My Car

Good bye car. I miss you. Please know that you were worth much more than the $4,677.50 State Farm said you were worth.

NEW SKILLS!?

I am going to be graduating in December, so I decided to tweak up the ol' resume and see what's out there. I ventured onto Monster, and they have really added some great tools. Under "Work Experience" in their profile builder, they have a section for skills. Just begin typing something, and a list of possible skills pops up.

It wasn't until I did this I actually realized all the things I do at my current place of employment.

They are:

Access database design and development - seriously? there isn't a day that goes by where I don't do some type of development in one of the 5 dbs we have!

Access - database management - Again, there are 5 dbs to manage, one all my own doing!

Financial Modeling - I have created and managed some different financial projections for shipping using various formulas and statistical methods.

Financial Statement Analysis - Each week I run/analyze the P&L for the Internet division. I understand that this may not be the traditional definition of Financial Statement, but, its pretty close to an income statement.

Customer Relationship Management - currently I run the Customer Satisfaction Survey, and do all follow-up communication with unhappy customers.

UPS Online Shipping - each week I match up the UPS invoice with our orders for that week and comb through it for money or training issues. Thus far for the year, I have found nearly $8k!

Logistics - I create and manage the supply schedule for all of our shipping material with the controller

Data Analysis and Presentation - I create and run various financial and inside data reports and present findings. Latest report was on the shipping department and possible lost business due to the old shipping containers.

Mainframe and internal financial systems - I have written and administer various financial reports that are run each week.

SQL - while my knowledge may be basic, its still pretty good.

Operations Problem Solving - My job has a real broad direction. I basically look for problems and fix them.

Not really sure what my current job is called, since I have so much freedom and wear so many hats. Originally, I was thinking my job was Quality Control Manager, because that's what I was told I was. BUT I do so much more than just Quality Control. I decided that Data and Operations Analyst fit much better.

I am sure that there are more, but for now, this is it!!

Updates

Ok. Lots has happened. Took the GMAT, got accepted to B School, and am rocking the Accounting world as much as I can in Savitskies ACC 3010 class. More later...

Business: The Ultimate Resource

I came across this book while doing research for a work. I got it cheaper at bigwords.com

Its unreal. I think its now the largest book it own!

It has great executive summaries of lots of books and academic research articles. It also has about 100 mini biographies on many of MT's favorite people, like Drucker.

The cover says "An MBA between 2 covers" and I really do believe it!

The main sections in the book are

Best Practices - People and Culture, Marketing, Strategy and Competition, Finance, IT/Information Management, Systems, Leadership, Structure, Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance, Renewal and Growth, Productivity, Personal Effectiveness - each of these sections have 15-20 articles or books summarized.

Almost 300 Management Checklists, a Management Library that summarizes lots of great books, a Business thinkers section (Drucker, Deming, Herzberg to name a few), Management Giants (Buffet, Dell, Gillette, Jobs, Welch) and a HUGE dictionary.

This will now be my definitive desk resource on almost anything, along with the casts and forums from here of cour

Nero Hell

Ok. So i USED to like nero. I hate it. For no reason at all, my dvd burner, an Asus DRW-2014l1T stopped recognizing bland dvds. Everything else worked fine. So I thought it was Nero. I uninstalled it. Then I thought it was my motherboard bios. Looked into flashing that. Didn't feel like going through that at 10pm.

After 2 hours of searching I found someone recommending CCleaner. I tired it once but it didnt work. I finally resigned to re-formatting my computer. I hadnt done it in about a year, so why not.

But, just before I was going to start that process, I decided to run CCleaner again. I noticed that it didn't fix ALL my reg errors the first time. I ran it like 4 times until it couldn't find anymore reg errors.

It totally worked!! I had to run it a few times but it worked. I had uninstalled Nero, but it left a bunch of crap behind.
Now I have to find some Chippy Chap, and go to bed!!

