1.) Use Status Shuffle

First off, I have never seen a Status Shuffle generated status that did not strike me as trite or inane.  They are also totally unoriginal and I often have multiple friends posting the same Status Shuffle garbage at the same time.  If you don’t have anything original to say, keep quiet.

2.)  Repost Status Messages about Causes

Yes, cancer is awful. Yes, we should support our troops.  No, posting the same message that everyone else is posting for any cause will not have any effect whatsoever without a direct link to a concrete action.  If you care so much about a cause, there are multiple ways you can leverage that feeling to create a real outcome.  Re-posting something as your status on Facebook is the lowest possible form of civic engagement.  Also, no one thinks cancer is a good thing.  There is no other side that needs convincing

3.)  Fall for the “See the People Who Look at Your Profile” Apps

Here is a link to developer documentation that lists everything a Facebook app can do in terms of accessing your information.  Do you see anything about there being some kind of magic functionality that would allow an app developer to track who visits your profile?  That is because it isn’t possible and never has been.  Do you know what it is possible?  Getting narcissistic people to use an app that generates random pictures of their friends, assigns random visit counts to them, posts this information on their walls and then spams everyone associated with them.  If you fall for this once, you might be stupid.  More than once and you are unfriended without remorse.

4.)  Type in All Caps

I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this.  Do folks really not know how to turn off caps lock or is holding down the shift key really that appealing?  If you want to use all caps to emphasize one word or to be ironic, that might be okay, but probably not.  Using all caps is the internet equivalent of yelling and a surefire way to let the rest of world know that you have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, but you want to say it anyway, loudly.

Ultimately, fear and worry are usually the product of either not having control over a situation, taking a risk, or letting things slip.

The first case, not having control, is the most understandable to me.  I used to have a serious fear of flying, primarily because I felt completely helpless while up in the air.  No matter how much I cared about staying alive, the only things keeping the plane I was riding on from crashing into the ocean was the skill of the pilots and the mechanical soundness of the aircraft.

This lack of control caused me to worry and stress, every sound, shake or tilt caused me to close my eyes and grip on to my arm rests preparing for a plunge.  Over time however, I realized that how I felt really had no impact on whether or not the plane stayed in the air.  My worrying however did have a serious effect on me and caused me to be miserable the entire trip.  Learning to embrace (or at least accept) this lack of control was not easy (I still need a few drinks to completely relax on an airplane), but ultimately something that I needed to do.

Fear that comes from taking a risk is avoidable if one accepts that failure is possible, perhaps even likely.  Risk is necessary and even though learning to make good bets can allow one to avoid a good deal of pitfalls, at some point, no matter how good you are, you will fall flat on your face.  Understanding this is critical in any endeavor and there are certainly strategies to limit the impact of failures.

A former boss once promoted the credo “fail fast”.  The idea was to minimize the effects of failed projects by gradually increasing their scopes, testing and modifying as needed along the way.  Following this approach, we might have a series of small failures, but would learn from these mistakes and adjust, reducing the risk that the end project would result in failure.  This concept of failing fast has an application beyond the realm of technology projects and can go along way in minimizing the fear associated with risk taking.

The final source of fear, letting things slip, is actually a fear caused by guilt and later by a feeling of lack of control. If you missed a deadline or have been ignoring a problem, you feel guilty because you know that you have been done something “wrong.” This guilt slowly evolves into fear as one starts to ponder potential results (real or imaginary) of their neglect.  If a problem is ignored long enough, the feeling of lack of control may also come into play.

While certainly not a silver bullet, the way I have found to avoid this kind of fear is to attack anything that I am worrying about immediately as the worry enters my mind.  If I have let a deadline slip, I don’t spend my day worrying about whether my boss will call me out.  I try to own the situation by either getting what ever needs to happen done or approaching my boss to inform him or her proactively.  Not only have I found that most employers appreciate this approach, but it also allows me to avoid unnecessary worry.

So in short, no worries.  Like all strategies and attempts to explain the complexities of living a happy life, the thoughts above are the by-products of my limited experience and time being a human being.  Believe it if you need it; if you don’t, just pass it on.

The plugin claims compatibility with both IE and Firefox (I can verify that it works with Firefox 3.6, but does not work with Firefox 4.0.7 beta) and can be linked to and installed like any other browser plugin.  When you visit LibX’s edition builder, you are able to search for various editions of the plugin that have been created by different libraries.  If you don’t find a plugin for the library that you seek, you can create an account and then go through a pretty basic plugin creation process.  In most cases, you will just need to paste in the URL of the OPAC that you would like to search.  You can also customize the plugin further by uploading your library’s logo.  Once you are ready to share your plugin, you can publish it and then share the link with your patrons via your website, Facebook page, etc.

As you can see in the screen-shot above, Libx provides a search box right below your address bar that allows you search by a variety of different fields (or you can just search by keyword).  The plugin also allows you to highlight any text, right click and then search for that text in your catalog.  Another cool feature is that when you find a book on popular book-selling sites like Amazon.com or Barnse & Noble, your library logo will appear next to the book title and if you click on it, it will search your library catalog for the book.

