Saturday, July 18, 2009

Video Time: Baker Street

I almost forgot about this tune..

Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


I found this a couple of nights ago. It is from a resume of someone who used to work at these media outlets. Take some time to get a behind the scene look at Fort Wayne's past by clicking here.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Video Time: 30 years

Can you stick it out for 3 decades? Watch this:


Watch CBS Videos Online

Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


It's tomorrow in Ft. Wayne. Click here for details.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

20 Lessons

from the DLM Blog:

20 Things I'm Glad Life Taught Me

Posted: 12 Jul 2009 06:14 AM PDT

How many times have you heard someone say, "Hindsight is always 20/20"? If you are like me, you hear it a lot and think it a lot more. Last year Jay wrote an article listing things he wished he'd known earlier. It got me thinking that the most crucial lessons in life and success aren't taught in books or written on blogs, but they are found by living life itself.

Sure, there may be nuggets of wisdom that we pick up from Dumb Little Man, Zen Habits, or Life Remix, but it is up to us individually to act upon them and learn the lessons. If it takes a failure for us to learn something important, so be it.

Here are 20 things that I personally came to understand and believe in. Your 20 could be totally different. Perhaps you only have 5, it doesn't matter. The key is that you learn from your life, your failures and your successes. Neglect any one of those and you are taking a rocky road to learning and personal development.
  1. You must create and look for opportunities: Opportunities rarely ever come knocking on the door of someone who's not seeking them. You have to create and seek opportunities for yourself. You have to take the initiative to get the ball rolling and the doors opening.

  2. Negativity will only bring more of it: When you focus only on negativity, obviously that's all you will see. You will not seek out positivity, and even when positivity comes into your life, you'll look for the negative part of it.

  3. Where you are does not determine where you can go: It doesn't matter if you're homeless or living in a mansion, poor or rich, or if you have a 4.0 grade point average or "failing", it won't make any difference in the future. There are countless rags to riches stories to back this point up. If you have the drive and talents, you can go anywhere. You create your own limitations and horizon.

  4. If you can't help others, you can't help yourself: Even if it's just to hold the door for someone or some other simple gesture, it will do wonders for your life. You'll feel great and you'll eventually be returned the favor sometime during your life, whether you realize it or not. If you don't want to help others, then others won't want to help you, and nor should they.

  5. Follow your passion, money will follow: If you have passion and have fun doing your job, then I wouldn't consider it a job. You can focus on creating even more passion for that subject and money will eventually follow you. If you focus only on the money, it won't come because you're focused on the quantity of your work and not the quality.

  6. Enjoy yourself: Have fun as much as possible, don't take everything so seriously. Push your worries aside and bring enjoyment closer.

  7. If it were easy everyone would do it: This is why get rich quick schemes will never be true. If it was so quick and easy then everyone would be millionaires. Making money and accomplishing tasks is hard work, but well worth it.

  8. Planning is good but so is being spontaneous: Planning ahead in business and in life is important but so is being able to quickly change that plan. Various people and events will get in the way of your plans, so you have to be able to modify or forget your plans at times. Be spontaneous once and awhile, it makes life interesting.

  9. You have many talents: You may be a talented athlete or musician but you probably have ten more talents you don't even know about. When people find something they're good at, they only focus on that instead of seeing what else they can do.

  10. Don't work hard without rewards: What's the point of working hard to follow your dreams if you aren't going to treat yourself along the way. Each little or big goal you accomplish should be rewarded with a proportionate treat, maybe a day off or a big slice of cake.

  11. Money does bring happiness: As I said, you shouldn't be chasing money but when you do earn it, you know you've been accomplishing something. It feels great and brings you happiness because you know you'll have more freedom and time to do what you want.

  12. Someone always has it worse: At times you may be having a bad day, but stop yourself and think about it; there has to be millions of other people are having a worse day than you.

  13. You'll need others: Make as many friends as you possibly can and never burn bridges. You will need others for your success.

  14. Being open-minded is the key to more knowledge: If you want to know more about the world you have to be open-minded. Give everything a chance.

  15. Failure is great: One of the most important, if not the most important steps to success is failure. You have to fail at least once, but it's better if you've failed multiple times. You can learn so much more from your failures than you could any other way. And when you finally achieve success, you'll appreciate it so much more.

  16. Most people are actually nice: This is something I've only recently realized. Most people are nice, but not usually to strangers. Once they get to know you and you get to know them, they will most likely seem like very nice people.

  17. Words and thoughts control everything: What you say and think will ultimately become reality. If you say you're going to fail, then you will because you'll find a way to make it happen. If you say you're going to succeed, the same will happen, you'll find a way.

  18. Your view is the reality: How you see an event or situation is how it exists. If you see something as tragic and negative then that's what it means to you. If you see something as exciting and positive, then that's what it is.

  19. Inspiration and motivation are everywhere: I don't care where you are, there is something there that can motivate and inspire you. You can be at war is some far away country, in horrible conditions, but there will be something there to keep you going and strive for something better. You just have to recognize it and keep it with you.

  20. You can change the world: Every single person has the ability to change the world whether directly or indirectly. When you change your life and the lives of those around you, you've changed the world. Small things that you do can make a huge impact on the world.

Written on 2/13/2008 by Andrew Galasetti of Lyved. Republished on 7/12/09.Photo Credit: suburbanbloke

Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Managing Email

I got this in my Email from the DLM Blog.

My method is to have all my email forwarded to a gmail based account, with labels. Check out the other tips:

How to Consolidate Multiple Inboxes into One

Posted: 14 Jul 2009 05:47 AM PDT

Fairly recently here at Dumb Little Man, I wrote a post which shared my tips on clearing a massively crowded inbox. At the time, I had 5 email accounts and they all had thousands of emails into them. From the advice on that post, I showed how anyone in a similar situation can get the size of their inbox down, quickly and efficiently.

What I didn't touch upon in that article is how I managed to merge all of my inboxes together. I went from 4 that I would check daily, and 1 that I would check weekly, to only using one now every single day. With more and more people moving online each day, there are new services coming out to handle our needs and multiple solutions that people use.

My first email account was with my school, and then I moved to Lycos, and then to Hotmail (which was purchased by Microsoft). These days, as a webmaster, I use Google Apps to give me an email address that not only includes my domain name, but gives me all the features of Gmail.

In this article I want to share my tips on consolidating your inboxes into just one in order to make life a little easier.

Organise Each Account Before You Move Anything
Before you forward all emails to the one account you have chosen or import them anywhere, tidy it up first. You can find most of my tips on this here, but as a summary:
  • Un-subscribe from email lists you no longer care about
  • Turn-off unnecessary communications from social networks, forums and the like
  • Search for phrases which you know will only show junk messages and remove them all at once
  • Make sure you save your password and registration type emails before removing anything
Once you have your inbox clear, you can then look at consolidation.

Import All Necessary Emails

Now that things are tidy, you will want to move all important emails from each account into their final home. The process on how to do this will vary greatly depending on what type of email set-up you are using.

Some great guides for some of the most common moves can be found on the following sites:
  • Moving from Hotmail to Gmail - Here
  • Moving from Outlook to Gmail - Here
  • Moving from Outlook to Thunderbird - Here
If you are using some other service or moving your emails in a different direction, a quick Google search will usually help you with your specific needs.

Forward Future Emails from Each Account
Now that all your emails are in one place, you still don't want to go back to other services to check for new emails. Before 'leaving' each account for good, you need to make sure that future emails each receives will all go to the same account.

You can do this in Gmail by going to Settings; Forwarding; Then enter your email address

You are also given the option to choose whether you want to keep incoming emails in this newly redundant account or simply forward to your new account and then delete in the old.

To forward Outlook emails somewhere else you can go to Tools; Rules and Alerts; Then create a new forwarding rule

Update Friends & Websites With Your Email Address
The solution of forwarding isn't very useful if you still have to open Outlook or Thunderbird everyday for emails to be forwarded to your final account. For this reason, make sure you tell your friends, co-workers and family about your change of address.

It might be best to do this by sending out a mass email.

Similarly, it's a good idea to update your email address on websites you use or lists you subscribe to so that you can guarantee proper delivery of your emails. Examples of this include your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or online forum accounts.

Choose Your Email Signature Carefully

Some people have multiple email accounts because one is for business and one is for personal use. If that is the case, I recommend you keep things that way unless otherwise necessary. In my situation, I had multiple personal accounts that didn't really need to be separate.

I run a lot of websites and each have their own contact form, so I had to be especially careful about the email signature I choose. If people are emailing you about one thing and your signature is related to something completely different, it's likely that they will be confused.

See if there is an option in whatever client you are using to be able to switch between multiple signatures either manually or based on certain words that the email contains. This way you won't be sending out any confusing messages.

Have you had the pleasure of consolidating multiple inboxes? How did it go?

Written on 7/14/2009 by Glen Allsop. Glen writes on the subject of Personal Development at PluginID. His site's main aim is to help people Plug into their Identity, be who they want to be and live the life they want to live.Photo Credit: idogcow

Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Video Time: Eat like a Cowboy

Kim Komando featured this recently:

Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


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Monday, July 13, 2009

Help!

