Sunday, August 31, 2014

Team Collaboration with OneNote 2013

The following video on my YouTube channel shows how you can create notebooks on a network drive within your company, share notes with your teammates, host a Wiki, exchange project notes. It is all about improving team collaboration. This is a great solution as most of the companies do not allow the information to leave company's servers and PCs; therefore, you can use OneNote and create your notebooks on a network drive that your technical operations team backs up and maintains on regular basis. You may ask "why not use SharePoint". My answer to that would be:  if your company already invested into SharePoint, you can use it, but nothing beats the search functionality within OneNote and I mean nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocbl8HQ-KdU



- almirsCorner.com -

#almirsCorner #almirx101 #OneNote #OneNote2013 #TeamCollaboration #Microsoft #OneDrive #Tutorial #notetaking #Wiki #SharePoint #SharePointAlternative 

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Cars and Coffee in Irvine - August 30, 2014

This morning's Cars and Coffee in Irvine was packed. It's been a while since I have gone, and it is good to be back. Waking up early morning is not that tough when the show is this great. There was a good selection of old school Japanese, American muscle and exotic cars.

Album Link (All Pictures)

Here is the preview with a few pictures:








- almirsCorner.com

#CarsAndCoffee #Irvine #OrangeCounty #carshow #cars #Porsche #Porsche911 #GT3 #Datsun #Benz #AMG #McLaren #MiniCooper #AcuraNSX #Jeep #BMWM4 #BMW2002 

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Are you paying attention ?

A lot of times you wonder if somebody actually read the document or information that you shared with them. You may spend a lot of time putting this information together, and you expect that the information is to some degree read or analyzed. This is easy to manage in smaller teams because you establish that mutual trust and respect, but it gets harder in larger teams that constantly change size based on demand.

If you are noticing that a certain individual or a group of people are not being professional about it, there is an easy way to confirm this suspicion. 

(1)
Use a tool or a cloud solution that can tell you if a document was downloaded from the link you shared in the email.

OR

(2)
Provide a bad link to your document. If this person or these co-workers never read your email and tried to open the document, they will not realize that you provided them a bad link :)


I did not intentionally do these steps, but it happened by accident and I discovered a few things :)


- almirsCorner.com - 


Chromebooks / Cloud Solutions - Simple tip for students to make their Chromebooks better primary computers

Whether we like it or not, the cloud solutions are becoming a norm for a lot of us from day to day. Chromebooks are just a hardware platform that supports this direction and Google is not slowing down with it.

What do we need in order to find Chromebooks useful:

  • Internet connection if we want to properly utilize the features of ChromeOS (i.e. Chromebook HP 14" comes with 2-year data plan through T-Mobile 200Mb/month).
  • Offline Chrome App support in case you lose internet connection

These are not really the tips. This is just the bare minimum you need.

A lot of times you would want to use a cloud word processor or a cloud spreadsheet editor, but you know that your school requires your documents to be submitted in certain file formats. First, the school might not want to accept the link to your document stored in the cloud. Second, they will want your homework to be submitted for example in Microsoft format.

There is a simple solution.

When you are working in your GoogleDrive or OneDrive, both solutions have an option to download the documents in the Microsoft format. You can save the file on the local drive of your Chromebook and then email it to your teachers or professors.

If you are running out of space on your SSD on your Chromebook, then a simple solution is to get a USB thumb-drive. I happen to use a 32Gb SanDisk that is so tiny that you can barely tell that anything is connected to your laptop.

Have fun chromebooking :)


- almirsCorner.com - 

#tech #Chromebook #GoogleDrive #OneDrive #CloudSolutions #students #education #cloud #CloudComputing #BackToSchool 




Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Reaching the milestone of 5,000 views / month on my YouTube channel (almirx101)



Another milestone is reached on my YouTube channel http://www.YouTube.com/almirx101

Thank you for watching.





- almirsCorner.com -

#almirsCorner #almirx101 #youtube #milestone

Monday, August 11, 2014

RM Auctions - Pre-Event Pictures - Monterey (August 2014)

It is a beautiful day in Monterey, CA. Here is a link to the album with the RM Auctions pre-event pictures. They are preparing it. The viewing is on Wednesday and the auction is on Thursday.

ALBUM to all car auctions in Monterey:
https://plus.google.com/photos/100186124957600957314/albums/6046480808306549089?authkey=CIio7-yAxezflAE

Preview to the album:








- almirsCorner.com -

#cars #auctions #carauctions #RMAuctions #supercars #classiccars #Monterey #Porsche #Ferrari #Ford #Mercedes 


Sunday, August 10, 2014

Agile Teams and Professional Sports Teams - What do they have in common?

One agile team could be anywhere between 3-8 people, but what do you do when you have multiple agile teams of 3-8 people that have the same overall/company goals within your division?

I was sitting on my couch a few days ago and thinking about this and I think I found a very good comparison. Multiple agile teams in a single company division can be compared to professional sports teams within a professional sport association.

