8 Best Windows 8 Keyboard Shortcuts / Hotkeys

Below are my 8 favorite Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts / hotkeys to use:

1. Windows key + M minimizes everything on your desktop so you can see the background.
2. Windows key + Shift + M restores all the windows you just minimized above (but not ones individually minimized beforehand).
3. Windows key + E opens the windows explorer for quick access to files and folders on your computer.
4. Windows key brings up your metro start screen along with quick search for applications and files.
5. Windows key + L locks your computer so when you walk away your coworkers won’t install silly software.
6. Alt + Tab cycles you through open windows.
7. Windows + P  let’s you change your screen setup
8. Windows + left or right arrow allows you to cycle through your windows quickly.

Hiring Slow, Firing Fast: Problems of this Strategy

I have been following the strategy of Hire Slow, Fire Fast when it comes to recruiting and have come to realize that there are a number of severe limitations to this strategy. Here are a few:

1. If your company’s customer base is growing rapidly, your team of brilliant people can become overworked and demotivated because of it. Hiring more rapidly might be a good idea in these situations.
2. Firing fast is much easier said than done. Once you’ve brought on a new team member, I feel a strong obligation to give this person every chance I can before firing them for underperformance. I try to help them with training, switching them to different types of tasks, and doing everything I can to help them succeed.
3. Hiring slow will limit your growth. My capacity has pretty much been the biggest limitation of my business growth over the last year.

I will still follow the strategy of Hire Slow, Fire Fast… but there are some major disadvantages to it. Your thoughts?

Social Security Disability: America’s Largest Scam

There was an excellent article in NPR today about the Social Security Disability Scam. At $260 BILLION a year it is by far America’s largest scam. Bernie Madoff only managed to achieve $60 billion through his entire lifetime. However, the Social Security Disability scam is considered politically untouchable because 14 million Americans benefit from it and don’t have to work. Each one of these people will vote and fight extraordinarily hard to protect their disability entitlement.

I actually personally know many people on Social Security Disability who are scamming the system:

• My own mom – never worked in her life but is fully capable of sitting in a 7/11 gas station or admin position.
• Buddies dad – hasn’t worked in 10 years but has done tons of odd jobs around the house and for neighbors for extra cash.
• Buddies mom – she regularly works at the gym, but still collects a disability check.

I can think of probably a dozen more people like this. The only legitimate person I know on Social Security Disability would be my stepdad who fell off a building while working and crushed his legs. He is much of the way recovered now though and could probably do a desk job.

Come to think of it – why I am working so hard? I could collect a disability check and get a doublewide and play computer games for the rest of my life! And if I really wanted to do well, I would have a bunch of kids and purposely make them do poorly in school so I could collect disability checks on behalf of each one of them! Then I could buy a sick Alienware gaming machine.

Work is for suckers, right?

The Foolishness of Chasing the Quick Buck

How often have you thought to yourself how great would it be to make a lot of money without a lot of work? To have a passive income stream? To build the next Instagram?

Do you think you’re the only one who wants to do that?

The marketplace of people who want to make a quick buck is huge. The competition is enormous fighting for the obvious low hanging fruit… people trying to build the next hit web app, write a quick e-book that becomes a bestseller, or get a quick pay day. A whole cottage industry has grown up that preys on people’s desire for a quick buck (think of everything from Nigerian scams to Tim Ferriss’s 4 hour workweek to real estate & stock seminars).

Here’s my breakdown of the different types of get-rich-quick schemes ranging from low brow to high end:

• Nigerian scams – “Just send your bank account details and I will wire you $9.6 million”
• Multi-level marketing - “We have an amazing Sham-Wow product and if you can sell it to your friends and family and they sign up and sell it to their friends and family…”
• Investment Seminar - “Sign up for our $999 weekend seminar and learn how to be a millionaire like me!”
• Tim Ferriss – “Work only four hours per week and have an income stream forever” (forget to mention Tim works 70 hours a week)
• Copycat Businesses - “X person is making $200k a year doing Y business. I would be happy to make $50k a year and work 1/4 as much!”

The elderly and infirm fall for the Nigerian scams, the uneducated fall for multi-level marketing schemes, low to mid level employees fall for the investment seminars, and the young and smart fall for Tim Ferriss’s ideas (some of which are quite good, but the concept as a whole is unrealistic).

Key principle undermining the quick buck: If it is so easy to make money in a certain specific area then why wouldn’t someone work just a little harder than you to make that money?  If you can make $100 selling a crappy e-book, what is to stop a competitor from offering an e-book for $20 that is slightly better written? If you can build a web application in 200 hours of work, what’s the barrier of entry to someone else doing the same thing but better?  Competition will always make it more difficult to make money in an area. The first guy might have an advantage, but unless he works his butt off to defend it competitors will come eat your lunch.

