2015 - Page 2 of 4 - Michael Bianco

How to Save Hundreds on Your Next MacBook Purchase

When it comes to something which requires a lot of my time on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, I purchase the best tools for the job. I’m a designer & software engineer: my computer is the most important tool in my craft and I make sure I have the best. However, the best doesn’t mean the most expensive: to me, it means the most utility for the dollar. I’ve always bought every mac I’ve owned used. A couple of people have asked me recently how to find the best price on a replacement MacBook. Here is the process I’ve used to save hundreds of dollars when I’m getting a new computer. Determine what you need. Most likely, unless you work in tech, 11″ or 13″ MacBook Air will work just fine. Hard drive space is not important…

Interrogate Your Reactions, Change Your Perspective

It’s easy to be negative, to feel busy, to perceive the current situation as mundane. Part of the reason that people that are consistently positive are often so enlivening is because it’s hard to be positive over the long term. It’s refreshing to meet those who are able to remain positive and magnanimous. My internal response to situations and tasks that arise can often expose thinking that needs to change. My reaction to when a client doesn’t understand a concept “yet again”, or when I feel like I just have to “deal with” a flaw in a friendship work relationship is a key indicator of where and what I need to change…

How to Transfer a Car Title in Pennsylvania

I recently purchased a new car and needed to transfer the title from the previous owner. For anyone else who hates digging through state and government websites or wasting time on the phone trying to determine the correct process, here is the cliff notes of how to transfer ownership of a car in Pennsylvania: How it works: You and the current owner of the car need to go to a tag/title notary service. Interestingly enough, you can transfer title without getting new license plates if the transfer is mother/son or father/son, but not between siblings…

Call Your Old Friends: Four Reasons Why It’s Worth It

I’m horrible at keeping in touch with people who aren’t in my immediate daily life. If someone isn’t involved in my work or my local social circle, I generally won’t remember to give them a call. It’s easy for the busyness of life to eat away at the time available to keep in touch with old friends. Old friendships are worth fighting for. Yes, it’s impossible to maintain all your old friendships, but it is possible to cultivate a intentional few. For me, although the time is definitely a limiting factor, the real blocker is the fear of loss. To be frank, for me, time is just an excuse. It’s these questions and thoughts that create the real resistance: What if the conversation isn’t as good as I remember it?..

How to Tackle an Overwhelming List of Tasks

This last week I didn’t keep up with my task list. Some work with a client required all of my attention and the notification badges on my email, todo list, and Slack messages kept growing. When Saturday rolled around I was buried. After dumping everything in my mind and organizing tasks into logical contexts I realized that there was no way I was going to get through everything. The glowing red double digit notification badges didn’t give me any hope or encouragement either. I’m not in the clear, but here’s what helped me gain momentum and dig my way out of the hole: Split tasks up – even if they are small. It’s helpful to break up tasks, even if they should take less than 30min, and schedule the pieces sequentially through the week…

Working on Your Life vs In Your Life

I’m reading the E-Myth Revisited. One of the key concepts is the idea of working on your business instead of in your business. In other words, working on streamlining the process that you or your employees use to create the product or execute the service rather than actually performing the service or creating the product. Without improving the system you can’t scale the outcome. You’ll be a slave to an undefined process that you can’t delegate. The same principal applies to my personal life. I need to work on improving the systems an processes that I use to run my life. Working on my life, not just living it. Here are a couple examples: Where am I wasting time? What tasks or processes are time consuming but necessary?..

Results Follow Clarity

Clarity is hard. It takes effort to defined what you are looking for, why you are looking for it, and what you are going to do to get it. Clarity creates results. It creates momentum. Opportunities appear with knowledge of exactly what you are looking for. Without precise goals you can’t adjust your time and energy to seek out opportunities that align with that vision. Without a framework to interpret opportunities or situations from it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to choose between opportunities when all the opportunities are better-than-great. Driving results requires saying no. It requires cutting out the good to make room for the great. And, sometimes, it means cutting out the nearly-great for the extremely-great…

How to Get Clarity When Your Mind is Scattered or Distracted

When I have a week that is concentrated on a single project I often feel as though I loose focus. My mind can forget other projects or important tasks that were not contained within the context of the project I was working on. If I don’t catch myself, there is the opportunity for things to fall through the cracks. I forget to respond to important emails, to close the loop on an important task, or push the ball forward on an important project. Here’s a practice I use to recalibrate myself: Organize all the paper with ideas or tasks in a single stack. Get a blank legal pad. When my mind seems scattered a blank piece of paper brings clarity…

NetSuite SuiteTalk User & Role Edits Are Delayed

If you work with NetSuite’s SuiteTalk API, you know that: You must access the API via employee/user record in NetSuite API calls specify the user role to use You will get different results based on which user and which user role you are accessing the API with. For instance, if the employee record has the “Sales Rep” option checked, all Sales Orders created using that employee/user credentials will have the “Sales Rep” field assigned to the user’s record. Each role has a different set of permissions. You will get different fatal error messages depending on which user role you are operating under. Often, when developing a NetSuite integration, you’ll need to make edits to the SuiteTalk user/employee record or the role…

Install PHP with PNG Support on Apache in Yosemite

Yosemite comes with Apache + PHP out of the box, but its PHP binary is a bit handicapped. It doesn’t come with built in PNG support. This causes issues if you are developing WordPress sites: resizing PNG images will silently fail. If you have custom image sizes set in your WordPress theme, they will not be created at all if PHP is not compiled with PNG support. Here’s how to recompile PHP on Yosemite via Brew: You’ll have to edit your Apache configuration to use the new PHP installation: There are also some additional WordPress & PHP tools you can install via brew.

Year: 2015