All posts by J. Gryphon Shafer

Technology Leadership, Software/Media Innovation, Entrepreneurialism, Cinema Owner, Author/Publisher, AM Talk Radio Host
Aviation, Personal Log

Avoiding the Traffic

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Sunday after church, my family drove directly to the airport just around the corner and loaded into our airplane. We had planned a flight up north to the Skagit Regional Airport because I thought we might be able to sneak in a preview of the Heritage Flight Museum before their official opening in a couple weeks.

Very Excited Little Girl Co-Pilot Wife Xander Happy to Fly The Pilot

We took off into completely blue skies, warm temperatures, and mostly stable air. There were a few annoying bumps along the way up, but not too bad. What made the trip up north particularly stressful was a couple different pilots who thought it would be a great idea to fly up really close to us to get a good look at our strange airplane. Continue reading Avoiding the Traffic →

Technology

Let Me Google That For You

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There are times both personally and professionally where I’ll get asked all manner of questions that could have been answered with a simple Google search. I suspect you’ve probably had folks ask you to do Google searches on their behalf as well. Now, that’s justifiable in cases like my wife driving and needing me to look-up an address for her. What’s not justifiable are folks sitting behind desktops who want to know Dragonfly Cinema’s weekend showings schedule. The commonality and frequency of these “please do this search for me” requests has spawned sites like Let Me Google That For You [lmgtfy.com]. If you use Chrome as your web browser, you don’t even need to visit Google Search; just start typing a search query into the URL field and you’re off to the races.

Google Search is a quite powerful little tool. (Little and simple on the surface, not behind the scenes certainly.) What you may not know is that there are some ways to tell Google to conduct your search in very specific ways. Most of the time, Google just gets it right. (They have a mind-reading artificial intelligence engine in their Columbia Valley data center.) However, there are times when you want to get more specific. Continue reading Let Me Google That For You →

Life Hacks

5 Tricks to Maintaining Efficient Productivity

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Due to the primary nature of my vocation, but more especially because of the way I established and kept my software company, I tend to do a lot of work behind a bank of computer screens alone in an office. As a self-employed professional, my livelihood (and really, the livelihood of my family) depends on my ability to maintain a certain level of productivity despite persistent distractions from the Internet, the real world around me, and even my own mind wandering off onto undirected brainstorming tracks. Here are 5 of the tricks, 5 keys I use to maintain productivity in isolation. Continue reading 5 Tricks to Maintaining Efficient Productivity →