HeyBrett

I'm watching Snoop Dog and Doug E Fresh on one channel and the Bruins playoff game on another a little while back, bouncing back and forth. I'm struck by the beauty of just watching artists "in the zone". Doing the art. This one is worth repeating. Seth Godin said it perfectly:

"When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we're saying we're going to do?"

Quieting the lizard brain

If you are kind, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

People are unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere, people will deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others will destroy overnight. Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some will be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will be forgotten. Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa

Darren Hardy of Success Magazine said it perfectly:

I'm working on restoring a bunch of photos. This first one is my grandfather, Raymond "Hutch" Hutchins. He served in the U.S. Navy on the USS Mayo DD422 (Mighty Mayo - Destroyer Class) from 1940-1943. You can see him here as well with my grandmother, Mary (scroll down a bit). I have this photo also as an original and am working on restoring it. (Click on the photos back and forth here and you can see how I have cleaned them up.)

My grandad was a strong dude (an "old salt", rugged and intelligent they called him), and filled my head with hundreds of stories from WW2 any chance he had. What strikes me most was how proud he was to say he served, and the tight bonds he maintained until he died to his shipmates.

   

Click here to download:

my_hero.zip (443 KB)

OK, so my day job running a web/software company keeps me glued to my laptop. I often have over 40 tabs open at any one time. It made me think that I ought to share the apps I love and use daily. It's almost sick when I think about all of these, but heck, it's what I do. And yes "dev and IT guys at my company", we have tools in Biz Dev/Marketing too.

• Gmail - Love it and wish I could convince my IT guys to run our corporate mail through it. :) http://mail.google.com | @google
• Google Docs - I use it instead of MSWord more and more. Love access to all of my writings in one place and that I can share them with anyone. Also cool that you can share folders now too. http://docs.google.com | @googleapps
• Google Reader - Total addict. Love it. I scan and digest content from my favorite blogs and sites every morning and learn a lot in the process. http://reader.google.com | @googlereader
• Google Analytics - See a theme here? I give in. They got me. My company uses it to manage our site traffic. http://www.google.com/analytics | @googleanalytics
• Firefox - I ditched IE about a year ago and never looked back. My only complaint is the damn caching issue. But the add-on's rock. I shout out to one of our lead developers, John, who kept hounding me to switch. Firebug is a nifty tool that lets you highlight text and determine what CSS is going on and let's you change it in the browser to preview different ways of treating text/etc. on a web page. (I can hear you now John - yes, that tool was made for me). http://www.firefox.com | @firefox
• iTunes - Ya', I use this to org my music and sync with my iPhone all day. http://www.itunes.com | @itunesmusic
• Rhapsody - I've been using their desktop app for years to stream any music, anytime. Rather than buying song's at .99 cents, you pony up like $14 a month (which btw is smart- even if I want to cancel, i forget and it's a small amount) and stream anything you want. And it's not just a preview, but the actual full song. They now have an iPhone app and other appliances for your home so its accessible everywhere. Guess I should decide between iTunes and Rhapsody at some point.
• Posterous - Seriously, these guys are one of my favorites. It's a Guy Kawasaki venture and I am a big fan of Sachin (http://sachin.posterous.com | @agarwal ) and his team. It's DEAD simple blogging via email. As a matter of fact, I am writing this right now in Gmail, will send it to a posterous email address, and presto - my post is published and shared on twitter and facebook through their autopost feature. (i'm going to do an expanded post on this later. And guys in IT? Ya, I want posterous to power our company blog). http://www.posterous.com | @posterous
• Outlook - Of course, we use this in the office and I use it on my laptop outside of the office, but see item #1. http://www.microsoft.com/outlook | @office
• HootSuite - I was using Tweetdeck for a while, but I am really liking HootSuite. A cool little bonus? Being a web-app it provides URL click-tracking. So when we post something that references our blog, we can see how many people clicked to check it out. If you're in marketing, that's pretty cool. http://www.hootsuite.com | @hootsuite
• iPhone - I use this all the time for email, text, and social networks. I use Twitterific to post to Twitter and Facebook for iPhone (which is really slick) to stay in touch with friends. I will say again, Posterous still rules, even on my iPhone. It's new iPhone app (picposterous) basically acts as your camera and can instantly upload pics to your blog from your iPhone. Again, I can also blog through email on my iPhone too. Nuts. I can't believe I just said that. http://www.apple.com/iphone
• Basecamp - The guys at 37signals are just cool and their app has always elegantly served us. I am not involved in project work as much as working on the company, so I am not in it as much as I used to be. But our entire company and every project we work on is run through it every day. http://basecamphq.com | @37signals
• Salesforce.com - This is our company CRM and our email marketing software integrates with it. Our web site is tied to it and all leads (trial requests for our software/demo requests/support/etc.) routes into our salesforce.com account. http://www.salesforce.com | @salesforcenews
• Pandora - What can I say, I am a music addict and Pandora is my drug of choice. It should be yours too. http://www.pandora.com | @pandora_radio
• Grooveshark - ok - second drug of choice. Go try it and share music instantly with people. Spread the love. http://www.grooveshark.com | @grooveshark
• Mint - I use it to manage all of my finances. Super-slick interface/GUI and nice iPhone app for me to carry around my finances where ever I go. Their recent acquisition by Intuit makes me nervous though. Don't lose the charm of a well designed app please. :) http://www.mint.com | @mint
• Facebook - I use it, but more and more I use Twitter. Facebook for me is akin to a quick pop-in and hello to a friend now and then and see what peeps are up to in their lives. I have connected with many, many new friends, but also it has been a great experience to reconnect with old friends. http://www.facebook.com | @facebook
• Adobe Suite - Old faithful. I use it for all things creative and web dev and have since, say 1997? (was called Macromedia then I think)
• Dynect - Our partner helps us manage DNS and our application through their very cool and easy-to-use platform. If uptime is important to your business - and you happen to be any one of the companies I list in this post, you need to connect with @dyninc and specifically, the mad-cat who will set you up @kyork20
  
