So I have this Linux box running Ubuntu Server 7.10 sitting at home, downloading all my of my... data... from various sources. After about a month or so of downloading I more or less filled up my server's VERY limited 80GB drive with a variety of software, movies, music and e-books. "Fortunately," I thought to myself, "I have this massive, monolithic 500Gb HD sitting next to my desktop, why don't I just put all the data onto there!" Sureee great idea in theory... not in practice. Some of you may already know of Linux's issues handling or better described, mishandling of NTFS partitions. I got it mounted in 5 minutes or less, closed out all my torrents, shutdown the downloader and started moving all my data over... Great! That worked just marvellously! I could see all the data watch movies listen to music and read my e-books all off of my external. I even ended up multicasting a movie to watch on the TV(via S-Video) in the living room and also for my computer to watch it simultaneously... from my external. "So" I thought to myself, "I can now unmount my external drive take it upstairs, plug it into my computer and away we go, no need to transfer media over my relatively slow 100Mbps router, I can now transfer at 4.8x faster or 300x faster if only i could find my e-sata bracket!" So the drive gets plugged in to my desktop, running Windows Vista Business x32 annnnnnd it asks to format the drive... Shock.. Horror... and finally I "Come to a sad realization...".......... Allow :'(
Friday, April 11, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
SMU Leadership Fourm.. Or was it just Business...
I have never gone to a conference before; therefore, this is my first experience with this kind of environment. I also have never blogged before but I will give it my best shot.
This week, three of us from NSCC attended a conference on leadership. Let me firstly say that it was not quite what I expected. Oh, I expected all the suits and the manner of professionalism, which I do admire and enjoy but I didn’t expect it to be so business oriented but I was probably just beeing ignorant or naive to think it wouldn’t be; having said that, I did thoroughly enjoy the entire experience, and would love to attend many more conferences like this.
The first guest speakers we heard from were the owners of Just Us Coffee, Jeff and Debra Moore. By giving themselves modest salaries they were able to pay the growers and producers more, give back to the communities that they had stakeholders in and provide assistance to the infrastructure that produced their beans. This in itself is incredibly inspiring and goes to show that doing things like this pay off not only financially but also morally. I think that these two are great role models to all companies and I think that if all companies could do even half of the good deeds that Just Us did then the world would be a MUCH better place. It is also such a good business practice because in the long run you will be more productive because the infrastructure will be more advanced and your workers will be happier and work harder because they are being paid fair wages.
We were able to have a chat with them after their presentation before they exited the auditorium. I found that they were a very pleasant and sociable couple. I enjoyed meeting them and seeing how down to earth these people are, that they came from a small town, humble beginnings and how, through good, ethical business practices they were able to start a widely successful business. Chris noticed during the presentation that there was a need for more communication, more social networking between their company and the rest of the world and acted upon it. He proposed a sort of student project, to get web designers to build them a website. I’m not interested in the project as I’m a networking guy but it still was a good experience as to how to approach people and of course meeting and talking to this couple was inspiring.
After a round of psycho-analytical profiling of “who’s who and what do they do” in the lobby with a side of coffee and cookies we were back at it; this time enjoying the words of wisdom of Lynn Patterson. She seemed like an intelligent woman and obviously knew what she was talking about, but even with this being the case, overall, I just wasn’t very intrigued by her presentation. Although it is an important factor to be a socially responsible company, from my point of view, learning what factors make a company be rated good on a report card was uninteresting; it just didn’t pique my interest. What did intrigue me however was the discussion regarding NGOs. I liked hearing about the actions taken by these organizations to try and get companies to change their operating practices. I liked learning about the outcomes of having a bad (and good) rep when it comes to your consumer’s decisions. And I was captivated by how RBC is carrying out certain discussions by using a blog. I thought that was very VERY interesting that they would have done it in this manner. Typically, blog and corporations are not synonymous, they seem to be on totally different playing fields, but here we have this huge, multibillion dollar company using a blog-like forum to share ideas and discuss them. This is huge! Finally we start seeing companies starting to use these new, revolutionary social networking tools! The fact that these types of things no longer need to be discussed with all parties present in a boardroom and that they can be done online, in digital form is very exciting and again is something that Chris saw the need for and took note of it.