If you live in the Traverse City Area or just want to get a taste of what this plugin can do, feel free to download the Travese Area District Library plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer.

These plugins are still in Beta and we are in the process of extending their functionality by adding the capability to authenticate and search our online databases, as well as adding links to account information, upcoming events, etc.  Let me know what you think!

Making the decision to leave Interlochen was very difficult.  The energy of the place, the talent of the IT team, and the things we were able to make happen there were simply amazing.  During my last few days as an ICA employee, I never felt more appreciated and respected.  I feel blessed to be able to leave a job that I loved gracefully to follow my passions elsewhere.

A clear bonus in the situation was being able to stay in the area and thus be able to stay in touch with my many partners in crimes.  I also take with me the memories of webcast gone array, stretching and scratching, proud men, loading up the danger ranger, etc.

The new job is great so far.  Amazingly solid, experienced, and interesting IT team, bold leadership, and an organizational openness to change.  I think we will do great things together.  Working in town, less than a fifteen minute walk (or when it is really cold or raining out, a two minute drive) from my house, is pretty sweet and makes me feel a lot more like I am actually a citizen of this town and not just a transient.  I also feel invigorated by just doing something different, facing fresh challenges, mixing it up, mastering new things, etc.  The future is bright.

And I will try to keep this thing updated.  I have no excuse for not contributing to the internet.

In the last year or so I have been to Geneva for three weeks two summers in a row, voyaged to castles Southern France, hiked the coast line of Northern Italy, and snorkeled the reefs  and explored ruins in Cozumel, Mexico.  For some, this amount of travel / novel experience in distant places may be routine, but for me it is not.  This burst in travel was the direct result in enrolling in a graduate program that involved a good deal of international travel.  Now that I have completed this program and return to normal life with a new degree, a good deal more “free time”, and the exciting feeling that comes along with deciding what I want to do next.

But this post is not about that.  This post is about a few observations I have on coming home from a serious adventure.  Here they are:

• I have concluded that it is best to avoid giving yourself recovery time and to jump right back into your everyday life right away.  If you like what you do, the people you associate with, and where you live, getting back into that pattern helps avoid post-vacation depression or malaise.
• You can avoid feeling overwhelmed upon returning home by getting your business in place before leaving and staying connected on an intermittent basis.  While the idea of being completely disconnect is compelling and sometimes necessary, I would rather check in and stay on top of things for a couple hours every few days when I am on vacation than come home to an overflowing inbox.  Not having to return to a mess of any kind is key to post adventure happiness.
• It is good to reflect on and use what you learned through/from your quest experience.  This may be as superficial as starting to use that new compelling ingredient you discovered while away or as meaningful as re-examining your valuesystem and what you want to do with your life.  Change is life.  Embrace it.

Just some thoughts.  Take what you need and leave the rest.  Believe it if you need it, if you don’t just pass it on.  You get the picture.

Oh the picture to the right of my bullet-ed list is of the Freddy Mercury statue in Montreux.  Lead singer of Queen, Freddy Mercury spent the last few years of his life in this small city on the foot hills of the alps and shores of Lake Geneva.  To commemorate him the city commissioned a statue to be built.  At its base is engraved “Lover of Life, Singer of Songs.” Not a bad legacy.  We are the champions!

As this sign suggests, some parts of Geneva do not welcome any form of dachshund or wiener dogs.  While other canines are approved of and celebrated, any form of “long dog” is meet with condemnation.  This has resulted in small, wiener enclaves throughout the city.

Geneva, like many other European cities, contains a small population of man-eating slugs.  If you are caught on the street when these slugs emerge from their hiding places, your only hope is to run into one of the many slug protection shelters located throughout the city.  Signs like the one above help route folks to these safe havens.

Some shops allow you to have lit matches, some allow you to smoke only cigarettes, and others only allow pipes.  However, some shops do not allow smoking of any kind and these shops need special signs to make this policy extremely explicit.  The sign above explicitly bands matches, cigarettes, pipes, but the absence of hookahs, cigars, and joints indicates these forms of smoking are welcomed.

]]> http://www.swmorey.com/index.php/travel/signs-of-geneva-part-2/feed/ 0 http://www.swmorey.com/index.php/tech/37siginals-getting-real/ http://www.swmorey.com/index.php/tech/37siginals-getting-real/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:44:36 +0000 Scott http://www.swmorey.com/?p=297 37Siginals is a pretty awesome IT organization.  Not only did this seven person team create Basecamp, perhaps the greatest online project management suite available, but in doing so they also created Ruby on Rails, my favorite development environment by far.  In 2006 they published a book titled Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.  You can read it online here.

