MentalRise

Brain Trust: 100 Ivy League Business & Entrepreneurship Courses You Can Take for Free

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:07:42 +0000

From BSchool.com:

Just because you don’t have the deep pockets or stellar grades it takes to get into top tier schools doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some of the same resources these establishments offer. Through open courseware programs, you can access course materials from a wide range of top universities. Whether you decide to take these courses on your own time or just skim through the information, we’ve compiled a list of 100 places to start looking for great business and entrepreneurship information.

Full Article: http://www.bschool.com/blog/2008/brain-trust-100-ivy-league-business-entrepreneurship-courses-you-can-take-for-free/

Breaking the Holding Pattern - Moving Forward on Your Path

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:05:52 +0000

Planning the future in spans of 6-12 months requires deciding with certainty what paths to follow.

The present is most valuable when its events are the results of past planning. Knowing not only where we are currently, but where we should be, sets an internal pace, and an objective measure of progress along our path.

Even in writing this, I stumble over words and concepts I know to be almost universally true. Why? Because their truth is uncomfortable, and as such, they are shown to be all the more timely and important for me.

Some of us, myself included, have tried to avoid planning for fear of missing some larger but hitherto unknown opportunity. We must realize however, that the negative effects of continued stagnant procrastination, a self-glorified, self-righteous, self-justified holding pattern we daren’t break, wastes away our precious time and focus.

While those action-oriented individuals spend their time continuously planning, executing, processing input from successes and failures, and repeating, those in the eternal holding pattern gain zero units of real world experience. This withdrawal from reality into an unproductive feedback loop is where many of us find ourselves today.

So now, what is the first action?

It seems that I must repeat the most boring, generic, cliche advice that all of us claim to know, but few actually rise to act upon - brainstorm and write out goals, now!

Work backwards from these to the present, and take immediate action.

10 Startup Steps for Hiring a Great Sales Team

admin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:34:56 +0000

For some of us, the products we develop and market need to be sold directly to clients via direct sales and eventually, referral building.

At the beginning of our ventures, it is imperative to personally develop a strong, benefits-based sales method for our product. But what about afterwards? We aren’t supposed to sell each and every widget ourselves, right?

Enter the Sales Team.

But wait - there are a lot of amateurs, yahoos, and slackers out there! There is a real danger that the wrong pick could:

Damage your reputation
Waste your precious seed money
Get you in legal trouble
…Impregnate your daughter?

Anything is possible! With that in mind, pay close attention to The 10 Startup Steps for Hiring a Great Sales Team

Properly define the job.: Most managers try to determine whom they want to hire rather than hiring the best fit for the job. If you profile the person whom would do a superior job, the resulting profile might define some one totally different than originally planned, filling the position based on skills, behaviors and motivators inherent to the job.
Benchmark the position.: Job Benchmarking is a definitive tool designed to take the guesswork and bias out of the hiring process. It assesses the job based on the merits of the work required by the employee and not on their perceived abilities and personality. It also eliminates comparing the new employee to others already doing the job. Hiring as hired in the past will not target super stars needed to excel and grow your business.
Re-write your ad.: Most ads ask what the candidate has done in the past, and while it might be important, it doesn’t tell you what they can do or how well they will do the job. Specifically state the outcomes you want each candidate to display while employed. Most will not apply if they feel pre-screening will not meet your requirements.
Pre-screen the applicants.: To many, this means going over the resume to qualify backgrounds, experience or education. Instead, E-mail each applicant a set of questions to weed out ones who are clearly a poor choice for the job especially if they interface with internal or external customers, and are unable to represent the company in a professional manner.
Screen the applicants.: Most companies have set pro-cedures in place to screen out prospects that do not meet the basic requirements of the job. However, pre-screening via email and a set series of questions will help to further weed out unprofessional or less than desirable candidates.
Pre-interview meeting.: Many companies have multiple employees interview prospective candidates. What they fail to do is preplan the interview process to consistently obtain the same information from each of the candidates. When possible, interviewers should also be included in the benchmarking process to ensure buy in and accountability.
Interview the Candidate.: Most managers have not been trained on how to interview a perspective new employee. When possible, companies need to hire a coach to train managers on how to interview and determine a good fit for the organization. Most interviewers make the decision to hire based on a person’s past performance and within the first five minutes of an interview. Companies need to teach how to avoid these pitfalls by reducing the hiring bias and taking the guesswork out the hiring process.
Assess the Candidate.: Talent assessments tell how closely the candidate matches a job. Many feel this part of the process should come after the interview. A well-designed talent report will help determine not only if a candidate can do the job but also how well they might do it. It will often highlight deficiencies that might detract from the individuals’ overall performance as well. Why waste more time and money interviewing a candidate requiring compromise to hire?
Post-interview meeting.: Debrief each of the interviewers on their choice of candidate(s). Interviewers need to justify choices based on the sample questions each asked and on relevant feedback and agree as a group. If you did your benchmark correctly, and you have already run a talent report, there should be a stand out candidate.
Don’t hire to just to fill a slot.: Some just want the hiring process to stop because it is taking to long and fill the position with a “body”. Managers who are willing to settle for a so-so employee are probably just so-so managers. Either you did not throw a wide enough net to capture enough good prospects or your ad writing needs improvement. It costs just as much to find a good employee as it does to find an incompetent one.

