I’ve been fiddling with Quantified Awesome, this personal dashboard that I’m building so that I can keep track of what’s going on in my life and use that data to make it even more awesome. For example:

• Tracking my time helps me make sure work doesn’t tempt me too much, and that I make time for both personal projects as well as connecting with other people. It also helps me improve my time estimates: How much time does it really take to walk to the subway station? How instant are instant noodles?
• Tracking library books reminds me before they’re overdue, helps me collect my reading history, and gives me a greater appreciation for where my tax dollars go.
• Tracking my clothes helps me remember to wear different types of clothes more often, makes it easier to donate items I don’t typically wear, and encourages me to try new combinations.
• Tracking the produce we get from community-supported agriculture helps us avoid waste.
• Tracking stuff helps me remember where infrequently-accessed items are.

It turns out that other people are interested in this too. 21 people have signed up through my “I’ll e-mail you when I figure out how to get this ready for other people” page, and my mom wants to use it too. That’s awesome!

Now I have to go ahead and actually build it so that other people can use it. That’s scary.

And like the way I deal with other scary, intimidating, procrastination-inducing things, I’m going to list my excuses here, so that I can shine a light on those assumptions and watch them scurry away like the cockroaches they are and, if necessary, squishing them with a well-applied flipflop.

• Excuse #1: Idiosyncrasy. The way I work might be really weird, and other people may not be able to figure out what to do.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? “I have no idea how this works!” I end up with lots of crufty special cases because I can’t figure out how to reconcile different ways of working.
  • What’s the best case? I adapt the system to the way other people work, and I get inspired by what they do. I build a lovely, flexible web app and API.
• Excuse #2: Risk. I’m fine with loading my own data into an experimental system, but if I mess up and delete other people’s data, I’ll feel terrible. Also, they might trigger bugs.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Catastrophic data failure, nothing saved.
  • What’s the best case? Regular backups help me recover from any major mishaps, and careful coding avoids more common mistakes.
• Excuse #3: Support. I’m going to spend more time handling bug reports and feature requests, and less time building little things that might be useful only for me.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? People get annoyed and frustrated because I’m currently focused on other things, like my work.
  • What’s the best case? I get the system to become mostly usable for people, and I use my discretionary time to build more features. People’s requests inspire me to build more stuff and create more value.
• Excuse #4: Documentation. I’ll need to write documentation, or at the very least online help. This means confronting the less-than-intuitive parts of the system. ;)
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? I describe what currently exists, get frustrated because I want to improve it, and end up cycling between updating documentation and improving the system.
  • What’s the best case? I describe what currently exists, and end up improving it along the way. I build online help into the system so that it’s easy to change. There’s a blog that helps people learn about updates, too.
• Excuse #5: Offline access. A web-based time tracker might be of limited use if you don’t have web access often. I’ve been working on an offline HTML5 interface, but it’s still buggy.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Early testers try it out, but get frustrated because of the lack of offline access.
  • What’s the best case? I figure out the HTML5 offline thing. Someone else might be interested in building a native app, and we work together on fleshing out an API.
• Excuse #6: Impatience. If I bring people on too early, they might get annoyed with a buggy system, and lose interest.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? People give it a cursory try, and give up in annoyance.
  • What’s the best case? Early users are extraordinarily patient. We figure out a minimal viable product for each of them – the simplest thing that could possibly support what they want to do. Over time, things keep getting better and better. Also, I build a decent export interface, so even if people move on to a different system, they’ll still have their data.
• Excuse #7: Privacy and control. A bug might accidentally expose people’s information, which is not fun. I also don’t want to have to police the system for objectionable content, considering the thumbnail uploads.
  • What’s the worst-case scenario? Someone’s private notes get accidentally published.
  • What’s the best case? People sign on knowing that I might have bugs, and don’t save any super-secret or inappropriate information on the system.

Okay. I think I can deal with that. So, what are the smallest, least-intimidating steps I need to take in order to get closer to opening up?

• Write a quick test to make sure that people’s data will stay private. We’ll make people’s accounts private by default, although mine will stay mostly-public.
• Make a list of things that people should be able to do right now. (Not including new functionality!) Gradually write tests to nail down that behaviour.
• Make a list of things that people may want to do some day. Eventually set up an issue tracker.
• Enable Devise’s invitable feature so that I can set up accounts for people easily.
• Doublecheck backups.
• Bring one person on. Then the next, then the next…

It will still be better than nothing, it will be a good learning experience, and participation is purely voluntary anyway.

One step at a time.

We spent most of yesterday afternoon reorganizing the basement. We had moved boxes out of the basement in order to make room for the water meter installation, and we decided to postpone putting them back until we finished with the furnace upgrade. In the meantime, we squeezed our way past flip-top bins and bankers’ boxes filled with who knew what.

The furnace had finally been replaced, so it was time to win our basement back. W- and I set to work, methodically going through the stacks. We kept a garbage can and a recycling bin close by, and made frequent trips to the living room in order to drop off things destined for donation.

A few things made it back into the basement or various nooks around the house, duly labeled and added to my stuff-tracker. The vast majority of the things did not. Imagine – we could have skipped all those weeks of squeezing past those stacks if we had done this kind of review in the first place!

Today we’re going to work on clearing the second floor and moving furniture around so that the insulation installers can get to wherever they need. Along the way, we’ll probably bundle up more things for donation or disposal.

We’re working on having less stuff, and progress feels liberating.

We were going to be away for a week and a half, so we needed to make plans for our three cats. In the past, J- had done a little cat-sitting for us. I’d also asked a friend before, but that was for a weekend. With our cats occasionally throwing up or pooing outside the litter box when they’re upset, I didn’t want to inflict that on friends, even if I was happy to pay market rates. We wanted to make sure the cats were watched over and played with during the day, so we decided to give cat boarding a try.

Boarding cats is more expensive than hiring a cat sitter. We felt anxious about having someone else come into our house while we’re away, though, so we considered the difference a worthwhile premium for peace of mind – no litterbox accidents or throw-ups to worry about, and no worrying about stuff missing either. We also liked the ability to specify instructions like feeding Neko small, frequent meals – if you give her a lot of food in one go, she sometimes rushes and then throws up.

There was a small risk that the cats would pick up colds, ticks, or fleas from other cats, but we decided we could deal with that.

After calling up a few cat boarding places, we settled on Lonesome Kitty, a nearby cat boarding place. I checked out the location, and it seemed fine. The resident cats looked bright and alert, and none of them were obviously scratching themselves. We decided that it would be better to board there than with a veterinarian because vet offices tend to be busy (and occasionally full of sick animals!), so we e-mailed our confirmation. On the day before our flight, we dropped the cats off along with enough cat food for their stay.

After we got back, Luke and Leia sought attention more often than usual, and Neko had a cold. (The poor dear.) The cats were okay, though, and life returned to normal a week or so after we got back.

The cost of boarding three cats worked out to around $32 per day. A cat sitter would have cost around $23 per day. Lonesome Kitty has since then raised its prices to $36 for three cats / day.

2011-09-25 Sun 09:06

• PassionSaving shares ten money-saving tips: focus on getting over the $100,000 hump (yay!), add income tax when you consider costs, multiply by 25 to estimate capital needed for each of your spending categories, translate money into time, have short-term savings goals, focus on your goals, save for particular changes you want to make, think of saving as a normal thing to do, spend consciously, and be mindful of your limited savings potential.

  I started calculating the time cost of things when I came across that tip in Your Money or Your Life (Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford). I calculate my rate after I take out my savings and fixed expenses. To avoid getting confused about whether I’m using an 8-hour workday, a 16-hour waking day, or a 24 hour day, I calculate a daily rate instead. It makes it easier to stand in front of something and think: yes, that’s worth a day of my life; or no, I’d rather be financially independent a little bit earlier.

  Hat-tip to Lifehacker for the link!

• David of Money under 30 shares how he makes money blogging. He focuses on affiliate advertising. If I develop a blog as a part-time source of income, I probably wouldn’t want to deal with the hassles of filtering Google Adsense ads that I don’t agree with or that I find offensive, so affiliate advertising, information products, and/or services might be the way to go.
• David Seah’s diagram of work-life baselines nudged me to visualize my time and figure out more about my activity requirements. I don’t have the kinds of rules of thumb that he has, but maybe someday! So far, I know that I’ve got about 4 hours of discretionary time to work with on weekdays, and that sleep hovers between 7.5 and 8.5 hours. Going to bed at 11 means I’ll get up at around 7 or so, and that means I’ll be at work by around 8:30. An hour of tidying is enough to start laundry, sweep the bathroom, and put away clothes. Homework help and socializing takes around an hour, too.
• We’re always interested in good books to read, so I’m looking forward to checking out Katie Zenke’s recommendations for geeky books for kids. The comments are great, too.
• This rainbow layer cake looks great. It makes me think of Nyan Cat.

Lots of interesting posts turn up in my feedreader. I’m thinking of sharing highlights weekly so that I nudge myself to go back and review them, see what I’ve done with the information, and share the ideas with you.

It felt like a reasonable week. Looking back, though, I’m surprised by how much I finished! =)

Drupal 6′s drupal_json method encodes ampersands incorrectly for JQuery 1.5, causing the rather cryptic error:

Uncaught Syntax error, unrecognized expression: ...

(If you’re lucky.)