We returned to lobby and of course, the refreshments table, and Rebecca and I watched Chris from afar work his magic. He shrewdly walked over and queued up to have a word with Lynn, who I believe was getting somewhat aggravated after speaking to a somewhat overzealous MBA student for the past five minutes. Finally, after some waiting, the student had his fill of conversation and Chris stepped in. He introduced himself and started to chat about the whole concept of Social Networking and Rebecca and I joined in. I believe that Lynn may have not been the exact person to ask about setting up a potential social networking project with the school but I think we impressed her and hopefully she will have the time to pass it down the levels to the person best suited to do this. This project unlike the web site one, I would be much more interested in, where this is more appealing to me, being at least partially non-web based and of course because it deals with Social Networking which I have been strongly interested in since I got to the school in September.
After impressing Lynn (hopefully) we moved on to our breakout session, “History of Socially Responsible Leadership and Doing the Right Thing”. Etruscan did something very intelligent from a business point of view. They were able to get prepared while gold was cheap by doing many surveys and setting up new developments. They also had very good tactics when it came time to get the permits for these large gold deposits. Wherever they went and drilled or tested or anything they felt compelled to help the villages that they were in and in many cases this ended up securing the site for them. There were villages without books, wells, and many other basic necessities. They saw this need and acted on it. Once gold started to go back up they went into full swing, selling the stuff like crazy and since they had the infrastructure already in place to do it they ended up being quite profitable.
I found this presentation, and I almost hate to say it, but that it seemed like a company awareness plug. I mean, sure they set great examples for all other companies to follow, but I found that it was somewhat incomplete and kind of like a list of things that the company did. The other issue I had with the presentation is that I thought it was too specific, centralizing on only Africa and one or two factors of being a socially responsible corporation. Don’t get me wrong, I think that he made many good points throughout the presentation, and that others should follow their example and take things into their own hands rather than having NGOs breathing down your neck, forcing your hand, and coercing you to take socially responsible action, but it was just not complete. Again, I think the same thing as in the case of Just Us, that if more businesses and corporations follow the lead of these good, socially responsible people the world would be a better place to live in.
We then exited the auditorium for the third time that day and proceeded down the hall towards lunch, following our noses all the while. Our trio sat together in a center table and started discussing the day’s events. We were then joined shortly after by two women, one an MBA student and the other an employee of the NS gaming corporation, and a male MBA student. The lunch was divine, at least what seemed like high class cooking. We had a three course meal; tomato basil soup for the appetizer, then the main course, stuffed olive chicken, perfect taters and julienned veggies and for desert the most decadent chocolate cake. If this is how these business people eat all the time I think I chose the wrong career! Anyhow...
The keynote speaker of the day was Mickey McDonald. This man knows business. He has had so much competition throughout his career but has overcome all of the challenges he was faced with. I admire his charisma and his ease at speaking in front many people. He told basically us his life story, well at least the business side of it. He cracked many jokes and I was quite disappointed when they told him it was time to wrap things up. I think that he wasn’t very socially responsible in his early days of business from what he told us but now that he is incredibly successful he is starting to do things to give back to the community. I think of all the speakers that we heard from today Mickey was the most inspiring.
I am overjoyed that I was given a chance to participate in this conference and can only hope that there are more opportunities like this to come.
This week, three of us from NSCC attended a conference on leadership. Let me firstly say that it was not quite what I expected. Oh, I expected all the suits and the manner of professionalism, which I do admire and enjoy but I didn’t expect it to be so business oriented but I was probably just beeing ignorant or naive to think it wouldn’t be; having said that, I did thoroughly enjoy the entire experience, and would love to attend many more conferences like this.
The first guest speakers we heard from were the owners of Just Us Coffee, Jeff and Debra Moore. By giving themselves modest salaries they were able to pay the growers and producers more, give back to the communities that they had stakeholders in and provide assistance to the infrastructure that produced their beans. This in itself is incredibly inspiring and goes to show that doing things like this pay off not only financially but also morally. I think that these two are great role models to all companies and I think that if all companies could do even half of the good deeds that Just Us did then the world would be a MUCH better place. It is also such a good business practice because in the long run you will be more productive because the infrastructure will be more advanced and your workers will be happier and work harder because they are being paid fair wages.
We were able to have a chat with them after their presentation before they exited the auditorium. I found that they were a very pleasant and sociable couple. I enjoyed meeting them and seeing how down to earth these people are, that they came from a small town, humble beginnings and how, through good, ethical business practices they were able to start a widely successful business. Chris noticed during the presentation that there was a need for more communication, more social networking between their company and the rest of the world and acted upon it. He proposed a sort of student project, to get web designers to build them a website. I’m not interested in the project as I’m a networking guy but it still was a good experience as to how to approach people and of course meeting and talking to this couple was inspiring.
