Heeeees Baaaaaaaack.  Bet you thought I had abandoned my blog.  Let’s not use such a strong word as abandon.  How about hiatus or leave of absence or long vacation.  It’s been a whirlwind crazy couple of months but don’t worry, I didn’t forget you all.  To ease you back into my blog posts I thought I would write about the HRevolution conference I attended on April 30th.  I didn’t want you all to freak out having to read so many words on my blog after my hiatus so I hacked into Paul Smith’s blog since he doesn’t know WordPress from WordStar and left my true thoughts about Paul and the conference on his Welcome To The Occupation blog.  So go click that link just to the left of prior period thingy.

I’ll be back soon with some delicious blog posts of my own.

It’s been a busy week in the technology tips world.  In fact I might have to hold a few back for next weeks blog post.  So let’s get on with it, shall we?

I know that the majority of the people who read this blog travel to conferences on a pretty regular basis and many of you also carry an iPhone in your purse/pocket/briefcase/holster (but not in your left hand). Read on for Five apps for the conference -goer.

Unfortunately I think we all have some email habits that probably should be avoided.  Our pals over at Lifehacker have rounded up The Worst Email Habits and Annoyances You Should Avoid (or At Least Be Aware Of). Go on. I dare you to read it. Maybe one of your habits is on their list.

Don’t have Adobe Flash on you mobile device or can’t get Flash?  Addicted to YouTube?  Thank goodness I found this information over at the Boy Genius site: YouTube launches HTML5-enabled mobile website, native YouTube apps soon to be obsolete.

For you Apple Time Capsule lovers, I have some good news and some bad news.  That bad news is that Apple manufactured a whole batch of flawed Time Capsules in 2008. The good news is that TUAW found out that Apple will repair or replace these Time Capsules should they die on you.

By coincidence I happened to find this beauty of an Apple Support document: Time Capsule: Using AirPort Utility 5.3.1 or later to make a copy of the Time Capsule disk.  Since it looks like Time Capsules might be a ticking time bomb, I highly suggest you follow these instructions to make sure you have a copy of your Time Capsule backups.

Not really a tech tip but for the ultimate gadget lover I just had to share this totally amazing bathroom faucet with touch panel controls.  I want one…bad.

Wow, iPhones, Email, YouTube, Time Capsules and High Tech Bathroom Faucets all on one blog post.  What will I think of next?

While talking to a few people recently and comparing our Google Reader subscriptions and trends, I discovered that I read a lot more technology sites than the average reader of my blog.  So I figured I should put all that reading time to good use and share some of my technology goodies with you all.

It’s iPhone 4 pre-order day and I am sure you all are running around the house/backyard/office/parking lot/mall like crazy person trying to figure out how best to pre-order an iPhone for your spouse/significant other/son/daughter/dog/cat.  Fear not. Engadget has you covered with their post on: How to: pre-order the iPhone 4 (update: third-party retailers best avoided)

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to stop by Starbucks for our daily quad shot Latte, the Boy Genius Report says: Starbucks offering free Wi-Fi access at all U.S. locations starting July 1st

A couple of my tweeps/peeps/yahoos have been bugging me to do Skype video calling. So for all you Skype people and video bloggers pay attention as Engadget has the goods on New Logitech HD Webcams

I don’t know about you but sometime my spelling engine goes on hiatus. It can be a problem when trying to search for something on Google.  Its Google to the rescue with: Spelling corrections in Google search suggest

I know many of you use Google Reader and have been saying why, why, WHY can’t I easily rename my folders.  Stop your crying and read all about:  Renaming folders and tags in Google Reader

Last but not least for all you hardcore Gmail, Buzz and Google Maps users (you know who you are). I give you the holy grail of Google Maps previews in Gmail and Google Buzz

Did you like these tech tips?  Found them useful?  Want me to continue serving up these tips on a regular schedule?  Hated it and wish I would not waste precious blog space doing this?  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

I’m currently sitting on a plane heading from Portland to Denver. The person in front of me has reclined their seat leaving me no room to use my laptop.  Being a good tech guy, I pulled out the iPad I won at HRevolution and am typing this out using the iPad WordPress App. Okay, Okay, I might have finished up this blog post back on the ground but rest assured that the majority of the blog post was indeed written on the plane using my iPad.  Now would probably be a good time to thank all the good people at Monster.com (especially my new best friend Eric Winegardner) for sponsoring the opening night party and for the iPad raffle that somehow I miraculously won.