The way to fix this is to borrow the JSON-handling code from Drupal 7. Here’s something you might be able to use:

function yourmodule_json_encode($var) {
  return str_replace(array('<', '>', '&'), array('\u003c', '\u003e', '\u0026'),
}

// Fix Drupal JSON problems from http://witti.ws/blog/2011/03/14/jquery-15-json-parse-error
function yourmodule_json($var) {
  drupal_set_header('Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8');
  if (isset($var)) {
    echo yourmodule_json_encode(json_encode($var));
  }
}

Use yourmodule_json instead of drupal_json wherever applicable.

Hat tip to Greg Payne (Witti) for pointing me in the right direction!

2011-08-04 Thu 14:01

Happy people are sometimes derided as unrealistic Pollyannas, other people’s way of bringing them down to earth. I’ve heard it from people who don’t yet understand how I can be so optimistic. The dictionary defines “pollyanna” as an excessively or blindly optimistic person. Curious about this, I requested Eleanor Porter’s book Pollyanna from the library. In the pages of this easy-to-read book, I discovered a philosophy similar to the one I live.

You see, Pollyanna’s life centers on the Glad Game that she plays – the game of finding at least one thing to be glad about in any situation. An orphan taken in by her stern aunt, she inspires the town and eventually her aunt into playing this game. Invalids are comforted, quarrels are patched up, life gets better all around. When she runs into her own challenges, the whole town pitches in to help her play the toughest Glad Game she’s ever faced.

I play something like the Glad Game too. Grew into it unknowingly, took it as my own. It becomes easier – almost instinctive – as you do it. In the book, Pollyanna says:

“Why, Nancy, that’s so! I WAS playing the game—but that’s one of the times I just did it without thinking, I reckon. You see, you DO, lots of times; you get so used to it—looking for something to be glad about, you know. And most generally there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.”

The game I play isn’t quite the Glad Game, though. I don’t stop at being glad. I guess I play the Learn-Share-Do Game. What can I learn from this situation? How can I share what I’m learning? How will I respond – what will I do about this situation? This turns every joy and success into something greater, and every heartache into part of the story.

It’s a blend of the infectious optimism of the 11-year-old Pollyanna and the resolute freedom of the Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, who wrote this:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

There is no shame in being a Pollyanna, on facing life with conscious optimism and deliberate gratitude. Optimism can be firmly rooted in reality, finding nutrients in its depths, using the rocks of life as anchors.

I play the Learn-Share-Do game. What game do you play with life?

I’ve just come back from a bike ride organized by the Toronto Bicycling Network. The ride was supposed to go from High Park to Port Credit, but we stopped at the Tim Hortons near Alexandra Avenue and Lakeshore Road because it was raining so hard. The Tim Hortons we stopped at was just 3.5km from the destination, though, so I’d count that as mostly there. =) In total, I biked 33.7km in about two hours of constant rain, although part of that time was spent rather comfortably sipping hot chocolate inside the cafe.

This is where we ended up:

I’d never been that far west on my bicycle, and I haven’t biked in the rain for such a distance or length of item. It’s not that scary after all, although I wish I’d worn my rain pants and my gloves!

Calendar reminders on my Android: Working so far. I see the calendar reminders on my lock screen and on my home screen, so there are plenty of reminders. I’ve also started adding more events to my calendar, to increase the reward of checking it.

Test cases: Yes, for code’s sake, yes! I’m returning to a Drupal project after several months’ hiatus, and one of the first changes we’re making is extensive: changing a field to a taxonomy, changing lots of logic along the way, making sure all the forms work again… I am so glad I wrote a lot of tests covering the parts I wrote, and I only wish that I got all the other developers to do the same.

Laptop battery replacement: Replacing the battery on my tablet was a good idea. I’ve been getting tons of use out of it, particularly now that I’m back in development. Although W’s new tablet does look pretty tempting, I’m going to hold off buying new gadgets for a while.

Developer setup template: I added “Getting started notes” to our developer guide. Slowly getting there! And I’m glad to see that virtual-machine-based development is much easier now, too.

Standing desks: The kitchen counter is now my default standing desk. It’s well-lit, there are plenty of outlets near by, and I can easily refill my water glass or grab a snack.

Vibram toe shoes: Comfortable as anything, and then some. I prefer to wear these instead of my flats when I’m walking around the neighbourhood. W- still thinks they look funny, but that’s okay, he loves me anyway.

Kindle 3G: Awesome for looking up things on the go, and for occupying myself during subway rides. I’d still rather ride my bicycle than take the subway, but reading classic literature makes up for the fare and the missed opportunity for great exercise.

Folding bike/push scooter: Still haven’t taken the plunge. No local need to do so – I don’t mind saddling up my bike for short trips to the library or supermarket. No travel plans ahead, either.

Community-supported agriculture: We tried a bi-weekly spring share from Plan B Organic Farms, and that’s been working out well. I’ve been having salads I finished the last of the kale and the lettuce

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro: While using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro for presentations doesn’t give me the overview, the infinite canvas, or the clean lines of Inkscape, it’s a smoother workflow, and I rather like it. I’ve been sketching more, too. W- has just gotten his own tablet, and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro (trial version) was one of the first things he installed. I’m looking forward to practising drawing with him.

Writing more about life: I like it. I think of it as writing for my future self.

Blog limits: I sometimes schedule my posts, and I sometimes post more than once a day. Fine with you so far? If you find the e-mail frequency a bit too much, it might be a good idea to check out Google Reader or another feed reader. You can subscribe to my blog using that, too!

Over the past few weeks, several people I’ve had the pleasure of working with have left the company. I used to feel confused and a little disturbed by people’s departures, particularly if they’d tried to find other internal opportunities and the timing didn’t work out. Quite a few of my mentors left IBM, and one of my colleagues even lightheartedly teased me about it.

I feel much less worried about people leaving now. I wish them luck on their next adventure, connect with them through social networks so that we can keep in touch, subscribe to their blogs or follow them on Twitter, set myself a reminder to follow up with them, and perhaps write them a recommendation on LinkedIn.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand in the beginning: It’s okay.

When people leave for other companies, they colonize those companies with the things they’ve learned in ours. They spread skills and ideas they’ve honed here, while learning even more from new cultures and new situations. New things become possible.

The network grows. Now I might be able to easily reach out to one more company, one more industry. Now I might hear about interesting ideas and trends outside my usual areas of focus. Now I might connect even more diverse worlds.

It’s not all an easy win, of course. People leave behind these gaps, these unfulfilled possibilities. They also leave new opportunities. What will their successors create? How will the organization adapt around them? How will everyone grow?

I still work on helping IBM improve, in my own little way. But now I can properly wish people good luck on their new adventures, and be confident that things will generally work out.

2011-04-08 Fri 20:23

1. Compile Ruby from source.

First, install all the libraries you’ll need to compile Ruby.

yum install gcc zlib libxml2-devel
yum install gcc
yum install zlib
yum install zlib-devel
yum install openssl
yum install openssl-devel

My particular application has problems with Ruby 1.9.2, so I compiled Ruby 1.8.7 instead. This can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz

Unpack the source code for Ruby. Configure and install it with:

./configure
make
make install

Add /usr/local/bin to the beginning of your PATH.

2. Install Ruby Gems.

Downloadcd the latest Ruby Gems package and unpack it. I got mine from http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.7.1.tgz . Change to the directory and run:

ruby setup.rb

3. Install Rails and rake

gem install rails rake

If all goes well, you should now have Rails and rake.

Troubleshooting:

*builder-2.1.2 has an invalid value for @cert_chain*

Downgrade Rubygems to version 1.6.2 with the following command.

gem update --system 1.6.2

(Stack Overflow)

sqlite3-ruby only supports sqlite3 versions 3.6.16+, please upgrade!

Compile sqlite from source:

wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-amalgamation-3.7.0.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf sqlite-amalgamation-3.7.0.1.tar.gz
cd sqlite-amalgamation-3.7.0.1
./configure
make
make install
gem install sqlite3

LoadError: no such file to load – openssl

1. Install openssl and openssl-devel.

   yum install openssl openssl-devel
   

2. Go to your Ruby source directory and run the following commands:

   cd ext/openssl
   ruby extconf.rb
   make
   make install
   

LoadError: no such file to load – readline

yum install readline-devel

Change to your Ruby source directory and run the following:

cd ext/readline
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install

(Code snippets)

You can’t access port 80 from another computer.

Port 80 (the web server port) is blocked by default on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.5. Edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables to allow it, adding a line like:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Make sure you put it above the REJECT all line.

Load your changes with

/etc/init.d/iptables restart

(Cyberciti)

2011-04-04 Mon 11:06

I promised to put together a talk on learning for an IBM virtual conference for new hires. Here’s a rough draft, just to get it out of my head and into a form I can work with. I’ll add URLs internally. The next steps I want people to take are:

• Find a mentor, or even several mentors.
• Bookmark Lotus Connections so that they can easily search it in the future.
• Learn to find people based on documents and other shared information.

One of my mentors told me that at IBM, it’s okay if you don’t know something. If you don’t ask for help and things get messed up, though, that’s when you get into trouble. So I want to share with you some tips I’ve picked up on how to learn as quickly as you can, from as many people as you can.

