Oh my!
Brand new HP Scanjet G3110 scanner scanner straight out of its box!
Nice piece of machinery. You can even use it to scan photo negatives, if you’re that way inclined!
But what’s that?!
Oh dear! Not my lucky day it seems! Back into the box and the shop with you!
Just discovered how to ‘post by web’ to posterous
priceless feeling silly moment…
Harpo Tells the Story of How His Gookie Face Came To Be
Almost finished reading Groucho’s biography. Will move onto Harpo next… 
After all these years, they are still thoroughly fascinating characters.
Real-time search
Like the new theme? I changed it a while ago, but I kinda forgot to even mention it. But on to the subject of this post – Real-time search.
The concept behind real-time search is simple enough. You have an search engine which you can query for whatever topic you wish and said search engine will give you all past and present results. on the go, even while they are being created. Got that?
In order to do so, the search engine will either have to be extremely fast at indexing everything 100% of the time, or else there will have to be some physical limitation on the objects that are being searched.
Now all the hullaballoo currently making the usual circles about twitter is around the real-time search feature that one can enjoy on Twitter and how it is going to be the ultimate Google-killer. Oh, and about how Google is supposedly shitting itself because it cannot compete with Twitter at this game.
Which is a load of bull, if you ask me. Because the scope of Google search is is far beyond anything that Twitter can possible muster that it doesn’t even seem right to compare the two. But allow me to expound.
As a search engine, Google is second to none. It has the largest search index of the world. It has literally thousands of servers crawling the web and indexing everything. Based on the importance of its search rank, a new post on a blog – probably not this one – will get indexed and will become searchable within 10-15 minutes. That’s fast! Especially when you consider that content on the web runs into the millions of pages and grows with every second! Making such a search facility work in real-time is not impossible but, I would imagine, hard to do. The resources needed are unimaginable. Then again, I guess if there’s anyone who has the resources to do it, it must be Google.
So what of Twitter? Ok so it has real-time search. Of? People’s tweets, of course! Twitter has a few million users, though no official figures exist that I know of – TechCrunch puts it at about 5-10 million. And Twitter’s search engine is supposed to be able to sift through all the millions of tweets already archived and those being created in real-time right as I’m typing. I’m saying supposed, here, because as already shown by Louis gray in this post, all is not always well in Twitter-search land.
So where does the comparison come from? I’ve no idea. Google has always really been about search and it does do search impeccably. Twitter is the standard the ultimate micro-blogging site which every other service is desperate to be and may it very well be that at one point in time it will have perfected its real-time search to perfection. But given its limited scope, I doubt very much that it will ever pose a threat for the giant of search engines!
I mean, come on! Yahoo! and Microsoft have tried and to this date they have only managed to lose even more market share. So can a company whose name used to be synonymous with the Fail-Whale succeed where those two have failed? I very much doubt it..
New Me
Da Plan: Get back to a reasonable body weight.
Background: Having always been on the feather-weight scale of things, I was rather disconcerted, some weeks ago, when I went to weigh myself and found I had reached almost 77KG. A panic one-day fasting event brought that to just under 76KG.
Aim: Get back to under 70KG
Why I’m writing this: Well, it’s a sort of commitment. I once read about this guy who used to publish his accounts on the Internet every year as a way to keep himself going straight. Always worth a try!
Way forward: Starting from last week I have been eating cereal morning and evening, with a normal meal in between.
Outlook: 3 days into the ‘diet’ my weight had gone down by 1 KG.
The Story so Far
Well it’s been an interesting week as far as most things go. My twitter following is increasing slowly but surely. It is nice because I get to follow interesting people who I could never have know about before. Remember, the real power of twitter is not in how many followers you have, but in how many and who you follow. This will only become apparent once you are following a couple of hundred people. What happens at that point is that your tweet-deck comes alive with a never ending stream of information, ideas, cheer and good will. I’ve yet to meet a pessimist on Twitter – sometimes I wonder what the reaction would be if I started spewing out pessimism. I’d probably get un-followed within a day
Focus
In real life, but also at work, it is easy to be carried away by the initial enthusiasm that accompanies every new enterprise.
Beginning a new activity or a new project is always the easiest part of the equation- the sheer number of sporting items and accessories bought by people all over the world, only to be left rotting in a cabinet after more than a couple of uses is testament to that.
Going to the gym? You take out a 1-year deluxe membership that gives you access to all the perks the establishment has to offer 24/7, you go to the flashy sports accessory shop and you buy two pairs of everything – trainers, wrist-bands, shirts which transpire sweat in a hi-tech way that leaves you feeling fresh as a flower.. So you being begin by following assiduously ever single piece of advice you can find on the intertubes, radically change your diet, go to the gym at least 3-4 times a week. Those of a particularly enthusiastic disposition will even buy the whole training equipment lot for home, just in case… And so on and so forth.
Until… Fast-forward to a couple of months, maybe even weeks, later. And all the equipment has been lying there gathering dust, now, for longer than you could care to count. You probably can’t even find the gym membership card anymore. Make no mistake, gyms all around the world thrive on such people. Otherwise they would be full to overflowing with no hope of getting new members at all 
.
But where was I? Oh yeah! the problem of course, is focus . Lack of focus is the one thing that can keep you from becoming the best in whatever enterprise you decide to undertake. Consider the pros in any form of sport. Do you think they have achieved their status simply by practicing every once in a while, in between visits to the local burger joint? Not at all. Achieving a high level of proficiency in any discipline requires self-sacrifice, tenacity, the ability to forgo on slouching on the couch in front of the TV for endless hours in favour of running that extra-couple of miles a day, or studying a little bit more, applying yourself in order to reach that plateau on the horizon; and the one after that.
