Just a quick note...

We're up on the ballot this year with our new product, Graffiti CMS. If you haven't played with it, take a look, and if you have: GO VOTE FOR US, PLEASE! :)

Ok, enough of the shameless plugs. Sorry!

Hey again! Yes, I know, I'm blogging again. Gasp. Shock. Awe. Hehe.

This week I want to talk about what it takes to get blogging on a normal basis. If you read my post last week about losing weight and the discipline it took there, I thought surely I can get off my butt and actually blog on a normal basis. I can't let this blogging thing "beat" me, dangit! So, in my usual manner (as Rob can attest) I set out to figure out how I can do this on a normal basis by putting together my own little attack plan to start executing upon.

Here's Yet Another List (YAL) on what you can do to help make yourself blog more regularly:

1. Set an attainable goal. That sounds familiar, huh? Same principle, last year I started trying to blog daily and just blog about every little random thought I had, and at the time I thought it was fun. And, it was for awhile, but I quickly realized that it just wasn't a natural pace for me. I was doing everything I could to enable this "insta-blogging" scenario where I could quickly pop open WLW, type, ctrl+enter to post, and it would automatically close for me. Yeah, that's great, but I don't think readers necessarily want to hear my everything little thought. If you really, really do, go read me on Twitter.
2. Figure out your style. It's taken me, literally, YEARS to figure out what my style is for writing. I start off trying to do these huge article style posts, where I tried to be all articulate, have screenshots and illustrations and so forth; later, I tried doing the quick, easy going, talk-about-whatever's-on-my-mind style and that was fun, but exhausting for both me and my readers (IMHO), and now I'm falling out somewhere in between. I want to write about something that's worthwhile and I want to spend some time on it so that it's not a waste of your time. And, this really works for me. It makes it easier for me to put down whatever I'm doing and write.
3. Don't forget! I just had to block off time in Outlook for "Writing a blog post". No joke. With reminders and everything! ;) I live and die by my Outlook calendar (even though I hate you, Outlook... seriously. stop looking at me like that.) so this is the most effective way for me to set that checkpoint to myself to say "Oh, crap, it's time for me to blog." I talked with James Shaw once about this and he sets up a AT job in Windows to pop-up WLW at a certain time/day. That's awesome! Whatever works for you. Right now I have a reminder to take an hour a week, every Wednesday at 1pm CST, to write my blog posts.
4. Make time for blogging. Yes, there's always a million other things you need to be doing or should be doing, but blogging is JUST AS IMPORTANT these days. Not only does your company probably blog (if they don't, they should), but it's great therapy for you to unpack those topics that are swirling around in your head, and a great way to capture whatever may be on your mind. I'm constantly thinking about ideas, thoughts, subjects to post about, an opinion I may have, etc... there's no better way to record it than on my blog. Take the time to put down whatever you're doing to blog, and if something comes up keep blogging as a top priority! It's no less important than anything else you're doing. And, finally...
5. Write it down. If you're like me, you constantly are thinking, "Oh, oh, that's a good idea or topic to blog about!" and then I promptly forget it completely 5 minutes later. Yes, I suck. But, in this case, I've started using 37signals Tadalist for just creating a list of topics that I want to blog about at some point. I currently have 12 topics in there. And, I'm usually putting a new topic into every day at least - I almost always have a "shower thought" that I think is bloggable.
   
    

So, of all my old Code Drop posts that I did last year, I probably get at least one email a week asking where my Authorize.net wrappers went. I had no idea these things were so "popular" until they were no longer available.

Digging through my old webroot, I dug these out of Community Server and stuck them up.

If you're interested, you can download them now here: http://jasona.net/files/uploads/AuthorizeNet.zip

Likewise, I've added a new category to my site called "Downloads" at the top level navigation in case I publish anymore code here.

Andrew announced this on the mailing list, but DotNetOpenId 0.1.1 was released yesterday!

It's been awhile, but this was a pet project that I started quite awhile back when I decided to start porting the JanRain boo libraries over to C#. Digging in, I found lots of interest in this area, and Andrew had built some ASP.NET controls for OpenId already - it seemed like a perfect fit!

And, boy, was it - Andrew has been a MACHINE. Unfortunately, I've been busy and haven't done much other then then initial porting of the core libraries, since then he and others have spent substantial amounts of time improving the libraries, controls and server and they continue to set an incredible pace for pushing this project forward.

