Don’t Praise Me, Bro

I have had the great fortune in the close to 12 years that I’ve been working at NC State of being able to do work that I enjoy, that I’m passionate about and I have had the great honor to have worked with a lot of smart, caring, involved, hard-working people that care about those around them.

Both of which mean that I’ve been, at times, in the right place at the right time to receive praise and recognition of the things I’ve worked on. It’s something I’ve never quite been entirely comfortable with.

Don’t get me wrong, I have enough of an ego that I don’t shirk away from being the center of attention. I have been known a time or two (cough) to take over a meeting, a forum, a discussion with long rambling soliloquies in one form or another. It’s not really a center of attention thing.

I like to think that I do good work. I certainly care very deeply about my work, and want it to be the best it can be, and jokes and sarcasm aside, I care very deeply that others can learn from, make use of, and benefit from that work. I’m sure I’d be lying to you and myself if I said that part of me doesn’t want some recognition of that.

But even given that, when it comes to praise and recognition, I always get a little embarrassed. I don’t really know how to take it. I’ve tried to learn more how to graciously accept it, because when you don’t have that skill, you can appear at best ungrateful, and at worse, you can insult the one providing the recognition, and you might cheapen the praise for others.

But still, I’ve been trying to put my finger on it – and I think it comes down to the old “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” line from American Bandstand I’m composing the metaphorical equivalent to the album, and I guess I’m the artist that wants a little more than “it’s got a good beat” – I’m not necessarily expecting the person hearing to have the faintest idea about how to compose music themselves (because I sure don’t know how – as my flawed metaphor will surely attest) – but to be interested enough in how it sounds to tell me they played it all night – and ask questions about that middle part – and let me tell them that I borrowed that classical part written for the glockenspiel and turned into an electrical guitar solo. Honestly, I’d feel that – or at least I hope that I could – handle the flipside – having someone come up and tell me out of the blue that they really didn’t like it and maybe had I used a part written for the violin instead of the glockenspiel, it would have been better.

Without that, praise and recognition sometimes feels like it’s not far removed from judgment. And maybe uninformed praise and recognition really isn’t that much different than uninformed judgment.

Maybe I really am an educator deep down. I’m not looking for praise or recognition – but for understanding

The Year Behind

So on January 1 of this yearI wrote a “year ahead” post. It was perhaps an easy post as far as predictions go. But that’s what punditry is about right?

Let’s review:

We get a house

This was a pretty easy prediction, but it still feels like a nice accomplishment for the year. There was a fair amount of uncertainty at the start – my townhome was in an area of Garner that didn’t sell all that fast usually – and my townhome definitely did not follow the price appreciation trend of the greater triangle area in the last 7 years. We had no idea where in the Triangle we wanted to live. Most of the kinds of house styles and lot sizes we wanted were in a ring from Fuquay-Varina to Clayton to Wendell to Wake Forest, and even a few in Durham (for non-NC readers – that’s a pretty wide circle around Raleigh) But things worked out, we had a contract on the house within 2 months of listing – and we found a nice house, with a nice lot, in a pretty area. It’s not far from where I grew up, which I wasn’t all that thrilled about at first. But we have great neighbors, and while the commute is long into work, there’s llamas and cows, and trees.

In the end, it wasn’t all that sad to leave my first home that I bought myself. After 7 years of a meadow-like area where rabbits raised families and lots of buffer trees behind the townhome, several months after we moved – it’s finally being developed commercially (the plan for that space all along). And it’s nice to have a yard and a fence to call our own. And the lawn-mowing really isn’t all that onerous.

We get a dog

And I even said “maybe two.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Truman came first:

And Winston came second:

And when not running over each other and biting each other’s faces in the yard, and when we aren’t renaming them to “damnit” and “stop that” and “no” – they make a pretty cute pair.

I implement OpenID somewhere/anywhere

Our account signup application, which should slowly grow to providing an account for every Extension employee in the nation (okay, we probably won’t get there, but it’s a goal) – provides an OpenID for all those employees. For use in our applications, and well, anywhere. This was quite straightforward thanks to the folks at JanRain and the others contributing to the Ruby OpenID project.

