David Alison's Blog

  Email overload - it may be time to declare bankruptcy. Source: DALL-E I've been adhering to a zero-inbox policy for years, a practice born out of necessity while working in a company with limited email space. This approach demanded ruthless efficiency in minimizing my storage footprint. What this means is that my inbox contains only items needing my immediate attention. It's effectively a succinct to-do list. Anything lingering for more than a day gets shifted to my actual to-do list. Beyond managing data overload, a zero-inbox also eased my cognitive load. There's something inherently overwhelming about an email icon flaunting a red badge with a number in the hundreds. Scanning through a massive list of emails meant making countless micro-decisions: Is the sender significant? Does the subject hint at something urgent? Is there a time-sensitive issue within? So, how do you tackle this challenge? Declaring email bankruptcy often involves deleting everything in your inbox a...

Source: DALL-E In a world dominated by technology, where digital tools are often the go-to for note-taking, I’ve found immense value in maintaining the practice of keeping handwritten notes during meetings. This technique is not just about documenting discussions; it’s an integral part of my active listening strategy — a critical skill for effective leadership and coaching. Active listening involves more than just hearing words. It’s about fully engaging with the speaker, maintaining eye contact, processing their words, and often, reflecting their sentiments or phrases back to them. This ensures not only that you’ve understood their message, but also that they feel heard and valued. In my years of experience in leadership and executive coaching, active listening has proven to be a cornerstone of successful communication. Interestingly, handwritten notes play a pivotal role in this process. Research has shown that the act of writing notes by hand can significantly improve focus and info...

Source: DALL-E Embarking on each day, none of us plan to fail. Whether it’s our personal endeavors, professional projects, or simple daily tasks, the aim is always success. However, life is unpredictable, and at times, despite our best efforts and intentions, we encounter failure. My own journey, marked by both professional challenges in the tech industry and deeply personal experiences, has taught me to perceive failure not as a setback, but as a precious gift. This perspective has deeply influenced not just my approach to challenges but also my understanding of growth and resilience. Failure, in its essence, tests our limitations. It nudges us out of our comfort zones, challenging us to confront and embrace our vulnerabilities. In the tech world, a project that doesn’t pan out as expected or a glitch that goes unnoticed isn’t merely a mishap; it’s a crucial learning moment. It highlights areas needing growth and skills demanding refinement. This principle extends beyond professional ...

Dear Friends, I am writing my first blog post in years to share some exciting news and a significant shift in my professional journey. I have decided to follow a longstanding passion of mine: executive coaching. A few years ago, I received my certification as an executive coach, and I believe now is the perfect time to put that to good use. The name of my new venture is PotensMentor . This executive coaching practice is designed specifically to nurture and empower leaders in the technology sector, a domain I have been intimately involved with throughout my four-decade-long career. PotensMentor is committed to unlocking the potential of tech leaders, fostering personal growth, and building resiliency in a rapidly evolving industry landscape. Our mission at PotensMentor is simple, yet profound. We aim to ignite transformative growth in technology leaders, helping them evolve into the best versions of themselves. Through committed partnership and immersive coaching, we strive to empower t...

Note: On August 17, 2018 I released my book: Finding Davey: A Father's Search for His Son in the Afterlife . It is available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle formats . When I started writing Finding Davey it wasn't because I wanted to write a book. It was because I wanted to keep a journal of what was happening to me as I navigated my way out of the profound grief I found myself in. Initially it was a struggle just to get through each day; so much of my life had been turned upside down by the death of my son that I found myself in free-fall, grasping for anything stable. Most days I would write down how I felt and record my thoughts. This was not intended to be a cathartic exercise; the writing was often very difficult and required that I re-experience the emotions as I wrote down how I had been feeling. Many tears were shed on my keyboard in the early stages. I did it because I wanted to see if I was in fact getting better. When you've fallen down a hole so ...

When you lose a child the number of challenges you face is profound. One of the reasons many grief stricken people disconnect from their prior lives is that the reminders of their loss are everywhere. I experienced this first hand after I lost my son in a car accident in July of 2016. As a purveyor and advocate of technology for over 30 years, I had always been a fan of the sharing nature of the modern internet. Easy access to information opened completely new and innovative ways of solving problems for me, and I embraced it fully. Over the last few years social media has evolved, pushing more and more automated engagement on it's users. Social media is both a blessing and a curse to the newly bereaved; it can be a primary conduit for connecting with friends and family. In our case it allowed us to see all the wonderful acts of kindness people were doing in our son’s name , receive links for inspirational videos and articles, and do research on how consciousness could survive p...

Losing a child is arguably the most difficult challenge a person can face in life. When I lost my son Davey in July of 2016 I was plunged into the most profound grief and sadness I had ever experienced. In my 55 years on this planet I have been through a lot, however this made every other challenge I encountered seem trivial by comparison. It wasn't just my son that died in a car accident on that hot muggy day in July. I died too. I instantly became a completely different person, changed to my core by an event that brought up all of those deep existential questions that I had previously just brushed aside. In the initial days I was in free-fall and found myself surrounded by hundreds of people that wanted to express their sympathies, doing everything they could to support me and my family. The vast majority of my friends and family handled it with grace and compassion. A few were so overcome with emotion they blurted out things that only made my sadness more profound but as t...

