Thinking Aloud

Entertainment is a double edged sword that I think about from time to time. Whether its reading a book or watching TV, I spend an awful lot of time putting other people thoughts and work into my vision and into my mind. Often I don’t ever take the time to make a response to what I’ve seen or heard. And I can’t help but wonder if that cheapens the experience. Is there something truly human about responding. If it’s true that watching TV puts peoples brains at a lower state of activity then sleeping is that something that we as a people should really be striving for?

It’s so easy to make life about consumption and inputs. But what are we putting out? What are we adding to the world or our society?

Certainly, there is a time for enjoying those things that others have worked hard to create! That’s art! And art is made to be shared and enjoyed. But I have found that concerts are better when I’m able to stir the courage to be a dancing and plays are best when I am able to shake hands with the players or clap loudly to encourage them. There is a big part of me that wonders if when there is a lack of ability to have that kind of feedback if there is something missing. I recognize that reading a book is a passive consumption and I wonder if the reason that schooling forced us through book reviews was to help us engage the work. At the end of the day I think that’s what is at stake here, engagement. Where input/entertainment is taken without engagement I feel like there’s something amiss. Input deserves output. Even if its just a status update, sharing something with a friend over a beer or a full blown blog post.

Some people consider me to be handy around the home. It’s quite a compliment. In an effort to help other be handy, I thought it would be a good idea to share my secrets for home handyman success.

• 5 tools from downstairs, all retrieved one at a time
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I need
• 1 new tool (price >= $20)
• 14 parts I thought I would need
• 2 hours futzing around understanding the issue
• 2 minutes calculating whether it actually would be cheaper to call a professional.
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I actually need
• 1 idea to rip it all out and “do it properly” — tried and abandoned
• 1 other job done as a procrastination tactic
• 2 parts that I really did need, usually one of which is improvised from junk I have around home (see I was keeping that for a reason!)
• 15 minutes actually fixing the problem

And yes, Joanna, the sink is now fixed.

I enjoy seeing bands, sports and really pretty much any event in a small venue and with a reasonably small crowd.  The warmth and closeness that you can have in a small venue is just awesome.  It makes the show come alive in a way that the big shows (at least the ones I’ve been to) can’t seem to match.

Concerts

Concerts are one of my favourites. I love the music, I love the rhythm, I love the chance to dance (although I am occasionally a somewhat reluctant dancer). And I’ve been to a number of large concerts in stadiums and outdoor stages. And so far, I’m still loving the small venue with it’s less popular band over a large venue and a wildly popular band. The conversation that a band and crowd can carry out in a smaller venue is awesome. The band stirs the crowd up, and the crowd starts giving the energy back to the band and soon, it is one awesome collective experience.

Amateur Sports

Going to the game live is pretty neat because you have the chance to be in the atmosphere and I’m certainly not saying the watching an event on TV is any substitue in the atmosphere department. But I will say that when it comes down to just seeing what is happening during the game you’re almost always better to watch on TV, unless you can get tickets right up front (or go to a game where the crowd is small enough that pretty much all the tickets give you a spot that is right up front.

In both cases, whether an sporting event or a concert, the atmosphere is the reason to go and see it live.  And for my money it seems I enjoy going to twice as many small events and spending the same money as I would on one big event.

Supporting Where It Counts

The last great thing that going to smaller local shows and sporting events does, is support the events that really need support.  The band that tours across Canada hitting all the little cities, they need your support to keep going!  The local team that is playing week in and week out in the local college gym, they need you to get in there and buy hot dogs so they can keep playing! Your contribution to what they’re doing is notice-able and significant.

Big Names and Watching Success Grow

There’s no way around it.   If you’re into supporting smaller shows, smaller venues, amateur teams, you aren’t going to be seeing the big names play.  There’s just no two ways about it.  I think this is something that the local supporter just has to come to terms with.

Equally troubling is watching a band/team/player grow from a small venue to the point of popularity that they can no longer play small venues. If/when someone does make it big who you supported through the course of their success they reach the point that the small venue supporter probably won’t go any longer. It’s kind of a sad time, a parting of company although one can always go to the big shows. It just won’t be the same. And at that point, perhaps there is nothing left to do but reflect back on those first shows and enjoy the memories. In some ways being a small venue support you get to be involved in the growth of the group/team and that may be a reward all it’s own.

