After giving my Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop a much-needed memory upgrade, I’m preparing to take my Windows Vista experience to another level by installing the first service pack.
From what I’ve read so far, people reported speed and battery life improvements. Those two are enough to prompt me to update to SP1. Are the negative reports true? I got a restore point in place just in case they are. 
Just to give you an idea, I’m running Windows Vista Ultimate on a Inspiron 9300 laptop with:
- 2GHz Intel Pentium M Processor
- 2GB DDR2 Memory (I upgraded from 1GB)
- 256MB NVidia GeForce 6800 Go Graphics Processor on 17″ WXGA+ Display
- 160GB Hard Drive (I upgraded from 80GB)
- and a rating of 4.0 on the Windows Experience Index
If everything goes to plan (meaning as long as Windows doesn’t crash or kill my laptop) I’ll use my Vista SP1 laptop this week to get work done. Then, later next week, I’ll report my experience. Stay tuned! 
Images courtesy of Cruz Creative™.
The MIX 2008 Internet presentation Advanced SEO for Web Developers, by Nathan Buggia, was Rated! 4 Stars.
Rated! Value Scores™ (5 being the highest)
- Price: 5
- Educational: 4
- Evangelizing: 0
- Originality: 2
- Relevance: 3
- Usefulness: 3
- User Experience: 2
- Replay/Lasting Appeal: 2
The MIX 2008 Internet presentation Advanced Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8, by Scott Dickens, was Rated! 3 Stars.
Rated! Value Scores™ (5 being the highest)
- Price: 5
- Educational: 4
- Evangelizing: 0
- Originality: 4
- Relevance: 3
- Usefulness: 2
- User Experience: 2
- Replay/Lasting Appeal: 2
The MIX 2008 Internet presentation Adding Instant Messaging to Any Site, by Keiji Kanazawa and Nikhil Kothari, was Rated! 3 Stars.
Rated! Value Scores™ (5 being the highest)
- Price: 5
- Educational: 4
- Evangelizing: 0
- Originality: 4
- Relevance: 2
- Usefulness: 3
- User Experience: 2
- Replay/Lasting Appeal: 2
The MIX 2008 Internet presentation Welcome to Internet Explorer 8, by Chris Wilson, was Rated! 4 Stars.
Rated! Value Scores™ (5 being the highest)
- Price: 5
- Educational: 3
- Evangelizing: 0
- Originality: 4
- Relevance: 4
- Usefulness: 3
- User Experience: 2
- Replay/Lasting Appeal: 3
I had the fantastic opportunity to apply for a passport today. I applied for the Passport Book and Passport Card. The new passport card will be available in the spring and basically allows a person to travel to and from bordering countries by land or sea without having to use the traditional passport book.
The passport card contains a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip. As a citizen who values privacy I went ahead and did some reading on the subject. As written on Wikipedia,
RFID is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radiowaves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.
The U.S. Department of State says that while the RFID chip will allow Customs and Border Protection inspectors to access my photos and biographical information, my privacy will be maintained because “no personal information is written on the electronic chip itself. The chip will have only a unique number linking the card to a stored record contained in secure government databases.” Scary isn’t it? On a final, more reassuring note, the U.S. Department of State is at least “taking every care to ensure that this passport card is as secure as current technology permits.”
So why get passport now, you ask? I hope to travel to different countries on business and for pleasure. A passport is a necessity for international travel by air, land, and sea. Make it a great day and happy traveling! 
(more…)
Yesterday I received a set of memory sticks ordered from Fry’s Electronics. They sold me two 1GB DDR2 PC5300 memory sticks for $35.99 plus shipping. The cool part is that when I receive the $18 rebate I sent for, I would have paid only $17.99 plus shipping for 2 GB of laptop memory.
This purchase was necessary to help my Dell Inspiron 9300 run Windows Vista Ultimate without a problem. Once I installed the memory and ran Vista, I was very pleased with the results. Windows Vista now ran much quicker and wrote less to the disk. At last I can be more productive with my laptop! For the record I now recommend at least 2GB of memory in order to run Windows Vista. So, once again I can work on my business financials, creative, and documents while watching videos or listening to music.
