Contrary to what you might think when listening to older relatives recount stories of past Christmases (you know the ones, where they tell you about the good old days and explain that things are not quite like what they used to be) the festive season has indeed changed. Things are not the way they used to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, wouldn't it be terrible if things always stayed the same?
Organizational skills are an absolute necessity for anybody working online! The internet is the perfect breeding ground for information overload and unwittingly we allow our email to work against us in this way. The problem stems mostly from our own failure to better manage information that we receive in our in box and simply compounds over time. The result is a flood of email which we do not know what to do with therefore allowing it to clutter up our in-box.
I had a dream about dangling participles last night; probably because I had a bowl of chocolate-chip, fudge brownie, chocolate ice cream followed by a second bowl of hand picked sweet cherries, before I went to bed. Instead of sugarplums dancing in my head, there were dangling participles hovering over the bedpost. It sounds kind of kinky doesn't it?
What is a participle? It is a word ending in "ing" and sometimes "ed". It looks like a verb but acts as an adjective. A participle is used to describe other words in a sentence.
A few days ago I bought one of those women's magazines that try to tell you what to wear, what to think and how to treat your mate. I've bought the same magazine in French, but I wanted to practise my English a bit. So, do you know what the most impressive thing about it was? The number of advertisements: about one every two pages! And do you know what almost all of them portrayed?
Hey women! "Be sexy! Be slutty! Be arousing!"
Image by Mozzercork - CC Licence.
I was born in Norway, but I Left after high school to emigrate to Montreal, Canada. I just got back from a trip with my new French Canadian partner, she's never been there before. We travelled from Vancouver to London and on to Oslo on British Airways. Great flight, great service. And the booze was free. More than I can say for Norway... A pint of everyday lager/pilsner is about 69 NOK = $12 CAN. Here in Vancouver it's $5-6. But that's OK.
In many organizations managers are not taught how to manage their budgets. In some cases managers are given budget responsibility but not budget authority. In these organizations it takes 5 levels of signatures to get a few hundred dollars approved. Worst, managers are given both responsibility and accountability but little financial training. As a result, budget forecasts are a guess; managers tend to spend whatever they have, because they are afraid if they don’t, their next quarter budgets will be reduced. Revenue goals or plain budget goals are not based on data from customers or trends; they are simply numbers picked from the sky. If the organization grew 5 % last year then 10 % would be a better goal for this year. The problem with financial projections starts when programs and projects get either overfunded or underfunded based on the initial projections which were not made with financial integrity.
