ben.hamilton.id.au

Do you love your job? I do. Let me tell you why. I get to change ‘someones’ world on a daily basis. And I love it. 

I do technical support for a small marketing firm, all of our clients use ACT!, which is a contact management application. When you show someone how they can improve their productivity, improve their bottom line they get excited, and by extenstion, so do I. 

Just this week we demo’ed a customisation that will totally change the clients ability to track the jobs they do, the items associated with those jobs, the people and all the rest of it. The client was literally getting out of his chair, walking around “of course”, “WOW!”, “does that mean…” – “yes it does”. It was a the HIGHLIGHT of my week. To have spent the time delving into their business to work out what they do, how they do it so as to figure out what they needed was fun, it was truely enjoyable, but to see the reaction, the excitement, the realisations for what would now be possible – that was GOLD.

I love my job.

[note: the title "Changing the world one ACT at a time!" is a hat tip to an insightful guy with a Blue Monster]

[note: edited to fix a typo and add URL for www.evolutionmarketing.com.au]

Hey, this is cool, I’ve just realised that Chome will open the web interface of VMWare Server 2.0 – it didn’t last week. Neato.

I use LinkedIn and find it useful to keep in touch with the business people I deal with. Also it has enabled me to find key people in companies so that I can get the information I need quicker, for example I needed some technical help with an IBM product, I was able to find a contact on LinkedIn that had close contacts with IBM technical people – shortcut to the answer I was looking for.

Thus, if you use LinkedIn, link to me. What goes round comes round. I’ve found others useful, other have found me useful – my LinkedIn profile is here: www.linkedin.com/in/benhamilton

Here are some lists that others have compiled of ways you can use LinkedIn to benefit yourself:

• Guy Kawasaki on ways to use LinkedIn
• A short slideshow on why LinkedIn is useful
• HUGE list of 100+ ways to use LinkedIN

Also worth reading is Mitch Joels take on Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn and the difference between them.

The rate of change in the world is immense. Take a look at this to put a few facts into perspective. Amazing. Scary. Exciting.

A client has a SharePoint installation that has died, with all their project files and data in it.

In the course of searching for how to resurrect it, I’ve found the following that seem to be things that others may well benefit from:

• An article on the Official SBS Blog, pointing to an unofficial tool:

  During disaster recovery, if no backups other than the database files exist, we may manually extract the files from the database as a “belt and suspenders” approach to disaster recovery.

• A script from Mark Jen at Plaxo that restores files from SharePoint SQL DB with their directory structure
• An article from Ed Walters on how to backup SharePoint

Possibly the biggest lesson here is to ensure that if your using SharePoint, make sure you back it up PROPERLY, ALL OF IT.