Pruetts.com

 

Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.
— George-Louis de Buffon

 

I came across this list of Nine Critical Behaviors for Effective Mentoring when I was reading a couple weeks back. I want to remember them, but thought you’d also find them valuable as a reminder in your leadership endeavors.

Nine Critical Behaviors for Effective Mentoring
from The Transparency Edge

1. Keeping Your Promises
2. Staying Composed Under Pressure
3. Being Willing to Say “I’m Sorry”
4. Being Overwhelmingly Honest
5. Gathering Feedback About Yourself
6. Letting Your Guard Down
7. Delivering Bad News Well
8. Watching Your Mouth
9. Being Quick to Praise Others

Pretty simple, huh. Well, easier said than done, if you ask me. I think I struggle most with the last four.

I don’t like letting my guard down — except with a very select few friends who have known me for years.

I don’t like delivering bad news, and hate to disappoint, but I realize I need to get better at this, and learn to “fail forward” as the saying goes.

I tend to say things I definitely should keep to myself - especially when I am unhappy or bitter about something. I can be pretty cruel or foolish sometimes. Definitely an area to work on.

I like to praise others, especially in front of them to their peers/co-workers. I just need to be more intentional in finding opportunities to do so. Hopefully I’ll be able to be more observant in the coming months to improve in this area.

I’m sure I need work in more areas, but those ones really jumped out at me.

How about you? I think the comments section is working… if not, email me… where? Well… put my first name in front of “@pruetts.com” and it will get to me

JP

I decided to buy the Princeton monitor, and so far I’m pretty happy with it.

The screen is very bright, and easy to read, even in low-light situations. My main concern was that it would not be as bright as my CRT, but it actually seems brighter.

Windows XP’s ClearType rendering, and so far like it pretty well. The text is super crisp, so that has been very, very nice.

Once I’ve used it for a while I’ll have a better idea of how well I like it. So far, color me impressed!

JP

I ended up with a little mad money to spend this Christmas, and am considering buying a new LCD monitor. I’m looking at two right now:

19″ Sony Monitor (SDM-HS93/B) [ product details ]
at Circuit City for $349.99 after rebates.
Adjusted for tax, shipping, and rebates, the total out of pocket for me would be about $395.

19″ Princeton Monitor (VL1916) [ product details ]
at Costco for $379.99 after rebates.
Adjusted for tax, shipping, and rebates, the total out of pocket for me would be about $415.

They have almost identical specs:
700:1 contrast ratio
250 cd/m2 brightness
1280x1024 resolution
0.294 Dot Pitch
25 ms response time
170/170 viewing angle

The question is… do I go for Sony’s brand name or Costco’s return policy?

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” — Saint Augustine

My friend Ben and his roommate Chris joined Kristen and I for dinner at Firestone Grill in San Luis Obispo tonight. They have awesome sandwiches, and we had a great time.

Tonight I’m trying to resolve the XML-RPC difficulties I’ve been fighting when posting to WordPress via an offline blogging client. I think that I’ve finally got it figured out.

JP

Shot hoops with my younger brother yesterday — he’s 2 years younger — and … ahem … won 3 straight games playin bball.

This is only significant because he played high school ball, and I got cut in Jr. High. Now I’m older, heavier, shorter, but still took him to school. We’re not the least bit competitive though… can you tell?

Of course the day before he destroyed me in tennis… so I had to even the score. We’re playin tennis again tomorrow, so we’ll see if I can beat him at his sport for once.

Merry Christmas!
Jeff.

It has been a crazy couple of days, but in the middle of work and many, many, many Christmas parties, I’ve managed to creep along in re-installing all of my favorite applications after baselining my PC last weekend. It is amazing how many little applications I installed over the course of last year that I now find invaluable.

I thought it would do me some good to list the programs I really like here, and perhaps you’d find them useful too.

* Mozilla Firefox - This is a must-have application in my book. Others have reviewed it better than I could hope to ever do, but in short, I don’t even need Internet Explorer anymore — Firefox is that good.

* Startup Control Panel - High on the list of the applications I cannot live without. Startup CPL simply shows you what programs are trying to start when you startup Windows. You can uncheck any of them to disable them. So sweet.

* Whisper32 - I discovered this little password keeping program several years ago, and still find it incredibly useful. It is simple, lightweight, and just does what it is supposed to do — keep my passwords for me.

* AntiVir - I got tired of Norton AntiVirus taking more and more memory to run — I think the executable I was running was taking around 8 Mb in TaskManager. AntiVir meets my requirements — autoupdates, catches the viruses, and has a footprint of only 4.4 Mb when running.

