Matt Bernier

So, I realized that I had a whole bunch of garbage music in my collection and decided that I really wanted to get rid of the crap and keep the good stuff.  I needed a way to do this methodically. iTunes has a couple of great ways you can do this: Play Count, by Genre, by unclicking songs, etc. First things first, I had about 10GB of duplicates, so I used their duplicate finder and deleted all but one of every single song that showed up.  It was easily 10GB of duplicates. This was a small victory, because I got rid of so much junk, but I still had something like 39 days of music left. Next, I scanned through… » Read More

I was recently chatting with a friend about how some very topically slanted groups have been advertising on one of his favorite websites which actually leans the opposite way as the advertisements.  I realized something very interesting, we talked about it, and I figured I would share it here. First, a little background on how Google Ads work. Whenever an advertisement is clicked, the site that provides the link gets paid a small amount of money and the person who posted the advertisement is charged some amount of money. Also, most people who post advertisements set a specific daily budget for their ads because otherwise it is possible that through Google that advertisement could be seen by millions of people… » Read More

This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities.  There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post. Lists In Notepads Recently, I found myself writing everything down in a notepad.  I was writing all of my personal to do items as well as my client and work to do items in the one list.  I quickly realized that it was getting to be too much in one list and maybe even too much for a single notepad. My solution was to run to Target and get some new stronger notepads that will withstand the wear and tear of being transported in my backpack to and from work and all… » Read More

This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities.  There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post. Email I have clients that insist on using just email to communicate, which is fine with me because I use GMail, which lets me keep emails in threads instead of as individual emails.  This makes keeping a conversation in control very easy.  However, my inbox is constantly full.  For the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that when I empty my inbox out before bed I have between 20 and 50 emails waiting for me in the morning.  Most of them are status updates, automated messages, or twitter messages but it… » Read More

I am constantly trying new things to keep myself organized, on time, and accountable to my clients.  I have found this increasingly difficult as I add clients, projects, and responsibilities.  I am going to start chronicling how I manage my tasks, my clients, emails, and general to-dos in the next couple of posts. I use a number of tools to manage myself, in this introduction I am going to go over the easiest ones to explain. BaseCamp I have and continue to use BaseCamp with my clients, which helps me to keep all of my client data in the same place.  Also, they provide an easy place for me to communicate with my clients, and them with me.  It is… » Read More