Continual Improvement

A new Jyte poll…

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There’s nothing like a dose of humility to remind us all that even the best plan can wind up a disaster if we aren’t careful. Take my own personal example of a 5K race I recently “ran”. This is a very hilly 5K race I’ve run in the past, but to make a short story even shorter, the picture below tells the tale. The green line represents the actual race course, and the red line represents the scenic tour that I decided to add to the race this year.

Besides more than tripling my normal time with a 60 minute 5K record, I learned a few things along the way. First, taking frequent checkpoints of where you are cannot be underestimated. If you are an Agile purist, this means short iterations – two weeks preferred. Second, just because you’ve been there before doesn’t mean this time will be the same. To emphasize this point, I like the quote “if you feel comfortable, you should be uncomfortable” (author unknown), and my discomfort was only compounded when I had to stop and ask a local resident for directions on how to get back to the finish (twice). And last, the hare doesn’t stand a chance against a tortoise that knows about the first two lessons.

My amateur status as a photographer has now been set, and I wasn’t even trying that hard. Here are the details of what happened with a few parting ideas on how to “get famous” via Flickr. To start, I was contacted by an online travel guide, asking for permission to publish one of my Flickr pics in their latest version on London. Here’s the link where the pic is published, which includes my name and a link to my Flickr pic. Granted, it’s nothing fancy, but it has become my most popular photo by over twofold. This is the 3rd request I’ve received to use my Flickr pics in other’s material over the past year or so, and while I’m far from famous, it’s been an unexpected upside to publishing my pics on the Internet.

Guidelines for a good Flickr presence:

• Always give photos tags, a title, and a description. A nature shot is good, but it’s 10X better when you know where and/or why it was taken.
• Make the good pics public, and keep the duplicates private. A few snapshots of your dog is good, but clicking through 100 speed shots can get tiresome.
• Post your best pics on your blog along with a post. This will give your post some nice spice while publicizing your pics.
• Add a Flickr “badge” to your Web site. This is a nice way for visitors to see random samplings.
• Use photo sets whenever possible. This allows photos to be grouped with one description, and a photo set can have a separate link.
• Turn on Flickr stats. This is a manual process, but it gives you an idea of what photos were more popular and when.

Have you recently told someone on your team to do something? If so, there’s a good chance that some management training may be in your future. (Disclaimer: This blog post doesn’t just apply to software development.) We often hear that the command-and-control style of management is the “old way”, and removing roadblocks is the “agile way”. While this sounds like a good thing every time we hear it, there isn’t a quick and easy way to determine how to adjust. I often find that it’s difficult to take many of these self improvement suggestions and act on them, so I prefer internal triggers that can shape behavior in an ad hoc manner.

In this case, the key trigger is simple asking/telling someone to do something. What?! Our internal voices may find this proclamation to be borderline-insane as this is method by which we get almost everything done. But wait, there is a better way that creates self-empowering teams and removes the management dependence. The alternative approach, simple and elegant, involves explaining the expected result and trusting the teams to accomplish the resulting tasks. In some cases, the difference is a subtle change in the wording and intentions, and in others, there may be political reasons why specific commands are given. In the later, this is a trigger in itself that the political issues (often elephants in the room) should be tackled head-on instead of being obfuscated.

It’s true that since childhood none of us have liked being told what to do, and each of us wants to feel that we had some say in the planning. Using the method above solves both of these common psychological dilemmas. The bottom line is that if you can’t trust people on a team to know the intended result, there could be a problem with having the right people on the team or managing the team.

If you are like me and capture digital pictures in almost every circumstance, the frustration of organizing all of these has crossed your mind once or twice. Two common options are (1) installing software on your computer to help keep track or (2) uploading all your pictures to an Internet site like Flickr. With the first option, the software to organize your pictures is likely to require you to open its user interface (i.e. application) to manage your pictures, and you will be responsible for transferring this application to another computer when you upgrade. With the Internet upload option, which I partially use, the idea of having all your pictures labeled, grouped, and constantly backed up does have its advantages; however, I’m not a big fan of uploading every picture I’ve ever taken out on the Internet. (Call me old-fashioned.) In both cases, there’s likely to be a license or subscription to purchase.

To alleviate this image nightmare, I’ve created a simple and free system for organizing and tagging pictures that allows for easy searching and backing up. This involves creating a directory/folder structure in Explorer similar to the following.

Each year has a folder, and within each year, there are groups of pictures with keywords as the name of the sub folder. Note that the beginning of each sub folder is a number, which indicates the month the picture was taken. This provides chronological searching, since the folders are sorted in order.

To group the pictures in Explorer, you can see a small preview of the picture on your hard drive or the memory chip from your camera by setting Explorer to show the Thumbnails view. If the preview isn’t enough to determine which folder to place the picture, moving your mouse pointer over the picture in question will provide additional details. If you are like me, I often have a set of pictures with the same date and relative time, which makes it easy to figure what goes where.

