I got a Roku from a special someone after visiting their house and being in complete amazement over the technology. I've had a Netflix account for several years. First I was crazy and would get 3 movies at a time, rush to watch them all and mail them back to get three more new movies in the mail. I even started adding movies still in the theater in my queue just to get the DVD once it was released. I don't get to the theater very often so DVDs were the only way to stay on top of the best flix out there. Netflix has had the "Watch Instantly" feature online for a while. When I would be working late into the night, I would use it to have a movie playing on one monitor while I slaved away on the others gettting work done. It was a great feature from Netflix to use for a guy that is glued to a desk 10+ hrs a day. The only problem I had with the Netflix 'watch instantly' feature was that there were only s a few dozen movies to watch online. Most of them were old and rarely any TV series that ...

Last month I met with a writer for a local Concord Ca. paper called the Concordian. The Concordian has been around a really long time. I should have asked the date they started. I couldn't find it on the website.The paper was mailed to everyone in the city. It was a free monthly newspaper that talked just about our not-so-little city. Not to be confused with the local blogs like Mayor of Concord or Claycord that fill the internets with news. Recently the paper has had to stop the mailings but still prints thousands of copies and places them in Concord, Pleasant Hill and surrounding area. The writer André Gensburger who is also the co-publisher for the paper first entertained the idea of talking with me a few months ago. He said my background would be something interesting that the community may want to read about. The topic of the article was to talk about how I have adjusted post Iraq. I agreed and thought this would be a nice thing to talk about. The last time I was interviewed by the media for Iraq was after coming home and talking to reporters that had read my Last Letter From Iraq. The ...

After starting with Paragon Software Group in June I have been able to gain a lot of traction internally with my coworkers as well as build on the momentum of creating a better more efficient channel sales experience.Using the principles I developed while writing the Channel Sales Playbook, I have been able to hit the ground running with the new company. In fact, I may be updating the Channel Sales Playbook or putting together a new one just to give a more detailed set of actions that I have tested with positive results. (In my non-existent spare time) Besides the channel stuff, I also have the responsibility to work with the developers and the product managers in Europe to generate documents and product copy that will be used for the company website and be distributed internally and externally for customers. This is a new role for me. I did something like this in my last position and I obviously like to write so it seemed like a good fit. Writing product documentation is not as easy as writing a blog post about a shiny new desk or Twitter tips 101. In the latter, I am writing for myself and can be ...

After my initial addiction to Twitter, I started becoming fascinated by the growing amount of Twitter applications that were being developed. One of the suggestions I had made about how Twitter can make money was that they charge a fee for validated API applications. I don't know if they started charging but the recent 'validation' of Twitter applications makes me feel much better about using services that I have to identify my credentials through. Between getting my breaking news updates and talking to friends, Twitter has become a staple in my life. I want to share some of the best Twitter applications that I use on a regular basis. TwitterFon TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and is a superfast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch. TwitterFon is focused on ease of use and 80% of your daily Twitter tasks, such as see your friends/replies/messages timeline, see favorites, and send/reply a tweet. You can also search tweets, get twitter trends, upload photos to twitpic.com, and update your location information. TwitterFon is my primary iPhone Twitter application. Monitter Monitter is one of my favorite voyeuristic Twitter applications. So simple that a 5 yr old can use it and yet powerful enough to show me ...

I have been wanting a new desk for a long time. I have been using my wife's desk that she had in college ever since I got back from Iraq. Do to the nature of my work and the fact I'm addicted to my computers, I spend more time than I care to admit at my desk working, writing or playing Bejeweled. When we moved out of SF and into the burbs, I wanted to throw out the old one and start in the new place with a new shiny desk. The old desk was nice but it was small and didn't have a lot of storage options. I wanted something bigger but we had said that when I got a new desk it had to be better than the particle board one we had. We were looking for something that looked like a piece of furniture and most desks we found were too expensive at the time. It also had to be long enough to cover the long wall of the room under the window. For Fathers day my gift for being a new dad was a new desk.  We ended up getting a modular system from JC Penny of all ...

As if I didn't already have enough to get done, I found out last night that I somehow got a computer swine flu virus. Well, that's what I'm calling it anyways. Now it doesn't look like my computer is going to die but it's definitely not doing well. I realized I had a virus/malware/rootkit when I typed something into Google and when I clicked a link, Firefox sent me to some completely different site. I wanted to make sure I wasn't smoking crack so I did this a few more times. Yes, I was infected. The worst part is that the virus is completely random. Now this virus is not just related to Google searches. I am infected with Bing, Yahoo and any other search engine I try to use. As I said the browser redirect virus is random so there is a chance I get to the site I wanted to look at. But in this case when I am doing a search for Spyware tools and click on Major Geeks link, I get directed to Stopzilla's website. If I go back and click the same link again, I get sent to a completely different site. When I click the link from the ...

Early in March, I was let go from Acronis software. Probably for the best because I got hired to build their Channel Program but the company had so much channel sales conflict I wanted to puke. I fought the good fight despite the company selling their product direct. Being out of a job is not very fun. Especially for a guy who has been working in some aspect since he was 15 yrs old. I kept myself busy redesigning some of my other sites, working with some companies on a project basis and most importantly, I got to spend a lot of quality time with my new boy. I wasn't sure what I was going to do next. Thankfully between savings and a little money coming in from other places, we didn't become homeless in the process of me finding a new job. I looked far and wide. The economy sucks and I knew that finding a place to work was going to be difficult. The unemployment rate just kept going up and with that, my chances of standing out from the crowd was getting slimmer and slimmer. Then came along Paragon Software. The company has a global presence in disaster recovery ...

Whats going on with FriendFeed? FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the Facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt. The site has been around for a while but in recent weeks I have been seeing a lot of activity on my profile that I hadn't seen before. FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They’ve brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating. Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites. I've had an account for a while and never use it actively. I signed up for the FriendFeed account and plugged in all of my feeds and then left it alone. There were other features such as the ability to comment and share links but ...

Tweaking my websites and blogs is actually really fun for me. I love finding a new theme and getting into the code to make it my own. Since my online sales tips blog hasn't had a real refresh since February 08, I spent some time making it look a bit more clean. I used the same theme as HyperLocal Edge since it seems to be my new favorite. SOCOM Sales started off as a way for me to blog about my journey as a sales person and has morphed into a blog that covers a bunch of different topics. I was getting such a great responce to the site through comments and emails that I even wrote a Channel Sales Playbook to explain how to run a channel sales team. The e-book is free and there are plans to put together a more detailed and expansive e-book covering channel sales in a very simple format. SOCOM Sales was my first professional applicationof using social media. Besides having a blog with over 300 posts on sales tips and selling skills, I manage a Twitter profile called Sales tools that has grown to a following over 1000. Most of that growth has been in the ...