working on your 2006 goals?
2 links that will help with goals, beyond what I have already posted:
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2 links that will help with goals, beyond what I have already posted:
So. Let me parenthesize this whole post by saying we did not make it to Florida after all. This type-A girl who planned out everything* regarding the flight and perhaps yes the trip as well, did not in fact put 2 and 2 together to set the alarm for a time of day that would have got us there - to the airport and through security - by the time the plane took off. In case you were wondering, that time of day would have been 3am. We were up until 12am packing, then 1am just amazed at how elusive sleep was compared to the tiredness. Eventually I got up at 3:30 just because I wanted the first shower. But I did not rouse everyone until 4am, and our 5am departure delivered us to the departure line at 5:55 which was five minutes after our seats had been given away to family X. We listened patiently to the woman at the counter explain that she could get one of us to Miami on Monday. Then less patient while listening to the travel agent explain that yes, the tickets truly were non-refundable++. It was a disaster, then a learning experience the likes of which I wouldn't inflict on my worst enemy, and ended up inflicting on my son.
We spent all day on Friday - this is after the 2 hours of sleep mind you - on standby for an indirect flight to Tampa. Every flight we waited for, they asked for volunteers for confirmed customers to leave the plane in exchange for the usual. They would never ask for volunteers to make room for us, as we had missed the plane and were the lowest on the totem pole. Four times after we arrived we watched planes come and go. A fifth time we caught at midnight only after riding Metro back into the city to have a decent meal (we had checked the car seats and they were already there in Tampa by then).
I explained standby to my oldest, feeling like the red haired mom on the Titanic explaining to her kids that they would be rescued right after first class, and not to worry. It's a sad thing for a kid to understand, and he got downright mad. "The airport is being mean to us." Yes, it was. Our fault, completely by the rules, and on any other weekend we'd be on our way, but yes, this weekend it does feel that way. We talked about how much more we could take. Remember this is a trip to disney that a 5 year old is looking forward to. He frowns up his face and tries to hold in his lip not to cry, when he thinks about giving up. I ask him, how many more planes can we be on standby for, before we should cancel the trip and do something else. He thinks one, maybe two. Maybe come back tomorrow. I explain that we have wasted our whole day and we can do something else with our time, and ask him how many days does he want to do this. How many more planes. We settle on one, the midnight, and it leaves with volunteers but not with us.
In explaining standby I also talk about another family. Because there must have been a family with tickets to disney that were waiting on standby at 6am for our flight. There just must have been. It would make the world turn so much more smoothly if so. They must have given our seats away to that family, just like another - I'll call them family Y - will be late for a future flight today and we will get their seats. This is my story I tell, while mentally writing off the whole day.
But, apparently, neither family Y nor anybody else misses planes. I certainly didn't, until last Friday.
After a short regroup back home we decide to head back north to spend the rest of our canadian money from northern voice. We get a better hotel with a better pool, spend the day at the world of science. We eat traditional cantonese in chinatown, where we saw an actual purse snatcher running into an alley, trailed at a distance by a cellphone wielding asian girl. I felt hardy, and vulnerable, and tense for the combination of the both. Vacation is when the time doesn't matter, when you have so much time you wonder how to spend it. When the time spills out onto the floor and you don't bother to pick it up. We got that in Vancouver again, and we were probably never going to get that in Florida. Some consolation, though. My oldest was a little scarred and betrayed. This was his first major dashed expectation. It will take him a while to open up again.
Right now, this is hangover time. Another learning from this vacation - besides do the math and set the alarm clock - is to plan in buffer days on either side of the vacation that are just for getting ready and unpacking. Today is an unexpected buffer day. I have the odd feeling like I'm not supposed to be here, like I'm getting away with something somehow. I have bought lots of toothbrushes like someone who is sneaking around. I have the impulse to go into work, but I have nothing to wear except workout clothes - because you know none of that has happened - and that would be awkward. I'm not looking forward to the "how was Florida" questions either, as missing planes is SO not like me, and I don't have a good answer. I am getting inquiries about our house as a rental and I wonder if we will get on a plane again. It's just too much. We can't even last until the menus arrive without needing a major disciplinary time out. An airplane is a lot to ask.
There is a thing about vacations, or anything that you pay for for that matter, that makes people want to cheerlead for the purchase. If you spent $200 on dinner then that was the best dinner you ever had. If you stay in whatever hotel then you could write a short essay, if you were assigned this, on why your choice was the best one. The thing that makes it sound fake is when as a reader or listener hearing this cheerleading, you can't also hear the coins of time rolling around on the floor. If you get the impression that the speaker never really let go, never really had a vacation, then the money to value ratio does not matter a whit.
