Which Were Your Favorite Books?

On our Bolt bus trip down to DC to visit my parents for Easter, Emma rapidly ran out of books to read. True, the trip lasted much longer than usual - we were stuck at the New Jersey toll booth before the Delaware Memorial Bridge for close to three hours. However, the books she brought lasted twenty minutes in the best of circumstances.

Luckily, I had an iPhone and the bus had electrical outlets and I successfully downloaded a book I thought she might enjoyed - one of my childhood favorites - Anne of Green Gables. [Pretty nifty what's possible with technology!]

In the process of searching for titles [I limited the search criteria to classics], we came across other favorites:

The Complete Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer

The Wind in the Willows

Pride And Prejudice

The Secret Garden

As I thought about these classics, I started to wonder about other favorite books - the ones you can't put down, that become friends, that you enjoy rereading over and over again. What are yours?

Emma has devoured the The Little House on the Prairie books, imagining herself a pioneer girl.

Ted loved The Works of Andre Norton and others in the science fiction and fantasy genre.

My Dad enjoyed The Tom Swift Collection and books like Don Sturdy with the Big Snake Hunters: Or, Lost in the Jungles of the Amazon...

What about you? Which books did you treasure growing up? Which ones do you recommend?

Happy Easter to you!

Image credit:  English embroidered binding, late 19th century

Kaboom Retail Experience Contest

Last week, I organized and took part in the 4th annual Bathroom Blogfest - a global event that brought together 20 bloggers and a sponsor - Kaboom - to discuss the customer experience from a variety of perspectives.

What is a Bathroom Blogfest, you ask? Well, per my press release: "A blogfest gathers writers who direct their posts around a single subject while making the subject relevant to their readers. Between October 26 and 28, these experts in marketing, customer experience and service, public relations, library sciences, life, retail—toilets and bathrooms—will call attention to improving the overall bathroom experience."

I was great intense fun with activity on blogs, Facebook and Twitter... I have a recap of the entire Bathroom Blogfest 09 event detailed in this post [and I'm very proud of the 14 posts I contributed on Flooring The Consumer, Simple Marketing Blog and The Carpetology Blog. Perhaps you might enjoy them, too!]

Here's where I need your help.

For the first time ever, I launched a contest and it flopped. Not a single soul participated. Can you imagine?

I refuse, though, to accept defeat. Perhaps one of you will participate? Here's where I explain the contest and show the prize: a FREE Kaboom cleaning kit. Note that I'm extending the contest dates. Septic safe. Good for hard water. Cool packaging and it smells good.

To win, please post a comment, ideally with some details about a memorable retail bathroom experience here on this post, via email or on the Flooring The Consumer contest post. Entries due in by Sunday, November 8. I will then randomly pick one lucky winner....

Thank you for helping me out.

[Oh, and if you already really love Kaboom, here's the link to the special deal that Kaboom put together for the Bathroom Blogfest.]





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Why I Love Kinnelon - Tai Chi Anyone?

I love that Kinnelon has such easy access to New York City. My favorite route in is via Route 23 to the new NJ Transit Center where I catch a direct bus into Port Authority on 42nd street in Manhattan. That's assuming I reach the Transit Center early enough to get a parking space; next option is to park at Willowbrook Mall. Regardless, the trip into Manhattan takes 3o minutes and, from there, marvelous adventures are guaranteed! For example Tai Chi in Bryant Park this past Thursday morning.

I love cutting through Bryant Park to get places.

Bryant Park reminds me of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris: small green tables and chairs along pebbled walkways around the grassy green; wonderful people watching and always unexpected activities. An oasis of calm surrounded by tall buildings and intense city.

From 1985 to 1988 or 89 I worked at 11 West 42nd on the 3rd floor. From my window I could see Bryant Park. In those days, it wasn't a place worth hanging out in - at least if you were sweet, young and not looking for illegal substances. I remember it being boarded up for a long time, too. However, from my window, I also remember admiring the antics of Rubberband man, the contortionist. Do you remember seeing him?

I was delighted when Bryant Park was redeveloped and spent many an idyllic lunch time there when I worked at 1460 Broadway at the corner of 41st street. That from 1993 to 1999 or so....

Now, I like stopping in Bryant Park to catch my breath and check my email or to meetup with friends for an intense chat.

What was most wonderful on my most recent trip into NYC this week was coming across this group of Tai Chi enthusiasts in intense action. It made me wish I could simply step in and take part.

I've admired similar groups taking part in Tai Chi in Beijing [not always with swords], in Toronto, but never in midtown Manhattan. I tried Tai Chi briefly at the Palisadium in Cliffside Park a long time ago. I'd like to become more adept.

In fact, seeing this motley group in Bryant Park made me wonder what if we could do the same here in Kinnelon...

Tai Chi anyone?









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Backing Up Your Computer -- OR -- Do you know what your computer is doing tonight?

Maybe it's, aakk!, dying!

Outside of my computer consulting business, I do local computer assistance for people having one problem or another.

I see people with dead computers or dead drives all of the time.

And beyond that, in the past week, Christine and I have had 3 friends who have had computer disasters which resulted in replacement of their systems.

Did they get their data back?

Most did not.

By far the most frequent and most serious computer problems people have come from NOT BACKING UP their computers.

