Posted by Darrell Hyatt on December 5, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast.. 2009 is almost over and the holiday season will be here shortly. This year has gone by very quickly for me, I had so many plans and so many ideas of things I wanted to do, some of which I was able to do others I was not.
My business is currently undergoing some changes in a variety of ways including how I want to better service my clients both all and new. I am changing my website adding new features and new ways for people to communicate and interact with me. I will be doing a series of webinars in the New Year on how to create transcripts for your podcasts.
I look forward to 2010 I want to make it my best year yet, I look forward to working with new people, take on new challenges and projects and overall help more people to reach their goals in full potential.
I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday season whatever that may be for you, I also wish you the best in 2010. Please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com. or visit my website www.enablingabilities.com. thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on November 16, 2009
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Here is my latest post, it sounds different because I used a new recording method. Enjoy!
Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast Windows 7 has now been out for several weeks and I thought it would be a good time to discuss that important question whether or not to upgrade to the latest version of Windows?
The first things to consider when thinking of upgrading is does my existing computer handle my computing needs, both now and in the immediate future. If the answer to that question is yes then there may not be a need for you to upgrade, if however your existing machine does not meet your current needs and your future need or if your computer is not working at all than now may be a very good time to not only purchase a new computer but upgrade to Windows 7 is well.
When looking at whether to upgrade or not one of the first things to think about is what are the minimum requirements to run Windows 7 efficiently and effectively with the other software that you use.
When I looked at the minimum system requirements from the Microsoft website it included a minimum of a 1 GHz processor or faster 32-bit or 64-bit CPU, they recommended for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 you needed a minimum of 16 GB of hard drive space for the 32 bit version. The 64-bit version required at 20 GB of hard drive space.
Another concern is the amount of RAM that you have on your computer for the 32-bit version of Windows Microsoft recommends 1 GB of RAM, for the 64-bit version they suggest 2 GB of RAM. This number does not include having extra RAM to run other programs that you would normally run within the Windows operating system.
I would strongly suggest having a minimum of 4 GB of RAM no matter which version of Windows 7 you are going to be running, I also suggest a much faster processor than the 1 GHz which is suggested on the Microsoft website.
If you’re anything like me you tend to run multiple applications at once, for example most days I have my E-mail running I have Skype for communications and I usually have a least one web browser open at any given time. I have 3 1/2 GB of RAM on my Windows XP system and everything runs quite smoothly if you’re going to be upgrading you definitely want the system to run smoothly and the more RAM you have along with the speed of your processor will make this an effective computer for you. My best suggestion if you’re going to do an upgrade of both your hardware and your operating system purchase the best system that you can afford that will meet your current and future needs.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com you can also visit my website which is www.enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on October 28, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast, last week I returned from Las Vegas and the BlogWorld and Social Media Expo. This was the third year that my wife and I have attended the conference and as usual it was very good.
I learned a great deal about what other people were doing with their podcasts as well as learned several new techniques involving video which is one of the other areas that I enjoy working in. I had the opportunity to meet several new people as well as connect with friends whom we had seen at previous BlogWorld Expo’s overall it was a wonderful experience and I look forward to next year’s blog world already.
We also had the opportunity to take a vacation while we were in Las Vegas he weather was very warm and very nice which I always enjoy.
This year I was in for some very interesting surprises, as many of you may know I am a NASCAR fan and have been watching it for years. One of the things that I happened to mention to my wife some time ago was I would love to ride in the NASCAR and experience the thrill and speed of being in a NASCAR.
Well to my great surprise she and several of our friends Damien and Jennifer were able to arrange just that, the only thing is I knew nothing of it. So on Tuesday we left early in the morning and I had no idea where we were going, we arrived at the Las Vegas Speedway and at that point I still have no idea what was going to happen.
A short while later several people loaded me in to a NASCAR and I was able to go around the track for several laps at 165 miles an hour, which was a great thrill for me something I never thought that I would experience and something I will never forget. So I would like to thank all the people involved in making that experience come true.
