2015/03/23

Moving to WordPress

I'm trying the big league stuff: WordPress.
Harder to configure, because there are a lot of options, but theoretically more versatile.

So, if you want more posts, they will be available on my new site: Learning everyday

Yesterday, I have been learning WordPress, and today, I will be learning WordPress...

Happy Learning.

2015/03/22

Writing: Content Strategy

I just started a course called: Content Strategy for Thought Leaders

This course is to teach people to build a framework to help them write what they like. Fiction, non-fiction, blog, essay, books or simply become a thought leaders in their area of expertise.

I started this course because I do think it will help me become a better thought leader in my area (professionally, being able to write better technical documents), and enhance my hobby of writing.

I did start a lot of writing project but never completed any. This blog is one of them, and for now I still doing it. That's a beginning, but not the first. I did start the same things a couple years ago with another blog, that became a photo blog; And I didn't post any photos for 3 years. Or thoses about my experience with my Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle repairs, or my house construction. But now I just started again. Hopefully this course with help me motivate myself to make it work and be know has a thought leader.

So, I'm still learning, learning to be better at what I like. And after the first session, I figured out that what I like is teaching. Learn, simplify, optimize and teach.

I wish I could find a software or process to teach. As Joseph Michael did for Scrivener, I need to open my eyes to the opportunities. The Mind Mapping exercise did open my eyes to some opportunities, I need to work on them. Maybe a recipe book, a video training on website management for volunteer in sport organisation (Soccer moms, Hockey moms, or even dads), Business Intelligence design, Ruby programming, developing BeagleBone Black projects or database administration.



Happy learning.

2015/03/21

The Writer Life

I found out about this website from like on the Scrivener Coach and Jeff Goins.

The Writer Life

There's a lot of article for writers. How to get published, How to manage a freelance career, and much more.
There's a lot of content of this web site and it's a very good ressource if you want to become a writer or want to publish a book.

 Happy reading and learning.

2015/03/20

TED Talk: Architecture of the future

This TEDTalk it very impressive. I always loved architecture, and Marc Kushner tells us a bit why some building have special shapes. And why the newer building usually are better looking then the 80-90's buildings.

Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you

This presentation is very informative and inspiring. I just want to call an architect and build a new house.
But, I'll wait a couple of years for that...

Happy learning, and get inspired!

2015/03/19

Proton Mail

Our e-mail are not truly private anymore, or have they ever been private?
In this TEDTalk, Andy Yen compares our e-mail to postcards. I do like this analogy.

Think your email's private? Think again

His talk is very accessible, and I do think that anybody could understand the concepts.

So I went to the Proton Mail site and got on the waiting list.

I'll make a post to let you know how much time it took.

Happy learning.

2015/03/18

School of Greatness: Adam Grant


I heard this guy on the School of Greatness podcast.

Give and Take: The Revolutionary Path to Success

I do like the idea of the personality types: Givers, Matchers and Takers.
If I look at my past, I would be a mix of giver and matcher. And it has given me great projects and great opportunity.

So I added his book on my "To Read" list:

2015/03/17

How your old mobile could save the rain forest

Topher White and his team got a very good idea, and it can even inspire other projects in other parts of the world. It's a cellphone recycling project, but it started out to be a save the forest project.
But looking at the ressources available, they found that old cellphone could solve their problem.

What can save the rainforest? Your used cell phone

This project inspires me ideas that somebody could do to recycle more old cellphone like:
- anti-theft device
- house alarms
- pool alarm sensor
- rodent detection
And much more.

This TEDTalk is very inspiring.

Happy learning.

2015/03/16

How to stimulate Innovation

This Ted Talks from Linda Hill is very inspiring.

Called "How to manage for collective creativity", I would have called it « How to stimulate Innovation »

How to manage for collective creativity

She talks about what the innovative companies and persons have in common. What to change in the management to help the lower levels of the hierarchy of the company to bring forward the innovative idea. Or has she says so that everybody can bring their slice of genius.

She has a book called Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation that is now on my "To Read list".

I have seen some managers that can bring a team to makes real progress, and managers that have problem bringing a team from point A to B. Has she says: "understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it". I do think that some leaders try to get on the stage and they create a shadow so big that the slice of genius the team could bring is obscured by the manager.