INTERWEB, I LOVE YOU!!

Glenn Beck is a friend of mine....

My first exposure to Glenn Beck was a piece he did on foreign oil, the large conspiracy by American car companies to purchase and kill those new 'green' technologies, and how important it is for us all to understand this.

I at first thought this was going to be an attack on the evil American car companies by a Liberal nutjob. I was wrong. It was a piece about why its so important to stop the flow of capital into countries that wish ill will on the US. I couldnt beleive that this was CNN. More recentlyl, an analysis in Time Magazine of all the news shows out discussin the bailouts and the economy, Beck had the most economists on to talk about the nuts and bolts, with 22.

He is typically middle of the road and he gets mad at both sides. The He has recently joined Fox News. An insider at CNN stated that negotiations fell apart when CNN decided to stop airing the repeat of his show in the 9pm time slot, and instead, will put Lou Dobbs on.

The first airing of Beck, which is on at 7, gets 375,000 viewers. His 9pm slot gets 485,000. So Lou Dobbs, with his AMAZING personality, will get 500,000? I think not. I think that CNN didnt like the conservative slant that Beck has, even though he goes after everyone fairly. They would rather lose money than have anyone with a conservative thought on their network. And people are up in arms because Fox News is a slant to the right? Please. NBC, CBS (or whats left of it), ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR (but not all of the time) slant heavily to the left. 1 against 7. And they are afraid?

Take the money....NO!

So, some Dems are up in arms that some GO Governors are rejecting some of the bailout money that their states will be receiving.

Deomocrats:
State Democratic Party chairwoman Carol Fowler: "He's (Sanford) so ideological," Fowler said. "He would rather South Carolina do without jobs than take that money, and I think he's looking for a way not to take it."

Republicans:
A spokesman said Sanford, the new head of the Republican Governors Association, is looking at the stimulus bill to figure out how much of it he can control.

"We're going through a 1,200-page bill to determine what our options are," Spokesman Joel Sawyer said. "From there, we'll make decisions."

The issue here is interesting. These are the people elected to run their states. Let them do it. If they dont want the money, its not a political power move, and it's not ideological. This bill was created and passed without ANY republican involvement. How is that bi-partisan?

"Idaho, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter said he wasn't interested in stimulus money that would expand programs and boost the state's costs in future years when the federal dollars disappear"

This is an excellent point. What do we expect? This money to be happening all the time? These people are trying it their way. They dont want a handout. Thanks Dad, but I dont need a loan. Sure it will be tough, but we'll get by. I am curious as to how much of this money will be gobbled up by the bureaucracy? It's as if the Governors Association is being yelled at for even reading it.

Democrats of America need to figure it out that the American populous doesnt want a handout. They want a real job. It seems that many of the "jobs" created from this will be working on the infrastructure of America. The skills learned on these jobs, outside of the engineering, are low skill jobs. There is no vertical line to the next level. We are setting ourselves up for this again. We should start an intensive training program for the out of work americans. Training to use their brains, not their bodies.

What we need to do is invest much of this into NASA. Think I am nuts? During the space race of the 1960's, NASA was funded with 1% of the GDP of the US. In 2007 it's less than 1% of 1%.
Think of all the amazing things that have come out of the space program. Computers, cell phones, cable tv, sattelites, velcro, the list goes on and on. This site is awful, but the info is not.

Forgot something

In a rush to get my post done so I could study for my Operations quiz, I left off a great idea of Peter Ubel's I wanted to have here.

In the interview, he was asked "Are there things we can do to construct markets themselves differently so they actually take human nature into account better than the existing free market system?"

Now, his answer is easy. Very easy. In fact, we started doing this already in places like student loans.