The biggest test of this hangover, for me, will be getting back on the program I'm on which was going so well for me before the packing started. I knew I was going to have a break and I knew it was going to be hard to get going again. Even though I had exclaimed several times that this program was the only thing I was doing well with, and I have such pride in that, it will still be hard for me to get going again. Buffer day or no.
So happy buffer day, and may you fly under the radar if that is your wish.
*
- I planned toys for my kids each hour of the flight
- I had snacks for everyone including "emergency" snacks for nervous breakdowns
- I considered carefully juice boxes - messy and unpredictable - versus sippy cups and a liter container. I settled for the latter.
- I mailed half the toys to Florida with a return mailer packed inside. This is so we would have a fresh toy every hour.
- I planned what expenses would be cash, debit, or our one credit card, and what amounts not to exceed with each.
- I had maps, itineraries, phone numbers, cell phones and chargers.
- I sent a bottle of nice wine ahead for the first night in the hotel, so we could unwind without thinking about spending $40 via room service on a $10 bottle of wine.
- Lined up two rental sources for strollers and cribs, so the airport schlepping could be minimized.
- I tried on every stupid, summery outfit I had and threw half of the combinations out and kept the paltry remainders.
- I planned for hats. I had a hat plan. Wow. I'm almost glad I didn't go, I'd have to have gone with a person who plans out her hats.
++ Financial loss for missitng this plane was minimal. There was $175 for the first night at the disney hotel which was non-refundable, we did not have the notice to give and could not reach the right number to plead our case. The $1900 in tickets can be applied to another flight sometime. If we ever feel like flying again. Our current vacation constraints are, it has to be July 7 or August 7, and apparently it has to be someplace that AA goes. Preferably with air conditioning. We will see.
A shout out to Julie where northern voice was just the beginning of the adventure. A robbery is when something is taken from you. Something that is YOURS. And they will do this, from YOU. That's what a robbery is. No matter how common, it's still unbelievable on a minute to minute basis.
My awesome department at InfoSpace is hiring develpers and testers. If you want to work with the likes of me, send me your resume and we'll figure it out. I joined this company because I thought the engineering problems were interesting. My address is egrigg9000 at yahoo.com.
Hmmm, the coffee might be here. I will check.
Wow, that was a long coffee break. It's now Saturday Feb 25. I'm at work, I just filed my taxes. It's all good. Anyway, back to posting the notes I have on this talk.
Second on the list for Northern Voice was Dave Sifry prompted on occasion by Tim Bray.
One thing Dave Sifry did was ask the audience how many people in the audience understood how search engines worked. Most of the audience raised their hands. Not just raised, like "oh, I've heard of that once" but raised Hermione Granger high, as in "Pick me, pick me, I'd like 2 hours to explain." Despite that information, it doesn't seem like he customized his speech much, but given that it was mostly intelligent improv based on audience questions I don't see how he could have done that. (Customized his speech much, I mean.) It was an interesting demographical study, though. One of the organizers later told me this conference is much more techie than last year. Later at dinner Robert disagreed, so I suppose it depends on if you are already a kettle.
At another point in Sifry's talk, he was thinking about categories of blogs not in politics or technology. Knitting came up alot, as the poster edge case. Then in the second demographical study of the morning, he noticed visually that it was mostly men in the room. Then he gave an aside opportunity to recognize Maryam and mentioned fashion blogs. Well. Maryam has more of a poetry/lifestyles blog, but the woman herself has many interests including fashion. So interesting that Dave knew this about here even though as voyeurs we could only trace this if properly briefed (like me). Perhaps he has been to dinner.
Why do I bring up these two demographical blink studies. One is to point out that they happen, and are mostly accurate, and should perhaps be done more deliberately so we can follow-up and spot trends. Another reason I bring this up is to point out that you can't really talk about blogging and the taxonomy of tagging and categories without bringing up edge cases. I thought I was a walking edge case until I saw the audience at Northern Voice's reaction to Julie's speech, which was recieved visibly warmer than seemed possible. I am sure all the male geek doting embarassed her. In a way, this warmth proves maybe there are no edge cases here. The dubyah haters that number in the zillions have the same services and frameworks as the knitting or the shoeblogs. This makes most demographical studies moot and flattens things out nicely. But the studies are cute devices, and we still think in those terms for now.
Now onto some fun content from Dave's talk.
There was some interest in figuring out how to share a master list of domains / IPs that are content spammers or link sites. This goes beyond just bloggers, by the way. The application for this list being public - and by public I mean in the taxpayer sense - is incredible and can support all the right industries and take down the wrong ones. This is my commentary, by the way. Dave just brought up that he shares this information with Google etc as he discovers it by running Technorati. Interesting. I know Jay Allen has gone through that bridge and out the other side by saying any blacklist plan is inherently flawed. It still kicks around, though.
There is a spam squashing summitt sometime this year, the third one (I have down in my notes). Would be great to get a link to that.
