Category Archives: Work Stuff

Governor’s Volunteer Service Award Breakfast

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From the day job: TAA's team was honored to be presented with a Governor's Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service (Forsyth County) in the "Team" category at a breakfast at Salemtowne this morning.  There were also winners in six other categories and it was a true pleasure to be surrounded by so many people doing incredible things for their community.  A big thanks to The Children's Home for nominating us for the project. Here's a couple of pics:

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The TAA Team

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TAA VP and Labor of Love Chair Marc Crouse

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Kind of cool shot of the program    

Something for Nothing

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I was doing some research for the day job and came across this article about a panel discussion on the future of GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).  There are several good quotes contained within, but these two really caught my eye: 

But according to White and Booher, it was a broader cultural issue, an unbalanced federal housing policy that stressed homeownership at the expense of rational underwriting. “I believe that the deception of our culture, that money grows on trees, that there can be action and no reaction, is so prevalent that we live in a fantasy world,” White said. “And members of Congress were the ultimate actors there.”

That unbalanced housing policy was prevalent on the operations side as well. "The problem really starts with a culture that’s increasingly looking for something for nothing,” Durkin of Wood Partners explained. “That permeates our housing policy.”

I really do hope my children's generation ends up being smarter than mine or my parents'. 

Nice Article on Labor of Love

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Kim Underwood wrote a nice article for the Winston-Salem Journal about TAA's Labor of Love project at The Children's Home.  As I wrote before, this is one of the most amazing projects I've ever been involved with and I think the article really helps explain why:

The cottage is needed because last Sept. 1, the Children's Home took over the operation of Opportunity House, a nine-bed emergency shelter for young people on Brookstown Avenue. The shelter had been run by the Youth Opportunities organization.

"The intention from Day One was to move that facility on campus," said George Bryan, the president and chief executive of the Children's Home…

When the Children Home agreed to take over the shelter, Bryan estimated that it could take $150,000 to renovate the 10,000-square-foot Stultz Cottage. With no money available, immediate action wasn't possible.

Along came Marc Crouse, a member of the apartment association who volunteers at the home and is in the process of adopting a young person who has been living there. When he approached Bryan about the association doing something at the home for this year's "Labor of Love" project, Bryan thought that fixing up the cottage for the program would be just the thing.

"From the first, we are considering this a miracle," Bryan said.

Labor of Love is a True Highlight

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This weekend was the kick off for a project that I'm already sure will be one of the highlights of my career.  The organization I work for, Triad Apartment Association, is doing it's annual Labor of Love project and this year it really is audacious.  We're taking on a three story building at The Children's Home that has been vacant for over 25 years and fixing it up so that it can be used to house children that the Home serves.  The project includes cleaning and painting every room, installing new carpet, replacing outlets and light switches, repairing all plumbing fixtures, re-glazing all bathroom tiles, replacing/repairing floor tiles, repairing and refinishing a parquet floor, removing an interior wall from one room, installing new appliances, installing 9 new ceiling fans, repairing exterior woodwork, providing new furniture and installing new landscaping. What makes it so incredibly rewarding is that all of the materials, time and money have been donated by companies and individuals involved with TAA, and even more remarkably, people in the community who somehow heard about it and volunteered to help.

We're getting all this done in four days, Feb 12-13 and 19-20, which you'd think would be impossible until you consider that on the 12th we had over 70 people show up to help and on the 13th we had over 90. We're expecting just as many, if not more, next weekend.  We had so many people that we had enough to go out and do other projects on The Children's Home grounds.  

One of our volunteers is a woman who grew up at The Children's Home and lived in the building that we're working on.  I can't even describe the feeling of standing in a room with her as she painted a window and told a story about her first night at the Home spent in that very room and how it changed her life.  It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

There aren't words appropriate enough to describe what all of these volunteers have given The Children's Home, so to those of you who have participated please accept these humble words: Thank you! If you would like to help with The Labor of Love you still can and please feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested.  Otherwise there is always a need for volunteers at The Children's Home and there's plenty of information on how to help at their website. 

Good Day at the Office

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Well, just sold the last available exhibit space for my client’s annual conference and the sponsorships are starting to roll in as well.  Good for the conference, bad for my fingertips and brain.  My fingers are feeling kind of QWERTY and my brain feels like oatmeal.

BTW, if you’re in the competitive intelligence field I have some killer sponsorships available.  Just sayin’.

Time for a beer and a long sleep.