I’ve been with IBM for almost four years. I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by all the different things there are to learn: working with Lotus Notes and other applications, dealing with technologies, working with team members and clients… It can be really intimidating. Fortunately, at IBM, there are plenty of people who can help – but sometimes you need to step up and ask.

• Mentors
  

  If you don’t have a mentor yet, find one. Even better, find several mentors. Mentors can help you figure things out: the specific technology you’re learning, the tools you need to work with, the processes in your team or business unit, even your career plans.

  How can you find a mentor? Share your questions with your manager and ask your manager to refer you to some people who might be good mentors for you. Look for people on Bluepages or Lotus Connections. Take advantage of the speed mentoring events that IBM Learning sometimes organizes and see if you can connect with anyone. Attend presentations and connect with speakers or other participants. Once you have a mentor, ask him or her for introductions to other people who might be able to help.

  Maybe you’re feeling shy. Maybe you think, “Well, I’m new to IBM. Why would anyone mentor me?” I found it hard to ask people to mentor me, too, but I was amazed by how generous people were when it came to helping new people. Many mentors help others because other people mentored them. Others mentor people because they learn a lot in the process. Mentors have lots of reasons for helping, so don’t be afraid to ask.

  Social networking tip: Look for mentors and role models who blog or post updates in Lotus Connections or on the Internet. That way, you can easily learn from people in between your meetings. You can even learn from people around the world, and people whom you might be too shy to reach to right now. For example, if you’re curious about what IBM Fellows do (they have the highest technical rank in IBM), or what vice presidents are like, or so on, you can learn from their blogs, tweets, and other posts. Maybe you’ll find something you can comment on or ask about!

  How to work with mentors: Talk to your mentors about your goals and figure out how they can help you. Take the lead in setting up meetings and asking questions. Show your appreciation through thank-you notes – and even better, show your appreciation through the results that come from taking your mentors’ advice.

  Okay. You’ve got mentors. But you can’t go to your mentors for every little thing you need to learn, so you still need to figure out things on your own.

• Documentation, assets, and other sources of information
  

  You’re probably already used to searching the Internet for information when you’re trying to learn something new. It can be harder to find just the right document within IBM. If you’re new to a topic, it can be difficult to find beginner-level resources, or even to know what and where to search.

  If you’re stuck, ask your coworkers or your manager for help in getting started. Take notes! Make a list of the resources you find useful as a beginner, and you’ll be able to share that list with other people who join the project. It’s a quick way to create value – and people are more likely to invest time into helping you if they know that your notes will help them and other people save time in the future.

  Don’t stop with the documents you find, too. One of the best things you can learn from a document or an asset is where you can go to find more information. Are there related communities? Can you look up other things the author has written? When you come across a useful document, look for any author information or lists of related experts. If you need help finding the right resources or you have a question that’s not answered by the document, you might be able to ask those people for help. (Look for communities or forums first, though – this helps avoid e-mail overload, and you can ask more people for help. We’ll talk more about communities later.)

  Okay. Formal documentation is great, but there’s often very little of it, especially for new tools and technologies. What do you do when you need to learn about something that doesn’t have a lot of articles or manuals yet?

• Files, bookmarks, wikis, and blog posts
  

  When I need to find out about something new, informal, or obscure, I often check people’s files, bookmarks, wikis, or blog posts. This is where Lotus Connections really shines. You can search people’s public files and presentations for new information, search bookmarks for information other people have found useful, check out wikis to see what people have collaborated on, and read blog posts for people’s notes and articles.

  What if you still can’t find what you need, and the people you ask don’t know of any resources, either? This is where you might need to ask more people.

• More questions and answers
  

  Have a short question? Try posting it on IBM Answers. You’ll get an e-mail notification if anyone replies. While you’re there, see if you can answer any of the pending questions.

  Tip: Don’t just post your question on IBM Answers and walk away. Reach out to specific people to see if they can share anything. If you use Profile status updates, post your question with a link to the answer page.

  Regarding experts: If you have a question that needs deep expertise, you might want to give Expertise Locator a try. You don’t want to waste experts’ time, though, so if your request is non-urgent, it’s probably better to start at a lower level. People can escalate your request if needed.

  Sometimes it helps to ask many people instead of focusing on just a few. This is where Lotus Connections Communities and IBM forums come in.

• Lotus Connections Communities
  

  Whatever you’re looking for, there’s probably a community or forum related to it. Search Lotus Connections Communities to find groups related to the topic. IBM Forums has older groups, too.

  Many communities have discussion forums. You’ll need to join the community in order to ask a question. Look at other posts to see how people ask for help. Provide as much information as you can in your message, but don’t post any confidential information. Show that you’ve “done your homework” – describe how you’ve tried to solve the problem or where you’ve looked for information. That way, people might be more encouraged to help you.

  Important: Ask the community owners (see the Members tab) Some communities use the “Mail community” feature to handle questions, before mailing the community. Many communities have thousands of members, and too much community e-mail can make the community useless.

• Building your network
  

  What about all those questions that people haven’t answered before, and for which there are no active communities? This is where your personal network becomes important. When you’re faced with questions that need much broader or deeper experience than you have, or you have no idea where to even start learning, your network is essential.

  If you can’t think of anyone who would know the answers you need, try thinking of people who might know people who would know the answer. Ask them for referrals. You can also look for people in Lotus Connections Profiles or Bluepages and try reaching out to them.

  Social networking tip: Lotus Connections Profiles is a great way to ask questions and get quick responses from whoever’s available in your network at the time. You need to build your network before you can use this effectively, though. Look at the main Profiles page to see who’s been participating, and invite them to your network. If they agree, you’ll be able to see their updates in your timeline, and they can see yours. That means that if you post questions in Lotus Connections, people might see it and answer it.

  Why would people spend time checking out Lotus Connections and possibly answering questions? For many people, it’s like a quick break by the virtual office watercooler, a way to catch up with lots of people and to help out people if they can. Try it – spend a little time each day or each week building your relationships by reading people’s profile updates, answering other people’s questions, sharing useful resources, and posting notes of thanks or encouragement.

• Wrapping up
  

  You’ll need to learn a lot at IBM, and you’ll need to learn it quickly. Not everything will be written down, and you might not find everything you need using w3 or an Internet search engine. You’ll need to learn from the network.

  • Learn from managers, coworkers, mentors, and role models about things you might not even know to ask about
  • Follow the clues from people’s files and assets to find related communities and experts.
  • Search people’s files, bookmarks, blog posts, and profile updates to see the latest.
  • Check out Q&A sites for additional resources.
  • Reach out to communities and forums if you need help from more people.
  • Gradually build your network so that you can easily ask for people’s help when you have new questions.

  Good luck!

  2011-04-02 Sat 21:42

Paul Gillin invited me to do a tweetchat on the professional and personal value of blogging yesterday. When I brainstormed some of the things I’d like to talk about, I ended up with a big list: not just the value I get from blogging, but also tips for how you can build that too. I hope you enjoy this blog series! You can also see other resources in this value of blogging series.

1. ROI

Blog your work to increase your return on investment or effort by remembering more effectively and by reaching more people.

How much time do you spend solving problems similar to what you’ve encountered before, answering questions you’ve already answered before, or remembering information you need to solve new challenges? Take notes and save that time.

How much time can you save other people if you share your notes with them? Are there other people in your organization, client base, or network who could benefit from your solutions? Share your notes.

Tips:

• Invest the extra minutes in taking and sharing notes in order to increase your ROI.

2. Questions, updates, resources, and serendipitous conversations

One of the challenges of blogging is that you don’t know who’s going to read it. That’s also one of the advantages. When you ask a question, you might be surprised by who answers it – perhaps someone you wouldn’t have thought of asking. When you post an update, you might make an unexpected connection with someone else, and learn about resources you might not have discovered on your own. When you talk about something you’re working on, you might end up in a serendipitous conversation with someone who can make use of it or help you with it. It’s the online equivalent of the lucky hallway chat, except with a lot more people in the virtual hallway.

Tips:

• Make it easy for people to discover your updates or even subscribe to them.

3. Connection

If you add personal touches to your professional blog, you can make it easier for potential clients and coworkers to connect with you through common interests. Write about why you do the work that you do and what you love about it. Write about your other interests, too.

Tips:

• Don’t be afraid of bringing your personality to your blog. Use it to connect with people.

Example:

• Maybe people really are generous with their wisdom

4. Reputation

Blog your work to build your reputation. When people read about what you’re working on, they learn about your skills and get a sense of who you are as a person. The next time they come across a challenge that looks like it’s a good fit, they might think of you and refer the opportunity to you. Particularly if you’re starting out, sharing your knowledge will help you build your network and your reputation.

Tips:

• Use your blog to demonstrate your skills and your character.
• Invest time into building thought leadership through blog posts, articles, and presentations.

5. Jobs and careers

A blog can help you look for a great job or plan your career. Use it to explore your strengths and figure out how to communicate them. Use it to think about what kinds of companies would be a good fit for you, and where you would be a good fit. Use it to connect with people and ask them for help. Use it to reflect on where you want to go with your career and what kind of value you want to create.

Tips:

• Don’t beg for a job. Use your blog to communicate strength, passion, and professionalism.
• Build a network of mentors and friends. Connect with people and ask them for advice.

6. Accountability and transparency

Blogging is a great way to make public commitments and hold yourself to them. You can use this for both personal and professional goals..