Quote I didn't understand:
"If the blogosphere turns into usenet, that's really bad."
Hmmm. I still use message boards like you used to be able to find on deja.com. Sometimes they are the most relevant thing out there. However, Dave might have had a more specific complaint. I think there are a lot of similarites.
Here is a paraphrased comment about link sites that republish blogger's posts elsewhere. 'The adsense and affiliate guys are on our side because they are violating the terms of service by republishing material that they don't own. It is part of the adsense deal that this needs to be content they have rights to. The ad companies can pull that adsense ID, and they can also know the name etc of the person doing this.' (single quotes due to paraphrase)
One very useful technical problem to solve in the blogosphere right now is how to get statistics on readership. Not just subscribers, but actual readers. Feedburner puts graphics in the RSS feed that ping the server in terms of readers. Even then could just be scrolling down. Newsgator marked as read phenomenon. Everyone codes for a different case in the "was it read" situation.
This made me think of the idea of doing a Nielsen aggregator. This would work to get ratings on your blog like the ratings are done for TV. The space has to get a lot larger for that project, though.
Next in the talk, Robert brings up an interesting point about the financial benefit of writing about something bankable like mortgages. "As a blogger, do you write about world peace, or do you write about mortages?" He asks. My comment is that one can write well and rather altruistically about mortgages, if that happens to be your gift. Hey, maybe this is my gift. Big bucks here I come.
Dave brings up another topic. He thinks advertising is completely broken. Then he goes on to rephrase my superbowl advertising greatness theory which I have subscribed to since 1999 or so. I have to find the link to when I wrote about it, I am sure it was only once. The way the theory works is, all advertising should be like super bowl ads. Entertaining and relevant, as well as destinations in and of themselves. Advertising shouldn't be the cruft you tack on to the side of your web page. Advertising should be something your audience will thank you for. He brings up Lucky magazine as a great marketing vehicle. The catalog business is another good example.
What if there was a blog that just produced ads as art forms with no clients. How quicky would they be thanked versus sued.
Note that I have been singing the "Feelin 7-up" song in my head while changing diapers all week. Including the falsetto part (feelin like a seven). Of course it occasionally morphs into the big red song with approximately the same tune. This is also an example, in my own way I am grateful for knowing the words to something upbeat and happy that grooves. That the jingle composer even bothered to craft it well, back in 1977 or so.
Another aside from Robert (paraphrased) 'What happens when SEO pages go underground, asking bloggers to link to them. We tell bloggers to be interesting, but Google juice does not need interesting it just needs links.' My comment. I would want to understand this more. At first glance it sounds like the music business. We tell musicians to be good, to work at their craft. But the music business does not need good, it needs marketable. There is a long trail of high quality musicians with day jobs. Time will tell if blogging will leave a similar trail of interesting but link-free blogs, or if we can dynamically self-tag or crawl for "interesting." That could really flip my funnel.
Dave: "Those types of networks (SEO underground links) are fairly easy to spot" - this is the part I want to understand better, how to spot this. Then, what is the role of the spotter once they have this information to benefit the public. How can we tell teacher?
Googlebowling is a term. You heard it here, um, maybe not first but bear with me. Gotta be in the SEO space in order for this term to make sense to you. If you have a bunch of sites on page 3, you create a spam site that points to the 20 sites on page 3, and get them kicked out. Ooohhh forces of evil big time. Then the sites you had on page 3 get promoted up by process of elimination.
That's it for my notes on this talk, comments will be open for a few days if you have something to add...
Julie is a welcome friendly face at the front of the room this morning. Her talk spins between topics so deep we cannot process them in our peanut buttery throats, and lightweight topics such as sneaking pepperoni from one's vegetarian boyfriend.
I do not know if most people will have her gift of having a natural voice. Most people are awkward writers just like they are awkward programmers. Only some develop a voice, which means something to programming as well as text. Whatever the file extension, there is a process of translation in between thought, emotion, and the reader (or compiler's) interpretation. Sometimes people want to have a few instructions on how to piece together a voice. And of course, Annie Lamott nothwithstanding, this instruction set does not exist. Read a lot. Write more. And want it enough, almost more than anything. See it as part of your identity.
Bring the whole family to a blogging conference? What were we thinking?? Well, given the new kid-friendly room, given my cousin's move to Vancouver, and given my dh's continued fascination with the roadsigns, the metric system, etc. (You know, roadsigns in the US are designed by prisoners! In Canada, they're designed by graphic designers. Curiously, they're not all that different. but different enough to indicate the author) we decided to give it a whirl.
We thought we would beat traffic by leaving at 3pm. Note to self, do not move to Marysville anytime soon. We pulled under the sign that said that our border crossing would take less than 5 minutes. What a relief after the traffic! Then, when actually reaching the border around 7pm, the police were there and lots of roadblocks. They directed us left and on I5 back to the states as if this was ordinary business. They said "follow the traffic."
