Cam Findlay

Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Welcome back to 2010, it has been a while since I last posted anything Techy or Samurai related it reminds me how quickly we can go from leadership thinking to management thinking when one gets very busy (My company re-launched our flagship Guitar learning product Jamorama at the end of 2009 which didn’t leave me much time for blogging, a poor excuse I know!).

As it happens it looks like Julia (my partner) and myself are moving to Wellington! (NZ’s Captial City) for a change of lifestyle and a lot more Film and Television work for Julia.  So I am putting together a proposal to keep working at Rock Star Recipes but remotely!

Remote work and more interesting, remote or distance leadership is something I have become very interested in, how can we in 2010 with all the technology easily available to most businesses lead from a distance?  What are the challenges? How does communication, face to face time, company culture and atmosphere differ? I suspect a culture of great communication, trust and respect is key.

I’m hoping to document as much as I can while I learn more about this and also put my proposal forward to actually experience and work as a remote staff member and remote leader…

Perhaps we are coming to a point where there is no real difference whether someone is in the office or not as long at the end results are met and accountability is key. In the 80’s they called it “Tele-Communting” more recently it was dubbed “Tele-Work” (Perhaps to make it sound more like working for those managers who could not let micro-management go?) but I think going forward it will just be “work” as the technology and easy constant contact and communication from anywhere in the world becomes the norm.

More to come…

Oh, and for those who need their Technology and Ninja fix… check out the new Nexus One powered by Google Android.

So for a “Samuari Tech Geek” i haven’t really put up anything on the tech tip yet so I thought I would talk about a couple of useful little tools I have been using.

I just spotted an interesting article on Read Write Web (a great tech blog I read) about a backup tool for Google Docs.

I had a quick read and installed the software only to find it is only for the Enterprise Version of Google Apps (And for those of you out there using Google Apps it looks like a good tool).  Myself being a big cloud computing advocate (I live in gmail and Google Docs nowadays and haven’t even opened Outlook since the start of the year!) I wanted something that would work with my personal GDocs to have a backup of everything sitting in the Cloud.  A quick search turned up a tool called GDocBackup which does exacly what I want. Within a few mouse clicks I had all my documents and spreadsheets saved to a USB drive!

On to useful tool number 2!
The most annoying thing I think about windows is that as time goes on and you are constantly installing new applications and removing old ones Windows just seems to collect fat in its arteries and slow down.  I think I experieced this on every windows machine I’ve ever used.  Rather than having to do a fresh install of windows everytime I came across this tool called Registry Fix (Which I now run on every windows machine I work on and even installed it on my parent’s computer to keep them from having a techno freakout).  I usually run this tool every month or just whenever I feel my machine has become a bit slow of the mark. It takes only a few minutes to zip through and cleans everything up in your windows registry and gains back that bit of lost performance and productivity while not breaking the bank.

SO thats all from me on the tech tip today, I hope to post more useful tools, websites and write some articles on getting the most out of todays technology and looking forward to tomorrow’s.