Any ideas of what to do while working through the holidays?

I've used up my vacation time and like many, will be working through the holiday season.  I usually spend my time calling on prospective clients or updating current clients.  So I find myself making a list of things I can do in the office, by myself, that will help our company move forward and not bore me to sleep.  Perhaps there are online courses?  Books to read?  I need to be careful that what I am doing isn't just about making me smarter, it's about my learning for the sake of making the company stronger.  With that... I ask you for your suggestions of something meaningful I can do over 3 - 4 weeks?  Maybe there is a course you know of?  Books to read?  Make a plan for new calls every day in 2010?

Maybe attend Harvard (yes... the real one) extension school online?  Work towards a masters degree?  Doubtful there is a course during holiday break but you never know.

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/management/default.jsp

Any ideas as to what I could do??

Could Eating at McDonald's Help Save the Environment?

My colleague sent me a document today entitled "Global Best of Green 2009. Building Better Business through Effective Environment Practices Across the World" with the McDonald's golden arches logo beneath.

This had to be a joke circling the net.  No, it was real. Then the NY'er in me oozed freely as I glanced through it. Of course I viewed it with significant skepticism.

I soon started writing a blog on how stupid they must be if they expected us to believe them.  Come on, McDonald's claiming to be green?  I read their ebook looking for specific examples where they were trying to fool me.  I began dissecting suspiciously written sentences.  I looked at the shiny happy people photographed throughout the document and said to myself, "You can't fool me!"

I finished reading.  I'm now considering buying stock in McDonalds. Did I simply drink their McMarketing or could McDonald's actually be a model for fast food truly going green?

You be the judge and post your opinions.

I like Wordle & Prezi

There were two free tools I found interesting while attending last night’s American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) Atlanta’s SIG about “Cheap Tricks and Cool Tips.”


1) Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.


2) Prezi is a new presentation tool designed as an alternative to PowerPoint.  I'm always amazed when folks develop a truly innovative and useful product yet they can't talk about it effectively in a few words. Their tag line is “Prezi is zooming sketches on a digital napkin.” Just with that, I don't get it.  Maybe I'm wrong and the rest of the world understands based on that.  My daughter will tell you that I could very well be completely wrong and everyone understands but me.  However, my personal opinion is that their marketing materials discuss everything but a truly informative ‘elevator pitch’. I needed to watch their video to understand the benefits of Prezi. I agree it’s cool and could be very effective. Although I’m still left not being able to explain it to others - yet I want to because I think it's worth a good look. Also, a video would be an effective tutorial showing how it’s easy to get started. I don’t know about you but a ‘blank canvas’ to get started scares me. Is it truly blank? If it’s easy, I would hope there are point and click options. Will I test it to find out? Probably because the ultimate results are promising and I do want to know. However, I shouldn’t have to work that hard to find out.


ABOUT ASTD & ASTD ATLANTA
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) is the world's largest non-profit association for training and development professionals, with over 55,000 members worldwide.


The Greater Atlanta Chapter of ASTD, established in 1955, is one of the five largest ASTD Chapters with nearly 600 members. We are a regional, non-profit association of workplace performance professionals, providing our members with a forum for the exchange of professional development opportunities and resources as they strive to improve workplace learning and performance.