A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Long a fan of telling business “stories” with pictures, I’m always looking for new sources and references for ideas.  One dropped in my lap the other day when a Point B colleague mentioned A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods in a Yammer posting (more to come on Yammer in another post…).  Graeme’s gift prompted me to recollect and revisit Visual Complexity, another longtime favorite of mine.

Was ist das? Eintausend Wörter.

Used in the right way, pictorial presentation of material can communicate far more than a stack of bullet points on a slide.  Which leads me to a visual tool I’m experimenting with: mind mapping.

I’ve been exposed to mind mapping a couple times and it’s nothing new to many folks, but I personally haven’t done much with it. However, it’s picking up steam with many of my colleagues, so I’m giving the Mindjet application a shot as a way to learn about mind mapping.  In many respects, Mindjet is just a different way to collect and organize notes, which is something I do a lot regularly with MS OneNote.  But it’s also interesting in that it does a lot of things you might try to do graphically with MS Visio, but a bit easier.

So I guess it’s sort of a hybrid tool, but it’s really not the tool that interests me.  It’s the mind mapping techniques and other presentation formats like you see on the Periodic Table that I need to spend time learning how to use.  Really not sure where this post is going other than making plugs for PToV and Visual Complexity.  They’re just cool.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Unboxing

I’m a wee bit behind on my posts and can’t believe it’s taken me this long to publish this post which I started on 30.Nov.08.

Julie was due for an upgrade on her personal computing power. As I reached the checkout on Dell.com for her rather snazzy new Dell Studio 1537 (in lime green!), I was offered the opportunity to add a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 netbook to my order.  “How much you pay?”, I asked.  “$173.85 with shipping & handling”, sez Michael Dell and crew.  Sold!  Here’s what came in the cutest little box ever:

• Intel Atom N270 CPU (1.6GHz w/ 512k L2 cache)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 8.9″ Wide Screen WSVGA TL monitor
• 8GB Solid State Drive
• Ubuntu Linux

Make no mistake, this is not your son’s gaming power house PC.  But it runs Ubuntu real nice, goes for hours unplugged, comes with Star Office out-of-the-box and boots up in 42 sec.  Really.  It does.  Honest.  With WiFi, a 10/100 Ethernet NIC, 3 x USB ports and a 15-pin VGA video output, it’s got the basics covered. It is sort of hard for me to touch type on, so I pretty much peck type when I use it during the occassional Saturday morning outing to Starbucks.  My kids like to steal it and check on their Webkinz.  Other than that, I haven’t found too many uses for it.  I think I need to be more purposeful in taking it with me when I run random errands.  If you’ve got ideas on how to use it more, I’m all ears.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics. Enjoy!

Da Box

Da Packing

Da Gadget

2008: A Brief Year in Review

Let’s see.  What happened this year?  Quite a bit actually.

According to my 2008 annual report from Dopplr, I traveled 189,838 km (52% of the distance to the moon) to achieve an average “personal velocity” of 21.8 km/hr over the year.  And that doesn’t count my Nike Training Log totals for 133 runs (572 mi over 81 hrs 31 min).  I spent many, many hours coaching soccer, playing soccer, watching soccer or talking about soccer, but I still love it.  I shut down my business and opened up a new career chapter.  Bought a house, sold a house, then refinanced a house.  Hosted a family reunion for 13 and a Thanksgiving dinner for 13.  Crested 500 business connections in LinkedIn and 170 friends in Facebook.  Watched my investment portfolio crater, then shifted gears to take advantage of the market opportunity.  Grew my MP3 collection to more than 4,300 tracks (with many, many more CDs yet to rip) and converted 722 35mm slides to digital images.  I shoveled, mowed, mulched, weed whacked and leaf blowed a whole bunch.  Posted a rather lame 27 times on this blog.  Gotta do better than every other week in 2009, but not exactly off to a blazing start, am I?  I did fire up rockymtnfuller.com, so that has to count for something.

Anyway, a busy year with another on the way.

Now, I leave you with this: JibJab’s usual irreverent compilation of recent events encapsulated in their short film entitled What a @#$% Year! 2008.