Author Archives: bluedepth

Behind the Barn

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It is something I’ve never really understood clearly enough. Why do people roll over so readily when it comes to technology? Instead of being curious, poking, prodding, and exploring, they just roll over and give up.

I get this a lot with people who can’t use websites at all, a lot like WordPress.com or WordPress.org. What gets me is that a lot of these systems are written in a way where the programmer really has a vested interest in helping you understand. They are going way more than halfway with the design of a lot of these systems, but some people simply refuse to explore. Why are we so incurious, so resistant to exploration? Is it that daunting and I just don’t see it? So what if you broke something? That’s what IT people like me want to see. We want to see a field littered with broken technology because that shows us where we need to concentrate on making things better.

I get this a lot at work. People tell me frequently “How do you know this?” and it’s rather embarrassing to tell them that I just looked at the thing and saw what the purpose of the thing was and saw how it was supposed to be used and blindly wandered around bumping into things until I figured things out!

It’s how I learned how to drive a car. It’s how I learned Windows. It’s how I learned Mac. It’s how I learn everything. I open it up, dive in head first and start making a right proper mess out of everything. Each oops and damn and well-crap reveals more about what the system does than any manual could. Plus you get a feel for all the natural ways that people may approach new things like these bits of software. It seems so natural and simple to me that I get to wondering why more people don’t try it and see if it works for them as well.

Don’t study, don’t just sit there contemplating doing something. There is no try, there is only DO. Do it. Whatever it is. Anyone can be an instant genius if you have just a sliver of faith in yourself and absolutely zero qualms with making messes out of things. I wish more people would do this sort of thing. Go exploring. Make a mess. Take something broken apart and see how it was put together.

I’ve tried to explain the whys and the hows to people in my job and I’ve seen the same response over and over. Exasperation. People don’t want to know the why or the how, they just want simple instructions, much like “Slot A” and “Tab B”. It’s almost a kind of Pavlovian thing, someone comes to them asking them for something and all they want is just the minimum to produce minimally acceptable output and then hand it back. There isn’t any pride in that and that’s something else that bothers me. So few anymore take actual pride in their work. Even if you can’t take pride, you can at least say that it works, even if your solution is a hot mess and someone else has a much more elegant solution. At least you came up with a solution on your own! I suppose a part of what I dearly wish for would be for people to sit back and say “If I got what I’m about to give this other person, would it be correct?” And if it’s not, and you hand it off anyways, and you know it, then you are the worst kind of lazy person – willfully lazy. I just can’t stand that.

I hear the same statement from folks quite a lot, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. This statement bothers me so much and so deeply that my usual response (and usually I leave it unsaid) is “If the old dog can’t learn new tricks perhaps it’s time to take Old Yeller out behind the barn and do what must be done.” It is one of my deepest held beliefs that when you stop questioning, when you stop being curious, when you stop wanting to know – that’s when you die. Yes, the mechanical parts of you live on and you may have another thirty or forty years of meaningless shuffling yet to do, but really, you’re dead inside. When you stop wanting to know, when you stop being curious, you might as well go behind the barn and do what must be done. Living any other way is living like a sleepwalker, just shuffling through your life and the only thing you can really take pride in, the one last thing that you can contribute is carbon dioxide. That’s no way to live.

So I urge everyone to take things apart and put them together again. Find something that interests you and explore it. Do something. Take pride in doing it badly at first, but you will get better. There is so much to our world left undone, unimagined. I don’t think one lifetime is anywhere near enough to ever “have had enough” of learning. If you feel the icy grip of age sneaking up on you, fight it off with something new. Try something creative. Write, draw, sculpt, paint, sing. Any verb. Do it, do it awfully, but take joy in knowing that you are really DOING something instead of just waiting to be led out behind the barn.

TL;DR

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Information on the network is perpetually increasing in volume and so I find it progressively important to seek out tools that help me parse, limit, and control the flow of the information that is out there raging by like an enormous wordy river. I started my personal evolution in many places other geeks do – old skool with newsgroups. Since then, Usenet has been abandoned and shuttered and handed it’s info-river crown off to RSS and ATOM, which are ways of syndicating content from websites and aggregating that content in one framework. In a lot of ways, these systems are effectively joining the little rivers into a giant monster river that goes gushing by.

