I have this new gig, with a new company, and new associates, so I think it is time to clean out my office and update it.  Right now it is a disaster!

So I was looking for a little inspiration and found this video.  It should help, don't you think? 

This is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. Cucku 2.0 allows you to create a peer to peer relationship between 2 computers and using the Skype network create an automatic important files backup. It can be two way or one way.

If you need to include more computers there is a $49.95 Pro version that lets you have 5 computers in your backup network!

See the site at Cucku.com , but watch the video below and then check out the article on ZD.net .

CUCKU Backup Demonstration from Off The Broiler on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

Many of us are trying to avoid the whole business travel scene as much as we can. However we still need to bring home the bacon! And remote presentation systems are not new. Webex, GoTo Meeting/Webinar, Video Conferencing and desktop communiacators like Skype and ooVoo have been used for years to increase communication and cut down on travel.

But what kind of an impression do you make over these systems? We need to make our presentations and delivery as effective as possible and as close to what might happen if we were in the room as possible.

If you are a trainer, coach or marketing person, you have worked on your personal presentation skills for years. I started studying public speaking when Nixon was president! (wow, that's a long time ago!) However, have you ever thought about how to make your remote presentations better? How do you stay focused the subject and the audience? How do you keep the audience tuned in to your message? How do you manage feedback and questions?

I don't pretend to have all the questions. However I found a great video post, (remote presentation) that has six great tips for improving your remote presentations. In this presentation Nancy Duarte delivers a presentation to be studied and modeled in your next remote presentation.

Click here to see the video -> http://www.duarte.com/six-tips/

I like the new social networking tools. I think they can be helpful to learn, share information with others and keep in touch.

However way too much traffic out there, like on Twitter.com, is just shouting into the dark.

I ran across this video that made me laugh.

Are you shouting into the dark to no one?

The first question you might ask is "why do I need a blog?". Fair question. So let me see if you really need one. Answer these questions for yourself.

1) Do you have a job that is recession proof at an employer that will certainly exist as long as you want to work there?

2) Are you 100% satisfied with your job, your co-workers, your boss, your commute, your benefits package?

3) Do you make enough money to save what you need for retirement without changing your current lifestyle?

4) Do you have the lifestyle you want?

If you did not answer all of these questions with a clear and resounding "Yes" then you need a blog. Well, you need more than a blog, but we will start there.

Just so we are clear, a blog, properly maintained, can help you find a job when you need one, help you find a better job when you want one, increase your social and professional connections so you can find more and better ways to pursue your goals. Create the lifestyle you want.

The two primary ways that a blog does these wonderful things is through developing an ever increasing network of likeminded people and by creating an online presence for yourself that you create and manage.

Networking is the path to improving your career. Today's networked world is demanding it. If you only interact with co-workers, friends and family and you find yourself in a position needing a new job you will be relegated to the back of the line because you came to the new opportunity through traditional sources like adds and recruiters rather in the front door because you were known by someone in the organization. Once you are being considered for a new position or trying to land that next big customer, the chances are nearly 100% that you will be searched for online. What will the prospective employer see when they Google you? College drinking party pictures? Your web site dedicated to your dead dog Stinky? Out of date comments from a previous employer's web site? A blank social networking page that would make a person wonder if you even exist?

Starting a blog is listed as the #1 step by the internet marketing firm HotSpot on their Inbound Marketing Blog . Many other experts also list starting a blog as the first step in increasing your online reputation. See Doug Shimp's article "6 Easy Steps to Embrace Social Media and Networking".

Hopefully I have convinced you. Now you may be asking what is the best way to start a blog. There are any number of free and low cost services out there and they are fine as far as they go. I'm not going to say they won't work, I have one myself that I have had for several years. However to really make the effort worthwhile from a long-term career perspective you will need to look more professional than using Google's Blogger.com, Blog.com, WordPress.com and the like. To do this you will need a domain name that identifies you. I like to recommend the pattern firstname-lastname.net . Mine is http://rod-claar.net. The first and last name are separated because this is how the search engines can find you when someone searches for your name "firstname lastname". I have a unique name so I don't have the problem many people have that are lots of people with the same name. Then you will have to get a little more creative. Most of the time I recommend using a city name or a profession in domain name. For example "Joe-Smith-Jockey" or "Mary-Smith-Toledo". If you don't have a unique name, and Google yourself to find out, you will have to put some thought and a number of searches before you find something you like and will be unique enough.

