What Is Noise

A friend and I were talking last night about careers and various goals. Some people want to run a large organization, others want to go as far from an organization as possible. There is a satisfaction that many take in working with a single company and focusing for many years on efforts there, and others want to work in a very lightweight roll away from a company and not have any specific day-to-day activities with any one company.

Regardless of all of these work goals and any career paths that you might have in mind there is one goal that everyone should work on but yet few do; your personal brand.

The concept might honestly sound funny to most people. It is easy to confuse personal branding with attention seeking and a shot at stardom or at least your 15 minutes of fame. But that is simply not it, although many famous individuals do have strong personal branding.

You know you have attained strong personal branding when you are irreplaceable with someone else who has similar talents or job description and this is largely recognized in your community.

Take Jeff Pulver for example; Jeff has excellent personal branding. When you want to meet with Jeff then you want to meet with Jeff. There isn’t a substitute. Sure there are other entrepreneurial people out there, but his unique talents, social network, and success make him a one of a kind. He is not famous. He is not a household name. Yet for those that know him there is no replacement. Many of the top people on twitter could also be thought of in this way. From Robert Scoble to Chris Brogan to iJustine, they have each created their own unmistakable personal brand that could not be substituted or replaced by another person with the same ‘job title’.

The paths to getting here there are infinite. It is not a matter of only being the best at something, but being pretty good at something, a great communicator, well liked and overall respected. Getting good at something is a great start, but also doing something special is another strong starting point.

Think about getting past your job title. You are not a photographer, consultant, planner, actor, musician or business-person. You are you and the goal is for at least your larger social community to recognize that.

When you attain this you, in my opinion, have attained the best job of them all; being yourself.

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Sometimes the only way to express yourself is via a facepalm. This evening Twitter really fucked up hard, and rocked even the most hardcore Twitter users to the core.

Twitter works on a system of following people and being followed in lieu of ‘friends’. This is the way that your voice is heard, and the way you heard others. Without it, its pretty stupid and basically just a system to update your blog via SMS (like I said, stupid).

This evening some problem popped up that basically cut many people’s followers down by 20-80%. One of my friends went from 500+ followers, to just over 100.

Twitter acknowledged the problem and said they were fixing it. The problem seems to have occurred when they ‘fixed’ it however they made things worse for some. I wasn’t affected in the first round, having over 600 followers… and now I’m sitting in the 400s after many others seem to have their problems fixed.

This has many questioning whether Twitter is useful, or worth their time. Seemingly no amount of money that is thrown at the problem will fix it before the usebase outscales it. Everyone wants their site to go viral right? Well twitter went viral and the virus is killing it.

Twitter said that it is just in the ‘count’ and that it didn’t actually affect user followers. I disagree. I KNOW that I was following @samhouston for example. Yet when I looked at him this evening, I wasn’t. That’s simply not good. Its unfollowed people. Does Twitter keep backups? At all?

Where would people go? Pownce? Brightkite? A twitter clone written properly?  Can social media people still justify putting time into Twitter if its going to inject a bucket of fail whale nonstop? Moby Dick seems to have been let out of his cage.

This hurts my head and I’m ranting, but its late and this freaking sucks. No more fail whales please? kthxbai.

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After arriving home I realized that I needed/wanted a USB keyboard for a computer that I had been given recently. I walked to Radioshack and Best Buy to find that everything was by far excessively overpriced. I will walk to Microcenter instead tomorrow to get one for $3.99. I will not type on it often.

However on walking home from this, I saw police cars and an ambulance racing down the street. Being the curious individual that I am, I started running. It was already dark and the skies where additionally grey from the rain clouds overhead that had yet to open again. As I got closer I knew something was very wrong.

At least five Boston police officers were standing around, seeming to not know what to do. Several other passerbyers and neighbors stood around. One man in particular seemed genuniely confused. There are several assisted living and other elderly housing nearby so my initial assumption was that someone elderly had collaspsed.

I stood for a few minutes, try to figure out what was happening and I think to talk away. I actually do walk probably 50 feet away thinking to distance myself from whatever is happening and not be in the way or a gawker. Yet I walk back and ask the man who seemed particularly troubled what happened. This many was in his mid 30th, and had taken off his shirt for whatever reason. He told me, “That’s fucked up, he just collapsed, I tried to help him, but that’s fucked up, he’s dead man, they’ve been pumping away on him for 10 minutes.” Each of us of course wanting for that to not be the truth, we stand. The police mill around, wishing they could help as the ambulance crew make their best efforts.

The man standing next to me tells me of the other man who I never see, “He wasn’t ugly or anything, he wasn’t old… probably 30. That’s fucked up man. I gotta live with that.” Apparently he had caught the man when he was falling, or had came to him right after he had apparently suffered a stroke or heart attack.