This is the first step. Anyone who attempts to put their head in this river only sees a blur as it rushes on by you, maybe you’ll get a hundred stories but the majority of it will pour on by without one iota of attention from you. This didn’t last too long and then the next step came, which was social curation. People follow other people and the ones who are the most popular are the ones curating the epic flow of information and bringing only the things you are really interested in to your attention. These social networks are like fishermen on the raging river of information, they catch bits and pitch them over their shoulders and they slide down the duct towards their followers. You don’t have to worry about the raging torrent anymore because you have faith that anything worth your attention is ending up in that duct running towards you.

Something really foolish happens next, you start to aggregate the ducts together and now you’ve got a smaller version of the giant raging torrential river except now it’s sorted, somewhat, but still rather too swift to catch much.

Then comes instapaper and all the other “read it later” services. When I see something that I sense may be interesting, usually by headline or keyword I will tap on it’s link and send it to instapaper for keeping. It’s as if the matchsticks in the raging torrent are getting picked out, then aggregated and the smaller torrent is being picked over by me and then serialized. The information waits, and I move through it item by item at the pace I am comfortable with. Now, the rate of information loss is immense. It’s meaningless to return to the giant torrent, the curators are just as noisy as the torrent is itself, the ducts might as well be the new torrent, and the tools you use are making uncomfortable squealing sounds under the pressure of how much we are effectively serializing.

Then as I read through my instapaper queue I finally reach the last point on the journey of raw information reaching me in the 21st century. Either I like it and archive it or save it in my evernote “for ever” or, and this is actually turning out to be a new theme, I brand the information TL;DR. It stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read” and I find myself reading just a few sentences of what at first looked compelling and then realizing that either I don’t care or I don’t agree and then out comes the TL;DR stamp and the information is pitched into the big bit bucket in the sky.

There is something new coming, and I’ve seen an inkling of it with an iPad app named Thirst. It acts as a kind of content aggregator/curator for twitter traffic, another raging torrent of information and categorizes tweets and brings other content along for the ride. I think it’s really quite something however I can’t really make good use of it because my iPad is just too old for such an app, it jettisons after a few moments of use. Alas, there will come a day when we set up networks of aggregators and curators in spiral arrangements so that the final product is an intensely hyperlinked virtual meta-document delivered on some sort of display technology.

Something like this I find will really only work and make most people happy if we borrow a theme from email and arrange it serially like with instapaper. New material is always flowing into the queue but we can scan the queue, comfortable with knowing that nothing will go unseen, and able to give our attention to the stream of incoming relevant, curated, categorized, and hyperlinked information. Like a DVR helps people by timeshifting television information, whatever this new second or third generation information application will also perform the same duty.

Speaking of television, a great majority of it is TL;DW, or TB;DW. Too long or too boring. Perhaps we’ll extend it to TI;DW. Too inane; didn’t watch.

This blog post is already TL;DR, but at least I know it and celebrate it.

Eduardo Saverin is shameless and should be banished!

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Reading an article on Google Plus, about one of the Facebook executives, Eduardo Saverin who renounced his citizenship to dodge his fair tax burden. A burden that we all share so that our society can function!

This man, Eduardo Saverin is shameless. He is not alone and that is a huge problem in our modern world. Nobody feels shame any longer. They know they should, but they simply do not care. They are greedy for greeds sake and unwilling to take part in what it means to be an American, and a big part of that is to pay what your fair share of tax to pay for the basic services that we all take for granted.

There is a lot wrong with our world. We are plagued with the lazy, the criminal, and the shameless. They spend absolutely no time considering how their actions will affect anyone else. Contrary to popular opinion, every single American is interdependent and each one of us has an obligation to work and pay taxes for those services that we all take for granted.

I find people like Eduardo Saverin to be a clear example of what is horribly wrong with our society. People unwilling to act responsibly and be a proud citizen of our great country. So what is to be done with people who do this sort of thing? I’ve got a great idea, at least in this case, and that is a punishment befitting the crime: Banishment.

