* ??Mark Glaser?? for ??PBS??: “Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?”:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/digging_deepershould_community.html (via “Digg”:http://digg.com/tech_news/Kevin_Rose_Responds_to_Jason_Calacanis_Rant_from_Netscape → “Kevin”:http://krose.typepad.com/kevinrose/2006/07/calacanis.html → “Jason”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/07/25/kevin-rose-cracks-or-how-to-know-when-youve-won-the-debate/). Aside from the Digg vs. Netscape drama that’s been erupting over the past couple of weeks, Calacanis raises some interesting questions about how people in the *attention economy* are compensated for their time and hard work. The next 18 months as these two players in community-driven news hash it out should be really interesting.
* ??John Gruber??: “Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding Microsoft’s ‘Zune’”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/07/magic_8ball_zune. That 8-ball. He sure knows a lot about the *digital music* industry.
* ??NPR??: “Avoiding the Housing Market ‘Dead Zone’”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565128 and “Location, Location: What to Buy, and Where”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5565119. The nesting instinct kicks in: these interviews were pretty insightful about the state of the housing market right now. Of course, there are derivations for where you are, but the overall buyer’s recommendation is to wait until some of the *already-present market pressures* (housing surplus, higher interest rates, and exotic mortgages held by peers) bring prices down — perhaps even way down.
* ??Everything Newark??: “‘Newark is an Emerging Market””:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/07/19/newark-is-an-emerging-market/. The ??New York Post??, of all places, has a practically beaming article about Newark’s comeback. Booker’s enthusiasm, that Newark is a place of *untapped potential*, hangs on the very critical results of his stopping crime in the city.
* ??Washington Post??: “Religious Left Gears Up to Face Right Counterpart”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072500437.html (“via Digg”:http://digg.com/politics/Religious_Left_Gears_Up_To_Face_Right_Counterpart). Favorite quote: ‘I’m an evangelical Christian who thinks that justice is a biblical imperative,’ said Wallis. ‘The *monologue of the religious right* is finally over and a new dialogue has just begun.’
I really hope Wallis is right.
* ??The Motley Fool??: “Opportunity Knocking for Citigroup”:http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06072514.htm. Citigroup may (or may not) be on the rise if the Fed stops raising interest rates to counteract inflation, which would be nice for shareholders given the “latest anxiety”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aWJ3CLLNPUp4&refer=us over rising costs. A thought for Mr. Prince: consumer banking is sucking wind because *the customer experience is just awful*. The ATMs are nice, and the marketing is fun, but customer service just pales in comparison to banks like Wachovia.
* ??37signals??: “Writing Words vs. Writing Software”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/writing_words_vs_writing_software.php. I love these guys: Everyone and his cousin is working on a web app. But how many are actually finishing? That’s why we argue for biting off less. Write a short story/small app instead of a novel/massive app. *Shrinking scope means you actually finish*. And finishing is huge. When you finish something, you show up. And, like Woody Allen said, ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up.’
* ??Rosecrans Baldwin?? for ??The Morning News??: “The Maine Attraction”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_nonexpert/the_maine_attraction.php. Never been, but this sure was funny: Crystal Meth is easier to obtain in rural Maine than it is back home. So are crystals, and posters of *wolves kissing dolphins* in outer space.
* ??Paul Ford?? for ??43folders??: “Are there ‘good’ distractions?”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/24/paul-ford-distractions/ Paul’s struggle between accomplishing something with his life vs. “swimming in a sea of data” really touched a chord. I’ll have more thoughts on this later, but, if you read only one of these linky-things, make it this one. When I’m not getting enough done I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. I want to feel like *I did something during my brief life* besides check my email.
* LAUNCHED: Sarah goes independent with “Side by Side Dog Training”:http://sidebysidetraining.com/. The quick-and-not-so-dirty site brought to you by the wonders of “Wordpress”:http://wordpress.org, “Quilm”:http://oriol.f2o.org/qwilm-a-wordpress-theme/ theme, and the “DreamHost”:http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?63570 “1-click install”:http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Goodies_Control_Panel#One-Click_Installs. Feel free to pass the site along to your friends with dogs — especially the ones that accessorize their dogs with *Louis Vuitton dog carriers and DKNY collars*.
