Online Learning and Biomimicry

Online learning is starting to become a bigger and bigger platform as time goes by. From free learning platforms such as Khan Academy, that lets you choose to practice a variety of skills, to websites dedicated to various, more specialised courses (such as the CS-101 course I took through Udacity, back when it was free), if you keep your eyes open, you can find the most incredible courses.

At the beginning of this week, I started a one month (free) course offered by an online learning platform called Canvas,  on an introduction to a topic that goes by the name of Biomimicry. This is something that I've been passively checking in on every now and then but is a concept that I really like. In a nutshell, and to use the words of the women who is the primary force behind Biomimicry, Janine Benyus, 

The idea, in the broadest sense, is that that one observes how nature solves a particular problem and then uses the insight gained by this and applies it to the problem that you're trying to solve. The key here, is that you emulate a solution on three different levels - on natures form, on natures process and finally, on natures ecosystem. 

I'm still in the early stages of the course, but I'm really looking forward to learning more about this topic and I thought that, since it's only the first week, if anyone who reads this blog was interested in joining me, you can click on the link here and also enroll for free!

There are so many different online learning platforms, here are a list of ones that I'm familiar with (some of them I've tried out, some of them I've heard good things about), just in case you'd like to check out the world of online learning for yourself!

Udacity
Codecademy
Excel With Business
Khan Academy
Canvas
Coursera
edX
Crash Course

How to Rename Picture Files in Bulk Version 1

Development work over the weekend while I was checking that my program worked!

Over the weekend I told you that I had been working on a little project that I was almost ready to share with you and today I'm excited to announce that version 1.0 is finally ready! Now I need your help...

As you should by now know, I take a lot of photos. And I like having photos for a specific event labelled by name. So if I take 500 photos at my birthday party and I want to label them something along the lines of "Caths Birthday 1" all the way through to "Caths Birthday 500". I also want them to be sorted from lest recent photo at number 1 to most recent photo at number 500 (so that I can start looking through my pictures at number 1 and they follow the sequence of photos as they happened). It's also better for blogging to upload more descriptive photos than DSC_0010.jpg. 

I know some photo processing programs do this for you, but I wanted a way to do this by means of a small program dedicated to this. And so I decided to create a program to do this. I've called it "Bulk File Renamer", but if anyone has any better suggestions, please comment below!

I've decided that I want to give you access to this and so I've put this on a public google doc. If you would like to download this FREE program - please click on this link and download the folder named "Bulk File Renamer.zip".

To get started, follow my instructions below:

1. Download the zip file called "Bulk File Renamer.zip" if you haven't done this already.

2. Go to the downloaded zip file "Bulk File Renamer.zip" and right click on it. Select the option to Extract All and when the window pops up asking where you want to extract the files to, specify that you want to extract them to "C:\Program Files". You can also specify "C:\Program Files (x86)" if there is no Program Files folder.

3. Open the Bulk File Renamer folder that is now located in the Program Files folder and copy the file labelled "Bulk_Renamer_App - Shortcut" and paste it to your desktop.

4. Double click on the Bulk_Renamer_App - Shortcut and a screen like the one below should pop up. 

5.1 If you want to rename all pictures in your a particular folder, click the blue "Choose Folder" button and navigate to the folder of pictures you want to rename, when that folder is highlighted, click on OK. The blue button should now say "Folder: <your folder>" where <your folder> is the name of your folder.

After clicking on the blue "Choose Folder" Button
I navigated to my "Test Photos" folder.
I clicked on it once and then clicked on OK.

See my text has changed from "Choose Folder" to
"Folder: Test Photos".

After entering in your details and clicking on the
green "Rename" button, a window pops up telling
you when the action has completed and how
many files were renamed.

5.2. If you want to rename only certain pictures in a particular folder, click the blue "Choose Files" button and navigate to the folder of pictures you want to rename, select the individual pictures (hold down the "Ctrl" key to select more than one picture at a time) and then click on OK.

