There are those of us who are right-brained and those of us who are left-brained, just as there are peo­ple more involved in logis­tics than aes­thet­ics. That is, you might be the best mime in the world but not the great­est pub­lic speaker.

It doesn’t have to stay that way how­ever. Before he was famous, Rush Lim­baugh worked at a local radio sta­tion. In an effort to work his way to the top he made sure he did every­thing, even if it wasn’t in his job descrip­tion. He cleaned toi­lets, brought donuts and cof­fee to fel­low work­ers and even mopped the floors. The pay­off was that Rush climbed the lad­der of suc­cess and was pro­moted to sta­tion man­ager. When you hear some­one com­plain about emp­ty­ing the trash at work, think of Rush and think of what impres­sion you might make on some­one, higher level or not.

In this day and age we have to bring a hand­ful of skills to the table, how­ever menial they might seem to be. You might be sur­prised to learn that Kevin Spacey can dance and sing, but not so much when you real­ize actors and actresses usu­ally per­form in many capac­i­ties. Dressed for suc­cess is one thing, doing some­thing that isn’t in your job descrip­tion is another. You might be the best-looking man in the room, but if you aren’t will­ing to go above and beyond, for­get it. Who needs a Joe Schmoe with lim­ited skills when a Jack Shpack not only refills the paper towel dis­pensers and shov­els the icy front entrance but man­ages to also do what’s in his job description.

Refrain from being one-dimensional when it comes to your skills, think out­side the “job descrip­tion” box and you’ll find that learn­ing new skills brings more to your plate. In the end you’ll be a well-rounded employee not afraid to help with answer­ing phones on occas­sion or clean­ing out the refridger­a­tor at your workplace. 

I’ve always won­dered how dif­fi­cult it would be to set up a local web server. It’s been a per­sonal project of mine con­sid­er­ing I uti­lize web tech­nolo­gies on a daily basis.

Thanks to Chad of Greasy Val­ley I found an excel­lent writeup enti­tled Set­ting up your first web server on win­dows with Apache, PHP and MySQL by Amit Arora. In plain jane lan­guage, Amit walks you through the steps of installing PHP, MySQL and Apache on a Win­dows machine. It’s like a Spar­knotes or Dum­mies guide for set­ting up web servers, clearly writ­ten for the “new­bie” but con­cise and infor­ma­tive enough for a novice user.

As I sat here read­ing through Amit’s tuto­r­ial, I felt as if the author was hold­ing my hand through the nasty bits, explain­ing in lay­mens terms what each con­fig­u­ra­tion meant. Within about 15–20 min­utes tops I had my own pri­vate Idaho (server) ready to be exper­i­mented with, and to think it only took a minor 7 or 8 steps and presto! I’m with Chad on this one — why didn’t we think of this earlier?

I plan on mir­ror­ing an exact replica of the kartooner.com web­site. This way I can exper­i­ment and tin­ker to my heart’s con­tent with­out actu­ally mess­ing up the orig­i­nal pris­tine instal­la­tion. Clearly this means improv­ing not only my web server main­te­nance skills, but also tidy­ing up my CSS and cod­ing habits, not to men­tion along the way I’ll improve and refine my PHP and MySQL knowledge.