Lifehack.org

http://www.lifehack.org/ I think there are interesting articles. Should spend time reading.

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I've just activated my web album: http://picasaweb.google.com/thanh.hoc
I'll post images to it to share with others.

How to be interesting [a must read article]

I think by following the tips written in this article seriously, we can become more interesting. By being an interesting people, we may live happier.

This is the URL of the article: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/11/how_to_be_inter.html by Russell Davies

And this is a comment from melanie | January 02, 2007 at 11:29 PM

"Hey, I came across this article, read it carefully and then read all comments under... and know what? all clues from the comments are much more interesting than the article itself. And that is the most intersting thing!"

A brief summary from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-be-interesting.html:
"A while ago, I tried to observe people who are interesting - they are all present themselves well and able to talk within any situation. I found they have one common trait - they know broad areas of topics. It strikes me though how the earth can they learn all those stuff? An article written by Russell Davies tells me there are ways to do it:

* Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.
* Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.
* Keep a scrapbook
* Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before
* Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.
* Collect something
* Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it. (Carefully)
* Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art, one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV. Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it
* Make something
* Read

The similarity of all those ways are to increase your scope of thinking and knowledge, by jumping out from your comfort zone of knowledge."

Today, it is too difficult to have a good health!

It seems that people today are easier to get sick than ever. Looking around, I see many people living with bad heath. Why's that? Personally, I think this is because of our habit of living and eating. We lack the movement, we eat foods which is not good for health (so sweat, dried foods, a lot of fat, unhygienic foods). This may cause to serious problem for health: cancer, sugar-in-urine.

About to have IFI diploma

For the first time from its etablishment, the IFI (Institut de la Francophonie pour l'Informatique de Hanoi www.ifi.refer.org) delivers to their student the diploma, within this week. This is really a great news!

Studying program at IFI (written in English): http://wiki.e-ifi.org/wiki/index.php?n=IFI.IFI

My favorite Vietnamse singers

My favorite Vietnamese singers are Dam Vinh Hung, Hong Ngoc, Thu Phuong and Bang Kieu. If you have their CDs or DVDs, please share it with me thanh.hoc@gmail.com. Thanks so much :)
* Dam Vinh Hung's voice is original and he is creative in singing. I like his personality.
* Hong Ngoc and Thu Phuong's voice are bass and smooth. I like the CD "Nhu* chu*a ba('t dda^`u" (Seems not to start) of Thu Phuong so much.
* Bang Kieu's voice is very high
Both Bang Kieu and Thu Phuong are now living abroad and the Culture and Information Ministry has prohibited from distributing their CDs because of their anti-patriotic actions.

Top ten tips for preventing innovation

1. Hire employees looking for safety in their roles. Innovation happens when people stretch outside their comfort zones - don’t let them stretch! Find people who primarily want security and a nine-to-five role, stay away from those troublemakers who want to “change the world.”
2. Hire incompetent employees. What better way to prevent innovation than to have people who have to focus just to do the bare minimum? For extra safety, try and find someone who can take credit for other people’s work and hide their own incompetence - these people are easier to promote, which will become important later. If we are forced to hire someone who is competent, it’s critical that we make sure that they only have one area of expertise. People with more than one area of expertise, switch-hitters, just cause trouble by talking to people on other teams.
3. Keep salaries below the 75th percentile. Innovators know their value - and when they aren’t applying for jobs with intrinsic utility to them, they are commanding higher salaries. If we keep our salaries low, there’s much less risk of one of these innovators sneaking into our organization. As a bonus, we’ll save a fortune!
4. Read The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley of IDEO. He focuses on the types of people and organizational behavior that encourage innovation. The writing style is very clever - Mr. Kelley writes as if he were trying to encourage innovation - what a riot! He identifies ten personas that contribute to innovation. Put those ten faces on the wall in HR like an FBI most-wanted poster and coach HR to screen those people out.
5. Treat employees like garbage. Yell at them. Whenever possible, call them at midnight to yell at them some more. They work for us. If they get uppity, make them work on the weekends. Make them dig holes and fill them back up again. Threaten them - especially when they need the job. If you can’t yell, at least be condescending in public forums. Remember we are smarter than they are. Punks.
6. Reward conservative and marginal successes. The old rule of thumb for office politics was “It takes ten good projects to recover from one bad project.” Stick to it! If we punish people for mistakes when they ’swing for the fences’, and reward them for marginal and safe projects, they will quickly get the idea. This is the most subtle of all the tips - but don’t worry - people will figure out the reward system and shy away from those risky projects. This technique has the added benefit of propogating itself up and down the management hierarchy. Many organizations get lucky, and do this one accidentally. Wish we were all so lucky!
7. Micromanage. We’ve been promoted because we understand their jobs so well that we could do them in our sleep. Whatever those pesky little people think, it’s wrong. We know what we want, we know how we want it (not like that, you fool!). Every day we should make sure they do things exactly like we want. Even things like using the right font in their emails can be important. If anything slips thru unmanaged, then we aren’t doing our jobs. Of course, if we have a good boss, he’ll tell us exactly how to manage them.
8. Only create customer-requested features. Let our customers tell us what to do. Lucky for us - customers don’t have big ideas, they keep us focused on what we’re doing. Don’t let them whine about their other problems - that’s not why we’re talking to them. We just want to know if they like the idea of animated buttons on all the dialogs. Stay away from the unhappy customers - if we aren’t getting the job done now, well, we don’t really care what they say (they are existing customers, we need new customers). We’re here to solve our problems. Oh - and don’t second guess the customer. If they say they want the menu items in alphabetical order, well, that’s what they want. The customer is always right. If Henry Ford had listened, think of how fast horses would be today. Even better, appoint a user-representative, then we don’t have to talk to the customers at all.
9. Make performance reviews easy. Create some easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, # of powerpoint slides created, # of meetings attended), and use those for performance reviews. People always gravitate toward the metric. We can run the reviews with a minimum of effort, giving us more time to tell them how to do their jobs. Just an hour a year. Some managers can give feedback in 15 minutes.
10. Build a kingdom. When we have information, that means we have power. With that power, we can grow our organization. The more people we have, the more important we are. We need to make sure that those other teams don’t get our information. They might apply it in ways that we didn’t intend. While we’re at it - make sure our people don’t find out what we know. Not only will it protect us from them, but it will keep them from accidentally discovering a more important problem, or an alternate way to apply what they already know to a new problem domain.

http://tynerblain.com/blog/2006/03/06/top-ten-tips-for-preventing-innovation/

Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips

1. Write a meaningful subject line.
2. Keep the message focused and readable.
3. Avoid attachments.
4. Identify yourself clearly.
5. Be kind -- don't flame.
6. Proofread.
7. Don't assume privacy.
8. Distinguish between formal and informal situations.
9. Respond Promptly.
10. Show Respect and Restraint.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/e-text/e-mail.htm