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You have two ears and one mouth – use them in proportion.

Why is this so important?

It’s so important, at least in my mind, because it can be successfully applied to almost every aspect of our lives. If you run a business, listening to your customers is paramount. If you are in government, listening to people increases understanding before apply new policies. If you are a client-servicing business, listening to your client and understanding their concerns and problems before providing advice is critical.

I am by no means suggesting that you merely listen and then take no action – indeed the quote when my grandfather says it to me – by no means directs this. Rather, it suggests that you should do more listening before you talk.

Don’t interrupt. Don’t put someone on hold. Don’t interject. Don’t talk over the top of them. Listen to people – then talk.

I am actively trying to achieve this daily as I really think it’s a positive step in the right direction for listening more about what people have to say – and then responding with relevant arguments. Many people I have discussions with tend to try and talk over the top of me and this is ultimately extremely frustrating. It’s a little like ‘hey you’ve had your turn, now it’s mine’. Of course, the better way to approach this is not to take such a view but rather simply take heed of this quote and listen more.

Since I’ve been doing this – the counter arguments are often more effective as I have listened intently to what someone is saying rather than forming thought patterns in my head – ready to hit back at a singular particular point or two points. By waiting and listening you are able to draw upon the whole argument – and most importantly, you are able to listen and feel like an engaging person in doing so. This helps the person you are talking too feel like they are contributing to the conversation and having their chance at speaking – rather than being cut off all the time.

People love listeners – they don’t love talkers.

So I am all excited to get modern warfare 2 for a little relaxation time when I get the chance [which is not often] – only to discover that an install on Windows 7 x64-bit is an absolute nightmare. It’s a ridiculous proposition that a Gaming Studio – Infinity Ward – would release a game without even testing it on Windows 7 – yet this is exactly what they have done, and this is why there has been a huge amount of backlash in respect to this game. However, in order to get things running on my PC I thought I would post something to assist those trying to install on a Windows 7 x64-bit build. I note that this is the setup that allowed me to get it working and this may not work for everyone [different hardware etc].

1. The first error I got was a “Failed to Run Install Script” error. To solve this, you must download and install Steam as a separate download first – then open Start –> Run and type “C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam\steam.exe” -install “CD Driver” – where “CD Driver” is “D:” or “E:” or “F:”. So for example the final line would look like – “C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam\steam.exe” -install “F:”. This will get the Game installed.

2. When I attempted to run the game after install – all I got was nothing but a blank screen which required me to do a reset. To resolve this problem, I needed to fix DirectX. Goto C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\Redist\DirectX and run DXSETUP.exe. Install this file and Restart your PC

3. After restart, I got the same error again. So I searched around and found that I had to make the screen size 1024×768 for launch – so I had to adjust my settings for launch. This launched the game but presented me with yet another error.

4. Now I had the game started – but I received nothing but Garbled Text on load. So the game wouldn’t work at all. To solve this, I needed to update to the latest version of ATI Catalyst Software - but of course this is not supported in Windows 7 for my Graphics Card. When you attempt to install this on Windows 7 – it doesn’t get past the install splash screen. To resolve this, you must download a fix from MSFT to install ATI Catalyst Install Manager as Windows 7 has a problem with any sort of legacy card except the newest hardware. This solves the VC++ 2005 redistributable problems which prohibits installing and fixes the garbled text issue.

5. The game still seemed to have a “blackscreen” onload and so I thought that this problem might be related to the fact that it was in fullscreen – so I wanted to shift the game to “windowed mode”. To do this, you have to go into C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players and you will see 2 .cfg files called config and config_mp. Open both these files in Notebook [config is for single player and config_mp is for multiplayer] and find line seta r_fullscreen “1″ and change it to “0″. This will fix the game to run in Windowed Mode and you can change it back at any time. When the game starts [and this fix was a key for me] – ensure that you just change the graphics under “settings” to basically make the window full screen.

6. Another problem I experiencing throughout this entire process was a fairly common one such that Comodo Personal Firewall kept buggin me to accept the game as a permissible firewall program. I had to edit a Custom Rule in Comodo to allow the game to access the Internet.

So after close to 4 hours total – combining a 40 minute game install time and then all the time spent trying to resolve these bugs – I managed to the start the game. To be honest, it is completely unacceptable in this day and age to purchase a game and have to go through hoops to try and run it. I would definitely not have purchased this game had I known all issues were present from the start and quite frankly any future games that Infinity Ward produce I will not be getting.

