These are my last few minutes before the trip to Ecuador. Here is the detailed plan - Excel Ecuador Travel Plan

• Look for the unusual in everyday life
• Write ABC lists of unusual words or adjectives
• Keep it personal
• Write usual 'boring' but informative staff in point form. This will save time that can be spending writing other things
  • Weather
  • Food
  • Expenses
• Think about creating characters with names like 'popsicle' to describe adventures
• Research staff using guidebooks and other info for snippets of information
• Use metaphors to evoke and explain emotions
• Explore all the senses.
  • Smell
  • Taste
  • Touch
  • Hear
  • Sight

Now that I've long lost hope that I might learn any proper management skills from work I thought I might benefit something from learning what I shouldn't do should I ever become a manager. I'm still at the infancy stages of considering management positions but I think some of these points might be practical even in real life.

Find time for staff - I can still remember how I felt the first time that I heard the "I haven't got time for you phrase" and a few minutes later saw the boss spending half an hour with our maid. If you are a manager you are supposed to manage people and when managing people you must find time for the people. If your schedule is so busy try to learn some new time management skills but do find the time. Unless you're a super boss staff don't usually like to be in front of you, consider this as soon as somebody comes over to talk without being asked to.

Listen to your staff and believe in them - I feel mostly motivated when I know that the person for whom I'm working believes in me and wants me to achieve my goal. Listening to somebody is one of the ways you can show that you care about the opinions of your staff. Listening means actively listening, not just acknowledging words and then loose track of what was said the minute the person is out of sight.

Treat everyone on the same level - This is very tricky but keeping a good open communication with the workforce might be the best tool to achieve this goal.

People are not dumb and they have feelings - No matter how stupid somebody may look he still has feelings so you must always pay attention not to hurt his feelings. I think it's more beneficial to treat people as though they were intelligent animals rather than dumb ones.

Treat staff as people not as numbers - It's true that the companies interest are the most important factor in any equation but the people are what make or break the company. People feel dejected, unmotivated and are unproductive as soon as they start feeling that they can be used instead of oranges in kindergarten classes when children are learning addition.

Continue meeting with clients and customers and don't close yourself in an ivory tower - Most things boil down to communication so it should be kept alive as much as possible. Meeting with people face to face is usually more fruitful then sending an e-mail or picking the phone. When you talk with customers you can understand their requirements better.

Did you ever forget to write "immediate" after shutdown when trying to stop a database? When this happens Oracle waits for all connections to terminate before shutting down which usually takes ages. Oracle obviously disallows the creation of new processes so if you try to shutdown the database again using the immediate keyword you will receive the "Not connected to Oracle" message. To recover from this situation you have to open another session and startup force the database and then shut it down again using shutdown immediate.

This last week I listened to a couple of podcasts through Odeo. Odeo is a sort of podcast aggregation service where you can queue up podcasts to listen to, or download for offline listening. Although it works with the Ipodder libraries I found it infinitely more user friendly and easy to use to the extent that it's still running on 2 PC's for the last 3 days.

Podcast worth referring:-

The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 98 - A feature about online music and music licensing issues with an in-depth interview with John Buckman founder of Magnatunes.com. Audible!

The Linux User Show Episode 13 - Interview with Richard Stallman about the GNU license and the importance of software freedom. RMS used a brilliant analogy when comparing the software freedom to the freedom one has when using recipes by created by others, changing them and redistributing them to your friends. Authoritative!

Infonomicon - A new addition to my podcast queue made an entertaining listen while cleaning my room. Swear words prevail!

With all these long podcast shows I wonder when winamp are going to decide to allow creation of bookmarks to mark time positions within a single file.

IT Conversations, Interview with Joel Spolsky. Amongst the many interesting points, Joel remarked that users don’t usually come up with radically new developments for software, apart from the obvious staff that the programmers already know about. It is up to the programming team to come up with these new developments

Krupel - baby

Pupix - the pupa

Flikks - mamma

I've spent the last three hours looking for a cheap hotel in Manhattan. The cheapest half decent hotel I managed to find was $135 per day and it's nothing near a duty travel hotel. The average hotel rate is around $300 per night, and nobody seems to give discounts to airline staff. With these rates I'm wondering what it entails to live in NY.