About Movie

Ah, Christmas, my favorite time of year. Tis the season for parties, great food, meeting up with family and friends that I haven't seen in a long time and yes, don't remind me; a season for getting the cold or flu.

As lovable as Santa is, I am gonna think twice about letting my child anywhere him, let alone kissing him.

You never know, Santa might be bearing gifts other than toys for children. Him living all the way in the North Pole he just might be having the sniffles or worse.

Last Christmas, I used my radiator heater heavily because I hate living in a cold house. Despite the heating and wearing multiple layers of clothing outside, I came down with the flu once and had the sniffles a couple of times.

Maybe a 'couple sniffles" is not bad but when I got the electricity bill, it wasn't the sniffles I was worried about, it was my heart. Man was it high!

Any how, maybe I can use a little less heating this season and include extra practices that will help me from falling prey to the flu.

So here is what I am gonna do

1. Get more sleep. Not sleeping enough can make your body more susceptible to sickness by decreasing the amount of cells dedicated to fighting bacteria.

2. Practice good hygiene. Isn't this something our parents drilled in us from a young age so as not to spread germs.

When you sneeze, do so in a tissue and not in your hands. If you are using a public bathroom, wash your hands and then wipe them in your own tissue.

Before and after meals wash your hands.

Getting some of those antiseptic hand wipes is also a good idea for wiping hands. My grandmother always said "a clean wash and a dirty wipe makes no sense"

3. Drink clean water, filtered preferably. Keeping the body properly hydrated helps keeps the tissues of the respiratory system moist which helps prevent bacteria from settling and making us ill.

4. Take It Easy. A body that is under stress is more susceptible to catching a cold. People that are under stress often have low energy, a sure sign that their immune system is feeling the pressure.

Get a message, meditate, do yoga, see a movie, listen to music etc. Such activities will do wonders for you.

5. Air Out The Place. Perhaps last year I used my heating too often and didn't open the windows enough. By opening the windows, you'll be letting out potentially harmful pollutants that could attack your immune system.

6. Take supplements. Dietary supplements give you the vitamins, antioxidants and other nutrients that you might not be getting from food. These nutrients promote immune system health and give you more energy.

Even if you think you are eating a balanced diet and that you don't need a good multivitamin, think again. The soil our food is grown in is so nutrient-deficient that by the time you cook it, whatever little nutrient it had might be totally gone.

So do yourself and your children a favor right now. Take a quality multi vitamin and antioxidant supplement today and boost your immune system. And please, say hi to Santa for me.

The blue screen of death can be one of the most frustrating things that can ever happen to a computer. One minute, you are sitting on your computer looking up valuable information or playing games, then all of a sudden it happens. You freak out and you have no idea on how to fix it. With a little work, you should be able to get your computer back up and running today. Here are 2 ways that you can fix or avoid your blue screen of death.

Tip #1

The very first thing that you should do is always update your drivers. Your drivers are the backbone of your computer. They relate all of your hardware/software to your operating system. If these are not working properly, then your computer will not work properly. To update your drivers, you can go to the manufactures Web site or download a program that will automatically do it for you.

Tip #2

The next thing that you can do is download a registry or virus cleaner. If you are one of those people that download music, movies, games, etc., then there is a good chance that you have a virus on your computer that is causing your error. Be sure that you get a registry cleaner that will fix your error. Some cleaners will only remove files, rather than correcting and fixing them.

The blue screen error is frustrating but if you take the time to update your drivers on a monthly basis and always scan your computer for virus, you should not see another error on your computer again.

I am a big fan of Eastenders and love the character led storylines, and while I think Pastor Lucas has an intriguing and mysterious sickness in the head, I am getting a bit tired of seeing every committed Christian that appears in movies or TV films these days portrayed as a psycho. Certainly it happens in real life, that people just don't get what faith is all about and the will of God becomes a ball of confusion in their heads leading them to do the wrong things. Instead of standing back and letting God take the reins, some people project their own will onto God to justify wrongdoing. But when these ideas are being expressed to mass TV audiences, it is vital to get the balance right.

For those who don't know, Pastor Lucas has now murdered his second victim, Owen, his wife-to-be Denise's ex who found out about Lucas' first murder (which was more of a failure to report a fatal accident than murder) of his own ex-wife. As always with Eastenders, quality scriptwriting comes to the fore, cleverly building up the obsession and the motives that have led to the poor tragic character of Lucas. Particularly skilful was the way tension prior to the wedding ceremony was increased by the unravelling of two story lines which became one: Lucas' spat with Owen and Phil's problems with the loan shark. Phil, desperate to hide his Jaguar from the repo merchant, hands the keys to Lucas and tells him to get it out of the square. The car then becomes the scene of the crime when Owen appears in the back seat to torment Lucas, and ends up strangled in the boot (or trunk). Comedy is used to good effect to highlight the tragedy, both in the characters of Denise's sister and brother-in-law, who cannot keep their hands off the gin, each other or anyone else they happen to fancy, and in the presence of the Jaguar at the wedding, with murdered Owen's mobile phone going off periodically in the boot as his mother frantically tries to contact him to no avail.

