I'm a startup founder heading up ops, an experienced management consultant focusing on change management, and I'm on a personal healing journey. For all my life, I masked the fact that I am a child of refugees. Now, I'm taking off the mask.
I bought the gear and software well over a year ago in hopes of doing some screen recording. It’s been fear (and a bit of laziness) that’s been keeping me from publishing using this new medium. As with everything in life, the first one is usually the hardest. I’m hoping that getting this one out of the way will pave way for more opportunities to sketch out new ideas.
Whiteboard Talk Intro: My first recording from Daniel Hoang on Vimeo.
The power of technology and creative minds is demonstrated with Khan Academy. In this Ted talk, Khan talks about how his concepts evolved and how these tools can enable teachers to engage with their students. I love the concept of watching lectures at your own pace and using in classroom time for exercises.
When we first bought our home, we upgraded to a new 200 amp electrical service and rewired much of the home. With that project done, we installed a hydronic furnace a tankless water heater hooked up to an air handler that pumps warm air to the ducts throughout the house. Unfortunately, our home had old galvanized steel water pipes which were too rusty to hook up to the water heat. We finally planned and started the water repipe project.
One lesson I learned right away is that any infrastructure work impacts the rest of the home. We took this opportunity to shift the garage wall five feet in to gain some space in the basement. We worked with my neighbor to frame out a 2×4 wall. I got a chance to play with a framing nailer and a powder-actuated nail gun. It uses a .22 caliber shell to shoot a nail into the concrete floor. Before any of this could happen, my friends and I pulled down lathe and plaster and some blown in insulation.
Continue reading “Adventures in home improvement: water repipe”
I’m no where near a paperless workflow. I’m about 60/40 digital and analog. I prefer to take handwritten notes. This preference leads piles and piles of paper. In a recent effort to organize my old files and papers, I found imaging is a lot of work.
For a successful scan, you have to remove staples, flatten the document, feed it through the automatic document feeder, monitor it to ensure that each page scans correctly, and then name the file. Once I have the file, I would have to tag, label, and date each document. For search, I have to run it through an OCR program.
Meet Shoeboxed. I call it the Netflix of paper. They send you pre-paid blue envelopes that fix 8.5×11 sheets of paper. You stuff it full of your documents and send it off. Each envelop is tracked with a unique tracking number and Shoeboxed sends you a message when they receive it and when they’re done imaging your documents. The service includes a quality control mechanism that includes automated scanning and a review by a person. For the most part, I found that the tagging and labeling of documents about 80% accurate. In some cases, the software scans and labels it something else. Usually this is just personal preference.
I also have the Evernote integration setup so my scans are automatically uploaded into Evernote.
Most recently, I have been cutting the binding off my old Moleskine notebooks. I put a binder clip and sent one off to Shoeboxed to test out the quality. My test document was 122 pages and each page was scanned beautifully. My notebook was a combination of black ink, pencil, and various colored inks. The black was scanned B&W, the color was maintained, and my pencil marks came in fine. Unfortunately, my document was over the page limit for OCR and my handwriting is terrible.
Lessons learned:
Things I’ve sent in to Shoeboxed to be scanned recently:
Here’s a great video by Dave Gray sketching out the concepts of the Connected Company.
Certain functions of a company needs to be more like a machine, particularly when it needs consistent and repeatable outputs. When the path is uncertain, the machine breaks down and you need to create a more organic structure. In the video, notice how the differences are analogous to a machine and organism.
The If Then statement is one of the most powerful tools. We use it in Excel to create formulas that perform a calculation if a certain set of conditions apply. We also create an If Then for our email to apply rules.
If This Then That, or IFTTT, is another great web service that uses that basic premise to integrate most major web service such as social networks, cloud storage, and others. For example, I currently have a “recipe” setup to monitor my WordPress blog for any new posts. If there’s a new post, then it will create a link and summary on my Daniel Hoang Facebook fan page. IFTTT tracks the number of triggers that executes and logs them.
Computers are amazing at performing repetitious activities nearly perfect to the specs provided by the user. In this case, as long as I get my recipe right, IFTTT will always pull the data and perform the action. Just like email rules, the most precise you are, the more automated your routine actions will be. By automating your routine actions, you can manage by exception.
All this talk of bigger screens will never beat out a 4×8 whiteboard. Multiple boards can creative an immersive experience that a display will not be able to replicate.
“The best elevator pitch doesn’t pitch your project. It pitches the meeting about your project. The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It’s not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it’s a little fractal of the entire story, something real.”