More importantly our news application will consume any OpenID and our public site application will soon consume any OpenID. Every internal application will move to OpenID consumption (if limited).

I’m not sure that 2008 (or 2009, or 2010) is going to be the year of OpenID either, generally. But we can do our part. At the least, it’s pretty convenient, if only for the handful of people using it right now.

I do something vague and interesting at work

I did do lots of vague things. And a few moderately interesting ones. Nothing to write home about as the saying goes. I hope 2008 will bring far more interesting things. But that’s mostly about whether I decide to do that. If this is to be a goal, it will have to be a great deal more concrete.

I reflect on 10 years at work

February was my 10th anniversary in a working role at NC State, and I did briefly reflect on it – and even more with my 2-year anniversary in my current role

The February post is somewhat enigmatic, but not all that much so. I was not sure that I’d make it to 11 years at the University. And I wasn’t sure that I’d make it to 3 years in my current role. It wasn’t about the pay, it wasn’t about my co-workers, perhaps the only way to say what it was about was similarly stated by Mark Pilgrim in March when he left IBM for Google.

Sometimes though, in my strong desire to want to see a greater purpose, a greater meaning, and the kind of leadership that is ready, willing, and able to take us into the 21st century version of Seaman Knapp’s vision for the land-grant – I forget too easily that I have to be the change that I want to see.

To risk self-repetition, you don’t have to be Winston Churchill and Harry Truman to change the world. Two dogs with similar names changed ours. And that’s what really matters.

On a personal-professional level, I love watching the photographic talent through flickr of one of my colleagues in our content development group, I am really, really enjoying getting to know my colleagues at Auburn, Iowa State, Texas A&M, and even NC State through something as simple as Twitter. Those connections and relationships have gone a long, long way to providing new perspective, and new meaning.

And with those reflections, my job satisfaction is way up. I’m isolated from the larger IT quagmire of the University. Our Engineering/Professional Development team is one of the absolute best groups of people I have ever worked with. My boss gets it and is very supportive of the work we do and the ideas we bring to the table. I have the freedom and flexibility to build the systems we need, and our own version of 20% time to explore new directions, and the co-workers to do it with. I am only limited by myself to making the kinds of differences I want to make – at least at the levels I have a direct influence over.

When Paul Jones wrote in his blog about speaking at NCSU Computer Science’s December graduation, he asked “What would you tell today’s Computer Science grads before they go out into the world?” My comment was hastily, but passionately written, there’s an amazing power that software and systems people have. Paul ended up saying it much better than I – my comment was more about the individual, but Paul got to the real issue of the social. As a developer, system administrator, software/systems architect – you do have a choice – design software and systems that foster relationships, or design software and systems that attempt to control them. It helps to be in an organization that understands the former and from what I see in Twitter and Flickr at least, is that we still do.

My new camera and lens gets here

Making it’s public appearance on January 18th I entered the DSLR world in 2007. I’ve taken a lot of baby steps with it. I’ve learned a lot, if only to learn that I don’t know a thing about taking pictures, not really – nothing like I thought I knew. But I’ve had a few that I’ve enjoyed recording and a lot that needed work – but I think they are as good, if not better than any I’ve taken before.

But the best part is that photography is definitely one of those “the journey is more important than the destination” activities – and that’s something that I need reminding about again and again. I’m looking forward to that continued journey through the lens this year.

I write something vaguely funny again

Not really. I did make appropriate fun of Michigan State recently. But perhaps I did something a bit better, if I didn’t really keep it up consistently, with some plastic dinosaurs and bad one-liners – I made a comic of a sort

The best far and away was about blog badges. But I think the the one about Rails and the other about java aren’t too bad.

No warranty implied, your mileage may vary, don’t poke your eye out, contents may settle, etc. etc. yadda yadda.