I enjoyed the shopping experience at Fry’s Electronics. I will fully recommend them to you once I receive my $18 rebate. Until then I don’t consider my transaction with Fry’s complete. I chose to have Fry’s ship the memory via 2nd day service. Fry’s utilizes DHL. At first I was a bit hesitant, but I was happy when I received the memory a day before it was supposed be delivered. 
Here are my Inspiron 9300 main specs:
- 2GHz Intel Pentium M Processor
- 2GB DDR2 Memory
- 256MB NVidia GeForce 6800 Go Graphics Processor on 17″ WXGA+ Display
- 160GB Hard Drive
I am super happy that I was able to make a three-year old laptop help me be productive while running the latest software. If all goes well, the laptop should last about two more years.
(more…)
I took the opportunity to check out a few CIO Executive Council Outlook videos the other day and ran across a very interesting “conversation” with Mary Hall Gregg, CIO of Quest Diagnostics. What I found most interesting was how the use of language helped change an IT culture. Today I wanted to share some of this language with you.
The idea is to stop using the old IT language and use the new business language. From what I understand the CIO Executive Council put this together for the beneficial use of all businesses and their IT organizations. Check it out:
| IT Language |
Business Language |
| Internal customer |
Business partner |
| External customers |
Customers |
| IT governance |
Investment planning |
| IT and the business |
IT in business, business technology |
| CIO’s business peers |
CIO and other business leaders |
| Internal SLAs |
Quality goals, excellence standards |
| IT project (or priority) |
Business project (or priority) |
| Functionality enhancement |
Business process change |
| Resources |
People |
I really liked the example of changing the language used to describe internal customers to business partners. Mary Hall Gregg made a great point when she explained the conscious decision her organization made to never use the word customer to refer to colleagues (the people inside the organization) and instead refer to them as as business partners.
Our colleagues — they are our business partners and together we are trying to drive growth for the company, and IT is a tool and a technology to drive growth. Our customers are the people that we serve, so patients are our customers and the patients are first in everything that we do. Physicians are our customers, health plans are our customers, employers are our customers. The people who use our services, who pay the bills — those are our customers. The employees of Quest Diagnostics, they’re either our business partners or, in some cases we refer to them as users, if they are using a service of IT, but we don’t allow anyone in IT to talk about our partners as being customers because it changes the dialogue and it sets a different expectation. If you think you’re my customer, you’re less willing to engage in a dialogue about how we can improve things and work together and collaborate. You just expect that I’m going to deliver a service, and when I don’t get it right, you don’t want to engage in a discussion about how we improve and move forward, so the use of the word partner versus customer I think is very essential for a company and an IT organization, that is about the growth of the company.
Language is important in the corporate culture. Every business and industry defines its culture by their use of language. I have worked for some of the best companies in their industries and each had their own language for industry-specific terms and for general terms, like employees. In my businesses I call employees team members and partners and consider all divisions to be groups, in order to discourage silos and invisible walls and to promote collaboration and a sense of family - an association of people who share common beliefs or activities. I am amazed at how powerful language is.
Kudos to the CIO Executive Council for their fine work on the Outlook series. It was very educational to watch the videos and read the transcripts. I cannot wait to put this information to good use. How about you?
In their survey, ExecuNet found that not many executives were happy with their jobs. What caught my attention was the response from the IT/S (Information Technology and Information Systems) professionals, with the lowest percentage of job satisfaction.
| Profession |
% Satisfied Executives |
| Human Resources |
67% |
| CFO/Comptroller |
63% |
| Marketing |
44% |
| MIS/IT |
41% |
Source: ExecuNet, full press release.
So how come the IT/S management is the least satisfied of the bunch? As a technology professional, that percentage does not necessarily motivate me to keep climbing the corporate ladder.
The survey was a step forward in identifying the alarming trend. But how can companies retain their talented management and help them become satisfied with their current roles? After all, this may affect a company’s bottom line, morale, and its edge in the marketplace.
So what are some of the problems and possible solutions? Any ideas?
