ATCP, LLC

A colleague turned me on to an article here that talks about 5 stunningly awful mistakes for demos. I don’t think these are all that bad, and certainly not stunning, but I’ll include the 5 here, as we have a few more practical ones to add after:

1. Misunderstand the customer’s needs: “Harbor Cruise.” Don’t make a demo in the hope that your customer will eventually see something of interest. Inexperienced salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for doing their homework. Jaded sales engineers offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from their sales colleagues. Do the research to figure out what your customers need in advance. More »

It used to be, years back, that a certification meant that you were knowledgeable. Problem was, it really only meant that you were able to pass the kind of test given, and that you had enough short term memory to cram for the test’s material. Certifications do not now, nor have they ever, indicated wisdom or knowledge in the application of one technology into the infinite variety of prospect environments.

If anything, these days too many certifications mean that the person has no time for a real job in the real world, and is virtually useless in a Sales Engineering situation. With thousands of certifications for thousands of applications, which ones do you pick? Oh yeah, and there are more every day! Would you bring a perpetual student on the most important sales call of your career? Of course not. More »

[AS2, Flash CS4 Professional]

This might sound silly, but it is extremely useful. I just did a job for a client that needed to rotate their banners on a site that they had done for them 4 years ago. The site was hard coded to:

MovieA_______________________________________________

loadMovie(”flash/MovieB.swf”, intro_mc);

intro_mc is a simple, 1 frame movie in MovieA’s library that holds a Rectangle shape the size of the banner area. You use this rectangle to precisely position the asset in Movie A. intro_mc is placed as soon as it is needed, sometimes before the frame here that loads it.

MovieB_______________________________________________

This movie has the job of loading banners and displaying them. This is a great approach for lots of reasons, but for us the most important is that we don’t have to hard-code our banner rotation worker, MovieB, into MovieA or any other caller.

MovieB loads it’s movies from an XML file called banners.xml, which looks like this:

More »

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:

More »

I think that in photography how you carry your precious gear is a complex, personal, and probably hotly debated topic. My solution to a good in all cases need was the straps from PacSafe. Their Photography section has two products in particular that I’ll talk about today:

-CarrySafe 100 – For cameras
-CarrySafe 200 – for camera bags

The 300 is to lock the bag to a pole, chair, etc.

One of the nice things about these straps is that they are made of steel cables. Not the heavy kind, but light, flexible stranded cable that cannot be cut. They appear completely normal and unimportant on the outside. The other significant thing about their design is that they each have a way that prevents the strap from being disconnected from the camera or bag. In the 100 it is a nifty block for the D ring, and the 200 is literally bolted on.
More »