I get completely tired of all the “Double-Oh-Seven” Jokes

You know what? I never heard one the entire year. Another small joy of life.

It was a good year

If you are reading this and made it this far – thank you. Thanks for walking along with me. It was a good year. A year in a normal life perhaps, but sometimes the something normal is changed into something beautiful.

Happy 2008 and happy trails everyone!

Absolutely Astounding

Dear WordPress devs.

I really appreciate the work you do on WordPress. I appreciate your open source philosophy – I appreciate your contributions to the community of a relatively easy-to-use software package that has been a part of a revolution in how people communicate. Long ago, I threw away my own blogging platform, because I was attracted by the community and ecosystem surrounding WordPress (once it got going out of a languishing b2 product).

But I continue to be mystified by your continued obstinate behavior about helping the product’s users actually pick a standard way of syndicating their data. I know that Uncle Earl cares not about what text strings are formatted where and in what way. But as programmers you should actually get the fact that standard ways of consuming and sharing information really do matter – and they are going to matter more and more for Earl and Millie both when they begin to realize the power of mixing, mashing, and aggregating information.

I was so impressed that you enlisted the community help with implementing Atom support – including the publishing protocol. But why on earth did you not write a few lines of code to make it easier to change the default format from the InternetJerrySpringerDrama that is rss2 to atom?

Oh, I see, you “didn’t think this option should be part of the UI, because for almost all people the option is not useful.”

Of course, because my timezone offset and my encoding preference and whether or not I use “wp-hacks” support is stuff that more people care about than using an actual standard way of syndicating our content.

I really, really do in all sincerity appreciate that WordPress is Open Source – because it give me a chance to route around your damage to it.

For the rest of the world – the quick hack – until plugins show up to make this a little more seamless is to (I THINK) replace line 845-846 in wp-includes/functions.php from:


if ( $feed == '' || $feed == 'feed' )
$feed = 'rss2';


to


if ( $feed == '' || $feed == 'feed' )
$feed = 'atom';


That was only a quick, cursory examination on my part, I’m sure others will be coming out with better solutions.

I realize that open source means putting your coding fingers where your mouth is, but some coding choices in life just seem better off in the core – and this is certainly one of them. The WordPress devs apparently disagree, and it’s their software and their prerogative to do so. I respect that – I just don’t have any respect for it.

Enough of the Gmail Contacts already

Facebook, Quechup, and now Twitter.

Folks, I’ve had it. This is not a feature. It started going downhill when I was still briefly using Facebook, before my permanent embargo – and I got friendship invitation from Hugh MacLeod. Yes – that Hugh MacLeod.

You might would have thought I would have been overwhelmed with amazement and awed at the mighty power of the new and glorious social networks! Me! Friended by Internet Celebrity! A top marketer! Microsoft gets it! Wow, I’ll bet next up, I’ll get friended by Scoble! O’Reilly ((Badgers!)! Cory! Maybe even Guy! Oh that would be the best!

Horseshit.

I emailed Hugh MacLeod once, before he was at Microsoft, and was still marketing wine. I think his cartoons are inventive, and honestly – I liked his post once on writing your own manifesto. So I wrote one and sent it.

I thought the Facebook thing was an anomaly. Then I got invited by MacLeod to join Quechup. Why? Because he uploaded his email contact list to that site.

I’m stuck as a buried entry in MacLeod’s address book. I’m not MacLeod’s friend. I’m not in his social network – I’m a single line in a huge ass address list.

I’m sure Hugh is a wonderful fellow. If I was a marketer, or I was a big customer of Microsoft products, or I was Hugh’s neighbor, or I drew cartoons, then maybe I would give a flying damn what he’s doing. But I don’t. And I seriously doubt the man cares about what I’m doing.

There are certainly blogs that I read that I have no relationship to the person writing them. Either they are great writers, or work in industries that I follow, are conduits for information, or are just entertaining. I’m glad that they do it. For some of them, I might could conceivably follow them in social networking tools if they manage to use those mediums in the same way (I follow the del.icio.us feeds for Jeremy Zawodny and Mark Pilgrim because they are good at finding information I’m interested in and after all, it is the lazyweb). I even followed someone pruporting to be Stephen Colbert for a time in twitter because it was funny.

