Changing the world one ACT at a time

Whilst talking to @StevieHamilton he mentioned listening to this great podcast called Radiolab Numbers. He also mentioned Benford’s Law and it’s applications, it sounded interesting and so I went and listened and indeed, it is.

Benford’s Law, also known as the First Digit law basically states that numbers will have a tendency to start with a lower digit number than a higher digit number, i.e. they start with a 1 or a 2 more often than a 8 or a 9. It was actually a guy called Simon Newcomb who first found this tendency because he noticed that in logarithm books (a book of Log tables), the pages at the front of the book, were much more worn than the other page, this lead him to ask the all important question of “why?”.

And that is actually the point of this post, asking “why?” is important. Very. Unless we ask that question, so many things will be undiscovered. It doesn’t matter if someone else has already discovered it, if it’s new for us, it can be something that expands our mind, leads us in new directions. As proof of that, you’ll note that Benford’s Law isn’t called Newcomb’s Law. You don’t have to be the first to ask “why?”, but you do have to ask.

What have you asked “Why?” about lately? and why is that?

If like me you work in the online world, you could be forgiven for thinking that an avatar is a picture or photograph used to represent yourself in online communities.

Yet, every definition I’ve found lists another, older definition in first place, and I found this interesting…

The wikipedia disambiguation page, the Google define:avatar & dictionary.com pages and more all say this of the word Avatar:

the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human or superhuman or animal form.

Who knew huh?

Google Wave is occuping a great deal of mind space at the moment, the best site I’ve found that explains what it is, and how to use it is this, which starts out with this:

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help.

read more here: The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave.

The jury is still out for me, but at this point Gina and Adams explanation has made more sense of it, how this helps CRM and how it can be integrated with ACT! is what I’m mostly interested in.

Often I’ve been told “my ACT! won’t print reports, it doesn’t matter which report I select, it won’t print”.

In the majority of these cases, the fix is actually very quick and simple.

You simply require at least one printer installed and have it set to be the default printer.

See, that was simple. Unfortunately, people sometimes remove all their printers, or for some reason none of their printers are marked as being the default printer and the first sign of trouble is that when they go to print out a report in ACT! it doesn’t work.

I read Seth Godin’s post Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law and found that the idea there resonated with me, there is a limit to how many people you can truly keep up with.

It was in fact the first time I’ve heard of Dunbar and his ‘magic’ number of 150, further reading showed that it was in fact not 150, but is 148, or 147.8 and is commonly rounded up to 150.

This number of 150 has become “Dunbar’s Number” and has been popularized by various very popular business books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (summary), Duncan J. Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (review) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (review), and Mark Buchanan’s Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (review), the ideas from which are the foundation of the various Social Network Services that I’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog. – source: Life With Alacrity

All of which shows that a lot of people believe there is an upper limit to how many people you can meaningfully interact with in before you start losing productivity/efficiency/usefulness. This is certainly true of the popular social media sites.

What it does for me is make me think how I can use this information to make myself more useful to the social networks I’m involved with. Does it mean I should follow fewer people on twitter? Or does it mean follow them by the bucket load and simply ignore those outside of my ‘Dunbar’ group?

What do you think? Perhaps you have some ideas that I’ve not thought of, if so, please let me know.

After spotting a link to both the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, I’ve read the original 1980 paper by the Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus (A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition)which made for interesting reading.

It describes (suprise!) 5 stages one goes through when learning a skill:

• Novice
• Advanced beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert

I’ve yet to read the book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, but the two chapters that are online (“Introduction” and “Journey From Novice to Expert”) and the mind map shown all lead me to believe that the book uses the Dreyfus Model as a basis to then provide practical measures to implement in order to make your way from novice to expert.

This is of interest to me because since October 2008 I began working with a product called ACT! which is a Contact and Customer Relationship Management product. When I began I was a Novice at using and implementing ACT!. My employer provided great training which got me to the Advanced beginner stage. Constant use and troubleshooting got me to the Competent stage, which was validated by my passing the ACT! Certified Consultants Exam. Now I’m chipping away at the Proficient stage, made just a little more interesting by the fact the the software has just been updated to version 12 (ACT! by Sage 2010).

But enough about me, what have you been working on becoming an expert on?

I’ve just come across a terminal server that wouldn’t let me log on. Turns out the maximum number of users the terminal server is licensed for has been exceeded.

Thusly, from another machine on the network, we open a command prompt and type
qwinsta /server:<servername>

This will give a list of the terminal server sessions on that server, note the ID number (aka sessionid) as we use them in the following commands.

We can reset a session by using
rwinsta <sessionid> /server:<servername>

or we can disconnect the session with
tsdiscon <sessionid> /server:<servername>

or we can logoff a session with
logoff <sessionid> /server:<servername>

Dan Rigsby has more info as does Scott Forsyth.

I have a schedule that I print for a community group. I use Excel to produce it and one of the things I’ve done to make it easier for people to see when they are rostered on is to highlight the row that relates to their assignment.

Posted via email from Ben’s posterous

Stan Smith has just posted a link to MS KB 321185 – How to identify your SQL Server version and edition which is quite handy.

I’ve posted previously on how to find out what version of SQL is running, but this newer KB link above adds SQL 2008 version numbers as well.

Today I had the privilege of running 3 workshops at Brisbane Boys’ College for their Careers and Counselling department on the topic of “Social Media – the use of electronic social networks to advance your career“.

I found a few things of interest:

• Almost all the students were on Facebook (a guess, 80%)
• A lot of the students were on MySpace (a guess, 60%)
• Only 3 of the students had heard of LinkedIn
• maybe 1/3 of the students knew of twitter, 1 read, but none posted much

This does line up with what I’ve read elsewhere, that is, that the largest demographic using twitter are older than the students at BBC. Although it seems that this doesn’t account for other twitter clients such as tweetdeck, twhirl, seesmic desktop. (Bonus link: Australian stats for twitter)

I have to say that I did push the view that they should be creating themselves a LinkedIn profile now!

Before they enter the workforce, they should in my view, fill it in with:

• their educational history,
• encourage their lecturers, any part-time employers and members of any sporting clubs they are a part of to also join up to LinkedIn,
• they should then connect with each other via LinkedIn
• then they need to ask for recommendations.

This gives them the opportunity to write their own history online, to actively create the content that google will find when a potential employer checks up on them.

Thanks to both David Ogilvie and Renate Falkenhagen at BBC for inviting me to be a part of the program today and a special mention to Lee Hopkins, because I’ve learnt a lot about social media and communication from him.

My own LinkedIn profile is here: www.linkedin.com/in/benhamilton.
I encourage you to connect with me there, also, you can follow me on twitter at twitter.com/benhamilton.