Mr. Eduardo Saverin should not be welcome in the United States. He should be banned from any future dealings, his entry should be rejected at whatever port he attempts to gain access through and if he is discovered here illegally he should be deported. If you have the temerity to make a distastefully large sum of money on the backs of your fellow countrymen and then turn around and flee to avoid your tax burden then you should never come back. If you flee, stay that way!

We really ought to bring banishment back. We should banish Mr. Eduardo Saverin.

International Day of Lying

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People need lies. Lies are good.

At least when it comes to your online identity. I’ve been reading a few things here and there with people who are quite upset that Mark Zuckerberg is seeking ways to dodge his fair share of paying taxes and these people are very upset that Facebook is making money off their personal details – their lost privacy.

So how does one regain lost privacy? Simple, lie. Lie right through your teeth. Make lying an art form. Create a fantasy life out of pure whole cloth and make it as bombastic and marvelous as you have creative chops to make it!

In fact I think everyone should do this. Right now. We need a international day of lying. Everyone needs to log in to Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter and go to town. Change the years, fiddle with the places, come up with schools you didn’t attend and live in cities you have no idea about beyond their brief entries in Wikipedia. Make it all random, make it monumental, but above all else, make it a lie. A big beautiful fantastic fabrication!

To that end, I’m going to edit my Facebook to this end. It’s going to feel good. Oh so good. Why don’t you join me? Nothing says pleasure more than wrestling power away from those that do not respect you, like Facebook. And Google. And Twitter. And well, anywhere else really.

Monetize that bullshit. I DARE you!

Of Clouds and Stones

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The early 21st Century will be known for the era of cloud computing. Just a little bit of what the cloud can do I’m actually taking advantage of right now as I write this blog post.

Google provided a huge space for people to upload their music and created a handy tool to upload their iTunes music up to Google’s storage system on the network. I took advantage of this offer and copied my entire iTunes library up to Google. That’s of course just half of what I needed to cloudify my entire music collection. I also need a client to play the content on whatever devices I want to use them on. Unfortunately the Google webapp for their Google Music service doesn’t work well on my iOS device, however there is an app called Melodies which does work fantastically well!

This has saved me so much time, expense and bother. Instead of having to buy a device with a big storage unit for my music I can simply stream my music off the network, using Google and Verizon (and Wifi if I have it, and that is almost universally ubiquitous in North America anyways) so now I have nearly universal access to my music, in a way having my cake and eat it too.

This wasn’t always easy, the Melodies app did have an issue with not being able to shuffle properly but after I contacted the app support staff and telling them what was wrong they fixed the app and it updated on my iPhone in a few moments. From that point I have realized something I never thought I’d be able to do, but play my music right off the network. It’s just one more way that devices, storage, computers, all of it are becoming increasingly abstracted away from my computing experience. I expect that sometime soon the notion of a computer will start to erode and evaporate as more and more of my life becomes cloudified, or perhaps the right word is enclouded? Going to have to work on the terminology.

Of course, people who I’ve spoken to about the cloud come up with very familiar complaints as to why they don’t want to join me. Mostly it comes down to a question of privacy, and that they feel the cloud would endanger their sense of privacy. I’ve thought about that point for a while, trying to come up with a position on it. I’ve honestly never really given two shakes about my precious privacy. What value am I coveting? So what if Meijers knows what I buy and when I buy it? So what if Google knows what music I enjoy? So what if I’ve been categorized and indexed? Where is the hazard? People regard privacy as some sort of grail-object. They protect it beyond all rational sense and I don’t think that any of us can maintain any sense of privacy any longer, at least since social networking became a mainstream part of our lives.