The benefits of this system are that it’s super easy to do while moving the pictures from the camera’s memory chip to your computer. Just create the folder on your hard drive with some memorable words, and drag the pictures into the folder. In addition, it makes backing up the pictures easy as well, since you can backup via the date/year. This is especially important once you have more pictures than can fit on one DVD. What’s best about this model is the ability to take the system to different computers without additional software or Internet access.

I was planning to grill some fajitas, but we decided to let the meal come to us. Click on the picture for more details.

I’ve been playing around with Jyte, and it seems like a cool way to do some simple reader polls on my blog. This is my first one, so we’ll see how it goes. Click on this link to vote, or click on the widget below, if visible.

Can the simple rules of capitalism help you with life’s predicaments? In both family and business, all of us are forced into situations where we have reached an impasse with someone else. Often the “facts” favor each party’s perception of the conflict. Before entering into a conversation that can become heated, one simple rule of thumb to remember is the supply and demand mindset. On the demand front, it’s important to never demand anything during the conversation. The goal should be to determine what the goal is and work towards an action plan that is acceptable to both sides. This is not easy to do when we think we are “right”, but it’s a simple rule to remember once the emotions start flaring.

On the supply front, it’s a good idea to start the conversation by admitting what part of the conflict you have supplied. This is the most difficult but most important part of resolving the problem because we often think in terms of facts and evidence, but the only reality is that both sides have contributed some part of the awkward stalemate. This also requires serious self-examination as the contribution may have been doing or saying nothing for too long of a time. When having difficulty identifying what your contribution may be, viewing the situation from the other person’s point-of-view can often help. In many cases, the admission of what one person supplied to the problem will result in other person following the same course, and in the end, the conversation has a much better chance of both parties having their demands met.

No, this is not the beginning of a multilevel marketing pitch. In fact, the pitch is an old story with a different twist, and it begins with the old adage that exercise is good for you. Shocker!? Here are a couple of facts that the local health club rarely mentions.

It’s now and has been a proven fact that exercise will make you smarter. Simple blood flow and increased nerve growth in the brain improve cognition and decrease the amount of degeneration of brain cells. In other words, exercising isn’t about being vain; it’s about being smart.

An additional item rarely mentioned is that exercise helps with sleep. When someone sleeps more sound, they need fewer hours of sleep, which could result in doing something much more productive like being awake. In addition, exercise helps wear out the body physically, which allows one to fall asleep faster and decrease insomnia.

The combination of these two improvements could very well provide a business justification for 45-60 minutes at the gym. An alternative take on this is that regular exercise will prolong a person’s ability to think and focus as they age, which is a bonus that needs little salesmanship.

As any personal trainer or dietitian will attest, the best way to increase general fitness for most people is to cut back on the food, but can cutting back on the calories increase your lifespan and healthy years besides just losing a few pounds? While most associate healthy eating with a lack of obesity diseases, there is a substantial amount of research that says a lack of eating actually decreases the aging process.

One article goes so far as to say that every unnecessary calorie avoided increases your lifespan by 30 seconds. While this statistic might be a little hard to believe, there is hard evidence that reducing calories will slow the metabolism. Unfortunately, eating a lot and exercising it off doesn’t seem to result in the same life extending aspects, even though exercising has its own benefits. Interestingly enough, both of these theories seem to hold true to the health adage that fitness is 80% diet and 20% exercise.

It seems that many bloggers are doing fewer posts these days, and I’m not the only one to notice the situation, which many would be quick to tag as a fad. The Austin American Statesman recently had a front page article about how the number of new blogs is slowing and the number of dead blogs is increasing. In the article, Gallaga suggests that easily unloadable photos, video, and audio are where future bloggers will spend most of their time. It’s hard to argue with this notion as Flickr integration has been a part of my blog since inception, and the popularity of YouTube is undeniable.

But, the question remains as to whether plain old blog posts will go the way of the dinosaur. There’s no doubt that I’ve had fewer posts over the course of the past 3 or so years, including a one year hiatus where I only posted 1 or 2 times. From my point of view, the blogging world appears to be in a consolidation mode with bloggers grouping together to keep readers coming or with a few bloggers who have figured out ways to make money. For many other casual bloggers, the motivation to keep going just isn’t there.

The other slant on this story is whether the readers of blogs have become information inundated, causing a reversal of the chicken and egg. For instance, the motivation to write for many is knowing the content is being read, and as readers have become bored with weak content or too much content, they have slacked off on subscribing entirely. While a decent percentage of my techie friends actively maintain a blog and/or read blogs, 90% of my non-techie acquaintances have never blogged and claim that reading blogs takes too much time.

Blogging may not be going away any time soon, but as a Darwinistic consolidation increases, those who are left will most likely be the ones with the best content, which should lead to a resurgence in subscriptions. As for myself, I cannot yet image a situation where audio and video completely capture the market for freeform expression; thus, I predict a long life for blogs or some similar format.

As someone who is quite particular about the words I write, I constantly make the assumption that anything written can and often will be published to more than the present/intended audience. For example, I try to punctuate and spell correctly when typing in IM, even though I use my fair share of chat abbreviations for speed. Others choose to strive for speed in chat and email, often leaving all words lower case and misspelling about half of the other words. So, what does all this babbling about “writing” have to do with anything other than personal preferences? Almost nothing, it’s all about style and old habits in many cases, and it really doesn’t matter. What is important is the content, and specifically, how well the message is delivered.