When I started this blog just over 10 years ago it was to  document what I was experiencing while adopting a Mac . My primary computing platform at that time was Windows and I was both a long time user and developer. My goal with the blog was simple: I was learning a new platform and wanted to share with others what I had discovered. The internet has always been a tremendous resource for me and I felt that I should do my part and contribute to that knowledge base. That simple goal ended up serving hundreds of thousands of readers over the years. Though I haven't made a single post to this blog in over 4 years, hundreds of people still visit this blog daily based on search results for things like  Time Machine errors ,  keyboard shortcuts ,  upgrading an old Mac hard drive to an SSD  and  setting up a MacBook for a college student . I received messages from readers of this blog fairly regularly asking when I would return to blogging, but I always repli...

When I talk to people in person about Net Neutrality I generally get blank stares from all but the highly technology oriented people. Most folks don't know or care how the internet works. Ask the average person if they understand the internet and most associate it with a web site or email. They still say things like "The internet is down!" when their local connection is having issues. There is nothing wrong with this blissful ignorance. Technology should  fall into the background for most people. There are lots of things that work this way. Most people don't understand how water or electricity is produced and delivered to their homes. They turn on a switch and a light comes on. They turn a handle and water pours out of a faucet. The stuff just works (most of the time). If you fall into this category you need to learn more about the Net Neutrality issue and how the internet we use every single day is about to be hijacked by the cable and wireless industry. It will ...

After the near miss I had in losing a considerable portion of my personal digital library I decided to do something about it and look into a cloud based solution for keeping my files safe. I’m still using Time Machine locally to back up nearly everything, I just wanted a final line of storage just in case. I’ve been using DropBox for years for my documents and miscellaneous files. I have several Google Apps for Business accounts that store my emails and shared docs and spreadsheets. The code I write is versioned and stored in GitHub . For the most part I live off the cloud already, the only thing missing was my large collection of family photos and videos, which totaled nearly 140GB. iCloud is cool and all, and I love the way it keeps my little iPhone photos synced, but at $100 / year for only 55GB, this is a pretty expensive solution. I looked at a variety of different cloud backup solutions and found them to be ill-fitted to my needs. While many of them have plenty of capaci...

As I wrote last week, the SSD upgrade for my Mac Pro went very smoothly. There were two important things I found out after I started reading the comments from that entry: An SSD is a good performance upgrade but the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 provides incredible performance. Though quite a bit more expensive than a standard SSD, if you want the absolute best performance for a Mac Pro you may want to consider it. At 820MB/s it is over 5 times faster than the SSD I just installed. Hat tip to Eytan for pointing this out to me. After adding a 3rd party SSD to your Mac, you need to investigate TRIM support. Derek brought up the issue in the comments and I spent some time investigating it. What is TRIM? TRIM is effectively a garbage collection model for SSDs. There is some great information on it on Wikipedia’s TRIM entry . The bottom line is that without TRIM enabled the performance of an SSD will suffer over time. This is something you’ll want to address. I contacted Crucial tech...

Mac Pro circa 2008 I bought my Mac Pro 5 years ago and other than the hard disk failures I just had with my add-on drives, the machine has been rock solid. I’ve kept it up on every version of OS X that’s been available and it runs Mountain Lion like a champ. Even though my Mac hasn’t slowed down with age, it feels relatively slow ever since I added my new 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display to the mix. Between the 16GB of RAM, stunning display and ridiculously fast SSD, the new MacBook Pro seemed to run circles around the larger Mac tower. Upgrading the processors didn’t seem reasonable. It already has 12GB of RAM and for the way I use the machine that provides plenty of headroom. The one area I figured could see dramatic improvement was by swapping out the 320GB boot disk with an SSD drive. This was the route I took. Finding the Right SSD I did a lot of reading on SSDs, looking at Amazon reviews and finding guidance from a variety of different sources where I primarily f...

It had been a long couple of months. We’d been working furiously on the launch of EasyGrouper and were just a few days away from having it go live. As I sat in my home office working on my new MacBook Pro I heard a deeply disturbing sound coming from my older Mac Pro tower a few feet away:    ZZZZ-click     ZZZZ-click    ZZZZ-click That’s never a good sign. My Mac Pro is my main home machine and runs a lot of stuff for me. It’s got a 320GB main drive (“BootDisk”) running my apps and working documents, a 1TB drive called “BigDisk” that contains my family photos, videos, music, etc. and another 1TB drive called “Backup” for... you guessed it... backups. I tapped the keyboard to wake up the screens and could see that the icons for my drives were all on my desktop when suddenly the BigDisk icon vanished and OS X gave me an error message that said I had not ejected the drive properly. Not good. My Mac could no longer see my BigDisk internal d...