If you speak on behalf of a company, then you definitely need a fast way to respond to any issues that come up. With the speed of conversation on Twitter and blogs, you can’t wait for press releases. Establish this channel before a public relations crisis comes up. It’s better to admit a mistake and work with people on resolving it than to stonewall.

7. Culture

Whether you’re an executive or a newcomer, you can influence the culture of your organization through what you share. When you share what you know through your blog, you encourage a culture of knowledge-sharing. When you add a personal touch, you contribute to a culture of human connection. When you show that you aren’t afraid of making mistakes and learning from them, you develop a culture of growth. This can have a powerful effect on your organization, both online and offline.

Tips:

• Consider the fit between how you want to write and what the existing culture is. Be prepared for differences, and modify your approach accordingly. For example, if you want to shift your surrounding culture to share more, anticipate and address people’s concerns.
• If you’re a leader, take the initiative in demonstrating the kind of company culture you want to encourage.

A trivia question related to pi and my teammate’s subsequent recitation of pi to ten digits reminded me of this memory which I may not yet have shared here.

—

It was an evening get-together with several friends in the roofdeck garden of our home in the Philippines. After dinner, the conversation turned to geek superpowers, the little specialties and quirks we’d developed over time. The friend on my left started reciting the digits of pi. To my surprise, the friend on my right joined in – the same pace, the same digits, and I in the middle entranced by this melody of tenor and baritone. They went to about 100 digits head to head, then one dropped out; the other continued to 200 digits or so. It was as sublime a concert as I have ever listened to.

—

If you’re curious, you might want to check out the Wikipedia page on piphilology – the creation and use of techniques for remembering pi.

—

Like the way beauty often brings pleasure to viewers, my reaction to intellectual displays is closer to “Oooh, that’s awesome” than to “You have way too much free time.” W- and I have tons of geek moments, and I’m lucky to meet so many people who relish being geeky. Life is good.

2011-02-04 Fri 21:52

This was my first Lotusphere, and it was a blast. Lotus has such an active, passionate, experienced community around it. Heading to the conference, my goals were:

• [X] Learn more about Lotus Connections adoption and APIs
• [X] Learn about IBM’s strategy and innovations
• [X] Get a sense of the ecosystem around Lotus (partners, clients, etc.)
• [X] Meet people and make personal connections
• [X] Brainstorm and share insights
• [X] Show my appreciation for the cool work people do
• [X] Learn more about conferences and presentations
• [X] Fulfill my room monitor responsibilities

Here’s what I took away from the sessions and BoFs I attended:

Clients are interested in collaboration and have lots of adoption insights. We’re starting to see interesting case studies from clients. In addition to reporting excellent returns on their investments, clients shared qualitative feedback, such as stories of pilot groups who couldn’t imagine giving up the tools. Successful clients used executive support, communication plans, mentoring, metrics, incentives, role models, and other techniques to help people make new forms of collaboration part of the way people worked. sketchnotes from the birds-of-a-feather session on adoption

LotusLive is awesome. LotusLive currently includes web conferencing and parts of Lotus Connections. LotusLive Labs includes a technical preview of LotusLive Symphony (collaborative document/spreadsheet editing), Slide Library, and Event Maps. (I wish I’d seen Event Maps when I was planning my Lotusphere attendance!) Granted, Google Docs has been around for longer than LotusLive Symphony, but I’m curious about the ability to assign sections for editing or review.

Activity streams and embedded experiences are going to change the inbox. I don’t know when this is going to go into people’s everyday lives, but the idea of being able to act on items right from the notifications will be pretty cool – whether it’s in an enriched mail client like Lotus Notes or a web-based activity stream that might be filtered by different attention management algorithms. It’ll be interesting to figure out the security implications of this, though. It’s already a bad practice to click on links in e-mail right now, so full embedded transactions might encounter resistance or might open up new phishing holes. Project Vulcan is worth watching.

People are already doing interesting things with the Lotus Connections API. Embedding Lotus Connections content / interactions into other websites, adding more information to Lotus Connections, using different authentication mechanisms… people are rocking the API. The compliance API that’s coming soon will help people do even more with Lotus Connections interactions, too.

The next version of Lotus Connections will be even cooler. I’m particularly excited about the idea blogs and the forum improvements, which seem tailor-made for the kind of collective virtual brainstorming we’ve been doing in Idea Labs. Idea blogs are straightforward – a blog post or question with comments that can be voted up or down – but they’ll go a long way to enabling new use cases. Forums will also have question/answer/best answer support.

Sametime Unified Telephony rocks. I need to find out how to get into that. I like click-to-call ringing everyone’s preferred devices, easy teleconferences, and rules for determining phone forwarding.

Lotus Notes and Domino are getting even more powerful. XPages looks pretty cool. I’ll leave the rest of the commentary on this to other bloggers, as my work doesn’t focus enough on Lotus Notes and Domino for me to be able to give justice to the improvements.

The Lotus ecosystem is doing well. Lots of activity and investment from partners and clients.

Analytics + research = opportunity. Interesting research into attention management, activity streams, social network analysis.

Lotus geeks are a world of their own. It’s amazing to spend time with people who have immersed themselves deeply in a technology platform for almost two decades. There’s a depth and richness here that I don’t often find at technology conferences. There’s also a lot of tough love – people like IBM, and they’re not afraid to call us out if we’re not clear or if we seem to be making mistakes. =)

Notes from conversations

The hallway track (those informal encounters and chance connections) resulted in great conversations. For me, the highlights were:

• Being adopted by various groups – so helpful for this Lotusphere newbie! Special thanks to @alex_zzz>, @belgort, @billmachisky, @branderson3, @ericmack, and @notesgoddess for bringing me into fascinating conversations.
• Andy Schirmer walking me through his task spreadsheet with eight years of task data summarized in some very cool graphs. I want to have data like that.
• Talking to Hiro about crowdsourcing and sharing the cool things we’ve been doing with Idea Labs.
• Seeing all these people I met online. Finally getting to meet Tessa Lau, Bruce Elgort, Julian Robichaux, Mitch Cohen, and other folks, too! It’s great to be able to connect with people on a personal level, thanks to blog posts and Twitter. (How do people manage to keep up to date and remember all of this stuff? I felt all warm and fuzzy when people congratulated me on the recent wedding, and I wished I remembered more tidbits about them. Working on that!)
• Being reminded by David Brooks and other early adopters that I’ve been around from the beginning of Lotus Connections. (Okay, David did that in a BoF.) It seems Lotus Connections has always been around. <laugh>
• Joining the geek trivia challenge. The questions about television and comics went way over my head, but it was good to spend time with other folks, and I had so much fun. Well worth needing to figure out how to get back to the Port Orleans hotel after the conference shuttle service ended.
• Talking to Jeanne Murray and Rawn Shah about a personal maturity model for social business. Some ideas: control of recipients, trust, transparency, conflict resolution techniques, asymmetric knowledge of others, persona separation/integration, acceptance of change; overlap with leadership maturity models; context dependency of decisions…
• Talking to Bonnie John about the politics of writing about process improvement. Interesting thing to untangle. More thinking needed.
• Swapping tips on Gen Y life with Julie Brown, Alexander Noble (@alex_zzz>), Brandon Anderson (@branderson3), and others

If I get to attend Lotusphere again, I’d love to be able to stay at the conference hotel. It would be much more convenient and I’d be able to go to more of the evening get-togethers. The chances of my being able to attend again probably depend on how much of the Social Business adoption consulting we’ll get to do over the next year, and I hope we do a lot. I’d also make time to check out the showcase. I missed it this year, thanks to all that chatting.

Next actions for me

For work, I’ll probably focus on external Web 2.0 / social media site development while other groups figure out the structure for social business adoption consulting. I’m looking forward to learning from the case studies, insights, and questions that people have shared, though, and I’d love to do more work in this section.

Here’s what I need to do for post-conference wrap-up:

• [X] Go through my index cards and write additional notes
• [X] Contact people I met and follow up on conversations
• [X] Catch up with work mail
• [X] Catch up with personal mail
• [X] Write further reflections
  • [X] Time analysis
  • [X] Appearance and bias
  • [X] IBM and women in technology
  • [X] Reflections on careers, loyalty, story, and alternatives
  • [X] Presentation reflections (time for questions, presentation style, rapport, morning sessions?)
• [X] Plan my next steps

Other Lotusphere 2011 wrap-ups you might like: Chris Connor, David Greenstein, Luis Benitez (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5), Andy Donaldson, Marc Champoux (… where are the female bloggers’ writeups?)

See also: Lotusphere social aggregator, Planet Lotus, Twitter search for #ls11, Twitter/blog archive

2011-02-04 Fri 16:04

I sent my first batch of Christmas cards two weeks ago, raiding my stash of Philippine-themed Christmas cards. Good thing, too. My sister had apparently been planning to send the exact same design of cards, so she scrambled to find a Dutch card instead.

Ever the geek, W- suggested a Christmas card protocol to eliminate collisions. We’ll focus on Canadian cards, Kathy can do Philippine or Dutch cards, and Ching can do Singaporean cards if she wants.

What does a Canadian Christmas card look like? I was thinking about it, and an idea got stuck in my head. I had fun drawing this:

© 2010 Sacha Chua – Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License

I’ve just ordered a set of 30 custom Christmas cards from VistaPrint. They’ll arrive too late to send to family and friends in the Philippines, but I can use them for people here. It’s a good experiment in creativity. If they work out, I might make or order more next year.