In a recent email exchange with Coté, I congratulated him on his usage of “has had” in a sentence. My simple amusement of this seemingly insignificant detail was derived from an encounter I once had with an English literature teacher in college, where I used this combination. After a lighthearted demonstration to her showing where several famous authors wrote this in their books, she caved, and I became one of her favorite students. After the story, Coté remarked that things get a lot easier once you start writing to say what you mean. (Put that one in the old memory banks, and use it often.) Granted, it’s unlikely any of us would tolerate complete gibberish, but I would take this a step further and pass a little caution onto those who admonish clichés and other society-driven terms. Unless the line clutters the meaning, why not throw it in?! Because, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, since he who lives by the sword, shall die by the sword.

As most of you know, I’m a diehard Netflix fan. Besides a really simple and cheap method for watching movies, some of the really addictive aspects of Netflix include the ratings and friends features where you can rate movies and see what your friends thought. I really enjoy the “most similarity” rating, which shows which friends have the most similar taste in movies. While the rating could become self-prophesying, it definitely provides a good means for deciding what to watch in some situations.

Over the past couple of months a couple of friends have mentioned the new service that Blockbuster is providing, which is effectively trying to put Netflix on the dead company list. In addition, I’ve noticed that the Netflix turnaround on movies over the past 6 months has fallen off significantly. Since there is a shipping hub in Austin, I would typically get 2 day turnaround on a returned movie, but now, this time has increased to 4-5 days, which has left me dry on more than one occasion. Is this competition with Blockbuster starting to have an effect on Netflix? Has anyone else noticed the Netflix slowdown? I would think Netflix would want to do all it can to fend off its market share from Blockbuster; thus, saving a few dollars by slowing the movie return process seems like a bad trade off.

On a completely different note, why hasn’t Netflix integrated with Rotten Tomatoes? Before investing 2 hours of your life on a movie, it pays to do a little research, and Rotten Tomatoes includes excellent overall ratings from a large number of critics as well as users. Netflix has some critics involved with the online system, but having the power of aggregation of all critics would be a much added bonus.

As a lifetime dog owner, I recently sat down to investigate the answers to a couple of questions that rose during a conversation with some good friends, who are also long time dog owners. During the conversation, a lively debate ensued over whether it made sense to have leash laws. While the various stances taken on this subject are interesting (and quite intense as I found out), I thought I would instead set out to research some of the sticking points which surfaced during the conversation.

What do dogs and kids have in common? One answer that could be given is they are both typically shorter than most adults and can be behave impulsively at times. Actually, the real question was whether friendly dogs could and have bitten children. The really hard part in answering this question was defining the subjective “friendly” aspect. While there’s little debate that very few people die from dog attacks in the US, there appears to be a number of dog bite claims in any given year. While most of the statistics I could find pointed to the majority (> 60%) of dog bites occurring to children, it was hard to determine how many of the bites occurred from the teeth of a friendly dog, otherwise known as a dog with a responsible owner. So, while the ultimate question can’t be certified with statistics per say, the bottom line seems to be each reader’s belief in whether the opening question and subsequent answer is truly fact or fiction.

What is the safest thing to do when running past an unleashed dog? As a devoted runner, I have a vested interest in knowing what the experts recommend, and while the first question left some grey area to be explored, I was unable to find much variance while researching this question on the Internet. The unanimous suggestion by runners and dog owners alike all pointed to slowing down to a walk or stopping, if pursued by a dog while running. Most articles on this subject suggest doing things to make the dog uninterested if the pursuit continues or becomes aggressive, such as looking away and rolling up into a ball on the ground.

Leaving the original debate for the local representatives to hash out, the research resulted in some fascinating information on this subject, and knowing that many of the regular subscribers of this blog are dog owners, I’m curious to see if any comments surface on this subject. As for me, I’ll be sleeping sound knowing the king (or just Joe, as we like to call him) is protecting the house.

If you ever watched a NASCAR race, one question quickly comes to mind: Was this sport created by car enthusiasts or by brilliant marketers? This is the only sport (and I use the term loosely) where the souvenirs and even the sport itself represent the sponsors more than the people involved in the sport.

To my knowledge, this the only sport where people would actually purchase an orange $500 leather jacket covered with Home Depot logos, while the term “NASCAR” is hidden on the inside tag. The sponsors of this sport have an ulterior motive in selling this paraphernalia than say the average Fortune 500 company buying a sign out in center field. The NASCAR sponsors are literally “allowing” people to pay to become walking billboards. In fact, it’s no wonder the drivers are awarded points for being in first place the most laps. Guess which car, I mean logo, is shown on TV the most?!

Why haven’t companies pushed other professional sports onto this strategy and to this extent? While the target audience might seem restricted to some, it’s actually quite diverse. I can’t speak for all readers out there, but I can’t wait to start wearing my Southwest Airlines blazer to the next family dinner.