If you have listened to my previous podcast done just prior to me going to Las Vegas you will remember that I mentioned I had a surprise that I was going to launch when I returned, I am doing a webinar on how to create transcripts and show notes for your podcasts so for those of you who are podcasters and would like to learn how to do transcripts and show notes using a piece of software called Dragon NaturallySpeaking and some basic editing techniques involved in creating your transcription show notes please look for information which will be posted on my website very shortly, the website is www.enablingabilities.com
If you have any questions comments or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com Thank you very much
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on October 12, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast. I am so excited, on Monday my wife and I leave for Las Vegas we are going to the BlogWorld conference for bloggers and others who use social media.
This will be our third year attending this particular conference and I look forward to it every year. It gives me a chance to meet other people who are creating podcasts and doing similar work to myself, it gives me an opportunity to meet new people and learn new skills.
This year I have something very special that I’m going to announce at BlogWorld to the people there I hope to help pod casters be better at what they do. I will be enjoying the somewhat warmer weather of Las Vegas than what we have here.
If you’d like to know more about what my special announcement is please come and see me if you’re at BlogWorld and for the rest of you who may be listening I will be announcing it when I return from BlogWorld, along with a full report of the interesting information that I find while I’m at BlogWorld.
Please watch my website which is www.enablingabilities.com for further details and enjoy the next few weeks I know I certainly will. Thank you very much
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on September 20, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to do a podcast because I have been in the hospital for several weeks recovering from pneumonia.
During this period of time we’ve had a variety of individuals in and out of the house and last week one of the people that had been in our home to assist me was a gentleman who had said that his daughter had just gone to university and he was feeling a bit stressed about that and trying to figure ways to stay in touch with his daughter.
He talked about the fact that he had a inexpensive phone plan that would allow him to phone his daughter for an hour for $.99, but he had to pay a five dollars monthly fee for the phone line. I asked if his daughter had a computer and if he had one? he said yes to both questions and I said well I have a cheaper method the may work better for you that being the computer application Skype when I described what Skype would allow him to do he was very intrigued.
The next time I saw him he had installed Skype on his computer and sent an e-mail to his daughter suggesting that she download Skype, and then there they could find a convenient time to connect and hopefully this method will not only be less expensive but will allow both of them to stay in contact and keep the communication channels open.
Based on this I thought why don’t I talk about not only that but some of the other tools that are available for communication so that parents can stay in touch with children and generally family members can communicate with grandparents and other people important to them, not only is there Skype as I mentioned but if you’re more of a text based person you can use things like twitter which is www. twitter.com.
There’s also Facebook which allows pictures and text and all sorts of interesting things all these applications that I mentioned are free and they require you to create an account with a username and password and then you can share that information with other people that you want to communicate with and stay in touch.
So I’m sure this is only beginning of what is possible in terms of programs and so on, but these are the main ones that I use and that other people use to stay in touch. It’s also called social media if you are looking to do some research on these programs you can google social media and no doubt all of these and many more will show up in the search. I hope this has given you some ideas that you can use to communicate with the people that are important to you.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on July 15, 2009
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Hello and welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast. Summer has finally arrived I have several projects which I’d like to complete or at least get a very good start on over the summer, the first of which is spend some quality time with my wife doing the things that we very much like to do. Like going out in the sunshine and exploring the various parts of our beautiful city.
I would also like to achieve several business goals which have been on my mind for a while now, the first of which I find myself thinking about is the fact that I’m not very comfortable writing things and I have recently purchased the book called “Can Do Writing“.
Which describes a 10 step process for writing various business documents and so and details the process which should make writing more comfortable, at least that is my hope.
Another goal for me is to become more active in the area of social media and becoming more comfortable with marketing my business as a whole. The more I look at the things that I want to do with my business and the places that I want to take my business the more I see that marketing is, and will continue to be a major factor.
It doesn’t matter how many podcasts I do, how wonderful my website looks , how many products or services I have available if people don’t know that I exist and that I have these products and services to help individuals with their computer training and so on.
It doesn’t do me any good at all and I don’t achieve the biggest goal that I want for my business, which is to be able to help individuals with their computer training needs as well as help individuals with disabilities to achieve their full potential.
Over the summer I am going to endeavor to do a better job at using social media and marketing as a whole to make myself more known and to more importantly build relationships with as many people as I can , to allow me to help as many individuals as possible. I would be interested in hearing others’ thoughts on the topic of social media and marketing. Any tips that you may have as well as any key concerns that you’ve got for your business, things that you are working on to do more than you are currently.