But then again, there is the fear. Where does that come from? People hiding who they are, what they think, what they buy from others because we’re afraid of, what exactly? Isn’t it a more comfortable life to simply be who and what you are and let the chips land where they will? A life exposed is a non-issue for those that are proud of who and what they are. I admit to having a definite cavalier attitude when it comes to my privacy, but what the hell do I have to hide? Or any of us? To me it has always been my argument that if I reveal elements of my life to strangers that somehow they’ll take advantage of that information and somehow misuse it or attempt to hurt me. Well, first and foremost they’ll have to endure the social awkwardness of being the ones to expose my “secrets” to everyone else. The key here is to own everything about yourself. Own your passions, own your foibles, and own your mistakes. Nothing about the past means anything, regret is a dull nothing. For example, Anthony Wiener’s crotch-shot being publicized lead to the end of his political career. WHY? I respect people more when they stand up and own whatever it is that others find outrageous. Here’s the thing, none of us are pure. None of us really have any place to stand and throw stones. Even Jesus Christ spoke on this very point. “Let him who hath no sins cast the first stone!” Well? So you have a picture of your tenty underwear out there? OWN IT. BE PROUD OF IT. In fact, go on a Playgirl shoot and show the world your junk. This idle and meaningless outrage is stupid and lame. I would pay real money to anyone who could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any random other human being isn’t a sexual pervert loaded with monumental loads of kink. All it takes is a shot of whiskey to get a man to drop his shorts and do highly entertaining things with his body.

So what it comes down to? Privacy bent to protect the image that we’d like to impress upon other people that we are all pure as driven snow? How silly is this, when we are as pure as driven-over snow! At least have the fortitude to stand up and say “Yes, that’s my junk shot! Do you like it!?!” Because in that, lies respect and honesty.

To people that feel differently than I do, I have a one word question to ask you:

“Really?”

Guest Post: Yoga for Cancer Patients

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This post was submitted by Mr. David Haas with the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance, he requested that I share it on my blog and I think it’s worth a read.

Yoga- A Good Fitness Choice for Cancer Patients

Most people regard yoga as a form of healthy physical activity. However, yoga is more than mere exercise; it is both a practice and a philosophy. Originating in ancient India, yoga requires physical, mental and spiritual discipline. It is usually associated with the meditative rituals of Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions.

Commonly practiced around the world for centuries, yoga is growing in popularity across the United States. It has numerous health benefits, not only for healthy individuals but for those battling cancer. Some doctors and fitness trainers consider yoga ideal for people going through aggressive cancer treatments or entering cancer recovery programs.

A Good Cancer Fitness Choice

Yoga is an excellent low-impact activity for patients in all stages of cancer. It is gentle on the body and beneficial for the mind. In fact, yoga is at the cutting-edge of mental health. It relieves emotional and physical stress, provides mental clarity and promotes general well-being. All of these things work together to help patients win their battle with cancer.

Patients going through conventional treatments can use yoga to increase energy and combat fatigue and other treatment side effects. For those battling difficult cancers like mesothelioma or pancreatic cancer, yoga is a wonderful palliative treatment.

Many patients find it hard to endure treatments for mesothelioma and other advanced illnesses, and vigorous exercise is usually out of the question. Gentle stretches in bed may be all they can handle at first. When they are ready to move beyond stretching or short walks down the hall, yoga is a good fitness choice.

What is Yoga?

Many cancer treatment programs integrate yoga regimens with traditional therapies like surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy. Yoga is a form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, a holistic practice.

According to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, numerous findings suggest that yoga improves life quality issues for survivors of breast cancer and other diseases. While it cannot cure cancer, yoga is beneficial for those enduring pain or discomfort. Less pain means a better life, with more time for loved ones, things and experiences.

Yoga emphasizes certain physical postures and positions. As a result, people often regard the practice as exercise. However, the term “yoga” literally means “union.” Both the practice and philosophy of yoga seek to create oneness by uniting the body, mind and spirit.

Yoga’s Value for Cancer Patients

Due to yoga emphasizes fitness as well as self-reflection, it can be quite valuable for patients who face treatments for mesothelioma, breast cancer, skin malignancies and other tumors. Physical and mental health is essential for fighting cancer, and yoga helps patients maintain a healthy body and mind.

