Alpha Mind Blog

5 hours + later, and it still works, and with del.icio.us re-enabled! Oh joy!

Within minutes after my last post, I got an email from the Sage user list. It wasn’t someone trying to help me, but someone with a problem of their own. Two minutes later, he wrote again to say “never mind.” But, wotcha know?–his problem solved mine!

He had messed with his Feed Folder setting in Sage. I’m pretty sure I had not messed with my Feed Folder setting, but something had, and I just had to set it back to the right folder. Everything works.

Now I have the combination I want: Sage to aggregate my feeds, and, in the same Firefox window, Performancing to allow me to instantly blog any page I’m looking at. (And Performancing does it faster than the Wordpress interface, because it’s only doing database calls to do the post, not feeding me a page on which to edit.)

Until Murphy strikes again, I’m in blog heaven!

Over a year ago I scrapped the very annoying Awasu feed reader and went with Sage. Today Sage died. So, asks the tech support guy in my mind, have you changed anything?

Well, yes, just a bit. I upgraded Firefox to 2.0.0.1. I was then advised to upgrade Sage, which I did. I then installed the del.icio.us plug-in. Now Sage shows nothing but blank windows. All the feeds I’ve ever subscribed to are gone. I know that the bookmarks for the feeds still exist, because when I uninstall delicious, they reappear under my Firefox Bookmarks menu. So I can get at them using Firefox, but only if I leave delicious uninstalled, which I’m not sure I want to do.

I’ve written an email to the Sage user list. We’ll see if I get any help.

Meantime, I am so desperate for a feed reader that I downloaded Awasu again and tried it out. It took me 40 minutes to lose patience with it and uninstall it. When it needs to open a new window to read a page, it opens IE by default, and I hope never to have to use IE again. It can be set to use “Mozilla,” and I don’t even know if this is supposed to mean Firefox, because when it’s set that way (and the required Mozilla ActiveX control in installed), no new windows are ever opened. Nothing happens at all.

I’ll be trying Google Reader, but already I see a problem with it: there’s no OPML export function, so that any list of feeds I build for it can go nowhere else. I’ll give it an hour, perhaps, to see if it has any features so wonderful that I’m willing to overlook this grave defect. My hopes are not high.

In five months I leave my pastorate at Berkeley Friends Church. At that point I’ll emerge from my semi-retirement and go back to full-time consulting. And just what, you ask, does my consulting consist of?

I help intelligent people and companies sound as smart as they are. I give them the tools to be thought leaders, and help them use these tools to achieve their goals, further their causes, and propel their careers.

In the next month, I’ll chronicle the work I’m doing to prepare for the full launch of my business. This will start, today, with some of the joys and sorrows I encounter as I return to active blogging after several months away from it.

I’m happy to be returning to blogging after some months’ hiatus.

….the site

The Alpha Mind is Max Christian Hansen’s blog about thought leadership. Here is its rationale:

We live and die by ideas. Thinking is an endeavor of the highest importance.

Not only every person, but every social grouping lives and dies by ideas. Families, communities, non-profits and churches, business enterprises, nation-states, and even, when the stakes are global, all humankind, must originate, evaluate, accept or reject, and act upon ideas. As every problem whose stakes are large is a problem that will be thought about, effective thinking is as urgent a craft as any we engage in together. Thinking is a social endeavor of the highest importance. And it is an endeavor which calls for leadership.

This blog is intended to help thought leaders do it well.

About Max

Max Christian Hansen is a management consultant who has been studying technological innovation, leadership, and the specialized field of thought leadership for over a decade. From 1992 through 2001 he operated the consulting firm The Max Hansen Group, which focused on innovation, incubation, and technology marketing. Now semi-retired, Hansen continues to consult (without a group), and is the part-time pastor of Berkeley Friends Church in Berkeley, CA.

This blog and related web site will be the channel for publication of Max’s studies in Thought Leadership. It will be accompanied by a podcast (May 2007) and other media that seem appropriate.

Max’s work on Thought Leadership has been influenced by:

• Robert Greenleaf’s work on servant leadership,
• Robert Levering’s work on workplace quality,
• several decades’ experience of the peculiar participatory leadership models of Quakerism, and
• studies of “public strategy” which he performed in his own consulting engagements and while working at Sun Microsystems.

Max may be contacted at:

510-541-7971
max(-at-)alum.mit.edu