I don’t know how I’ve been missing out on this, but everyone within reading distance of this blog needs to go here. Great hearty fits of laughter are few and far between, but at the moment the dogs think I’ve lost my bloody mind. It’s awful… I can’t stop watching these damned things… and every time I open a new one, I’m off to the races on another fit of laughter and watering eyes. I won’t dwell on details. Go. Do it now.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
I gotta feeling…
Ever have one of those feelings where you’re pretty sure you’re about to do something dumb, but know you’re going to do it anyway? Yeah. That’s what’s on my mind tonight. I’m a smart enough guy to hold my own in most situations, but there are times when even I (and my ginormous ego) know that we’re being outclassed all the way around. It then becomes a question of whether we can step it up and meet the rising challenge, whether we’re going to take the beatdown of a lifetime, or whether it’s better to cut and run. Cutting and running hasn’t really been my style in most things so I’m pretty sure that’s going to be an option. And I’d say there’s a 50-50 chance of either of the other options coming to pass.
I’m not really as pessimistic as that just sounded. In fact, I’m confident that it’s going to be one hell of a ride either way. How long the ride lasts, however, is anyone’s guess. Buckle up, gang. This ought to be fun.
Wired…
Saturday morning is usually my time to attempt to bring order out of chaos here at the house… laundry, cleaning, etc. While I’m not quite a neat freak, I do tend towards a touch of OCD about where things are and how they are organized. It’s not so much that everything has a place and it must be in it as much as it’s just a deep-seated desire for everything to have a place when I’m done with it. For the most part that’s easy enough to manage… until I come to the kitchen counter. The coffee pot, toaster oven, microwave, and liquor all have their place; no problems there. My current OCD-driven mission is to find a good way to manage all the various charging equipment that keeps me tethered to the electronic universe.
Without accounting for any future additions, my “must charge” arsenal includes charging cables for the following: iPhone, bluetooth, BlackBerry, e-cigs, and camera batteries. The result, as expected, is something worse than the spaghetti behind the average television set strewn across a goodly sized chunk of my kitchen counter. I’ve looked at several “charging station” options but all of the ones I’ve seen in the flesh feel a little shoddy; mainly pressboard and plastic. I love the concept, but so far hate the execution, which is why I’ve resisted the temptation to order some of what I’ve seen online. The simple solution would be having a power strip sitting full-time on the counter and that just looks, well, bad to me.
I know some of you out there reading are bigger technophiles than I am, so my question: What is your solution to make charging multiple devices slightly less tacky?
Big picture…
It feels like it has been a while since I’ve really been able to take a look at the big picture. I never thought of the chance to take the 100,000 foot view into perspective as being a luxury, but when you’re way out in the tall grass moat of the time it sure feels that way. I know that almost everything is interconnected, but you usually can’t see those connecting nodes from ground level. The big picture is about doing the analysis and making sense of the inputs. Life on the ground is about reacting to those inputs, either through training, instinct, or pure random chance.
I think I’m self aware enough to know that what I’m really missing at the moment is the time to disengage from that reactive mode and do the thinking, and writing, and the reading that tends to keep me balanced. I need a few minutes of operational pause to marshal my forces, lay out the way ahead, and come at things fresh.
I don’t have the first idea of when that might happen, but knowing the remedy seems to be a good first step.
Processing…
It’s going to be a long week. I’m in the middle of a week’s worth of “process engineering” which basically entails sitting in a room with five or six people and arguing about the best way to do something. You know what the say about opinions, right? Yeah, I figured you did, so I won’t cover that ground. What should come out by Friday morning is a brand-spanking-new business process telling us how we’re going to roll out new and brilliant ideas from here on out… everything from inception to implementation. What always concerns me about investing alot of time and effort into these exercises is that after we pitch the new idea, someone is going to call it a success, we’re going to congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and then it’s going to end up on a shelf somewhere. Or more precisely, on an intranet site where it will never again see the light of day.
Look, I get that change is hard… You’re talking to the original hater of new ways to do things here; the ultimate creature of habit. But even I know that doing things the same way that was unsuccessful yesterday is not going to lead to different results today or tomorrow or the day after that. If you’re going to fall into a habit, why not fall into one that actually gets something accomplished? Sure, that’s not the easiest path, but doing it right will probably take less energy in the long run than trying to run against the tide. Here’s hoping we come up with something worthwhile and can actually make it work.
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