After a round of psycho-analytical profiling of “who’s who and what do they do” in the lobby with a side of coffee and cookies we were back at it; this time enjoying the words of wisdom of Lynn Patterson. She seemed like an intelligent woman and obviously knew what she was talking about, but even with this being the case, overall, I just wasn’t very intrigued by her presentation. Although it is an important factor to be a socially responsible company, from my point of view, learning what factors make a company be rated good on a report card was uninteresting; it just didn’t pique my interest. What did intrigue me however was the discussion regarding NGOs. I liked hearing about the actions taken by these organizations to try and get companies to change their operating practices. I liked learning about the outcomes of having a bad (and good) rep when it comes to your consumer’s decisions. And I was captivated by how RBC is carrying out certain discussions by using a blog. I thought that was very VERY interesting that they would have done it in this manner. Typically, blog and corporations are not synonymous, they seem to be on totally different playing fields, but here we have this huge, multibillion dollar company using a blog-like forum to share ideas and discuss them. This is huge! Finally we start seeing companies starting to use these new, revolutionary social networking tools! The fact that these types of things no longer need to be discussed with all parties present in a boardroom and that they can be done online, in digital form is very exciting and again is something that Chris saw the need for and took note of it.
We returned to lobby and of course, the refreshments table, and Rebecca and I watched Chris from afar work his magic. He shrewdly walked over and queued up to have a word with Lynn, who I believe was getting somewhat aggravated after speaking to a somewhat overzealous MBA student for the past five minutes. Finally, after some waiting, the student had his fill of conversation and Chris stepped in. He introduced himself and started to chat about the whole concept of Social Networking and Rebecca and I joined in. I believe that Lynn may have not been the exact person to ask about setting up a potential social networking project with the school but I think we impressed her and hopefully she will have the time to pass it down the levels to the person best suited to do this. This project unlike the web site one, I would be much more interested in, where this is more appealing to me, being at least partially non-web based and of course because it deals with Social Networking which I have been strongly interested in since I got to the school in September.
After impressing Lynn (hopefully) we moved on to our breakout session, “History of Socially Responsible Leadership and Doing the Right Thing”. Etruscan did something very intelligent from a business point of view. They were able to get prepared while gold was cheap by doing many surveys and setting up new developments. They also had very good tactics when it came time to get the permits for these large gold deposits. Wherever they went and drilled or tested or anything they felt compelled to help the villages that they were in and in many cases this ended up securing the site for them. There were villages without books, wells, and many other basic necessities. They saw this need and acted on it. Once gold started to go back up they went into full swing, selling the stuff like crazy and since they had the infrastructure already in place to do it they ended up being quite profitable.
I found this presentation, and I almost hate to say it, but that it seemed like a company awareness plug. I mean, sure they set great examples for all other companies to follow, but I found that it was somewhat incomplete and kind of like a list of things that the company did. The other issue I had with the presentation is that I thought it was too specific, centralizing on only Africa and one or two factors of being a socially responsible corporation. Don’t get me wrong, I think that he made many good points throughout the presentation, and that others should follow their example and take things into their own hands rather than having NGOs breathing down your neck, forcing your hand, and coercing you to take socially responsible action, but it was just not complete. Again, I think the same thing as in the case of Just Us, that if more businesses and corporations follow the lead of these good, socially responsible people the world would be a better place to live in.
We then exited the auditorium for the third time that day and proceeded down the hall towards lunch, following our noses all the while. Our trio sat together in a center table and started discussing the day’s events. We were then joined shortly after by two women, one an MBA student and the other an employee of the NS gaming corporation, and a male MBA student. The lunch was divine, at least what seemed like high class cooking. We had a three course meal; tomato basil soup for the appetizer, then the main course, stuffed olive chicken, perfect taters and julienned veggies and for desert the most decadent chocolate cake. If this is how these business people eat all the time I think I chose the wrong career! Anyhow...
The keynote speaker of the day was Mickey McDonald. This man knows business. He has had so much competition throughout his career but has overcome all of the challenges he was faced with. I admire his charisma and his ease at speaking in front many people. He told basically us his life story, well at least the business side of it. He cracked many jokes and I was quite disappointed when they told him it was time to wrap things up. I think that he wasn’t very socially responsible in his early days of business from what he told us but now that he is incredibly successful he is starting to do things to give back to the community. I think of all the speakers that we heard from today Mickey was the most inspiring.
I am overjoyed that I was given a chance to participate in this conference and can only hope that there are more opportunities like this to come.
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