This is a great idea to spread and to think about, so we could bring more innovation to the world. And have a better world.


Happy Learning.


2015/03/15

The power of open data

This TEDTalk shows the power of big data and open data combined.

How we found the worst place to park in New York City — using big data

As a BI Expert, I do work with a lot of data, and sometimes, visualizing the data can help us understand some aspect of the data. But with big data, you have much more data. And with open data  you can have even more data from the government authorities.
And this is were the dream begins.

Imagine a city were you could have all the data that is possible to have (without the sensitive information of each persons). You could understand something that usually doesn't make sense like:
- grocery shortage VS weather
- restaurant busyness VS traffic jam
- weather VS sickness
And much more.

A part of Artificial Intelligence called Deep Learning is using a lot of data to find trend that the humans have not yet found. We could learn a lot about ourself using some of those techniques together.

Happy learning.

2015/03/14

Antibiotics of the future

This TEDTalks is about the microbes that live within us.
If you don't like microbes or don't think that they could be symbiotic organism living in us. Don't listen to this it could change your vision of our body.
But that was fun learning.
The world of the very small is amazing. It's not something I like, but I can see the potential in the research Rob Knight and his team are doing.

Happy learning.

2015/03/13

OS X Yosemite: iBooks, Where are my books stored

Now with the new iBook application on OSX (I'm using Yosemite). The books are a bit harder to find.
I wish it could be as easy as finding song in iTunes. But it's not.

You just have to go look here:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

It's by users, and it's amazing all the stuff you can find there...

Using terminal you can got into epub files and look at it's content.


Happy learning.

River Turbine


Here in Québec, most of our electricity comes from the hydro-electricity. Mostly from huge damn, like Manic-5.

But now the company idénergie has created a small river turbine that works with a low level of water.

They have some videos on YouTube. Some more funny then others.

This one looks like TV interview.

This a great idea, and it doesn't need a huge infrastructure.

Happy learning.

2015/03/12

Emotional Hygiene

This is an idea worth spreading. This presentation talks about how we enhanced our personal hygiene in the last decades, but we never talk about our emotional hygiene.

Why we all need to practice emotional first aid

This TED Talks is for me a very inspirational talk. I need to learn more about emotional hygiene, what do we have to do to help us have a better hygiene. In the presentation, there is some tips, but I need more...

Happy learning.

2015/03/11

Miracle Morning


The Miracle Morning is a book that tells you how many people starts their days with a fixed routine.

I learned about The Miracle Morning in Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income Podcast, session 150.
The idea of starting your day always the same way, early, and motivated is very inspirational.

Pat tells us that it has helped him grow and have more energy. I can relate, I did went to run a couple of time early in the morning and I felt great. Like everything was possible that day, more motivated.

Adding to the Miracle Morning the Five Minutes Journal, I think would help me to set a point where to go. Gives a small, possible To Do List to complete in the day.

So, I should schedule myself a morning, a Miracle Morning. But I don't know were to start, read the book, start a Five Minutes Journal, build a fitness program, or ...

I will try to learn how to start that and I will write more about it.

Happy learning.

2015/03/10

Wearable technology, getting better and better...

The wearable are the new portable device that doesn't look very good and are not market ready. Or mass market ready, but it's getting better and better.

With the Apple Watch presentation yesterday, the wearables are getting more and more on the top news.

But this is a true innovation in the wearable's world:
This energy-generating cloth could replace batteries in wearable devices

With those wearable batteries, or energy generating clothing, the battery life of our device could get better. Or the device could get smaller, since it doesn't need a big battery.

Energy-generating cloth could replace batteries in wearable devices

This is an amazing world to learn about, and progress are going very fast.

Happy learning.

2015/03/09

InfoBarrel


Listening to SmartPassiveIncome podcast session 15, I learned about InfoBarrel. A website where you can put articles and get paid when they are viewed.

This is a good way to start to write, and the article must be at least 350 words, so it could fit with the 500 words a day of Jeff Goins. You double the motivation, earn money and complete the challenge.
Now, we just need to find a subject to write about.
In the Podcast, Pat Flynn is talking about what subject you need to choose. In summary, choose something that you like and can write about for very long. Choose something you're passionate about.

So I might start to write some articles on InfoBarrel, I just need to find a subject. I like to learn, so I might learn about something and write about it. But it might take more then a day to write more them 500 words.

