Start with the customer and work backwards. Those two things, passion and customer-centricity, will take you an awful long way. – Jeff Bezos
Umbrella Today
Umbrella Today – simplest weather report ever.
Productivity content from Leo Nelson
100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
Some day I hope that I’ll make time to read all of the books listed on the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written page. Out of the list I’ve read a few but it’s time to review and re-read by way of an Audible subscription – another addition to my wish list on Amazon.
Refund Please
Just came across another great Lifehacker article titled Track Amazon’s 30-day refund guarantee with Refund Please.
Apparently, similar to some other stores, if the price of an item you purchased from Amazon.com drops within 30 days of the purchase date, Amazon.com will credit you the difference in price. This is great for anyone who shops on Amazon.com except that checking the price on a daily basis can become quite a pain.
Enter Refund Please – a site that checks the price of the item you purchased daily and sends you a message if the price drops and also includes the relevant links and information on how to claim your credit. I’ll try and use Refund Please for some of my most recent Amazon.com purchases but am also curious about Price Protectr - a site that offers a very similar service but covers purchases from Amazon.com, Backcountry.com, Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears and Target.
(IN)SECURE Magazine
(IN)SECURE Magazine has just released Issue 6. This edition includes the following:
- Best practices in enterprise database protection
- Quantifying the cost of spyware to the enterprise
- Security for websites – breaking sessions to hack into a machine
- How to win friends and influence people with IT security certifications
- The size of security: the evolution and history of OSSTMM operational security metrics
- Interview with Kenny Paterson, Professor of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London
- PHP and SQL security today
- Apache security: Denial of Service attacks
- War-driving in Germany – CeBIT 2006
Getting Things Done
I’ve been on and off the Getting Things Done lifestyle as described in David Allen’s book. Whilst, I’m not yet at the point of evangelizing the change, I definitely think that I’ve been able to improve certain elements of how I receive and process information. Recently I came across a message on What’s The Next Action regarding the 6 types of e-mail that people typically receive and how to best process them.
- E-mail you’ve read and there’s no action associated with it and you don’t need to keep it for reference. So delete it!
- E-mail you’ve read and there’s no action associated with it right now but perhaps on a later date. So incubate it or file it!
- E-mail you’ve read and decided there is an action but you are not sure what the action is. So incubate it or defer it!
- E-mail you’ve read and decided there is an action and you know what the action is but you haven’t come around to doing it. So put it on a Next Action list in the appropriate context!
- E-mail you’ve read and decided there is an action and you actually did the action. But now you are waiting on some sort of reply from someone or they need to track the outcome of that action. So put it on a “Waiting For” list!
- Email you haven’t read yet. Those are the only emails that should be in your Inbox!
In general by following some of the above principles I’ve been able to keep my Inbox down to about 10 messages and when I go on vacation or the semester starts it’s becoming much easier to return to the ready state of 0 messages in my Inbox.
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