Amazon Spam

 General  2 Responses »
Jul 242010
 

Some­times spam is amus­ing. Email address and actu­al links elided, but the rest is as it arrived in my inbox:

Thanks for your order, my email address

Did you know you can view and edit your orders online, 24 hours a day? Visit Your Account.

Order Information:

E-mail Address:  my email address
Order Grand Total: $ 97.99
	
Earn 3% rewards on your Amazon.com orders with the Amazon Visa Card. Learn More

Order Summary:
Details:
Order #: 	D99-2665292-8925183
Subtotal of items: 	$ 82.99
	------
Total before tax: 	$ 29.99
Sales Tax: 	$ 0.00
	------
Total for this Order: 	$ 47.99

The following item was ordered:
	Click here and see items, Price: $ 48.99
By: Click here
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

I par­tic­u­larly like the way none of the num­bers bear any rela­tion­ship to each oth­er, except for end­ing in “.99”.

Meeting Productivity

 General, Project Management  No Responses »
Jan 052010
 

Some months ago, Time magazine pub­lished an art­icle called Why the Office Oddball Is Good for Busi­ness, about how really pro­duct­ive meet­ings need someone in them to stop too much con­sensus too early. The art­icle starts

Want to get the most out of your next brain­storm­ing ses­sion at work? Bring in an oddball. If you can­’t find an oddball, try a naysay­er or even a mere stranger — any­one who can keep things vaguely uncom­fort­able. If that sounds like a pre­scrip­tion for one of the worst meet­ings you’ve ever had, suck it up and go any­way. It might also be one of the most productive.

It does sound like the recipe for an act­ive meet­ing, one in which every­body has to be on their toes, listen­ing for the real mean­ing behind the words. A meet­ing in which those catch­ing up on their email will miss some­thing import­ant. A meet­ing which may not pro­duce agree­ment, but will pro­duce more clar­ity on pre­cisely what it is you dis­agree about. If you’re going to have a meet­ing, isn’t that what you want? A meet­ing to pro­duce res­ults, not just nods around the table from people who aren’t really pay­ing attention?

Which is not to say that every meet­ing should be uncom­fort­able; lots of meet­ings are to hash out details where people agree on the basics. But it’s amaz­ing how often people think they agree about some­thing until they’re chal­lenged to explain it in detail, which is where they dis­cov­er they dis­agree on the explanation. 

Wheth­er any per­son rais­ing uncom­fort­able issues is wel­come depends on who’s run­ning the meet­ing, wheth­er they’re look­ing for res­ults or, instead, look­ing for uncrit­ic­al approv­al of what they want. I’ve also seen cases where the per­son run­ning the meet­ing claims to want the uncom­fort­able ques­tions asked, but in real­ity does­n’t. it’s hard, allow­ing the dif­fi­cult ques­tions. Answer­ing them is tough, admit­ting you don’t have answers to all of them can be tough­er. So the tend­ency is to squelch the ques­tions, usu­ally by squelch­ing the ques­tion­er. I sus­pect this tend­ency con­trib­utes to a cer­tain num­ber of busi­ness failures.

It’s Been a Long Time

 General  1 Response »
May 272009
 

Since I pos­ted any­thing, I mean. Which does­n’t mean I haven’t been doing things, just that I’ve spent more time think­ing and doing and talk­ing than writ­ing and describing.

