Cam Findlay

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

What are you naturally good at and what talents do you have?

• Good at listening and understanding others.
• problem solving and learning.
• translating “geek”… that is I have always been able to communicate technical concepts clearly and concise to people that aren’t very technical.
• Anything technology and computer related, programming, web development.
  
• I often see opportunities and uses for technology to make working easier.
  
• Helping others understand and make use of new technology, website, social networking.
• I have a good feel for music, i have played several instruments, DJ’d and written music.
• I have recently found a “talent” within my chosen martial art, iaido which also offers time to work on a clear mind and a greater sense of spirit.
  

What are the images you associate with you doing work that you love?

Gadgets, computers, communities of people both online in forums, social network and offline in professional networks and hobbies, music, solving challenging problems, writing useful website code.

Think of the three greatest/most significant experiences/achievements of your life. What are the images that you associate with them?

1. Completing my Diploma of Multimedia – Being creative with computers, solving problems, working with clients and to a brief, self paced learning.
2. Getting my current job at RockStar Recipes – Getting to combine computing with music, teaching others to play guitar, building an online community around learning, solving technical problems and contributing to the vision of the organisation.
   
3. Attending the X:Media:lab Conferences – Getting to learn about the latest technology and ideas, meeting the worlds best in my industry, being able to speak on a highly technical level and being understood by others who are as technical as myself.
   

If you were to do work in the future that you loved and that was totally aligned with these images what would it look like? How would it feel?

I would be using the latest new technology on the internet to help people communicate there would be a sense or feeling that I am contributing to making the world online a better, easier and more fun place for everyone to interact, have conversations, do business and hopefully it would be so easy, integrated and intuitive that everyone can participate and contribute without the current technical barriers.

As far as passions go, technology has to be up there on the top of my list.  I really enjoy keeping track of all the new hardware, websites, mobile phones and gadgets that always seem to be released overseas long before we even hear about them out here in New Zealand.  I try to listen to as many technology focused podcasts and follow many technology blogs.

I’m an early adopter of as much new technology I can get my hands on if I feel it is something that is going to change the way we think going forward.  The iPhone being one of those gadgets I lined up last year in July to get my hands on this game changing platform, not just because the iPhone is a cool piece of kit but because I believe that portable computing platform like the iPhone push forward the way in which we connect with others and have meaningful conversations (though tools including Twitter and Facebook).  Technology touches so many aspects of our lives without us thinking twice about it and I makes our lives *easier and more interconnected with those around us.

I am also passionate about the method in which I gather all my technology related information and media; the global community that exists online and in online communities and “social media” (a term I use relatively loosely as it seems to be a word thrown around in many a traditional marketers plan a lot as the new cool thing).  In reality I think the best “social media” is naturally and organically formed communities around a topic of interest and led by those within the community.

Whether this conversation is initiated by organisations or individuals doesn’t matter so much, as long as it is real, genuine and honest conversation.
It is becoming more and more accessible to engage and have real dialogue with a community of people using freely available tools and a smart strategy, I get excited when I see great implementations of these ideas/tools and people engaging in communities about ideas and interests they are passionate about.

*There is some debate around this… just try keeping your mobile phone or computer off for a day or two and see what happens!  I also am guilty of cursing at my computer screen when something doesn’t work as it should.

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.