Putting a new stamp on the Post Office

Here are two ways to fix the out of date floundering United States Postal Service (USPS).

It's disappointing to hear the gloom in the news about the Postal Service, a service that we expect as a right in the United States of America, and how it is failing and making decisions on which local branch offices to close, which days to stop delivering mail on or how much to raise the price of a stamp.  These are not the best options and will only extend their problem and continue to destroy the brand.

Americans have been proud of the Post Office brand for years.  With few exceptions, someone can pay a minimal amount (+/-44¢) and have an envelope or small package delivered in less than 3 days to someone within the 50 states.  With all of the labor and fuel involved this is a good deal relatively speaking.  As most people know, technology advancements like email, blogging, micro-blogging, discussion forums and online bill payment compounded with social media and social networking explosions have made a significant blow to the traditional communication and financial transactions previously reserved for traditional mail.  Regardless of significant changes and improvements, the Post Office's brand is still the same.  They get important messages and packages to recipients quickly (relatively speaking) consistently.

Companies need to change just like people.  Small, medium and large companies change all the time.  They adapt by creating better products and delivering new services every day or end up going out of business when their products and services are no longer needed.  Why should this be any different for the Post Office?  There is no need for the Post Office to die off nor should the great people of the United States let it.

USPS made the necessary changes to stay competitive with shippers like UPS, FedEx and DHL over the past couple of decades.   But USPS has failed to stay competitive now that communication has gone so much more digital.

Here are the answers:  email and file transfer.

If you have the least bit of technically savvy, you are probably thinking, how would this work?  These aren't new products?

Email
The Post Office needs to get into the business of email.  Email is the communication vehicle that people have been choosing and will continue to trend into for at least a few years to come.  The use of blogging, micro-blogging and discussion forums are definitely increasing, but email is something most people need in today's society.  There is money to be made off of the (regulated) advertisements parked on the side of email web based applications.  And who better to provide email security than the government?  People are born everyday that will need new email accounts and if they don't want to wait there are students in public schools that could benefit from their first email accounts.

File Transfer
The second part of the coupled fix is file transfer.  People need to get large digital files to recipients immediately every day in today's business world.  The Post Office's current best option is overnight or express mail, which just doesn't cut it for most.  They need to get into the file transfer business.  The quantity, size and frequency of transferred files is increasing all the time.  Eventually the infrastructure (application servers, server disk space, bandwidth, associated databases, etc...) of existing vendors will not be able to provide free services for transferring files and will either charge outright per file, per license or by term; or trade free file transfer services for advertisement ridden applications.  Again, there are several companies already in this space but this is consistent with the USPS brand, a lot of opportunity remains and would be easy for them to transition in customers as well as convince those advanced in the technology spectrum into digital transactions.

Innovation doesn't always come from brand new ideas as it can also come from a different application of what exists already.  Altering the USPS's product landscape with these new directions would make them drastically more applicable to today's instant communication consumer.  It's time for the Post Office to start acting outside of their proverbial box and instead of making cuts looks to redefine a well known brand.  Good Luck USPS.

Bar Codes

Keep an eye out for information on Bar Codes here at Michael Michael.  Quite an interesting way to capture, store, and share information.  more to come...

Feed me

Exploring Feed Aggregators.

It appears that Feed aggregators fall into three categories:  Desktop, Browser, and Mail client.

Oh yeah, What are Feeds?  Not the type of food one would feed to an animal for nourishment either.  Feeds are a way of subscribing to something such as a website via its URL.  So if you wanted to get updates on a single list from all of your favorite websites, blogs, and news reels you could subsribe to the relevant sites or pull the feed URL and input them into your Feed Aggregator.

Make sense yet?  Maybe not.  Check out the list of Blogs that I follow off to the right margin of this blog site.  Notice how they dynamically change over time and add new items to the top of the list?  This is a Feed Aggregator that Blogger provides as an out of the box widget to add onto this blog.

Using a single Feed Aggregator would allow you to pull all of the recent articles, posts, comments, and so on from all of your favorite sites and put them on a single viewable and clickable page.  This creates an efficient alternative without having to surf to all of your favorite sites everyday.

A couple of the Feed Aggregators to check out are:  FeedDemon & RSS Owl  and then of course your browser most likely has this type of functionality as well.

Stats

I have really been enjoying the 'Stats' feature enhancements included now with Blogger.  They serve up stats on all time, monthly, weekly, and daily views.  They also provide details on referring sites, origin country, browser and a bunch of other great data points.

My blog doesn't yet follow the best practices of gravitating my articles around a particular topic or area of expertise.  But at least I am still chugging along over two an a half years later on posting my public rants and journal type entries.  So far I have taken enough time to add 175 posts which have yielded only 71 comments - 10 or more are probably from me.

This is the real stuff though.

• I have had over 7,300 total page views. And interestingly enough, roughly 40% were from out of the country.  I guess I am not that interesting.
• Over 630 of those views have been for a single article.  It seems that there are lots of people searching for how to create a Green Email Signature everyday.  You can click HERE to see this post I made back on 8 August 2008.
• I have had over 500 viewers take a look at the huge burger I had at Genny's Diner.  HERE is a link to that post from 13 October 2009.
• The next top four posts all have around 250+ page views each.  Two of them are on burgers and the other pair are about beach cruisers. 