We're using much of this work in Community Server 2008, and if you're looking to add OpenId support to your .NET application, you should really look at this library - it's one of the most mature, and supported project out there for .NET!

Meanwhile, here's Andrew's original post:

*DotNetOpenId 0.1.1* DotNetOpenId version 0.1.1 is done. Included in this release are feature enhancements and a security fix for OpenId providers. Find out what's new with version 0.1.1 . Download the binary and samples here . *What's coming...* Coming up next, version 0.1.2 will have support for partial trusted hosting environments and no requirement for session state for consumers. Early adopters are welcome to check this version out of branches/0.1 and test it. *Contributions...* Do you want to contribute to the project? Email dotnetopenid@googlegroups.com with what you can offer. Right now we especially need people who can write unit tests and extra strings for localization. If you happen to be an expert on the OpenId 2.0 spec, we're scoping the work for upgrading to support that in version 0.3 as well. -- Andrew Arnott

Now, I know it's been awhile since I last blogged. And, I'm sorry. I really am. There's no excuse other than that I've been really busy. But, who isn't? I promise to work harder this year about blogging more often.

That said, I wanted to kick it off with a post that's a bit off-topic. I hate to do the fatblogging like Jason Calacanis, but as some of you know I've taken control of my weight the past year and I've had lots of questions of how I did it. I think many times I've simplified it too much, and I want to get this out of my head and into a post somewhere. If it helps even one of you guys, I'm happy.

To give some background, nearly one year ago I had finally hit that point where I had it. I was miserable, frustrated, and upset. I was starting to believe that I would never get back down to my old weight. Here I was, 6' 2", and right at 260 pounds. I had hit the 40" waist club, too, and even they were getting tight. I was deathly afraid of spilling over into the 42" range and having to head to the Big & Tall store for clothes. And, I had 4 year old and a 1 year old that I want to be around for as long as possible, and be able to get out and play with them if I wanted to.

I had recently noticed one of the guys at our user group had dropped a substantial amount of weight, and when I cornered him about it he just said that he had started watching his calories in and calories out, and excercising. Wow! I totally expected him to talk about some miracle diet that was working wonders for him, but he didn't. Surely it couldn't be that easy.

Looking around on the Internets I found http://sparkpeople.com and was intrigued. Sparkpeople.com really works with you to understand the calories you're taking in, and the calories you're burning. They help you set goals, telling them how much you want to lose and by when, and they tell you how many calories you should be eating daily to reach that goal. From there, they have an incredible application that helps you track your daily caloric intake (with a huge database of items in it already, with other screens to help you easily enter nutritional info off of items that aren't in their database), and can even help you build your grocery list for the coming week.

Seemed like a big step, but what the hell. I didn't have anything to lose at this point. So I dove in and started trying to record my meals and snacks. I did this for about two weeks, quickly realizing I was about 3k+ calories a day. I had no clue! I thought, "Hey, I'm eating chicken, this should be fine." meanwhile it would be smothered in sour cream sauce, queso, butter, something. And, if that wasn't enough, instead of having a decent serving I would have three. I mean, it was chicken, it should be fine! Boy, was I wrong.

So, Sparkpeople told me I needed to get down to around 1,500 calories per day. Dang, that's tough. That meant cutting my meals in half. And, I won't lie, it wasn't easy. But, with some time and effort I was getting down to that level. I'll admit, I had/have my bad days, but I kept trying instead of just giving up the first time I fell off the wagon. Slowly the weight started coming off. It wasn't drastic. I was losing 4-5 pounds/month. It wasn't like the Atkins where you lose 10-12 pounds/month. That's not healthy for you to lose that quickly. And, losing that quickly doesn't help you set the habits and life style that you'll need to maintain the weight loss.

Now, nearly a year later, I'm down 50 pounds to 210 and I'm still losing a little here and there (but I'm really focusing on maintaining at this point).