As a consumer, they owe a legal responsibility to ensure that their products are tested on all relevant platforms before they sell the game. It’s so evident that their strategy was to release the game as quickly as possible in order to grab as much revenue as they could in lieu of Christmas and deal with the fallout as it comes. Whilst the official gaming merchandise says “Vista” – it was a fatal error to release the game without testing on Windows 7 and prepare a patch fix for immediate release. Instead, they have angered the very hand that feeds them and in this regards many gamers in the future will not purchasing Infinity Ward games.

While it’s a good game, it’s unacceptable to except a normal consumer to have to go through all this simply to get the game working.

One of the companies that I greatly admire is Zappos.com led by a fantastic CEO - Tony Hsieh. The company essentially drives its revenue from the sales of shoes and has managed to etch its mark in the same manner that Amazon.com did for books. Zappos.com’s statistics are a little mind blowing for a company that is essentially still growing – more than 3.6 million products from 1,250 brands and more than 146,000 different styles.  But that is not really what makes me love Zappos – rather, it’s the companies fanaticism about customer service – something that is seemingly lost in this day and age. It’s interesting to parallel & compare today’s customer service to that of the ‘olden days’ – the 1950’s and 1960’s – which was driven by person-to-person sales and advice with the primary business differentiator being which had a better & more engaging customer service paradigm. In my opinion, it’s something that needs to return to business in this day and age and technology should assist the promotion of such endeavors rather than seek to reduce it by pushing the customer experience to ‘automation engagement methodologies’.

The reality is that customer services cost a significant amount of money. To maintain call centers and front-line sales staff is an expensive exercise when you slap on top of this training, turn-over, culture problems and sales incentives. The model is one that needs a high degree of tuning – but it’s one that is not overtly difficult – something along the lines of what my father says about marriage – “happy wife, happy life” – except in this regard it’s more “happy staff, happy path”. That is, make the staff happy and watch the path of your company skyrocket forwards. You see, the reason I think Zappos has got things so right primarily relates to the fact that the staff who work at the company are generally excited to be there. They love what they are doing, they are passionate about the Zappos brand and they honestly believe that they are making a difference to the customer experience. It’s a far cry from other organisations – particularly at the enterprise level – which aim to cut cost by outsourcing the customer experience and who generally have poor employee morale which has been inherited through write-downs, management changes and degradation of the purported ‘Company Mission Statement’ or ‘Company Values’.

It goes without saying that by setting up your staff to be happy, you are maintaining their enthusiasm to be engaged in your business and as a facet of this – be engaged in the customer. The customer drives revenue, and the revenue sales drive the ability to keep staff happy and the business ticking over. You can see the cyclical action in this regard – it’s definitively not rocket science – rather it’s taking business back to basics and really looking at what makes it overtly tick in the first place. Most notably, it’s also fairly amazing to see how simple it is to achieve employee happiness. I would suggest that in small business, it’s primarily ensuring that you employ the right people who fit similarly with you – this is perhaps the hardest part – and one of the reasons that Zappos offers staff who get to the final round of the interview process more than $2,000 to leave. Yes, you read that right – to leave. Tony Hsieh believes by offering staff an incentive to leave – you are able to weed out those people who really don’t want to be there and who aren’t really interested in the organisation. It’s an interesting strategy and perhaps one that is not available to all business’ but one which has considerable merit.

After the post-employment process – that is the interviewing, questioning, cv-reviewing and generally attempting to ascertain whether a person is the best fit for your company from meeting with them for 2 hours or so (ridiculous in my opinion) most staff – and I say this as a vast generalization - are looking for flexible hours, safe working environment and good colleagues. Additional perks like free lunch or free t-shirts cost surprisingly little but go a long way in terms of staff ‘loving’ your business and wanting to over-extend themselves in times of need. Perhaps my former comment also deserves a little more explanation - interviewing someone for 2 hours is hardly the best way to get them to know whether they work for you – at most, it should be a prima facie indicator but by no means the final stamp of approval. Getting the person into your office, working with them on a project or asking them to interact with your colleagues at drinks is by far and large the best way to determine whether they are suitable for your business. While this isn’t always possible – for example, overtly hard in computer science engineering roles were source code is confidential – it is definitely possible for sales or customer facing staff.