If you want to print your own set, I could share the hi-res file. =) Disclaimer: I haven’t seen what this looks like as a printed greeting card yet!

Me? Five to ten minutes extra, tops. That’s for my most useful posts: the ones where I’m sharing how to solve a problem or answer a question I’ve come across. That’s all it takes to strip out sensitive information, format it for readability, pick tags, and throw in a few hyperlinks if I’m feeling diligent. I’ve already done the hard work of solving the problem or answering the question. I might as well spend an extra five minutes to make it part of my personal reference library and share it with search engines.

I take longer to write my other posts – the ones I write from scratch. But that’s not blogging time, that’s thinking time. I’m going to have to think through things anyway. For example, it usually takes me four hours to prepare a presentation, from brainstorming key points and examples to organizing everything into a coherent story. At some point, I usually write things down into an outline, and from there, I often write full speaker’s notes.

Whether or not I blog something complex like a presentation, I’ll still spend time thinking through it. Blogging saves me time and stress because I don’t have to worry about forgetting anything important, and it allows people to not only share that resource with others but also to stumble across it through search engines. Five minutes to post presentation notes and share the slides on Slideshare – okay, maybe closer to ten minutes because I like cross-linking them, which results in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation – that’s nothing compared to the return on investment I get from sharing.

At this point in my post, for example, I’ve spent eight minutes thinking through typing. This is one of the reasons why I encourage everyone to learn how to touch-type. When you don’t have to think about typing, you can type as a way of thinking. You can have a record of what you’re working on for very little extra effort. “But I type so much slower than I think!”, you say. Personally, I catch myself thinking that when I’m thinking too quickly, I’m wasting a lot of effort by going around in circles or working on things I’m going to forget. Slowing down to my typing speed is not a problem.

In fact, my bottleneck isn’t typing. The previous four paragraphs (almost 380 words) took me 10 minutes to write, giving me a thinking+typing speed of about 38 words per minute, or 1.5 seconds per word. On the other hand, a typing test rates me at about 110 wpm (using a software-based Dvorak keyboard layout, on a Lenovo X61 keyboard), or about 0.5 seconds per word. Where did that other second go? Thinking. I tend to speak at 200 wpm or so when I’m excited (0.3 seconds a word?), so obviously, I can think faster – but how much more value is added by that, or taken away at that speed? Slower thought is worth the clarity and reach.

There you have it. A post I’ve recycled from something else – a presentation, an answer, a technical solution? Five to ten minutes extra, with more time if I’m crossposting or illustrating or doing anything fancy. A new post like this? 20 minutes, and now I have something I can link to in case this comes up in conversation again. =) (I have many recurring conversations, most with different people, some spread over years. Each time we revisit a topic, it becomes richer.)

How much time does it take me to write? The real answer is probably a negative amount. If I don’t write about things I’m thinking about, I waste more time thinking in circles and solving problems all over again. This saves me time.

How much time does it take you to write?

Image (c) 2006 Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License

A former teacher of mine asked me, “If you were a season, what would you be, and why?” I thought about it because I wanted to dig beyond the trite answers that tempted me: summer for sun, spring for new beginnings.

If I were to pick a season, it would be autumn – and not because of the breeze or the brilliant colours. (Isn’t it funny that the colours are always there in the leaves, but the green must die to let the other colours show?)

I’d choose it for harvest, celebration, preparation, and the ever-present awareness of winter.

If life is a year of seasons, it might be strange that I often think of winter, and of other years I’ll never see. That’s why it’s good to do the work now: to save the seeds from what’s working well, to plan and prepare the soil so that next year’s beds can bear more fruit.

The harvest is abundant, although it might not much resemble the plans from spring. Save some for the long winter – stored sunshine and water and nutrients in a variety of forms.

There may even be just enough time to sneak in one more cool-weather crop of lettuce, which frost makes sweeter. Who knows? Start it anyway.

And then, when winter embraces the garden, let go. You have done your work. Underneath the blanket of stillness is a future you can influence but not predict.

What’s success when you’re writing a personal blog–not a niche blog which you want to make money from through ads or e-books, not a corporate blog where you want to project a certain brand, but a personal blog, a notebook into which you write whatever might be useful to you and others?

Success is not a matter of becoming wildly popular.

You succeed as soon as you grasp a thought and try to think it through, writing it down. Even if you throw away your draft and never publish it (although please do–you’ll be surprised at how valuable these sketches and attempts to explain can be), you have already gained a little more clarity and understanding.

You succeed again when you share those thoughts, getting over your fear, anxiety, and discomfort.

You succeed again when you look up your old posts for a solution you’d written down or a reflection you’d shared, saving you time figuring things out again.

You succeed again when people read your post–even several years later, brought in by search engines–and they learn something from it. You succeed again when they do something about it.

You succeed again when someone shares their thoughts in a comment, even if it’s to point out that you’ve missed something. (Another opportunity to learn!)

You succeed again when one comment turns into another, and into a serendipitous connection you might never have made.

You succeed again when you learn something, and again when you do something about it.

You succeed again when you build friendships.

There are so many different kinds of success in blogging. Don’t get distracted by all the fuss about increasing your subscriber count, building your personal brand, or making money through ads, products, or services. There’s more to it than that. Enjoy!

2010-07-28 Wed 07:46

We had a four-day weekend thanks to Canada Day, and boy, did we ever make use of it. The three big things were lots of parking practice, lots of canning (95 bottles of jam on the wall, 95 bottles of jam! – well, technically, a few bottles had apricot syrup), and a new hobby: playing the ukulele.

And because it’s important to be comfortable with mediocrity on the way to competence:

From last week’s plans:

Work

• [X] Bike to work on sunny days
• Worked on expertise locator project
• Prepared posters for upcoming meeting

Relationships

• [-] Drop off marriage licence application  – filled out, still need to drop it off
• [X] Blog more stories
• [-] Fix jacket for tea ceremony – started working on this
• [-] Start on storage bench project  – measured
• [X] Pick out swatches for my chair
• Made lots of preserves for gifts/entertaining

Life

• [X] Do research for tablet?
• [X] Draw, draw, draw
• Sewed a slip – comfy
• Picked up Lego Harry Potter for the PSP – pretty good
• Used the compost in the garden. Hooray!

Plans for next week:

Work

• [  ] Finalize posters
• [  ] Revise expertise locator note
• [  ] Talk to manager in Lotus (IBM)

Relationships

Having realized that I should trust people more to make their own decisions and that when I invite people, I’m not imposing on them, I think I’ll organize more get-togethers. =) I used to do this back home, too. I like doing things together more than just hanging out, so if I put some thought into it, I can experience new things and help friends experience things too. Besides, there are a number of new friends in Toronto and a number of people getting the hang of grown-up life, so it’s practically my duty to help people try things out. =)  So I’m planning to be more intentional about looking for opportunities and events, and we’ll figure out some way to organize get-togethers.

• [  ] Host tea party on Saturday – Just canned blueberry jam, kiwi jam, and apricot syrup. Perfect excuse to make biscuits and banana bread. Also good time to raid the garden for a pea shoot and nasturtium flower salad, and green beans and garlic scapes. Maybe bruschetta with basil too. =) Mmm…
• [  ] Check out High Park picnic potluck organized by Gail Vaz-Oxlade. I liked her “A Woman of Independent Means” personal finance book, and I wonder if that might be an interesting place to meet other people into personal finance. =) July 11 (Sun) at 10 AM (High Park Area #3)
• [  ] Drop off marriage licence application  – filled out, still need to drop it off
• [  ] Fix jacket for tea ceremony

Life

• [  ] Try more videoblogging
• [  ] Practice ukulele for at least half an hour a day. Have to work on those calluses…

Between stimulus and response is the freedom to choose. – Victor E. Frankl
A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. – Albert Schweitzer
Useful for all sorts of things, including happiness.

Work is love made visible. – Kahlil Gibran
We can do no great things, only small things with great love. – Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Many people seem to think that work is a burden. It doesn’t have to be.

Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions. – Unknown
Everything can be a learning experience.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Good for teaching.

Grief is the price we pay for love. – Queen Elizabeth II
Loss sharpens joy.

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. – JD Salinger
If you find what you look for, you might as well look for good things.

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken. – Oscar Wilde
Always a good reminder.

Take the first circus. Make more pots. Build a cathedral. - random bits from my favourite teaching stories

That was a busy week. Lots of work, lots of accomplishments, and lots of new things learned!