If you have any comments questions or concerns please email me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com feel free to visit my website which is www.enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on July 5, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast, a few days ago while riding on the sky train I saw a poster for a job fair which was coming up in our local area this cause me to think a great deal about how things had changed in the last five years for me.
Five years ago I was employed in a regular employment situation where someone else controlled the hours that I worked, the days that I worked, and in some ways what I did and how I did it.
The more I thought about the way things are now being self-employed I enjoy much more freedom, much more control. I choose the type of work that I do, who I work with, as well as the hours and the days that I work.
I’m able to take time off when I want to and when I need to. I’m able to spend much more time with friends and family doing the things that I enjoy and I get to work the hours that I want, best of all I don’t have to leave home to do what I do.
Whether is no longer a factor for me and neither is the amount of time that I commute back and forth to work because I can be anywhere in my home within 30 seconds. I also find it very interesting that due to modern technology I can work with anyone anywhere in the world and never leave home.
Being self-employed has given me a great deal of options that I didn’t have before, I’m realizing how fortunate I am to have this opportunity and I am no longer so worried about my future because my future is now in my control.
I can make my future anything that I choose and to me this means a great deal, I’m sure as I grew more and more and develop my business into what I envision in my mind at this point I will become even more comfortable with self employment.
I would like to hear your thoughts and opinions on this topic, please e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.comfeel free to visit my website www.enablingabilities.com Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on June 15, 2009
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Hello and welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast over the next month or so I’m going to be talking about something that is important to all of us as computer users at one time or another, answering that question of when is it time to upgrade my computer or my software.
This is a question that we all face at some time or another and recently it’s come to my attention because several of my clients have either had issues with their computer hardware or are finding their existing computer hardware is not fast enough or adequate enough for their needs and is becoming more of a problem than a solution.
Once you decide that it may be time to upgrade your hardware there are several key questions that come into play, and I’m going to start with some of the basic ones here. As the series goes on and I will look at other questions and put the whole picture together for you to assist you in not only deciding if now is the right time to upgrade but also what should I be looking at to make sure that the next system I get will meet my current needs as well is my future needs.
When deciding what to do about your computer hardware needs some of the important issues to look at are items such as what type of computer processing do I need for example is a dual core processor enough, or do I need to move to the new quad core meanings four processor chips system rather than my existing system. If you computer is up to three years old you most likely have a dual core processor meaning two processing cores in one.
One of the other issues to look at is how much RAM do I need in my new computer. Ram memory is the working storage for your computer this is where all your running programs are stored while you’re using them. The more memory you have the better, it means you can have multiple programs running at one time with a minimum amount of conflicts here again having a dual core processor or quad processor will also help with the amount of programs a user can have running at one time without noticing any slowdown in performance
A major key question to answer here as well is what size hard drive do I need for storing of my programs as well is my data and information which I create. If you are running a business, or if you do a lot of photography or video work you may want a larger hard drive. Today when you purchase new computers they generally come with hard drives ranging anywhere from 320 GB on up to 750 GB perhaps even 1TB. My recommendation is the larger the hard drive the better.
If you have any comments, concerns or questions please in e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com. Please feel free to visit my website which is www.enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on May 11, 2009
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Hello and welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast, my name is Darrell Hyatt. Have you ever had one of those days or weeks where as a small business owner and entrepeneur everything seems to go a little off the rails in that we’ve all got so many things that were working on, so many projects that we are in the midst of.
Things that we worry about such as money for example or how are we going to fit in time to do that one more task that we really need to get done. Do you ever have one of those projects that drives you crazy? it always seems that there is a challenge or something that you can’t figure out how to do and yet you know that you need to get it done, its crucial to what you do as a business owner.
I had one of those recently, as many of you may know I do training videos on a wide variety of computer topics. One of the things that I face is the fact that being in a wheelchair trying to produce my own video’s here in my office I don’t have a lot of space.
So it’s always been a challenge when producing my video’s to be more than a talking head. And I’ve been looking at buying a new video camera that would hopefully allow me to do a better job, and allow me to show more of myself on the screen. Recently I was able to borrow a video camera from a colleague of mine.