A couple of weeks ago was the HRevolution 2010 conference in Chicago. I was not able to attend HRevolution last year as it was darn near impossible to get from Portland Oregon to Louisville Kentucky in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike many people who attended this year, I did not go to specifically pickup nuggets of HR knowledge. In some of my previous posts I lamented HR department’s lack of interest in technology so I didn’t go to HRevolution with the hope of a tech breakthrough. It’s a good thing since for the most part I witnessed the status quo. But more on that in a future blog post.  I did not go to HRevolution to pick up HR technology information; I went for the opportunity to spend time with my HR thought leaders outside of the sessions.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and with casual meetups over snacks, the parties, the sessions and impromptu hallway discussions  I managed to have great conversations. I also managed to squeeze in a couple of sessions. Of course one session I didn’t miss was the HR Technology Q&A session since I was co-facilitating with Bryon Abramowitz and Bill Kutik.  Again, stay tuned for a future blog post on my observations on HR Technology conversations at the conference.

I could write about what worked and did not work for HRevolution but as it turns out many of my fellow conference attendees have already blogged about it better than I could. One of the HRevolution planners, Ben Eubanks, has already rounded up the HRevolution blog posts into the wonderful Carnival of HR-HRevolution Style. Go ahead, click that link to open up the HRevolution Carnival in a new window and read all the wonderful blog posts.  I’ll wait right here until to you return.  As incentive for returning, there is still a matter of the blog title to resolve.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my partner in crime and an amazing blogger Paul Smith who kept me highly entertained from morning until late at night and to the HRevolution organizing committee.  Finally as I end this blog post, some of you are thinking, what’s the deal with the Dirty Martinis in the Blog Title?  Well…I ended the conference on Saturday night at the rooftop bar at theWit Hotel by sipping a Blue Cheese Olive Dirty Martini along with Shennee Rutt and many many others.  Good times were had by all.

Stay tuned for my next blog post when I beat you all silly for not having a proper backup strategy for your personal computers.

The Carnival of HR has landed right on the tail of Mardi Gras  so grab a Sazerac or Hurricane and some Jambalaya, pull up a chair and settle down for some fantastic blog posts.

As you know, Mardi Gras is a downright fun celebration but sometimes people imbibe a few too many hurricanes and need their friends to keep them from embarrassing themselves.  At work sometimes you also need a network of friends and mentors to help guide you.

Mary Jo Asmus at Aspire Collaborative Services kicks off the carnival with Leading People Can Be Messy about unpredictable people.

Continuing the theme of messy people who probably need a mentor, Melissa Prusher from The Devon Group suggests you rely on your mentors in Count on Change – and a Mentor to See You Through.

Speaking of friends and support systems, Paul Smith continues his story from his previous post about being gay at work and asks you to take stock of your support system in Support (if It’s Not love, Then It’s the Bomb).

If you don’t do mentoring then my guess is you don’t do Succession Planning. With a blog post titled Got Succession Planning Phobia? You’ve Got Problems, you can bet that the CEO of Aquire, Lois Melbourne has some specific thoughts on the subject.

Friends don’t let friends make HR mistakes so please read the HR Observations post by Michael Haberman on the Top 5 HR Mistakes That Small Businesses Make.

I’m sure the HR Bartender has a fabulous recipe for Hurricanes but more importantly, Sharlyn Lauby in Failure is Nothing Personal explains that it might be your methods that are failing.

Continuing the discussion on failures, Mark Bennett over at Talented Apps wants you to Focus on Failure! and learn from your failures when they happen.

Steve Boese thinks that Gartner may have forgotten that HR can and should play a role in Social Media initiatives and would like your thoughts on subject. Head over to What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions to add your comments.

Now sometimes when you are enjoying the Mardi Gras celebration you need a little encouragement in form of Beads.

Speaking of needing some beads, over at Simply Lisa, Lisa Rosendahl gives us some thoughts on how to free up the mind to write in The Anti-Writing Demon.

Over at Humor That Works, Drew Tarvin talks about what you can learn from an improv class. I wonder if the 10 tips include tips for attracting bead throwers.

Beads are a powerful motivation but more importantly Three Star Leadership’s Wally Bock tells us about a different type of motivation in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.

Continuing our discussion of motivation, Mr. Renegade HR himself, Chris Ferdinandi, wants your thoughts on How to Turn Average Performers into Rockstars.

Beads are also currency and The HR Store answers a write in question about negotiating a better salary for a job offer in Job offer negotiation.

Let’s not forget our international currency by reading Three Rules for Compensation Surveys in Smaller Developing Markets by Warren Heaps over at the International HR Forum.

More than just about beads, Bill Kutik writes What Does Salary.com Actually do and lets us in on the best kept secret in HR Technology and as a bonus gives us his thoughts on the SuccessFactors purchase of Inform.

