A couple of weeks ago I decided to order some business cards that I could hand out instead of having to write down my domain name on pieces of paper for people when my blog comes up in conversation. So, I went over to VistaPrint.com and gave their process a whirl.

It took me about 45 minutes to search through all of their different designs until I had finally decided on and customized my new cards. By the time I was done I ordered two sided, full color, glossy cards on the heaviest weight paper. Yeah, I’m a sucker for upgrades.
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My buddy Jamie Harrop found this awesome new little site that helps choose a domain name by automatically trying every possible combination of whatever words you want in the domain name.

The original post comes from our HTMLHelp.com Blog.

The site is called Bust A Name and it has some truly excellent features and will really save a ton of time when it comes to choosing a name for your next new Web site.
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Google recently acquired a company called GrandCentral, which I was preparing to do a review of anyway after testing the service out a bit. This only makes the offering all that much stronger, and in my opinion it’s something everyone should try out.

Here is the Google acquisition announcement which took about 2 seconds to download directly from my voice mail:

GrandCentral links all of your phone numbers together and layers on a TON of new features. How? They are giving people One Number…for Life - a number that’s not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you. This number will consolidate your voice messaging, route calls to wherever you are, and even allow you to screen your calls.
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The following article, by Vickie Elmer, appeared in the Washington Post, Friday, December 8, 2006. It is in reference to this survey from Industrial Performance Group.

The Harder Sell
The sell, sell, sell strategy for sales staff may now be sell, fill out paperwork, look up some details, go to a meeting, sell.

Salespeople, on average, spend only 38 percent of their time pushing products or services, and even peak performers figure they are selling during just 58 percent of their work hours, a new survey of 1,502 salespeople shows.

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Here is a whole mess of new Web-era definitions that have appeared in our vernacular in recent years. How many of these can be applied to your routine at the office each day?

• Adminispam: Useless e-mail sent from upper echelon bureaucrats that’s not applicable to your area, about people you’ll never work with or issues you’ll never face.
• Adminisphere: The upper levels of management where big, impractical and counter-productive decisions are made.
• Blamestorming: A group process where participants analyze a failed project and look for scapegoats other than themselves.

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Let’s see, if we wanted to start combining things to come up with the most dangerous job we could find where would we begin?

• Let’s start out by putting our employee in a tiny little open cockpit helicopter.
• Then, let’s make him fly 100% of the time within 10 yards of massive powerlines.
• And… what the heck! Let’s dangle a gigantic chainsaw from the tiny little helicopter and make our pilot hover just above and trim massive trees!

Now, what’s hard to believe is that someone actually does this for a living! And here is the video to prove it.
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Dear Eric,

On January 30, 2007 you mentioned that MyBlogLog was seeking a community manager. You described the role as follows:

“Based on customer emails, the community manager will develop a comprehensive faq, oversee a community-based help system (either a wiki or a bulletin board, you will help us decide) and advise the team on ways to improve MyBlogLog.

Lastly, the community manager be an active and vocal participant in the world inside and outside of MyBlogLog.com, spurring conversations, mediating disputes and just generally building kharma by making the world a better place.”

Well since I haven’t heard any progress with regards to this much needed role, here I am. But before we go on, make no mistake about it I don’t want the job. I just want the job to be done. Philosophically speaking, that makes me the best candidate. ( As Socrates reasoned, “And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.” )
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In olden times, that is to say pre-Internet, a businessman’s dream was to one day grow up to lead a company as President or CEO into a new era of growth and profitability. Well, not any more. Now, the dream is simply to become the CEO so that you can have an enormous, unchecked compensation package.

A new study jointly issued by professors at Harvard, Yale and INSEAD demonstrates that CEOs with the most outrageous compensation packages, relative to the other company executives, are associated with companies that under-perform.
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I needed to host a remote training session recently and had to do a little research to determine the best, free way to do it. As a result I’m sharing my research so you don’t have to go through it as well.

My remote training session had two requirements. A live tele-conference, and a live Web based demo. As a result, I’ve broken this article into two sections; free conference calling, and free Web based presentations.
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Yesterday’s post about the Annoy-a-tron brought back fond memories from long ago when I worked in an office where people actually liked one another and we all used to pull practical jokes.

In fact, we were very competitive about our pranks, with each of us attempting to out do the other. Here now is a list of the top pranks from the ‘good old days’.
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This is an interesting application of Google Maps and mashup technology, which is basically the concept of taking information from multiple sources and blending them together.

So, here they are:
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Over the years I’ve collected a huge stack of business cards. This is primarily the case because I just don’t have the energy to either type them all in by hand or scan them into one of those card readers - which incidentally cost a couple hundred bucks.

So, imagine my delight when I discovered a free service which allows you to take a digital photo of a business card, e-mail or upload it and then have the contacts information automatically e-mailed back in Vcard format ready to import straight into Outlook!
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