In my opinion and experience so far, attempting to keep your staff happy is the only way to succeed. The have to love what they are doing and they have to believe in both the management team and what the company stands for. If this is enshrined in a ‘Company Mission Statement’ all well and good – but if it is not actively and knowingly reinforced every single day then it’s just another worthless piece of paper which sits along side – no doubt in such companies – the other 1000 ‘brain storming sessions’ which have gone no-where and ‘business continuity meetings’ which are pointless. Create the best culture you can in your own unique way, keep your staff as happy and engaged as you possibly can and then your business will grow organically through their enthusiasm and drive. Dislodging any aspect of this carefully crafted ‘Tim Davis Path to Success’ (ha) will result in probable downfall. As Jim Collins – author of Good to Great - puts it

first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. People are not your most important asset – the right people are.

Once they are on the bus, drive it like crazy.

One of the annoying things in ALL windows systems has been the lack of native support to create user defined services. Yes, you can type in the cmd prompt “sc create /?” to get some instructions to get some services that rely on executable files in Windows – but nothing really exists for web services and hosting in this regard. Way back in 2003 Microsoft released some developer tools for Windows Server 2003 and they have been used ever since – including (yes, it is true!) in Windows 7.

To setup a user defined service in Windows 7 for hosting purposes (in our case for our development server) – hopefully the following steps help you (its been written for the Trac project)

1. Download instsrv.exe and srvany.exe from Microsoft 2003 Resource Kit (I’ve included them in this post but feel free to download them from Microsoft if you want)
2. Open a windows cmd prompt (run as administrator) and punch in the service you want (in our case tracd) i.e. drive:\path\to\InstSrv.exe tracd drive:\path\to\SrvAny.exe
3. Goto your Start Menu, type in “regedit” and goto the new service (in our case tracd) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\tracd
4. Create subkey *Parameters* below which you must create 2 string values:
5. Create an String Value called App- then right click on this and add drive:\path\to\Python25\Scripts\tracd.exe
6. Create an String Value called AppParameters with the relevant parameters of the tracd.exe - i.e. drive:\Python25\Scripts\tracd –port 8080 –auth=proj_name,drive:\path\to\proj\digest.txt,trac drive:\path\to\proj\ if you were using Trac and wanted to generate passwords without apache
7. Run net start tracd
8. Complete!

Obviously, you can change this around and run it for any service you want to run it for and it will start up and appear in services.msc where you can start around the rest of the settings as you please.

So I am all excited to install the new Windows 7 Ultimate x64 operating environment. The installation was a breeze – but the internet setup not so. I would have thought that the internet setup would have been a piece of cake – but unfortunately I was sorely mistaken. Now I am a huge Microsoft Fan (although I also use an iMac) and was a bit perturbed when this happened – hoping that Mum & Dad Windows 7 users wouldn’t face the same issues.  The solution was relatively easy to fix but did require a little bit of playing around as the cmd –> Run as Administrator console was denying all relevant “ipconfig /renew” or “ipconfig /release” commands.

In the end – I discovered the solution as:

1. If you have already setup your internet and you are now getting this error – you MUST click Start –> Type “cmd” –> Right Click –> Run as Administrator
2. A black window will appear (for those who have never done this) – you must type in “netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt” and “netsh winsock reset c:\winsock.txt“
3. You must now reset your computer.
4. On reboot – right click on the “Network Connections” and open the “Network & Sharing Center”
5. Click on whatever connection you have – a new window will appear with “Details, Properties, Disable, Diagnose” buttons
6. Click on “Properties” and then uncheck the Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCIP/IPv6)” checkbox.
7. Click OK and then Close.

Now you can either Reopen this console if you need to enter a Static IP Address or you can ask Windows to find your Network via the “Network & Sharing Center”. Everything will now work (or should anyway!)

The investors dream business is predominately focused on one word in the end – scalability. If you here it uttered once, you will here it uttered at least a thousand times more. Many of you may be asking right now, what exactly is a scalable business? Well, essentially a “perfect” scalable business is one which can achieve huge revenue growth with little additional investment capital required. It’s a business whose revenue model is not constricted by factors such as manufacturing outputs or human capital considerations – it’s one where the revenue (y-axis) vs. cost (x-axis) graph looks much like a vertical line sloping on a 89 degree angle. The cost of each dollar invested is far outweighed by the revenue per dollar returned so the overall incremental cost is reducing as the business expands. To put it simply, a scalable business is one where revenue is exponentially increasing as a function of time.

