June 25, 2007

Repaired Headphones

I have a pair of Sony MDR-G72 headphones - they fit my big-headed small-eared noggin well, have good sound, a "just right" cable length, and fold very neatly. They’re about 5 years old, the earpads were worn to disintegration, and I was warring with my love of the old ‘phones versus having an excuse to buy some new goodies.

Unfortunately, I’ve been burned by headphones before (bad fit, bulky, bad sound, shoddy workmanship, etc.) So I was happy when I came across this photoset showing someone in the UK getting replacement earpads. Comments on an Amazon entry for these now-unavailable headphones led me to a US source: servicesales.sel.sony.com.

My headphones are fixed. My ears are happy. And my conservative anti-sustainability boss thinks I’m even more a liberal for not contributing to consumer capitalism by buying new headphones. Win all around.

Posted by jim at 03:36 PM

November 30, 2006

And what is good, Phaedrus?

Two apparently unrelated articles follow - but consider the following when you read them:

Apple and Nintendo are both companies that have eschewed choices that would lead directly to market dominance. Even Apple’s now-market-dominating iPod wasn’t created to attack an existing market (unlike, say, the Zune). The essential point - as a deeply religious person told me - isn’t what’s being done, but why it’s being done. Arno asks the question, “Is the result good?”. Nintendo’s Wii seems an attempt to answer the question, “what makes this fun?”

All while the ones whose “why” is “to be the #1 seller” are crippling themselves.

The Design of Mac OS X Shutdown Feature

Arno Goudal – MacOS X Finder Lead from 1999 to 2001 - weighs in on the discussion of shutdown menu design in Vista. “The success of Mac OS X has been due in part to an ability for Apple to successfully manage a project this complex to the point where full builds of the OS could be done reliably every week. To that extent, considering the issues described by Lettvin, shipping Vista at all is quite a feat, indeed.”

In Praise of Third Place

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker discusses Nintendo’s very lucrative position at third place in the video game console market. “[Nintendo] has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?”

Posted by jim at 12:08 PM

August 23, 2006

Enough

Last night was date night - the sitter watches our son one night every other week while my wife and I go out and spend some time with each other free of the distractions of parenting. After dinner (great Indian food at Kanishka), we went to a nearby shopping center - she visited a crafting store while I sat and watched the water fountain.

I experienced a bit of a zen moment as I watched three jets of water, each rising to a different height. Some might have seen it as a metaphor for striving to always reach higher - I saw three fountains of water that had each risen to the height which was theirs. They accomplished what they needed to accomplish, their purpose was served by the height they’d reached.

Had the lower one risen higher, it would no longer have been so inviting to the toddlers that came to touch it. Had the high one been even higher, it would have soaked passers-by with every breeze.

“Find your place,” the scene said to me. “Once you’ve found it, you don’t have to always strive for more, more, more. Do what you’ve found. Do it well.”

I let that just wash over me for a while. Our culture - American culture in particular - is so focused on always reaching some next level: grow your sales, grow your market, upgrade your house, your income, your car, your computer, your career. Ofttimes, someone who has declared “I am accomplished, this is enough” is viewed as a drop-out from society. In a society that values the Upgrade so much, that might be true.

When Jenni came to find me, she gave me an odd look.

“What?” I asked. “You have a very smug smile on your face,” she told me.

Is it coincidence that “smug” is so often followed by “and self-satisfied”?

Last night’s thoughts were only reinforced this morning when I read Seth Godin’s remark that perhaps “good enough” might be the next big idea.

Maybe it already is.

Posted by jim at 10:28 AM

June 08, 2006

Blame the Stick

I find myself telling this story a lot more recently:

Spring of my freshman year at university, I took a 100-level art course. Black and white, charcoal and ink and collage, very basic stuff. The instructor tried - with varying success - to inspire his students. Admirable for a survey course at a state school.

One fine day, we were working with brush and ink. Our teacher became more and more frustrated as we hunched over the paper and tried to make fine, controlled movements when he wanted broad, bold strokes. Finally, he'd had enough.

