Alright, I haven’t had time to post the winner for the simple fact that my ass hasn’t been off the bike long enough to do so and using my laptop doesn’t work on a motorcycle.

So, I actually didn’t buy either one of the bikes that I listed on the last post, but instead bought a 2009 Softail NIGHT TRAIN. I couldn’t help myself really. Once I seen this one and sat on it…I instantly knew that it was the one. So…..Here it is!

Air-cooled, Twin Cam 96B™
96.00 cu. in.
3.75 in. x 4.38 in.
87.90 ft lbs @ 2750 rpm

Okay, so I have to make one of the toughest decisions in my life! Below you will see 2 bikes and only one of these will come home with me tomorrow….which one will it be?

This is the Harley Davidson Night Rod! Choice number 1.

The aggressive speed screen visor framing the headlamp tells you they better be ready. Mid-mount controls set you up with a riding position that screams “go.” New black, five-spoke cast aluminum wheels, optional ABS brakes and a liquid-cooled 125-horsepower, 1,250-cubic-centimeter Revolution® engine leave no doubt about the hot rod inspiration behind this beast. Optional chrome engine covers provide the sparkle. If you haven’t gotten the message yet, one twist of the throttle clears up any doubt.

2009 H.D. Custom “Chisel” XL1200N Nightster / Option #2

What a HOT paintset! Additional features include all new HD Black Diamond grips, black mini-apes handlebars, black forward controls, and black diamond clutch, brake and throttle cables.

So which will it be……I don’t know, but I will be happy to tell you as soon as I bring one of these SEXY BEASTS home tomorrow!!!

Awesome bike descriptions courtesy of Rocky Mount Harley Davidson.

Emotional intelligence has to do with your way of reacting to things and of understanding other peoples? feelings and emotions on an intuitive level. People with a high level of emotional intelligence are simply skilled at emotions in general including personal emotions, emotions of a person, and the emotions of a whole group. Not only can people with high emotional intelligence understand emotions readily, they can also take this understanding and shape the emotions of each. Basically, people with emotional intelligence simply have the ability to get a long with other people.

This seems simple, but not everyone has a high emotional intelligence level. Ever wonder why some people simply can?t get along with others? They probably do not have a lot of emotional intelligence. Either that or they just do not care about how other people feel and try to deliberately hurt others.

When you have a high amount of emotional intelligence, this can actually benefit you in many ways. First, people with a high emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ, tend to be excellent sales people, marketing experts, and succeed in the work force in general. They also make great psychiatrists and psychologists because they are really in tune with the human condition.

So how do you know if you have a high amount of emotional intelligence? You can assess your personality by consulting with a personality and emotional intelligence expert. There are plenty of tests you can take and way to get assessments. You can also take an emotional intelligence quiz that you find online.

There is some controversy surrounding the notion of emotional intelligence. Is this a branch of intelligence or merely a type of personality trait? The issue has been debated extensively in certain circles. But to most, the idea makes sense. The fact that there would be a certain type of person who seems to handle people better than others is undeniable. Whether or not this is a determiner of a certain kind of intelligence is the part in question.

One thing is certain. People with a high amount of emotional intelligence can not only understand and manage their own emotions, but those of individuals and even larger groups. This is an essential trait for people who work with others.

Why Coaching is the Way to Go in Team Management

When you hear the word “coach”, what comes first into your mind? Do you picture a basketball team with a man/woman shouting out directions? Or perhaps a football team with a man/woman pacing to and fro and calling out the names of the players?

Coaching is no longer reserved to sports teams; it is now one of the key concepts in leadership and management. Why is coaching popular?

Coaching levels the playing field.

Coaching is one of the six emotional leadership styles proposed by Daniel Goleman. Moreover, it is a behavior or role that leaders enforce in the context of situational leadership. As a leadership style, coaching is used when the members of a group or team are competent and motivated, but do not have an idea of the long-term goals of an organization. This involves two levels of coaching: team and individual. Team coaching makes members work together. In a group of individuals, not everyone may have nor share the same level of competence and commitment to a goal. A group may be a mix of highly competent and moderately competent members with varying levels of commitment. These differences can cause friction among the members. The coaching leader helps the members level their expectations. Also, the coaching leader manages differing perspectives so that the common goal succeeds over personal goals and interests. In a big organization, leaders need to align the staffs’ personal values and goals with that of the organization so that long-term directions can be pursued.

Coaching builds up confidence and competence.

Individual coaching is an example of situational leadership at work. It aims to mentor one-on-one building up the confidence of members by affirming good performance during regular feedbacks; and increase competence by helping the member assess his/her strengths and weaknesses towards career planning and professional development. Depending on the individual’s level of competence and commitment, a leader may exercise more coaching behavior for the less-experienced members. Usually, this happens in the case of new staffs. The direct supervisor gives more defined tasks and holds regular feedbacks for the new staff, and gradually lessens the amount of coaching, directing, and supporting roles to favor delegating as competence and confidence increase.

Coaching promotes individual and team excellence.

