Can you offer any experience from PG County as far as how you dealt with requiring Custodian applicants etc. – folks where there is a perception they might not have an email address, how did you overcome this perception did you help facilitate them signing up for free GMAIL accounts, did you offer them to come to the HR […]
Author: Mark Pescatrice
Goodbye Bluehost
Back in April, we decided to move website hosting for this site to Bluehost. We had outgrown our old hosting service and needed a more robust solution. On recommendation from some other Bluehost customers, we moved all of our commercial sites to Bluehost. Over the past 11 months, we have had intermittent problems with Bluehost. […]
11 Years and Going Strong
It’s hard to believe, but it has been a year since we celebrated Matrice Consulting’s 10 year anniversary and relaunched this website. Although it has been difficult to keep up with the blog posts over the past two months due to professional commitments, I can tell you that we are still going strong, quietly going […]
Why Your Niche Matters More Than Ever
You will hear entrepreneurial leaders and other talking heads (Seth Godin, can you hear me?) telling us to find our niche. As I was watching a Twitter feed during lunch on the day of the manhunt for the (alleged) Boston Marathon bomber, it struck me how unimportant nearly all the voices (tweets) were, at least […]
Are Your Passwords Safe?
Password security is one of the hottest security issues and one of the most difficult to manage, regardless if you are a Fortune 100 company or an independent consultant, such as myself. Password managers make it a lot easier to manage your side of password security, and if you are not using one, you should. […]
Moving Day
Today was moving day for matricellc.com. We didn’t quite expect to move, but performance with our old site was so bad that we could not wait any longer. We moved our site to bluehost.com, which we also use for hosting other sites and have had excellent performance. I had considering going hardcore and deploying on […]
Things I Carry
In the spirit of the LinkedIn series, Things I Carry, I have created my list of the things that I carry. I am a frequent traveler and have well over 1 million miles of air, car, train, and bus travel over the past 10 years, and I’ve learned to travel as lean as possible. These are […]
The Best Month Ever
For the independent consultant, marketing does not come naturally for us, unless perhaps you are a marketing consultant. This is because we are technicians by nature, using the definition of technician as described in The E-Myth Revisited, the brilliant book by Michael Gerber. Our websites and blogs are one of the most visible ways in […]
Using Your Power For Good, Not Evil
As some of you may know, I am a regular reader and fan of the web-comic xkcd. As of this writing, xkcd.com has Alexa rankings of 2,100 globally and 765 in the US. For the uninitiated, this means that xkcd.com, a web-comic, is the 765th most popular website in the US, which is pretty good […]
How to Get Questionnaire Data from an Appraisal in Oracle SSHR
The appraisal function in Oracle E-Business Suite Self-Service HR, like many other parts of EBS, is very good at capturing lots of data, but not very good at letting it go. The questionnaire, which is an optional component of the appraisal function within SSHR, can be used to collect data using standard HTML form functions, […]
Evernote Email Fail
If you know me or have read any incarnation of this blog, you will know that I am a huge fan of Evernote, going way back to the beta days. If you are an Evernote user, you are probably aware of the security breach they experienced. I knew it was big when it appeared on […]
Where Mark Zuckerberg Got it Right
I finally watched The Social Network last week and was very impressed with this film. I take it for what it is and nothing more: just a film based on a book based on true events. For me, there is one major takeaway from this movie that was probably lost to most in the ensuing […]
Website Updates matricellc.com
We are happy to announce the release of the latest version of matricellc.com, version 5.1 **. This minor release provides both technology and functional updates: Enhancements to site navigation: Look up ^^^ Enhancements to the blog pages, including the addition of categories, recent posts, and cloud tags: Look left >>> Updates to the website’s technology […]
Build Customer Loyalty by Adopting their Vision, Mission, and Culture
For the small consulting firm and independent consultants, building strong customer loyalty can make or break your business. Weak customer loyalty, at the very least, will make the struggle to keep your sales pipeline full a lot more difficult. Strong customer loyalty will provide dividends for years to come. Some of the common approaches to […]
Calm Before the Storm
One of the most common things that occurs to people who have blogs is that they tend to stop posting articles. I am guessing this is due to a lack of interest, other commitments, or discouragement. I’ve gone silent with my own blogs and this blog is no exception. I’ve actually written or started writing […]