"Everyone! Put down your brush. Pick up your pad and your ink bottle, and come outside!"

He marched us out to the front of the building, which faced the tree-lined quad. "Find a stick about as long as your arm," we were instructed.

Once everyone had their stick, he nodded and gave us our orders. "Hold the stick by one end. Now, dip the other end in your ink. This is what you're painting with."

Our dismay must have been obvious. His glee came through in his voice, "Anything that you don't like, blame the stick. Now paint."

* * *

This story comes back to me when I find myself, or others, getting hung up on perfection. When the desire to be Insanely Great on the very first iteration prevents me from getting a single thing done. When nothing seems as good or creative or elegant as what inspired me.

That's when I'm reminded of a spring day, painting with crufty twigs.

Blame the stick. Now paint.

Posted by jim at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

Score with iPhoto

I use iPhoto on the Mac to organize my digital photos. I try to assign keywords and such as soon as I download photos - nothing fancy, but enough that I can find pictures from one thing or the other without much fuss. Like pictures of Nathan from the past 12 months.

One of iPhoto’s other features is the ability to create and order photo books. Pick a slew of photos, pick a theme, tell iPhoto to do an automatic layout for you. Tweak the ordering a bit, add titles and such, and you’re good to go. Click “order” and it’s sent to a printing service that makes and ships the book.

So the year, for Christmas, I made up a keepsake book for my parents - a series of about 50-odd pictures of Nathan that spanned 2005. 8 1/2 x 11, hardcover, glossy paper, nice layout. Score. Not only are my parents raving about their book of grandson pictures, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is now the expected Xmas gift for the foreseeable future. Their friends are asking to borrow the book so they they can show their parent-of-grandchildren kids what they want for Christmas.

Score.

Posted by jim at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

Productivity Tip: Throw everything on your desk in a box

From the good guys at 37signals:

Toss everything, and I mean everything on your desk in a box. If it doesn’t fit in a box, put it on the floor. Your desk should be completely cleared of everything — no monitor, keyboard, mouse, pencil, paper, stickies, gum, etc.

Next, get to work. Only remove something from the box (or the floor) when you absolutely need it. Not before. No anticipation. If you don’t need a pen now, don’t get the pen. Only place it on your desk when you need it.

Throw out the remaining items in the box in 30 days or sell the contents on Craigslist. (Edit: or give it away on Freecycle)

Disclaimer: Before you toss it, you may want to go through it and make sure you pull out the picture of the family and the legal documents, but toss everything else.

When we decided to move this spring, we started by “de-cluttering” our house (at the recommendation of our selling agent). Loads of things to criagslist, freecycle, goodwill, a 10x10 storage space, or just the dump. Made our home look much better, and certainly contributed to the quick sale.

Not to mention it made the eventual move so much easier.

Posted by jim at 10:13 AM

July 06, 2005

An old theme

I’m an IT professional - I’ve spent well over half my life making computers work for people. While my platform of choice is Mac OS X, I still know much more than the average bear about making Windows XP go where I want it to go. The Dell laptop that my workplace supplies is kept well-patched, lives behind the corporate firewall, has several company-supported GPOs, and runs up-to-date anti-virus software (Trend Micro).

So when I lose a workday and a half clearing my computer of a worm, I become intensely frustrated. The worm, TOMBAI, came courtesy of autoplay. It was undetected by Trend (and failed, in later tests, to identify files recognized by other scanners). It reduced the security settings for IE (which I have to use for several corporate IT services such as SharePoint), such that I found out about my infection via the secondary infections that Trend did detect.

Today, finally, I’m certain it’s clean.

The frustrating part is that, with the knowledge, resources, and support structure I have at my disposal, I lost almost 2 days.

How can the “average” user - running Windows, behind on patches, relying on the spare time of the neighbor’s kid, and likely unwilling to shell out for good security software - even hope to survive?

Why does the consumer tolerate this? In my heart, I know - it’s a combination of low Cost of Entry and undervaluation of personal time. People look more at what it costs to get into a system rather than the total cost (TCO), and they usually undervalue their own time. So they buy systems that are cheap, not factoring in what it’s going to cost to make it run - and keep it running - or the lost value in not really being able to do what you set out to do.