Little did we know that we were being taking on a 2 hour detour... we knew things were wrong when the next exit was 10 miles away. We stuck to the car ahead of us like glue, since it had BC plates. Then, we figured out they were doing a U turn to the truck crossing. This was a 2 hour delay just like out of that famous episode of Malcolm in the Middle, where the cop tells the mom "You're a control freak. This is a traffic jam. You can't control it." Our cell phones were off, and the last placative cookies out of my purse were eaten.
Finally I cracked and started singing. Here were my options:
"Boom boom ain't it great to be crazy"
"Sister Christian"
"Somewhere Out There (from the land before time)"
"Jingle Bells"
We made it to the hotel, apologized to my cousin and - in spirit - to the BBQ we had no chance of attending. I did bring a killer sweater for it, perhaps you'll get lucky and see it.
WHile waiting we looked up in the sky and saw the helicopters. We still don't know what happened, but we know they were looking for someone. I thought of my elementary school classmate who recently went underground because his name was on a list. I thought how very sad it is we have to live in a world of such suspicion - that we have to give up our rights - and also that we live in a world where such suspicions are occasionally justified. I thought maybe it was my classmate sludging through the swamp next to us, eluding the helicopters, raiding the dumpster at burger king. Heck, I was so hungry I might do it myself.
Anyway, we made it. More soon.
I've had two hearty glasses of wine, exactly 1/3 of an Amy's organic cheese pizza, and American Idol is about to start. I'm not about to go to book club. Sorry guys! Passive entertainment rulz
My dh is not a big self-help aficionado. He has not attained guru status in this area. (And despite what my tag cloud has to say, neither have I). However he has one master plan for certain situations. The decision diet.
What the decision diet is is an announcement. I suppose it's primarily an announcement. What you do is announce "I'm going on a decision diet! No more decisions!" And see what people do. Right away there are problems. "What do you want for dinner?" "NO DECISIONS!" "OK, then it's sardines." "WELL, NO BIG DECISIONS ANYWAY!" Then you find out that was making you so upset was the little decisions in the first place, the sheer number of them, ganging up on you like termites.
My adorable and gifted acupuncturist has diagnosed me as suffering from effects of too many small decisions. Apparently that's "gall bladder" as opposed to big decisions being "liver." I'm still learning. She's great, though. I'm tense in all the right places for the gall bladder thing. Glad to know I'm doing something right.
Today I took a bit of a decision diet. I know it's completely unsustainable, but I couldn't handle one more fish thrown at me. I'm learning that happiness is a skill, and part of the skill is knowing when to not look for it. Sometimes it's like trying to see in the dark, or breathe on Mars or something. You'd be happier not knowing if you're happy or not. You'd be happier in the zone.
We will see how the rest of the week goes. I hope someone's taking attendance, because all I'm planning on doing is showing up.
This blog, as many dear readers know, is not a source of information. It is, rather, a string of commentary and "what ifs" not normally fit for traditional consumption. Sometimes it's just fun to let the hypotheses have the steering wheel, no?
So, on to a topic that I bring up, not to be a source of information, but to ask if anyone knows what is really going on here. I'm a big fan of yahoo, and don't like to see people firing companies for no cause. I would even jump to yahoo's defense if I even knew the whole story. Which I don't. So pretend, if you will, that you are sitting around a nice dinner table with lots of informed people (other than myself), and some blowhard (that would be me) brings up the latest rumor and stuffs it with conjecture and puts it on a plate with hollandaise. What would the informed people say? (besides yum)
The story. I wake up to my nice yahoo email inbox like I do every day. What's in my mailbox today? And will the Loading Yahoo Mail and Logging Into Yahoo Mail purple words dance around in a way that is center justified today? It's a small dream, but well worth checking every day if it comes true. Then, living in my inbox is a message from someone in one of my outer circles of acquaintance, declaring that they are changing their e-mail address because yahoo will now be "charging people to send her mail." Now to be honest some people who live in these outer circles deserve to be charged if the letters F and W are in the subject line. But that's another story. My first reaction was to get my hands all dirty with, like, the truth and everything, and send a crack team of reporters to find out what happened.
Okay, the crack team is me. And I didn't really find out what happened. I did laugh at the irony of using Yahoo to find an answer, though, and with a light bit of reflexive echo-chamber style searching came up with the following article.
This article "proves"
* Yahoo is charging somebody (pretty sure it's companies, although those of us filing our taxes will be reminded how tempting and easy it is to create one of THOSE)
* There was some amount of thought put into this, including customer alienation. Whew!
* They mean well.