Of course, such a “perfect” business is never truly possible in real life – this is half the battle. People are needed to run business (damn those humans), markets are different, risks in each market are different, market share is different, brand power and intellectual property considerations are all different. All these factors play into the battle of finding companies which are working towards a highly scalable model, and companies which investors want to focus their funds on. Of course, even taking investment capital suggests – at least in the beginning – that the business is not a truly scalable one, since the investment infers that cost per dollar invested is already outweighing return. Of course, a longer term growth return projection may set this initial failing straight – but applying the narrow definition stated above – it’s an observation that is still true.

So what are some scalable businesses? To start, it’s important to state from the outset – humans are not scalable.

Yep, that rights – any business which solely relies on humans is not scalable. Businesses restricted by human capital and output volume as a function of time do not scale. For example, a legal firm is inherently unscalable - lawyers have lengthy skill development (education), time is limited to a maximum of 24 hours per day which means revenue restrictions, billing time per day fluctuates and most importantly – there is a ceiling limit on what clients will pay for legal advice. Even the best lawyers can only charge so much – as people and businesses – the customers – are themselves limited by cost constraints and will go to the next best lawyer who charges slightly less. This is a perfect example of the inability of an entire industry to be scalable businesses because it is fundamentally restricted by revenue as a function of time – that is, revenue per hour hits a limit.

“OK Then” you are thinking, “well, what is scalable?” Well, practically any industry that is not solely reliant on those pesky humans. Take the Internet for example.

Internet businesses can be hugely scalable because the market available online is not restricted, for example, by jurisdiction. You can purchase a domain name and any person in the world can access this domain name. Sure, they might not even know that something exists at the domain name you have purchased – but it doesn’t limit them accessing it. On the flip side, legal advice is restricted by jurisdiction as laws are different in every country. So Internet businesses have the potential to be hugely – not infinitely – scalable. Of course, a lot depends on the nature of the Internet business and the degree to which it exists entirely online. Business which are built and rely entirely on software are not restricted in anyway by manufacturing output for example – since software can be distributed and replicated an infinite number of times. In comparison, Internet businesses which rely on the processing of physical goods are restricted since they rely on channel, production and distribution partners to assist them with the delivery of the customers order.

This is why a lot of “new age” business are moving online because it entirely removes the need for physical distribution locations – which have heavy costs of staffing, leases, safety, insurance, internal shop fitting and all the rest. It all comes down to the revenue as a function of time. The faster the revenue as a function of time, the more scalable the business – conversely, business which are restricted by such an equation are either not scalable or no longer have the same degree of scalability. If you own a business, you need to look at your revenue drivers and try and establish the highest revenue areas as a function of time and then focus – or promote these more – since it is probable that these are the areas of your business that will increase profit in the long run.

Of course, importantly – this article is not in anyway suggesting that businesses which are not scalable have no chance at being successful – that is a ridiculous proposition. It is merely pointing to the establishment of businesses which are scalable and have a “higher chance” at being able to generate huge revenue quickly as a function of time. Any business can generate huge revenue – but typically they do not fall into the high revenue businesses as a function of time. The key is too look for businesses which can produce $2 or $3 or $100 per second and have no ceiling limit on what this rate can scale too.

No business can do this forever, but the ones that consistently maintain high levels of revenue as a function of time are the ones to watch.

In the spirit of my last post, I thought I would also tell my loyal readers about how to really speed up their Firefox web-browser. So much so in fact, that you will be amazed at how much faster your web-pages actually load. This little trick is really designed for website users who have broadband connections – but those of you that do not – you are probably able to adjust the settings to a slightly lower level and it will still increase your page load time. This works best on any version of Firefox 3+ :)

A little unknown fact about Firefox is the HTTP application-layer protocol that most web-pages are transferred with and the “safe” limits that Firefox developers put into the config to ensure maximum stability. The problem is that these settings are really really conservative – and while sure thing this improves stability – it slows the whole process down. To really increase your web-page speed and make your browsing experience better – and more importantly faster – with 99% stability – we need to tweak the HTTP application-layer protocol. The logic behind this is much the same as the logic behind tweaking the maximum number of connections when using Peer-to-Peer systems. The more HTTP connections the application can make on a broadband connection the better – so use the settings below to make your web-pages load at least 4-5 times faster (and indeed make Firefox load faster when you open it):

