Stories of the Road, issue 33: The Great Gray North

This blog post is long overdue, but with good reason.  My latest client is headquartered in Vancouver, a city that's been on my top destination list for quite a while.  I was determined to make the best of my time there, thus I resolved to spend my weeknights seeing Vancouver rather than writing about it.

I'm never sure how much my feelings about a new city are influenced by my predispositions.  I've long imagined Vancouver as a Canadian San Francisco, so I had an easy time spotting similarities: the waterfront geography, the West-coast attitudes, the seafood-heavy menus.  There was even a dense fog (which the locals repeatedly assured me was uncharacteristic) languishing in the streets for most of my stay, reinforcing the impression that Vancouver was separated at birth from its American counterpart.

Vancouver's air is charged with the same ineffable energy found in other distinguished metropolitan locations.  I felt it as I walked to pick up dinner after work, wearing a smile that seemed to spring from my chest cavity.  I'm not a spiritual man, but I'm positive that some cities radiate a metaphysical verve yet undefined by science.

The travel requirements for this project were aggressive: Sunday night arrival and Friday afternoon departure for four weeks straight.  Lucy flew in for a ski weekend in between.  I tested my snowboarding skills, which were almost so rusty as to be worthless.  After three hours of scraping down the face of Grouse Mountain in thrift-store snowpants, my ass was ready to mutiny.

The food quality was top notch throughout town.  The sushi restaurant population downtown seems too large to be sustainable.  I never had a bad piece of fish in my time there, and I'm certain that my blood now contains enough mercury to manufacture several thermometers.  Oh, and let's not forget the poutine.

Why hasn't America appropriated this dish yet?  It certainly meets our minimum legal requirements for sodium, cheese, and fried food content.

Kudos to monstro (AKA Steve Wolfhard) and his friends for showing us a good time at Gyoza King.  Lucy drew a fantastic Vancouver travel journal when she vacationed with her dad last fall, so I have to plug it one more time.

Externalizing my brainwaves

For starters, new blog with zee puppets.

 

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It's a new year, folks!  Did you rock in 2008?  Did you suck?  Yes, you sucked?  Is it time to stop sucking so much?  There are a number of things I'd like to work on in 2009: regrowing an attention span, not being a jerk to my mom when she asks me computer questions (ugh, so bad at this... sorry, Ma), getting more sleep like I promise myself I'm going to do EVERY SINGLE YEAR...

I'd also like to do a better job getting my thoughts in order.  These days, it feels like I keep ideas in too many places.  Here are some (not all) of the ways that I'm recording the thoughts that are worth saving - in other words, these are notes about my notes.

 

Text files (Google Docs & Microsoft Word)

All-purpose, simple, effective.  I use them for all sorts of lists, like words I love (most recent addition: zaftig) or blog ideas.  Lately I'm using Google Docs more often for the simple interface and the ability to view the files at any time from my iPhone.

 

Mind maps

Long my preferred method of choice for taking notes at work, via the freeware Java application Freemind (shown in the screenshot).  Mind maps make connections between ideas much more visual.  They're perfect for concepts with a hierarchical structure, which might be why I've found them so useful for tracking projects at the office.

 

Google Notebook

Great for capturing info on the web, especially with the Firefox Google Notebook extension: highlight some text, right click, and choose "Note this"; the text is recorded in your notebook, along with the web page title, a link to the page, and the date the note was recorded.  Tagging and search capabilities help you track things down, so you don't lose track of that great Churchill quote you wrote down a few months ago.

 

legal pads

I keep one at my desk and one on my nightstand for writing down the stuff that pops into my head right before falling asleep.  It's easier to relax when you don't have to worry whether or not you'll remember to add gummy bears to the grocery list for your fancy dinner party tomorrow; write it down and fall asleep with a clear mind.

 

back pages of books

Only done this a few times with my non-fiction reading.  It's nice having the notes on hand whenever I'm reading, and I try to fit them all on a single page that I can reference quickly.