I guess you could say the information in this article leaves a lot to be desired. Let's take the case where I am a Yahoo fan, and want to explain to my virus-forwarding joke of the day hoax chain letter friend that it's OK to keep her e-mail address. What would I say... please refute...
Dear Person I Occasionally See,
I noticed your strong reaction to the news article on Yahoo's decision to offer a service which would charge companies a fee to bypass the spam filters for yahoo recipients for mailings. First I want to make sure you understand that this fee would only be useful to companies who have been accused - rightfully or wrongfully - of sending spam e-mail in the past. Due to the way spam filters work, these companies cannot recover from these accusations. If spam filters are to be truly dynamic, and react to user feedback, then companies can't ALSO count on the mail always going through. This feature helps to correct that problem. I'll call it pay-per-send. And it does seem that Yahoo will be earning every penny.
Let's be clear. Your friends will never be charged for sending you an e-mail. Some companies, such as ebay or evite, might on occasion want to send you a legitimate e-mail. They should have the right to do this, but moreover it would be nice for them to be able to know you get these mails.
You know the spam filters are clogged with people claiming ebay and evite sent them spam, right? What really happened in that situation was a spammer got ahold of an SMTP server, typed "loser@ebay.com" as the FROM address, and sent the message. Just because someone did this, does not mean that ebay is a source of spam. It means e-mail is an old technology written for university professors and like, Al Gore and people like that. Trusting people. No, what the fragility of SMTP servers means for service providers like Yahoo is that when it comes time for a legitimate mail to come to you from ebay, it has no chance at all in making it through the filter.
Yahoo did spend some time - years - trying to correct this problem and came up with a cute thing called domainkeys, but not sure what the status is of that.
Anyway, friend, what would you do if you were running ebay, and you wanted to notify all your customers about something important. Like a stock price move or something. How could you know that the e-mail would go through to your recipients, what with the fragile state of spoofing (that's when people use SMTP servers as described above) and spam filters the way they are?
It seems to me that Yahoo is providing a reasonable deal: bypass our spam filters as a pay-per-send service. This is tough luck for companies already in the spam filter, but that's cost of doing business for these big orgs. I guarantee that the companies that are being spoofed for spam are BIG companies that, while not being overjoyed at the idea of paying for something, will nonetheless be happy there is SOME plan placed in front of them to bypass the spam filter. Well, maybe not happy, but at least there's two evils to consider rather than just one.
So, you are changing your e-mail address and going over to Google. That's fine, but please understand you are making a decision as a consumer, you are putting this bumper sticker on your car: "It is unfair for these BIG companies to have the option to bypass spam filters to send me legitimate e-mail." That's quite a statement you're making. Not sure it would make my bumper, but to each his own. It would make more sense if you were affiliated with one of those companies, and did not like what the 0.25 cents per message (or whatever) was going to do to your bottom line. But I worry that you're standing up for the biggest kid on the playground rather than the littlest.
Oh well, have fun with your new account,
- Signed etc etc.
Do you see what I mean? I don't have quite enough information to support or refute someone's act of firing yahoo. Please chime in, folks, those comments are open for a reason!
I was initially delighted that there was a Starbucks in the new building where I work. However, after a few weeks of Jay Allen - style binges, I am cutting myself off.
In the Solution training, we are taught to set a threshold for whether to identify a behavior as a problem. There are two tests.
1) Does it adversely affect your health?
2) Does it adversely affect your happiness?
As for health, the caffeine is an innocent enough substance. I'm not at work often enough past recommended consumption hours to have it affect my sleep. However, the simple fact is I don't like the Starbuck's coffee enough to NOT spike it in some way. It's not like I'm drinking Ladro here, which if you spike Ladro so help you, you'd better have a good reason, like you're buying your caramel syrup latte for your grandma.
Spiking a coffee drink of course means sugar. And I don't even like sugar. If you asked me to give up sugar or pork I would pick sugar and even be happy about it, grateful, thank you for not filling me up so I have more room for lovely bacon. We all know how bad sugar is for you, and all the substitutes are even worse. For me, it's like smoking a pack a day and not being addicted. You know, just smoking because it's there. Not really caring about the substance. So it's even worse to abuse a substance you don't have a relationship with, because it doesn't take place of the ones that you do. It's just a waste of plain old white stuff. If a nutritionist were to analyze my diet on a Starbuck's day, you could easily conclude that the single most pivotal thing I could do for my health would be to not go there anymore.
As for happiness, this happens on a lot of levels. First, there is the fact that I am absurdly thrifty and hate spending 5 bucks on a coffee drink 3 times a day the same way a little old lady on social security might. Yet I do it anyway. That's cognitive dissonance that requires earplugs. Then there is the smokescreen effect. I am optimizing every second. (I kid myself). I have a spare 15 minutes. I go and get NEEDED and NECESSARY coffee drink so I will be productive with every second. Oh, there goes all my spare time. So by going there and meaning well I am instead suckered into smokescreening over any actual work I might do. Or, god forbid, actual personal or professional development.