(View Full Source Article Here)

What other tips have helped you while hiring Sales Representatives?

Staying Motivated When You Least Want To

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:50:25 +0000

Every day we lose precious time to Motivation Malfunction. Little by little, it tries to sap away our precious focus, to dwell on ‘what ifs’ and ‘boo hoos’ that lurk about in the peripheral of our consciousness. This article, “Staying Motivated When It All Goes To Hell“, is a great wake up call to keep moving forward, faster than ever.

I use it as part of my “Emergency Motivation Arsenal”, in case I find myself moping about instead of pursuing my goals.

It’s easy to get motivated by an idea. A plan. A goal. We tend to get easily excited by and obsessed over these (and other) four-letter words. The thought of them is intoxicating, and when you’re caught up in the euphoria, suddenly all things seem possible. You want it bad, and you chase it with a smile on your face.

But there’s another four letter that most people don’t like to face, and that’s work.

When your goals just aren’t doing it for you, when you’re not getting excited enough to chase them anymore, something is wrong. You feel like you’re going through the motions, doing what you have to in order to chug along, and the hot idea that once dominated your thoughts has lost its luster. What used to be a driving passion becomes just another chore. You start entertaining thoughts of giving up.

Full Article: Staying Motivated When It All Goes To Hell

Obama CTO - Top Priority Idea

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:03:13 +0000

When http://www.ObamaCTO.org posed the question “Barack Obama is going to appoint the nation’s first CTO. What are the top priorities?”, it struck me as a very good time to come up with something truly useful.

There are a lot of different tasks that need tackling by the new CTO (whoever he/she/it is), but as a Security Administrator for a hosting company, my perspective is a bit different. The explosion of the web has led, of course, to the explosion of hostile code, fraud, and network attacks, with the United States leading the pack.

My Idea?

Negotiate escalation procedures between ISPs/Providers

ISPs and owners of large networks (hosting companies, colo facilities, Military networks, large corporations) should have an established method of escalating incidents between each other.

Any company with a minimum network size of ____ IPs is required to register. Only registered members can escalate between each other, ensuring that each complaint/escalation is properly formed.

Anyone reporting an incident would provide proof (logs, urls, etc) as necessary.

Depending on the reputation of the reporting entity (i.e. military vs. small ISP), automated action can be taken against the offender(s)

Volunteer organizations, corporations, and other good netizens can join the fight against botnets, spammers, and virii-laden machines.

Companies would have a responsiveness score, showing the community how quickly and seriously they respond to threats.

What do you think? Send me a twitter @MarcelChastain , and vote at http://www.obamacto.org/.

