DesertStandard

Oh man do I love buying stuff. and my latest trend of being frugal means that when I do get something new its super big time celebration and what not. This time I treated myself to a Pressure Cooker and couldn’t be much happier. Since I am now mostly eating vegan food it all about shortening the time to cook stuff and with a pressure cooker you are looking at a two thirds reduction in cooking time.

My recipe tonight was a play on the recipe for curry lentils that came in the Pressure Cooker instruction booklet. I doubled the recipe and added a few extras:
1.5 yellow onions chopped to 1/2 inch pieces
4 cloves garlic minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 bundle of asparagus chopped to 1 inch pieces (3cups)
1 sweet potato chopped to 1/2 inch pieces
2 cups red lentils
6 cups water
1/4 cup white wine
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground tumeric
1 tablespoon ground corriander
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon gaelic sea salt
1 tablespoon black pepper

saute onion and garlic in olive oil on medium heat in the cooker for 5 min. add asparagus and potato to brown for a few minutes. add lentils, water, wine, and spices. stir and cover and take to high heat. cook for 5 minutes once pressure is achieved. let it cool on its own. serve with wild rice, chips with homemade salsa, and new grist sorghum rice beer. delish!

I have only recently caught the twitter bug. I learned of the service last year when it took off at SXSW but I didnt really understand what it was and none of my friends thought anything of it. So it went slack and I left it alone. Then I had a chance encounter with @biray and learned what twitter is all about: tracking all types of whispers in a room and being able to filter the ones you want to hear.

Naturally the Robert Scoble puts it better:

Twitter and inadequacy (er, the great friend divide) « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
People still aren’t getting this. They didn’t get how I was using Twitter and still don’t. I follow the world’s best early adopters, business executives, and entrepreneurs. I really don’t care if I have a single follower. If I defined myself by my followers I’d always feel inadequate. If I define myself by the people who I follow, well, I follow the smartest, richest, coolest, funniest people in the world. That makes me smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier.

I am trying to take this same approach and its a wild ride and I have to do my best to pull away and get back to work or dinner or reading or sleeping or… You get the point.

Here it is exclusive for DS readers only!

Having been in a number of sales offices over the last few years I always get a chuckle when managers start talking about the ’sales team’. This always seems like a total oxymoron right up there with Military Intelligence and Working Vacation. By their very nature salesmen are individuals driven by ego and selfishness since it is their job to get the customer to yes, or maybe not. While movies like Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, Wall Street, and Boiler Room, to name a few, romanticize this notion the truth is that its a grey area.

Still the notion of a ’sales team’ is always humorous to me because the same people who spend all the time talking about it and have all the control over it never really do anything to foster it. I am of course talking about the sales manager(s). Sure they have the weekly meeting where they bring up things that should just be emailed and let people as questions that never get answered, but other than this they really don’t do much in terms of creating a team environment. That is until I read a post on SocialText.com by their VP of Sales talking about Collaborative Intelligence:

In our sales wiki today, we capture all prospect discovery calls (using a template that already contains the questions we use for discovery). Each rep has a dashboard that displays all of their quarterly discoveries and territory plans. These dashboards also display all their existing customers, and allow them to pivot to all the unstructured data related to that account like account plans, org charts, all the stuff you never end up putting in Salesforce.com. Our service team uses the wiki to manage the entire post-sales process for implementation, documenting ongoing account reviews, customer feedback, and more.

This is unreal stuff for anyone who has worked in a sales department, well at least for me. I have always thought that stuff like this would be really great and useful, but have never seen it happen before. Having people put all of this information up in a form that everyone at the company can review and utilize is just genius. Taking all of the individual effort and insights and sharing them with the group only makes everyone stronger. This is a culture of Generosity and as Keith Ferrazzi talks about in ‘Never Eat Alone’ it is how true relationships are built.

Naturally I have applied to work there. =)

How much does gas have to rise before people realize how huge an expenditure it is?

According to the report, gas prices are not the only driving-related cost on the upswing. The costs of tires, financing, license, registration and taxes also showed increases over last year. The average cost to own and operate a vehicle is 54.1 cents per mile, or $8,121 per year, an increase of nearly 2 cents per mile and $300 from last year, according to AAA and based on an average gas price per gallon of $2.941, which is even higher now.

Motorists can save as much as $3,000 per year by switching from a large model to a smaller vehicle, the auto club said. For example, driving a sport utility 15,000 miles a year averages $10,448, compared with $8,644 for a minivan.

Looks like we are keeping things nicely setup to continue to repeat in regards to more consumer debt and money mismanagement:
Federal Reserve survey: Financial aptitude of youths declining

In 1996 I took one of the best classes in my life at CU Boulder called Humanities and the Electronic Media. I was taught by a pair of Grad Students for the first time and it was a total build it as we go class. They had a ton or articles and various books to read but the class was wide open since we were talking primarily about the Internet. One writer I remember talking about was Clifford Stoll. He was an interesting figure because he had first hand knowledge of the Internet and how it worked, but he dismissed it as a viable platform for business.

I immediately saw his arguments as short sided and knew that their was so much more potential, unfortunately it took me another 8 years till I took them seriously and started supporting myself on them.

Perhaps it was an issue of seeing all the Windows users getting online and the sadness that the prospect of all those Frontpage designed websites would bring. =)

The Internet? Bah! (looking back to 1995)

Yahoo is really loosing it. I have been saying since last year that Yahoo is done and over with and this just adds to it. At this point they need to take the Microsoft deal and just disappear. What have they done in the last 10 years anyway? Besides follow in googles footsteps?

Yahoo, along with a new effort by large stakeholder Legg Mason, is attempting to show that the company can thrive on its own. The risk here is that Yahoo may see Microsoft pull its offer leaving Yahoo to actually go it alone.

Yahoo turns to Google for help

oh ha ha ha

Keep track of whats being said about you and your brand on the social internets:

According to Kingsley, here’s how to use the pipe:

In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: “salesforce ideas”, ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important.

Keeping up with the social media fire hose: Church of the Customer Blog