Addendum: One totally awesome thing about going to smaller shows is how much more accessible the players or musicians are.  Chances of meeting a performer at a small show? 1:1 large show? 1:100, maybe worse!

One thing that happens when you start using some of these new fun websites, facebook, twitter, identi.ca etc. Is that you really do end up mixing friends, from all kinds of different places. In my case I’ve got friends, from university, high school, church, work, Hardwicke Island, Victoria Social Media Club plus my parents, inlaws and pretty much everyone having the ability to look in on my status updates, new pictures, etc. It really cuts across groups that are generally held separate. In some respects, this is great, and in some respects this is taking some getting used to.

Are you all listening?

The great part of this is that everyone who is interested in what I’m doing has the opportunity to keep up with my latest thoughts and latest happenings. The bit that takes some getting used to is that, being a fairly private person, I would tend not to tell my high school friends what the latest up on Hardwicke Island is, and vice versa. It makes it a bit easy to get stuck not letting anyone know what’s up since the messages aren’t really targeted. There’s things that are obviously inappropriate, and these days it seems no election campaign will now be complete without some facebook/youtube-reveals-your-past news. Not that I’m planning to run for office any day soon…

So, it seems that there’s a few ways forward. Set up separate accounts for different people to tune into – This seems crazy, do I need more usernames and passwords… Surely not. Or the second, just get used to the fact that the world is going to know a little more about my life than they could before, and let the benefits of sharing outweigh any detriments that might occur. So, does this really all come down to “sharing is good?”

There’s a little more than that… somewhere along the lines, the idea that avoiding talking about religion, politics and money seems to have seeped into my thinking, I’m not the only one. But if you read that article you can see that things are changing. And that’s where the simplicity comes in.

Just Be Yourself, Ok?

With all the social media slashing holes in our so called anonymity, everyone gets some choices. If anonymity and integrity are important, you really can’t play. That’s the only way, just keep reading the webpages like back in 2001, don’t comment, don’t post, don’t tweet, don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t get involved. If anonymity is important but integrity is not, then you could always just fake it and be who you want online, and be someone else off line. But just like in really life, being different people in different places, means remembering your character when you step into a certain situation, and it is very awkward when those people from different situation collide, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Integrity Sans Anonymity

The last choice is if integrity is important and anonymity isn’t or at least is sacrifice-able. Then you just speak into every situation as yourself. The downfall here is that everybody get’s to see what you’re thinking; what you’re about. And it may be very different from what they expected. It offers people the opportunity to be involved in what you really are thinking. It definitely exposes a lot more territory for discussion, but I think the benefits of this way outweigh the detriments.

Getting thing done is a constant struggle and to be honest, I’ve spent way to much time thinking about how to try and catalog all the things I want to do, rather than just doing the blasted things that need to be done. So, to share what wisdom I’ve got (if any) on this topic, I thought I’d pass along the details of all my efforts how I try and keep track of my self and what I’m trying to do. And how I’ve tried to stop obsessing about my todo lists and just do something (this post may be part of my therapy on that front).

My Tools

Both my tools are online, at this point in my life, it’s where I live, so it seems to make sense to me try and keep myself organied online as well.

• Online Calendar That syncs to my mobile phone (Google Calendar)
• Online Email accessible via my mobile(Gmail)

Separating Work and The Rest of My Life

I don’t bother. I’m just one person, work is part of my life. So, there’s just one calendar and one todo list, and one log book email with everything in it. For me, the simplicity of just having one place to look for things far out weighs the bummer of looking at work tasks when I glance at my to do list on the weekend.

How my System Works (or tries to)

Calendar

Everything that has an actual time (think meetings) or due date (think reports) hits the calendar. And that’s where it lives. This provides the hard landscape (borrowed from GTD) for my life. So, that’s pretty simple. I get an agenda sent every day to my email and I try and survey the weeks events fairly regularly so that I see the big trouble coming a little before it arrives.

The To Do List

I’ve tried plenty of online stuff that is pretty fancy (and feature-full) but I always end up neglecting it and then getting disorganized, so I’ve resorted to a draft email. I seperate my tasks by project in the email and then write the tasks as a bullet list. If I’m waiting for something I put a note in the list that I’m waiting for this from someone and when I started waiting for it.