Like other alternative therapies, the type and intensity of yoga vary from person to person. Patients who choose to incorporate yoga into their cancer fitness programs should talk to their doctor first. Yoga requires fairly good physical health to begin with, so patients should verify their health status with their doctor. Upon approval, patients should search for a qualified yoga instructor in their area. Instructors can show patients the proper techniques for the most benefits.

Lepers of East Main

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Kalamazoo has a section of road that I absolutely detest. The road in question is at the foot of Eastwood Hill. It’s East Main Street as it drops with an almost twenty percent grade downhill. The reason why I hate this section of road so much is because just to the left, as you are going downhill, there is always (or at least it seems so) a cop waiting in the unused parking lot just in front of the DQ on the corner of East Main and East Michigan. What makes this road so awful and uniquely suited to attract cops? The entire downward slope is set at 25 miles per hour and the cops are very fond of detecting oncoming cars with radar and pulling them over if they were in excess of this limit.

For those that are wondering, yes, I did get caught going 35 down the hill. It’s an evil hill because to go down it at 25 you have to chew up your brakes the whole way down. This got me to thinking about alternatives to this route, heading downhill. I started to explore the local roads and discovered that if I select Humphrey Road instead of East Main to make my way downtown I have three choices to make from that point and they all have minimums of 40, except for one which doesn’t matter. If I turn on Bixby then I’m guaranteed a red-light-signal which may or may not give me clearance to make an easy left onto Gull Road and head downtown. If I don’t do that, I can run to the end of Humphrey and brave a left onto Gull from that position further along, it’s more dangerous because there is no controls on the flow of traffic on Gull Road from there. Another path I’ve found is to turn right and head into the residential areas. If I turn right on Charlotte, then I can turn left on Bridge Street and that has just one dangerous intersection. The safest path is Bixby with the light, the quickest is actually a split between the end of Humphrey and Bridge Street.

Throughout all of this it bears noticing that I never once suggest following East Main downtown. It’s just not worth the trouble. The worn out brakes, the aggressive cops and their speed traps, or the stop light that always seems to catch me at the most time-consuming parts of it’s cycle. As I traverse these roads every morning I get to thinking just how much that particular section of East Main is kind of a taboo section of road now. Nobody should use it, it should be a one-way heading away from downtown. That would eliminate the brake wear and make it that much harder for cops to set up their damned speed traps. It’s much easier to have to scale a hill starting out slow, noticing the cop, and progressing slow with an assiduous use of the accelerator pedal instead having to endure watching dollars peel off your brakes as you use them up to slow yourself down.

If anyone else who reads this blog likes this intersection, all you have to do is get caught once in the speed trap and you’ll change your tune. If the city turned the entire affair into a one-way, that also would solve the issue. One can hope.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow

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It eventually had to happen. I read this little nugget in a spam email that was delivered to my inbox just now:

Excuse me ,
I have a question- have you seen this picture of yours in attachment?? Three facebook friends sent it to me today… why did you put it online? wouldn’t it harm your job? what if parents see it? you must be way cooler than I thought about you man :))))

The attachment is IMG9821.zip. Come on. A zip file? Seriously?

Just a note to everyone who might come across this blog post. When you get files in your email that you aren’t expecting, don’t willy-nilly go clicking on them. Even if you have a Mac you could be duped into running a Trojan Horse, which would be very bad. This is likely a Windows virus trying to spread via social manipulation.

Anyhow, if there are compromising photos of you on the net, own them. Be proud of them. There is very little you can do to combat something like that so you might as well make the best of the situation.

Brown Chicken, Brown Cow. 🙂

Making Sandwiches

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I was raised with an appreciation for the simplest sandwich possible. The venerable Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. It’s something that my father makes, some would say it’s the only thing he knows how to make, beyond fudge, and it’s something that I’ve just refined.

