Tools for blogging

Maintaining a blog sometimes is a difficult task, specially when you’re in the middle of a battle. It takes discipline and the belief that your ideas and experience could improve someone else’s.

There are some tools to assist you in writing a blog but I discovered that my old palm and a simple sheet of paper can work better than new editors or browser plugins that allow you to post from any webpage. Maybe I’m facing a corollary of KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid).

On the other hand, reading many blogs is almost impossible without a specific tool. I had a good time using RSSOwl and now I’m using GreatNews, both are free. I tried the Google Reader version of it but I’m usually offline when reading the blogs – usually at the airport.

I also use my iPod to follow podcasts. If you’re a project manager I recommend Jerry Manas Project Results Podcast.

What are you using to follow my blog? Leave your experience as a comment here!

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Travel Plans

As vacation season approaches, our interest in traveling increases. I addition to my recent trip to India I have made some other trips on the job or on vacations and I collected some interesting websites that can assist in planning trips, cross-country meetings or even dealing with other cultures. Have a nice trip! First of all, what time is it … there? To avoid calling someone in another country without noticing it is 4:00AM. I strongly suggest consulting TimeAndDate . In my personal page, I have two links to this site: one to the “Personal World Clock” and another to the “Meeting Planner”. It works great when my group is organizing concalls with people in India, in Europe, in Brazil (of course) and in California/USA. Another preoccupation: how much is it? (or how much it was, when you’re creating your expense reports). I usually recommend oanda website converter. It allows you to convert between many currencies in specific dates and also allows you to print a convenient conversion ...

The Whiteboard Trick

Some time ago I read an interesting article from Scott Ambler where he suggests using whiteboards for initial modeling and later, photographing the whiteboard as documentation. I don’t think he created the technique but it was the first time I saw it and I like it very much. I have been recently working on Bangalore, India, assisting my client in negotiating a new plan for their project with the company we were visiting. My colleague used heavily this trick - people even mock at the “Picture! Picture!” motto. This simple technique was one of the key points in our work. It’s was an aid for everybody’s memory, it permitted a double check to our annotations and it was a proof of the decisions made. I’d like to point some tips: 1. a good digital camera is fantastic for this task but even your cell phone photos can sometimes do the job; 2. the flash of your camera can make some points of the whiteboard unreadable. Try with and without it. 3. you don’t necessarily have to improve your pictu...

English or Brazilian Portuguese?

When I started this blog I faced a dilemma. Should it be in English or in Brazilian Portuguese? In Brazilian Portuguese, my mother tongue, it would be easier to write. I would make fewer mistakes and it would probably take me less time (and effort). I can also use more local expressions that would make my text more natural. In English I would (potentially) reach much more readers. Since I don’t like to loose time, reaching more people seems to be a greater return on investment. As most of my friends and colleagues read English, I’ll keep the “better ROI” approach. If you are a reader and you’ll facing difficulties with this approach or would like me to change to Brazilian Portuguese, please drop me a comment.

Wronowski

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