Has Micheal from ScrivenerCoach did, if you have a hard time learning about something, that's maybe a need.

Happy learning.

2015/03/08

OSX Yosemite: Automatically restarts after showing screen saver a certain amount of time

It has been 3 days that my computer MacBook Air has been restarting without any warning while on the screen saver. Backup, anti-virus scan, copy, movie on the Apple TV stopping because the computer was "restarting". (Actually, it was login out
I finally figured it out after a couple research with my friend Google.

I had the same problem has described int this question:
OSX Mountain Lion: Automatically restarts after showing screen saver a certain amount of time

And it was the same solution:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4014

The only difference is that I know when I changed the setting. Lately I had problems with Steam, Borderland 2 and the Accessibility settings. The solution was to disable everything and add Steam back. So the Log out after X minutes of inactivity setting must have reset it self.

Today, I learned a bit more about OS X,
Happy learning.

2015/03/07

Study Less, Study Smart

This presentation is quite long, but it's greatly interesting.
I have a bit of time this week, I will put this in practice to study Ruby.

I found this article on LifeHacker


He's mostly talking about memory, and how the brain remembers. And giving tips about how to trick your memory to remember more stuff.

I wish I could have listen to this lecture when I was in high school.

Happy Learning.

2015/03/06

Writing Challenge

I listen to a webcast given by Jeff Goins, invited by The Scrivener Coach on march 5th.

It was about the keys you need to become a full-time writer. It's not one of my goals, but I would like to write a book.

The webcast will be available here for a couples of days, if you want to see it.

One of the key, it to practice. So he has a challenge on his website:
My 500 Words: A Writing Challenge

This is a great way to practice, 500 words a day for 31 days is quite intense. But I do think this is what you need to do if you want to become a full-time writer.
And some useful information about working hard, and how to build a good network.

Jeff Goins's new book will be out on March 24th: The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do. He has written this book using Scrivener.

This book looks good. I talks about discovering your true calling, thinking about your future and finding what you could do to help the community, the world to be better.
So I added this title to my "To Read List".





Happy learning.

2015/03/05

Review: TwelveSouth Travel Journal BookBook

Lately I bought the Twelve South BookBook, TS-12-1319, Travel Journal Vintage Brown .

This is a great looking product. A leather covered case to store your power cord, headphone and other travel accessories.
The Wireless Magic Trackpad and the Apple USB Superdrive fit tightly, an Apple Wireless Keyboard MC184LL/B doesn't fit. But the basics does fit very well.



It has a soft pocket for an iPad of any size. Some straps to hold the stuff in place. And small net pockets to hold the smaller items like dongles, USB keys, and SD cards. A pocket the size of and iPod or iPhone (I don't think that the bigger iPhone 6 fits).
With all those pockets and straps the case is versatile enough to hold almost anything.

So if you like leather and book like cases, this product is for you. Good looking and big enough for the basic accessories that you need to carry. It better then to just drop them in a bag.

If TwelveSouth, or any other company wants an idea, make that BookBook 0ne (1) centimetre wider, sometimes we need to play Tetris with the accessories to make them fit well.

Affiliate Links

On Pat Flynn's Podcast SmartPassiveIncome.com in the session 15, he talks about how to make money with a online.
One of the way that I'll be trying now is the Affiliate Links. It's not an easy way, since the users of your site needs to click on your links, so you need to have traffic on your site before that could be profitable. But you need to start somewhere so I subscribed to the Amazon.ca Affiliate, so I could try that.

Amazon.ca is great because you can promote almost any product. So this is a good way to start in the passive income world.

And I added the affiliate links to the Scrivener Coach post. Since Scrivener is a tool that I like and I do think that it's very powerful, but like Photoshop, the tools is very complex and training is not a bad idea.

Happy learning.

2015/03/04

The funny science of "What if"

Those "what if" are funny. But this guy is pushing it to the extreme. It becomes extremely funny.
I heared about him in an article a couple of years ago.

And now, I just watched this TedTalksComics that ask "what if?"

In the TedTalks he talks about this post Relativistic Baseball.

When I was a teen, I did like to do the same. But I gave up doing it, for I don't know why?
Ok, I didn't do it to this point.