The refinement I’ve made adapts something my father does but always seemed unusual to me. He adds butter to the sandwich and as far as I can remember, he butters the side of the bread that eventually carries the peanut butter component. I’ve noticed for a long time that when I make a PB&J that the side of the sandwich that carries the jelly (or in my preference jam or preserves) always ends up being slightly soggy because the bread sucks up the water from the jelly/jam/preserves and carries that mush through, so you’ve got a dry slice and a damp slice. This makes for an okay PB&J, but it can be better. I’ve adapted my fathers use of butter to act as a water barrier on the jelly/jam/preserve side of the sandwich. By spreading a thin layer of butter on that side, you create a waterproof block against that slice of bread. After the butter, then the jelly/jam/preserves go on and you join the sandwich together. It can stay that way for a while, or at least until lunchtime and the bread isn’t damp or soggy. Plus the butter adds a little extra something to the sandwich that I like.

So if you are also fond of PB&J’s then I suggest you explore adding a little butter to the side where you spread your jelly/jam/preserves. You’ll be glad for a equally dry bread-edged sandwich.

GLMUG, with the Lead Pipe, at NIU.

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Just returned from a work-related mini-conference. Every year all the sites that use Sage Millennium gather together in their regions and meet with Sage representatives and talk about the database, how we use it, how we get other people to use it, and to socialize between each other. For us, we are a part of the Great Lakes Millennium Users Group, GLMUG for short. Over the years we have gotten together at WMU, where I work, and other years we have gone to St. Olaf University in Minnesota, Medical College of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and this year Northern Illinois University.

For these events we are centrally located to pretty much every GLMUG member so for us, we pretty much always drive to wherever is selected to be our host for the meetings. We schedule a three day mini-conference, with the first day occupied by landing and socializing, then we dive into topics the next day, and the last day is mopping up any topics we missed on the second day and talking about the product and sharing notes between each other where one site does something unique and helps another site out. I always enjoy myself during these events because it gives me a ringside seat to some of the biggest changes to the software, brought to us by our Sage rep, as well as some of the biggest challenges to how we use the software. I am a DBA / System Admin so I see things in terms of IT, hardware, training, and the logical parts of how things are arranged. I also have a ‘unique viewpoint’ which often times is at odds with the more soft-pedal approach that most people prefer. I’m brash, sometimes vulgar, but I bring the same passion to these discussions that I do to my workplace. I don’t do anyone any good if I just shuffle along and mumble as a yes man. Fortune favors the bold. If nothing else, I am bold. Sometimes I’m a few other four-letter things too, but bold is nice and friendly.

This year we visited NIU, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been to Dekalb, Illinois. On the way up my coworkers and I got to talking about Illinois trivia that doesn’t have anything to do with Chicago, which is the obvious 800 pound elephant taking a figurative dump in the corner. The only thing that I could readily volunteer was that Illinois is the nation’s number one producer of pumpkins. Funny what you get from a John Carpenter’s Halloween movie trivia track on the DVD. 🙂 I am the movie generation. We see things in terms of movies that we’ve seen, and in a lot of ways we relate to our world through the vocabulary of cinema that we are fond of. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve recognized situations that come out of Airplane!, Clue, or Princess Bride. To say nothing of the endless quotes from those movies. People often times wonder where I get my oddball humor from and I tell them time and time again that those three movies are a great place to start to get to know me better. My mind spends a lot of time thinking about those movies.

Northern Illinois is to Dekalb in a way that WMU is to Kalamazoo. Both schools sort of hug their cities and bring a certain flavor to the area that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Western has our Bronco and the colors from the black-eyed susans that grow here – while NIU are the Huskies and much in the way that Chicago pushed painted plaster cows as a cute city theme, Dekalb pushed painted plaster Husky dogs. Every mascot is adorable in their own way. Cows are harmless herbivores. Broncos are exceptionally handy to ride (and not eat, or turn into glue, Frau Blucher!) and Huskies are arguably one of the most recognizable and adorable dog breeds there are, plus they can pull a sled. The University staff welcomed us warmly and went above and beyond to ensure that our get together was a success.