* ??Jon Katz?? for ??Slate??: “The Loneliness of Rose”:http://www.slate.com/id/2146000/. Rose is not cute. She is a working dog, a farm dog. She herds sheep, keeps the donkeys apart from the other animals during graining, alerts me when lambs are born, watches my back when the ram is around. *She battles the donkeys*, the ewes who protect their lambs, and stray dogs who approach the farm. She and I take the sheep out to graze two or three times a day. On Sundays, we sometimes march the flock down to the Presbyterian Church to hear the organ music and present ourselves through the big windows. ‘Hey, Rose,’ the kids sometimes shout after the service is over. With Rose, we don’t need fences. As my friend Peter Hanks said, Rose is the fence.
* ??Washington Post??: “US waives sanctions on Saudi over religious rights”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901178.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/07/25/galatians-221-turbans-teaching-and-temperance/) The United States has extended a waiver that avoids imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia because it has made efforts to *improve religious tolerance* in the kingdom, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
The US ignores the religious freedoms of millions to suck up to one of its few allies in the Middle East.
* ??New York Times??: “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html (via Angela over IM). If you read _two_ of these linky-things, make this the other one. 
It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if *I should throw him a mackerel*.
Incidentally, this is how Sarah trains Dina (and maybe me).
Category: Business
* ??Chris Welch??: “Misconception: Renting is for Suckers”:http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/25/renting-is-for-suckers/). Many of my friends are reaching that point in their lives where they’re considering buying a home. However it’s unfortunate that so many choose to buy over rent, especially in this expensive market, because many well-intentioned people are buying homes that are actually damaging their finances.
* ??Fresh Pursuits?? “Canvas”:http://www.freshpursuits.com/canvas/. Canvas brings the freedom to express yourself through design without needing to know CSS or PHP. With Canvas and Ink for Wordpress, you can easily rearrange, reconfigure, and colorize your entire blog without ever touching a line of code.
* ??Michael Barrish??: “Hell Freezes Over”:http://lumino.us/weblog/hell_freezes_over. Revamped and redesigned, it uses haikus in place of business copy (I couldn’t bear to write business copy) and features a new weblog about making websites (you’re soaking in it).
Wondering what “Michael”:http://oblivio.com is up to, I find his new, angsty, neurotic web design company website. Brilliant work.
* I’ve really begun to dig “digg”:http://digg.com lately. As usual, I’m behind the curve (“digg just launched version 3 of their site”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/22/digg-30-to-launch-monday-exclusive-screenshots-and-stats/), but I think I’m just one of those people that has to see something working well before I can grok it. For the uninitiated, digg is a news site that has its content submitted by users. I had initially dismissed it as another “mob rule by the masses” type app (you know, enhancing the “echo chamber”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/23/echo effect of blogs), but it regularly produces some interesting results. Check it out, and “add me as a friend”:.http://www.digg.com/users/kwalker411.
* ??Granite Consulting??: “Late Binding in Microsoft Access”:http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/latebinding.htm. In essence: if you’re exporting to Microsoft Excel from Access programmatically, just use late binding.
* ??Joshua Porter??: “The MySpace problem”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem. Joshua gives some thought to what aspect of “design” MySpace really excels at. Hint: it’s not the graphical type. Instead of wondering what MySpace could be, let’s learn from what it is. Let’s assume (forgetting visuals for a moment) that MySpace is well-designed instead of condemning it as a visual failure. Let’s ask the obvious questions: why is it so popular? What makes it so successful? The answers to these questions might make us rethink our basic assumptions, but will make our future designs stronger as a result.
* ??Jason Calacanis??: “The new publishing model”:http://www.calacanis.com/2006/06/28/the-new-publishing-model-or-on-rafat-om-federated-media-ad/ (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/28/new-publishing-model/). Here is the new model: 1. Start a blog with adsense and make spare change. 2. Scale a blog to 250k to 1M pages a month and become big enough for Federated Media, AdBrite, and Blogads to care about you (i.e. sell you’re inventory)–now you’re making a living. 3. Scale over 1M pages a month and become big enough that you can afford your own sales group and fire Federated Media for taking 40% of your money because your cost of sales will be 15-20% as a stand alone business.
* YouTube: “Pirates of The Caribbean Ride”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTQ5eWBlApY (“via Mike”:http://overloadednoggin.com/2006/06/28/captain-jack-meets-captain-jack/). Johnny Depp meets an animatronic version of himself as Captain Jack on Disney’s new Pirates ride. Very cool.
