a little while now, and it’s become indispensable to me. I don’t take advantage of everything they offer, I just use it for one thing, and it works really well.
My Powerbook is the only computer I use for work. It’s usually with me, but sometimes it’s just not convenient to pop it open and do something. You know, like when I’m driving. This is where Jott comes in. I’ve got Jott on speed dial and I fire it up and leave myself a message. Couple minutes later it shows up as text in my email …read more