I’ve been following the progress of Randy Pausch for the past several months and wanted to introduce this extraordinary man to all of you.  For those of you who don’t know who Randy Pausch is, he was once a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and was recently diagnosed with cancer, he was given 3-6 months to live and he is currently in month 9.  Randy Pausch is really an amazing person and has inspired people all around the nation to live better lives.  Please watch/read the story of Randy Pausch and help spread it, it’s truly a story worth spreading.  I won’t give away too much information about Randy, instead I will let you watch the following the videos:

Randy Pausch, the last lecture at Carnegie Mellon

Randy Pausch an Oprah, Shorter Version of the Last Lecture

Randy Pausch on Time Management

I hope the following videos were both inspiring and touching.  You can find out more about Randy and see more of his videos (including an interview with Diane Sawyer and an appearance before congress) on his website.  You can also follow Randy’s battle with cancer on his day-to-day update page.

Thanks for reading everyone and I hope you will share this story of hope and inspiration with your friends and family.

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As their website cleary says “Whozat?” is a search engine designed to find and display information about people.”  Whozat? has recently been recognized by several companies as being one of the hottest new startups today. So naturally, this peaked my curiosity and I decided to poke around a bit.  What makes Whozat? different than almost any other search engine in the world is that it uses semantic technology to understand relationships and relevancy for searches.  An interesting idea, by why not just use Google to search for someone?  Excellent question, let’s take a look…

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I spent a little while playing on compete.com and found the following charts rather interesting.  I decided to compare the trends of a few popular social networking sites such as myspace, twitter, facebook, youtube, and linkedin.  It’s really interesting to see the growth or decline of these sites.  When looking at the graphs ask yourself what may have caused the following trends.  I also added a brief commentary under each graph, I didn’t want to go in too much detail, but still, I gave my 2 cents.

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First off happy 4th of July everyone!

The beauty of living in the United States is that we have so many different cultures, religions, beliefs, and ideas.  We should all be thankful that we live in a place that gives us freedoms that we oftentimes take for granted.  However, we also deal with a lot of misunderstandings and communication barriers.  I was flipping through channels earlier when I cam across the Oprah show.  Oprah was interviewing a Muslim woman who was born and raised in the United States.  She was discussing the many misunderstandings and myths of being Muslim.  This really got me thinking about how quick we are to judge people and place our approval or disapproval stamps on those we meet.

I know that nobody is perfect but for this 4th of July I want to wish for everyone to be more compassionate and more understanding of people.  Realize that oftentimes people don’t do things to purposely hurt you.  Take time to understand the situation from different points of view and think before you act.  I think if we were all a bit more understanding and accepting of one another we would definitely make the world a better place.

happy 4th of July everyone!

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Just came back from the supermarket in Lake Tahoe. As I reach the checkout counter I notice that the line is literally wrapping around itself, I wish I would have had my camera with me. It felt like we were in line to get on a ride an amusement park.  Nobody likes to wait in a line for anything, so why did the people at the Raley’s in Incline Village think that they wouldn’t need to staff up during the week of 4th of July?  What made matters more frustrating is that staff members were located throughout the store that either were not asked to help or had no idea had to run a cash register.

So what is the moral of this story?  Try to anticipate customer behavior, there were literally several folks who threw there groceries down in a fit of anger and said that they were going to go to another grocery store.  Part of running a successful business is being able to anticipate what your customers want and how you’re going to give it to them.

Continuing with another moral of the story, why completely segment and isolate tasks among the staff members?  Grocery clerks should also know how to operate a cash register during times when unexpected crowds form.  Operating a cash register is not a difficult task and should only take a little while to learn.  This way you can increase overall operating efficiency.  It’s fine to specialize employees for a particular task, but in the end, make sure that your entire team is capable of performing the basic functions of the business.  It will come in handy, especially when a swarm of people suddenly decides to purchase something, ask a question, bring back a return, or wish to get some more information about something.

Have you seen other examples where people are so specialized that they can offer you know help for a basic general inquiry, or cannot perform a basic task?

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