From last week’s plans:

Work

• [X] Discuss virtual leadership
• [X] Finalize preparations for Idea Lab
• [-] Revise my “Remote Presentations That Rock”
• [X] Flesh out more parts of the wiki
• [X] Follow up on expertise location pilot – export lists of experts
• [X] Track Idea Lab interest
• [-] Update invitation template
• Also: Listened to Debbie Landers talk about being a remote executive (“All executives are remote, in a way”)
• Chatted with Laurie Friedman about leadership
• Blogged about facilitation tips
• Drafted newsletter
• Set up training community
• Posted visual essay on smarter leaders
• Updated and reorganized part of the wiki
• Talked to extended team members
• Helped Camille Nichols track down resources
• Sent list of experts for expertise location pilot

Relationships

• [X] Meet with lawyer regarding the marriage contract
• [-] Add another freezable meal to our repertoire (chicken-based?)
• [X] Plant more herbs in the back box
• Also: Attended Tania’s tea party
• Built garden box frame with W-. Lots of work and lots of fun.
• Planted asparagus, whee! Also picked up more strawberries and a cherry tomato plant
• Turned the compost
• Made large batch of spaghetti sauce
• Made cream puffs
• Attended J-’s school musical (Dear Edwina) – that was fun! Why don’t we have beginners’ musicals that grownups can sing in? =)
• Scanned paperwork for my mom

Life

• [-] Get started on skirts
• [-] Post five drawings
• [X] Figure out how to blog or journal small, quick notes
• Also: Drew more cats
• Planned how to simplify life, remember better, and fight clutter

Plans for next week:

Work

• [  ] TOP: Facilitate Idea Lab and summarize results
• [  ] Revise “Remote Presentations That Rock”
• [  ] Follow up on expertise location pilot
• [  ] Reflect on IBMers at their best – map competencies to how I currently practice them and how I want to grow
• [  ] Post more thoughts on career growth

Relationships

• [  ] Work on garden frame
• [  ] Send some more information that my mom needs for her visa application
• [  ] Plant the rest of the herbs
• [  ] Send additional information to lawyer

Life

• [  ] Spring cleaning: wardrobe, bedside table, living room, etc.
• [  ] More organization: try belt pouch + bag system

I’m going to find out if all that cooking we did last weekend will get us through this week and next week. If so, then that will free up a valuable block of unstructured time.

My weekdays have mostly settled into a good routine. Thanks to cooking ahead, I have 2-3 hours each evening of unstructured time. Batch-cooking takes a day out of my weekend, which means I have to plan around having one day of unstructured time instead of two, but the convenience and variety of meals during the week is worth it.

So, what are the things I can do with that unstructured time?

Evenings:

• Write 3-4 blog posts
• Organize things at home and improve our processes (kitchen kaizen!)
• Work on code
• Start seeds or improve the garden
• Sew pre-cut or small pieces
• Prepare presentation
• Read

Weekend: Evening +

• Pick up books and groceries
• Do laundry + cooking + major cleaning
• Cut pieces for sewing
• Review blog and revise
• Host tea party

So I should prioritize sewing over writing or coding during weekends, because I can write and code during evenings, but cutting pieces and patterns is harder to squeeze into an evening. =)

Did my first Ignite talk last night, at Ignite Toronto 3. It was fun! Scary, yes. But fun, and I hope I convinced at least one person to share more of what he or she knows. Here are some things I learned along the way:

Five minutes will fly by. Don’t worry. All you need to do is do a commercial and point people to where they can find out more. You have plenty of time to make an impression. TV spots are typically 30 seconds long. You have the equivalent of 10 TV commercials to make an impression in. You can do it.

Instead of starting with a bigger presentation and trying to squeeze it into five minutes, start with your key message and expand that to fit five minutes. It’s easier that way.

Write your script, plan your slides, plan a key point for each slide, and then let go of your script. Focus on getting your key point for each slide across, and improvise whatever you need to make it shorter or longer. This means you don’t have to stand around waiting for a slide to change (you can always just add more detail!) or stress out if your slides seem to be going at lightning speed (just say your key point).

Don’t put a lot of text on your slides. If you can, don’t put any text on slides shown when you’re speaking. Text makes people read. Reading makes people stop listening. You’re going to be too nervous to give them time to read. Make it easy for people to focus on you.

You can either apologize for mistakes or focus on getting your message across. Focusing on communicating your message is more useful and fun. People don’t expect you to be perfect.

Put your notes or script online so that people can read the things you forgot to say. You can post it after the session if you don’t want to spoil your punchlines.

An easy way to remember your slides: Figure out your key point for each slide and the transitions between them. It’s easier to remember when it all flows. Tweak it until it feels natural. Then review your slides. For each slide, practice remembering your key message and the transition to the next slide. That way, you always know what the next slide is.

Practice the timing so that you can get a sense of how much can fit into 15 seconds. More important: practice the timing so that you can get used to recovering from timing errors. This is really helpful. People don’t mind if your speech isn’t perfectly synchronized with your slides. If you can keep it reasonably on track, that’s great.

Use a short description and bio, to keep the flow smooth.

Make a placeholder entry on your blog and use that link in the bio so that organizers can link to your speaker notes / presentation without having to make last-minute web updates.

Watch other presentations for inspiration. Plenty of great examples out there.

How to deliberately practice timing (very handy!): Print out your script, notes, or slides. Set up a 15-second looping countdown presentation. While this is counting down from 15 to 1, practice “scenes” from your presentation. You don’t have to do them in order, and you don’t have to do them all the way through, although that helps. I find it useful to repeat one scene until it feels okay, and then move on to the next one. It’s also helpful to run through the entire thing at least once.

You can reuse the timing presentation to help you keep track of time during your talk. But five minutes goes by really quickly, and if you’re making eye contact, you’re not going to look at your timing laptop. Don’t worry about getting everything perfectly timed. Focus on getting your message across and to adjusting as needed.

You can practice outside an Ignite event by recording presentations. You can also practice by doing your talk for a friend. Tag a fellow presenter and work out those butterflies by practicing with each other.

Another long reflection on my process: Thoughts on preparing an Ignite-style presentation

More specific notes for myself:

Things to remember for future versions of my talk: introverts aren’t likely to be out at a bar with 199 other people. They’re going to be at home, waiting for the Youtube replay. ;) Like, duh. Maybe a different way to frame these presentation tips?

Also, raise-hands polling is hard with a harsh spotlight. I couldn’t see anyone until I shaded my eyes and adjusted to the darkness.

Next for me: Remote Presentations That Rock (March 8, rerun), branding (March 8 PM), client workshop (March 18-19), then PresentationCamp on March 23.

Video to be posted in the next three weeks, I think.

Fun!

Great stuff from other people: How to give a great Ignite talk

What a great start to the year! A vacation to Siargao gave me a chance to get to know my family better. I brought my cat on the return flight (that was quite an adventure!). It took me a while to recover from jet lag and a sore throat, but it was good to get back on track at work. W- and I formalized our engagement, and our parents have been helping us plan the wedding (August!). I bought a new point-and-shoot camera so that I can take more pictures. What a month indeed!

Here are some of my favourite blog posts from January 2010:

• Agendas – in which I share the agenda for the formalization of our engagement
• What I want to talk about in 2010
• Facilitation: Thinking about the ends and means

Useful work-related stuff:

• Lightweight personas for ideation workshops – in which I share a lot of work-related lessons learned
• Braindump: Social media advice for events
• Getting started on your web presence
• Microblogging talk – something that fits in 7 minutes

Weekly reviews:

• December 27, 2009 and January 3, 2010
• January 10, 2010
• January 17, 2009
• January 24, 2010
• January 31, 2010

Monthly highlights: December 2009

Busy, busy, busy!

From the previous week’s plans for the week ending December 27, 2009:

Work

• Set up Idea Lab needed for January
• Document practices and lessons learned  Shared my braindumped mindmap internally (see blog) 
• Set up contingency plans, transfer skills Wrote step-by-step
• Interview Arvin P. about talking to CEOs Cancelled, Jason Wild’s interview was enough

Relationships

• Help make cheesecake  They did it while I was busy working! ;|
• Attend W’s family get-together That was lots of fun =)
• Fly to the Philippines

Life

• Relax (v. important! =) )

For the week ending January 3, 2010:

Work

• Checked in to make sure everything was fine before I left for vacation

Relationships

• Helped my dad get a netbook; set it up
• Spent lots of time with my family. We went to Siargao, my sister’s favourite island

Life

• Treated myself to a massage and a facial

Plans for next week:

Work

• Add people to the Idea Lab
• Help facilitate and summarize the Idea Lab
• Catch up on work mail
• Braindump some more
• Brainstorm microblogging talk

Relationships

• Talk to W- on Skype
• Catch up with personal mail and blog comments

Life

• Get back into the rhythm of writing
• Find a way to post my sketches
• Post blog highlights for the year
• Find or replace water bottle =)

Looking for your passions? You might be starting with the wrong question. Except in rare circumstances, passion doesn’t hit people out of the blue. You don’t just wake up one morning and discover a love for painting or polynomials. Passion starts small.

If you’re caught up in looking for the kind of burning passion that will turn your world upside down, you might miss the little things that lead to interests. Some of your interests will lead to skills. Some of your skills and experiences will grow into passions.

There are lots of guides on how to explore and develop your passions, so I won’t repeat the advice you’ll see elsewhere. Instead, let me share how I explore my interests, in case that nudges your mind.

I lucked into my big passions. I don’t remember learning how to use the computer, and I only vaguely remember teaching myself how to program.

One passion leads to another, almost without choice. My big passions span years and open up other possibilities. A passion for programming turned into a passion for open source, which led to a passion for personal information management and productivity via the unlikely conduit of Emacs. Personal information management led to a passion for social information management, social networking, and collaboration. Computing and open source led to teaching, which led to public speaking, which broadened and became a passion for communication. Looking back, each step—each evolution—seems natural and unavoidable. Each skill is a launchpad for other skills.

I think a lot about passions. I think about what I’m passionate about, how to explore that, and how to articulate that. But I’m not discovering things from scratch—I’m taking something that already exists, and I make it clearer.