I was cleaning out my email yesterday and found this piece from the DLM Blog. Click on the links and let me know which ones you like:

30+ Useful Websites You Probably Didn't Know About

Posted: 11 Jul 2009 06:57 AM PDT

No, we're not talking about blogs and random articles. We are talking about pure, no nonsense, get something done now, kind of sites.

Would you like to get out of your cell phone contract? How about finding a free, easy way to back-up your computer? Maybe you'd love a new way to discover cool music that is suited to your tastes. Or maybe you just need to find a public toilet, like right now!

Well, good news, boss! Help for these needs is just a click away! Here are some super useful websites that you've probably never heard of that can help make your life easier, richer, and more enjoyable!

If you have some favorites to share (and I know you do), please leave a link in the comments!

General Goodness
  • Cellphone Contract Buster. Want out of your cellphone contract? You may be able to do just that. Check out: Cellswapper and CellTradeUSA. Note that you need to get permission from your carrier in advance and let them know if you want to keep your phone number.
  • GetHuman: Stop being frustrated with automated phone systems. This extensive list will give you the ways to reach a live person at hundreds of companies!
  • Cash in on Airline Points: at Points.com: If you can't sell your airline points and if you can't use them either, you can now swap them for other items.
  • How Stuff Works: If you ever need to know how something works from computer related queries to health to business and more, check out How Stuff Works.
  • Online Conversions. Convert any measurement to another. Extensive and useful resource!
  • Search Public Records. Links to over 41,000 searchable public record databases. United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe.
Health & Fitness
  • Toilet Finder: Mizpee.com - Lists public restrooms in 18 US and Canadian cities. Go find one now or add your favorites and rate them! Handy when you gotta go!
  • Weight Management: Free calorie counter, weight loss calculators and weight loss tutorials. Very no-nonsense.
Happiness
  • Musicicovery. Discover new music according to mood, energy level, genre, and more. Very cool interface with results displayed in mindmap format. Very cool!
  • WikiTravel. Wikipedia for travelers. Tons of great information on your chosen destination.
Family & Home
  • Online Family Tree: Geni.com. This is a very cool online application that has many features! You can fill in your whole family tree going backwards and outwards. In addition you can set up profiles, set reminders, and more. It is a private social network for your family!
  • HomeFair: Rich resource for families that are moving: discover city reports, school reports, and relocation wizards. Also calculate whether you are getting a fair salary for your credentials and your location. There are many calculators also including whether you should buy a home or rent.
  • Universal Packing List. An online wizard that helps you with your packing list.
  • Good Recipes Free: Epicurious. Excellent!
  • How to Clean Anything. The name says it all.
  • FixItClub.com: How to fix just about anything
Business & Finances
  • Free Business Planning Resources: Check out the Small Business Administration's resources! They are abundant, highly useful, and free!
  • Consumer Ratings: If you're shopping for an item head on over to ePinions.com for ratings, reviews, and price comparisons. Virtually all types of products are covered from Electronics to Baby stuff to Office Supplies to Beauty and more! Also try ConsumerReview.
  • Online Library Book Requests! Lookup your local library's website. (You'll need to be a member first.) Request books, videos, and music. Pick them up when you get the email that they are ready for you! Better than Amazon and free if you return them on time!
Free Stuff
  • Freecycle.org: Sign up with your local chapter to donate used items and put in requests for items you need. Items can be as small as baby clothes and as big as automobiles.
  • Free Paperbacks: Paperbackswap.com - donate yours and take others'.
  • Computer Backups - Backup your computer online for free with either Mozy or Carbonite. Both sites have free offers but the larger packages and durations will need to be paid for.
  • Free Books, CD's, & DVD's: Titletrader.com -there's nothing to lose! Also check out Full Books for more free books.
  • Ringtones: Check out Phonezoo. You can create ringtones and download a ton - all for free.
  • Learn a Foreign Language: Mango can get you started in 12 different languages. FSI does the same and maybe even a little better. You can choose, they are both free.
  • Free Technical Support: Did you know that you can get free tech support? Try these free services if you're sick of paying big bucks to Microsoft and other big name companies for help:
  • Protonic
  • Written on 3/12/2008 by K. Stone of Life Learning Today. Republished on 7/11/09.Photo Credit: alextremps

    Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


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    Sunday, July 12, 2009

    Video Time: Normal Day

    Have you ever had a "Normal Day"?


    Fort Wayne Site-of-the-Day


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