I see real tragedy when someone loses 5 years of digitally stored family photos, or irreplaceable business documents.

We just do not think of backing up apparently when we get a new computer, and as time passes we don't realize how much personally valuable STUFF we have accumulated on our machines ... until ...you guessed it ... all of those photos and letters ... just go away. Gone, kaput, into the big bit bucket in the sky.

It happens in different ways.

Sometimes we accidentally delete a directory that we thought was for something else, unused or irrelevant, and when we are asked, "Files are too large to send to the Recycle Bin -- Permanently Delete?", we say, "Yes".

Oh, to take back that last "Yes".

Or sometimes we do not realize that time has passed and our new machine which has been working just fine is now a 4 to 5 year old dinosaur, still chugging along, but actually on the verge of DEATH.

And we often just procrastinate backing up -- we mean to do it, really -- it's just that, well ... we don't.

If that hard drive fails, it may still be possible to get that precious stuff out of the disk -- IF you are willing to spend $3500 or so by sending it to a hardware recovery specialist who will then return your data to you on the media of your choice.

Otherwise the (semi) permanent record of your memories is gone, gone, gone.

I also see methods of backing up our computers that fail us or leave us open to painful and time-consuming operating system restores. We have some applications stored on a flash drive, or copied to a CD or DVD. But we forgot all of those photos.

In this case when the system or drive goes, we have to painfully restore the OS and applications to the disk and then our data, and hope that we have it all. What about all of our system settings, passwords, logins, mail account setup info, email addresses, and so on?

That stuff is probably not backed up.

And I see the popular and commercially available backup methods people use fail, too. Or cause other problems.

There is one popular solution from Western Digital, a drive maker I respect and like, which installs so many little programs onto your disk that run in the background checking on what you do and what documents you change so it can all be backed up to an external hard disk, that YOUR MACHINE SLOWS TO A CRAWL under the burden.

Plus, it's so complicated that one person, when attempting to delete what he thought was a useless desktop icon, deleted his entire documents directory!

Ow!

OK. What should you do?

I will tell you what I think -- it's just my opinion, but it works for me. I myself have done many of the things I'm warning against, but, because I have:

CLONED MY BOOT DISK

I have usually been back up and running within in an hour of disaster. An hour or less. Yes.

It's not rocket science; you do not have lots of complicated little backup programs running around messing up your system, and you do not choose what to back up.

You back up the WHOLE THING to a pristine image of your boot hard drive, which is on a new bootable hard drive.

And which, when disaster strikes, you just boot from, in place of your original hard drive.

Or you copy your photos and documents from after you accidentally deleted them.

It's a wonderful thing.

It's very simple; the software only runs when you want it to; you are up and running, in case of disaster, right away.

You schedule it to run once a week or whenever you want.

You check the external drive now and again, just to see all of your stuff there.

The cloning software reports after every successful image backup.

You feel good.

So how do we do this?

We need the cloning software, a boot CD with the cloning software on it (in case of catastrophe), and an external hard drive, or internal for that matter, that is as big as(or bigger than) your existing boot drive and with the same interface, SATA, IDE, whatever.

There are a number of software products out there which do this, Symantec's Ghost, Acronis has a product, but my favorite is Future Systems Solutions' Casper 5.0 and Startup Disk.It's easy to use, simple, cheap for what it does, and it works.

At $60 for the software and something less than or a little more than $100 for the drive, you are in business.

Sleep tight. I know I will.

~ Ted

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A Must Read Book: The Age of Conversation 2

Cover art created by David Armano.

There's a  book I recommend you read.  It's titled "The Age of Conversation 2 - Why Don't They Get It?"  It's is available for purchase from LuLu.com.

I acknowledge up front that this book is off topic to this blog.  It has no direct relationship to Kinnelon or Smoke Rise.  However, it's one you might appreciate if you regularly read blogs like the The Smoke Rise Blog as it has to do with the sort of conversations that take place through blogs and social media.

There is a local relationship, though, because two local bloggers - my friend Steve Woodruff in Boonton and myself - have contributed.

And, it's for a good cause.  Proceeds from the sale benefit Variety, the children's charity [our goal is to raise at least $15,000].

Let me put this amazing project into perspective.

This book results from an unique global collaboration involving 237 authors from 15 different countries, all shepherded by my friends Drew McLellan in the US and Gavin Heaton in Australia.  Each contributor wrote a one page chapter that falls into one of eight topics relevant to social media and how it is shaping society, marketing, politics and business.

+ Manifestos 

+ Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation 

+ Moving from Conversation to Action

+ The Accidental Marketer 

+ A New Brand of Creative

+ My Marketing Tragedy 

+ Business Model Evolution 

+ Life in the Conversation Lane -- Bringing it all back to the individual 

My chapter belongs in the Business Model Evolution section. It is titled "Don't Be Myopic About Social Media."   The Age of Conversation - Why Don't They Get It? offers more perspective on who and what inspired my chapter.

The book is available in 3 versions - hardback, paperback and e-book - and is guaranteed to provide perspective, and help you appreciate and challenge assumptions about this Age of Conversation.

BTW, the first Age of Conversation, involved 104 authors and generated $15,000 for Variety. Age of Conversation 2 is even better given so many talented contributors.

If you'd like to learn more about this book, read It's Here!!! Age of Conversation 2. Now Available...

Thank you.

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