1. Type in the Firefox address bar about:config
2. Accept the Warning notification and continue
3. At the top of the page will be a filter – search for, and adjust, the following settings:

network.http.pipelining: true
network.http.proxy.pipelining: true
network.http.max-connections: 50
network.http.max-connections-per-server: 40
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy: 20
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 10
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 20

4. Then right-click anywhere in a blank space and select New –> Integer
5. Name this integer “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to 0.
6. Right-click again anywhere in a blank space and select New –> Boolean
7. Name this boolean “config.trim_on_minimize” and set its value to True.
8. Now in the Icon Tray, right-click on the Mozilla Firefox Icon and select Properties
9. Under “Target”, you will see the line “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”
10. Change this line to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” /Prefetch:1″
11. Ensure that there is a space i.e. \firefox”(space)/Prefetch:1″

Enjoy your new found Firefox load time and speed!

Being in web development – nothing irks me more than slow web browsers. I typically use Google Chrome (because of its rendering speed and the javascript engine which is written into the browser) but during any web development the “IE Clan” of browsers still accounts for some 70% of the market and therefore development and testing on it is a must. When I upgraded my browser sometime ago to the latest IE8 – I was astounded by the sheer lag of the browser on Vista Ultimate when loading pages, new tabs and even just in starting. Because I don’t really use the browser regularly – it has never really bothered me – but more recently I have been doing some testing on it, and the slow response time is just so painful.

Luckily, I have discovered a solution that improves IE8 Speeds hugely on my PC – regsvr32 actxprxy.dll - from the command prompt. This command re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library – which controls ActiveX/COM object interfaces – or in normal English translation – allows your PC  to load IE faster. This results in seriously increased performance and therefore with some other minor tweaks – allows you to have a smoother IE8 experience. To get it all happening simply follow these steps in Vista:

1. Press the Start Button and type into the Search Bar – cmd.

2. It will appear under the Programs list, and you can right click on it and Run as Administrator.

3. A new black window will appear with the command line window on c:\Windows\system32>.

4. Type into this window regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

5. A prompt should appear with DllRegisterServer in actxprxy.dll succeeded. Click OK & Restart your PC.

6. You can stop here – but if you don’t notice any improvements continue.

7. Once restarted open IE8, go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Advanced –> Reset (this will reset browser to default settings)

8. Close & Restart the Browser and you will go through the Welcome to IE8 screens again – here is where you need to adjust things:

• Select Suggested Sites – No
• Select Custom Settings
• Set your Default Search Engine (Google, Yahoo or Bing)
• Select Yes to Updates
• Select Turn Off Accelerators
• Select Smart Screen On
• Select Compatibility View Off

9. Once this is done, you should see some serious improvements in your browsing and rendering experience :)

Drop a note in the comments if this has worked for you!

If you are into Social Media and the Internet – the Facebook.com/Vanity-URL experience is – or speaking in past-tense was - a must  for you. On the 13th June 2009 at approximately 2PM Melbourne, Australia (GMT+10) – Facebook opened their service to include Vanity Urls – that is, instead of the old “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789” – you could now have “facebook.com/YourName“. If you still haven’t done this, you need to goto www.facebook.com/username/.

The response was unbelievable – more than 500,000 names were registered within the first 10 minutes. Lucky for me, I was able to secure the exact name I wanted – which makes things much easier now to tell everyone where to find me on Facebook. Unfortunately, for the millions of users who did not login when the process began – most, if not all, of the common English name associations would be taken inferring – much like emails – that you will have to have a combination of letters and numbers and wont be able to secure the name you want.

My name is common with more more than 1000 other people around the world – so having to be quick off the mark was pretty essential. Luckily – the exact name I wanted was not one of the “suggested” names or combinations – so I had to select more “Choose your Own Name”. My trick was that I had previously setup “Copy/Paste” for my name, so I was able to quickly hit Ctrl+V on this field and then select the “Set Username” – meaning that I was luckily enough to get in immediately – while more than likely, another Tim Davis around the world was typing the exact name. I was in all likelihood – only milliseconds ahead.