Transcription - More Content, Less Time

admin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:44:52 +0000

Transcription services are becoming more popular as outsourcing and other automation techniques are being explored in depth. Bloggers, internet marketers, content creators, and copywriters alike all see the vast potential for using transcription services to create more natural, realistic, attractive-sounding text for use in their products.

Let’s talk about some of the potential uses for transcription services, and where to find the best deal.

Bloggers need to generate a huge amount of content daily and do so in a very conversational, straightforward kind of a tone. Typing all of this information and formatting it consumes a huge amount of time, in addition to the original amount of time it took to research this topic.
For those that are involved in Highly Technical or highly detailed subjects, Documentation is another huge area where transcription can ease the burden on the writer. As a programmer myself, I regularly have to send one out of every three hours in documentation, especially for extremely sensitive or highly technical projects.
Copywriters need to generate a lot of ideas off the top of their head in a conversational tone, in a compelling, salesman-like way in order to appeal to their prospects. We can see that transcription helps in all of these cases because it allows you to speak instead of typing.
Sales Letters are typically extremely long, detailed, conversational pieces, sometimes 15 or 20 paragraphs long, for use with internet marketers and direct mail. Using transcription services, a copyrighter creating a new sales letter can get a rough draft going in maybe one to two hours with only a basic outline to start with
Product Reviews are another popular type of content on the internet nowadays. With new products coming out, people want to hear from an expert how it works and what features are attractive, and what should motivate them into investing in a product.Reviews of products are often very simple. Sometimes there is some technical data that needs to go inside of those, but that consumes a minimal amount of time for the review process. Most of the time is spent typing, formatting, and arranging conversational and natural speech on a keyboard.
Finally, one of the newer sides on the Internet, is MicroBlogging. A great example of this is Twitter tweets or Facebook updates. All of these services encourage person-to-person communication and reward those that speak to their users and their readers in the most conversational tone.

Effectively communicating to the reader in a way that they can understand is the one of the most important things, second only to content. Once you have a topic that you would like to discuss, a transcription service can help you get that data entered onto the computer for easy formatting and publishing.

Investment

The costs of transcription services vary according to the quality. We’ve seen published rates from major, mainstream American companies as low as $1.50 per minute to $2.50 per minute. There are additional premiums if your text contains highly technical legal or medical words as these slow down the transcription process immensely and require a specially trained transcriber.

Of course, you can find less expensive transcription specialists on eLance, but the quality varies tremendously.

What I have found is a wonderful flat rate service called CopyTalk.com. For a flat rate of $79.95 per month they allow you to make an unlimited amount of transcription pieces. The only catch is that each one can only be four minutes long. That’s no problem! All that happens is you get cut off after four minutes and you can continue right where you left off. I’m using it right now as we speak and it’s incredible.

At $1.50 per minute for some of the less expense transcription services, you would rack up a bill of approximately $90 for one hour of transcribed text, just to start off! To go through your first and second drafts, your revision, and other extremely busy times such as particularly busy news day or a release of it for a major product that you’re reviewing, you can easily accrue an hour worth of transcription time that will hit your pocket book pretty heavily. $90 for one hour is what we’re up against.

In comparison, $79.95 for Copytalk.com gives you an unlimited amount of transcription time but it needs to be cut up into four minute pieces. This was originally introduced to me or suggested to me by Tim Ferriss, the author of the best selling novel book, The 4-Hour Work Week.

Right now I can see on their website that they’re offering a one week free trial, you can try out the services and see the quality. Normally they deliver to your e-mail inbox within four hours as per their website SLA. I hope this helps all of you would-be entrepreneurs, bloggers, Internet marketers, and other content providers to generate more content quicker and build up the power on your side - easily.

Top Ajax Techniques: Bring these features to your site easily

admin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:20:30 +0000

Web applications have made huge leaps and bounds in improving user experience thanks to a lot of recently developed Ajax technology. When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of javascript you can produce some pretty cool results. In an effort to help you take it up a notch, we’d like to share some methods for helping your site anticipate a user’s next move.

