Meredith James

I just did this tweek to my settings in Firefox-3 after reading it over at Matt-Helps and mate it works a treat!.

Matt have discovered that broadband users can get a significant speed increase from Firefox just by changing a couple of settings.  Firefox is distributed with settings that will work with any machine or setup, but really anyone with a half-decent connection can make these changes and get a great speed increase, and here's how you do it!

Inside the address bar type:

about:config

and then find:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

and set them both to "true".  This adjusts the pipelining settings.

Then find

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

and set it to 8, though you should feel free to play with this number a little and tweak it as you see fit - the article http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests  suggests that 8 is easily sufficient.

Finally, right-click on any setting and select 'new' and then 'integer'.   Set the name to "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" (you might want to copy & paste it) and set the value to "0" (zero).  This removes the render delay. 

And thats all folks - except that its a lot faster!

Michael Arrington has written a very poignant article "Think Before you Voicemail"

"now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily. "

This describes me to a tea. I personally hate listening to voice mail messages. I would much rather receive an email or Text message with details rather than have to pay to listen to the message on my mobile phone. I have toyed with the idea of turning it off but I know that some people that struggle with text messaging, or as it's also known "smsing", struggle using the text function. Also I realise that if someone is calling from a landline this is also a hassle.

So as much as I hate listening to the old voicemail, I will refrain from switching it off as I strongly believe that accessibility is the key to communication, especially when I want to hear from my parents, and the best part is hearing messages from my neice's or nephews that can't even write yet :)

Music: Wolfmother - Vagabond

Everyday the challenge of working with people that are external to your organisation arises. The challenge is how do you communicate your message effectively?

• Do you call them?
• Do you email them?
• Do you fly them in for a meeting?
• Do you drive there for a meeting?
• Do you post them a document and hold a teleconference?
• Do you take minutes of the conversation?
• Do you create a business case, email it around to all the people involved and follow up with a phone call to ensure that they open their email and respond appropriately or post them a copy just in case their email isn't working?
• Do you hold a video conference?
• Do you hold a web conference?
• Do you create a website?
• Do you create a blog or wiki?
• Do you create a video? Do you post that video on the web?
• What on earth are half of these things anyway??

In this day and age there are so many forms of communication available that the most difficult decision that you have to make is which of these is best for the message that you are trying to get across.

And the biggest problem.... there is so little time to learn all of these methods of communication that you just need a bit of help finding out which will work for you.

So my aim is to details these here and let you know what has worked for me. Stay tuned!

Well these are my rules, would be interesting to see if people have any others to add....

1. If you don't know how to do something, ASK someone that does. Discussion Forums are godsends when you don't know how to do something.
2. Why re-invent the wheel? If someone else has done a better job at explaining things, use their expertise as a reference or link directly to their site.
3. Research, Research, Research!!! - google google google!!
4. Why purchase software when you can use free software that does the job just as well? How do you find it? See #3
5. If the free software isn't doing the job, look to see if their is an upgrade to become a member - better to pay a small amount that redevelop an entire website.
6. Three letters that will save you a heap of time and money when setting up a website and purchasing software:
   CMS - content management system
7. If there are multiple people that are updating a site, make sure that they are armed with the skills to write content for the web. Investing in a training course around this will ensure that your website/blog is concise and easy to follow.
8. Always have a code of conduct for social networking sites and a moderator. And more importantly -If you don't have a moderator - don't offer chats, comments on your site.
9. ALWAYS Keep your site up to date! Ensure that you have a content Manager! No one wants to waste time reading out-of-date information.
10. The world-wide-web is an ever growing and evolving place. Keep up-to-date via RSS feeds from industry experts.