"Sure, lets take things like conflict of interest. Say I am a credit rating agency; if you look at one of the causes of this mortgage its that the credit rating agencies weren't saying these loans were as risky as they were. And one possible explanation of that is they had conflicts of interest. They were working with these banks and mortgage companies, getting OTHER business from them. Its just human nature, when you are in that kind of complicated relationship, that being in one part of the relationship will influence how you work in the other part of the relationship; you are going to be less confrontational. You're not going to want to hurt someones feelings; harm the relationship because its important to your other part of your business. This is something we can regulate."

Feelings. Feelings are another reason why we are in this.

People need to learn and use the Ben Franklin decision tool. Basically, wright your problem at the top of the page, and divide it into two sections. One is the Pro side, the other the Con.

This will help take feelings and emotion out of decisions. Please. Use it!

Mortgage Mess

As I read about the 75 BILLION that the taxpayers are dishing out to help those facing foreclosure, I found myself asking WHY?!

According to this article, it will be helping some 9 million Americans. Ok. So 9 million people out there are facing foreclosure. (4 million facing it now, 5 million under water) I think some questions need to be asked before the government comes and 'saves' the day.

1. Why are these people facing foreclosure?

If the reason is that they lost their income and have no way of paying for their home, then ok, perhaps they should be helped out a little. My family looked foreclosure in the face once before, and any help would have been great. So, by all means, save the day.

According to Peter Ubel, author of "Free Market Madness" people are FAR too optomistic about their futures. In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Ubel states that the governments role in a free market is not to protect the citizen from the 'predators', but to protect people from themselves. I say our leaders have failed us then.

Now, if someone is facing foreclosure because they had no business buying the home they purchased, that's a completely different story. Some may scream "Ah, the predatory lenders! They are evil! It was all their fault!" That may be true, however, that wont work with me. Nobody forced these people to accept a mortgage at these terms. The reason why these folks couldnt get better terms for their loans is because they were too great a risk for the banks. Many, including myself, place blame on past Presidents for thier highjacking of the American dream. (See LINK ) This was pure and simple - banks had to loan the money out to high risk families.

Uber also states that "Most people have a hard time comprehending numbers, things like percentiles. If you asked the average American what is 10% of 1000, probably 1 in 3 people wont be able to answer that quesiton correctly. Now, put those same people in front of a mortgage broker who is talking about an adjustable rate mortgage that starts at x percent and goes potentially up to y or z percent. Remeber, these are people who dont understand what a percent is, and we're expecting them to understand ARMs? I think sensable regulation would say that we need to either help make sure people understand things like that better or we need to set acutal limits on how much people would need to put down on a house before they can qualify for a certan type of mortgage to keep them from over-extending themselves. "

This sounds a lot like the way mortgages were done before the multi-national banks, when each city had their own savings and loan.

Not everyone should own a home. Only those of us who have shown over time that we are credit worthy pepole.

Now, back to this mortgage bailout. The next tier of folks to receive some help, are the 5 million under water. I really feel for these people. These are people who's mortgages are for more than their home is worth. One more time. Their property values have fallen, and now they owe more than their home is worth.

Why? Because the housing market has collapesed; the first 4 million who were a litte too optomistic about their incomes lost their shirts.

So now, we have people who pay their bills on time and are otherwise good citizens being dragged down bigtime. This will eventually be felt all the way to the top.

I am all for helping these folks, but, for the ones who caused this, I say
NOTHING. Uncle Sam is closed.

My favorite gadget

Ok. So its been a while. I seem to say that each time.

Oh well.

I got to use my favorite gadget the other day. The Kenmore Vacum with the Intelli-clean system. It's awesome. It has this colored light system that I was sure was bogus, but, after hours of use, I am sure it works.

Case in point, when I was moving, I vacumed my bedroom with my vacum, then with the Kenmore. This room was an addition onto the house. After I finished with the Kenmore, there was LOTS of drywall dust that the other vacum did not pick up.

I have since used it 2x in my current location and i swear it works like a charm. This may not be the best vacum for stairts, but, wow its awesome.

Check it out!

GREATEST VACUM EVER!