…Then you want to go here and download and install the appropriate software for your Windows system: Security Essentials Download.
According to this, Microsoft has upgraded it’s security software to prevent similar attacks. That’s good. What’s not good is that you can be certain there will be a wave of copycat attacks coming. Get the software and install it today.
…then what you need is a good list to go through. Here's one List I highly recommend: Every book Barack Obama recommended during his presidency. There's a wide range of books here, and quite a few to chose from. Regardless of what you pick from it, I think you'll be rewarded with a good read.
According to Snopes (snopes.com), it is not. As in, there is not a specific day that is the most depressing day of the year.
That said, if you read carefully, you can see why people accept this notion. January can be a difficult month for many reasons. You might feel that the entire month is filled with Blue Mondays. Take it easy on yourself, especially if you have challenging resolutions you are trying to complete.
Good luck. Stay healthy.
(Image, via The Sun, shows the so called formula for calculating Blue Monday)
Unsubscribing to mailing lists you no longer read or want is a good resolution to make and keep. Here’s why it’s a good idea:
By the way, if you’ve been wanting to do a New Year’s resolution but haven’t come up with any, this one is easy.
Christmas for me is many things, including an annual exercise in planning. I keep a Word document that I update every year. It contains the typical list of things to do, by when. It tracks cards sent and received, presents given to whom, key dates, even what I need to buy for Christmas Day meal. One other thing I keep is a list of lessons learned. Here’s mine.
(Originally posted on Posterous, December 5 2011, 7:51 AM)
So says this article: Want to Raise Your IQ by 23 Percent? Neuroscience Says Take Up This Simple Habit | Inc.com
The article provides the details and a strong case for it. Meditation: not just good for relaxing. Make it your goal in 2017.
And by next, I mean this: How do you spot the next terrorist? – The Globe and Mail. Chances are the solutions they are proposing are wrong and harmful. Read that and know why.
If you love art, but believe you have to have tons of money or an art history degree to have an art collection, then take a few minutes and watch the above videos from the good people at art interiors (two of whom are in the video). After watching it, you’ll feel it’s something you can achieve, I’m sure.
Next step? I recommend a visit to their site and store to see what they have that suits you.
Good luck!
Over the last year or so, I’ve found these worthwhile pieces on how to think about life and how to improve it. If you find one of these worthwhile and it improves your life as a result of you reading it, then I think collecting and writing about these is worthwhile.
(Image from one of the articles linked to on NYTimes.com)
Is this you: despite having a great resume and being really good at your job, you aren’t appreciated at your current workplace or you are struggling to find a new place to work? If so, I encourage you to read this: The Life of a Free Agent Kicker | The Players’ Tribune
It doesn’t matter if you love or hate football, it is a great example of how you need to think in order to stay positive and maintain perspective when your work situation gets tough.
You can be great at your job, you can have a record of success, and you can still be rejected by employers. It can happen to anyone. You have to stay ready, stay focused, and do your best when the next opportunity comes along. Read the article and grab some perspective.
If you want to do more than vote in an election, especially if you are an American, then read this: THIS ELECTION IS FREAKING ME OUT, WHAT CAN I DO!? (An Introduction to Field Organizing). Obviously this is geared towards Hillary Clinton supporters for president, but read it regardless of you who you plan to vote for and at what level. It should help you get to the point of at least knowing the right questions to ask and where you might go next to get more involved.
Voting is important, but there is much more to democracy than that. If you step up, your involvement will make a difference, regardless of your role. Good for you for taking that next step.
My teenage son was wanting to wear fragrance, and I found that when it comes to this, there is something of a dilemma. On one hand, low cost fragrances (e.g. under $20) smell awful. (Think fresh cut lime juice mixed with a bottle of cat urine.) Fragrances that are appealing, on the other hand, can easily cost $50, $60, $70 and more. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that teen age boys (based on my limited observations) go through a lot of fragrance.
A way out of that dilemma is to buy fragrance from Zara. The fragrances above cost around $15 and they cover a range of scents. Some have more citrus, others more floral, some have dominant woody notes. In short, you can likely find a scent he will like that won’t cost you a fortune.
Do these fragrances have the richness or complexity of a product from Issey Miyake or Tom Ford? Nope. But he’ll smell better than his buddies drenched in Axe, even if he puts on too much at first, which he probably will. Your pocketbook and the people who have to share close space with him will thank you.
P.S. The two fragrances above come from a line of Zara fragrances named after famous streets. The packaging looks like the kind you would get with high end fragrances. I recommend them. That said, Zara has a number of fragrance lines. It will likely be painful, but try and get him to go and check out the fragrances himself so he will pick one he’ll like and wear.
P.S.S. These fragrances are not just for teenage boys, of course. Anyone can wear them if it appeals to them.