Let's use NBA (National Basketball Association) as an example to do some comparisons.

(1)
Teams?

All teams in NBA have two main goals:
  • Win and make their coaches and team owners happy. Bring in spectators and revenue for the team.
  • Follow the rules of NBA and have NBA win overall in rankings, popularity and revenue.
All agile teams within your company division also have two main goals:
  • Deliver projects on time with quality while meeting and exceeding the expectations of product management.
  • Deliver for the overall company in coordination with other agile teams.

(2)
Team Members?

Each NBA team consists of a few superstars, a few solid contributors and a few rookie contributors that are hungry to prove themselves. They all have the same goal and that goal is to win as a team.

Each agile team consists of a few exceptional performers, a few solid contributors and a few juniors who are hungry to prove themselves. They all have the same goal and that goal is to deliver on time meeting and exceeding expectations.

(3)
Resource Managers or Sport Agents?

NBA has agents that represent multiple players and a single agent could be representing players from multiple teams. It is in their interest to best represent their players and players have to be playing well in order to give agents enough reason to properly represent them.

Your company division may have a group of resource managers and a single resource manager could be representing/managing employees from different agile teams. Employees have to do great work to impress their managers and managers need to be representing employees to best support them in their career growth.

(4)
Trading season?
Everybody is on a different career journey.

NBA players have different journeys. Some players like the team and city they represent and they like renewing their contract with the team if they played well and if their agent represents them well in front of the team owner. Some NBA players play well, but decide not to renew their contracts and decide to explore other options as they and their agents believe that is good for their career. There are also opposite cases where the team owner decides that a player is not a good match for them and they decide to find somebody else in exchange. So NBA introduced the concept of trading in the middle of the season and also at the end of the season when contracts expire. The definition of trading is that you get a player in exchange for another player from a different team. It obviously gets more complicated when multiple players are involved, but you get my point.

Employees among agile teams have different journeys. Some employees may like the team and the type of work that their team is performing and they decide to stay with the team. Some employees who perform well believe that it is good for their career to change agile teams after giving the team enough contribution. A resource manager representing an employee could also recommend or arrange for that employee to be moved to another agile which would be a better fit. Therefore, a company division running multiple agile teams could introduce the concept trading to allow employees to grow their careers and to find the best matches for the agile teams.

(5) 
Competing against each other is NOT in common, but it is similar.

NBA teams compete against each other, but at the end of the day, they are all part of the same community.

Agile teams within your company division should not necessarily compete against each other but the spirit of competition can be channeled in different ways for their team to exceed expectations and deliver.


Conclusion:

Use some of these similarities and go have fun with it. You and your company can go as far as naming your teams by cities or by the names of teams in NBA/NFL/MLB/MLS and etc. That will make work that much more fun.


- almirsCorner.com - 

#tech #agile #scrum #sprints #agilemethodology #incremental #iterative #PDLC #SDLC #requirements #products #productowner #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment 


Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Car Modifications ...... in Photoshop

This is all about doing your homework before spending money on the real car modifications. I am just an average user of Photoshop and I am using the features of Photoshop to achieve the end goal; I am an engineer and the engineering behind the suspension parts are number #1, but the presentation is what sells. Another goal is to decide what the car will look like before making the next step in the modification process.

The first example is 997 Porsche Carrera S.
- first picture is the stock photo
- 2nd picture is the car lowered about 2.5"
- 3rd picture: 2.5" lowering with BBS wheels
- 4th picture: 2.5" lowering with Volk Racing wheels










The second car is 2010 VW GTI.
- 1st picture:  Stock suspensions with aftermarket wheels
- 2nd picture: Extreme lowering job
























The third car is 2009 Mini Cooper:
- 1st picture: Stock photo with Mini factory sports suspension.
- 2nd picture: Extreme lowering (2-3")














- almirsCorner.com - 

#cars #CarModifications #mods #CarMods #lowering #lowered #suspension #race #racing #Porsche #VW #Mini #Cooper #Carrera #GTI #VWGTI #vdub 

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Creativity is a product of free time and outside the box thinking

Creativity is a product of free time and outside the box thinking.

A simple example is when I took vacation in February of this year and spent some time on my YouTube channel and this blog. My results are below. I am sure that you have plenty of examples.

http://www.YouTube.com/almirx101


Don't compare yourself to others ...

Don't compare yourself to others. You don't know what their journey is all about. 

The nerd version of this saying continues as..... They might be a Java developer and you are a .NET developer. Your journeys are totally different.  You get my point; you know what I mean :)



- almirsCorner.com - 

#tech #career #software #programming #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment 

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Products?

It is not about what services we can provide to you as a company; it is about what services we can provide in order for you to get where you want to be. That final destination is what matters. That's what products should be all about.

- almirsCorner.com - 


#products #productmanagement #innovation #solutions #services #softwaresolutions #software #websites