I'm not trying to brag or expect any "attaboy!"'s... I'd like to give you some advice if you're in a similar situation I was in a year ago:

1. Small, Attainable Goals - Don't set this big, looming goal that you'll never hit. Let's be practical about it - sure, you'd love to lose 50 pounds but it's much better to say lose 10 pounds 5 times. The problem I've had in the past is I would set this big monster goal that was just not possible, and after a month or so I'd get frustrated and give up. But, by telling myself I wanted to lose 4 pounds a month, I felt like that was a much more attainable goal. And, I was less likely to give up if I missed my goal for one month.
2. Educate Yourself - Start understanding what you're putting into your body. As they say "Your body is a temple", and you shouldn't just put crap in your body without understanding what type of nutritional value it is. Start writing down the calories you've eaten, use Google to find out the typical calorie count on your lunch, it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT. Start paying attention to the those white nutritional info boxes on stuff, and pay attention to the number of servings. One of the tricks is that they will set the calories really low, but then jack up the number of servings in the package. For instance, they may say 100 calories, but there's 10 servings in a box. If you're not paying attention you might eat the whole box thinking it's only 100 calories, then you've blown 1000 calories in one pop! That's rough.
3. Don't Diet - This isn't a diet. This isn't a fad or something you're doing right now and that later you can go back to doing whatever you want. You have to make the mental decision that this is a change of lifestyle and that it's not an option to stop doing it once you've started. You have to create some sense of permanence to it, otherwise it's way too easy to just give up.
4. Be Patient - Again, this isn't going to happen overnight. If you lose 20 pounds in a year, that's awesome! That's 20 pounds lighter than you were a year ago! Keep in mind that 20 pounds in a year is 1-2 pounds per month of loss. That's not much, but it adds up! Keep the big picture goal that you don't have to lose a pound a day, or 10 pounds a month... that's crazy. Look at your goals a little bigger: how are you doing after 3 months, 6 months, etc...?
5. Go Ahead and Cheat - Yes, that's right. You're going to have bad days. You're human, you can't eat rice cakes and water only for 12 months. It's not possible to maintain a silly diet-like menu of things you can and can't eat, but just educate yourself on what it means to eat that one bad thing. Initially, I started off saying that I would eat bad only on Saturdays until I had a better understanding of my food and calories. Later, as I got better at things, I knew I could eat bad on different days, or levels of bad eating that I could eat throughout a day.
6. Keep a Running Tally - First, I used Sparkpeople.com to understand what I was eating and help me keep up with it. Nowadays, I keep a running tally in my head of how many calories I've eaten and how many I have left for the day. You could come to me at any point of the day and ask me and I could tell you. I know, it sounds crazy, but it gets easier I promise.
7. Quit Snacking! - I used to snack constantly. I thought it couldn't be bad becuase I was just eating little portions of whatever. But, once I realized what I was eating I was ingesting 200-400 calories per snack in most cases. You're wasting valuable calories for the day! I'd much rather "save" those calories and have enchiladas for dinner, personally. Ado hears me tell him constantly about this, anytime he grabs a snack I tell him, "empty calories dude". Yes, I know, that's annoying... but that's my mental checkpoint that keeps me from eating that one granola bar in the snack room.
8. It gets easier, I promise. - Early on, you'll seem like you're starving, I know. Early on, just take small steps in the right direction. When you're hungry go grab one of those 100-calorie snack packs (I love those), grab some jello (0 CALORIES! GREATNESS!), something. You don't have to starve yourself. This goes back to #5 - if you try to starve yourself, you'll eventually break down and give up. You don't have to be super strict to make this work. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

So, with that being said, please feel free to come talk to me (if you're a Telligenti), email me (jalexander [at] telligent [dot] com) if you have questions/thoughts/whatever, and I'm glad to help.

And, just remember to do small, achievable goals; it's okay to cheat; and this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Good luck!

I spent about an hour this afternoon getting all upgraded to the latest version of Graffiti beta 2. The upgrade was super, super easy and now Jayme's migration tool is all built right into the product itself, so I imported most of my old CS blogs in a matter of minutes! It was incredible.

Very nice work, guys. This is certainly a shining example of always hiring people smarter than yourself. ;-)

Go check it out, if you haven't already!

And, excuse the dust around here while I get things back to normal!

So, in my ongoing task to convert people over to the Mac platform (at least for day-to-day work), I was able to convert Eric Smith, of CodeSmith fame.

He had been asking little questions here and there for a few weeks, and one day I got a rash of questions throughout the day. Lo and behold, the next day he came to work with a brand new, fancy schmancy Macbook.