As a building contractor of ours used to say, he was "Getting ready to get ready. Ha ha ha ha." This is only funny if you have low expectations. I haven't seen any of those in a while myself. And you can expect that no homeowner ever has low expectations of their building contractor. So this was never funny and is still not funny. I kinda want to punch the guy just remembering his little laugh, in fact. Yet it was my habit to make this same statement via my venti purchase 3 times daily.
To track my progress, I am tallying on my whiteboard. At first, I wrote:
"Number of Days egrigg has not gone to Starbucks"
And then, a numerical count in roman numeral form.
III / (slash goes through the Is)
After my first failure, after 8 days or so, I put "Try 1" in front of the first set of roman numerals. I also modified the title of the tally.
"Number of ^consecutive ^work Days egrigg has not gone to ^this Starbucks ^in the building"
Try 1 IIII X
Try 2
Because it was important to point out how I was tracking this. What does it take for me to say I've blown it, end the attempt string with an X (for "splat" e.g. roadkill), and start a new row with Try n. First of all, it doesn't count if I go across the street to the one by the bus barn or by the bookstore. It doesn't count if I go to Cafe Habits which is also outside the building. It doesn't count if I go to a starbucks on the weekends or holidays. Just so you know, I'm setting the bar pretty low here. oh hey! A low expectation! Nice to meetcha!
Current record is 8, for Try 1, before blowing it.
Current try is Try 4, which is 5 days and counting.
Drat that Cinnamon Dolce Latte they just came out with!
I have a communication rule set up which I rarely violate. This rule is to only leave one message for someone. As a corollary, if I have left an e-mail then I will not also call voicemail, and vice versa. The primary rule is if that original voicemail goes unanswered, I will only leave one more voicemail.
That second voicemail is often a pivotal experience in my relationship with the person I am trying to reach. Of course that person has no idea, but my own boundaries are clear in this matter. It is more pivotal for people outside my social circle, who I would not normally bump into. For those I am likely to see again, it's no big deal, we'll catch up later.
Here is another technicality. If the person has a voicemail account and does not check it - say for example they have a new cell phone account that they have not configured, but it goes and takes the message anyway even though it will never be retrieved - unfortunately I may very well leave one of these fated "second voicemails" on this doomed account. If the account is working and accepts the message, then my assumption is it is part of the social responsibility matrix and part of that person's social property. Due to the fact that I will not switch mediums on the person unless there is a content specific reason to do so, this can be the end of the road. FYI, a medium switch, such as my requesting to switch to e-mail or fax from voicemail, requires in my mind an explicit announcement and also an APOLOGY. Medium switching is a faux pas.
Here are some examples of communications which break my rules:
A)
1) Hi, it's Beth, give me a call.
2) Hi, it's me again, call me back.
B)
1) Hi, it's Beth, I wanted to talk to you about arrangements for our really complicated thing, please give me a call.
2) Hi, it's Beth, and since our really complicated thing is tomorrow, I'm going to tell you all about it over voicemail. The first thing you need to do is .... (fade into eternity)
I will never do either of these above things. I have an exception to B below, which I have labeled B_OK.
B_OK)
1) Hi, it's Beth, I am returning your call regarding the complicated thing. I am so sorry to have to do this but I know this is coming up soon, and I have a really bad voicemail system. I'm going to send you an e-mail with all the details. Hope that's OK. Do respond to me either way and let me know it will all work out.
2) E-mail as promised.
Now, another example of something I won't do:
C)
1) Hi, it's Beth, give me a call.
2) To: person From: me Hey just sending you an e-mail in case you didn't get my voicemail. I am an idiot. Write me back. Bye.
The above examples are just details - edge cases - to give you some background for the last and most interesting case, the case of the second voicemail that I will perform. Note that this also applies to e-mail but I won't go into that here, the example would be redundant.
D_OK)
1) Hi, it's Beth. I'm calling because you asked me to give you a call in a week if I hadn't heard from you regarding the interesting opportunity. Has there been any change? Let me know. My phone is this.
2) Hi, it's Beth again. I'm going to assume the opportunity has dried up. What's happened since I left that last message is that xyz happened, so it looks like the window has passed for what we were discussing. You're welcome to contact me again to keep in touch regarding anything else. Take care.
Every time I leave a second voicemail for someone, I am prepared to never speak to them again unless the fates decree otherwise. This means that the second voicemail is always one directional, and gives closure on the matter of discussion. It also means this issue is not going into some sort of customer relationship management - type loop where I am going to call again later to just check in, etc. It means I am not going to continue leaving e-mails, or more voicemails, or otherwise attempt to pursue the situation. It's painful on my part because I might be in love with the idea we had. I might be in love with the opportunity. I might be in love with YOU. But if I'm leaving you a second voicemail, it's over.