But none of these people are in my social network. And neither is a person that I’ve sent a single email to or gotten an email from.

Real relationships are about conversations. And one’s real social network is a small, small, small group of people. The research has been showing that for years. We all know that. Hell, I know that Hugh knows that. He’s just uploading his email contact list because the sites let him, and… well, I have no earthly no idea why he did it beyond that, because it’s stupid.

Facebook, Quechup, and Twitter – I’m sure you think this is a feature that people want. And I’m sure for a sizeable group of people, it’s good for them to upload their “8″ that are in their email address book to their networks. And I’m sure you absolutely love being able to mine that email address data for whatever purposes your advertisers (or potential buyers) can come up with.

But stop the madness alright? Right now it’s just pandering to the look at me crowd, and there are enough of us out there.

These invites and follows aren’t marketing, and they aren’t social networking – they are spam.

Ruminations on Retail

The brown-eyed girl and I went to Cary tonight so that she could go to Kohl’s – and I decided to go over to Best Buy.

I hate Best Buy, but there’s a lot of stuff in Best Buy that I like, so it’s fun to go now and again. Thankfully I’ve learned the appropriate glares and the correct intonation in my voice to “I’m just looking” that means “I AM JUST LOOKING” – so the salespeople don’t bother me (well, as long as I avoid the TV section where they hover like turkey vultures in the deep south on a hot, humid day).

I had a while tonight to look through every section in the store – the Cary Best Buy, unlike the Garner Best Buy now has an Apple section – which is good to know. It looks like Apple foisted some design on them, but it’s certainly very different than an Apple Store.

What I found most interesting was which sections were getting traffic and which ones were not. I’m sure some design psychologists might have a comment or two, but for me, I thought it was extraordinarily telling about which products are really the ones that are grabbing our interest.

The busiest section by far was the mobile phone section – which also includes the iPods and other digital audio players (although it’s all iPod traffic).

Coming behind in traffic was the mobile section was the Digital camera section – the side with the point and shoots – not the SLRs – although I think a SLR was in process of being purchased, I’m not sure.

Right behind that – Video Games. Lots of kids playing Guitar Hero.

Behind that – a two way observation tie 1) the computer section – mainly hardware and monitors, not so much browsing through the software. The Apple computers were getting attention (the Apple display set up contributed to that – it’s a lot easier to “try” the Apple computers than most of the Emachines, HP’s and Sony’s – and whatever else they carry). 2) DVD movies – pretty good traffic there too.

There was also pretty good presence in the TV section – particularly the lower end LCD TVs. I had hoped more people would be browsing the 1080p TVs so that the prices would drop, but alas, most seemed to be comfortable with lower resolution HD. (not that I care – I still have a standard def Tube that won’t hasn’t died).

There were a few people in car audio, and an actual buying customer in GPS units.

There were two MAJOR ghost towns. Analog phones particularly. Even appliances had more traffic. The Analog phones had about the same traffic as the desks and chairs. (which I don’t even count as a Best Buy section – I’ve never seen anyone there).

The second Ghost Town – it had a few people, maybe 3 total. Audio CD’s.

People go to what interests them – and tonight it was mobile phones, digital cameras, video games… and NO analog phones and CD’s.

That’s some catch

[Redacted]

Dear Morale,

I yearn for you tragically.

- Yossarian

Three Days to Two Years

Two years ago today I started in my current job, after just under 5 years doing systems and people management in NCSU’s College of Engineering IT group. I wrote my first post three days in talking about the sheer panic of dealing with some kind of java problem.

I was so excited then. So excited about the possibilities. Ready to find my own Zihuatenejo

Some things change. Two years of delegating only to myself resharpened the technology saw reasonably enough and the sheer panic is reserved for things other than my linux servers these days.

As for the excitement. Well – the words seem remarkably prescient, but they’re not really.

I’m not sure we are ever going to change the culture until enough people have some idea of what kind of place we want to see us be at. Where we want the equivalent of Andy’s Zihuatanejo to be for us? And how do we make a place along the way? What are our arias, our chess pieces, our prison libraries? Even more fundamental – both Zihuatenejo, the arias, the bohemian-style beer, the chess pieces, the library – they were all outward manifestations of an inward passionate belief in something. Enough belief for Andy – and the seemingly-institutionalized Red also.

Maybe that’s an “aren’t we all” kind of paragraph – because I guess if you ever really find that, Hope managed to escape with all the Furies.

But more than a little of the excitement’s rubbed off from hundreds of stories that are best left over beers somewhere down the road, when time blurs the facts – and the repercussions.

I’m still seeking Zihuatenejo – though with the comfort that there are peers here and elsewhere doing the same. Searching for places where you can still make a difference. Searching for groups that still believe that’s what you should be about. And searching for leadership, including within themselves, that wants to make a place for that to happen.

I hope.

The New Rickety Rocking Chair

When I first graduated from College, I went to work for CompuCom – who in 1996 was trying to change their business model from the dying dinosaur of reselling Compaq and HP (then two separate companies) and IBM to a service business, and I was a college hire, sent to build and bolster the resell business with service consulting in setting up software and services on the equipment they sold. It was an interesting business that forever established a healthy distrust on my part for “service consultants.” It was the wrong place at the wrong time and I was the wrong person to be there. And I’ll mostly leave it at that – save for one story.

I was sent on one assignment to shadow a “Senior Systems Engineer” and install this brand-new software called “Microsoft Exchange” at a marketing company. There’s an overly geeky story with that that would invoke sendmail, pegasus, mercury, netware, and a very early distribution of Red Hat Linux, but needless to say, we struggled a bit to get the software installed.

Anyway, I remember lamenting about things at lunch with the Senior SE – I was naive then (okay, I’m still naive) – but I had more than a few problems at using being billed out as experts at $150/hour without knowing much about the product we were installing (or even conceptually how it all fit together).

He said something that has stuck with me for now-on 11 years, and maybe perhaps the best thing I got out of the 9 months I was at CompuCom. He said:

“They don’t pay us for what we know. They pay us for what we can figure out.”

It took a long time for me to appreciate that. After all, I’m euphemistically in that employment category of “knowledge worker.” My entire job is based on having and obtaining knowledge about putting together rules and instructions that collect, store, route, and display information. The most lucrative of the jobs in my field are seemingly based on having knowledge – that collection of disparate pieces of information – on subjects that most don’t have. It is with little wonder that there are many in my field – and similar “knowledge worker” pursuits – that vociferously guard the collected information they’ve gained, giving themselves some kind of “expert” label – and selling access to that collection through me or my authorized agent. Few would blame me for doing that.

But I would.

You see, somewhere along the line I bought into the mission and the ideals of the industry that I’m in. That it is a noble pursuit to share far and wide the collected information, the knowledge, that I’ve gained. Not only noble, but that it is a moral imperative to do so.

As I’ve gotten older, that belief has been reinforced, as I find myself having to function in an employment where it is impossible to know everything, impossible to be an expert relative to others in all subjects in a field. There is always someone that knows more than I do about a given subject. And only by those sharing what they know am I able to successfully accomplish many of the tasks placed before me. Sure, I have to know a fair amount, I have to have the fundamentals, but I can no longer be successful in the business I’m in based solely on what I know.

This isn’t new. It’s always been this way. Any time and point in history where the so-called “experts” tried to limit and shape and influence access to the things that people wanted to know, there was rebellion. Information always finds a way to be known.

What has changed – not only in my industry, but in just about every field of pursuit for the “knowledge workers” is the pace in which that rebellion happens. Our Ptolemaic circles do not survive for long. I can be an “expert” only for the briefest of time, before what I know is replaced with something new.

