Month: November 2008

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SEs Keep Deals Moving in a Down Economy

Yes, SEs can play an important role in the sales cycle in a down economy.

How? Note that in a complex sales cycle there are actually two decision cycles at work in parallel — The business decision and the technical decision. These decision cycles are independent of each other except that the technical decision needs to happen well before the business decision.

So, just because the business decision is stalled because money is not flowing, does not prevent the technical decision from moving forward as usual. The SE can work the technical decision right up to actually acquiring the decision. The SE can then maintain watch over those technical closures until the economy starts moving again, and it will. At that time, there will be a queue of technically closed deals awaiting business closure.

Sales VPs, I wouldn’t be so quick to lay off SEs during a down time. There’s plenty for them to do.

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Gmail’s “Labels” can act like “Folders”! (but don’t tell anybody)

If you wanted folder functionality in your web based client, you were usually out of luck with Gmail. In fact, here they say so:

Folders

Actually, Gmail doesn’t use folders. To help you organize your mail more effectively, Gmail uses labels instead.

Here’s why we think labels are better than folders:

Labels

Folders
A conversation can have more than one label You can only put a message in one folder
A conversation can be in several locations (Inbox, All Mail, Sent Mail, etc.) at once, making it easier to find later You have to remember where you filed a message to retrieve it
You can search conversations by label You can’t always do folder-specific searches

But this isn’t actually true-on either account.

You can actually have both folders and labels in Gmail-effectively having cake and eating it, too. All you need to do is install GTDInbox for Gmail so that your browser version of Gmail will act more like the IMAP service it actually is-showing you folders and such like it does in Thunderbird. This does not change anything about Gmail-instead it makes the Gmail interface look the way the actual Gmail servers see the email you have there. This step is also reversible, so any time you want to go back, just uninstall/disable the add-on. Simple.

So lets make a folder in Gmail called TEST:


Continue reading “Gmail’s “Labels” can act like “Folders”! (but don’t tell anybody)”

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WTF Fidelity? An open letter…

Fidelity Logo
I just fired off a little stress relief to my primary 401k company, Fidelity:

“[At Fidelity] I currently own/invest in:

Fidelity Dividend Growth FDGFX
Fidelity Magellan FMAGX
Fidelity Select Software & Comp FSCSX

I owned 10 funds at one time, but when I saw them all falling through the roof I converted most to cash, so I could ride this out.

The problem is, YOU DIDN’T!
Continue reading “WTF Fidelity? An open letter…”

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PacSafe CarrySafe 100 Claims a Victim!

In this article I talked about how useful the PacSafe straps were. I still feel this way, but I discovered that there is a trade-off in the design.

(click any image for full size) The problem is flexibility. In order to make a strap flexible, it needs to use a wire rope that it made of lots of thin strands. The problem is that with these small strands, they will break off of the rope. A good design anticipates this and either coats the wire rope in plastic, or covers the rope in a material that the little strands can’t poke through. Unfortunately, neither of these precautions exist in the PacSafe CarrySafe 100 camera strap.

Right where the strap has to make a 180 degree turn, it is most vulnerable to fraying. When this happens, you will bring the very thin wire strand across whatever part of your body it is closest to. It is so small that you will never notice it-until it cuts your skin. And fray it did:
Continue reading “PacSafe CarrySafe 100 Claims a Victim!”