Now, his message is not to pay your professionals less money so they’ll be more productive but to allow them to concentrate on their passion of what they do without the thought of money or any type of reward. People in my line of profession want to be passionate about what they’re doing and allowed to accomplish their job without someone standing on their feet about it. We want to concentrate on our work and enjoy it. That is our reward. That’s why we do what we do.

“Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.”

Autonomy, Mastery and Performance!!! What an awesome concept. I love being able to manage myself. I’m not the type of person that wants to be told when to get to work and when to leave work. Some days I feel like putting in 12 to 15 hours of work and can be pretty productive during that time. My creativity is flowing and my mind is on point. Then there are days where my mind is blank and I am not productive at all. I’m just there wasting time. I’d be better off doing something else where my head is not on my job.

The ideal situation for me would be to let me work at those times that I’m feeling most productive. Let me manage myself. Thing is, I am a lot more productive in the evenings. I’m just not a morning person. And at the age of 30 I pretty much know that I will never be a morning person. If I could, I would work from mid morning, maybe even noon, to early evenings or even late into the evenings.

I’ll use a day out of my week from last week. I was at my day job from 8:00 am in the morning till around 5:30 pm. During that time I was tired and not as productive as I could have been. My head and my thoughts were clouded and I really couldn’t concentrate. After that I went home, caught an hour nap and got up to work on a contract website. During that time until around 2:30 AM in the morning I was a lot more productive. Some of my best work came during that time. I felt refreshed and energized. I could think clearly and productively.

I love Dans concepts and the information he’s including. I think what he speaks about would be a great business model. I think allowing your employees to control and express themselves is ideal. Let them be autonomous, especially in a creative environment.

My favorite part of the entire lecture is when Dan touches on the open-source industry. I’m a HUGE advocate of the open-source business model and I can understand his thoughts on why it’s been so successful and how it relates to his subject matter. Creative and IT professionals don’t do what we do for monetary benefit – not entirely anyway. We do need money. Its all about “Autonomy, Mastery and Performance.”

Anyway, I loved this video. The icing on the cake was the illustrations. Great stuff and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

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Now let me say that I am by no means anti-Mac. I love their products and if I had the chunk of change I would own one of their top of the line Mac Book Pros. However, I do understand Mac’s attractiveness and why it’s so popular. With that understanding I can also see thier faults as well.

To me the iPad missed on a great market with some of it’s short comings. Flash support being the biggest. Sure the refined OS of the iPad is amazing and from what I have read about it, it’s flawless and an experience in itself. This is all typical of an Apple product. Having said that, I still wouldn’t throw my money at one of these things. I understand it’s not necessarily a laptop, netbook or phone but there is still some things it could have capitalized on being such a great concept.

For a techie like me I’m not really attracted to cute apps and tricks. I need functionality and compatibility. Yes there is a lot of productivity software type of apps for the iPad but no multitasking you say? I can’t imagine what the developers at Apple were thinking when they didn’t integrate some sort of multitasking capability.

I want something that’ll allow me to to do more than the simple day-to-day stuff. Sometimes I may need to jump onto one of my websites and edit code while I’m on-the-go. In doing so, I have to be able to jump back and forth between my ftp client, a text editor, and a browser and maybe sometimes a graphic editor. With my Lenovo S10 Netbook, this is easy and I carry it around with me for that reason. It’s extremely convenient; so much so that I’ve whipped it out in a bar a few times to make a couple edits to a clients website. Plus it has a fully functional Ubuntu OS so it’s not just small and cute.

The answer to the iPad’s woes: The ICD Gemini.

This thing is chock full of awesomeness. Way too much to be covered here but for starters it has an 11.2″ HD display and will play full resolution High Definition videos. The device runs Google’s Android OS and along with that a web browser that supports Flash.

Further more, you can use this thing as a cellular phone. It supports Cellular Voice, Data, SMS and MMS along with wifi connectivity. Not to fall short of anything it also sports an FM tuner.

I can’t wait to see this thing out in the world and hopefully get my hands on one. I would like to see if this thing can handle a full on Ubuntu install.

For more info check out the Engadget.com review of the ICD Gemini. This has a full listing of specs and a comparison chart to the iPad and another device called the JooJoo.

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Change Is Good…

In light of spring and the changing of the seasons I’ve put together some minor updates to the theme of my website. Although I wasn’t exactly going for any “look” in particular, I like the metallic feel and the burnt-in oriental flower background in the header. I think it came out really cool. I usually like dark colors as I think it’s a little easier to read off of, but maybe that’s just me.

With that in mind I stuck with a darker gray and light font as apposed to the black that overwhelmed the design before. I changed the colors of headings to stand out more and added an underline to them to separate content throughout my blogs.