Great story-telling brilliantly produced, so what's my objection? Perhaps there was a time in the past when ethnic viewers might have made the same criticism I am making whenever a member of their race was portrayed as a criminal without reservation. Now it seems it is Christians or religious people of any kind who get the scapegoat treatment. Just as in the past it became necessary for filmmakers to introduce balance whenever ethnic characters were involved, so it is important that whenever we have psycho Christians as crime protagonists, we should also have just as many in the show doing what they normally do, good, selfless, charitable work.

The issue of an employee using his official email account for personal purposes is something only the company can resolve. While it may or may not approve the practice, management has to establish certain rules that employees should know and agree to before they are allowed to use the company's network resources.

If you've been contemplating on this issue yourself, it will be fair to analyze it beginning with the premise that your business and personal affairs are two things that matter to you differently. Naturally, they should be treated differently as well. No matter how tempting it is to simply use one email account for all your online communications, don't. Your personal email should be treated differently from your business email and for this reason, you'll always want to keep them separate.

Examining the nature of business and personal communications will help you understand how far worlds apart your personal and business emails are. Business email, for sure, will need strict adherence to stricter rules on passwords. Business communications between you and your clients will also usually need encryption for more security. If sensitive or confidential corporate information needs to be sent, this can be sniffed or and stored on email servers when proper security techniques are not employed. If you work in government, the more communication will have to be secure and the more you have to adhere to even stricter rules. In other words, when dealing with business email, you have to submit to certain controls that have been put in place for a purpose that promotes the best interest of the company or entity you are associated with.

When you use your personal account for business purposes, official email communications will not be protected using such established controls set up by the company. Hence, there is significant risk of compromising the security of corporate information. Obviously, this is something you can get in serious trouble with as far as your relationship with management is concerned.

One thing that makes ordinary web users more susceptible to hacking is their negligence of the fact that the threat is real. People who do not know enough about the technical aspect of the Internet still tend to think that such threat exists only in movies and passwords are secure unless willfully revealed by the owner. The point is, passwords may be obtained without permission and this is possible through the genius of people we know as hackers. Unless one learns to accept this fact, he will remain to be unable to understand the reality of Internet threats.

As an employee, you will be incapable of appreciating protective measures that your company employs to secure its network. Hence, you will always tend to break rules, not necessarily because you want to put the company's safety on the line but simply because you think the consequences are not as serious as they are.

For your own PC, hide your IP to enable you to surf anonymously and be kept safe from interlopers.

We have to applaud the Balanced Scorecard for the evolution it triggered in organisational performance measurement and strategy execution. But no model is without its limitations. Certainly, on account of the Balanced Scorecard, we're now seeing the measurement of non-financial results rather than just the financial, and we're seeing strategies laid out in logical and cause-effect linked plans designed for execution rather than shelving.

But a few challenges continue to baffle those that embrace the Balanced Scorecard way. One of the challenges is easy and quick to remedy within the current Balanced Scorecard theory. But the other two, I believe, require a more radical re-think.

In this first part of a three part series, we'll look at one of those challenges that does indeed need a more radical re-think.

CHALLENGE 1: The Balanced Scorecard is hard to cascade meaningfully.

You might argue with me on this point, because part of the Balanced Scorecard's claim to fame is it's focus on strategy execution and cascading strategy to operational levels. But those famous four perspectives that were the revelation of this framework are also the limitation on meaningfully cascading strategy.

What Happens Is "Mini-me" Syndrome.

I call it the "Mini-me" syndrome (inspired by the Austin Powers movies), where what ends up being cascaded are localised scaled-down copies of the corporate scorecard. Each department or team has the same perspectives as the corporate scorecard, almost the same strategy map, but tailored to the scope of their work.

If injury reduction is in the corporate scorecard, then every department and team has injury reduction in their scorecard: even those departments where injury risk is infinitesimal. If cost reduction is in the corporate scorecard, then every department or team has cost reduction in their scorecard: even those departments (like Human Resources or Process Improvement, whose costs must increase in order for other areas' costs to decrease.

That's not true cause-effect thinking, and it leaves many managers and employees bemused and cynical about having to measure things that don't really matter to them, and that don't really focus on their specific and unique contribution to the corporate direction.

Additive Thinking Is Not Cause-Effect Thinking.

When the focus is on maintaining the four perspectives in everyone's scorecard to link up to the corporate scorecard, the attention has moved away from where it needs to be: focusing on the performance results and process improvements that have the highest leverage to achieve the corporate strategy.

What happens instead is a collection of additive scorecards, where you can add up or combine the metrics from scorecards across the departmental tier, and end up with the values for the corporate scorecard. Likewise, you could add up the add up or combine the metrics from scorecards across teams within a department, and end up with the values for the departmental scorecard. This isn't cause-effect thinking. It's additive thinking.

Cascade True Cause-Effect, Not The Scorecard.

