Slacker Manager

October 27th, 2006

Career Friday: what’s your gig?

I don’t do much in the way of reader surveys, but I ran into a thread on another forum that asked what people do. It was very interesting reading, but then again, I’m the kind of guy who’s only use for shopping malls is the good people-watching.
Anyway, what’s your gig? What do you do to […]

By Bren -- 34 comments

October 25th, 2006

Bring killed tabs back from the dead (Firefox 2.0)

Like everyone else, I grabbed the 2.0 release of Firefox yesterday. I won’t regurgitate all the neat stuff about it, but I will point out this one very useful feature: if you accidentally close a tab you can bring it back from the netherworld by hitting Shift+Cmd+T (on a Mac) or Shift+Ctrl+T (on Windows).
This is […]

By Bren -- 20 comments

October 23rd, 2006

10 ways to avoid disaster during change

This is straight out of Warren Bennis’ An Invented Life. I swear, between that book and On Becoming a Leader (also by Bennis), there’s enough good thinking and creative leads on leadership to last a career. Anyway, on to the list:

Recruit with scrupulous honesty. This means that you should play it totally straight when recruiting. […]

By Bren -- 2 comments

October 20th, 2006

Are the 4Ps dead?

According to University Business magazine, Don Schultz recently announced at a conference for Higher Ed marketing types that the 4Ps (product, price, promotion, place) are dead because they are product-centric, not customer-centric. Meaning, basically, that the 4Ps are focused on how to sell more stuff and aren’t focused on how to make customers happy.
Saying the […]

By Bren -- 3 comments

October 19th, 2006

Asinine church signs

Saw this church sign on the way home from a walk in the woods yesterday: “Download your worries. Get online with God!”
I didn’t notice the denomination of the church that this sign was on, but it was out in the sticks. Maybe the rural location has something to do with their internet illiteracy.
Download your […]

By Bren -- 11 comments

October 13th, 2006

Stat mining

I was trolling through a list of search keywords that brought people here and, as usual, there are some fun ones. Let’s have a look and talk about them, shall we?
can you wear suspenders and a belt?
We’ve been over this before. It’s like my old woodshop teacher used to say when we asked, “Can I […]

By Bren -- 4 comments

October 8th, 2006

Looking for a web-based calendar

I’m looking for a web-based calendar that allows users to build event templates. I can’t find one. I’ve looked at I-can’t-tell-you-how-many web calendars in the last week or so and nothing seems to have this particular feature. In addition to the standard features you find on web calendars, the features I need are:

Multiple users (important, […]

By Bren -- 9 comments

October 7th, 2006

Fostering collegiality

One thing I’ve always admired about the business of higher education is the idea of collegiality. The big idea is that coworkers ought to have a good sense of civility and cooperativeness. In higher ed, like most other workplaces, it’s easy to find intradepartmental collegiality, but tougher to find interdepartmental collegiality. On the whole, at […]

By Bren -- 3 comments

October 4th, 2006

Network effect (on me)

Well, if you stop by the actual Slacker Manager web page (as opposed to reading the feed), you might have noticed that a few icons have disappeared. Mosts notably, the 9rules leaf is gone from the top right of the page. On the Affiliations page, you’ll see that the 9rules leaf is gone, as well […]

By Bren -- 8 comments

October 1st, 2006

del.icio.us for search

I know a while back I said that Diigo might replace del.icio.us for me. It hasn’t yet. del.icio.us remains too simple not to use, and my experience using Diigo as a passthrough to del.icio.us left something to be desired (such as the ability to consistently remember my del.icio.us login). I’m use Diigo occasionally, but it […]

By Bren -- 2 comments