These changes took only a few hours and to me that is the beauty of a website that is theme or template based. Making major look and feel changes can be applied site wide extremely easily. I hope this inspires some of you all to refresh your websites and keep things fresh.

Back In School

So after a five week break from school due to “technical difficulties” with my account, I’m back. Today was my first day being back in and it felt good. Everyone likes to feel like they’re being responsible with their future. I’m taking a Sociology class and I’m looking forward to it. Not because of the work but because it makes me feel constructive; I feel like I’m accomplishing something. It’s a self-serving feeling but hey, in the end, I’m better for it and I just may finish that degree.

Latest Photos Uploaded Gallery

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In my friend Victor’s vision, The Santa Fe VIP was set out to be an end-all be-all resource for everything related to Santa Fe and in particular, it’s nightlife. After a little deliberating and getting an understanding for his project I had him focus the scope of his website on nightlife and highlight various businesses in town on a more concentrated scale.

Instead of being “all inclusive” I suggested he make exclusivity his selling point. My idea to him was, “What would make a persons night in Santa Fe a VIP experience?” People want to know about the deals in town. They want to feel like they’re getting the hook up or they’re part of “the crew”. If anyone has ever been to a night club that had a cover charge and known the bouncer well enough to get a deal at the door, that’s a “VIP Experience” and was going to be our model.

So far, it’s working, and because of Victor’s range of friends and connections in the restaurant and night club industry he’s been able to lock in some great deals and pass them on to readers of the website. He’s locked in a following and people appreciate the service.

My Role…

My role was simply to build and maintain the website and to help Victor get an understanding of publishing web content through a Content Management System; WordPress in this instance. The website went through a slew of design changes while Victor and I deliberated over how he could manage and maintain content as well as sell the site to potential customers with ad space and exclusively offered customized web pages.

Requirements

Victor initially didn’t express many requirements or things that were a MUST HAVE which gave me complete control over the creative process. He expressed to me his idea and I simply translated that into a functional web design. Some things that he did like were rotating and dynamic content; “flashy” stuff. I had a few ideas and a couple things that I hadn’t really tried or used before. For one, this is a website that is about entertainment so it should have some entertaining value to it. This means content that changes and isn’t stale. A lot of my clients want their information out but aren’t necessarily looking for any entertaining value in their content. Victor, on the other hand was.

In order to achieve what Victor wanted I used a jquery rotating banner on the home page. This would serve as two functions: ad space for exclusive customers or content and it has an wow factor. It’s dynamic content; It’s “Flashy”.

The Logo

When creating the logo we had a lot of different opinions. I had my own vision of what I thought it should look like and so did Victor. So to remedy that issue I had him send me examples of what he liked; font’s etc. He directed me to the website of Cody Sanderson. Cody is an amazing local Native American Jeweler and Victor liked the font on his website banner. After about two days of trying to find the font that Cody used I realized it was most likely a custom font and I’d save time just making it myself. Using Trajan Normal as a template I was able to add the exaggerated columns, ornate swirls and pronounced swooshes. What transpired from that was a pretty cool font and a great logo.

Results?

So far the website has been very successful and we’ve garnished a lot of attention from different resources namely Facebook and Twitter. I’ve always been a very big advocate for Social Networking. Not as a cool toy or a way to meet with old friends and reach out to social interests, but as a way to reach out to a large audience to gain interest in your content. More specifically in this case: Santa Fe locals and tourists were the target audience and both Facebook and Twitter offered a great way to reach out to that audience.

The site is growing everyday. Throughout the last month (even before announcing a launch) the website has had approximately 7,000 hits. Victor himself has managed to sell some of his newly found web-based real estate and produce some valuable content. Although we’ve experienced a few bumps with media content, Victor has grown comfortable in publishing regular blogs and events with pictures and links.

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What’s even cooler is sending a tweet is as simple as invoking Do’s dialog and typing away. Once your message is complete hit enter and your message has been sent to your Twitter account. You’ll even get a notification that Twitter has received and posted your message.

If you don’t have Gnome-Do installed:

sudo apt-get install gnome-do

To set up your account you need to search “All Plugins” for “twitter” and enable the Microblogging plugin. Note: Because the Microblogging plugin is not an official Do plugin make sure you have “All Plugins” selected in the Show: drop down list.

Click on the Configure button > select Twitter from the drop down. Enter your username and password and you’re set up. Immediately you should start seeing tweets in the notification area.

The Microblogging plugin does have other features that can be explored. For more information check out the Gnome-do Microblogging Wiki. Happy tweeting!

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