You’ve probably heard of Bluetooth by now? You may even own a Bluetooth enabled device… but what exactly is Bluetooth? Bluetooth is a low power, low cost wireless technology designed to rid the world of unncessary cables both in the workplace and the home.

In essence Bluetooth was created and became popular for a number of reasons. Firstly it could replace the use of infra-red devices at home and at work. This was especially true of PDAs and cell phones which needed to transfer data between each other. It also increased the range these devices could communicate with each other over from about 3 inches to 32ft. There was no more pointing a PDA at a printer or looking for yet another cable to connect it. Simply search for the other Bluetooth device, connect and that was it.

Secondly Blueooth offered a global standard so that all Bluetooth devices could communicate with each other. A Bluetooth enabled cell phone could communicate with a Bluetooth printer directly. Bluetooth laptops could share data with Bluetooth PDAs.

Thirdly Blueooth could handle voice and data traffic simultaneously which makes it ideal for PDAs and more complex cellphones where the ability to work with more data is becoming the expected norm.

Bluetooth was also integrated into laptop computers to dramatically extend their connections capabilities.

Bluetooth operates in the 2.4 to 2.485 GHz (gigahertz)using a special type of radio tecnology which prevents interference from other radio signals in the area.

Are there any downsides? Unsecured Bluetooth devices can be accessed quite easily. The famous Paris Hilton “stolen cell phonebook” case highlights this dramatically. Also the rise of Bluetooth specific viruses also gives cause for concern – these viruses can “jump” between any Bluetooth device quite easily. Basically make sure your Bluetooth profile is set to Hidden and that the device itself uses a PIN or password or possibly both.

Drop The Pink Elephant
by Bill McFarlan

This is another book I found while I was travelling and bored. Sitting in the departure lounge of Prestwick Airport, Scotland to be exact. There is, quite literally, nothing to do in the airport. It’s small but pretty short on features and definitely short of entertainment. I walked past a book with a bright pink elephant on the cover. After reading the introduction on the inside cover I knew I’d love this book. I was right.

Drop The Pink Elephant is an examination of how we communicate with others. It looks at not just how we communicate with others but also, and more importantly, the words we use when doing this.

Now that probably sounds quite boring? Fortunately not. Bill McFarlans writing style and examples make what is normally a difficult subject incredibly easy to grasp. He uses a lot of humour and personal examples to highlight the types of mistakes we all make on a daily basis when communicating with others. The section on Bullshit Bingo used at management meetings made me laugh out loud when I read it on the flight that evening.

Do you need to read this book? Well let me ask you a more important question – Do you communicate with other people? If so would you like to do this more effectively than ever before? You do? Then you need to read this book.

As a sidenote anybody working in the customer service or contact centre industry needs to make this required reading for all staff. It’s that good.

Available on Amazon.com

Fish
by Stephen C. Lundin, John Christensen and Harry Paul.

This book changed how I viewed customer service and business basics. I think there are some books that you’re meant to find in the same way that there are some people you’re “destined” to meet. Fish is one of those books.

I found Fish one hot saturday afternoon in a bookshop in Bangalore, India. I’d been there for about 4 weeks at that stage working on an outsourcing project for my company. Bored I decided to go shopping and picked up this funny looking book called Fish. After reading some blurb about it being “world famous” I decided it was worth the few dollars if it kept me from being bored for a few hours.

A few hours later I began to realize that this book was one of the single best investments I’d ever made.

Fish is based on 4 key principles:

Be Present
Play
Make Their Day
Choose Your Attitude

By implementing these principles in any business you can improve the performance of your staff and the company as a whole. Incredibly these 4 utterly brilliant steps were developed in…..a fish market. The Pike Place fish market in Seattle to be exact.

If you care about your business you need to read Fish.

If you care about your customers you need to read Fish.

If you care about your own success (personally and professionally) you need to read Fish.

Very rarely has one single book had such a huge impact on my life and I’m certain it will have the same impact on yours.

Available on Amazon.com

by Robery Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter

This is the first in the series of life changing books for you to invest in.

There’s been many books written on the topics of finance, investments and money. No book will open your eyes to realities of the financial world more than Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robery Kiyosaki – the man they call the millionaire teacher.

Based on Roberts life it takes you from his earliest attempts at quite literally “making” money to his first store in his parents basement and then on to his future success in property and elsewhere.

This book deviates from the normal lessons taught elsewhere. As a matter of fact Robert has attracted a lot of attention for teaching “against the grain” of what is considered to be correct.

There are a few key lessons that Robert teaches

1. Why education doesn’t mean financial success. How many highly educated poor people do you know? How many peoplw with honors degrees do you know who are unemployed?

2. Paying yourself first. Learning that you need to be invested in as much as you need to pay all the bills.

3. High paying jobs don’t make you rich. In fact normally quite the opposite.

4. Learning to make money work for you instead of you working for money. It’s simple principle but it will change how you view your financial life.

This book was recommended to me by a business friend of mine. I was expecting the same old thing. This book is anything but the same old thing. Highly, highly recommended. So good as a matter of fact that even writing about it has made me start reading it again.

Available on Amazon.com

There are some books that you read and leave to one side. They’re a nice read, they kept you occupied for a few hours and that was it.

Then there are those books which change the way you think about your life, the lives of others, your business and the universe as a whole. I’ve had the privlege of being exposed to some of these books over the last few years and I just wanted to share some of them with you.

The first of these will follow in the next post.

I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have and that they benefit you as much they have me.

Cheers

Niall

Now comes the last step in keeping your computer and hard drive neat, tidy and free of errors. The process of defragmenting your hard drive can be time consuming but the benefits are more than worth it. Your PC will actually perform better with a drive that’s been defragmented properly. Wait though what is defragmentation you ask?

Ok imagine your hard disk is a standard music CD. When you buy the CD first all the songs are in the right order. Imagine after 8 weeks you play the CD and not only are the songs all mixed up but bits of one song are mixed with parts of another song. It’s all just a jumbled mess. Your CD player can’t cope and eventually just dies from exhaustion. Now you know that doesn’t happen with CDs but the scenario I just described here is exactly what happens to you hard drive over time. Information gets scattered all over the place and the mechanisms inside the drive have to work 10 times harder to retrieve and save data. The end result is a hard disk that dies prematurely.

Defragging (defragmenting) is the process of putting all the data on your hard disk back where it belongs. Again Windows has a tool to help you accomplish this called, coincidentally, Disk Defragmenter.

To run this tool simply click on Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.

Windows 95/98/ME
The defrag tool will open in a small window. From there just select which hard drive you want to defrag and click on “Run”. This process can take several hours to complete. If defrag keeps pausing or restarting then restart your PC in Safe Mode and defrag from there to get around this problem.

Windows 2000/XP
With this newer version of defrag you can choose to either defrag the drive straight away or allow it to analyze the drive first. I’d recommend that you do the analysis as it only takes a few minutes and it will show you just how badly your drive is fragmented. Once the analysis is complete simply click on “Defragment”. Again defragmenting is a time intensive process and you’re best to leave your PC uninterrupted whilst it’s doing this. Catch up on a good book maybe

Norton Systemworks has a great defragmentation tool called Speed Disk which I love because it does such a thorough job on my hard drives and has been doing so for the last 10 years.