The garden is look­ing bet­ter after the rel­at­ive neg­lect of the past couple of years, although there’s lots more to do, as always (the weeds have more time to grow than I have to weed). I’m Course Dir­ect­or for the XML Sum­mer School, which means work­ing with the mem­bers of the Fac­ulty Board for the courses they’re chair­ing and fig­ur­ing out who should speak, and on what, for the two courses I’m chair­ing, as well as tak­ing care of the oth­er myri­ad details that go with any event. I’ve met with people in Van­couver for knit­ting after­noons, and lunches talk­ing about dis­trib­uted pro­ject man­age­ment, and figured out that right now con­sult­ing and con­tract work in pro­ject man­age­ment looks to be the right thing for me to con­cen­trate on (pro­ject man­age­ment being a broad term that cov­ers a myri­ad of pos­sib­il­it­ies). I’m even read­ing up on some of the form­al­isms for pro­ject man­age­ment. I did basic pro­ject man­age­ment train­ing early in my career, but I’ve mostly done what seemed to me to be the right thing without using Gantt charts and form­al resource alloc­a­tion. Mostly it worked out pretty well, but some of the form­al­isms such as Scrum look inter­est­ing. I’ll post some of my thoughts on those later, along with thoughts on dis­trib­uted pro­ject management.

Victorian Bushfires

 General  2 Responses »
Feb 102009
 

Aus­trali­ans learned so much from the Ash Wed­nes­day bush­fires (I was liv­ing in Mel­bourne at the time and still vis­it as often as I can); there was a sense that although every­one knew bush­fires are capri­cious and dan­ger­ous, that there were things to do to mit­ig­ate them. That all changed this week.

The com­bin­a­tion of years of inad­equate rain­fall, record high tem­per­at­ures, and arson meant there was no escape, no hope for those caught in the bush­fire’s path. There are thou­sands of people out there fight­ing for people and anim­als, hop­ing and pray­ing for the rain that is the only solu­tion. The Aus­trali­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­por­a­tion Mel­bourne news site tells the story. 

I can­’t find the right words to express my sor­row and sym­path­ies for those who lost fam­ily and friends in this hor­rif­ic way. All I can do is point people who want to help to some of the appro­pri­ate ven­ues. There’s the Aus­trali­an Red Cross, the Aus­trali­an Sal­va­tion Army, and some organ­isa­tions to help with anim­als and wild­life.

Projects and Resumes

 General  9 Responses »
Jan 302009
 

Now is a good time to update my resume (cv), and I’m hav­ing a little dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out the best way to present it. The clas­sic “say what you did for the employ­er” tends to assume that your involve­ment in pro­jects is bounded by your employ­ment, but that’s not always the case. For example, I’ve chaired tech­nic­al com­mit­tees and been involved with con­fer­ence organ­isa­tion for time peri­ods that over­lapped both employ­ers and being self-employed. For example, I chaired the XML Con­fer­ence from 2001 to 2005, work­ing for (in chro­no­lo­gic­al order) SoftQuad Soft­ware, my own con­sult­ing firm, and Sun Microsys­tems. It’s the over­lap­ping time peri­ods that I’m hav­ing dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out how to present. I guess I could go to a pure pro­ject-based resume, except for, some of what I did was on behalf of a par­tic­u­lar employ­er and thus was bounded with­in that time period.

I can­’t ima­gine I’m the only per­son with this issue; any­one con­trib­ut­ing to open source soft­ware over a peri­od of time has it, as well as people who volun­teer at oth­er organ­isa­tions in their spare time. How do oth­ers present what they’ve done in a way that suit­ably high­lights the import­ant stuff?

Leaving Sun

 General  17 Responses »
Jan 242009
 

As has been widely repor­ted, Sun Microsys­tems laid off a num­ber of people on Thursday. That num­ber included most of my pro­ject team and me, since the pro­ject I was man­aging was cancelled. 

Over the nearly four years I was at Sun I learned a lot, con­trib­uted what I could, and had fun work­ing with some excel­lent people. Some of them are still there; oth­ers, like me, are now fig­ur­ing out their next steps. These days it’s easi­er to keep in touch, for which I am grateful.

What’s next? I’m not really sure. First I’ll take some time off, help out with North­ern Voice, fin­ish off recon­fig­ur­ing my base­ment firewall/website sys­tem, do some house and cot­tage renov­a­tions, catch up on my crafts, and think about what I want to do next. Even­tu­ally some good oppor­tun­ity will come my way that I can­’t res­ist; ideas and leads are welcome.

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