Giving back to the community…by just shopping?

Posted: November 29th, 2007 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

That’s right. 10% of every purchase made through the “Shop Now! Amazon” link at the top of this page) will go towards Challenge for Charity. If you purchase stuff on Amazon quite regularly, it may be a good idea to bookmark the link/page.

Spread the word and help a good cause.


macbook

Posted: November 27th, 2007 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

I recently got a macbook with OS X Leopard installed. After a week of using my new laptop, I can’t see myself ever going to Windows Vista. The mac just feels a lot more intuitive and elegant than a laptop with a high-maintenance Windows XP or Vista installed. For instance, with my previous laptop (a Fujitsu T4020 tablet PC with Windows XP tablet edition), it would take me half a minute and at least 4-5 clicks to get the dual monitor set up correctly each time i hooked up a second monitor to my laptop. But with the mac, when I plug in the second adapter, it automatically knows what resolution to set the second monitor to and i don’t have to click a thing!

No more pesky “Not Responding” windows.


to embrace failure

Posted: November 24th, 2007 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

After going through some failures of my own recently, I’m reminded that success is all too often, taken for granted. When things don’t go as planned, we are quick to blame people and things, but when good things happen, we don’t take the time to appreciate all the important pieces needed in order to create success. Failures not only serve as great teaching tools, but also help us to appreciate the moments of triumph that much more. It’s funny that our eyes and ears are so keen on picking up success stories that are either completely bogus (think informercial or junk mail) or only tell one side of the story. In reality, most real success stories are often the result of a lesson learned from a previous failure.

Over a year ago, during an unplanned system outage, someone made the comment “You know, it’s good to have these types of problems every now and then to keep things fresh, or otherwise, we wouldn’t know what to do when we actually encountered problems.” In other words, “Lighten up, because without problems, we’d all be out of a job.” We ought to be embrace failure more, because behind every failure is an opportunity.

I’m currently applying to grad school and one of the more popular essay questions is “What is your biggest accomplishment?”. What this question, I believe, is really asking is what lessons have you learned from your past failures and how have you applied that to improve something?

In short, it’s not the result that matters but what you’ve learned along the way.