After clicking on the blue "Choose Files"
button, I selected 3 files I wanted to rename.

Note the text changes from "Choose Files"
to "3 files chosen" since I chose 3 files
that I wanted to rename

After entering in your details and clicking on the
green "Rename" button, a window pops up telling
you when the action has completed and how
many files were renamed.

6 In the "Text Rename" text box, enter in the description you would like all photos to be renamed to. (eg: December Holiday 2014, or 20150201 - Trip to KZN etc).

7. After performing action 5.1 OR 5.2
In the "Starting Number" text box, enter in the number to start at. This defaults to 1 if you leave this field blank. If you decide you rather want to rename these photos start at number 257, then type 257 into the text box.

8. Click the green "Rename" button. Once the program has finished renaming all your files, a notification box will pop up informing you once the file rename has been completed. If there is already a file of a particular name existing in the folder, it will not rename this file and will leave that file with it's original name and move on to the next file.

9. When you've finished all your photo renaming tasks, click the red "Quit" button, or the cross at the top right corner of the window to close the app.

Once you've done all of this, please let me know if it worked or not by commenting below, sending me an e-mail or posting on my facebook page. I would like to improve this, but I can only do this with your feedback. If there are any features that you think would be useful or beneficial, please mention those too.

The renaming facility should work on all files, however I haven't tested the "sort by date" functionality on non-image files. I'll be working on this on my next version of this program. If you test this out and it works, or doesn't work, please comment below to let me know (include what files you tested with - word, excel, powerpoint etc).

Meeting Minutes Tips

Manual Meeting Minutes

When you're trying to plan something that involves multiple parties and discussions and follow ups, keeping accurate meeting minutes is probably one of your most important activities. 

I know that most people know this. If you're anything like the me-6-months-ago, you would know and understand why meeting minutes are important, but not really have a good idea of what constitutes good meeting minutes and how to go about managing them. 

Luckily, in the last 6 months, I have been able to observe and learn from a pro meeting-minute taker and project manager (let's call him Minute-Man for the purposes of this post). 

Here are things that I've learnt from Minute-Man:

• Not only are meeting minutes important, but so is communicating the minutes to all relevant parties who couldn't make the meeting (either via a separate call and/or including them on the mail of the meeting minutes).
• Use your minutes to track who is responsible for what - then FOLLOW UP a few days later with a mail.
• When you're not sure where the conversation is going, use phrases like "Sorry guys, I'm battling to follow where we are going with this point." or
  "I'm a bit confused as to what needs to be done here. Are there any specific actions that we need to note down or possible follow up discussions that need to take place?"
• Keeping time is important.
• If you see you are starting to go over the allotted time, check with everyone to see if they can carry on for an extra half hour or so, or if another meeting needs to be scheduled for a later stage.
• Refer to previous minutes to check up on previous actions.
• Before the meeting, have a basic agenda and discussion topics listed down and add notes to them as the meeting progresses.
• Use coloured highlights to note attendance and actions.
• Sometimes you need to have the same meeting with a second group of parties if you need their input on certain aspects of the project.
• Label you minutes in a logical way. For example if you have a weekly update meeting label them something like 01 - Update Meeting 18 Sept. Create a special folder where you keep the Update Meeting minutes.
• Lastly, be cheerful and upbeat (and mean it!) - you can hear it in the persons voice, and when the voice is the only thing you can interact with for a person, it makes a huge difference!
• Use words like DONE and OPEN to note the status of actions as you go through them.

If you are needing a place to start - you can check out an example of meeting minutes below. You can also download my meeting minutes template and use that as a starting point for your own meeting minutes. Happy minuting!

Example Meeting minutes: 02 - Planning Meeting
Meeting Minutes template*: Meeting Minutes Template

* If the page tells you it can't display this document, don't worry, it's because it's saved as a Microsoft Office Template file. Download it, when you open it, it will open as a document that you can then save in doc format and not template format.