But knowing that intellectually doesn’t really help when you’re so frustrated you want to drop-kick the bloody thing and walk down the street to Microsoft with a fistful of invective. I just don’t understand.

Posted by jim at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Get out of my way

Several years ago, I came across an open-response question:

“If you could have only one superpower, what would it be?”

A lot of respondents wanted to fly, or be immortal, or see the future - but one person came up with a superpower that I keep going back to time and time again:

The power to make people get out of my way.

Line at the grocery? On hold? Crowded room? Traffic? Obstructionist bureaucrat? Get out of my way. The joy in the idea only underlined how much time we all spend with someone in our way - often for no good reason. Jenni and I still turn to each on regular occasion and chant, “I want the power to make people get out of my way.”

During a content-poor seminar this morning, I was pruning and cleaning the documents on my Windows laptop. And was marvelling at all the little ways that Windows kept getting in my way. Mix of mouse and keyboard to do simple tasks. Lack of visual cues. Terribly inconsistent interface. Obscured menu language. It got even worse when I decided to take some time to explore OneNote - which is supposed to be Microsoft’s let-you-do-things-quick freeform note-taking app.

The damn thing kept getting in my way until I shut it up and went back to my good old text editor. Maybe OneNote does neat stuff - but I couldn’t get the damn thing out of my way long enough to find out.

And I realized that I wanted my old favorite superpower, but applied to technology. That all the technologies and solutions and applications that I enjoyed using were the ones that - as much as possible - either stayed out of your way or got other things out of your way.

I’ve spent a lot of my career in technology saying that what I enjoy doing is providing cool solutions and elegant tools. But what is a “cool” solution or an “elegant” tool? I couldn’t find a succinct way of saying it. I have that now.

Tools that get out of your way.

Posted by jim at 01:10 PM

October 01, 2004

What am I worth?

What do I charge for my time?

It’s a fairly normal question for people who have been sararimen all their professional careers and are looking to do some freelance work. Searching for comparable rates rarely helps - web and IT geeks (my line) rarely advertise their hourly rates, same with editors (my wife’s line of work). So how do you figure out what to charge a client?

This is my take on it. It assumes you want to earn the financial equivalent of someone who has a full-time job; someone who works 40 hours a week (not 50, 60, or 70), gets benefits, sick time, training, vacation, and paid holidays. Sound good? Climb on board.

So, first off, decide your salary. That’s why you decided to freelance, right? Let’s say $60,000/yr - it’s a nice, comfortable number. First thing we’re going to do is take half of that, and add it back in. Why? A workplace provides you with all kinds of benefits: workspace, office supplies, office furniture, phone line, computer, printer, fax, paper, pens, electricity, bandwidth, email, coffee, trash service, tech support, purchasing office, training, voice mail, software, insurance, employee discounts, sick leave… just to name a few. I work in Higher Ed, so I also get many spiffy discounts, and access to lots of university stuff. Work for, say, a basket-making company? Bet you get a discount on baskets. It all adds up. But you, you lucky devil, you’re self-employed, you have to supply all these things yourself. So long as you’re putting yourself in the under-$100K range, let’s say that all those things are worth - collectively - about half your salary. So multiply your salary by 1.5. That gives us $90,000. Write that down - that’s how much it costs, per year, to keep you around.

Now, how much do you want to work? Really now. For the sake of argument, let’s use the old standard of 8 hours a day of real, live, billable hours, 5 days a week. Do you want holidays? All said, there’s about 12 valid non-religious (well, save for Christmas) holidays. Vacation? Let’s not be greedy, and take 2 weeks - 10 business days - of paid vacation a year. We already budgeted for sick days in the previous step.

Now let’s do the math. 52 weeks in a year. You work 5 days a week, that’s 260 days a year. But you don’t work on those 12 paid holidays, and you don’t work on those 10 vacation days. That leaves us with 238 working days each year. We liked 8 hour days, right? 238 days at 8 hours a day… that’s 1,904 working hours every single year. That’s our magic number: 1904.

