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I’ve been reading Influence: Science and Practice which is a more formal and textbook-like version of Robert Cialdini’s excellent Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The chapter on Commitment and Consistency is very interesting. One of the tricks of getting people (including yourself) to believe in something is to get them to write a written statement of the behavior you desire. Apparently, the Amway Corporation uses this technique. The following statement is given to it’s members:

One final tip before you get started: Set a goal and write it down. Whatever the goal, the important thing is that you set it, so you’ve got something for which to aim - and that you write it down. There is something magical about writing things down. So set a goal and write it down. When you reach that goal, set another and write that down. You’ll be off and running.

If you really want to make sure that the goal is achieved, make it known to as many people as possible. Having other people know that you are trying to achieve a goal brings pride into the equation, which is a very powerful force.

I’ve always had this feeling about the effect of writing things down, but now I see that there is scientific proof of it. I find that I achieve tasks much faster if I have a hand-written to-do list. I guess I need to start applying the “write it down” method to some bigger parts of my life.

I just finished reading Marty Neumeier’s Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands and The Brand Gap. While they are both good reads, I really found The Brand Gap to be essentially background information for Zag. Both books deal with the issue of creating you company’s brand, where brand is defined as people’s gut feeling about your company. This definition really hits home with me. I am a big fan of Apple, and I think they are a prime example of a company that knows how to create a brand. (But let’s not get started on discussions about Apple. We all know that those always end up with an endless array of idiotic rants and flames.)

One statement that really struck me in Zag was in determining who your enemy is.

Rather than trying to please everyone at the risk of pleasing no one, step right up and pick a fight.

I love this statement. I am so tired of the option paralysis caused by the dozens of uninspiring, “me too” products on the market. Give me a company that has a passion that I agree with, and I’ll give you my loyalty.

Today was an absolutely perfect day to do some mountain biking. I’ve been in Colorado for over four months now and the weather has been less than optimal to say the least (it always seems to rain on the weekends here). This weekend was an exception. It was 77 degrees, mostly cloudy, and breezy. It’s been dry all week, so the trails are excellent condition. Nothing was going to hold me back from taking out my new K2 Lithium 3.0 mountain bike this weekend.

I headed out to Rabbit Mountain in Lyons. I’ve gone to this trail a few times before. This is the trail that is closest to my home. It is also a fairly beginner course. While I did do quite a bit of trail riding in the hills of North Carolina, I’ve only biked in the mountains a handful of times. I am definitely a beginner here.

This was by far my best showing on this trail. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was going to die on the way up because my lungs were going to explode, and I didn’t feel like I was going to die on the way down because I was going to go flying off a cliff. I’m starting to get the hang of this Colorado mountain biking. I took a few pictures with my new digital camera as well. Unfortunately, they don’t really capture the true essence of these trails. When you look at the pictures it looks as though the trail is basically flat as it goes off into the distance. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The portions of trail in these pictures are fairly steep and very rocky. To make matters worse, a lot of the rocks are loose. And this is a beginner trail.

To top the whole day off, my final treat of the day was on the way down. I was coming down at a pretty good clip (just under 10mph) and there was a snake laying across the entire trail. It was too late to do anything about it, so I had to run over it. I didn’t bother to look back and see if it was alright (looking back while coming down a mountain on a bike is not a good idea). The other reason I didn’t stop is that this mountain used to be called Rattlesnake Mountain, but they changed the name to Rabbit Mountain for PR reasons. That didn’t, however, change the reason that it was called Rattlesnake Mountain in the first place. I’m not exactly sure how big it was since I didn’t see its head or tail, but it must have been at least 3 feet long. I’m just glad I caught it on the fast downhill rather than running into it on the slow uphill climb.

I tried out MacFUSE and SSHFS a few months ago when I started to work remotely. While the connection speed was much faster than SMB, the connections weren’t very stable. Any type of network disruption (including sleep) would cause the machine to lock up. The only way to get operation of the machine back to normal was by rebooting (ick!). After a couple of days of that, no amount of speed increase was worth it; I had to go back to SMB.

Recently, I’ve been getting fed up with the slowness of SMB again, so I thought I’d check on the status of MacFUSE and see if they’d made any progress. Lucky for me, they had been working very hard on it. The most recent version of MacFUSE is much more stable. It doesn’t lock up my machine any more. Now when it loses a connection, it displays a window asking if you want to try to reconnect on to eject. This is a huge improvement.

Everything isn’t sunshine and roses though. While it doesn’t lock up the machine, the reconnection dialog has never worked for me. In order to reconnect, I have to cd out of any mounted directories in any open shells, then unmount and remount. I guess I’ll see in the next few days if this remaining annoyance drives me batty. Hopefully some day soon they’ll have a fix for this as well.