If you are a software developer or someone working in IT, you need to consider having more than a good resume or CV. You should consider having:
If you use github.io to host your professional web site, you get to cross off #2 and #3 with one effort.
I was reminded of this when I went to check out this page: DevProgress Tech Volunteer Questionnaire. You can see them asking for this information. It makes sense: if you are looking to hire a developer, it would be great to see not just what people are saying about them on LinkedIn, but what their code looks like too.
For some employees, putting code on github may not be an option. In that case focus on the first two and have a page somewhere on the web that discusses why you can’t host code there.
If you want a better understanding of artificial intelligence or if you want to gain some insight into the future of machine learning, I recommend these two free reports, found here: Free AI Reports from O’Reilly Media. There’s so much hype and speculation about AI: these reports cut through all that noise and they will give you a better understanding of what A.I. really is and where it is going.
P.S. If you like them, check out the many great non-A.I. related reports as well. You don’t have to be a technologist to be able to read them.
Like most people — for instance, me — , you may need to get in better shape. In doing some research on it, I came across the following links that I found interesting, inspiring, and useful. I hope you do too:
It’s 2 and a half minutes. What? You don’t have time? You have time to get a coffee. You have time to check your phone. You have time to read your inbox again. So you have time to watch this. Don’t play basketball? It doesn’t matter. Check it out.
Work harder. Think harder. Try harder. Fail harder. Be better.
Put away that email you are about to send out and read this: Your Late-Night Emails Are Hurting Your Team. The same is true for the Sunday evening emails. Stop sending them.
Once you do that, look at how many emails you send out and try and find ways to reduce that, either with meetings, quick chats, or other media (e.g., internal blogs, status updates).
The result will be a better informed and a more motivated team.
It does sound too good to be true, and no, I haven’t tried it, but if you want to change your work routine, consider the pomodoro technique.
If you are still interested, there is an article on it: The Simple Technique To Fit A 40-Hour Workweek Into 16.7 Hours. I find it hard to believe, but for some of you, it may just be the thing you need to improve your work life.
This is for a particular app (MLB At Bat monthly subsciption charge will continue until you turn it off), but it should work for any app you have that is billing you monthly.
It may not seem much a month, but like any slow leak, the cost adds up. Best to seal it right away.
And as you can see from this: Italy’s dietary guidelines actually say pasta and cookies are food groups in Vox. Depending on where they originate, food guidelines are often very different. There is some overlap (which isn’t surprising), but there are just as many differences.
If you are confused as to what you should choose, try going with Sweden’s (below): it seems the most sensible.
What you want to do next is head over to Mashable.com and read this: The 100 best iPhone apps of all time. Apps make your iPhone much better. While you likely have heard of a certain percentage of them, but most you have not. Get them and make your phone better.
This article, Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss | First Round Review, is making the rounds and is making my nervous. It makes me nervous because it is a terrible concept and it is very hard to do well. Even the example given – being called stupid – is a bad one. Be wary of any boss or any organization adopting this in your workplace.
My long work experience is that the Challenge Directly part takes little effort and energy, but the Care Personally part takes a lot of effort and energy. The result is a drift towards a demoralizing and toxic work environment with lots of criticism and little encouragement.
There is a rare exception where I have seen radical candor work: an elite athlete with an elite coach. Elite athletes sign up for and encourage radical candor because it is the best way to be the best. If you consider your work role similar to an elite athlete and you consider your boss an elite coach, then radical candor could work for you. Likewise if you are in the role of manager. Otherwise, I would recommend you pass on this approach and look for a better way to work.
As Snopes.com says:
An uplifting social media rumor about the purportedly heroic actions of a security guard named Zouheir during the Paris attacks was largely inaccurate.
For the details, see Zouheir: The MUSLIM Who Saved Thousands of Lives? : snopes.com.
More and more, whenever I see something viral, I check Snopes.com.
If you hang around with or are involved in some way with IT people, you will come across individuals extolling the virtues of being a “Maker”. Making things (typically software or IT systems) is seen as a virtue, in some case one of the highest virtues, and the implication is that makers are virtuous people.
A well written critique of that is here: Why I Am Not a Maker – The Atlantic. If you consider yourself a maker or aspire to be considered one, you should read it. A key point is this:
When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.
This is true: tech culture sometimes places little or no value on other activities, such as the ones that the article mentions.
My main criticism of the article is that it has a blind spot for the middle ground. I know plenty of creative people whom I consider makers that also take care of others, teach, manage, administer…you name it. Often time the things they make are superior to those of people who devote themselves to being makers.
Being a maker is a virtuous thing, for the most part. But so is teaching, providing care, managing, cleaning, coaching and many other positive activities. Find the thing you are good at and contribute positively in your own way. If you can make some things along the way, all the better.