To apply true cause-effect thinking, we have to let go of structure. We have to openly explore and analyse how the performance of a part truly does impact on the performance of the whole. The four perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard don't encourage that open exploration and analysis, and that's why we have the Mini-me problem.

I haven't found a sensible and easy way to help departments and teams cascade the Balanced Scorecard in a way that's sensible for them and truly aligned to the corporate direction. Instead, we use a more open approach called Results Mapping, which encourages them to start with a conversation about the corporate direction (or scorecard) and explore the question "How and where do our results and our processes most impact on the corporate direction?"

Two More Challenges...

In parts two and three of this series, I'll discuss two more things I don't like about the Balanced Scorecard, and suggest some tips for compensating for these challenges also.

TAKING ACTION:

Where are you trying to cascade the Balanced Scorecard? Is it making sense to the teams it is cascading to? Is there anything in their scorecard that isn't really that important, or anything missing that actually is important? What questions are you asking to guide the way that strategy is cascaded in your organisation or company?

A friend of a friend had her first child leave the nest. She did it a bit too soon, left before graduating from high school to go live with some boy. The daughter did get her GED and fortunately is not pregnant. Despite the silver lining of moving out of a dysfunctional home, the daughter is not making good use of her life. She has no job, doesn't even try for one, lives off her husband's meager income and spends money like its water. As a result there are frequent calls home to mom and dad begging for money to cover the rent, the utilities and even groceries. Yet they have lots of computer toys, games and movies whenever they want.

As a parent of young children I look at this situation and try to learn from it. My first lesson is this: no matter how hard it is, I cannot continue to support an ungrateful lazy child so she can squander everything I work for just to play house two states away. I know that some lessons have to be learned the hard way. It would be very difficult for me to tell my child, "no, I will not send you food money. You have to get a job." It would be very tough. But it's something that must be done in order for that child to learn that life is hard and you cannot suck your parents dry. That poor daughter is very immature and in order to keep her from disappearing from their life completely they continue to feed her habits. But this only serves to destroy the potential for this young woman to learn how to lead a good life. I honestly can't imagine what she does all day long with no job, but her Facebook account talks about frequent shopping trips and she comes home with useless junk. I'm guessing it's all funded by mommy and daddy.

Take this as a lesson if you are a parent. If you give your kids free license to abuse you chances are they will. If your kids are still really young take the time to teach them about life's responsibilities and back it up with actions, not just words. Life is hard and it's not a free ride. The lessons can be painful but they must be learned.

I've always known that a marketing message should "connect" with your prospective customer's emotions. The traditional explanation has been that emotions truly rule the decision making process. This book explains why this mantra isn't quite right.

Dopamine, a neurotransmitter chemical in our brain, controls not only the "pleasure center" but all of our emotions. Dopamine neurons send and receive these chemicals based on different inputs. For example, prediction neurons produce dopamine when they anticipates a pleasure (think of Pavlov). Our brains continually are fine tuning our receptors based on real-world trial-and-error.

Our emotional brain is a stew of these dopamine receptors. Think about seeing someone you love. Do you tingle? It's dopamine coursing through your body. Now think about an almost car-crash you were in. Does your breath get shallow? It's dopamine again.

We assign emotions to certain physical responses: love, fear, hate, etc. Not everyone defines the responses the same way, but we all know how these emotions make us feel. When it comes time to make a decision, we weigh the emotional brain's answer ("a hunch") with the rational brain's ("calculated results").

While we can explain how our rational brain answer arose ("...based on a class I took last year, the answer is obviously...") we have an almost impossible time explaining our emotional brain. The emotional brain, it turns out, is wired to our unconscious. And our unconscious has been programmed by our lifetime of dopamine receptor programming. Our unconscious is processing information that our rational brain doesn't perceive.

So what does this all mean to your marketing? It means that while we're trying to evoke certain emotional responses, we need to talk directly to the emotional brain (and bypass the rational brain). A careful reader will read your marketing copy, think about the words, and in thinking, may trigger the emotional brain's response. A graph showing improved results likewise requires the rational brain to interpret the message. What we need to do is appeal to another set of neurons in our brain: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are what make us feel empathy. When we see someone smiling, we feel happier because our mirror neurons are giving us the same physical response as if we were smiling. It's true for all of the emotions that people express around us. (Aside: It turns out that one of the causes for autism are non-functioning mirror neurons. People can see other's physical responses to emotion, but their mirror neurons aren't causing the feeling within their own bodies.). Therefore, to evoke an emotional response, we need to trigger the mirror neurons. And the best way to do this is with images and sound. An image of someone happy makes us feel happier. We know that a great movie plays with our emotions (mostly controlled by our ears).

The goal for any marketing message is to arrive unfiltered to your prospect. Not only past the spam filters, but the emotional filters as well. Pick your images and sounds well, and you'll likely trigger the mirror receptors to evoke the emotion. As a prospect, it means that when it comes time to make a decision, you need to understand the kind of decision you're being faced with and the type of thought you need to solve it. You need to think about how you think.