After a few minutes, I see they are still working on him but the police are packing up shop. I very slowly walk away, looking back and hoping for the best. I twitter a few times to perhaps gain words of encouragement for the man from afar. I doubt that they will do any good however and that the man is likely already gone. As if to signify something, the skies open up and the rain and thunder roll in.

My only hope is for him is once I am nearly home I see the same pack of ambuluances and police speed away from the scene and turn to the hospital. I think, and hope, that the would not likely do so if all they were carrying was a dead man.

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Working at GamerDNA I noticed that not everyone was really on Twitter; which is true of most companies. I really did think that we could get things kicked up a notch and realized that part of it was that most people just didn’t have the time to figure it out. So the CEO gave me a chance to present to the company what I knew about Twitter. Obviously not everything I know about twitter is on here, but overall it gives a nice overview of things. Sorry as my slides have no audio. Perhaps I’ll record some later and update it, but for now, we have slides

If anyone would like for me to present Twitter to their company, of course just email me and we can figure something out. It really is a great tool for communicating and can take your company to a new level of customer service and interaction.

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Starting at GamerDNA they assigned me a 17″ Macbook Pro even though I already had a laptop personally. This was much appreciated on my part, as I always hated having to keep my computer “ready for business” at Jazkarta and installing a ton of crap on it that I didn’t want/use. If my personal computer broke because I did something to it odd (like running a Developer Release of OS X) then I was screwed.

Anyway, I got a new laptop. It’s got the 17″ high-resolution (1920×1200) display, 2GB of RAM (gotta upgrade this to 4GB next month) and a 512MB GeForce 8600M GT video card. Its also got all of the other standard options. If you don’t know what comes standard then go to Apple’s site or Google it.

I already have a relatively new 15″ Macbook Pro C2D 2.2ghz 4GB that I reviewed before and I love much. This is my 5th Mac that I’ve had personally or assigned to me (actually 6th if you count the studio computer that I used to use daily at Taylor’s studio).

Let me say, this computer screams. If you need anything stronger than this… then you are either doing HD/4K video, serious data analysis, a hardcore gamer, or something else crazy. This is the fastest computer I’ve ever had.

The 17″ High Resolution screen is amazing. I have the matte screen which imho is the only way to go. Glossy just looks like hell. I don’t like my photos on glossy paper generally, and I don’t like glossy screens either. I also compared the non-LED backlit screen vs this LED backlit one, its a night and day difference.

The 17″ has an additional USB port, larger speakers, weighs a bit more, and has a much larger battery than the 15″. Battery life is superb and outlast my 15″ by at least an hour. The sound is crisp and clear, worlds above my old G4 iBook 12″.

Upgraded from my 15″, but now available as standard options, are the new multitouch mousepad that rocks much more than I thought it would, My 15″ has a 128MB video card (can’t remember the model, but this one is much faster). Also the new ones come with a smaller and lighter power supply which is always a plus.

Downgraded is the fact that it no longer comes with an Apple Remote. I fear that Apple is phasing these out, as fewer and fewer of their systems come standard with it. I think it’s a really nice feature, but I guess the found that few people were using them. I use mine nonstop, as I generally keep one of my systems hooked up to my 37″ 1080p monitor at home and to my main speaker system. They also have a slightly different keyboard layout than my 15″, missing the lower enter key and switching around the volume and expose key. No biggie but a tiny bit annoying.

So asides from saying, “its fast” how fast is it? Well I’m not about to bust out benchmarks, but it runs WoW on my 37″ external screen at 1920×1200 at all settings maxed out and gets between 40-120fps in all scenes. Everything else also flies on it. I exported some videos to YouTube and the compression was nearly instant. Team Fortress 2 and Halflife 2 run at full resolution, with everything cranked at respectable frame rates that are totally playable.

The downsides of the system are… well somewhat obvious. Its big. I’m about to hop on a flight in a few minutes with it… and I don’t think its going to fit into my coach seat well- certainly not if anyone is beside me. I do wish that Apple still sold a smaller footprint notebook, but I guess they think that we should all buy Macbook Airs.

As a plus, my Crumpler Customary Barge shocked me. It holds a 15″ Macbook Pro AND a 17″ Macbook Pro, plus all cables, my D-SLR and extra lenses/flashes and a ton of other stuff. Of course I worry that it would be stolen with over $10,000 of gear in it (although they won’t be running away as it weighs a TON then and literally hurts after walking a mile), but it works. Hell, I could probably throw an Eee-PC, a Macbook Air, and a Kindle in there with it and would still have room.

Not sure if I want to leave this monster on my desk, or have it as my main unit on my back. I might actually just go get an Eee-PC for super-mobile stuff and only carry a “main” laptop if I need it. Save my back!

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