I’ve seen the squiggly versus straight line path to success in many places. It’s a great concept, and a handy reminder to keep close when things seem in a muddle and you wonder if you will ever progress. It’s also a good reminder to keep a log of your progress. A log will remind you that you are succeed, despite those bewildering times when things seem like you are getting nowhere fast.
For anyone starting out on the road to being an independent adult, the book Adulting (from Hachette) is a good guide to have. It is packed with tips – 468 to be exact – on pretty much any experience you are going to go through in your early 20s. If this is you or someone you love, this book will have an obvious appeal.
It’s not just for young people though. I think all adults could benefit from parts of the book, especially if you are having to start out on some adult experience that is either new to you or something you haven’t done for some time. It’s good advice, and good advice never goes out of date.
Even if you don’t need good advice, read it just for the humour. It’s a very funny book. (Note, there is a fair amount of profanity and references to sex, but if that doesn’t bother you, then you’ll be fine.)
Finally, if you want to have a better understanding of what life is like for that young person you know, this book can help you achieve that.
By the way, if you want a preview of it, you can check out the Adulting blog. Also very good.
I was killing time in a bookstore last night and I thought it looked good. I ended up reading it from cover to cover.
Sales people asking you if you want insurance at a counter leans on your anxiety and often leads you to end up buying it. Should you? Well, if it is rental car insurance, Vox says no and does so persuasively, here: Why rental car insurance is usually a rip-off – Vox.
Two other places I see people wasting money on insurance is toys and video games. Toys R Us used to push insurance on me all the time. Before you buy it, consider how your child plays with a toy. Chances are, the insurance doesn’t buy you anything. If it is the only toy you are going to buy your child and the only one they will play with for a long time, then sure. But most children will play intently with a toy for awhile and then the interest drops.
Likewise with video games. Perhaps your child will play with it for a year and it will be their favorite game. Most times, I’ll bet they play intently for awhile, and then the interest drops. During that time, the chance of damage is very slight.
The insurance for toys and video games is low, but it buys you next to nothing. If the store said: do you mind if we charge you an extra 5-10% on this item, you would laugh and say “no!”. Yet that is what they are doing with insurance.
Skip it and use the few bucks to treat your child to a sweet or yourself to a coffee or give it to someone in need.
Do you ever get stuck in this loop?
If so, then the Atlantic has an article for you. According to this article, The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It – The Atlantic,
Delaying hard work is all about your mood.
And it goes on to talk about how to defeat this.
Seven additional suggestions I have on defeating this doom loop:
It depends on a number of factors, but if you want to decide solely on popularity, then you need to see this: The Most Popular Programming Languages of 2015 | ProgrammableWeb.
At the top you have some consistency, with Java at the top, and C, C++ and C# in the top five. Python, a language that I am becoming fond of and using to replace Perl, is up there at #4.
Following that are what you’d expect: PHP, Ruby, and Javascript, as well as some data oriented languages.
What is interesting, and not shown, are new and up and coming languages, such as Swift. I expect that to inch into the top 10 in the next few years.
If you want to focus on learning a programming language, and you have no other criteria, pick something from this list.
Over at Vox is your typical article critiquing multitasking: Multitasking is inefficient. Here are 6 tips for a more productive workday. – Vox.
If you do a search on the word multitasking, you will find similar articles. Like the Vox piece, they are all reasonable, and they all offer good advice.
What they all miss is why we multitask. I think there are three key reasons why we do, and they go hand in hand:
To give you an example of what I mean, consider your day. You likely have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Now let’s look at the tool you have at hand in an office. First, you have a computer and you use software like email and your browser. With email, you can start a number of tasks, but you cannot complete them. With your browser, you ask for information, then you wait for a response. If you are using a mobile device, a similar lag in request and response occurs. Now, you could just sit there and wait for a response to complete your task, but remember, you have too much to do and not enough time. As a result, you start other tasks. You are ….multitasking. You are maximizing your idle time while you wait for tasks to complete. Now you could just sit there, look out the window or go for a walk, but that would be ignoring the third point, which is that you will be penalized for not appearing busy.
If you are fortunate, you can focus on one task, complete it, and then move on to the next one. If you are like most of us, you have to multitask for the reasons above.
One way to enjoy a staycation is to visit neighborhoods you normally don’t go to and treat them like you would any neighborhood in a city you are visiting. If you are from Toronto and think this is a good idea, then BlogTO has a number of pages devoted to what you can do in many of this city’s neighborhoods . Here’s a list of some of them I put together:
This list is also great if you are a tourist and want to see what the various neighborhoods of Toronto offer. Toronto has more great neighborhoods not on this list, ones you have likely heard of, like West / Queen West, the Beach/Beaches, and Harbourfront. Add some of these neighborhoods listed above to round out your trip to this city.
