JoelFoner.com

Can Real Food be Faster than Fast Food?

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Sept 28 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Can Real Food be Faster than Fast Food?

We eat fast food. We eat a lot of it. The amount is going up, and going up dramatically over the last couple of years. Why is this? Some people say it’s about speed and convenience. Some say it’s cost. Perhaps the answer is simpler.  People can’t figure out how to cook in a way that fits the reality of today’s lifestyle and so in the absence of a way to “make it work,” fast food becomes the only way to “get it all done in the small amount of time left” in a day.

We watch “chef battle” cooking shows, where people who have years of culinary training create gourmet meals in amazingly short times. Does this help? Maybe, in that it gets people thinking about cooking themselves. However, just as photoshop fakery of model pictures creates an image of people that is unattainable, these shows create an image of cooking that is similarly unattainable to many.

Whenever the topic of food and cooking appears in our We Are The Network discussions, the group gets totally energized, and it basically derails whatever else was going on, so I figured this week “let’s just go with it.”

Is it really possible, without any gaming of the numbers or process, to actually cook real food at home in the same or less time than it would take to take the fast food route. Before you leap up and say “of course it’s possible” – let’s talk about the full time investment, including preparation, cleanup, shopping for food – everything.

If you’ve already got this “all figured out,” let’s hear about your magic for choosing recipes, food shopping, when and for what, which kitchen skills you need to work on to make things flow quickly, techniques to get things done quicly, and how to not end up with a mountain of cleanup (a time sink that real people know about, but the recipe books so conveniently ignore when they say “simple, 30 minute prep”!)

Bring your ideas. Bring your recipes. Maybe don’t show up hungry (don’t say I didn’t warn you!), and let’s have a fun and very different session.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Social Media Applied – How to Get Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 3rd at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Social Media Applied – How to Get Consulting Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

Techniques for finding consulting projects and full-time jobs have changed radically in the last few years. Some of the changes have been driven by the emergence of social media. Others have appeared through changes to recruiting and hiring processes (for full-time positions), changing beliefs and strategies employed by hiring organizations, and large dose of new recruiting automation technologies.

While plenty has been written about social media marketing for products and services, little information is available to help job seekers understand how these changes affect what it takes to get found on this new playing field.

The number of applicants for any project or position outweighs the number of available opportunities by a wide margin (in recent times this number has been as high as 6:1, and is still almost 5:1). The large gap between supply and demand, coupled with new, advanced technologies, have changed the landscape of recruiting and seeking work in fundamental ways.

There is good news. Once you understand the new recruiting model, how the “recruiting ecosystem” fits together, and how companies, hiring managers and recruiters look at the process today, you can change what you do and obtain better results.

Instead of submitting your resume to job boards and wondering why you can’t get any results, you can know which possibilities to focus on, and how to get recruiters and hiring managers to start sending you messages asking if you’re interested in what they’re offering!

Moving from blindly submitting resumes, and getting no response, to having an inbound queue of recruiter and client requests is not instant. It does not rely on magic. It does not rely on luck. Each step is fairly easy, although some of the pieces involve new skills. There is real work involved, but this work can be done bit by bit. These new skills will pay you dividends for the rest of your career – so now might as well be the time to learn them!

Our session this week will be a slightly different format, in that I’ll start off by presenting some techniques and approaches developed and proven from experimentation, interviews with recruiters, and discussions with hiring managers and consulting firms, followed by a group discussion about how to best get from “Where do I start?” to fielding regular inbound queries asking “Are you interested in this opportunity?”

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

This post provides a bit more detail to explain one point from my earlier post 12 Ways To Make Second Life™ Run Faster On Your Low Performance Computer. Some debate arose over the “real meaning” of the maximum bandwidth option on the Network Settings dialog, so I figured I’d go research this and try to find the facts.

A quick caveat: Even though this post is fairly long, I have purposefully left out a bit of detail in order to avoid overwhelming folks who are not fluent with network engineering and programming. If you are fluent in these areas, I’m sure you’ll see things that will make you say “but you left out…” Don’t panic. This doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the mechanics, it’s just that I’m trying be sure this is accessible to people who need to understand it. Thanks for your understanding!

Why All This Detail? It’s Just One Slider!

I know… this seems like a lot, but it is broken down in to easy chunks. The reason I’ve included this background is that the Maximum Bandwidth Option only controls some of the traffic that goes back and forth between the viewer and the server(s) at the data centers. If you understand a little bit about what’s going on “under the hood” and which types of traffic it does and does not control, you’ll be in a much better position to decide on the best setting for Maximum Bandwidth as you use Second Life. Read more…

What is a Twitter Group Chat?

When you first start out with Twitter, you find that you can post status updates, and your followers will (may?) see them. Then you learn that putting an “@” sign before someone’s Twitter name creates a reply. Conversations with more than a couple of people get pretty awkward with only these tools.

Luckily, some folks figured out that by adding a “hashtag” (#), you create a unique phrase that is easy for Twitter Search to find. This is what enables Twitter Group Chats to work. For instance, searching for #hockey will find an on-going stream of Tweets about hockey.

It didn’t take long for people to realize that you could organize a group chats with hashtags. Twitter Group Chats are highly socially viral. They encourage lots of social interaction, and spread quickly, assuming the topic is interesting.

Twitter Group Chats are socially viral in a big way, and here are the six reasons they spread so quickly!

1) Starting a Twitter Group Chat is “Too Easy” Read more…

A question appeared in tonight’s #blogchat discussion asking how to get automatic reminders of the start times of Twitter chats. I shared my way of doing this, and got many positive comments about it, so I figured I’d blog it to help out a broader audience.

Warning – this is a really easy solution, and it doesn’t involve any bright, shiny new tools!

Whenever I hear about an on-going chat on Twitter, or a chat-enabled blog site, or in a virtual world (I am involved with several projects in Second Life™ and other virtual worlds) I just add it as a recurring appointment to my calendar, and set a reminder in the calendar! In my case, this is Google Calendar, so it is available everywhere and syncs to my phone, but this trick should work just as well for most calendaring applications.

For a Twitter hashtag-style chat, I start the calendar entry with a #, for example #blogchat, and then follow that up with a space and the full URL, so that a click will open a brower tab pointed at the chat in progress. I tend to use TweetChat for Twitter chat discussions, so the calendar entry for this example looks like this:

#blogchat http://tweetchat.com/room/blogchat, with a reminder set for 15 minutes ahead.

A few clicks, and it’s done. I hope this is useful for someone else as well. It’s been pretty valuable for me to keep track of how various chats relate to other appointments, and to remember to get online when chats of interest are about to start.