Full Article from noupe.com

Eben Pagan Recommended Reading List

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:30:53 +0000

Eben Pagan, Internet Marketing Expert extraordinaire, recommends some books for anyone looking to improve and enhance their understanding in the IM industry.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading quite a few of these, and agree wholeheartedly with the recommendations.

http://myvirtualpartner.com/blog/2008/03/12/whats-on-eben-pagans-recommended-reading-list/

Malicious Code Injection - Sans JavaScript!

admin — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:18:11 +0000

The fellows over at i8jesus.com have a great article on injecting malicious content into site that block javascript.

I’m looking forward to incorporating their findings into my Malware scanning methods..!
HTML/CSS Injections - Primitive Malicious Code (or, What’s the worst that could happen?)

Howto: LDAP Aliases on Courier

admin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:11:35 +0000

We decided to setup a mail server based entirely around the courier suite of mail applications on debian. This should end the incessant problems we are having with our poorly designed Qmail based mail server, hopefully.

Step 1 was to get user authentication working (via LDAP) against our local Domain Controller/Active Directory box - so far, so good (I’ll be sure to describe that struggle in another post).

Step 2 was getting the Aliases setup, which was a bit more involved.

We installed a local copy of openldap and courier’s ldap plugins using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install slapd courier-ldap

Next, to delete all the example data that came with openldap (NOTE: This will remote the contents of your ldap data folder! If you have anything important in there, back it up first!)

cd /var/lib/ldap/ && sudo rm -rf *.* alock

We’ll go ahead and import the base ldap structure. Referencing some old ldap data, we came up with this dump for the domain ‘example.local’, and stored it in /root/base.ldif :

dn: dc=example,dc=local
objectClass: top
objectClass: dcObject
objectClass: organization
o: example
dc: example
structuralObjectClass: organization

dn: ou=aliases,dc=example,dc=local
objectClass: top
objectClass: organizationalUnit
ou: aliases
structuralObjectClass: organizationalUnit

Great! Let’s load it in the into ldap!

sudo slapadd -vv -f /root/base.ldif

Now, the data is loaded inside of ldap, but all the physical data files are owned by root. Assuming ldap is running as the user ‘openldap’ on your system, let’s chown them:

sudo chown -R openldap: /var/lib/ldap/

Great. Let’s generate an admin password

slappasswd
New password: 
Re-enter new password: 
{SSHA}d5+W6qGRDcMbsnIAvYasklajdklaO7N3Kby

Copy that last line, and let’s start editing your openLDAP configuration file, slapd.conf

sudo vi /etc/ldap/slapd.conf

Find the following items, and change them as needed:

suffix      "dc=example,dc=local"
rootdn      "cn=admin,dc=example,dc=local"
rootpw      {SSHA}d5+W6qGRDcMbsnIAvYasklajdklaO7N3Kby
index           mail,objectClass eq

(Note: your ‘rootpw’ should be different from above. Also, look through the rest of the file for any mention of "dc=nodomain" and replace it with "dc=example,dc=local", or whatever your LDAP base is.)

Awesome!

Now, by default Courier bases its mail aliasing on a few different attributes, some of which are nonstandard or undefined. To fix this, we’ll create a quick schema file of our own. On Debian the schema files are stored in /etc/ldap/schema/, so we’ll create a new one named ‘local.schema’:

sudo vi /etc/ldap/schema/local.schema

# Copied and pasted from the 'mail' attributetype,
# with a different OID, Name, and Desc
attributetype ( 0.9.2342.19200300.100.1.3.1
        NAME ( 'maildrop' )
        DESC 'Courier alias, will be used to deliver mail to'
    EQUALITY caseIgnoreIA5Match
    SUBSTR caseIgnoreIA5SubstringsMatch
    SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.26{256} )