Now you may be reading this post thinking “you are such a nerd” – but for me – having an easy-to-remember facebook URL makes life so much simplier. I can tell friends, family, colleagues and business associates where they can find me on Facebook without forcing them to remember combinations of letters and numbers – which often get lost, can’t be remembered and could result in lost opportunities. Considering that once a name is set – it can never be changed - I don’t necessarily think it was such a bad thing to be online for and secure a little piece of Facebook real-estate.

If you secured the name you wanted, drop a note in the comments :)

It has been absolutely fascinating to watch the technological developments unfold as the world judges the probability of a Swine Flu pandemic. The current primary information repositories seem to be entirely based on information being released from the World Health Organisation (WHO) Swine Flu site located here, and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States located here. Google has released an interesting tool to plot the spread of the disease from their website which you can check out here which maps the latest information from a number of sites in a RSS feed. Interestingly, if you check out the Google News site you can also see the sheer number of stories being published around this disease, and more than 10,000 Tweets on Twitter are being posted every hour in relation to the latest news and information showing that real-time information surrounding the disease is quickly accessible.

The sheer number of searches being conducted online is clearly illustrated on the Google Trends search feature, which highlights a sharp rise in “swine flu, swine, flu, influenza” searches compared to the normal number of searches at the beginning of April.

What is most surprising, is the media’s massive exposure of the disease and the unprecedented global response to prevent the disease from entering nation States borders. To be frank, the sheer amount of coverage of the virus shows the power of new social media and most importantly – the gravity of the disease and perhaps the hype surrounding it. At the very least, the Internet is allowing people to stay so informed around the latest outbreaks that it is almost impossible to decipher all the relevant information. Perhaps more importantly, is the effect of the disease in our already fragile economy. Some news stories have stated that the economic impact of even a ‘mild’ dose of the disease would be around $330 Billion USD  in lost output as the world shudders and people remains indoors. Of course, on the absolute end of the scale the damage would total around 142.2 million lives and cost more than $4.4 Trillion to the world’s economies – something that we could ill afford considering the current financial crisis.

Thermal imaging scanning to detect body heat in airports, surgical face masks, commercial airline pilots being required to report the health of passengers, doctors and nurses at airports, quarantining ill people in their homes and even an increase in the sale of gas masks are the responses taken thus far to prevent the spread of the disease. If Mexico is anything to go off, increases in food shortages and clean water could also be a problem. Of course, this is all very much an ‘alarmist’ view and is not balanced in perspective to the number of people who die each year from influenza through a standard winter. At the moment, very few people have been affected by Swine Flu as a proportion of the standard number of people affected by influenza each year. But as is standard in this day and age – the sensationalist attitude of the media prepares everyone for the worst and an ill informed populace over compensates as a result.

Of course, whenever there global fear surrounding the disease – someone always seems to come out on top financially. The makers of the two most effective anti-virals against the disease are Biota Holdings Ltd and Roche Holdings AG who each produce Relenza and Tamiflu respectively – both the most effective influenza drugs on the market, and both seem to have an solid impact on Swine Flu. Smartly – Google have always denied advertising on drugs as part of their Adwords program and all searches related to Swine Flu – are advertising free. But of course, if the media continues to hype the disease and not report the truth of the spread accurately – then more and more people will begin to become alarmed about the disease – leading to the natural probable cause of panic.

So in writing this article, and doing some basic research online – it seems the most prudent course of action to take at this stage is simply standard smart and healthy personal care. This would include, both from common sense and from the CDC FAQ and Swine Flu and You pages, the following:

1. Cover your mouth when coughing
2. Sneeze into a handkerchief or tissue
3. Keep your hands clean at all times – my recommendation are the hand cleaners that don’t require water.
4. Avoid touching public surfaces and then touching mucous membranes (nose, eyes, ears, mouth etc)
5. Stay away from sick people
6. If you’re feeling ill – don’t go to work – go to your Doctor and take their advice.

Realistically, this is advice that is common to all genus of diseases and viruses – not categorically ‘just’ for Swine Flu. Most importantly, stay informed about the relevant outbreaks of the virus – but don’t start necessarily digging your outside nuclear bunker or moving to the country just yet. While the age old axiom – ‘better to be safe, than sorry’ – does ring true – I think that keeping healthy, fit and taking the proper precautions should ensure that the world contains and eradicates Swine Flu.

Stay Safe & Healthy! :)