The next thing you will have to decide is how to create the blog. There are choices here too. The first is how you want to create the content and the second is where the blog will be hosted on the internet. I mentioned before that I have a Blogger.com blog. It was my first blog and is very easy to use. I'm sure that most of the other free services are also very easy to use. Be careful, however that you can use your domain name. My Bloogger.com blog is actually hosted by another web site host. I use a domain name that I own, but have the ease of use of Blogger.com.

However there are some things I want to do that I can't do with a free type blogging account. The big thing is something called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. To do this you need the ability to control some very specific things that the free blog sites won't let you have access to. SEO is a topic of its own and you can deal with that later after you get your blog up and running. We will be posting information about SEO here in the future.

So unless you are a professional web developer with a ton of time on your hands, you will need a tool for managing your blog. Again there are a number of choices but the most popular seems to be WordPress standalone. Once you have WordPress and a domain name pointing to a hosting account at a reliable internet hosting provider you are just about ready to start blogging. In most cases you will have to upload WordPress to your site at the hosting provider.

If you are a little more technical and have a .net background you could choose to use BlogEngine.net . This has most of the popular features found in other blogging engine, yet built on a .net 2.0 platform with optional SQL Server database backend and asp.net roles and user management.

Either way the process is not difficult, but it can be a bit tricky. However there is a better way. At ProfessionalRecognition.com we have training and packages that you can use to make the process of getting started easier. If you want some in person training their Certified Trainers are experts in technical training and the groundbreaking course "Managing Your Professional Identity" is a great place to start. They will be offering introductory pricing the first time they hold a course in each major US market for the rest of 2009.

If you want to get started before we come to area check out the Quick Start package that gets you everything you need to start blogging. They will set up your site with a domain name of your choice and send you the popular book "How to Write a Blog that People Will Want To Read" by Scott McNulty. With this package you get the domain name, web hosting for a year and give you the keys to your new blog site! Then they will be there to support you if you need help and to help you make sure that the search engines find you and respect your great work!

So now you have no reason not to get started. Blog on!

OK, I'm hooked. Twitter is fun. Twitter is informative. However it takes a lot of time to manage a reasonable Twitter presence.

First, you have to get TweetDeck . TweetDeck helps you keep on top of what is going on in your Twitterverse. For my Mac freinds, and possibly others, they are having some memory leak issues, but I understand this is getting better. Even so, don't Tweet without TweetDeck.

Next you need TweetLater . The TweetLater site says "Learn How To Stand Out By Adding Sizzle To Your Online Persona". This is a powerful set of tools. Schedule tweets, track keywords, save and reuse drafts, send automatic direct-message thank-yous to new followers, a personal status feed and much more.

Somehow you need to be found. I just stubled on Twellow. This site is like a yellow-pages for Twitter. Register and select your categories.

Are you in this for business? Many people are. Google Twitter for Business and you will find a lot of articles. One of the best ones is 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business .

As you get more into it you will want to know how you are doing. Take a look at Twitalizer. From the site - "Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media." I'm just getting started, but here is a recent report for agile_coach. How do I get that Clout up? ;>)

Oh, Twitter, Oh Twitter are you here to stay or the hot thing today? I think it is here to stay.

You can follow the SilverBackGeek at agile_coach .

I'm a near bleeding edge person, technology speaking. I don't want to jump into every technology as soon as it comes out, but when something is past a raw version 1 and has reached a state where it looks like it will be reasonably popular, I feel that I have an obligation to jump in. I'm a coach and trainer and I think that I have a responsibility to my clients to keep my experience and exposure to technology as wide as possible.

