Emotional Quotient – What You Need to Know About EQ For Success in Workplace and Personal Life

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2014 | Business, Management | 0 comments

I recently took training on taming your EQ / Emotional Quotient at my workplace. This article is some of the notes/lessons learned from the training. It really was an insightful training.

Be self-aware:

Questions to ask yourself:

1. Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
2. Are you overly pessimistic/optimistic? If yes, find a balance.
3. Are you being good to people.?
4. Talk to people directly more than you IM / Facebook. (Otherwise, you will forget to feel others feelings and end up recognizing emoticons / only if the person tells you)
5. Approach people with empathy/trust to connect/influence them.

Be aware of others:

Emotions in facial expressions only last for .5 seconds. Learn to read them. If you don’t react to other people’s emotions that doesn’t make you a good communicator!

Value others emotions, and how to transform them by using the below technique:

VET – Validate, Explore, Transform.

Ask questions to drive other emotions to positivity.

Validate:

1. I sense you are feeling…
2. I get the sense you are…

Explore:

1. Hey, what’s really bothering you about?
2. What is the underlying fear/anger/disappointment?

Transform:

1. What are you going to do now?
2. How are you going to tackle this?

For your family life – Bringing up kids:

1. Let them express their emotions – don’t conceal them or ask them to not to show.
2. If they are angry, let them be angry. – Use VET to transform
3. If they are happy let them laugh/giggle out loud.
4. If they are afraid of something, Use VET to transform

Validate, ask questions to drive them towards fearlessness rather than being blunt and saying (it’s just a cockroach) vs say (why are you afraid? …. Why do feel scared about that? … etc.)

Stop Serving Images Directly From s3.amazonaws.com – Alias The Domain

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 1, 2014 | Business, Management | 0 comments

I see a lot of websites serve images directly from s3.amazonaws.com. Do you know a lot of corporates just blindly block this url? What your users may see is just empty “x” boxes instead of your beautiful images and will end up viewing your website as an ugly piece like this:

LeanPub.com from a corporate network

AppSumo.com from a corporate network

How to set an alias domain name or sub-domain name to Amazon S3:

Courtesy: https://carltonbale.com/how-to-alias-a-domain-name-or-sub-domain-to-amazon-s3/

Introductory Steps for new Amazon S3 Users:

First of all, obviously, you need your own domain name and your own Amazon S3 account

Secondly, you need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets, so you’ll need to install a client on your PC.

I recommend using Bucket Explorer, which is a full-featured and easy-to-use client that runs on Windows and Linux; (a Mac version is in private beta and should be available Oct 2007).

A free, less-featured alternative is the S3 Organizer add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Install your application of choice and either:

1. Open Bucket Explorer -or-
2. Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 organizer, and click the Manage Accounts button
3. Enter your AmazonAWS Access Key and Secret Key

These are available by going to https://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over the “Your Web Services Account” in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting “AWS Access Identifiers“

How to Alias your Subdomain to an Amazon S3 Bucket:

Identify the exact domain name you want to forward to Amazon S3. S3 is not a web server, so I would not recommend forwarding your entire domain there, but rather a sub-domain. The sub-domain I’m going to use is the actual one I set up: s3.carltonbale.com

Create a new “bucket” (a.k.a. folder) by clicking the “create folder/bucket” icon. Name the bucket exactly what your sub-domain name is.

Example bucket name: s3.carltonbale.com

Note: you must use a unique bucket name; you won’t be able to create a bucket if the name is already being used by someone else.

Now comes the tricky part: modifying your DNS server settings. The procedures on how to do this vary by host and software system, but are the general steps:

• Login to your web host control panel and select “Manage DNS Server Settings” or similar
• Create a new CNAME entry for your domain. For my example of s3.carltonbale.com, the entry was:
  Name: s3
  Type: CNAME
  Value: s3.amazonaws.com.
  (If you are European users, use s3-external-3.amazonaws.com. instead)
• And yes, the dot at the end of “s3.amazonaws.com.” is correct, at least for me. Look at your other entries to figure out what you should enter.
• Now comes the hardest part: waiting. It took about 2 hours for my subdomain to be recognized by AmazonAWS.
• Open the subdomain name in your browser. You should now be able to access your files through any of 3 urls:
1. subdomain.domain.com (as long as the bucket name is the same as the full subdomain name, it is not necessary to specify the bucket name again at the end of the url)
2. your_bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com
3. s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name

Final Steps

You’ll need to set permissions on your bucket and the files within using your favorite bucket management tool. I recommend setting the bucket permission to “full control by owner” only and set the permissions of the files within the bucket to “full control by owner, read access for everyone”.

This will prevent people from being able to browse/list the files in your bucket.

If you don’t want Google (or Google Images) to index the files in your subdomain, create a file named robots.txt containing the following and copy it into your bucket:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /