A blogger near Seattle exploring the future
Lessons learned about life; pearls of wisdom I’ve gleaned through pain, failure and honest reflection
Summer’s moving to fall
Teachers brewing coffee
Preparing classrooms
My wife awake before me, coffee ground, french press timed. Classroom preparations, lesson planning and coordination, so much effort this last week before school starts back up.
Forget the thermometer, this shows the season’s change.
With all the work I’ve done studying organization and productivity systems, a common element: taking time to thoughtfully consider actions. In today’s day-and-age, it’s easy to get caught up in stimulus:response, on reactive reactions. Or, as the adage goes, “running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off”.
Taking time to:
These are all critical to developing the correct solution for a particular challenge. There are always multiple responses and actions one can take. Knowing which one corrects the situation without creating a worse one requires considering all these elements.
It’s so easy, especially in today’s hyper-sped world, to lose sight of the time necessary. The urge to “do something NOW” is so powerful, and it often creates more damage than solution.
Our progress moves faster when we aren’t spending time repairing damage our inattention to details creates.
The sun blocks the moon
Or is Sauron searching hard
For his ring again?
Back in the mid-80s I came across a job opportunity in Antarctica. An expedition was looking for database managers. I’d just finished up a technical program for Information Processing. I’d built dBase databases, and pushed the information through Lotus, then used Word Perfect and (I think) Pagemaker to build presentations. I note some additional skills, like I’d converted an electronic typewriter so that it was a printer. I could print letter quality docs straight from my PC. In 1986 that was a unique thing.
I had a vision of the whole journey. Very wrong, of course. Laden with naivete. If I’d pulled that off, though…so much would’ve been different.
I was certain I was a great fit for the job, and that I would get it.
I didn’t get the job.
Back then, I was lucky to received a typed postcard (perhaps a simple 3 x 5 card) acknowledging receipt. Though I received the “No Thanks” letter a few weeks later, it was still pretty cool. The disappointment strong, yet without bitterness.
Looking back, it’s striking how much job hunting has changed. Starting with research. Now, with Google, I could’ve learned about the lead scientists, the focus of their research; I didn’t even know their names!
The typed responses tell me they probably processed a handful of applications. I read about this in an article somewhere. There were no online job boards. A job board was, literally, a bulletin board with job postings on it. They evolved to binders in college placement offices, (and other spots, too). Nowadays, with the online job-search eco-system they’d have hundreds, if not thousands of applicants. An upside: the acknowledgement and decline processes should be fully automated. And the larger recruit pool gives them a better chance at finding a more specific skill set. But, still, thousands of applicants…
It’s striking how different life is now. But it doesn’t FEEL that different. Well, not until I look back. Not that much simpler, though, as opposed to the adage air “simpler times”. The complexities were different. I’m happy, for the most part, with the path of our evolution.
How much intolerance
Must I tolerate
To prove to the
Intolerant
That I am tolerant?
I created this some time ago, but find it still relevant. Maybe even more relevant. Actually, more so each passing day.
Oh My Lord! This is the best bit of spam I’ve had in a bit:
Immediately made me think of good ol’ Zero Wing.
Independence fails
There’s so much more, please look to
Interdependence
My son and I have been watching the Flash on Netflix. It’s been a fun little bonding thing.
I love the show. Watching Barry Allen, and the people surrounding him evolve really delights me. And the ensemble of cast and crew gel very well.
We’ve made a pledge to not watch without the other, so that were in the same place in the continuum. Now I need to add that I grew up reading Flash comics. So there are times I see what’s coming since I now the new characters. But they’re done a good enough job tweaking their TV universe that you can’t assume a character’s comicbook identity will track. It’s a clever way to give homage to the DC legacy but not be terribly predictable.
Now, at times they flirt with the edge of cheesy. Every one of their Christmas episodes makes me worry. Though I have a bias about the weird games screenwriters play with any sort of holiday, but they’ve done well so far. Yet, I still wonder about the need for holiday specials, but that’s just me.
Now we’re about halfway through the second season. Netflix has through season three. It’ll be fun, especially if we get more seasons. If not, we’ll then move over to Arrow and keep the DC stream going.
In the Seattle area, we real estate agents use electronic keyboxes to access houses. Which means, when we list a home, someone needs to zip to the property and put one on. My team put a house on the market yesterday, and we really wanted to get the keybox on today. So, after getting copies of our keys, I head out. This home isn’t too far from my office, but with afternoon traffic, it took me over 1/2 hour to head out to Snohomish. Oh, a key (see what I did there?) element of this house: it’s new construction…and under construction. Now, per our schedule, the doors are on. And per reality, they’re not.
It was a true Laugh Out Loud moment to walk to the house, past the construction team with a keybox and look at the non-existent front door. So, I’ll be heading back…at some point in the near future.
Live and learn…live and learn.
French aristocrats
Their talk of “let them eat cake”
Then losing their heads
This is just a bit of an experiment to see how Instagram’s embed feature works. Looks like it’s too good, actually. Oh well.Â