Watson

In case you haven't seen Watson on the news or have missed the commercials, check out IBM's Watson.

IBM has build a computer with the ability to answer all kinds of questions with an immediate response.  Watson is going to be competing on an upcoming Jeopardy! episode to see how capable it really is.  Watch some of the videos linked above to see one of IBM's current projects.  This illustrates the innovation that is going on and how fast our world is changing right before us.

Maintaining your PC

I was talking to a friend over the weekend about their PC not performing very well and we began talking about how to maintain the equipment's performance. My recommendations are in line with what I understand to be generally accepted as best practice. What I do breaks down into about 6 major steps. Here they are...

You can google each of these section titles yourself for more information. This is more or less targeted on what you need to be maintaining and cleaning up regularly.

Browser Temporary Internet Files
Go into your default browser. For that matter, all of your browsers. Navigate into the Tools and Settings and clear or delete you Temporary Internet Files. You should really have this set to delete every time you close the browser or on a regular schedule about every week or so. You can research more information regarding what is stored here on your own. I am not a security expert, so I am not going to make up a list.

Browser Cookies
This is more or less the same as above. You should be deleting these regulary as well. Either every time you close your browser or on a regular schedule. Deleting your cookies can be done from within the Tools and Settings area of your browser as well. If your browser presents the options, you should also remove any history, saved passwords and other web information. If you are thinking, "Why would I want to do this?" Ask yourself, "Do you write the password to your garage door entry pad on your garage door?"

Operating System Updates
You should be checking your Operating System for updates every few months if not a lot sooner. For example, if you are a Windows user, go to the Windows Update site and run the wizard to check for updates.

Antivirus Software Updates
You should be checking your Antivirus company for updates as well.

Third Party Utilities
There are other third party tools to help you clean up your system. CCleaner is a great example.

And if you get really adventourus, investigate all of the programs you have set for startup. This can be found in MSConfig (Go to Run > Command Prompt > msconfig > Startup). But, be really careful as there are lots of items to screw up here.

Are you having trouble with your new SD card?

Why does my SDHC card not work with my laptop, PC, camera, or phone?

It took me a little while to figure out why my laptop and smartphone wouldn't recognize the SD card I recently bought. It turns out I bought one of the newer SDHC cards. And with this newer higher capacity technology (2+ GB) comes new drivers.

To cut to the chase...search the support articles on your operating system brand for "SDHC support " or something similar. For me it was Microsoft XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934428.

I have yet to try the patch out because my camera dock and USB cable are at home and I am on the road. I will update this article with confirmation after I complete this. To read up on more information, browse through the support articles of the brand of your SDHC card, your hardware device...or just skip to the OS. A lot of information comes up just by searching with "SDHC".

If you can find an update for Windows Mobile 5.0 let me know.

Good Luck.

Google it

Do you find yourself ever telling others to "Google it" when they need some information? Most people nowadays actually know what you mean and can execute the internet query on their own. With these simple instructions you can build a link to the desired Google search for those that have no idea what you are talking about.

First, paste in the Google domain and search string: http://www.google.com/search?q=

Next, add each word that needs to be included seperated by plus symbols and no spaces. Here is an example: july+4+independence+1776.

The resulting URL should look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=july+4+independence+1776

Keyboard Shortcut List

I was searching for a good shortcut/hotkey list the other day and found this one rather quick. Although it's not organized that well and could use some formatting, the content is there. And my search got cut short by time. Maybe someday I'll find a better one and revise this post. It's a great place to start for someone that needs to learn some basics or add a few more to their bag of tricks.

I particularly liked the CTRL+Enter and the CRTL+Esc. If you didn't know them already either, you'll have to read or search the list.

I'm the biggest fan of shortcuts, not only do they usually save time, you don't need to use a mouse then.

Enjoy. Click HERE for the webpage listing.

Green Signature: Please consider the environment before printing this email.

If you use email to communicate personally or at work, you have probably seen the closing line “Please consider the environment before printing this email”. Well warranted in today’s society of people wasting so much.

Have you tried to implement this pleasant green request by copying and pasting the tag line in your email signature and had problems? If you haven’t figured it out, the trick is that the graphic before the line of text is a character in the Webdings font. It’s actually the capital letter “P”.

So type out or copy the text section in the font of your choice. Then go back to the front and type a capital “P”, highlight it and change the font to Webdings. Lastly make it all the color green. Vioala!

P Please consider the environment before printing this email.

(If you can't view the Webdings image above and you are using Firefox it's because Firefox doesn't render Webdings and other symbol fonts by default. You can modify the fonts available so it works. Check out this article for instructions --> click here.)



Please let me know if these instructions worked for you; or if you have any additional tips to add this more efficiently.  :)




Other Search Keywords:  alternative, optional, tagline, trees, salutation, closing, road, ending,

New Microsoft Office File Extensions - Free File Converter

Have you received any documents lately on your computer and your Microsoft Office Applications can't open them? ...files that have .docx or .xlsx extensions, or similar...

This is because Microsoft changed the extensions of their common file types in their 2007 releases of Office products.

You have 2 options:

1. Contact the document originator and ask them to re-save it with a '97-2003 file format (.doc, .xls, etc...), or
2. Download and install a Compatibility Pack offered by Microsoft for free. You can find it HERE.