# Subclass of inetOrgPerson, with a different
# OID, Name, Desc, and MUST
objectclass     ( 2.16.840.1.113730.3.2.2.1
    NAME 'courierAliasPerson'
        DESC 'Courier mail alias person'
    SUP organizationalPerson
    STRUCTURAL
        MUST (  mail $ maildrop )
        MAY (
                audio $ businessCategory $ carLicense $ departmentNumber $
                displayName $ employeeNumber $ employeeType $ givenName $
                homePhone $ homePostalAddress $ initials $ jpegPhoto $
                labeledURI $  manager $ mobile $ o $ pager $
                photo $ roomNumber $ secretary $ uid $ userCertificate $
                x500uniqueIdentifier $ preferredLanguage $
                userSMIMECertificate $ userPKCS12 )
        )

Save and exit your editor, then add this new schema file near the top of your slapd.conf, underneath the existing schema declarations:

# Schema and objectClass definitions
include         /etc/ldap/schema/core.schema
include         /etc/ldap/schema/cosine.schema
include         /etc/ldap/schema/nis.schema
include         /etc/ldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
# Our new courier schemas
include         /etc/ldap/schema/local.schema

Let’s go ahead and import 1 alias for testing. If 1 works, they all should work!

cat <<__EOD__ >/tmp/testalias.ldif
objectClass: top
objectClass: courierAliasPerson
cn: bob
sn: bob
mail: bob@example.local
maildrop: my-email-address@gmail.com
__EOD__

sudo slapadd -vv -f /tmp/testalias.ldif
sudo chown -R openldap: /var/lib/ldap/

At this point we are done with the local ldap stuff for now. Let’s mess with courier’s ldap alias config file, stored at /etc/courier/ldapaliasrc . This is what mine ends up looking like, minus all the comments:

LDAP_ALIAS              1
LDAP_SERVER             localhost
LDAP_PORT               389
LDAP_NUMPROCS           5
LDAP_BASEDN             ou=aliases, dc=example, dc=local
LDAP_BINDDN             cn=admin, dc=example, dc=local
LDAP_BINDPW             my_awesome_password
LDAP_TIMEOUT            5
LDAP_MAIL               mail
LDAP_MAILDROP           maildrop

Replace the LDAP_BASEDN, LDAP_BINDDN, and LDAP_BINDPW appropriately. Note, the LDAP_BINDPW is your password in plain text, so make sure this file isn’t world readable!

If you were to start all of your services (slapd, courier-mta, courier-ldap, etc) right now, would it work? NO! Instead, you would get this mysterious error message:

Jul  8 00:56:09 localhost courieresmtpd: error,relay=::ffff:127.0.0.1,
ident=user,from=,
to=: 400 Service temporarily unavailable.

No details at all. This error message shows up because the ‘courierldapaliasd’ daemon is not running. Let’s fix that, and make sure the service starts up properly in the future.

ln -s /usr/sbin/courierldapaliasd /etc/init.d/
update-rc.d courierldapaliasd defaults
/etc/init.d/courierldapaliasd start

One last thing - if you have been following along, you might notice I didn’t start the other services. Let’s do that too.

/etc/init.d/slapd start
/etc/init.d/courier-mta start
/etc/init.d/courier-ldap start
/etc/init.d/courier-imap start
/etc/init.d/courier-authdaemon start

There we have it. You should be able to send a message to our test user ‘bob@example.local’, and it will forward to the email address you specified. From this point forward you can populate your ldap database with similar entries.

Keep in mind that each courierAliasPerson entry can have a potentially unlimited number of ‘maildrop’ attributes.

Wanna test it? (everything I typed in appears in bold)

examplemail01:~# telnet localhost 25

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 [examplemail01] [UBE Prohibited] Go ahead...
HELO fakehelo

250 examplemail01 Ok.
MAIL FROM: 

250 Ok.
RCPT TO: 

250 Ok.
DATA

354 Ok.
Hi!

.

250 Ok. 4872CE5A.00005C7B

My logs show the sweet alias success that I crave.

Jul  7 19:18:08 localhost courierlocal: id=00003F83.4872CE5A.00005C7B,
from=,addr=,
size=187,success: Message delivered.

Hope this saves some time for the rest of you out there