Excellence is a product of habitual good practice. The regularity of meetings and constructive feedback is important in establishing habits. Members catch the habit of constantly assessing themselves for their strengths and areas for improvement that they themselves perceive what knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to acquire to attain team goals. In the process, they attain individually excellence as well. An example is in the case of a musical orchestra: each member plays a different instrument. In order to achieve harmony of music from the different instrument, members will polish their part in the piece, aside from practicing as an ensemble. Consequently, they improve individually as an instrument player.

Coaching develops high commitment to common goals.

A coaching leader balances the attainment of immediate targets with long-term goals towards the vision of an organization. As mentioned earlier, with the alignment of personal goals with organizational or team goals, personal interests are kept in check. By constantly communicating the vision through formal and informal conversations, the members are inspired and motivated. Setting short-term team goals aligned with organizational goals; and making an action plan to attain these goals can help sustain the increased motivation and commitment to common goals of the members.

Coaching produces valuable leaders.

Leadership by example is important in coaching. A coaching leader loses credibility when he/she cannot practice what he/she preaches. This means that a coaching leader should be well organized, highly competent is his/her field, communicates openly and encourages feedback, and has a clear idea of the organization’s vision-mission-goals. By vicarious and purposive learning, members catch the same good practices and attitudes from the coaching leader, turning them into coaching leaders themselves. If a member experiences good coaching, he/she is most likely to do the same things when entrusted with formal leadership roles.

Some words of caution though: coaching is just one of the styles of leadership. It can be done in combination with the other five emotional leadership styles depending on the profile of the emerging team. Moreover, coaching as a leadership style requires that you are physically, emotionally, and mentally fit most of the time since it involves two levels of coaching: individual and team. Your members expect you to be the last one to give up or bail out in any situation especially during times of crises. A coaching leader must be conscious that coaching entails investing time on each individual, and on the whole team. Moreover, that the responsibilities are greater since while you are coaching members, you are also developing future coaches as well.

I just downloaded Firefox 3. For the first few hours it seemed fine, until I actually logged on to this site to make a post. It seems as the new Firefox release is not loading my pages properly. At first glance I thought maybe there was something wrong with my site, but then I loaded in IE and everything looked fine.

That’s why I always keep different browsers on my desktop, so that if there is ever anything in question I can load something in different browsers to cross reference it. Also, as a developer you want to make sure that whatever sites you are working loas properly in different browsers.

So, is there something wrong with the coding on my site or is it ff3? Quite frankly I don’t know at this point, but I have spoken with others who are having similar problems.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love ff, but I feel that there should have been more testing if it is indeed soemthing wrong with the new browser.

Are you having challenges with ff3?

Too much of thought is spent on useless things for it to be truly helpful in tackling a big issue. If you have something you are trying to brainstorm about, you will probably run into a few problems if it is your first time brainstorming. It can be hard to focus on the problem at hand in order to find the best solution. You may also spend time thinking in directions that won?t end up helping you find the final solution. Therefore, you should follow certain brainstorming rules that have been used by brainnstormers for years. They will help you get started with the best brainstorming session.

The first rule of brainstorming is to ignore absolutely no idea. Anything that comes to you during the brainstorming process is one more idea than you had before, and therefore should not be discounted. Even if you think it is absolutely ridiculous when it first comes to you, you should write it down anyway. You may find it is more possible than you realized before, or that you can build a working plan off of its basic premise.

You should always keep either a piece of paper or a tape recorder with you during your brainstorming session. Either of these will allow you to record everything that comes to you, and maximize your brainstorming session. You can buy nice dictating tape recorders that will switch on whenever you start talking. These are often hailed as one of the best ways to keep track of your thoughts during a brainstorming session. Afterwards if you forget an idea, you can just hit the rewind key and listen to your very moment of revelation once again.

Once you are done, you may be faced with a horde of great ideas, or you may have found absolutely nothing. But brainstorming is a powerful process that allows you to unlock the vast resource that is your own mind, and allow you to think of the problem from a different standpoint and possibly be able to think of something. So give it a try. It will only take a short while, and may give you something that you never thought was possible.

Some Hot Business Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

These days, a lot of trends in the business arena have surfaced. In a year, several business opportunities for entrepreneurs rank as the hottest. So as a budding entrepreneur, what field would you like to get into? It is believed by many that in opening a business, it must be something within the scope of your own expertise.

You need to have an initial knowledge about what opportunity you are getting into. In managing any type of business, it is a must that you exert a personal effort on it. But then as the times are concerned, it goes to point out that the business of your choice must be something which is within the trends and that which is appreciated by the consumers. Or else, you are opening yourself into some great possibilities of losing in business.

For a guide, here are among the hottest trends of business opportunities for entrepreneurs in the year 2007:

Communications Coach or Writing Instructor. Most American businesses involve the flow of communications. After all, how can a business transaction transpire if there is no communication that exists within the concerned parties? Most office personnel in America lack one skill—and that is the power to communicate effectively.

