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Showing posts from May, 2016

Product review: Anker RoboVac 10

This is a first. I have never done a product review on my blog. To head off questions, no I am not being paid for this. No, I did not receive this item as a sample or promotional item. Yes, I paid full price for it. With that out of the way, Anker RoboVac 10 is an automatic self-docking robotic vacuum cleaner. Basically, it's a Roomba. But is a rose still a rose if it goes by a different name and costs far less? I don't know. Never had a Roomba but I bought this Anker RoboVac last week on Amazon and it arrived couple of days ago. Setup was quick and easy but the vacuum wasn't pre-charged (more on this later). So I charged it overnight, set it to clean at 7:30 am and forgot about it. At 7:30 the next morning, it very quietly went to work. While the kids ate breakfast, "Robby" (as my daughter christened it...yeah we have a habit of naming everything...I am typing this on Maggie4) cleaned 2 bedrooms, a dining area, a hallway and the kitchen. Robby was still cleani

Handling failure

Blogger's note: I wrote this last year but never posted it. It's still pertinent; so enjoy. The past few days I have been thinking about failure. Not personal failure but professional failure. It occurred to me that while organizations are very good at highlighting success and awards, very few highlight how they handle failure. And even fewer job applicants are interested in knowing how a future employer handles failure. I have been conducting interviews for 5-7 years now and I have yet to have a job applicant ask me about my failures or my employer's failures. I think this is a very important issue. Because, let's face it, success is very easy to handle. Failure, by contrast, shows you way more about a person's/an organization's character. If you are about to join a new organization, ask them what happens when they encounter failure. Do the managers look for scapegoats? Do the employees shift blame? Do managers and employees focus on solving the problem,