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Showing posts from July, 2013

Feel Good Movies

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The following are some feel good movies I recently watched on Youtube Undercover Angel is a touching story of a man who had to baby sit a cute girl who turned out to be his daughter. The daughter in turn helped him become successful. Christmas Angel. A romantic story - telling about a man who do good deeds without any expectation of return to atone for his past and how he identified someone to continue his work. It's a Wonderful Life. One of my all time favorite Christmas movie Though None go With me. Sad and touching story

Interviewer's Note

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In my many years as a manager, I have interview hundreds of candidates and hired some. Interviews and identifying candidates who are suitable for the position you try to fill takes time. Some positions are more challenging than others. The few things that I look for in identifying the right candidate are as follows: Can the person do the job? Does the person have the right attitude? Can I retain the person within my organizations? I remember hiring a woman many years back. She was a top scorer from her university and very capable. Unfortunately for me, the job I had her for was not challenging at all. After a few months, she found that she was wasting her time with us and left for another company. Based on her drive and capability, I am sure that she is very successful now. In another case, I had an impressive interview with a candidate. He brought his notebook and gave a presentation of a web page he created. After hiring him, we found that he had difficulty

Copy and Paste Character Set

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One of the labs for Google Calendar known as flair has stopped working. Flair is great to add pictures and symbols on your calendar entries to make it easy for you to differentiate the events or highlight specific events. One alternative proposed in Google Group question on this problem is to paste image characters directly in the calendar event. This can be easily done using characters from this site . All characters are found in this page . Here are a few examples of image characters found on the site: ☃☎☂

What Makes Us Bad Investors - a good reminder

I recently came across the following presentation in fool.com. It is a good reminder of how to approach investment. What makes us bad investors? from morganhousel

Google Maps Navigation Is Now Available in Malaysia

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I just found out that Google Maps Navigation has been enabled in Malaysia even though it is not listed as the list of countries with this feature enabled. The version of the application I have on my phone is 6.14.4 but I am running it on Android 2.3.5. Personally though, I prefer Waze. This is why I prefer Waze over Google Maps Navigation: Waze uses less data compared to Google Maps. Waze provide more information - other Waze users lets you know of traffic jam, obstacles etc. The voice on Waze sounds better. You have more options and configuration in Waze. I read in another article the features of Waze is already incorporated in the application in some countries. I just have not seen in here in Malaysia.

Google Platform for Management Part 3

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In Part 1 , I covered how you can make Gmail, calendar and Tasks to help you manage your emails and reminders and in Part 2 , I covered how the Google Apps can leveraged for collaboration and communication. There is still another component of the Google set of tools which I find extremely useful. The final component is called Google Sites. Bookmarks I use it to bookmark the sites I usually use in the course of my work. It is true that you can add bookmarks to your browser and in some cases also set your browser to synchronize the bookmarks across different machines. However, you may come across situations where some applications will only work with certain browsers or cases where you might have to use someone else’s computer. Have a page will all the bookmarks will be more handy. Since it is a web page, it can work across different devices and OS. The same page can also be shared with others in your company. Blogger or Google Site Google Ste pages are more s

Google Platform for Management Part 2

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Google platform provides a rich set of tools for management. In Part 1 , I focused on Gmail, Task and Calendar. I shall continue with other tools and how it complements my activities as a manager. Collaboration Google documents strength is in collaboration. It is very easy to create either a Document (Word), Spreadsheet (Excel) or Presentation (Powerpoint) and collaborate with either your team members or people in remote locations. I indicated the MS Office equivalent in parenthesis for those who are more familiar with the Microsoft suite of tools. When you share the documents, you can either give others the right to edit the document, comment on the document or just view the document.  In a meeting, the attendees can edit the document and everybody else in the meeting can view it. Comments can also be used to raise questions and highlight items for others to respond to. Each collaborator can activate a setting to trigger to inform them of any changes in the docu

Google Platform for Management Part 1

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The following are some of the ways I use Google platform to manage my time, team and projects. Reminders For simple reminders to perform something on a given day, a calendar entry works best. Set it either to occur once or repeat daily, weekly or monthly. Examples for such reminders are: writing weekly reports, paying subscriptions, having a regular 1-on-1. Gmail Task Follow ups To follow up on tasks, the task option is best. There are two ways of creating tasks. Click on add to task while you are reading a mail. When you do that the tasks will have a link to that mail. Only one mail can be linked to a task. Create a task directly. The task option is great when you need to take notes and keep track of progress, you can place notes in the task and change the due date of the task as you proceed. However, there are limitations to the task feature. The entries in the task is personal and cannot be assigned to others. If you are using the brow