Written on January 17, 2010 at 10:22 am , by Brian Schwartz
Achieve Ability is Coach Kerry Lyman’s website. Kerry is a wonderful woman who was a former PR professional who moved into coaching as a way to help young adults navigate career planning and personal goal setting.
If you know a young professional who needs guidance or could use help planning their career, I suggest they contact Kerry.
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I built this site as a freelance project using Wordpress and customizing an off the shelf theme, which consisted of changing the color scheme, choosing photos, selecting the font, adding the content and training Kerry on how to use Wordpress.
Written on January 12, 2010 at 1:13 pm , by Brian Schwartz
New family of four is at home. Gabe already learned Jude’s name and he’s trying to share his toys and blanket. Very cute.
Written on January 11, 2010 at 12:35 pm , by Brian Schwartz
http://ping.fm/p/Ujqq3 – Jude’s ‘picture’ outfit is just a tad too big (same size we used for Gabe’s and it fit him)
Written on January 10, 2010 at 9:30 am , by Brian Schwartz
At the hospital baby will be here today!
Written on January 3, 2010 at 5:46 pm , by Brian Schwartz
Happy New Year from my family to yours.
Written on December 14, 2009 at 6:49 pm , by Brian Schwartz
I’m at work and just got this picture from my wife. It made me chuckle:
Written on December 11, 2009 at 12:12 am , by Brian Schwartz
I don’t recommend arguing on the internet, however if you do feed the trolls and end up getting into an heated argument I have the solution for you.
They will be so absorbed by the pure awesomeness of this page, they will have no choice but to smile, accept their defeat and walk away.
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Seriously though, I saw this page about 4 or 5 years ago on a URL called e-thug.net (intentionally not linked, because the site is no longer up). The page cracked me up and I loved the irony of the URL and it was used for the above purpose: to end an argument (or sometimes as a similar link prank as rick-rolling).
Anyway, earlier today someone’s ringtone reminded me of that song and to my chagrin the site was no longer live. So I spent 10 minutes and went to the wayback machine, did a little digging, found the page, tweaked it to work on my site and voila, it’s resurrected. I hope you enjoy.
P.S. - If you are the real “Thomas” and want me to take this down, by all means contact me and I’ll be happy to remove it.
Written on December 5, 2009 at 6:10 pm , by Brian Schwartz
I love Twitter, which is obvious if you met me there (and you likely did if you’re reading this)… I’m usually on it all day, except for meetings with clients and dates with my wife. I love the instant nature of it, the ability to make connections to people with like interests, follow inspiring designers / developers and for a variety of other reasons.
That said, I’m probably getting close the have a cap to the amount of people I can follow. Why? Well, I don’t use tools that separate people into groups. Twitter apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic (and others I’ve never tried) allow you to follow your friends and group the people you follow into logical columns so you can track certain accounts together.
I used to use this approach… I had a column in Tweetdeck for people I follow who tweet about Sports, Business, Design, Web Development, “Good Friends”, etc and a few saved searches – mostly related to Spoke or our clients. But I gave up Tweetdeck and the column approach altogether. Why? Two reasons — One was a problem I had with links in AIR apps and the second I didn’t realize until was a problem until I started using Tweetie for Mac: I wasn’t interacting with a lot of people.
See using these columns I was virtually ignoring the All Friends column. I was interacting with the same people over and over again and unless I added the account to one of those columns when I started following it, I would most likely not see any of their tweets. I didn’t even realize that I was doing this until I switched to Tweetie.
Tweetie is a one-column application (a la – All Friends column in Tweetdeck) and after I started using it, I noticed that I read (or at least skimmed) through the tweets in the stream (when I’m on twitter, I don’t worry about trying to catch up when I’m not). After a while I noticed I was interacting with more and more people. Making new friends, unfollowing people who spammed my tweet stream. Life is good.
I found one draw back to this approach — I’ll run into a maximum number of people I can follow. I’m right around 1,000 now, and I’ve decided to start removing people from the list if they are tweeting the same thing alot or if they are business bots that just tweet blog posts, etc.
I’ve talked with people each with different points of view about how many people to follow. Some only want to follow 100 people so they can keep up, other’s don’t care and just pick and choose what they pay attention and some people care about their follower numbers, so they follow everyone.
I made a comment on Mark Murnahan’s blog post about the following / unfollowing trend about my approach and his reply was that the communication matters less than the approach. He’s right, he also follows 18,000 people, something that I’ve come to realize I probably never want to do. It’s just not me… I want to interact with a large majority of the people I follow. I want to follow people who’s tweets I care about reading, and I want to actually read them. That’s the twitter approach that works for me. Make sure to find the way it works best for you.