Home Office Fun

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Working out of a home office has some definite upsides and downsides.  The upsides include not having to shave every day and working in sweats.  The largest downside is being your own tech support.  Take this morning (please)…I get up to my office and find that I cannot get to my email or get my browser to "find" the web.  Strangely my VOIP (Vonage) phone works and I can access my client’s VPN (virtual private network).  To rectify my situation I resort to all my old tricks:

  1. Re-boot the computer.  No joy.
  2. Unplug the modem/router for a couple of minutes.  No joy.
  3. Unplug the modem/router and the Vonage converter for a couple of minutes.  No joy.
  4. Re-boot and unplug everything for a couple of minutes.  No joy.
  5. Start cursing. No joy, but some relief.

I run down to Celeste’s office to see if she can connect.  No problemo for her, so that means that the problem’s with my PC.  Using her computer I Google my issue and get some tips involving manually resetting DNS’s, pinging and other nefarious and hideously technical actions.  I continue cursing.

Upon returning to my office I decide to plug the cable from my router directly into my computer, thus bypassing Vonage.  Voila I’m online.  Still haven’t totally resolved the issue, but hopefully I’m getting close.

Still cursing.

Cool Way to Manage Information

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Yesterday I wrote on my business blog about searchCrystal
and noted that I liked the graphical display of its search results.
Today I stumbled upon a couple of sites that deal with visual
information management.  First I came across VisualComplexity.com which is best explained by this description from the site’s "About" page:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource
space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.
The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of
different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as
diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope
this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing
research on this field.

From the VisualComplexity site I found TheBrain.com.
These guys have visual content management products, one for individuals
and the other for enterprises.  They describe their products this way:

 

TheBrain Technologies is the leading provider of visual content
management solutions. The company was founded in 1996 and has been
delivering award-winning information management solutions for over a
decade. By connecting people, processes, and information, TheBrain’s
products provide unparalleled context for smarter information discovery
and more informed decision-making.

      
 

TheBrain technology can be utilized on corporate intranets, desktops, and the Internet. Some
      applications include: customer care, project management, dynamic mind mapping, IT management and helpdesks,
      impact assessment, competitive intelligence, marketing and sales support, and personal information management.

       
 

TheBrain has two primary products: PersonalBrain for
        individual users and BrainEKP, an enterprise knowledge platform for group collaboration.

I’ve always struggled with content management.  In the physical
world I’m a "pile don’t file" kind of guy because when I file it I
forget about it.  (A happy compromise for me is binders; active
projects are organized in binders that I keep on my desk and then I
shelve the binders once the project is complete).  I’m constantly
hunting for files online because my folder systems tend to get too
complex and so I forget if I saved a file under "Taxes" or
"Accounting."  These products offer hope for folks like me.

Fun With Maps

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One of the things I do for my day job is manage the sales of sponsorships, exhibit space and advertising for a non-profit professional society.  For a variety of reasons I’m often asked where our customers’ offices are located.  For instance my client might have a local event and want to target companies in that region for sponsorships.  Typically I just do a search of my database by zip code or state, which works fine for areas I’m very familiar with, but it’s tough for me to get a sense of how many companies we deal with in an area I’m not familiar with.  For instance I’m very familiar with the northeast corridor of the US so I don’t have a problem pulling the data together very quickly for a Philadelphia event, but I’m not at all familiar with the western US so I’m not at all sure if a company in Calabasas is a good prospect for a local event in San Francisco. 

Yesterday I decided to take some time and use Google Maps’ new My Maps feature and load in my vendor database. Note: I wouldn’t do this if you couldn’t make the map "private" so that it can’t be searched or found by others, but I can share the page with whomever I want which makes it a good collaborative tool with my client.  Since there are several hundred records in my database I decided to input only the exhibitors from this year’s conference to see if it was worth the effort.  After putting in the 60+ companies I looked at the result and was amazed to see how much it changed my perspective.  Not only did it give me a good sense of how my exhibitors were distributed, but it allowed me to zoom in on a city and click on the little balloons for each company and see who was in Washington or Philly or wherever.  Very cool.

I did a little more playing around and found out that I could download the map to view in Google Earth.  That caused me to remember an article in Business 2.0 about a company that allows you to "mashup" your own data with Google Maps via a free service called Geocommons.  I went to Geocommons.com and signed up for a free account, and then tried to upload a file but found that it had to be in KML format which I know nothing about (i.e. I was in over my head).  So I did a search on KML and found a website called batchgeocode.com that will take data from an Excel spreadsheet or any tab-delimited file and convert it to KML.  I used the site to convert my vendor data to KML and then opened it in Google Earth.  Voila, all of my vendors are now mapped on Google Earth and I can zoom in and click on the little icon and see all the contact information right there.  VERY cool and I didn’t have to actually type in all the data.

I’m sure there are applications for this that I haven’t even imagined, but if you give me enough time I’m sure I can find something totally ridiculous to do with it.  If nothing else I’m good at figuring out how to quickly turn the useful into the inane.