Giving and collecting beads are a passion for some people and in the appropriately titled Passion – It’s Not a Dirty Word in HR, Steve Browne guest posts at the Cincy Recruiter blog to tell us how to be passionate about HR.

I don’t know how Naomi Bloom feels about beads but she has become passionate about blogging.  Read Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion and learn about who Naomi has beaten on over the years and why she is publishing her methodology for strategic HRM delivery systems planning.

Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors wants to throw beads to everyone with his simple plea to be passionate about something in A Plea For Passion.

At some Mardi Gras celebrations people wear masks to conceal their identities.

Let Lance Haun over at Rehaul show you how to take off the mask of your current career and show the real you in his book review post Doing a Career Transition the Right Way of Alexandra Levit’s new book.

Office politics: It’s Personal is the final installment of the 5 part office politics series over at Jennifer Miller’s blog where you can explore your personal influence.

Speaking of being an influencer, Heather Stagl at Enclaria gives us Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents to help influence when you have no direct authority.

Ready to switch to a mask that is unfamiliar to you?  At the Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy has some advice for people ready to make a lateral move into a role that is unfamiliar to them in Career Advice Part 3: Lateral Moves.

Masks can also be used to hide things we are uncomfortable talking about but Kathleen Nicolini over at the Omaha.net blog tackles obesity with A Big Problem: Obesity and Employee Rights .

Put on your mask of shame and head over to Susan Heathfield’s post Your Worst Job – Ever? where Readers share their worst job – ever.

Sometimes the goal at Mardi Gras is just to party on and have safe and sane good time.

I’m guessing the partying is kept to a minimum at these top 11 HR Masters Programs described by Jared Lucas over at The HR Patriot.

Mardi Gras can suck you in and so did the SHRM website for April Dowling. Head over to PseudoHR to read From APA to SHRM for the juicy details.

Mardi Gras is also about meeting new people and in Networking – Online of Off, Joan Ginsberg thinks the “traditional forms of networking are pointless time-wasters”.

If you don’t have any free time you probably won’t be able to go to Mardi Gras so be sure to stop by Blogging4jobs and let Jessica Miller-Merrell teach you 6 Time Saving Business Social Media Tools.

Of course you can’t have a good time at a party if you have not honed your conversational awareness so head on over to Jason Seiden’s wrap up of how-to posts on developing organizational savvy for Tips & Tricks: Develop Your Conversational Awareness (5 of 5).

The amazing HR Maven, Deirdre Honner, tells us why she continues to party on work, write, blog & talk with her blog post Why I do it.

I don’t know about you but I always get a return on my investment when attending Mardi Gras (beads anyone?) so read on about HR ROI.

What is the #1 HR Metric to Report to Your CEO? I am not going to give it way so you will just have to read this post from Cathy Missildine-Martin at the Profitability Through Human Capital blog.

I usually get a return on investment from my beads but do you know how to evaluate the ROI for your Learning Programs?  If not, you had better go read Reviving Training’s DOA ROI by Kevin Oakes.

Payroll is a topic not always covered in our sexy HR blogs but Tusha Bhatia over at the Talent Junction blog has a great post covering ROI on automating the Payroll Function.

Thank you everyone for your fantastic contributions to this Carnival of HR and to the readers for taking time to find some new blog posts to read.  Stay tuned for a very special Undercover Boss edition of the Carnival of HR hosted by Bryon Abramowitz at The HR Technologist Blog on February 24th.

That’s right kiddos; I’m hosting the next Carnival of HR right here in the rainy Pacific Northwest.  Please, pretty please send me your submission by February 15th to michael at infoboxinc dot com.  Yes, yes I know I am making you manually type in my email address but I do what I can to keep the spammers at bay.

Just a reminder that we have rules (but only a couple of easy rules) and I have lifted them directly from the @hr_minion listed them below:

1. Please submit a recent (within 2 weeks) post of yours for consideration to the current host.
2. Once the Carnival goes live please help promote it via twitter, your blog, or what have you.
3. Check out our fan page on Facebook and go to Twitter right now and follow CarnivalofHR!

That’s it!  Check back on February 17th for all the delightfully wet goodness of the Carnival of HR.

The latest Carnival of HR is up over at the Simply Lisa blog by Lisa Rosendahl.  This time the carnival is hosted in Central Minnesota and you know what that means: Get out your hand warmers and go read some great posts.

Here are a couple of posts that peaked my interest:

Kelly Mitton on 8 ways Gen Y can Impact HR

Paul Smith presents Fixing A Hole – HR’s responsibility to their Gay employee population

Trish McFarlane gives you some great tip on How to Simplify Your Social Media Life

I suppose I should plug my contribution to the Carnival in this post where I tell you how I Steal Time for Social Media

Big thanks to Lisa for pulling together a great Carnival with a fun winter theme.