* ??Lifehacker??: “Windows Vista Beta: A tour in screenshots”:http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vista-beta/windows-vista-beta-a-tour-in-screenshots-183883.php. Wow, not bad, Microsoft. I mean, after some five years of development, you’d hope that Vista wouldn’t be incredibly atrocious. There’s quite a bit of OS X influence in the finder here (nudge–hey Apple: time to get past “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal in “the finder”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/, by the way), and I’m glad they’re getting away from the “Fisher Price”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#User_interface_and_performance school of design.
* ??Angela Wu??: “So much rage”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/29/so-much-rage/. I’ll agree to this mission if I can be assured that your rage level (which was off the charts that unforgettable night which still haunts me) will stay at a reasonable level.
It’s true: I’m hosting Anglela’s website because she strong-armed me into it. Fear the rage.
* ??Jen Poley??: “1966 Plymouth Fury II”:http://sojourn-of-grace.net/2006/06/30/1966-plymouth-fury-ii/. What can I say? Jode and Nathan wanted a car to work on….we found this in Lincoln, and bought it. We hope to restore it, but if you can believe it, for now we are just really enjoying driving it around town.
I can just imagine how much Jode is enjoying this.
Update: if you loaded this page in the last hour or so and saw a bunch of garbage — yeah, that was me. I was trying to set up the “FlickrRSS”:eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ cache so this site would load a little faster. I think I got it working; the the site is loading a lot faster!
This Saturday, I will be attending a seminar given by one of the leading dog trainers in the USA, Jean Donaldson. Very exciting. Jean is also the founder of the “San Francisco SPCA Dog Training Academy”:http://www.sfspca.org/academy/, which is an incredible training center that is world renowned for its programs and humane training theories. Recently, when I realized that animal behavior and training is a passion that I really want to pursue, I went to “Dogwise.com”:http://dogwise.com and happily blew a portion of my paycheck to start my dog training library. It took me just a few weeks to eat those books up cover to cover.
One of the books was “The Culture Clash”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ourstory-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=1888047054%2526tag=ourstory-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/1888047054%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82, by Jean Donaldson. Every few pages, I found myself nodding my head in agreement, or enthusiatically interrupting my poor husband to read him some blurb about dog behavior. It was one of the most down to earth and approachable training books I have read. I really enjoyed how Jean unabashedly dispelled our cultural doggie myths while still maintaining a true love for the real dogs that we share our lives with. For example:
We are obviously fascinated by the idea that dogs might, just might, be really, really smart. When will we see there is so much that’s truly fascinating about about dogs, it makes intelligene a red herring? The discriminative ability of dogs in operant and classical conditioning, the awe inspiring power of their noses, their formidable ability to deal with a complex social environment, and their feelings and bonding are all mind-bogglingly vast topics, yet we keep harping on intelligence. It makes as much sense as evaluating humans on our ability to sniff for bombs or echo-locate. …
As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the respoinsibility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it’s wrong to destroy the furniture yet deliberatley and maliciously does it, remembers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punishment, doesn’t it? That’s just what dogs have been getting — a lot of punishment …
The myth gives problems to dogs they cannot solve and then punishes them for failing.
I see people falling prey to pre-concieved anthropomorphisms daily at my work as a vet-tech. I guess that’s one of the reasons this book resonated with me so much.
And now I can get it autographed.
* “Boil the ocean”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22boil+the+ocean%22&btnG=Search, an egregious consulting term used to limit the scope of a project: “we’re not looking to boil the ocean with this.” Fast Company took “a shrewd look”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/debunk.html at the phrase, and Bob Congdon digs up its “earliest use”:http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html.
* “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (“via Tim”:http://www.challies.com/sideblog/archives/001828.php). Very forward-thinking book design on the part of the Standard Bible Society. Bibles used to be beautifully constructed books that were admired, but rarely touched. That’s beginning to change as people want to — literally — interweave the story of their lives with the Scripture.
* YouTube: “Two Chinese Boys”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdpTCJgnwc (“via Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2140697/). Be sucked into the vortex of incomparable splendor that is YouTube.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The Great Escape”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371767/. Forty million American employees toil in soulless cubicles. How did they get there — and can business ever break out of the box?
Probably not.
* ??Crain’s Chicago Business??: “The new face of technology”:http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=25714&bt=37Signals&arc=n&searchType=all (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/crains_chicago_business_cover_story.php). Start-up! Start-up! Start-up! 
* ??Kathy Sierra??: “The myth of keeping up”:http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html. You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be.
Good to know I’m in good company.
* ??Michael Idov?? for ??Slate??: “Bitter Brew”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/. You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business — where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.
