Dominant, Expressive, Analytical and Amiable

In July, I attended a personality seminar run by Persogenics. I have done several personality, self helpy things in my life. Sometimes I get a little wary of this kind of thing. There are a few things I found useful from the seminar.

The workshop focused on improving the communication between people with very different styles. There are four patterns people use to communicate: Dominant, Expressive, Analytical and Amiable. Most people have a primary and secondary way of communicating.

One of the best stories was one the facilitator told of a rafting trip they went on as a company. It was a hoot to hear how the people of the different styles interacted with each other.

The bottom line for me were two things to remember per communication style. One was what the person of the style was to remember. The other was what others could keep in mind when communicating with the person. This is what I remember:

A dominant communicator should remember to ask not tell. Others should remember to take them seriously but not personally.

An expressive communicator should let others know when they are talking out loud. Others should restate what they heard them say. If appropriate, touch them to let them know you understand what they said. Paraphrase, playback.

An analytical communicator should let others know when they are thinking, "Let me think for a moment". Others should give them time (5-10 seconds) after asking them a question.

An amiable communicator should remember to speak up now, sooner is better than later. Others should ask to ask, "May I ask you something?"

This came up for my wife and I last night. It has helped us to avoid misunderstandings. It may help me at work too. It will serve me to remember these lessons.

Great Zip Code Map Site

Here is a great mapping site that shows you zip codes.

http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm

View HTML Color

Occasionally, I need to see what an HTML color looks like.  This site was useful.

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Google Chrome is an Operating System

I generally liked the look and feel of Google's Chrome browser when I first tried it.  Today I found the Google Chrome Task Manager. There is more at Google Chrome's Full List of Special about: Pages.

There is a good introductory video at 10 Features of Google Chrome.  Quite impressive.

Solar Noon

I have an uncommon interest in timezones and solar patterns.  A while ago I wondered where in the MST does the timezone time and the solar time match.  

One way to find out is to find the location where is it solar noon on an equinox day.  A friend of mine used solar-noon.com to figure out that Albuquerque is where solar noon and MST noon are the same (see chart).  Kind of funny that is always daylight savings on the equinox days.

I just noticed that the spring equinox is not noon.  I am not sure what that means.

Delete Temporary ASP.NET Files

IIS caches the dlls my ASP.NET project references. On my development box sometimes it does not copy the new files over. To ensure that IIS is using your latest files

- From command line issue a "IISReset /stop" command to stop IIS
- Delete the C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ folder
- Start IIS with "IISReset"

View Message Source in Outlook 2003

The Lazy Admin was useful to me today

The other day I wrote how to view message headers in OWA, and recieved a lot of mail asking if this can be done it Outlook as well. If you have ever used Outlook Express, you might be familiar with the View --> Source option. In Outlook this feature does not exist.

Outlook gives you the option to View --> Options which will display the e-mail header. To enable the View --> Source functionality in Outlook 2003 open up regedit and drill down to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

Create a new Reg_DWORD called SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders and give it a value of 1. This will enalbe the View --> Source option in Outlook 2003 but there are a few exceptions. It will only work for messages received after the change has been made and will not work with MAPI connections (i.e. Exchange mailboxes). You will only have this option for mail received from Internet transports (i.e. POP3)