Team Dynamics

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni

This is just a great book for any person. We all are members of teams in our lives, whether that's in business, family, sports, whatever.

The book is geared toward a business situation and that's where it shows the most relevance. It's written as a novel for most of the book and that was an interesting approach. The author does a great job of doing this and making his points understood very well by the different characters. You are instantly able to relate your life to the situation by picturing the different characters as the good, and bad, people on the teams in your life.

A valuable, although at times difficult, part of reading this book for me was seeing how I often do a lot of things wrong in the teams that I'm part of. After reading this book I'm much more aware of things that I do and have started to watch for those in order to put the team first. A very enlightening experience.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who leads a team, or is part of one that is looking to make improvements.

Orb DVR

I just ran across this on the trusty Gizmodo feed. I was pretty skeptical about it as I've seen some stuff like this in the past and they just didn't work all that well.

I loaded it onto my computer and gave it a shot. A little strange to setup, but certainly doable. I setup my laptop in the same room and gave it a shot. Seems to work pretty well. I've got a couple of things to work out, but so far so good.

Orb DVR Everywhere: Take That TiVo With You: "If you have TiVoToGo and a TiVo Series 2 DVR, Orb DVR Everywhere will let you stream programs from that TiVo to any Web-enabled mobile device, PDA, or PC. It will also let you access music, photos, or video from your PC.

And, if your PC has a TV tuner, you can watch live or recorded TV from that, too. It's a free add-on to the company's Orb software for Windows XP.
-Gizmodo Blog Entry

So if you're interested check it out at www.orb.com.

Google Reader learns to share

Google Reader learns to share

This is an interesting feature that Google has now added to their RSS Reader program. I've decided to give it a ty here on my Blog so that everyone can see what I'm recently marking off as "stared" items. Keep in mind that I don't "star" a lot of things currently, but what I do I find honestly interesting. Take a look on the sidebar and see what I'm finding interesting in the wonderful web.

Mom always taught us to share and now we know why: it's fun. Google Reader, which keeps track of websites you like to read regularly, just added the ability to share what you like to read with your friends.

Smart Playlists suggestions

This was a blog entry that I ran across through Lifehacker. It shows some pretty good ideas on how to create custom smart playlists in iTunes so that you can get a good mix of stuff you really like, stuff you haven't listened to in a while, and not get over run with the same old stuff.

Be smart about your Smart Playlists:

Blogger Andy Budd has posted a tutorial detailing how he sets up his iTunes Smart Playlists in order to get the most out his music library.

I currently have 3476 songs in iTunes which works out at around 12.4 days worth of music. This may seem a lot, but considering how much time I spend on the computer, I burn through tracks with surprising ease.

One of the problems with this is keeping your music collection interesting.... The way to achieve this is by utilising smart playlists, however it can be quite difficult getting the right balance.

For the rest see Andy's blog.


Update: 9-APR-06 -- I've been using this new playlist idea for a while now and just LOVE it. I highly recommend doing something similar if you have a large music collection to help you find some of those missing favorites out there.