So, after having taken the red pill, he had lots of questions of what apps were must-have's, how does he do certain things, and so on. With that in mind, I thought these were all great questions! So, I'm going to cover them here.

What are the must-have apps for Windows converts on a Mac?

1. FireFox and/or Camino - I'm not a big Safari fan, personally. And, I love FireFox. Now, add in a little Mac flare and you have Camino. It's awesome.
2. Quicksilver - This is THE must-have launcher app. I rarely ever use my task bar any more in OS X. A quick control+spacebar, start typing, three letters in (typically) hit enter. Bam. Done.
3. Adium - Awesome messenger application. Supports MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GTalk and so on. Highly customizable and has tabbed conversations. Greatness.
4. Thunderbird - If you have your own personal IMAP or POP accounts that you check, I like T-bird. It's a bit of a hog, so I don't leave it open. But, it's great for getting in, replying and getting out. I'm looking forward to Gmail IMAP support.
5. Flip4Mac - This lets you play WMV or WMA within Quicktime on the Mac. Must, must have.
6. Growl - Many Mac apps will use Growl to do toast pop-up's like you're used to on Windows.
7. DoubleCommand - With my MacBook Pro I have weird keys that are in odd spots (or at least spots I'm not used to), and I have keys missing all together. DoubleCommand lets me change and re-map keys on the keyboard.
8. smcFanControl - This lets you change the settings of how the fan works on a Mac. As you've probably heard, Macs tend to run a little hot sometimes. For me, I like running smcFanControl and setting the default speed of my fans a little higher so that it stays cooler all around and doesn't need to kick in so often. The plus side to this is that the settings stick so that if/when you boot over to BootCamp in Windows the settings stay.
9. iStatPro - This is a great Dashboard widget that lets you watch and monitor the resources of your machine, including CPU, memory, harddrive usage, processes, etc... this is a MUST have.
10. CallWave Widget - This is visual voicemail before the iPhone got it. I talked previously about how I switched my mobile's voicemail over to CallWave. Using this widget you can view and listen to your voicemail all from the Dashboard. For introverted hermits like myself, this is awesome.

Other tips:

• Apple -> System Preferences -> Dashboard & Expose - Set the top right corner to "All Windows" and the bottom right corner to "Desktop". This lets you move your mouse to the top right corner and Expose will kick in, showing you all windows that are open, laid out for you to pick and switch to. This is THE way to move between windows on a Mac instead of the old alt+tab (although, that works on a Mac too). Moving your mouse to the bottom right corner will clear all the windows out of the way, showing your desktop. This is ideal when you have a ton of windows open (like I'm apt to do) and you can move everything, clck on something on the desktop, move back to the bottom right corner and everything restores behind your newly opened window.
• Dashboard - Press F12 - This is Dashboard. You can install all kinds of widgets and such. Install the few useful ones I have listed above.
• Trackpad settings - If you are on a Macbook with a trackpad, you need to go into Apple -> System Preferences - Keyboard & Mouse -> Trackpad and check "Use two fingers to scroll" as well as "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click". The first option lets you use two fingers and with a scrolling motion on your trackpad you can scroll anything on the screen. Very, very handy. You'll get used to this and love it. The second option lets you tap the trackpad with two fingers and do a right-click on anything. One of the big misconceptions of Macs is that there's only one mouse button. Wrong. Only if you let it only have one mouse button. ;)
• Spotlight - Anytime you have a question, get lost, can't find a setting or a screen, using Spotlight. This is the little search icon/textfield that is on everything. Remember that Spotlight is contextual based on whatever screen you're on. If you're in System Preferences and type "network" in it it will highlight all icons within System Preferences that have to do with networking. If you click the magnifying lens at the top right of the screen and start typing, it will show you all files that have the name of what you're typing or have contents that may contain the text you're typing. Very handy for beginners when feeling your way around OS X.
• Locations - If you have different network setups at home vs. work you'll want to use Locations. Apple -> Location -> Network Preferences... will open the network preferences screen. Clicking on the Location drop down you can edit locations and add in various network profiles for how you want to configure your separate networks. Then, whenever you change physical locations simply go to Apple -> Location and choose the appropriate location to pick up your network configuration.
• Force Quit - YES, it is possible to have an application hang in OS X. I know, I know. You thought OS X was just all flowers and cotton candy. Well, it happens. When it does, just right click the icon on the task bar and choose "Force Quit" and this will kill that application with great prejudice.