Before leaving this message, I may put the phone to my chest and think about what has happened. I need to make sure that I am leaving something closure-oriented. I need to be ready to say goodbye to this idea, event, whatever. I need to be ready to have the relationship left to fate. If I cannot arrive at this state, I may put the phone down and not leave the voicemail yet. But I hope to be a bigger person than that, not wandering around with loose ends everywhere.
I have left second voicemails to people at Microsoft during the time I spent there, both as a placed contractor as well as someone seeking placement. The last time I had to do this was truly pivotal for me, because I realized this was a voicemail I was leaving not just to this person, but to the company. It was symbolic. A critical boundary had been pushed. Before leaving this message, I had to take a deep breath and wonder whether I was really willing to give up the fight to fit in over there. And one shred of dignity held up the loudest. I called, left the message, and that was it. Once I've left you the second voicemail, your project is no longer on my to-do list.
Unless we bump into each other. Then all the rules reset ;)
My eternally patient personal shopper has an interview on the local NPR station. Check it out for yourself:
http://www.kuow.org/program_theworks.asp?Archive=01-31
Rebecca is of a class that cannot be replaced. She does an outstanding job because almost every decision she makes is contrary to my own original instincts. If you find a person like this in an area of your life, jump on board and be grateful!
We're getting ready for a vacation. This will be our last weekend home until March. Here is a quick idealized list of how we get ready for a vacation around here in the Grigg household:
* Itinerary, with printouts of maps of each destination on our itinerary
* Critical phone numbers
* For an 8 hour flight, 8 toys or treats to bring out that the kids haven't seen before.
* A self addressed stamped big mailing envelope to mail home the toys from the flight out that have already been "seen."
* Dollar bills for tips, curbside checkin etc.
* Phone numbers programmed into the cell phone - both of them
* One starbucks doubleshot for each morning spent in coffee unfriendly territory
* Every stitch of laundry done in the house, folded, and put away. Even the stuff you're not bringing.
* Message to the neighbors with dates gone and back
* Message to co-workers as a single outgoing e-mail, and a sticky note on the door. I don't believe in OOF messages or outgoing voicemail announcements, perhaps one day I will take a 3 month sabbatical which might warrant that kind of broad and noisy distribution.
* Raid the basement for summery things. Sandals, flip flops, water wallets, bags made of straw, hats, things with the color pink in them, silly things.
* Snacks for the plane, and water, because the water cart never comes around at the right time, gum, mints, CD player and batteries
* Turn off comments on the weblog
* Pack enough information to cancel the credit cards in an alternate location besides your wallet
I found this post by Kathy Sierra via Robert.
Some comments:
* I have been told, that I do not possess the gift to get along with everyone and every type of personality. I am in the process of proving them wrong (kidding!)but so long as I can keep the impulse to "please everyone" in check, I should do well with my inverse bell curve of love and hate fans. According to the chart in Kathy's article.
* Each of us has our own leaf nodes with great ideas and branches which bring realities "fear" into the equation. Sometimes the bridge is not the best place to jump. It's not just at the corporate level.
* One idea for stemming the blockade of "good-ideas" through to "completion" is to hold postmortems on things that did NOT ship. Wonder what that would be like?
* Revolutionary improvements as opposed to incremental. This is exactly why you can perform better on a Monday after having caught up on sleep all weekend as opposed to "catching up" on work all weekend instead. Incrementals are highly subjective and rarely noticed.
Please read her post, there is lots in here that is so perfectly crafted it stands on its own as a 3 year career plan, without the need for commentary or customization. Writing your performance goals for next year? Here is your start. Cut and paste.
I have been keeping up with my subscriptions, certain ones anyway, usually in a big bloc rather than a little each day as is the usual.
One blog that I have been subscribed to for years is Russell's. At first glance you might think his blog is just another bleeding edge technology commentary, designed for ad optimization. This would be misleading for Russell's blog even though his might contain the same word count profile as others designed for that purpose. People who take their blog too seriously should take a page from Russell, who in addition to his excellent vitriolic bluster also posts on a personal level.
This is the kind of post you might see in an organization-centric blog, such as 43folders.
Sometimes I think the technology populace's tendency to attribute various personal issues in terms of failure or adhesion to a certain stated structure (GTD) is nothing more than shyness. Blogs are supposed to be some glorious monetizable thing, and not your personal confession board of your deepest fears. The shyness can result in a post anyway if the fears, failures, or successes can fit into a stated schema. Then, the post is OK because it's related to a schema and it's all OK to talk about. Shyness overcome.