This means that it’s difficult for me to help people get started and overcome inertia. Self-discovery is tough. Once you know the feeling of passion, though, it becomes much easier. I’ve thought a lot about accelerating new passions when you already have at least one. I don’t have as much advice for when you don’t know of anything you’re passionate about.

Against the backdrop of these big passions, I’ve explored dozens of interests. Many of those interests contribute to my passions in unexpected ways. Any one of those interests could become a passion—indeed, are passions for other people. I know more about exploring interests and developing them into passions than about finding passions right off the bad.

EXPLORING INTERESTS

Where do ideas for interests come from? Many interests start in my curiosity about what my ideal life looks like. I think about what I might do or experience if I had all the time and money I wanted. I look for ways to start experimenting with those ideas now instead of later. It often takes less money and time than I expect.

Many interests grow out of existing ones. Sometimes they’re logical progressions. Sometimes they’re complementary pursuits.

Many interests are inspired by others. I talk to people I admire. I read books and blog posts. I flip through course catalogues. When I come across something that tickles my imagination, I see if I can give it a try.

How do I make it possible to explore interests? Living frugally means I can regularly save money in an “opportunity” fund that I use for experiences or education. This means I don’t have to worry about choosing between interests and bills. Minimizing commitments and keeping work-life balance means I can free up the time to explore emerging interests, which usually end up being quite helpful at work and in life too.

How do I explore interests? I find that teaching myself is more fulfilling and cheaper than taking a class unless I really need other people in order to explore an interest. It’s easier, too. I usually check out lots of books from the library and make time to practice. As I explore, I think about my experiences and share what I’m learning. Is it worth it compared to other ways I can spend my time? Are there more effective ways to achieve my goal?

HOW TO TRY THIS

What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?

Plan how to learn it. Make time and space for it.

Give it a try. If you like it, get better at it. You’ll like it even more as you get better and better at it. And who knows? Maybe someday, it will number among your passions.

W-: I just have some more to do.

Me: Can I help?

W-: It’s okay. I’m faster in vi than you are.

<I do a mock eye-narrow emphasized with hand gestures> <we both do the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly>

Me: <laughing hard>

W-: Our kids are going to roll their eyes. “Ncurses was so fifty years ago!”

Me: <laughing even more> <mock-crying> “Oh no, I just had an integer wrap!”

W-: 16-bit or 32?

Geek love. It’s like xkcd with much less angst.

What kind of superpower would you like to have?

When I answered this ice-breaker at a women’s leadership session last week, I said that I wanted to be in multiple places at the same time so that I could explore all sorts of great opportunities and learn all sorts of great things. Most people mentioned time-based powers: having more time in the day, freezing time, and being able to instantly teleport. Me, I wanted to scale.

On reflection, though, I realized that the superpower I really wanted was different. So when the facilitator used the same question with a different group (I was there because they were going to discuss my Remote Presentations That Rock video), I was ready.

I want to have the superpower of being able to effectively teach everything I’m learning to people, to be able to package whatever I had learned and to share that with others.

I realized that what I really cared about isn’t filling the world with clones of myself so that we could explore different things, it’s building foundations so that I can learn from whatever else people create on top of it.

I’m going to figure out how to gain that superpower. And as I figure more of it out, I enable other people to figure it out even faster and go even further than I can.

My passion is helping people connect and collaborate. My vision is a world that’s truly flat, where people can work together and lead from anywhere, where we can fully tap the talent of people from different backgrounds, lifestyles, and geographies. To make any real progress towards this, I have to create exponential change. I can’t do that alone. I need an army, and I need to build things so that they transcend me.

People used to think that job security was about keeping knowledge to yourself. Me, I think that vision security is about sharing as much as you can with as many people as you can, so that the momentum transcends you. The more I learn and the more I can help others learn, the more likely it is that the vision will happen, whether or not I’m in the picture.

Fortunately, I don’t have to wait until I’m an expert in order to do this. I can move towards that vision as a beginner and a learner. I have a lever and a place to stand on. I can move my world. As we get better at this, we can move bigger things.

What superpower are you working on?

Of the three phrases in my e-mail signature and business card, storyteller draws the most smiles. People visibly relax. They ask me questions. They talk to me in a way they might not talk to an IT specialist or a consultant. Geek gets grins from people in the know, but storyteller is the one that crosses boundaries.

I added storyteller to my self-descriptors when I noticed technology evangelist needed a lot of explanation. The idea was simple: you can’t get people to explore social media by just showing it to them. You have to show them real people using it to create real value, and stories are a great way to do that. I collected examples from different industries and business units, and I used anecdotes to help people understand.

I was reading Solitude: A Return to the Self (a psychoanalytic exploration of introversion and creativity, drawing on historical examples), and I came across an interesting distinction between dramatists and patterns: people who retell stories and relieve experiences, and people who focus on patterns and regularities.

I stopped, reflected on it, and recognized more of myself in the patterner than the dramatist. At the family table, my father and my sister were always the ones telling stories with accents and sound effects. I spent more of my time thinking and reading, drawing connections among the dozens of books I read on a topic, teasing out common topics and threads.

I didn’t fully recognize that part of myself until I had the words to describe it.

I am more of a pattern-maker than a storyteller. Yes, I sprinkle anecdotes through talks to make them more alive, and I share stories through my blog. But the real value I find myself creating at work is in documenting and improving the way people do things. I build Drupal systems, and more than that, I build people’s ability to build Drupal systems. I use social software, and I train people how to do so. I facilitate workshops, and I improve the way we organize and facilitate those engagements.

What does this mean in terms of playing to my strengths? I’ll write about more processes and look for more ways to improve them. I’ll organize what I create so that it’s easy for people to learn and contribute. I’ll work on being able to see and being able to communicate. I’ll learn about lots of different kinds of patterns, so that I can bring them together.

I’ll still work on storytelling skills. Stories are essential for leadership and connection. I’ll keep blogging, and I’ll keep using lots of examples in talks.

But it’s nice to have a name for what I do.

Here’s a link to the book:

Solitude: A Return to the Self Anthony Storr

(Disclosure: The link above is an Amazon affiliate link. That said, I recommend checking out your local library. I got this book from the Toronto Public Library, yay!)

Most of it is about Freud and Jung, and various writers and poets who’ve had solitary lives (mostly troubled solitary lives). The key message is probably that being alone isn’t as bad as people think it is. =) And you might pick up something completely different, like I did…

Funny aside: When Jay Goldman handed Gary Vaynerchuk a bottle of water, Gary offered it for sale. Little things like that reinforce story.

Key take-aways: Passion and patience are everything. Hustle. Out-care others. Offer good stuff. Pay attention to everything. How do you scale? By trying.

Notes from the demos and the pub, before I broke my fountain pen:

Explanations for scribbles upon request, or when I can make time for it! =)

Yesterday, I gave my Remote Presentations That Rock session at the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange virtual conference. 98 people attended and shared their insights with me through a lively text discussion, lots of whiteboard interaction, and the occasional phone question. It was a high-energy presentation – I poured lots into it, and people gave me lots of energy back. We finished exactly on time thanks to tip #3 (Make time for learning) and tip #6 (Start strong and end strong). One of the organizers said it was one of the best presentations she’d seen.

What worked well

• Snagging a conference room meant that I could turn my energy level up.I had explained my situation to the concierge that morning, and she regretfully informed me that all of the project rooms had been booked. A few minutes before the set-up time for my session, I went to the mobility concierge again to see if there were any areas in the building where I might park myself near a phone and still not bother people. She said that one of the project rooms still hadn’t been claimed, and she was going to release it and give it to me. Whew! This is why you should be on good terms with people… They can save your day unexpectedly.
• Interaction gave me insights. I asked people to use Elluminate’s text and laser pointer tool to let people interact with the slide content – indicating their position on a spectrum of tactical and strategic presentations, the combination of in-person and remote presentations, the reasons why remote presentations fail, their top challenge as a remote presenter, and their underlying reason for that challenge. The results surprised me, and I’m glad I asked those questions instead of just going with my assumptions. There was much more of a spread than I expected. More people made lots of strategic presentations than I thought. People listed the general concerns I thought people would have, and then some more. People’s top challenges (they could pick only one) included practically all the challenges of remote presentations. There seemed to be a fairly even spread between the root causes of these challenges, too – lack of role models, challenges of interest, and lack of time. In fact, people liked interacting with the whiteboard so much, that they interacted and gave me feedback even for slides where I didn’t explicitly ask for feedback, and many continued using the laser pointer tool instead of using the A/B/C polling tool on another slide. And the text chat was fantastic. People were asking and answering questions, sharing tips and ideas, and teaching me a lot about what mattered to people.

  For my next presentation, I’d love to find a way to incorporate more real-time feedback throughout the session. Maybe if I left the whiteboard on and asked them to indicate something (state of understanding?) while listening… Elluminate has tools for indicating some feedback, but it’s displayed in the participant list and therefore mostly out of sight. Visually indicating feedback on the slides themselves would be more engaging, I think.

• The webcam worked out really well. I almost always use a webcam when giving remote presentations, because it makes things just that much more personal. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the project room had a clean and simple teal background, which was a vast improvement over the dimly-lit rooms in 120 Bloor and the cluttered background at home (unless I unfolded the cloth background we have for photo shoots, but propping that up somewhere is difficult). On the webcam, the teal background added a little bit of personality and energy to the image.