Go back up 2 paragraphs. How much money a year did we need to keep us in beer and cheese-whiz? $90,000 for the equivalent of a $60,000 annual salary. And we decided we wanted to work 1,904 hours a year. Divide the first by the second: 90000/1904=47.27 (rounded).

There you go.

If you want to live the life of someone who earns $60,000 year at a 9-to-5 office job with benefits, holidays, and paid vacation, you need to charge $47.27/hr for your time. Or, to make a nice geek equation of it:

( salary * 1.5 ) / ( ( ( 52 * daysinweek ) - ( holidays + vacationdays ) ) * hoursperday )

Don’t have a calculator handy? Fill in the numbers, then cut-and-paste into a Google query. They’ll do the math for you.

Now, I admit, the biggest leap of faith is the first one - that all your benefits add up to half of your gross paycheck. I’ve spent over a decade in workplaces where, to make you feel good about your (often small) salary, they give you a “benefits analysis” each year to tell you what your bennies add up to. And each year, it’s been close to 1/3 of my salary. Add in all the costs of putting you in an office and keeping you equipped with Post-Its and red Swingline staplers… that stuff adds up pretty quick. So, for a ballpark figure, I’ll stick by my 1.5 for sub-$100K jobs until someone gives me a detailed proof otherwise (and you’re welcome to do so).

So, now you know how much you should charge for your time. Or, if you’re a salary-earner, how much your time is really worth. It’s a powerful number, and can change your perspective on things. Here’s an example:

Let’s say I did the above exercise, and my time is worth about $40/hr. I have a house with a yard. It takes me about an hour to tend to the yard, each week, with a basic mowing and trimming. A kid in the neighborhood offers to do the job for $15. Now, if I like tending to my yard, it’s not even a question. But if I don’t - if I consider it an odious task - then having someone save an hour of my time (which costs $40) for $15 is a bargain.

Before you all rush off and start applying this to everything in your life besides your freelancing hourly rate, I want to make two last points:

• One - time spent on something you enjoy is priceless. If I like taking care of my yard, then I don’t care if the neighborhood kid offers to do it for free. I like doing it, and that makes it intensely valuable.

• Two - Money has no intrinsic value. Yeah, this is something for a later posting. But the short version reads something like this: money by itself is worth nothing. It is, at the core, a medium of translation. We used to barter directly - item for item, service for service. Now we use money as a representation of value - a middleman in the bartering process. So don’t fall into the “time is money” trap. Money is nothing. Time is what has the value, money is just a way to represent that value.

There. You’re armed now. Set your rates.

Posted by jim at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2004

Tom's TIB

Okay kids, go read this. You're going to have to have a PDF reader of some flavor to actually get into the goodness but, trust me, it's worth it. While it has a lot of your typical "what color is my parachute" and "who moved my cheese" stuff in it, there is also an overwhelming amount of the very-uncommon "common sense" that is missing in too many minds these days. Such as:

Management Rule/Role No. 1: GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. (“Manager” = Hurdle Removal Professional.)

“Thank you” trumps all!

Fun...is not a...Four-Letter Word (so, too, Joy).

Just go grab it. There's at least one thing in there you need.

Posted by jim at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2004

Anomalous Entries

Just discovered a few journal entries in an old notebook of mine. They’re not my handwriting…

Day One

Chickens in the dark lost their way

Day Five

Misplaced Chickens through time/space anomaly. Damn things are popping up like coffee vendors.

Day Three

Another time/space anomaly. Going back to day five after accrewing double-overtime. (wish pencil had spell-check)

Day Seven

Chickens almost covertly start microwbrewery. Not half bad.

Posted by jim at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2004

Commute Bag

Commute Score for the week: rode bike in once, drove once, bussed once. I’m out of the office on Thursday and Friday, so no commute worries there.