My peers and I created a Frankenstein for the gnostics. Those systems we built to collect, store, route, and display information created a revolutionary way to share it. The distribution channel is no longer the same. Information is a commodity. I’d apologize for all of us for that. But I won’t. I’m not the least bit sorry about it.

And now that revolutionary distribution channel is doing more. It’s no longer about sharing it. It’s about collaborative augmentation. Remixing it. Assembling it in ways that the original authors never pictured. Some people are calling this “Web 2-point-oh” – whatever the name it’s just the technology catching up with how we already communicate. So not only is information a commodity, but so is knowledge.

This gets me to the real point of this whole rambling treatise. And that’s about Cooperative Extension.

The heart and soul of Cooperative Extension, in my mind, at least in my short time in Extension, is the county agent. In all my years in IT and Systems Engineering, I know that the best support has always come from local staff. Even if those local staff weren’t up on the latest IT trends, or didn’t have all the knowledge of what was happening with the services they were actually supporting the use of – they had the experience with the folks they were supporting. Knowing you have to jiggle the faulty video cable in the back of Bob’s computer is worth as much as the knowledge about the signaling protocol that VGA uses, or what video driver version is loaded. Combined together – that’s pretty powerful.

It goes back to the famous quote from Dr. Seaman Knapp – who spearheaded what has become our county agent system:

“What a man hears, he may doubt, what he sees he may possibly doubt, What he does himself, he cannot doubt”

The commodity information sources exist. People can find what plants to place in their yard. They can find what the soil is. They can find information about what plants work best with their soil. But what they don’t have is the experience that our Master Gardeners and Horticulture specialists have. And when the Master Gardeners are on those same sites – working in those same communities where the people already are – they can see the some information, the same knowledge, and can “Yep, I did this” or “Yep, I was working with some folks last week that were doing exactly what you are trying to do” And there’s an increased level of trust by knowing that that experience is just down the road from me. Those communities can broaden the experience of our agents, connecting them to peers and connecting them to the public at times and in ways that an office visit just can’t do. These “connectors” are the new experts.

This isn’t really different from the way it’s always been. My great-grandfather owned a country store – and used to sit on some rickety rocking chairs and entertain company. Usually while watching “The Price is Right” (at least in my memory). Web 2.0 is the new rickety rocking chairs and checkerboard.

Anne Adrian at Auburn wrote a blog post a few days ago, about trying to articulate “Web 2.0″ for Extension. She wrote of something that I had been thinking about some time for the project that I’m involved in with Cooperative Extension. What’s in it for the states? What’s in it for the people in the counties that are where the people are? I know that where I in the same boat, on the spot, I would have ummed, erred, hemmed, and hawed a halting description of how Web 2.0 is beneficial to local folks. I wouldn’t have been even able to articulate what Anne felt was unconvincing. I’ve been thinking more and more about this since I read Anne’s post. And how would I answer that question?

I haven’t read Weinberger, so I’m going to boil mine down to those opening words.

It isn’t about what you know, it’s about what you can figure out.

And who do we have better than our local folks at figuring things out?

Question of the Day

Why oh why, doesn’t Keynote automatically save work? Especially two days before one’s presentation?

Inquiring minds would really like to know.

Heck, Yeah Baby

I just upgraded my iTunes purchased songs to the DRM-free versions.

After a bumpy start in downloading them with lots of ridiculously obscure errors – it finally went off without a hitch.

Of course, the only ones that I had purchased that are now DRM Free, were an album from the Blind Boys of Alabama and an album from KT Tunstall (and a song from Keith Urban that the brown-eyed girl and I used in our Wedding reception) – but hey, it’s a start.

And I bought the Corinne Bailey Rae album – dude, 18 DRM-free songs for $9.99.

And the song “Up on Cripple Creek” from The Band (I already have “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in mp3)

And I’m currently browsing all the country albums – and being very tempted to buy one from The Highwaymen and there’s Merle, and Willie and…

Somebody please stop me now before I buy “Okie from Muskogee”