So Randall Munroe has develop a good company, this is what I would like to do. I'm just trying to find a good project.

This is a way to learn, trying to figure out what could happen, does make your brain goes into hyperdrive.
Just like trying to figure out how Santa could manage to stop at every house in the world in 24 hours.

Randall Munroe has a couple of books now:



Happy learning.

2015/03/03

The importance of sleep


I always thought that sleep was very important, even thought I could stay up a couple days in a row.
My friends say that I have 3 batteries.

But listening to this episode of Lewis Howes's podcast did help me link some stuff I already noticed in my sleep patterns.

The Power of Sleep for Entrepreneurs and Elite Athletes

Ameer Rosic is a bit intense and extreme, but he does have arguments. I would like to see and the studies he's talking about, so I will do some research. Especially about the effect of sugar on our body and other side subject he's talking. Most of the things he's talking about sleep, I can relate and believe that it's true. For the rest I will have to do more research. So I will do a post about the other side subjects.

Based on the National Sleep Foundation an adult should sleep between 7 to 9 hours a day.
They have nice tips to help you go to sleep but the site has a lot of other very useful informations about sleep.

Happy learning and sweet dreams.

2015/03/02

Movie Review: American Sniper

I just saw the movie American Sniper. It was great, intense and very touching.

I'm not a big war movie fan. But after listening the episode 130 of Rich Roll's podcast, I told myself it could be a good movie. I do not live in the USA, I don't know a lot of people in the army, so I don't have a lot of interest in this kind of movie.

‘AMERICAN SNIPER’ SCREENWRITER JASON HALL: FINDING PURPOSE IN TRAGEDY

But after listening to the podcast with the script writer Jason Hall, it go me curious about all the human side of the war. As Jason says: Some people enlist in the army to kill people, others to save people. Chris Kyle was the second type, and this is what makes that movie great.

The movie is based on a book that Chris Kyle wrote with two (2) authors. (Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice)
The first version: American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History and the movie version American Sniper Movie Tie-In Edition.


Happy viewing

Scrivener

I bought this software in a MacHeist 4 bundle. It looks like a good tool for writing and noting ideas about stuff you want to write.

For a novel, you a place to describe the characters, so you can put more detailed ideas about the future of this character.

For research documents, you a research folder where you can put information about research before writing something in the text itself.

But yesterday, I found the scrivener coach. A website I found listening to SmartPassiveIncome podcast session 142.
And I went to get the free training available as described in the podcast.

The video is looking good, and the tips are useful. If you're doing some back and forth with an editor. Which I don't, at least not yet.

The videos are short and straight to the point. Maybe a little bit too much detailed. Maybe being an IT guy helps me understand some stuff faster. But it's very well detailed.
Since I started to blog, it might help me get blog post more complete. So I might have found the ressource I need to make the best use of this software.

Here is an article interesting on the ScrivenerCoach blog.
5 Reasons You’ll Fall In Love With Scrivener This Year

Happy learning.


2015/03/01

DeepMind VS Human

DeepMind Technologies has developed an IA the can play games using "eye-hands" coordination. He cannot beat the humains at SpaceInvader yet... But can beat a lot of people on other games.
This article is informative and very inspiring to me, since I like IA.



While reading this article, I thought about the 1985 movie called D.A.R.Y.L. (IMDB) In the movie, the android is playing a car game extremely fast.

In January 2014, Google bought that company. It's an other investment in artificial intelligence for Google. 

I'm sure the algorithms are able to do more then play games.

It does inspires me to learn more about AI. And how to code them.
DeepMind is hiring, they're based in London.

Happy learning!

Smart Passive Income

Today, I started listening to a new podcast: Smart Passive Income Podcast.

I first heard about it on The School of Greatness episode 20.

This is a great way to make money, but you have to work to create content first.

Pat Flynn: How to Let Go, Create Passive Income and Achieve Your Greatness

Pat want to make it clear and transparent, he even puts is previous month earnings on his website.
I think all politicians should do that, so we could know who is paying them.

The interview with Lewis Howes is very inspiring. So I was curious about Pat Flynn's podcast. The first session of podcast is inspiring and get me eager to listen to more, so subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Has I did.

So I might write an other post about the SmartPassiveIncome podcast later to let you know how I like it.

Happy learning