During these meetings we cover a lot of topics and the overarching theme that I kept on noticing isn’t so much technical issues but rather strategy questions about prospect management. Of course listening to all these schools talking about how they manage their prospects gets me thinking about ways to once-and-for-all solve the issues they all have. Many of them bring it up over and over again and many institutions really kind of muddle along. I see a divide between those that understand the technology and those that have to use the technology but often times aren’t really keen on understanding what they are using coming into conflict with each other. It’s a lot like the gulf that develops between IT staff and those that they support. I’ve written about incuriosity before, that it leads to a kind of prized ignorance and ultimately devolves into an unpleasant puddle of rank dependency. Those that cannot depend on those that can to help them do their jobs. It’s a whirlpool sucking at the overall efficiencies of an organization as nobody can really be said to be nimble when they are trapped in this unusual back-and-forth between executives who should use the system but do not and the support staff that help them by, in some cases, only achieving progress by applying blunt force to the situation.

Much of my exasperation, because that’s really what it is. It’s not irritation although I’m often irritated, but mostly I’m just exasperated. I was raised with a certain work ethic by my parents that has driven me my entire life. Take pride in what you do, be responsible for your actions, and be motivated enough to get your work done in a timely fashion. While my closest coworkers were with me on this trip, I was a party to several conversations which I won’t really go too deeply in on my blog because the thoughts that I harbor in my mind aren’t the most complimentary or charitable when it comes to some of the workplace issues that surround me. The only thing I can really write about is how I feel and what I would do in the situation that has been described to me. It’s mostly a part of my upbringing. I chafe strongly whenever I am a witness to certain entitled vanities. It’s the reason why I’ll never be regarded as senior management because I refuse to sugar coat my opinions. I am not a yes man, I am passionate and outspoken and sometimes exceptionally blunt. I think what really bothers me deep down is laziness. I feel awkward and ashamed if I’m just sitting around spinning my wheels and doing nothing for anyone. I feel driven to help, address issues, or at least try to make a difference in a project or someone else’s life for the better. This drive of mine is in direct opposition to my perceptions of indolence that I see from time to time. I also prize my bluntness. If people can’t or won’t do what is expected of them, then perhaps they should seek out something else to do that suits them better. There is a name for the kind of manager I would be if I had any power, that would be “Hatchet Man” as I would more likely fire someone for being willfully indolent rather than have them hoovering up resources and masquerading as human anchors. Whenever I hear “nobody listens” my nearly reflexive response is “Make their employment hinge on it. They’ll listen then.” which goes over like a leaded balloon. I spend a lot of time keeping quiet under the banner of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Plus it’s a good thing I don’t have any power over anyone. I’d be a monster.

Another thing that pops up over and over again in my mind is the fable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” and I find my mind dwelling on the story a lot. There isn’t anything that can be done because in some situations you simply have to endure the awkwardness of the situation. You should speak up, you should say something. You should grab the Emperor and shake him or her like a deranged british nanny and try to wake them up. But in the end you don’t. You just sit there, floating in an irritated miasma and over time it eventually wears down all your sharp edges into smooth dull rounded ones. I sometimes have little fantasies that I like to entertain from time to time, what I would do in certain situations. I end up imagining what I would do in other functional positions with what I know of my passion, my drive, and my work ethic. That I just can’t sit around waiting. That I’ve got to do something, anything, because not doing something would be hell. A good part of this all is that I’m an accomplishment junkie. I love the emotional rush of getting something finished. I don’t care about recognition, I’m quite happy being the ignored little cog in the great watchmakers design, but this cog will do something! I think that’s what I left with from NIU and this mini-conference. What would I do in some of these situations? I still have the idealism and energy of my youth and I’d make sweeping pronouncements and back it up with aggression nobody has ever witnessed. Again, it’s a good thing I keep my own counsel and stay silent.

Beyond some of this more aggressive stuff, we were able to help other people out with some issues they were having and sharing the plight of one institution almost always leads to other institutions either suggesting a new thing to try or accidentally fixing something for someone else who happens to be a semi-involved bystander. It also helps to know that you aren’t the only one, that other people are wrestling with the same kinds of things and in the way that you aren’t really alone offers a kind of consolation. You aren’t singularly damned, you’re just like all the others who are struggling with, well, whatever it may be.

At the end of our meeting we opened the floor to a general question about who might host next time. The fine folks from the University of Wisconsin Foundation leapt at the opportunity so next year we’ll be Milwaukee-bound. I am looking forward to it.