So, this is a huge post. And, there's so much more. Assuming you guys like this content, I may follow-up with more. Particularly, I've been an avid Parallels user for awhile, and I'm switching to VMWare Fusion as we speak. I'll blog about that experience later.

But, hopefully this is helpful to someone!

Wow, who woulda thunk it?

5 years ago I was adamant about the fact that you should only use your mobile phone as a phone. I really didn't like using email on the phone, I hated text messages... yes, call me a grumpy old man.

But, just this morning while I was driving in, I realized I use my phone for EVERYTHING these days. I'm talking on it (though, as some of you that know me personally can attest, I HATE talking on the phone), sending text messages, answering email, and then browsing... oh man, do I browse.

So, I'm wondering, what all do you have bookmarked on your phone browser? Here's mine:

1. Gmail - http://gmail.com - Gmail sniffs the browser and sends you a mobile version. It's great, and very handy. Very usable as an email client still, amazingly enough.
2. Google Mobile - http://www.google.com/pda/ - PDA version of Google for searching. Also gives you a cool little widget news screen on the search page. Very nice!
3. Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/ - The mobile version of Google Reader. The ultimate time waster. I've drained many a battery reading my feeds at my daughter's gymnastics class with this thing. Curse you Google!
4. Jaiku - http://m.jaiku.com - My new best friend. New post forthcoming, but Twitter is so Web 1.0 (insert tongue in cheek here).
5. Twitter - http://m.twitter.com - My old best friend. Unfortunately, it's plagued with problem after problem, and I've just had enough. I keep it bookmarked so when I'm bored I can still review what's going on.
6. My Blog - http://JasonA.net - I have my blogmailr setup to post to my blog, and my flickr setup to be able to snap and send pictures to my blog. So, I use this bookmark to double check to make sure things went through (maybe Brendan Tompkins is right, and blogs really ARE ego driven... hmmm...).

Obviously, everyone's been talking about how the mobile industry is heating up, and I denied it until now. But, I'm curious to see if this is the trend overall, or am I just weird (definitely could be the case!).

So, in the spirit of those terrible, nasty meme's, I'm starting another one! :)

I'm calling out five others to answer this meme, and pass it on to five others! What say you Scott Watermasysk, Robert Scoble, Rob Conery, Phil Haack and Jeff Atwood?

So, Scott pointed me at MarsEdit as a blogging tool on OS X. I had always tried to use ecto for my blogging client on OS X, but I think I like MarsEdit better. It's much simpler, cleaner and better looking. ecto seems to be more advanced and have more features, but at the end of the day I just want a blogging client, dammit. I don't need it to cook me breakfast, speak to me in French, and give me a back massage (scratch that, I DO want that).

But, so far I likey.

Rating? 4 out of 5 stars.

PROS: Nice, clean OS X style interface. Non-nonsense, get down to business blogging client.

CONS: The editor is somewhat archaic feeling. I can do markup, but it doesn't appear to be WYSIWYG, instead you work directly in markup source and you have to click "Preview" - that seems so old school these days.

Anyways, interesting app. Definitely worth a peek.

The great thing about Graffiti is that it also supports the MetaBlog API so that means you can use your favorite posting application, like Windows Live Writer (my personal favorite).

Well, it should work. We'll see if this post gets there. ;)

So, I spent much of Saturday night working on a new skin for my site.

I knew that I wanted to roll out our new product, Graffiti (website coming soon!), to use on my site (I wouldn't be a good Telligenti if I didn't dogfood it!). I started off by not even booting my Parallels XP VM up, and worked just on the OS X side with TextMate, and CSSEdit. I was convinced that I could just design a site from scratch. And, I probably could have, but ultimately my laziness won over and I started digging around.

In doing so I found this great Wordpress theme called Redoable. I was instantly in love. I've never really run a dark theme, so I had to give it a try. After a few hours of work I had converted the skin over to a Graffiti skin, and all was well with the world.

And, all I can say is: WOW!

You guys are going to love Graffiti. It's very, very powerful while at the same time it's so easy to work with. I really think it's going to change the world. :) But, I'm also a little biased.

Unfortunately, I've had to disable my comments temporarily while I work through a bug on my side (I'm sure it's something I've done). But, I'll turn them back on soon! Meanwhile, drop me a line at jalexander [at] telligent [dot] com with your feedback! I'd love to hear it!