Pragmatic advice for anyone who handles money. Worth listening to…twice.
* ??Sam Andreades??: “The Redefinition of Simon Peter”:www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/. Are you really free from how others look at you? I don’t just mean saying ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’–there are plenty of people in New York saying that. … Are you really free of carrying the responsibility of your reputation with others?
* Apple: “Get a Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?ilife_medium (“via Dan”:http://hivelogic.com/links/133). Quietly brilliant new “switcher” ads by Apple. Is it me, or does PC look a little like Mr. Gates?
* ??John Gruber??: “Good Journalism”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/good_journalism. One can only hope that Apple will one day handle security issues as well as Microsoft does now.
Wow, you can _taste_ the bitterness in this article.
* ??Evan Ratliff??: “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/04/modern-love.html). Feeling suddenly like a shy 10-year-old in the playground, I pretended not to understand. But he walked off, and there was nothing to do but follow. I was already uneasy in Dhaka, unable to blend in or communicate, and now self-consciousness was joined by a simultaneous thrill and fear that I was walking into some vortex of cultural misunderstanding.
* ??Angela Wu??: “Religious map of America”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/religious-map-of-america.html. Like, if you grew up going to church all your life and everybody else you knew did, too, you might fervently believe lots of things…
(bonus: “cows”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/beating-dead-cow.html)
* The Village Church just might be getting “a new calendar”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ based on the open-source “WebCalendar”:http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php?topic=About. WebCalendar has been okay to work with, but not trivial to integrate with the site — due in part because it’s “ugly as a dog”:http://www.k5n.us/webcal-screenshots/wcss-month.png out of the box. Still, it will export an iCal feed, so if you’ve got 30 Boxes or Google Calendar, you can “subscribe”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/publish.php?user=public.
* ??Fast Company??: ” Varnished History”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/pr.html. The documentary itself won’t be featured in any film classes — but in the tawdry realm of corporate propaganda, there has been worse.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Ministry Exchange Overview”:http://www.intervarsity.org/mx/item/3674/. IV constructs a massive content management system to share ministry materials, providng features as web-2.0 savvy as tagging and RSS feeds. Well done–this is worth watching for a while.
* ??Ken Walker??: “The Debate Over Newark, Part II”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/05/04/the-debate-over-newark-part-ii/. Have you heard? We’re getting a new mayor in Newark after 20 years of the same administration. The candidates recently debated — here’s how it went.
* ??Alissa Clark??: “Weekends and Things”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=261. And this, my dears, is why God made coffee for his beloved. It’s a common grace thing, like the rain.
* “Ask a Ninja”:http://askaninja.com/. Don’t ask me why, but I think this is hilarious (“iTunes podcast”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=115933673&s=143441).
* “ScrewTape on the Da Vinci Code”:http://churchofthemasses.blogspot.com/2006/04/screwtape-on-dvc.html. If anyone’s going to revive ScrewTape, I’m glad it’s Eric Metexas. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details — as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields.
* ??Russell Posegate??: “Graduate Recital”:http://russell.posegate.org/podcasts/recital-060327/. My brother-in-law is a rockstar. See him listed in “iTunes”:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=148258780&s=143441 among the other rockstars.
* ??Rands in Repose??: “1.0″:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/04/20/10.html. Who wants to do a startup?
* ??Jamie Zawinski??: “The Netscape Dorm”:http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html. It is two days later and I am still at the office. I did not go and chase coots. There is too much work to do. I want to die.
Who _still_ wants to do a startup? (“via Rands comments”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=408)
* ??The Onion??: “Beaver Overthinking Dam”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47469. Work-work-work. Gnaw-gnaw-gnaw. Build-build-build. Must hurry.
(“via 37signals”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_onion_beaver_overthinking_dam.php)
* ??Michael H. Goldhaber??: “Attention Shoppers!”:http://www.wired.com/wired/5.12/es_attention_pr.html Really, really compelling article about the future of the web, and of how we value things in the attention economy.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The boom is back”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375405/index.htm. Wow, I could have told you about these companies a year ago.
* ??Steve Jobs??: “Commencement Address at Stanford (iTunes)”:https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse/StanfordPublic-1770144-1770146–1770159–1770745_84019178?i=1741752008. I think I’ve linked to the transcript before, but John Gruber found the “audio version more inspiring”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative. I agree, and the video version is even better.