Ended up buying the new backpack from the Apple Store yesterday. I arrived, pulled the pack I was interested in off the shelf, and proceeded to transfer The Stuff into the pack. The Stuff is normally carried in two bags - a small messenger bag and a Marware sleeve - and includes:

• PowerBook G4 15”
• power supply
• Palm Tungsten T2
• cellphone (T616)
• iPod (1st Gen 5GB)
• headphones (the iPod buds died in the wash - oops)
• checkbook
• USB flash drive
• mini-flashlight
• keys
• pens
• screwdriver
• CF adaptor
• bills-to-be-paid
• notepad
• bizcards
• miscelleneous printouts
• firewire and USB cable
• whatever book I’m currently reading.

Yes, I do sometimes get nervous about the dollar value of what I carry around with me to-and-from work. Which makes a Good Bag all the more important, neh?

Fiddled with the arrangement of The Stuff. Tested getting things in and out. Put it on and walked around the store. Took it off, put it on. Checked for all the little features - removable laptop sleeve (don’t need the whole pack for meetings), a place to hook a d-ring or two, clip for keys, good padding and seams. Everything fit, everything was accessible, yet protected. Totable on bus, wearable for bike ride. It worked.

So I bought it. Didn’t even bother taking The Stuff back out. Heh.

Posted by jim at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2003

Run. Jump. Rewind.

A few weeks ago, Tycho over at Penny Arcade mentioned the new Prince of Persia game - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - that ubisoft recently released. Now, I'm an old fan of these games - in fact, I was much enamored with Kareteka, which was Jordan Mechner's first effort. I had far too much fun with Tomb Raider (well the first two non-sucking releases), which I described at the time as PoP in 3D, with boobs and guns. (Yes, there was a PoP 3D several years ago. Yes, it sucked. We shall not speak of it.)

Thus, the news of an updated PoP game - with Mechner's involvement, made by ubisoft (makers of Splinter Cell), and praised by Tycho as being "so good it's almost impolite to release it" - embedded itself directly in the "want it" part of my cortex.

I was not Jenni bought the XBox version as my birthday present (the game is on PS2, XBox, Gamecube, and PC), and I started playing last weekend. After I started, the game pretty much consumed what "free" hours I had (meaning a few hours each evening after work, dinner, child-to-sleep, and some household chores). I haven't been able - or had the imperative to do it - since Nathan was an inert sleeping-eating-pooping lump.

Let's just go quickly over what the game does in proper, and in most cases outstanding, fashion:

• Visuals: Outstanding. far above what normally comes in a multi-platform release. Great modeling, great environments with a firm, real feel to them. Characters move well. No clipping problems at all.
• Sound: good solid sounds, arse-kicking music. I want a soundtrack.
• Story: Yes, there's a story. Enough to hold it all together, with a nice twist close to the end, and an ending that feels genuinely satisfactory.
• Gameplay: Woot. Running, jumping, and fighting haven't been this fun and pretty in a long time. A very nice balance between the puzzle-solving and fighting. Both are challenging. The ramp-up of difficulty throughout the game is very well paced.
• Cutscenes: Even these are good, although there are some times when it's very hard to hear the voice of Fara, one of the NPCs. Most are done with the game engine, although the truly important ones are CGI.
• Extras: Very, very cool. Not only can you unlock the original PoP and PoP2 games, but there are also DVD-like "making of" video extras. Considering how cinematic this game is, it only makes sense.

Uhm... so what's not to like? Not much. I only have two beefs:

• There are certain fighting techniques - tricks even - for different bad guys. Once you figure these out, fights get a lot simpler, and a little repetitive. But still - the fight scenes are so fun and pretty to watch, you don't really mind.
• Length. The PA crew finished in about 10 hours of gameplay. I took a little over 12. I want more, dammit! At least a harder difficulty level!
• One last caveat - Jenni, who is prone to "screen sickness" (that nausea some folks get when playing 3D games), was affected very quickly with this game, as there are a lot of big, swooping camera moves. So be warned of that.

Those are small, petty beefs. If you have any interest in the action-adventure game genre, you want to go buy this game. If you have a friend who enjoys such games, this is a great Xmas present - if they don't buy it for themselves first.

Me? I'm gonna play it through again at least once more...