I built a 64 bit XP box almost three years ago and struggled to make it do all the things I do with a PC. Only in the last month or so has that become a reality.

I have been running Vista on my laptop for almost a year. It was a rocky start, but I have grown to actually like it. There are still some things that annoy me, but in balance it is a good thing.

Then I had a hardware problem on one of my desktop machines. I was running a SATA RAID-5 drive system using the motherboard hardware and driver. It had a nasty habit of dropping one of the drives out of the array. I never did figure out if it was the drives, the controller or the driver. I would just have the vendor supplied Windows configuration utility rebuild the array. No big deal, that's what RAID-5 is supposed to be about, right?

The real problem came when virtually simultaneously an automatic Windows update requiring a reboot happened at the same time as one of these RAID problems. Vista has a robust recovery system that enables you to roll back changes that broke your system. However, because I had a hardware problem at about the same time or for some other reason (possibly user error), none of the available restore points would load and fix the problem. I was really stuck. The drives ran, but Windows would not boot properly due to a problem caused by the update of the video driver that left the system with only a black screen and mouse pointer, even in Safe Mode!

My only option was to install another drive, reinstall an OS and save my data from the drives. What a pain.

So here is my recommendation for all of you who depend on Vista. Get an external USB drive at least twice the size of your boot partition and use the Vista Backup and Restore Center to completely back up your system on a regular basis. This utility will create a backup that the Vista install can use to restore your system when an event like this hits you. It is easy and quick. My 250 gig boot partition takes about 10 minutes.

The investment in $100-$200 might save you days of frustration and loss of data!

I just got back from teaching a design patterns course at Microsoft in Mountain View. This was my first trip down there and I really enjoyed the class and the students.

This was a very serious group of students. I teach a lot at Microsoft and for the most part the students are serious about their jobs and learning, but this group of 19 developers, architects, testers and managers were very serious.

I'm trying to say that this is a good thing. They listened to me, followed along in their manuals and asked great questions.

We have a design exercise on the second day around lunch time. I got them started on the exercise well before noon and I would normally expect some of the designs to be started when I go to lunch and most, if not all, to be complete when I get back from lunch. After lunch, I could see the outline of a design that had been erased on the whiteboard area for one team and the other areas were clean.

I asked them if they were having a disagreement and they said, "No, we just don't want the other teams to copy our design!".

An attitude that protects a proposed design from others in a classroom setting is one thing, but I know that this kind of reluctance to show and discuss a propose design happens all too often on real projects.

There are several possible causes for the choice to not “go public” with our deigns. Sometimes designers and architects want to wait until the design is complete before opening it up for comment. Others are worried about the public criticism or even just the time it would take to respond to comments and questions. Worst of all are the cases where the delay in comment is a calculated effort to force a design for the project by not giving sufficient time for comment.

I believe that all of these scenarios have the same basic flaw. These are all based on the assumptions that we can figure it all out up front and that a small number of smart people can figure out even the most complex design problems. Apart from just being plain wrong, these assumptions break a fundamental rule for success in an agile project. In these cases it is the people that are leading. For our projects to be successful they must be agile. Being agile means that we embrace change because we know that most of the problems in a traditional software development project surround how we deal with change. If change is the enemy and resisted we will probably not be open to requirements changes that can be the difference between success and failure for our products.

We must let the product lead. What does it need? How well do we understand what the product needs? How can we provide those features? Letting the product lead means that the team is more concerned with the success of the product than their own individual agendas. When people lead the project, what they want is more important than the product needs.

Put the product in charge and let the entire team help move the product along. Scott Bain likes to tell the story of the MIT project to develop the software for the guidance computer on the first Apollo missions. I’ll let him tell you if you have not heard it, but the breakthrough came when a junior engineer thought outside the normal boundaries and proposed a solution that worked. Getting someone to listen to his solution was the bigger problem than the actual solution! If the product is leading we will be more open to input from all team members and to solutions from outside the box.

Let your product lead. Clear off the old stuff from you whiteboards, move them into a public space and get your designs out there for comment. Your team and your products will be better for it.