* ??Mike Davidson??: “Hacking a More Tasteful Myspace”:http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/04/hacking-myspace-layouts. Wow–Mike’s MySpace page actually isn’t horrifyingly ugly. Not sure I want to spend the time tweaking my own, though.
* ??Steven Garrity??: “Acts of Volition Radio: Session 24″:http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2006/april/actsofvolition. I’ve really been digging Steven’s “podcasts” (now that they’re called that). This latest one ends with one of the most amazing songs I’ve ever heard.
* ??Heather Armstrong??: “Even I can’t believe I’m allowed to have a dog”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/nubbin/04_05_2006.html. This is exactly why having a dog is so much fun.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??: “All the dogs I have known and loved”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/04/14/dogs. Mark Pilgrim is writing a blog again. Also regarding dogs.
In other news, I’ve set up a “NewsGator”:http://newsgator.com account for Sarah and made it her home page so she can keep up on our friends’ blogs. It’s become a family ritual now, where she and I sit side-by-side, scrolling through the morass of bloggy goodness before going to sleep. Well, except for those nights when I’m burning DVDs until 2 AM, anyway.
In NYC today, making sure the project managers for our division are getting up to speed on the new “project management system from hell”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/05/pebfad/, (which shall remain nameless). It goes like this: I check my mail and find that I’ve received 30 new messages in the last hour since I was last at my desk. I pick the three most important — either because I can pass them off to someone else and let them work in parallel, or because it’s a critical thing that can’t wait for another hour — and forward the email, make a phone call, or do a desk visit. If I’m at my desk for more than 30 minutes, someone stops by to ask for help, and away I go. This goes on for the whole day.
Except for my 2 o’clock lunch. I ignore the one-line email (“Are you there?”) and slink out the office to the elevators. Thirty-one floors later, I’m through the lobby and standing at the lunch truck. A couple in their fifties are there, slinging hotdogs and hamburgers for a few bucks. They’re cheap, fast, and they’ve been there forever. He doesn’t say a word, and she’ll chat with you only as long as it takes to get you your burger– everyone calls her Mama.
A young man orders in front of me; he’s got his head on a swivel. Mama asks him whether he wants mustard and, looking the other direction, he replies, “My God, look at my _wife_.” I turn to look, expecting to see a woman waiting nearby, perhaps with a child. Instead, I only catch the glimpse of a woman in a skirt as she glides by — apparently he was speaking in the future tense. Mama summons him back to reality: “HEY, FOCUS. You want mustard?”
I order, take my lunch from Mama, and drink in the warm, blue sky. I decide with gravity that the day is too beautiful to waste inside of an office, and, with equal gravity, that I shouldn’t be gone for more than ten minutes. I grab a bench in the little park outside the austere office building we call “388″. Men in expensive suits stream in and out of the revolving doors, passing by Tribeca mommies (nannies?) pushing their strollers. Little kids are playing hopscotch across the stonework in the park. Working men in uniforms tell colorful stories in even-more-colorful language nearby.
Another day of “eating nuclear waste” to keep the business running. Nice thing about being busy is that, at the end of the day, you feel like you’re taking names and kicking arse — plus, it fights off the layoff jitters. I’m glad my manager gave me the opportunity to be the “key guy” on this project. I’m even more glad, though, that tomorrow is a holiday. I miss sleep.
Ten minutes come and go quickly, but are well spent. I grab what’s left of my lunch and head back into the fray.
Started this morning by getting up late. Been trying to get up earlier so I can do this journalling thing at a decent time–to spend the morning remembering why it is I’m going to carry out my day. Didn’t do that. Not even close.
Woke up just in time to drive Sarah to the train station and come home to shower. Only to realize that the hot water wasn’t working. Hemmed and hawed until I decided that a cold shower was better than no shower. Did the lather-rinse-repeat thing while uttering unvoluntarily at the shock of icy water. Called in the issue to the landlord’s English-speaking son on the way to work.
It’s been like this. No time for the important things because the urgent things crowd the mind. Work’s been insane. My manager is betting the farm on a pet project and speaks with the head honchos at corporate headquarters tomorrow — so he’s been out of play for weeks. My coworker’s father-in-law, who had been just hanging on after two successive heart attacks and quadruple-bypass surgery, finally passed away yesterday. A majorly disruptive project management system goes into production for our group of over 150 people on Monday, and I’m the only one left to support it. We’re officially in a contingency situation.