 

I'm really interested to hear anyone's suggestions on this topic, so fire away.

Stories of the Road returns soon with a new international edition!

Stories of the Road #32: The Lost Post

Hi, all.  It turns out that my work didn't appreciate my last post, which combined the company name and booze, drinking, etc. in such a way that my blog was spotted by their saved Google searches, and I was asked to take it down.  Here are the bonus items from the bottom of the post.

1. Quimby's is hosting a release party for Lucy's book on Tuesday, Oct 14th, starting at 7 PM.  If you're reading this, you should totally come.  Lucy's been busting her ass putting together the presentation for her book tour and Quimby's will be the debut performance.  Come!  Seriously!
2. Lucy & Johnny puppet blog #2 is here!

Efficiency expert in training

OK, so I've blogged about productivity a few times before.  This time, though, I'm going to pass along some useful information instead of just talking about how great GTD is.  Here are three of my favorite efficiency tips from three of my favorite efficiency gurus.

1. Batch your tasks (from Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek) - This one is pretty intuitive: buy all your groceries at the same store, run all your errands on the same car trip, cook enough food at once that you can eat the leftovers for days, etc.  Extending this idea to the web, you could also write all of your email replies in one sitting or check for updates to your favorite sites all at once, and no more than once a day for either of these activities.
2. Process your email inbox to zero (from Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero talk) - My personal email inbox currently contains zero emails.  Same for my work inbox.  Every time you check your email, process every single message and clear out your inbox.  Processing means performing one of five actions: delete, delegate, respond, defer, do.  As Merlin says, deleting is the most underused of these options.
3. Define your next action (from David Allen's GTD) - For every item on your to-do list, write down the next physical action you must take in order to "do" that item.  Let's say you lost your driver's license today, like I did (true story).  Instead of "renew driver's license," your to-do list would first contain "look up nearest DMV on internet," then once that was complete, "call DMV at 312-793-1010 to find out what to bring to get new driver's license."  This is great advice for unsticking a project that has been stuck for a while.

Also, puppets!  Lucy & I made this video before she left for vacation.  First in a series, maybe?

Stories of the Road, issue 30: Invading Mennonite territory

Thanks to everyone who made our party a rousing success!  Pam's piñata was a smash hit (ha!) and we damn near drank the place dry.  Also, we raised $55 in donations for my autism walk this May!

The party kicked off an insane 48 hours for me.  After going to bed around 5 AM on Sunday morning, I woke up at 9 to start working - as in work working.  I left the house at 2:30 Sunday afternoon to fly to Morris, MN, which is about a 3-hour drive west of Minneapolis.  After arriving at the hotel at midnight, I proceeded to pull my second-ever work-related all-nighter - the day after our party, mind you - and showed up at the customer's office at 6:30 Monday morning for a sales presentation.  Which, miraculously, I nailed.

After that I flew straight to Atlanta, where it was 70 degrees and sunny all week long.  One coworker was upgraded to convertible for free.  None of us know why.

 

 

Somehow, Lucy's ukelele love song to me (which I also linked to in a previous blog) was one of the featured videos on YouTube's home page last week.  In a two-day stretch, the video pulled in 700,000 views, 5,000 comments, and was favorited about 4,000 times.  How do you follow that up?  With another awesome ukelele love song video, of course!  I am crushed with adorableness.

 

To try and prove that all of the talent in this relationship didn't end up on one side, I put a new song up on the Tiger Stance MySpace page.  You can download it there or listen to it here:

share your files at box.net

Input vs. Output

Work is kind of slow these days, so I'm taking some corporate training classes online, like "Influencing Without Authority" and "Critical Thinking," and the best thing about them is that they have all sorts of great pictures to illustrate their points.



I know this is basically a case of the smug, cynical employee making fun of the corporate videos to prove that he's too cool for The Man's brainwash material, but they shouldn't make it so easy on me with pictures like this:



The training I've been going through at work reflects a trend appearing in other parts of my life lately - specifically, a trend in my input to output ratio. 