Continuing on with multi-post, detailed review of Good to Great, by Jim Collins -

Another core concept that Jim talks about is the overall formula to make your company great. It's hard to really boil down the specifics, and many of the Executives at Great companies couldn't really explain what they did or how it happened, "It JUST happened!" but Jim boiled it down to three things, which we'll get to. The main theme of these points, though, is discipline.

dis * ci * pline - Training expected to product a specific character or pattern or behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement.

Interesting. I think it's good to keep the context of the word in mind when going through the following points. Again, these points are what Jim states you do in order to become Great:

1. Disciplined People - Those right people that you now hired, you have to make sure they're disciplined. Do they have what it takes to carry to work through the tough times to help push you to Great?
2. Disciplined Thought - Now that you've got the right, disciplined people you have to all come to an agreement and work together, with absolute diligence, towards a common thought or goal.
3. Disciplined Action - And, finally, you have the right, disciplined people with all the same, disciplined thoughts you have to have disciplined action to carry through and take action on your game plan and strategies. Even with this being the last step that doesn't make it any easier, that's why you have to have the discipline to carry through on your game plan.

I know you think, "Duh, that's just common sense!" - and it is! But, for some reason, bigger companies can't see the forest for the trees in this case.

In his book, Jim gives lots of good insight into specific business cases. One of the cases, and I'm sure I'll slaughter this one, has to do with Walgreen's Pharmacy. Walgreen's competitors were all making big bets on the internet, putting a lot of investment into building big, hulking website. Walgreen's took their time, made a slow turn towards the internet, put lots of thought up-front and eventually launched a website that flipped the industry's sites on their heads. But, it took Walgreen's having the right people and team in place, with a unified, disciplined thought and strategy and having the disciplined action to carry out their plans. And, ultimately, this was seen as a huge win for Walgreen's!

Continuing on with my various thoughts after listening to Good to Great, by Jim Collins, I wanted to talk about "The Bus".

Jim does a great job of explaining the right/wrong employee situation using a bus metaphor (paraphrased):

First, you get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus. And, you make sure the right people are in the right seats.

This is so true. It's not just important to hire the right people, but it's equally important to make sure they're in the right roles to where they can be effective.

I've seen many companies hire someone who was great, and, for whatever reason, put them into a role that really didn't suit them. Sometimes it was a role that they had never done before, maybe it was a role that they thought they could do, sometimes it was just a temporary fix to get that person into the company with the intentions of eventually moving them to the ideal position later.

But, ultimately, even putting the right people in the wrong roles can be just as damaging to your business.

One of the first audio books that I read, as I mentioned, was From Good to Great by Jim Collins. This was an incredible book. In it, Jim and some of his researchers created a system by which to profile a company to understand if they were good or great, and how to get down to an understanding of what made the company become great. They profiled over 500 companies, and in the book they detail many of the Great companies and the details.

I won't give away everything, but Jim talks about many core, fundamental concepts that companies must follow or do to help them to become great.

In one of those statements he talks about the fact that companies, traditionally, always say that people are their most valuable asset. But, that's not true. It's the right people that are your most valuable asset.

And, he's absolutely right. This principle rang clear and true for me and our practices here at Telligent. As some people may have heard, Telligent has a tough interview process and we're VERY picky about new hires. We are adamant and unwavering in the fact that we must always hire the right people.

Now, that's not to say that we don't get it wrong sometimes. I'll admit, we have hired a few people that weren't a good fit, for one reason or another. But, we're very good about identifying those persons and making the corrections as necessary.

That may seem cold and cruel, but it's a terrible fact about business. Sometimes you have to make those hard decisions. Sometimes you can't avoid conflict. And, sometimes that affects people's livelihood. That sucks. We don't like it at all. But, it's unavoidable, unfortunately.

Take for example our internship program, this summer we started off with 6 great interns. Unfortunately, about half way through one of those interns were asked to leave. In this case, this particular intern wasn't right for Telligent - he was too young, too immature and had too much of an ego to really fit in. Very unfortunate because he was very, very smart. But, that's how it goes - you have to make sure that you're always hiring and keeping the right people.

Definitely check out that book, and look around at your company and think about it - do you think your company has done a good job of hiring the right people and making sure they're in the right roles.