• Corkd - This is one of Gary V's (@garyvee) ventures and I am glad he got involved. My love of wine is a new interest that I am enthused to say has a limitless future. Thanks to the cool app ver at Corkd, you can share with others who have the same love and outlook. I am just getting started, but looking forward to it. http://www.corkd.com | @corkd
• SendLabs - Ok, a little partial here. SendLabs is my email marketing software company. We're a talented bunch and have a really cool application that let's smart and responsible marketers communicate via email to their customers and prospects. I live in SendLabs every day and we use it to communicate to our customers and prospects all the time. http://www.sendlabs.com | @sendlabs
• dishKarma - Full disclosure, this is venture company we are involved in lead by two very talented internet and food-passionate chaps (and friends @BR80 and @griffijw). The app hasnt launched yet, but stay tuned. Go to www.dishkarma.com and drop your email address in to be notified of the launch. In addition to being able to quickly share your favorite dish (main course, app, etc.) from your fav restaurants, you'll also be helping to feed the hungry. The concept will be a dish for a dish as every time you submit and contribute to the community your favs, DK will feed one person through a local food bank. Really passionate about this concept and the software will be something and I others I believe will use often to locate great eats and help a good cause at the same time. You'll be able to use it and contribute just about anywhere too, online or from your smart phone, very soon. http://www.dishkarma.com | @dishkarma

Wow. Seems like a lot, but heck, these are the tools of my trade. I think it confirms for me that being in the software world (especially web-software) is a great place to be.

What software do you use everyday to get the job done? Any recommendations?

Next time I am thinking of sharing what sites/blogs I frequent and find useful and who I find interesting on Twitter. You may or may not find this guy interesting to start.

First of all, thank you. Thank you for lighting a candle and sharing this message with everyone you know. I am writing you as a father and longtime citizen of New Hampshire. When I heard the news about the senseless tragedy in Mont Vernon, I was completely overwhelmed with emotion to the point I had to close my office door while I wept. I could not get the thought out of my head that something like this had happened. It blindsided my soul (and all of ours) and rocked my belief that as a human race, we had been evolving to be the best we can be. It just felt like a step - a massive step - backwards.

As the hours went on Monday and then into the following Tuesday, I couldn’t help but feel an extreme wide range of emotions (which we are all sharing) and a gnawing inside me that said, “No. I refuse to believe that we are going backward. We are better than this.” Four teenagers brutally robbed the Cates family and while also robbing a bit of our souls in the process. We are innocently and beautifully pursuing happy, productive, loving and full spiritual lives, participating in making each of our lives and the lives of those we love around us better. This occurrence has left that feeling shattered for many of us. We are filled with sadness and anger that some souls remaining on this planet still choose to decide to take that beauty away from the rest of us.

I took a step back and decided I wanted to do something. I relied on what I know best – the internet and social media - and with the help of the most loving and wonderful friends and colleagues, put up this site. So often you hear about the masses congregating in these technological spaces for reasons seemingly without much substance. We felt like we might be able to unify people locally in our great state and beyond in support of the families involved and encourage the best part of humanity to rise to the top of this. The phrase “We are better than this” stuck with us as the message and we quickly registered the domain and set up a web site overnight so that people could congregate, light a candle and share their message with others. Seven hundred people attended the candle light vigil in Mont Vernon and so far well over 20,000 people from all over NH, the United States and around the world who could not be present, have started a candle light vigil of their own here. I am blown away as 7000 occured within just a 24-hour window from going live.

Not only is the effort raising awareness of the tragic events and building a supportive community but creating a dialogue about how senseless the acts were while offering support for the families. I'm here today to encourage the people of New Hampshire, the United States and the world to support the families involved and use these events to step back and reevaluate how we live our lives. This site, www.WeAreBetterThanThis.com, shows that technology can be used to rally people quickly and easily to get this important dialogue going and that social media can be used for the greater good of mankind.

All I ask of you great, powerful and wonderful people out there is to light as many candles as you can, express your feelings and then share this with everyone you know. You. Me. Us. We’re all better than what happened on October 4, 2009, to an innocent mother and her daughter.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Cates family and everyone who has been touched by this.

Friend, father, citizen of New Hampshire
& of the human race

If you have a comment or question, feel free to email me here. I would love it though if you decided to comment here so others can hear your thoughts.

P.S. I am overwhelmed by the participation and the attention even the media is giving this. If you are with the media, please feel free to utilize this message, and we thank you for using your channel to get the message out. We are very grateful.

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