For example, workplace training can be considered input: the trainee receives information from an outside source.  Workplace duties, for most people, can be considered output: in my case, I produce documents, tweak and install software, troubleshoot the system, etc.  Lately, circumstances have dictated that I've had to spend more time doing the former than the latter.



Creativity can also be thought of as an input/output system.  Reading is input, and lately I've been on a tear, finishing Hunter S. Thompson's posthumous oral biography, the entire Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels, and Alan Cooper's assessment of why tech products suck all in a relatively short amount of time (for me).  However, this is my first written blog post (output) in over a month, while before that I had a streak of several posts no more than two weeks apart.

My guitar/piano practice (output) has been on the decline as well, or at least not as satisfying, and the ideas that I do get around to recording never seem very good to me the next day.  I envy my friends who seem to be better disciplined in this area; I'd expect that they make practice a priority, whereas I can never pick up my guitar until I've replied to all my emails, screwed around for a while, checked all my daily websites for updates... and by then it's usually almost time for this 9-to-5er to get ready for bed.  On the other hand, I've been listening to a shitload of podcasts (input) - Kevin Smith's SModcast and Dan Savage's Savage Lovecast are two of my favorites - and trying to pay better attention to what I like and don't like about the music I listen to, hoping that it can help me improve the stuff I'm recording.

Even my alcohol input seems to be on the rise lately.  But that's not so bad - until you input too much and are forced to output it.



There's no formula for the correct balance of input vs. output in everyone's lives.  In many cases, input facilitates an increase or improvement in output.  It's been fun to talk about this idea with people to sort out which activities are input and which are output - like if you go to the movies with your friends, watching the movie is input and discussing & deconstructing the movie afterwards is output.  This concept has been floating around my brain for a while now and I'm interested to hear other people's input (or output) on it.

Stories of the Road, issue 27: Regarding business dinners

Wow, guys, you know what the only thing better than working an 11-hour day is? You might say "Nothing," but I have the answer: working an 11-hour day and then going out to a business dinner where you talk about work the whole time. Oh, but wait, stop, hold on, there's something still better than that: if you can immerse yourself in that situation but then also be conversationally marginalized the entire time, and then whenever you try to bring the topic off of work you're interrupted with non sequiturs the entire night, that's the only way the night could get even better. I swear, the older I get and the more time I spend in the professional world, the more I realize that people skills don't really have that much to do with getting ahead in the business world.

I can understand the desire to talk about work at a business dinner: everyone can relate to the topic, you get to dish all sorts of gossip, people are talking about their coworkers in a way that they would never do if they were sober, alright, that's great. Still, doesn't anyone appreciate the opportunity to really get to know the people they're working with? And do we really still have to kiss our superiors' asses outside of the office? Isn't that the time that we should be ignoring office politics more than ever in order to rebel against the onus imposed by the workplace where we spent the vast majority of our day?

Admittedly, I'm a very social person, so I'm probably just upset that everyone I work with doesn't interact with other people in the same way that I do. This whole rant makes me a bit of a hypocrite since I believe that people in general weigh communication skills too heavily when assessing someone else's intelligence and now I'm turning around and doing exactly that with my coworkers. I guess at the end of the day this blog could be viewed as a perspective on how people interact differently in social situations. Still, it's disappointing to spend three hours with a group of people that fuel the entire night's discussion with stories about themselves.

By the way, we ate a a restaurant called Koi tonight, which is a sushi place in West Hollywood that was featured in an episode of Entourage (so my coworkers tell me). The CEO of my client told me that he had been there once before for dinner with Michael Bolton and Nicolette Sheridan. There were a few paparazzi outside the restaurant tonight. The inside of the restaurant was filled with fake blonds, fake tans, fake tits, short skirts, long legs, and several older gentlemen escorting several more younger ladies.