In all levels of business, the staff members are asked to communicate orally, verbally, or technologically. But then most of them fail to do well in the task. They cannot even generate sensible sentences for that matter. Unfortunately though, a lot of English classes held in high school and college levels tend to overlook this matter so the graduates are not molded for these kinds of situations. One of the hottest business opportunities for entrepreneurs this year is to put up groups that would coach people in the entrepreneurial level in terms of communication. Many American companies seek the services of communications coaches and writing instructors.

Blogging. In a technologically advanced world, most information, ideas, and transactions are already done via the net. Blogging is one of the hottest and rising business opportunities this year. Whether the phase is internal or external, the blog must be well written so that it will be highly effective. Most companies involve blogging as part of their marketing strategies and if the blog is more or less poorly conceived, you know exactly what it will reflect for the company. The corporations that employ blogging as part of their businesses should provide ample training background in writing skills to their staff members.

Security and IT Privacy Consultant. For companies that mainly run technological-based industries, what they need are people who are IT competent and who knows how to troubleshoot technological problems. Since they deal much with information, they also need sufficient security. That is why masters in these matters are very much in-demand. As an entrepreneur, you can put up a business that relates to this need.

Some Construction-Related Operations. The country cannot rid of constructions of all types since it is moving towards global competitiveness. In the midst of all these constructions are great opportunities for entrepreneurs that are concerned with the plumbing, electric, carpentry, drywalling, and general contracting services.

Home Caregiving. In America per se, the aged individuals are always put in Home for the Aged institutions as their children are busy to care for them. It has been a custom to hire home caregivers for them. In the rate of employment, there are several individuals who go for caregiving since it is a highly paid job. If you may be interested, you can put up a home caregiving agency and earn much because of the high demand for such services.

Medical Technician or Home Healthcare Nurse. This business opportunity is likely related to the discussion above.

Virtual Assistants. The demand for virtual assistance is all the more increasing. People who would like to have online secretaries who can take charge of anything which they need pay much just so they can avail of the service. As an entrepreneur it will be beneficial on your part to come up with a set of staff members to work as virtual assistants.

Ebay Trading Assistants. People certainly love to shop on ebay especially with all those auctions. Being a seller in the website can invite lots of money for you.

Mobile Phone Applications. People cannot be detached from their mobile phones these days. So the demand for more advanced and upgraded phones increase each day. Outlets for mobile phones sales and repairs all the more prove to be successful this year.

There are more and more business opportunities that may knock on the doors of budding entrepreneurs. If you know how to handle a business, you will likely succeed.

Some people believe that your IQ is the ultimate indicator of intelligence. Children take IQ tests, and if they get a high score, they are considered gifted. That was the old school of thought. The new school of thought indicates that there are several indicators of intelligence and not all of them have to do with traditional book learning methods. Teachers and parents nowadays are more sensitive to the fact that each child is different and everyone has their own strengths.

Yes, it is true that someone with a high IQ has a high amount of a certain type of ability. Some are good in math and science; others are better at language and writing. However, in order to score well on typical IQ tests, you pretty much need to have a high amount of ability in several different areas. Some people consider this to be flawed thinking.

Instead of focusing on IQ, parents, teachers, and children should worry about building their own unique strengths and abilities. This should start early in a child?s life. For example, if a child shows aptitude in music, perhaps learning an instrument is a good idea. If a child likes to read, suggest to them different books and ask them questions about it.

However, there is a fine line between building their abilities and pushing them too far. Ask them what they want to do. Encourage them to build their skills and learn. Make them feel as if they have a choice. Even a child with a high IQ will renounce their schooling and get poor grades if they are driven to it by their parents, teachers, and peers. Good parenting and good teaching will help a child reach his or her own abilities.

Having a high IQ is not important these days because most feel that it doesn?t truly measure intelligence. IQ tests don?t take into account the fact that some children have abilities in areas such as art and music. People with high levels of abilities in these areas can also be considered geniuses. Instead of worrying about the terminology, work instead to build your own strengths. Living up to your personal potential and enhancing the skills in what you are good at is more important than what any IQ test can say.

A friend and fellow blogger posted this today and it really inspired me. This is one of the greatest speeches of all time in my opinion and from one of the greatest actors of all time. I just wanted to shared this magical 4 minute speech from the movie Any Given Sunday!

Do enjoy and be inspired!

Recently I’ve had challenges with my bills that are paid automatically online through a credit card. It’s becoming a common occurrence over the past couple of months.

At first I thought the problem was with the specific company which was attempting to process my billing. Each month the number of challenges with processing my payment has increased. Since I do a lot of work online and have a bunch of different accounts from auto responders, hosting, video posting services and all my personal bills that are processed automatically it has become a little frustrating.

I felt that it was not a coincidence that it was happening with several different accounts, I decided to contact my bank to see if there was a challenge there.

My bank gave me a really good explanation of what the problem was. Banks are tightening up on internet billing preferences such as addresses, phone numbers, zip codes, etc. These fields are much more sensitive when it comes to processing online payments. I simply had to make sure that my information in my accounts was very detailed. It even recognizes the street number on my address.

So, this is a good thing now that I have realized what’s going on. The security measures that the banks are taking to protect us are very advanced and do a great job at protecting us from fraud.