I went to a senior manager’s two-hour town hall today with some 300 other coworkers. He explained to us flatly that our technology division’s sole raison d’être is to MAKE THE BANKERS MORE MONEY. He spoke of “giving a shit” and “eating nuclear waste” (his words) to ensure we meet our commitments. He told anecdotes of working 70-hour weeks and weekend upon weekend to address production outages and deliver projects on time. So much for work-life balance.
The landlord discovered nothing was wrong with the water heater, so I looked at it again after I dragged myself back through the door at 8:00 PM. A quick test and a trip to the basement made me realize that the problem was in fact a PEBFAD (“problem exists between faucet and drain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC). We’ve been living in this apartment for almost three years and I had been turning the wrong knob for hot water.
??Ken Walker??: “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104. Hey, that’s me.
“Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com needed an article for the Career and Finance department of ??Relevant Magazine??, so I thought I’d divulge all the secrets of my success in 1,000 of my favorite words. Speaking of not sucking, do you know _how_ to condense everything you’ve ever wanted to say about the corporate world into a two page blurb? Revise, revise, revise. Then ask for feedback from people you respect (and will be honest about how much it _still_ sucks), and revise some more.
The final article endured 61 mostly-late-night revisions, ballooning up to as many as 1,714 words at version number 34. The picture below is every change I made between that version and the final. Highlighted green words are additions, grey struck-out words are removals. Here’s to “embracing your constraints”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_positive_side_effect_of_big_text_less_text.php:
??Fast Company??: “The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html?partner=rss. Snapper chooses to continue doing business with excellence, but not by selling out their brand and everything they stand for to Wal-Mart.
Indeed, the productivity of every factory worker is measured “every hour, every day, every month, every year,” says Snapper president Shane Sumners, who walks the 10.5-acre factory floor with comfort and familiarity. “And everybody’s performance is posted, publicly, every day for everyone to see.” It’s a lot like Wal-Mart–which measures the number of items every checkout clerk scans every hour. Some of Snapper’s dramatic productivity improvements, in fact, seem to come almost directly from the Wal-Mart playbook. These days, the Snapper factory operates in Wal-Mart time. It must, because it operates in Wal-Mart’s ecosystem.
??Rands??: “Subtlety, Subterfuge, and Silence”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/01/23/subtlety_subterfuge_and_silence.html
Herein lies the hard part of subterfuge. Depending on where you are standing, my plan could be viewed in any number of ways. The other engineering director would have called it, “Disobeying a direct order” whereas my boss, who got wind of the effort two days in, called it “a skunk works project” and told us to proceed. Phew.
??37signals??: “You still want meetings. Here’s how to make them useful.”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/you_still_want_meetings_heres_how_to_make_them_useful.php
Though meetings are harmful, you sometimes need to get together and work a problem out. Here are some tips to make sure nobody wastes their time.
And, in case you hadn’t seen it yet: “Apple’s Intel ad”:http://www.apple.com/intel/ads/. Love it.
New content from Ken Walker coming soon, promise.
It’s that time of year again. The holidays? Well, yeah, that too, I guess. I’m talking about Year-End Reviews. You know: those few weeks where you get to explain to your boss about what a wonderful job you did and how he can’t live without you. I usually take ‘em pretty seriously: anything generating paperwork that lands in your permanent HR file has got to be important, right?
But, taking reviews seriously means it comes with an additional cost: focused concentration. The kind that only comes when you have a full 90 minutes of uninterrupted Me time. Cubicleland offers precious few moments to take five-minute personal phone call, let alone a full hour to think straight. Usually, with these kinds of things, I duck out to a coffeeshop with a laptop or notepad so I don’t get prodded every so often for my TPS reports.
Today found me holed up in a pizzaria in Warren (home to arguably the best meatball parm in New Jersey) flipping through binders of material. One holds my weekly status reports of all the stuff I did over the past 8 months and the other holds corporate material on how reviews are supposed to go and what sort of career path opportunities are available to me and yada, yada, yada. Naturally, the iPod earbuds are stuffed in my ears, in part to drown out the blaring CNN on the overhead TV, and in part to try to motivate me to get this stuff done during my lunch break. With not a little irony, the Fountains come on and remind me about stuff that reallly matters, and that justifying my existence doesn’t have to mean 16 bulletpoint accomplishments.
Hours on the phone making pointless calls
I got a desk full of papers that means nothing at all
Sometimes I catch myself staring into space
Counting down the hours ’til I get to see your face
— Hey Julie, Fountains of Wayne