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Urgent Versus Rude: Email overload |
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Project Management
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By exocubic on
7/16/2008 3:35 PM
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This blog was prompted by a conversation with a client who was trying to improve their communication process but was constantly bogged down in response mode. You are not the only one with 352 unread messages in your inbox; go ahead, breathe.
A famous dead guy once said, "if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." (mostly attributed to Pascal).
I concur; we tell our clients when we are working on business processes
that email is the big hammer - to which everything looks like a nail,
thus other forms of communication, like forums, FAQ, even Blogs, open
up the possibility of slicing the complex messages into smaller parts,
but by nature people revert to what is easy (the big hammer). Solving
the problem involves:
- identifying the forms of question that eat up your time (not al ...
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Dealing with the mess |
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Project Management
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By exocubic on
7/14/2008 10:38 AM
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I once had a boss, the VP of Engineering, who stated "Having employees is like mud on your boots." How nice. But his point was that as an Engineer, he could deal with problems from the technical sense, rather than problems from the human sense; he made a good point. There is a Proverb that states, loosely, "Where there is no ox, there is no poop, but you can gain a lot with an ox." This blog is about dealing with the mess...
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Stylesheet wierdness |
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By exocubic on
6/20/2008 9:16 AM
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As soon as I published my last blog entry, I noticed some really weird behaviour on the stylesheets for my site - it seems like it happens on the blog and sometimes on long pages, but alas, humility is ironically timely - I just finished talking about debugging and found my own problem!
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Adobe's Fault: ColumnCharts in Flex for Live Data |
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FLEXocubic (Flex & AS3)
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By exocubic on
6/19/2008 10:18 AM
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I'm always careful (OK, not always) not to blame the vendor right out of the gates when I have a problem. This problem, however, I REALLY want to blame on Adobe - This blog is about isolating problems and knowing how to get the right information from a vendor when you have a deep issue with their tools...
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Time well spent - hired servants versus employees |
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Project Management
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By exocubic on
4/10/2008 12:47 PM
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We treat our employees like family, if we care about them. That's not saying much if the corporate leadership does not care well for their family, but that's another story. But we often treat our contractors like indentured servants - or at least hired servants - and thus evaluate their work by a different standard. This can cost more in the long run... we need to be careful to understand our own mindset!
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Custom Events |
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FLEXocubic (Flex & AS3)
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By exocubic on
4/5/2008 2:22 PM
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I recently encountered a need to build a custom event in Flex 3. I've done this plenty of times in other languages, but my first time in Flex was a bit more frustrating than I expected; there are a few oddities about how to declare the event name and ensuring it gets correctly called from the client object, etc. that I think would throw off a new developer, so I decieded to look for other examples people had posted on this kind of thing and maybe upload my own demo of the functionality.
One good tutorial I found was this one:
http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=170
There are some decent notes in the Flex documentation, but they are
pretty generic. Of course, you need to understand your reason for
creating the event or else you are better off using a pre-defined event
- this is the point the documentation makes; so, assuming you know you
want a truly custom even ...
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Operational Effectiveness |
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Strategic Thinking
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By exocubic on
3/15/2008 7:27 PM
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Operational Effectiveness is a critical factor in undertaking a project of any sort. Why bother with the project if the result does not improve something? Check out this article series regarding how to focus on actually improving your real effectiveness in a project - and what to watch out for!
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Strategies & Tactics |
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Strategic Thinking
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By exocubic on
3/7/2008 12:21 AM
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Ever heard someone say "Strategic Thinking" or "we have to get Tactical"? These terms are really important to our daily work and often left to "someone else" - strategy is the job of the CEO and tactics the job of the line worker, right? Not quite. Check out this article on really understanding the difference between Strategies and Tactics and why everyone (at all levels) needs to understand both.
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About Software Prototypes |
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Project Management
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By exocubic on
3/3/2007 12:15 PM
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Scared of prototypes? The customer may get the wrong idea, what if it morphs into the final code, etc. Software projects are filled with good and bad examples of prototype usage. Some prototypes become the real thing, and sometimes that is OK. Prototyping can vary from project to project for a variety of reasons, but should the outcome be left to happenstance or can we, instead, truly understand the kinds of prototyping and thus be intentional about their various outcomes? This blog discusses three stages of prototyping: Elementary, Expanded, and Evolutionary...
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The box is a container |
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What is the "Box", really?
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By exocubic on
3/3/2007 4:13 AM
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Boxes contain things. No new revelation there. But what does it mean?!?
This is my first blog entry on the topic of what the box really is. To start with, the box is a container... enjoy!
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