And for that to happen you need to focus. You need to make your objective, the over-arching reason for your life. You need to want to achieve. It is a very well known-fact, that if you aim for 60-70% success in any enterprise, you will only end up getting 30-40% out of it. Therefore, in order to obtain 80-90%, or even anything near to 100%, you need to aim real high. You need to overshoot. Aim for 120-130%. Anything less, and you might just go sit on the couch and spare yourself the expense of starting in the first place.
In conclusion, it is easy to begin something. But taking it to the next level, to eventual success and reaping the rewards. That is where your level of focus can make the difference between the best and the also-ran.
Point to remember – Second place is the first of the losers!
Surround yourself with the right people
‘No man is an island..’ or so the saying goes.
Left to his own devices, every person has to choose between excelling in what he’s doing or stagnation. And more often than not the environment which surrounds us plays an important part in which path we choose every we are faced with the decision to improve or vegetate.
Consider the work place. When I moved to my then-new job, around three years ago, I must admit I was not prepared for what I could describe as the cultural shock of my life. Having just left a very cushy, but totally soul-draining job with the government, I had been conditioned to work in a way which most government employees would instantly recognise. For instance, I had trained myself to:
- Procrastinate – never finish today what you can easily leave off till tomorrow, or the next day! This had inherent perceived advantages, like the fact that if I finished one thing, I would then have to start some new, possibly more aggravating task.
- Seek Security – this was easy. Never stick your neck out; mind your own business; be almost invisible. Be even less adventurous than a sloth.
Essentially, I had turned myself into a 9-to-5 machine that never looked beyond the next paycheque.
And of course the environment played it’s part too. Eventually, most of the staff were subject to the great evil of De-motivation. No real work was being done; the same memoranda kept being rejected and re-tabled at the same weekly meetings; people were more interested in internal bickering and scandals than anything else – you get the idea.
It didn’t take me long to realise that I was essentially stuck in a rut. That I had to search for alternative employment before my market value went so down that I would not be worth employing anywhere else. (As a side note, the entity where I worked started breaking down soon after I left. Once I had set the example, and went out there to get another life, other people followed.)
So anyway, I moved. And what a shock it was! The signs that life from now on would be different were not subtle at all. The company strived to be the best. And best, in this case, involves every aspect of life. New recruits go through life coaching during the first weeks of employment. They are taught to love and respect themselves. To push themselves beyond their limits to achieve their dreams. They are trained to refuse being second-best. Conversely, they will not accept second-rate work from anyone. ‘Dressing sharp’ becomes second nature – dressing for success really works; looking like you’re in control is really 70% of the way to actually being thus.
And it’s also a healthy environment. Being surrounded by people striving to be the best actually awakens in you the desire to compete – to be the best. There is nothing more satisfying in a job than healthy competition which makes you try to achieve ever more. And so we have the best people for the job, a fun work place which is not stifled by endless bureaucracy, and the best in IT software and hardware to bind the magic altogether.
But back to the shock in my life. Whereas before I was content as long as the systems worked, I now operate according to a different mentality. A system now needs to work, and do so in the best possible manner.
Being a Systems Admin, I was inclined to put my machines before the users and belittle anyone who dares criticise the way I set up something to work. This, btw, is the way most sysadmins tend to see things 
Nowadays I consider the users to be my ‘clients’ and it is my primary duty to ensure that everyone has that best hardware, software, even the best training possible. This in turn ensures that ever user has the inclination and disposition to give his/her best.
It was not easy to begin with. I remember, for example, a feeling of unease on my part when my new manager started actually listening to what I had to say from day one. Coming from an environment where my word was challenged and even subjected to mild ridicule from above – all signs of an unhealthy, almost bullish environment typical of where I had been working – I found myself sceptical, even mistrusting of someone who actually believed in me.
With time I realised that my previous employment had infused me with this poisonous attitude – if I wanted to survive I needed to change my ways, and drastically. It wasn’t easy, as I said. But it did have its rewards! Like making an enormous amount of new friendships and, most importantly – and quite unexpectedly – I could feel my self-confidence increase to a point were I now feel empowered to achieve anything I want!
Life is what you make it?
As I look at my tweetdeck, I see a multitude of posts from people coming from different walks of life. A cursory look at the Bio on the page of some people quickly paints a very curious picture of the people I have been surrounding myself with.
There’s Internet Marketers, Biz Entrepreneurs, New Media Experts (whatever that means – Hell, I even described myself as a satellite revolving around the planet of new media!), self-made entrepreneurs..
But what I could really never understand were the life coachers. Life coaching.. WTF is life coaching?! Is it some sort of magic formula that would grant you instant happiness? Could a few words spoken my some supposed know-it-all turn your life from day to night? Could a few sentences give you the insight that you need to achieve levels of performance which up to now you could only dream of?
Well I’ve just been to a 2 day life-coaching session and I must admit that it DOES make a difference. And it’s not just me. Colleagues who attended with me are seem to have an extra spring in there step. Hey I’m even playing Bill Withers’ Lovely Day, right now! (available here).
That’s all for this post. More stuff to come as I come to terms with what this course has done to my psyche and how it’s making me see things in a different light!