Following on to my 2010 predictions blog post, I thought I might make some personal predictions for some of my HR Twitter peeps:

@SteveBoese will write one too many late night blog posts and will find himself inside the Squarespace server farm.

After battling a Windows Vista corrupt files issue all during the 2009 holiday break @thehrmaven will declare “if you can’t beat them, join them” and will become a Tech Support supervisor at Microsoft for Windows Vista.

@adowling will suffer a total hashtag breakdown and end up in a hashtag anonymous group where she will find that @TLColson is the group president. Unfortunately both will fall off the wagon and be kicked out when they are discovered whispering to each other during group meetings only in hashtags.

Looking to bring some order and discipline to his employee ranks, Dr. Evil hires @HR_Minion to be his Chief Operating Minion where she quickly convinces him to turn his back on his evil ways.

@beneubanks will evolve to pure energy, simultaneously posting to 40 blogs every day and publishing 12 books.

@billkutik will have to fly down to Fort Myers Florida for a personal intervention when @InFullBloomUS‘s latest blog post hits 100 pages and our brains explode.

The Federal Government will suddenly discover how influential @lisarosendahl really is and appoint her as Blogging Czar. Her first directive will be “Mr. Obama, tear down this firewall!”

@MisterScrubby finally asserts control over @lruettimann, changes her blog name to fakepunkrockhr.com and appoints @bncarvin chief comments moderator.

While dreaming after watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs with her twins, @TrishMcFarlane discovers the secret of cloning and will show up at every 2010 HR event and conference.

Do you have some HR Twitter Peep Predictions you want to share?  Come on now, you know you do.  Please add your predictions in the comments.

Wait, I wonder if this should have been a Google Wave instead.  Oh, never mind.

Well, well, well. That was quite an HR Happy Hour last night.  For the 2 people that read my blog that were NOT listening in live last night, here is the recording of last nights show.

It was wild and crazy and we all got a good belly laugh at the antics.  And yes we did find out that Laurie Ruettimann’s husband, Ken,  really does exist and despite Steve’s probing he didn’t crack at the pressure to reveal embarrassing things about Laurie.  As usual Steve and Shauna did a fantastic job as co-hosts and Shauna even got to push the buttons on the blogtalk radio control panel. Go Shauna.

Don’t forget to read all the back channel tweets for #HRHappyHour.  They are hilarious all by themselves.  Happy New Year and welcome to 2010.

Since @williamtincup over at Starr Tincup did not ask for my predictions for 2010, I guess I will have to blog about them right here on my shiny new WordPress Blog.  Since it is New Years Eve and my brain is now official mush for 2009, I could only come up with 5 (really lame) predictions.

SaaS continues to pick up steam

As company’s budgets open up in 2010 and they start looking at upgrading or replacing their aging legacy in-house HCM applications, they will turn to SaaS replacements.  Additionally many companies already using SaaS applications for Talent Management, Recruiting and Learning will switch to another SaaS provider based on perceived but not necessary real shortcoming of their current system  (grass is always greener syndrome).

Consumer information such as Social Security numbers will continue to get stolen

Many companies still have not implemented procedure changes and technology solutions to keep employee information safe.  Too many system administers, database administrators and developers have inappropriate access to employee information in the HR systems.  Additionally, too many people in HR also have access to sensitive employee information.  Controls are still not in place to prevent or detect when files containing social security numbers have been emailed, copied to USB drives or otherwise been spirited out side the company firewall.

Social Media sites will start to be unblocked

More companies will finally get the hint that blocking social media sites is not actually causing employees to avoid spending work time doing social media.  The rise in popularity of smart phones such as the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices that can easily access Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites convinces companies that blocking is futile.  However as more people start using sites such as Twitter and Facebook and post before they think, we will see an increase in the number of employees getting the boot at work for posting negative information about their company, co-workers or management.

Oracle Fusion Applications will…

…nope, sorry, no way am I going to predict anything about Oracle Fusion Applications

Bryon Abramowitz and Sarah White will move to a self hosted WordPress Blog

Okay, I sort of get to cheat on this. I started writing this blog post a couple of days ago when Bryon was asking for Blogger Theme help and I predicted that he would eventually be persuaded by his fellow bloggers to move to WordPress.  However Bryon jumped on this faster than my speeding greyhound and moved to a self hosted WordPress blog yesterday.  Sarah will eventually get plugin envy after seeing all the really cool buttons on other people’s blogs and will move her WordPress.com blog to a self hosted site.

There you go. I hope everyone has nice New Years Eve and I am looking forward to continuing the conversations in 2010.