Here’s two views on Greece: one good, one glib.
I’m a fan of Michael Lewis, but this piece of his, Greece Saunters Across the Autobahn – Bloomberg View, is glib at best. It feels like he had to bang out a few hundred words on Greece or he had this Berkeley story he’s been itching to use and finally found a place.
It’s still worth reading, because he is a good writer and his thinking is likely what many people are reading. But don’t read it thinking you will get a better understanding of why Greece is in the state it is in.
After skimming that, read this: Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy by Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.
It sums up what I’ve been reading by people who are more aware of what is happening in Greece. You will come away shaking your head, as you should. For what is happening makes no sense from an economic viewpoint. But then, much of Europe has been making poor choices with their economies since the Great Recession started., mainly for ideological reasons.
Are you thinking of getting fit this summer? Or do you like to read about people getting fit while you drink your favorite cocktail and sit under the shade? Either way, here’s a bunch of interesting links you’ll want to read
Runner’s World | What Will It Take to Run A 2-Hour Marathon: fascinating. Right now men are closing in on this number, but this article shows how hard it will be to achieve that time. Even people who don’t run marathons will find this worth a look.
Weight loss and habit forming — Let’s not pretend we have it all figured out — Medium. For those of you struggling with their weight, this will be of some comfort.
Your Body is All You Need: The World’s Oldest Training Method (and a 1% Workout) | Arnold Schwarzenegger. Do you think you need fancy equipment to get fit? Think again and listen to Arnold.
Take off that Fitbit. Exercise alone won’t make you lose weight. – The Washington Post. Not just for fitbit users, but anyone trying to lose weight. You need to cut back on eating to make gains (though with enough exercise over time, you can lose that way too).
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Eats About 821 Pounds Of Cod Per Year | FiveThirtyEight. On the other hand, here is an extreme example of what massive amounts of exercise can do to your diet. The Rock eats alot. ALOT. See for yourself.
The Rise of the Spornosexual. Finally, this post is a good one on anyone who wants to go from blah to fit. (The image above is from this piece.) It’s a spartan life to get that way, but it is within the range of the possible for anyone dedicated. Like you, perhaps? (And yes, they use a bunch of tricks to make the After photo look fitter than the Before photo, but still, the dude is fitter.)
Mashable seems to have taken Newt on staff to do tech reviews and here he is the first piece of his I’ve come across: Newt Gingrich reviews the Apple Watch.
I was surprised, but I found his review well suited for non-technical people who are wondering if such and such technology is worth it for them. If you fall into that category, you should get some benefit out of what he writes.
If you are highly motivated at work, that is excellent. If you are not, and need some food for thought that may help fuel you to be more motivated, I recommend this: On the Origins of Motivation at Work from The Book of Life.
Are here: 23 Brilliant Life Lessons From Anthony Bourdain – Airows.
Some are great, some are funny, and some seem particular to Bourdain only. Still, well worth a look.
You may want to become a vegetarian or vegan but you may also be reluctant to give up eating things like bacon or fish. If you are experiencing this dilemma, then this question might appeal to you:
“The most effective question we can ask is not how can we increase the amount of vegetarians and vegans,” he says, “but rather, how can we reduce the amount of meat consumed?”
If this appeals to you, then I recommend this article: Love Bacon AND Animals? ‘Reducetarianism’ May Be For You. Still interested? Then I also recommend this book by Mark Bittman: VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good.
You are stressed. You decide: I need to manage it. That decision alone can help bring down your stress levels.
Your next step it to take action. If you have no idea how to do that, start here: Make stress management as routine as brushing your teeth viaThe Globe and Mail.
Teeth brushing won’t cure cavities and simple stress management techniques like these won’t cure significant problems in your life that are causing you to be stressed. But just like teeth brushing can prevent cavities, simple stress management can help alleviate some stress.
Unless you have a carefree life, these stress management techniques are worth reviewing.
If you think your Internet connection is too slow, or you just want to upgrade it, you owe it to yourself to measure how fast it is. There are a number of ways to measure it, but I like using this: Speedtest.net by Ookla – The Global Broadband Speed Test.
Record both your upload and download speed. Ideally, do it at different times of the day, and do it for both weekdays and weekends. Once you have that information, you can decide on what services would be an upgrade to this.
Also, while speed is important, the other thing to consider when you are upgrading your service is what your monthly bandwidth usage is. Your current ISP should be able to tell you that.
Can be found here: 100 Tips to Improve Your Life – 99U.
I challenge you to go through this list and not find anything here that you could apply to your own life. You will likely find at least five. If you find none, maybe your life is already perfect. 🙂
The 99U is a great source of guidance on any number of topics. I have even written some articles there.
Smart People I Know 