I tested it and it certainly did work somewhat better than my existing camera but I was still very frustrated because I couldn’t achieve the look that I wanted, the professionalism for my videos. Recently I found using another piece of software I can now achieve the results that I want.
This opens up a great number of doors for me in terms of video production and the quality of the finished product. Now what I have come to realize as I’ve been doing this is that if you take the time to honestly listen to your self and trust in your own abilities you will find an appropriate solution that suits you as an individual and as a business owner.
This has been one of those a- ha moments or awakenings for me because I now see and understand how I have to trust myself and believe in myself to help me achieve the goals and the results that I want, and I’ve also discovered if you build a good team of people around you who have a variety of skill sets that complement your own it will definitely assist you in getting where you want to be and relieving some of those stresses that we all face as business owners.
My challenge to you is to look back over the last week or so for example and see if you have had any a-ha moments or awakenings and describe for me either in e-mail or a comment some of those challenges that you’ve had that really allowed you to look within yourself and expand your realm of what’s possible for you.
If you’d like to learn more about what I can do and how I can assist you please visit www.enablingabilities.com or e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on April 15, 2009
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Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast, my name this Darrell Hyatt. There’s been a lot of talk and discussion recently about social media and how it assists both entrepreneurs and clients to build relationships and maintain a connection with one another.
I want to talk about some of the tools that I use in my business to assist me with that connection, creating a relationship with individuals. If you listen to my previous podcast I talked about two programs one was Skype www.skype.com which is a communication program the other one that I talk about was the Mikogo www.mikogo.com which works in conjunction with Skype.
While I thought there is so much more to the topic of what’s called Web conferencing and essentially that’s a tool that many of us use to work with our clients to assist them where we can actually, not only talk to them but see what is on their computer screen or show them what’s on our computer screen for example it may be a website that were talking about.
Some of the features that you may want to look for in a web conferencing application which in my mind a simple way of looking at this is “give me the tools that will allow me to communicate with either another person or a group of people at the same time without limitation or restriction to what information I present to them, and give them away to communicate back to me so that we have a true two-way communication.”
Here are some of the key tools that I look for in applications that I want to use, number one because I’m a computer trainer I want the screen sharing so that both of us can see what’s on the other person’s computer screen in real time. I also want to be able to switch presenters so that I’m not always the one presenting the material on my screen.
Remote control can be very useful this allows me to take over someone’s keyboard and mouse, it allows me to perform operations on their computer from my keyboard and mouse not everyone needs this sort of functionality depending on what you’re doing.
Another nice feature is having the ability to do file transfers. If I want to send someone a document or file that I’ve created and I want them to have access to it, rather than sending it through e-mail for example if it tends to be larger file I can send it through the file transfer of my web conferencing application.
Another nice feature is to be able to record the meeting and play it back for future reference and I can send it to the individual so they can have an archived copy of it. One of the things you may want to look at here is if only the presenters audio is recorded, or whether the presenters audio plus the participants audio is recorded along with the presenters screen.
Most web conferencing applications now will come with a white board which will allow everyone to draw on the whiteboard and present their ideas and your able come up with a final drawing or diagram based on everyone’s input.
This is all wonderful in terms of the things that we can do but there is also the consideration of a cost factor? and this is where if you are a Skype user already there are several applications that will work with Skype and as I said earlier, Mikogo is one of those such applications, another one is called Yugma www.yugma.com that is also a integrated Skype application.
Now with Yugma you can have up to 20 people for free with the integration of Skype and they do have options to increase that to 50,100 or 500 people but those are not integrated with Skype.
Another application that does this is one called DimDim www.dimdim.com it’s not integrated with Skype but it does have VoIP which is voice over Internet protocol capability which means you’re not paying long distance charges for connecting with the service or neither are your participants, and again with DimDim you can have up to 20 people. With the Mikogo you are limited to 10 people and based on your needs 10 may be sufficient 20 may be fine or you may need more.
I will put the links to all three of these applications in the transcript for this podcast and if this type of service interests you I recommend checking out all three of these services to see which one will best suit your individual needs.
If you have any comments, concerns or questions please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com also you can visit my website www.enablingabilities.com for information about all the services that we can assist you with. Thank you very much.