* Notepad2 - I love this little replacement for the Windows Notepad. It is a small program, but adds just enough - code coloring and brace/parenthesis matching. I don’t need a lot from a notepad replacement, but this one offers just enough. I’ve also used Metapad with great results.

* Microsoft Office XP - I have a hard time living without the Office suite, and though I’ve tried the OpenOffice alternative, it just isn’t as crisp. I use Office XP, however, because Office 2003 seems way too bloated. If I had to choose between Office 2003 and OpenOffice, the decision would have been much harder.

* Visio 2000 - My favorite diagraming software. I use this when writing software design documents primarily, but also to create illustrations for various presentations. I’ve been using Visio since before it was bought by Microsoft. Microsoft made it better through Visio 2000. Then they made it worse. Again, the bloat is crippling in the later versions.

* Quicken 2003 - I have used Quicken to manage my personal finances since version 5. I think that means I’ve been using it for about seven or eight years. You know how everyone got version happy and changed things to years when Windows 95 came out, so I’m guessing Quicken 1996 came out after version 5. Anyway. I’m on the upgrade every two years cycle. So Quicken 2005 will be my next upgrade.

* PDF Creator - I used to use Adobe Acrobat, and in fact still have the license for it, but have found this free alternative to render some more complex documents more accurately. Surprisingly, Acrobat chokes on some of my Visio diagrams, while PDF Creator whips them out with ease.

* Spybot Search & Destroy - Spybot is a great little tool to clean up the various spyware that may hitch a ride as I surf the net. With Firefox as my default browser, I’m curious to see how much spyware I attract in the coming months.

* SpywareBlaster - This app blocks known bad ActiveX spyware, which is important if you insist on using Internet Explorer. I don’t, but from time to time I still need IE — like when updating Windows — so I protect IE with this bad boy.

* CloneCD - Just about the fastest way to duplicate a CD. I’m a big fan of their simple, task oriented interface, without adding endless features I’ll never use.

* Nero - When I need to create a more complex CD, whether bootable, or a compilation, I use Nero. Hands down my favorite CD burning software.

* Dreamweaver MX - I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with web pages — Dreamweaver is the tool for experienced tinkerers. I can code in Notepad, but when Dreamweaver does just as good of a job, and reduces my workload, why would I?

* VisualStudio.NET 2003 - My development environment of choice. I went to school where they tried to teach me to be a Unix programmer — and found that I enjoyed programming so much more when I used VS. Right now, programming is just a hobby for me. Perhaps some day I’ll become a real programmer and get paid for it.

* AIM/Gaim - I’m trying out Gaim, but have used AIM for years. The verdict is still out on this one.

* TreeSize - I found this little application a few years ago. It is wonderful for seeing how much data you’ve managed to pack-rat away in various folders. Also great for seeing if a folder could be backed up to CD. It adds a “Treesize” option to the right-click menu of folders, and shows you the file tree with calculated file sizes.

In what has become somewhat of an annual tradition, I’ve decided to baseline my PC this weekend. It seems like it takes about a year for me to accumulate enough junk on my PC to slow things down.

So, about once a year, I re-install Windows and everything else to clean things up. I never had this problem with my Linux boxes, but then they weren’t my desktop computers either. If my Windows box was only a server, I doubt I’d have to baseline it annually — but with the installing/uninstalling of games, apps I want to test out, and more, things just get cluttered eventually.

All that to say. My Internet access may be spotty the next couple days — if I don’t post, you won’t see anything new =)

If you reproduced yourself in another leader, would you be happy with the results?

Honestly, there are many aspects of my leadership ability that I would be happy to see reproduced in others. I think my genuine concern for others, my ability to analyze a situation, my commitment to follow-through, and my passion for learning are all traits I’d want to see reproduced in a protege.

However, there are still several areas of weakness in my abilities that would likely also be reproduced. I still have a tendency to avoid conflict, though I’m improving in that area — rather, now conflict comes to me . I also struggle keeping a real disciplined schedule day to day. Part of that is a result of my working environment, but part is just a lack of discipline.

Overall, I think I’d be moderately happy to see a protege reproduce the leadership traits that I possess. I obviously have much to work on, and plan to make a concerted effort in that direction.

How about you?

Gotta love it when the waitress is baffled by your age. She couldn’t believe I was as old as my DL said as I ordered a martini with dinner — or she could have been fishing for a good tip. Who knows.

Kristen and I went out to dinner at Portabella’s, an Italian restaurant in a local hotel here in Santa Maria. The atmosphere is nice for the area, and the food is certainly reasonable. Two of us ate for under $30, including my martini.

OOOh. That reminds me. Leftovers for lunch, baby! Wow… now I’m watching the clock til lunch time. Sheesh.