The Log Book

Being trained as an engineer, I have it drilled into me that a log book is crucial to success, you NEED to be able to see what was done and when. Being incredibly forgetful when it comes to things that happen in day-to-day life (especially with dates) this is even more important for me. So my log book has become an add on to the end of my draft email to do list. Once I finish anything, I copy that item from my to do list to the bottom of my draft email and tag them with the project that they’re for and list them underneath the date I completed it. At the end of the week, I copy all these paste these finished tasks into a new email and send it to myself. Then I archive it and when the time comes that I really need to recall what I’ve done, three weeks from now, I’ll call it up and look at it, curse myself a little for not leaving better notes and thank my lucky stars that I left any notes at all.

The Daily Habit

All this stuff only works if you buy into the system 100%, I’m trying to buy in 100% and review my calendar and to-do list daily. During my daily review I find a few items that I really want/NEED to get done during the day and write them on a separate piece of paper that I try and put somewhere VERY prominent. Throughout the day, the really quick tasks (5 minutes or less) I do right away and then longer jobs I put on the to do list. Then I just try not to get distracted by youtube, google reader, wikipedia, my own navel and facebook and get those few items on my list for the day completed.

It has been getting ever clearer to me as people start to ask me for my opinion and what my team has been doing this week, that I have arrived in middle management.  Hmm… So now the question become how to be a good middle manager.  I read a few things like Joel Spolsky’s thoughts on middle management. Which gives me some hope that yes there is a good reason to have people doing middle management.  So now the issue is just how to do it well.

Oh Dear. courtesy of cultclassicts.com

One of the big issues that I think anyone in management faces is trust.  This is proboably doubly so if your in middle management.  Because now you not only have to have people that you can trust to do good work (which thankfully it seems that I do) but you also have to be able to explain to anyone else how your method of management works and does indeed get the most out of people.

To be honest my experience of managers is that they have had a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards managing me and consequently I think I’ve been a fair bit less productive than I couldhave been otherwise.  So, somewhere between micro-managing and “I don’t care what you do just don’t bug me” seems to be the happy medium that I’m looking for.

The other new aspect of this is the planning, and strategic business development side of things.  This is both exciting and somewhat daunting.  This is the part where we choose a direction and hope like heck that when we reach the next measuring point that it worked and we’re making more money or at least making the same money.  And here my true colors show.  Much as I’d like to be a risk taking business adventurer, I lean towards conservativism, which I am pretty certain in the web world leads to business death.

So, here’s to growing into something new.  Hopefully, Ths doesn’t make me really annoying.

A couple of verses to share , this one from Phillipians 3, this is Paul talking,

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

And one other from Matthew 6

“So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Looks like there’s just one place to focus.  Today.

I find myself reading quite a bit these days. Granted much of the reading is online. It’s still reading. And… well what’s the point of all this reading?

• Learning
• Enjoyment
• Up to Date-ness
• Procrastinating

I enjoy reading, but I think I REALLY enjoy doing things.
MEh, I don’t quite know what I’m trying to say here. But it would be nice to point at some things that I have done, even if it is just writing book reports. Somehow reading for escape, seems to be losing its charm.

Let’s do something.

To substantiate my claim I offer the definition of a Dementor adapted to the mall. Definition lifted from the HP Lexicon and unabashedly butchered for my purposes.

"Malls are among the foulest places on the face of the earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in mock-beauty and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even the shop-a-holic feels the malls ghastly presence, though they can't keep themselves away. Get too near the Mall and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Mall will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soul-less and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."

I must admit that I kind of enjoy plazas, but then I would say a plaza is entirely different from the mall. No crazy floor plans designed to keep you lost inside. No constant 21 degrees Celsius.

I learned something about compliments the other day.

Sometimes when people give compliments they are really just impressed by your abilities. They're thinking "Wow, that guy is just really good at that."

But sometimes compliments are more like a way of saying "I love you". And when they are, boy, you better respond. We all know that an unreturned I love you spells some pretty serious consequences (or at least some damn awkward moments). When one of these "I love you" compliments comes up… same thing. Don't leave it hanging, you gotta return that compliment, asap.

Good luck.