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Easily Create and Edit your Gmail Signature
Gmail allows you to have an HTML markup e-mail signature. That means you can get pretty fancy with how you sign your e-mails. The only problem is that the area where you edit that signature does not have HTML edit tools and you can’t cut/paste HTML directly into that box. You CAN, however, cut/paste from a Web page into the e-mail signature box and all of your HTML markup (tables, bold, links, etc) all come through. After a little work, here’s what worked for me to create/edit my own e-mail signature for Gmail. Take the code below and cut/paste into your favorite text editor. I recommend TextWrangler. Edit the information…
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Verizon Caught Blocking VoIP Traffic
I was just on a phone call with a new customer who is setting up multiple retail locations. The reason for the call was their backup network wasn’t working. Whenever they tested the Verizon 4G LTE Wireless connected to Cradlepoint modem backup network, the phones would not be able to make or receive phone calls. Their IT staff was on the line and they were running Wireshark and grabbed a PCAP that seems to show that OnSIP at 199.7.175.101 was responding to their request with a “500 Server Error”. The actual text was: SIP/2.0 500 Server Internal Error Warning: 399 sipalg “Internal Error” Call-ID: b876f6fb4aad25a55546217e07dd4f82 CSeq: 47 REGISTER From:…
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Remove Bitnami Logo in Amazon Lightsail
Amazon Lightsail is their new low-volume Web hosting environment. One of the options for Lightsail is to launch with WordPress. This site is on Lightsail with WordPress in an Linux environment. When you first launch a WWW Site, you get a “Bitnami” logo on the bottom right corner of every page. This is convenient at first to allow you as the site administrator to log in to your new WWW site to make posts like this. However, once you get the swing of things, that logo is a blight on your otherwise lovely WWW Site. Luckily, it’s very easy to remove the logo. Log into AWS and into the Lightsail…
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Zen and the Art of Business
Yin and Yang I’ve worked out for pretty much my entire life. I played football and basketball in high school and football in college. Working out meant pushing yourself: more reps, more weight, faster laps, more distance. My mentality was one of pain makes gain. Until, that is, I started yoga. I’ve now been practicing yoga for going on 16 years. When I first started I had the same mentality. If I couldn’t reach a certain pose, it was because I wasn’t working hard enough. I would push myself into a pose and still not get there. It wasn’t until one of my instructors started to stress the yin and…
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Why You Need a Devil’s Advocate
“The Buck Stops Here.” Harry S. Truman had that sign on his desk. As he said in his farewell speech that “The President — whomever he is — has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody.” It’s true for the President and it’s true in business as well. It’s lonely at the top. That’s where all the hard decisions end up. One person is ultimately responsible, but ideally that person does not make decisions in a vacuum. In government and in business, it takes a team. Part of that decision making should be to challenge ideas. As a decision maker, the last thing you want is for…
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My Favorite Business and Political Podcasts
I am a Podcast addict. Walking around or in the car, I’m listening to one podcast or another. Right now I’m listening to about three hours of political podcasts per week and this week, I don’t think that’s going to be enough to contain all this chaos. But, I thought it was a good time to list my favorite podcasts in categories. Political Podcasts Most Informative: Pod Save America by Crooked Media. This podcast is hosed by Jon Favreau (the Obama speechwriter, not the IronMan director), Jon Lovett and more with special guest like the former White House Counsel and current members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Most…
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Passion and Business
Passion. That’s what I learned about when I attended the 2017 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans this last weekend. Everywhere I looked, I saw performers loving what they were doing and concert-goers thrilled to be a part of the experience. In the Gospel tent local choirs moved the audience to tears and living legends like Irma Thomas completely transformed herself and the crowd by her presence. On some of the larger stages I saw fans listening to music not because the pop-music industry machine told them that they had to go see whatever the latest boy band was, but because they wanted to be there. They wanted to be transformed. The Crown…
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Development without consumer input…
“But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers.” This very well-stated article in Bolt.io states one of the biggest issues I see in startups today – an idea without a market. It’s a great idea, but no one wants to buy it or certainly not at that price. It’s a supply and demand curve that never swipe right for each other. What Un-CEO features are in play here – mostly I’d say confirmation bias. No one went outside their little group to see if this idea would actually work in the real world. They stayed in their own bubble agreeing with…
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Amazon Lambda – E-mail via SNS the URL of an S3 file when created
I threw together the following Lambda function to send an e-mail via SNS (Amazon’s Simple Notification Service) whenever a file is created in S3 (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.) Yes, it’s barely commented and overly loggy, but you get the idea: 'use strict'; console.log('Loading function'); const aws = require('aws-sdk'); const s3 = new aws.S3({ apiVersion: '2006-03-01' }); exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => { //console.log('Received event:', JSON.stringify(event, null, 2)); // Get the object from the event and show its content type const bucket = event.Records[0].s3.bucket.name; const key = decodeURIComponent(event.Records[0].s3.object.key.replace(/\+/g, ' ')); const params = { Bucket: bucket, Key: key, }; s3.getObject(params, (err, data) => { if (err) { console.log(err); const…
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Unroll.me ‘heartbroken’
On April 23, 2017, unroll.me posted a blog with a byline from Jojo Hedya – the CEO and co-founder at Unroll.me. In the blog, Jojo states that “it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.” Yes, if the service is free, then you (and your information) are probably what is being sold and unroll.me was no exception. How could the tenants of the un-CEO have helped Jojo? Treat your employees with respect and, just as importantly, treat your customers with respect. This is the time for the CEO to come clean with the customers. Actually, the time was well…
Unconventional Management