Posted by jim at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2003

Geekdom, Day Four

Spotty network connections have been one of the ongoing themes here are WWDC, but they finally seem to have gotten it right today - wired and wireless are working. Or, it could simply be the reduced number of attendee as the conference winds down. Either way, I'm online.

New pictures in the Gallery - four "art" shots from the Yerba Buena gardens, which are between my hotel and Moscone West, and a picture especially for Jenni. Ain't Target cute?

More WWDC commentary follows.

Good session this morning on transitioning existing OS9 and Windows systems (clients and servers) to OSX Panther. The most disappointing part of it was the mini-preso by a Pixar sysadmin, explaining how they transitioned - it involved a lot of custom scripting on their end (which were simply shown as black boxes - I'd prefer to see the underlying code), and a management that allowed them time and resources to plan well in advance of the transition. Still, Panther's (and Apple's) almost manic emphasis on OpenLDAP and MIT Kerberos (with continual assurances that, unlike MS, Apple isn't modifying Kerb) is very reassuring. Tony, I think we'll be able to do some of the metadirectory stuff you want to do (although Panther can't run an AD... yet).

One more session this afternoon about AppleScripting for SysAdmins, and then it's off to Cupertino for the Apple Campus Bash. Haven't been to the home of the Mothership before, but I still think I'll refrain from bringing my camera.

A couple sessions tomorrow, hang out with Todd and Family in the afternoon, then home-again-home-again Saturday morning. I miss my son, miss Jenni, miss my own bed. Miss my bed with Jenni in it. Don't miss my yard, which is likely horrendously overgrown by now, but that's why I'm taking a 4-day weekend for the 4th. Time to sharpen the machete...

Posted by jim at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2003

Geekdom, Day Two

It's a much calmer morning than yesterday, when every WWDC attendee was waiting anxiously for Steve Jobs' Keynote address. Still, even with the reduced numbers, the Airport network doesn't work. sigh So I'm typing in TextEdit again, and will post when I get some connectivity...

Second night away from Jenni and Nathan and I'm still not sleeping that well. Usually I sleep fine away from home (just give me a bed), but not this time, not yet. It might have something to do with the remainder of the sinus cold I'm still getting over (slight congestion), but I really think it's just parenthood. Unconsciously, I'm still listening for Nathan in the night. Why else would I have awakened at 3:30pm - Nathan's wee-hours feeding time of choice - the past two nights? No question about it - I'm a daddy.

Although I do miss my wife and boy a lot, there's one benefit - the dull ache in my lower back and left shoulder has lessened. I'm still planning on finding a family practice doctor when I get back to Seattle to get a look at the shoulder, as it's the same ache that was diagnosed as a minor rotator cuff injury about 6 (six?!?!) years back. What fixed it back then? Why, some anti-inflammatories and a week or so of no lifting. Hrm...

This afternoon will be packed - back-to-back-to-back Mac OS X Server sessions, with the final one covering Authentication (a topic near and dear to us at work), which will segue nicely into tomorrow morning's Directory Services seminar.

Posted by jim at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2003

Plane Switch of Geekdom

So, here I am. Still in Seattle. Flight 592 was supposed to take off at 5:49pm, but the plane had a pressurization problem (leak in the door seal, apparently), so we've been switched to another plane.

One that doesn't take off until 8:20pm.

On the bright side, I have this wireless access that I'd paid for and is good until midnight (hopefully I'll be out of here by then), and I managed to snag a chair near an electrical outlet so I have power for the, well, Powerbook. No to mention, in moving to our re-assigned gate, I managed to escape the too-loud lady with the lapdog, and am now ensconced between a fellow WWDC attendee and a pre-teen sk8ter grrl.

Too bad they don't serve beer here at the gate.

Posted by jim at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2003

Ways to Get Under My Skin

Without forewarning, show up 20 minutes late for a 1-hour meeting that you're one of the primary participants of (ie., meeting doesn't start until you arrive). Make a cursory apology (no eye contact), telling others that you stayed late with someone from your previous meeting.

Don't ask what others can bring to the project - instead, make assumptions about what they can do, and about what's possible in their area of expertise.