BTW, the team that hid their solution would have benefited from some input!

I recently wanted to build a new personal desktop for my home office. Yes, I know, for what I spent I could buy a nice laptop, but I want to say I built it and moreover be able to fix it if something goes wrong. I started out with the lofty goal of a dual core 64 bit killer machine, but gave way to a more practical single proc configuration.

This article is not about what I used and why, I'll save that for another day. What I wanted to let you know is what to expect if you venture out on to this new 64 bit landscape with me.

I don't have all the answers, but here is what I have learned.

First of all I had access to the new WindowsXp x64 version through my MSDN subscription. So after I collected all the parts I proceeded blindly into the setup process.

Problem #1 – SATA drivers not in Windows x64 distribution. They were not hard to find, but not expecting this, I at first doubted my skill and luck as a PC builder. However a quick call to my son who does this kind of stuff for a living, he assured me that a couple of keystrokes at the right place in the setup and a floppy with the drivers, it would not be a problem.

Problem #2 – What floppy, I got no stinking floppy! Yes, that’s right this was going to be the third PC in a row that I build without a floppy drive. It was late on a Saturday evening at this point so I had to cannibalize an old system for a floppy drive. Looks like I am going to have to buy one because I will need one to flash my motherboard BIOS too.

Problem #3 – Yes, Dorothy, this is not your old 32 bit system and those old outdated 32 bit device drivers will not work. Not so big a deal to begin with because the VIA chipset site has all the drivers AND they are all in the x64 install except the pesky SATA driver. However other devices may be a problem. I use a couple of Line6 USB products with my guitar and Line6 does not have 64 bit versions of the drivers and can not or will not say when they will.

However overall I am very happy with my new killer system. My Line6 stuff does not work yet, but I will pester them until they get the drivers out.

My biggest piece of advice is to carefully research the availability of 64 bit device drivers before you must depend on that system to use your favorite card or USB device.

I'm sure that there are thousands of organizations out there that share the “The Challenge”. IT groups, application service providers, independent software vendors teams of people with a common set of goals that leverage computer technology to get the job done. Their “Challenge” is to keep up with technology and still deliver the products and services that their customers and business depend on.

These are small organizations. These teams don't have accesses to the resources of a large company with a revenue stream that is large enough that even a small percentage of the total revenue produces a funding level that meets the basic needs of the team. Don't get me wrong, large organizations have their own types of budgetary problems, but small companies have a disadvantage that results from their small revenue stream.

This funding issue results in forced economies in at least three areas. The first and most obvious is people. Not only is the total number of people provided by the business to meet the goals lower, but because of that people have to wear many hats. In some ways this leads to flexibility and nimbleness, which is an asset in any organization, but because individuals are expected to be able to do many diverse things, their skills and knowledge can not be as high in any one area. In a larger team, people can specialize and the company ends up getting more bang for it's buck. These smaller team's efforts become fragmented it is harder to get projects complete on a predictable schedule.

The second major effect is the slower pace at which new technology is adopted. This is a byproduct of the staffing issue, but is also a primary issue in that hardware has to last longer, training budgets are smaller and business is often managed in a more frugal way. Being thrifty is a good thing, but it induces inefficiency and prevents teams from adopting new technologies that would save time and money just because of the up-font cost.

The third and hardest factor to recognize and quantify is the higher risk attributed to the adoption of new technologies due to the unknowns and the higher portion of the total budget that new technology adoption would require in these small organizations. A new server operating system or development platform may be tested and proved in a large organization often has to go quickly into production in a smaller organization just because the cost of the change is a higher percentage of the total budget. Often, these new technologies are avoided in the small organization until there is literally no choice. Then eventually some situation will arise that forces the issue. For example the old server is down or a customer demands a new interface built on the latest development platform.

One of the primary goals of SilverBackGeek.com is to help organizations understand these issues and find short cuts and efficiencies to implementing new technology to keep their customers, business and technical workers satisfied.

I hope that this blog will be of help to you.