Year: 2003

Some lessons learned

2nd Email. I get a lot of email. I post it very infrequently. This is a keeper.

As I’ve Matured…

I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.

I’ve learned that one good turn gets most of the blankets.

I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just jack
asses.

I’ve learned that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others – they are more
screwed up than you think.

I’ve learned that depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

I’ve learned that it is not what you wear, it is how you take it off.

I’ve learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you’re
finished.

I’ve learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.

I’ve learned that ex’s are like fungus, and keep coming back.

I’ve learned age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

I’ve learned that I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.

I’ve learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are
celebrities.

I’ve learned that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

I’ve learned that 99% of the time when something isn’t working in your
house, one of your kids did it.

I’ve learned that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.

I’ve learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you
too soon and all the less important ones just never go away. And the real pains in the ass are permanent.

Pass this along to 5 friends…trust me, they’ll appreciate it. Who knows,
maybe something good will happen.

If not…tough.

As Always … Keep grinning …. it makes people wonder what you are up to

[raving lunacy]

Since I talk about learning from time to time this seemed worth keeping and passing along.

From status report to discovery tool

Weblogs as status reports – It can work but the barrier is cultural not technological. (SOURCE:Rands In Repose: Status Reports 2.0 via McGee's Musings)- We've tried over the last 2 years to replace status reports with blogs at a e-commerce company I do consulting for. Success has been mixed. Even though most of the people are engineering staff (i.e. technical people who should have no problem with the 'geekiness' of today's blogging tools), getting them to document in real time what they do has been more difficult than I anticipated. Transparency, even internal status transparency, is a new and hard thing for today's business culture. I think this will shift in time as people become more used to the idea of making themselves more transparent. Not only will the tools get easier to use, but the idea of being transparent (internally at least) will become more and more common just as the idea and culture of email took a while to take hold. Remember the executives who got their email printed out by their secretaries? Just as this is perceived as being quaint today, so too will today's resistance to internal transperancy be perceived as quaint in the future.

QUOTE

There needs to be some creative incentive for individuals to write stuff down. For the Wiki, there is the promise that if you write it down, maybe you can avoid future lame redundant questions. For the weblog, the timely conversational style of the medium keeps the content focused on news of the moment and that's really the question; is news of the moment interesting to an engineering organization?

What I'm curious about is if anyone has had any success using web-based collaboration tools as a means of augmenting or replacing status reports. I know Wikis have successfully emerged as semi-structured information repositories… have they evolved into anything? How in the world can I get out of writing Status Reports?

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Roland, of course, is spot on about the problems being cultural. And with the notion that the transition is becoming more comfortable with transparency. Time to move David Brin's The Transparent Society to the head of the reading queue.

My current hypothesis is that you have to start with the individual knowledge worker and work from the bottom up. What I haven't cracked to my own satisfaction yet is what the organizational support requirements need to be.

Current status reporting requirements are still rooted in industrial assumptions about projects and processes. Key to those assumptions is the notion that variation is bad. Things are supposed to go as planned. In a knowledge economy those assumptions are inverted. You still need to plan. But now the plans are to help you recognize which variations are important, which are trivial, which are bad, and which are good. Status reporting should become more about discovering and understaning the implications in those variations.

Status reports in the knowledge based enterprise

Status Reports 2.0. At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people — this is the moment when, if you're an early employee, that you first see… [Rands In Repose]

Some nice reflections on the potential for wikis and weblogs to address that perennial necessary evil in organizations–status reports. Comes down slightly in favor of weblogs for most organizations given the open-ended, unstructured, nature of wikis.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree, although the hybrid strategy that Ross Mayfield is pursuing at SocialText is intriguing as well. Another take to factor in is that taken by the folks at Traction Software. The start up curve appears a bit steeper, but they seem to have thought more about how to operate at the structured team level.

What I'm continuing to struggle with is how best to introduce these concepts into organizations that are just beginning to grasp the limitation of email as a management tool.

 

ER-6 headphones

Buzz is nothing if not a persuasive salesman. He's been on my case for months to try Etymotics's ER-6 earphones. He finally succeeded a few weeks back and I've now been using them for a while.

I should have given in to Buzz earlier. Understand, I was already using an upgraded pair of UM In-Ear Monitors as recommended by Kevin Kelly at Recomendo. And I used Bose's noise-cancelling headsets when I travelled. The ER-6's replace both of those and give me noticeably better sound over both of those choices.

Don’t return those MP3s

A picture named fargo.jpgThis idea is going to backfire. Better to send music CDs to record company execs, cut them in half so they can’t re-sell them, and send an unmistakable message that the gravy train is drying up. Sending email with huge enclosures is a horrible abuse of the Net. [Scripting News]

I’d have to agree with Dave here.

Besides being an abuse of the net likely to cause more harm to the average user than it will send any useful message to record company execs, it has another problem. I’m willing to bet that many if not most of these execs don’t read their own email. You’re more likely to make life difficult from some poor Executive Assistant than you are to deliver any useful message to the executives themselves.

If the relevant executives were making any extensive use of email and the web, I think we’d see a lot less clueless behavior on their part.

Full-text feeds and weblog comments

Comment on post 3836 on 11/17/03 by Liz Lawley. I think for many of us the goal is to get our thoughts *written*–the being read is a secondary bonus. 🙂 The real problem with full-text feeds, I think, is that they make it more likely that comments–which I think are a critical part of many weblog entries–will be missed. 🙁 [chaosplayer News]

As expected, Liz raises several cogent points about my bias for full-text feeds. First, like Liz, my initial goal in blogging was to make it easier to get my thoughts written down in the first place. Discovering that there were people out there who wanted to read them was a secondary and welcome bonus.

As for missing comments, I'm less clear. It was a while before I enable comments at all. I do get comments and those that I get are always valuable. My solution to not missing comments on  my own weblog is to provide an RSS feed from my comments so they flow into my aggregator. The only drawback to that approach I can see is that comments do get separated from the original post as they come into the aggregator, but I can always go back to the weblog itself to track the comments in place. I also find that the bulk of the discussions I track tend to be cross-blog rather than comment-centric. The question, of course, is whether that observation in an artifact of my being aggregator-biased. How many good discussions am I missing by not tracking comments on other blogs more closely?

For that matter, why, or perhaps when, would you choose to post a comment instead of making an entry in your own blog? The technologies are opening up more choices; are there any emerging guidelines or practices to direct my choices.