Listen to others attempting to explain what they can bring to the table only until they pause long enough for you to grab the reins again.

Ramrod the meeting through, telling the others that you have another important meeting in 10 minutes (when the current meeting still has over 20 minutes scheduled).

---

What does the above say to me?

• "I do not respect your time - my time and the time of the people whose meetings bracket this one is more important than yours."
• "While I have a vague idea of some things you might bring to the table, I'm too busy with other more important people to listen to other expertise you might have."
• "Although this is supposedly a planning meeting, I have already conceived a plan without consulting others who might have context or experience to add."

When you're hoping to have me design, implement and maintain things that have the power to make you look very good - or very bad - the above are most definitely not the things you want your behaviour to be saying to me.

I am not a prima donna. I don't expect people to hang off my every word, or defer to me at all times. I do expect, especially when being supposedly brought in for my expertise, to be treated with the respect due an equal.

Posted by jim at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2003

A Higher Purpose

I have a few recurring dream "themes" - not necessarily recurring dreams, but a theme that will pop up now and again in similar-but-not-identical dreams. One is the "got way behind" theme, which is almost always expressed in academics, and goes roughly like this:

Now, to quote Bill Cosby, "I told you that story so that I can tell you another one." I had a dream last night...

Then I woke up. Just in time to turn off my alarm clock before it would have started to sound.

I firmly believe that sleep and dream allow your mind to take in what has happened during the waking hours and assimilate those experiences into the corpus of your existing knowledge, thought, and experiences. Not only that but, in sleep, your mind will try to work through the dilemmas and worries that you're facing. Dreams, then, are the conscious remembering of that activity. I've had a few other dreams with this flavor and, as with those dreams, I have a pretty good idea what this dream was about. Don't worry - it's good.

Posted by jim at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2003

Brought to tears

Headphones on, I'm going through my music library - the 4+ gigabytes of MP3 files that I have stored in iTunes. I'd acquired some new music on my laptop, and was generally synchronizing everything, weeding out old stuff, and ripping CDs from my collection that I wanted to have on my iPod. Jenni's due in 3 weeks, and we have about 6 hours of music that we want to have to help her relax and find her zone during the delivery.

As I was going through my music, I came across Right Here, Right Now, by Jesus Jones...

I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history

Back in 1991, this song hit me in the chest. It was an anthem - in the short few years preceding, we'd seen the eastern Europeans countries - the "satellite nations" of the Soviet Bloc - break away and declare their freedom. I was taking a polisci class while the Berlin Wall fell - my teacher threw away the textbook and taught from the daily news. The Soviet Union crumbled, seemed ready to return as hardliners attempted coup and shelled the parliment building with tanks, and was rescued by the court of world opinion - stuck in the old world, they'd shut down the TV and radio, but hadn't counted on the FAXes and emails and cellphones.

In what seemed like a matter of months, the Cold War - the leaden weight laid on our shoulders and the shoulders of our parents before us, and created in the era of their parents- was over.

The Gulf War just seemed like a brief abberation. For me, even with the horrible economy that cost Bush Sr the election, the early 90s seemed filled with promise and hope.

Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history

As the 90s progressed, we saw the rise of the Internet. The beginning of economic upswing that was the dot.com era, and the hallmark of the Clinton administration. Crime in the US dropped. Peace reigned across much of the globe. The world, while its problems were still many, seemed to be waking up from history.

Now, where are we? Seattle is one of the top 9 cities at risk for terrorist attack. Dubya is beating the drumbeat ever louder for war with Iraq. The budget surpluses of the turn of the millennium are now record deficits - state governments are going into debt unseen in 50 years, and the federal government is voting on raising the national debt limit. North Korea lobs missiles into the Sea of Japan. As Jon Stewart said recently, "Is it my imagination, or is every leader of every county in the world acting like a giant dick?"

My son will be born within the next month.

I heard that Jesus Jones song, remembered the hope and promise of a decade-and-change ago...

I was alive and I waited for this

...and, remembering what I was feeling a little over a decade ago, I nearly cried.

Posted by jim at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)