This is not what Russell has done, he has in this post openly talked about his own organizational crash, without the shyness I mention above. He doesn't cover it up with a schema. It's not monetizable. And it's great, honest, and revealing work. Perhaps not the post itself, but the work behind the post. "I feel guilt about it at a deep profound level..." he says. I suppose the more gifted you are, the more you regret not having every seed planted and set to auto-grow. Us mortals who are less gifted know many of those seeds did not have a chance. This leads me to a new discovery about hyper-optimization.
Say you have 4 careers going at once. 3 of them are by any rational measure, failing. Then you encounter a rashly impossible statement such as "There is enough time for everything." What? I'm wolfing down an energy bar in the elevator and you're telling me there's enough time? But what that statement means is there is no reality except for our subjective and emotional consumption of the time we are awake for during our day. We can feel just as happy or sad or guilty consuming the waves of success and failure of 4 simultaneous careers as we can with one. The consumption is the thing that is truly life, the experience of taking in the wave and interpreting it through self. There is no need to scale this experience, as it happens no matter what we are doing. This experience is the "everything" we are trying to pack in, which is funny because the moment will be consumed whether we do anything about it or not. So really, there IS time for everything. Because the density of events is simply not a factor in whether you lived life to the fullest.
But I digress. I was talking about the differences between blogs and why posts like this are such gems. Sometimes reading the organization blogs doesn't get you as many new ideas as reading about honest people who are actually trying to stay that way. (Just like reading technology blogs by technologists might not get you as many new ideas, especially about your true market you imagine you might eventually have. You might be better served by reading blogs across disciplines.)
Right now, the wind is blowing very hard. The rain is on its zillionth day in a row, minus the one 8 hour stretch we had once a couple of weeks ago. Sleep is affected. I have been having dreams about tsunamis, about beachside picnics overrun by water, various torrential scenarios. Those dreams are intermixed with being awake, looking over and of course my dh is still awake. Once he was seriously thinking of driving to California right then and there, no suitcase or anything. Because we've had it. This is the worst winter for this kind of blustery rainy dark that I can remember.
In addition to the sleep loss, the flat roof above the kitchen seems to be leaking in two places. I say "seems to be" because there is not an identifiable hole. I could get up there with food coloring but then I'd have a colored leak. Some satisfaction that would be. It seems to be a systematic, just something that was bound to happen given a fluffy birch tree which sheds onto the deck, and a bad winter. The leaks are physically invasive. There is something to a leak in the house that is personal. It's not just a building, it's your home. You can stand it no more than you can stand a rock in your shoe, but there it is, temporarily unsolvable due to the dark and the weekend and oh so many needs elsewhere.
Parents are physically glued into their kids, especially regarding the kid's eating. I know Dads have this too, not just Moms. There's a thing that happens when your kid starts to eat, after even a minor hunger strike. A part of you relaxes, your feet sink into the floor a little bit, the backpack of tension you're carrying falls off as you watch them chew. It's physical and involuntary. Kindof like that zappy electricity you feel when you touch their skin. You know they belong to you, for now, and there is a big bundle of survival instincts in there combined with the happiness and pride in knowing it's going to be OK.
A cold winter, a leaky house, a sleepless night of nightmares, these all have the same physicality except in the opposite direction. Tension mounts along with the feeling of vulnerability. A streetlight near our house is out - an obvious source of danger. Unknown things thump on the roof. The trees are blowing so hard that they sway down to the trunks.
When waiting for the bus the other day, I joined 6 other commuters to take a bizarro bus #243 that only comes a few times a day. This bus makes my commute to my thursday Solutions class possible. It is always late, and I am always frozen due to underestimating the power of the wind tunnel along 106th in Bellevue at that particular stop. The stated time is 5:20, typical arrival is 5:30. Buses are overheated, so underdressing for the wait at the stop is part of the compromise of ridership. At 5:55 on this unusual day I gave up my fantasy that someone would drop a 3G wireless free electronic bus monitoring device in my lap and spent some time on hold with BUS-TIME. The bus would be along in 3 minutes. It did arrive, overheated, late, with a bitter bus driver whose shift was supposed to be over hours ago. We were all still there, still waiting for him, because in the critical years where your schedule hinges on taking the bizarro bus with practically zero ridership in order to make good decisions about the car, you are not likely to change your mind and fork over $40 for a cab ride in the middle of traffic. We were all flying without a safety net. If the bus hadn't come, we might have spent the night in the office or taken an unruly commute downtown, canceling our plans.
Winter is having no safety net.
OK You're all probably wondering what has been taking me so long to post again. Despite the fact that my "dog" took the Enter key off my keyboard, I'm back. I have some time to write today as well as a backlog of things to write about. Hopefully this is all going the right direction and there will be lots of posts soon.
Where is that dog anyway?