Why competitors will eat you alive if you just want a quick buck: So you want to start a business that doesn’t take a you a lot of time but provides some nice extra income?  Let me give an example of why this doesn’t work.  You see that I have been successful at web design and think “Hey, I would be happy with 1/3 of Joel’s success and only working 1/3 as much, I’m going to start a web design company!”  So you go out and get a couple of books on web design, or try to hire a web designer.  You put up a website selling your services. You incorporate and set everything up.  Nothing happens.  Why?  There are one thousand and one competitors working overtime to be successful and fight for the potential clients out there.  You need to develop a competitive advantage (better looking websites, lower costs, white paper directory, major partnerships, better programming, etc).  If you aren’t outworking your competitors you will have no competitive advantage and you will get no business.  Competitive advantages are not easy to develop – each one of your competitors are focused on being the best in a certain way and many times have spent years honing their edge. You think you will just laze about and customers will choose you? Rarely.

The Bottom Line: Yes, occasionally people get lucky and win the lotto or build a web app in little time that goes viral or have some other piece of good fortune with little effort.  However, this happens far more rarely than you might think.  Most successful people spent years and years working hard at it.  There is no quick buck – usually just scams.  If you focus on being the best at something and developing a competitive advantage you will be very successful and make a lot of money. If you focus on making money fast with little work, you will never get anywhere.

Italian Employment Law Caused Carnival Cruise Ship Debacle

Almost everyone agrees that the Italian captain of the Carnival cruise ship was utterly incompetent and caused the deaths of several people when he ran his ship aground.  He is now being charged with manslaughter, abandoning ship and other crimes.  Read more about him abandoning ship here.

The question is: Why was this idiot the captain of a major ship in the first place?

I don’t know the captain’s personal details, but I do know that Italian  law makes it nearly impossible to fire any employee, regardless of how incompetent they are.  Such a legal structure not only causes obvious disaster such as the cruise ship, but it causes hidden economic disaster since you can’t fire someone when they are underperforming.

Interesting Conversation on Singularity.

Google Apps

I am starting to do some very interesting things with Google Apps using the API & some basic Javascript code…. sending emails based on certain events, running master reports that aggregate data from multiple docs and other fun stuff.

BigCommerce SEO

CoalitionTechnologies.com provides SEO for BigCommerce as well as website design services.  Coalition Technologies is an official Google partner and an official BigCommerce design partner.  Our project managers are awaiting your call now.

SEO & PHP: 5 Practical Applications

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing websites so that their pages appear in high positions in search engines like Google for important keywords (like “women’s swimwear”).

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor – this is a made up name… it originally was just initials) is the default programming language of the web.  It is the P  in LAMP stack.  If you see dynamic websites (social networks, dating sites, workout trackers, etc.) there is a good chance it is built in PHP.

So what do you PHP & SEO have in common?

Actually a lot.  Most of the best search engine optimized platforms like WordPress, Magento, Drupal and others are built in PHP.  Tons of free open source software is built in PHP.

Below are my favorite practical applications for PHP:

1. Dynamic HTML & XML sitemaps. You can programmatically build a webpage using PHP that keeps itself constantly up to date with all the most recent content additions.
2. Automatic Redirects. Remembering to setup 301 redirects after each time you delete or change a webpages URL is difficult to remember.  You can set up your PHP code to automatically add to your 301 redirects when necessary.
3. Pretty URLs. This is more of a warning than an application: it is easy to set up PHP so it passes information in URLs, creating ugly URLs like http://www.example.com/index.php?t=125189200.  We prefer URLs such as http://www.example.com/bill-and-ted-excellent-adventure.

What are some practical applications you have found for PHP in an SEO context?

Free Immigration

America is based on immigration, almost everyone who is here immigrated here at some point.  At every point in America’s history though some people have opposed immigration (and generally not been that successful).  Almost every nation & race has had people try to prevent their entry: the Irish, Catholics, Italians, Greeks, Africans, Chinese and so on.

Our country is based on the idea of allowing people to come here and work their ass off to get ahead.  It is not based on protectionism (“they’re stealing my job!”).

Give everyone who is not a rapist or other convicted criminal free entry to our country.  Do not give them free medical care or education.  Do give them the opportunity to open their own businesses and make their way ahead in the world.

Arizona & Texas’s attempts to block immigration should be shunned as the blatant racism and anti-capitalism that it is.

Every human being deserves a chance to forge a better world for themselves and their children.