To go hand in hand with this week’s poll, I’ll talk about a habitual notion. If you’re like most people, you can look around your office and within arm’s reach will be a ream of cds or dvds. They’ve been anxiously staring at you for a few months’ time.

You heard about all those viruses on the go and headed to your local geekery shop, bought your backup media, and were gun-ho in ensuring those years of work are backed up.

Amazing how a threat can get you to drive to a store, hand your money over to a cashier, bring the cds home, but not follow through with actually backing your data up.

If you were to calculate the amount hours, sweat, and tears you put into every single piece of data on your computer it would be well into the thousands. Now take all of that and delete it. Why the hell would you do that? Well you wouldn’t, but somebody else will try to at some point.

Hackers can be slowed down with firewalls, software, and common sense, but 9 times out of 10 you’ll be the one that accidentally downloaded an infected file from a colleague, which leads to your computer’s slate being wiped clean in no time.

So take the time this week, only a couple hours, and back up every important document on your computer. You’ll thank me for this public service announcement if something tragic was to ever happen to your computer.

When’s the last time you went skating or played a little hockey? It’s been much too long for me. Are you a good skater? Have a mean wrist shot?

It’s nice every now and then to go out with your buddies, play a little shinny and feel that crisp air in your throat as you speed past Tony the turtle.

We all know a Tony, or Tonya. In fact, you might be a Tony. He or she’s the person that’s always active, doesn’t show any hesitation in life, but once they finish lacing up their skates and walk towards the ice, something kicks in.

Those butterflies should get two for unsportsmanlike conduct. Tony steps on the ice and in a split second is as stiff as a board.

That my friends is fear. Chances are Tony fell on his ass once or twice before. He didn’t like it. So he’s now afraid to try anything that might reintroduce his rear and the ice.

For the rest of his life, Tony will be the Frankenstein in your group that cautiously two-steps on ice, or what he calls “skates�.

What should Tony do? Simply fall down. Over and over. Try to stop like the pros, skate backwards, crossover, jump, duck—all the things he wouldn’t do before because he was afraid.

Trying new things will help him see what he was doing wrong and right. It can only make him a better skater.

Imagine how many times the pros have fallen. Thousands. That’s how they learned what does and doesn’t work for them and refine their approach from there on out.

Are you a Tony or a Tonya? Falling on ice and failing in business is the most important thing you can do.

The new Sony Bravia spot debuted today in an explosive fashion. (Sorry for that one). Known for their blockbuster approach (balls), Fallon has once again gone all out to tie color and Sony Bravia together.

A few on-site videos snuck onto the net a couple months ago when the piece was being shot, but the blogosphere has anxiously awaited the final production. Well here it is.

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Microsoft has been playing catch-up in most of their undertakings. They seem to enjoy the strategy of waiting until someone else is successful and then trying to steal market share away from them. They’re trying to outsmart the iPod with the Zune, and now they’re trying outdo YouTube with a site they call Soapbox.

Online video has been the craze for the past year and will only get bigger over the next few years. YouTube has dominated the scene so far and become the hot spot for just about any pop culture clip.

Soapbox was mentioned in the media a couple weeks ago and I decided to apply for an invite into the beta test. I just received the invite, put the site to test and here’s what I think.

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