The bottom line is that you need to read this.  Though written for an audience of web application developers, this text is relevant to any IT organization (and really any modern business).  Just like 37signinals’s software, the book is minimalist consisting of around 91 extremely short essays (a few paragraphs or less).  Here is an example from Chapter 7 entitled “Meetings are Toxic”:

Don’t have meetings

Do you really need a meeting? Meetings usually arise when a concept isn’t clear enough. Instead of resorting to a meeting, try to simplify the concept so you can discuss it quickly via email or im or Campfire. The goal is to avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting. Here’s a few reasons why:

• They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow
• They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)
• They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute
• They often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
• They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow
• They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about
• They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway

For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting (this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

• Set a 30 minute timer. When it rings, meeting’s over. Period.
• Invite as few people as possible.
• Never have a meeting without a clear agenda.

I for one love this kind of no nonsense approach to doing business and getting things done.  37signals has demonstrated that small teams can do amazing thing when they focus on the product and actually making things happen versus posturing and dealing with the traditional corporate customs and superstructure.  Read this book, think about it, make it happen and prosper!

After spending a weekend traveling to and then hiking Cinque Terre, I understand why so many travelers have fallen in love with Italy.

I could probably write an entire blog post about just the journey to Genoa (or Genova as it is spellt in Italian), but ultimately, part of keeping a blog (and I guess life in general) is choosing what to leave in and what to leave out.  Suffice it to say that once we surfaced on the other side of the tunnel through Mont Blanc, our small band of travelers were amazed by the beauty of all the small villages and castles built along the slopes of the Alps.  At some point or in another lifetime, I would like to spend a few weeks visiting each of these castles, but on this occasion we were on a mission and needed to continue on the course.

Because we organized our expedition only a few days before departure, we could not find any lodging in any of the villages in Cinque Terre and decided to use Genoa as our base camp for the journey.  This turned out to be a pretty good decision as our hotel, run by an extremely kind and helpful man named Paulo (who was literally always at the front desk), was a pretty nice place to stay and most importantly was located close to the train station.  Not only was Genoa the hometown of Christopher Columbus (the man who discovered America, freed the slaves, and was the first man on the moon), but we were also able to find a great restaurant, where we first discovered the wonders of Vermentino wine.  We woke up the next morning and took the long train ride to Cinque Terra.

Cinque Terra, which with translates to the “five lands”, is a region of northern Italy that consists of five villages that run along the northwest coast of Italy.  There is a trail that connects these villages and being a natural adventurer, I was committed to hiking this trail to completion no matter what the terrain.  Though the vistas were certainly beautiful (as demonstrated via the image at the top of this post), the first two trails were fairly tame.  Other than a flight of 368 stairs, to my favorite city Cornigula, I barely worked up a sweat.  Thinking that the rest of the trail would be as easy, we decided to eat a feast for lunch and drink a bottle of wine (plus a couple glasses) with my partner in crime.  We hung out at this very cool wine bar / restaurant and the owner chatted with us and then put on a CD of his friend who can best be described as “the Italian Tom Waits”.  His name is Folco Orselli, you can hear one of his tunes below, and if you like it, you can buy his album here.

Folco Orselli – Lo Spazzacamino

After departing from Cornigula, the trail became much more challenging.  Gone were the slow and steady inclines.  In their place we found primitive stairs marching up and down the mountain sides.  Guardrails became a thing of the past as well.  We now walked along cliff ledges with nothing but our own coordination (which was limited by the bottle of the wine) to keep us from falling down the cliffs and into the sea.  This was certainly the kind of hiking that I was seeking, and though the trail was challenging, the views made the effort more than worthwhile.

I have traveled a good deal and live in a very beautiful place, but nothing I have seen thus far compares to the majesty of Cinque Terre.  If you have an opportunity to do international travel and are up for a challenge, I can not recommend this place highly enough.

After I get back you can expect a solid blog post and lots of good pictures, but for now I wanted to kick off the culture section of this blog by sharing a little info about my favorite Italian novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Summarized by Wikipedia:

“This book is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Every odd-numbered chapter is in the second person, and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter. The even-numbered chapters are all single chapters from whichever book the reader is trying to read.”

While that summary may leave you thinking this novel is just a bunch of post-modern, meta-garbage, nothing could be further from the truth.  While the narrative is fractured and the structure certainly unconventional, the story is engaging, thought provoking, and especially enjoyable if you are a serious book-junkie.  The entire novel centers around the relationship between the reader and the text, both the fictional reader and the fictional text and the real reader and the real text.  This duality and Calvino’s mastery of prose helps the reader enter the realm of the story, falling in love, becoming part of international conspiracy, and taking part in a revolution among other things.

While this book is certainly not popcorn fiction, it is extremely rewarding for those with an open enough mind and strong enough intellectual back to take on the challenge.  I can not recommend it highly enough and suggest that the reader enjoy a glass of wine or liquor while reading as it helps lower the boundaries between reality and the reality presented by Calvino.

In closing, I present one of my favorite quotes from the novel:

“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”