  Because of my parents (my dad’s an advertising photographer) and my amateur interest in photography, I knew that good lighting could make a big difference. Although the room’s top-lighting evenly lit the background, it lit my face with high contrast – bad for detail and a feeling of connection! I was thinking of using one of the desk lamps to improve my lighting, but they were clamped to the desks and the power cords were routed within the cubicle dividers, so I couldn’t borrow any of them. Fortunately, I had a hat. (Oh, the many uses of a hat…) The hat brim blocked the light from the top, the room diffused light on my face so that I wasn’t in shadow, the webcam compensated for the brightness levels (and here the teal background helped again; white would have probably been too bright), and we were good to go. The only thing that was missing was a reflector or a secondary light source to provide shaping. ;) I could’ve brought the clamp-lights we have at home, but I didn’t make space for them in my bag. (And I might’ve been tempted to color-gel them too, as they’re daylight-balanced instead of tungsten-balanced… Ah, pickiness! ;) )

  Webcams make a huge difference in terms of communicating energy. People tell me I’m great at sharing my enthusiasm on the phone, but seeing someone be passionate about a topic is even more effective.

  Lesson: Webcams are great. You should definitely have one if you do lots of remote presentations. Also, hats are good for dealing with top lighting. ;) Better yet, plan your remote presentation setup in advance, and bring extra light if you can.

• The combination of hand-written comments and sketches worked out, too. In the process of creating this presentation, discovered that I could draw more than stick figures (yay!). But those sketches felt a bit more polished and formal than my hand-written messages and stick figures, because I’d obviously put a lot of time into it. The tablet I bought made it easy for me to add simple annotations, although the Elluminate pen tool was jaggy and didn’t smooth the curves. People liked the hand-written comments, though, and they felt that it made the presentations more personable. =)
• Picking people’s brains rocks. I love discovering the expertise of people around me. Marc Hood contacted me before the session because he was assigned to record it. I asked him if he’d recorded many sessions before, and I was delighted to hear that he’d done thousands. Knowing that, I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask him what characterized the best presentations he’d seen so far. He ended up sharing lots of tips with me on the importance of conversational intimacy, comfort with video, and other things he’d picked up in his experience as a videographer, and I’m going to keep picking his brain about what great presenters are like.

(Yes, I think about these things.)

I think the key thing I’d like to do even better next time is to collect real-time feedback throughout the session. That would be cool, particularly if I end up with interesting data after that.

One of the best things about doing presentations with plenty of time for Q&A is that the resulting discussion helps me think about fascinating topics. For example, one of the participants asked about the advice I gave on encouraging interaction and planning plenty of time for questions. He pointed out that this involved different group mechanics.

As I thought about that change in group mechanics, I realized that I really do flip the “expert-audience” dynamic on its head. When I present, I’m not an all-knowing, all-powerful expert, and I’m not just talking to silent listeners in a darkened auditorium. My mental model of a presentation is that of a well-lit circle of participants. I might be there to share what I’ve learned, but other people also bring a lot of questions, experiences and insights. My work as a speaker is to set the stage for a conversation and get people to think and talk. Sometimes, in quieter cultures, that reflection and conversation happens outside my session, and that’s okay. More and more, though, people really step up to that challenge. They share terrific thoughts during the Q&A, and I learn so much more than what I would have if I had come in “knowing everything”.

I can see how this flip might be difficult or unexpected. In many cultures, the idea of active speaker and passive listener is strong. Traditional education is structured that way. Hierarchical organizations work that way. So it might not always work as perfectly as it did yesterday, but it’s worth it. It might need a little more introduction to encourage people to participate. It might require several attempts before people see it’s okay. It might also be that people may not have the conversation right there with you, but they’ll think about it and talk about it afterwards, and that’s great too.

Adapting is challenging, but the benefits of the approach are so compelling that I don’t want to give presentations any other way. Even in a real-life keynote where I can’t have that two-way communication going on in the background, I try to expand the conversation both before and after the presentation.

Now that I think about it, I can see how the same theme of experimenting with the power dynamic runs through other aspects of my life. I’m relatively new to IBM, having joined it right after grad school. I read books and talk to people about great management and leadership (and many other things). I influence the way people feel about the organization, and how they see their connection to the big picture. I haven’t waited for someone to give me a job position or title that reflects that, because the opportunities to make a difference are all around me, and I want to help others see those opportunities for themselves too.

Even when I was growing up, I thought about dynamics. I read parenting books, getting a better understanding of what my parents were thinking about. I realized that they’re not all-knowing and that they’re also figuring some things out for the first time (despite raising two other kids).

I’d like to keep playing with dynamics as I grow older. If I manage people, I’d like to be the kind of manager focused on serving people and making sure they have what they need to excel. If I follow the executive career path, I’d like to be the kind of executive who values listening to people from all over the organization and outside it. If I build a business, I’d like it to be the kind of business that looks for a problem and solves it instead of making a solution in search of a problem.

I’m sure I’ll revisit this topic and the other ideas shared in that session. I suspect it’ll be well worth the time I spent preparing and delivering the session, and reflecting on the results. This, too, is work: gaining a little more understanding, changing the way we work just a little bit more, and sharing my experiences with others.

One of the hidden gems in David Gillespie’s Digital Strangelove: or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Internet is a hat-tip to Compfight, a Flickr search engine. I like the search interface more than Flickr’s built-in Advanced Search, because you can continuously scroll through the thumbnails instead of paging through the results.

More Creative Commons search options would be nice. =)

What I really want is an advanced search engine that lets me specify subject position and dominant color, like Stockxpert’s. Someday!

Thanks to Suzanne for the link!

From last week’s plans:

• Update the market scans for innovations and forces of change. Moved to a lower priority. Instead, working on a facilitator’s guide to running Innovation Discovery workshops.
• Draft some points to include in The Shy Connector’s Guide to Conferences. Now fleshing out slides and planning the website.
• Bike some more. Enjoying my new bike computer! Also, picked up another pannier.
• Attend improv and sewing classes. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it! Lots more energy this time around (my cough is starting to make a retreat), and I had a lot of fun playing with specificity and making assumptions. Now I just have to get used to doing that faster. Sewing: Made a drawstring bag easily. Learned a tip for making accurate folds – stick pins through the folding line, and then fold along the pins.

I also:

• Tried more ready-to-eat meals for our emergency kit. Oatmeal is good. Uncle Ben’s Brown Rice is okay. The curried chickpeas we had were a little spicy (although the package did say medium). The Stagg Chili was good too.
• Watched a movie with W- and J-.
• Attended Wendy Koslow’s birthday party and chatted with a couple of interesting new people. I should have a tea party–maybe two or three weeks from now?
• Cut out the pieces for my wool skirt. Wondering if I can get more of the matching wool so that I can make another asymmetric blazer
• Had a great chat with my manager about career planning
• Thought about what I want to do
• Do some work on next The Shy Connector presentation =)

Next week, I plan to:

• Create the facilitator guide
• Attend improv and sewing classes. Improv: get the hang of assumptions. Sewing: Make zippered pouch.
• Watch an improv show
• Celebrate a nice, quiet Thanksgiving weekend with W-

The last few movies I’ve watched in an actual movie theatre have been in 3D. Whenever I see the opening sequences, I still can’t help but think, “Wow. The future is here.”

It seems that most 3D movies are kids’ movies, which is perfectly all right with me because I like watching those too. Today, we watched “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” If you haven’t guessed by now, I have a soft spot for nerds. Nerds in love? Even better.

As it turns out, watching a 3D movie with lots of kids in the audience was actually quite fun. The sheer wonder they couldn’t help but share made me smile. This was perhaps the first 3D movie for many of them, and there’s something magical about seeing _into_ the screen for the first time.

Even though I’ve watched many movies in different formats, I’m still amazed by it all. I appreciate it for different reasons than I did as a kid. Now, I think of moving pictures and the persistence of vision; of polarization, depth perception and 3D images; storytelling and plot devices. I see the advances in computer animation overlaid with different cinematic techniques. Over time, I may learn to appreciate movies within genres and place films in the context of the director’s work.

But today, when the 3D movie started, I still closed one eye, then switched to the other, and then went “Wow.”

We’ve been working on our 72-hour survival kits, and we decided to test the food in our kit. Time to find out if the instant meals and energy bars work for us. For extra measure, W- duct-taped the fridge and freezer closed.

So far, so good. For breakfast, we mixed milk from powder and combined it with granola. It was okay, although the cats wouldn’t touch the left-over milk. For lunch, we used the camp stove to heat up lamb curry, grilled chicken, and rice. We still haven’t made dinner, as the two meals and assorted snacks have kept us quite full.

It’s good to plan ahead. When you have your safety net in place, you don’t worry as much, and you have more fun.

1. Log on to calendar.sachachua.com and to mail.sachachua.com in two windows. Arrange them so that you can see both windows.
2. Click on the IBM Upcoming Events label in the mail window, and open the e-mail for today.
3. Click on the down arrow next to the IBM meetings calendar in the calendar window, and choose Display only this calendar. Switch to the Agenda view for convenience.
4. For each item in the list, verify that it is on the IBM meetings calendar. Create it if necessary. Review the next three days of events and remove events that are no longer listed in the e-mail, including the removed events in an e-mail to me.
5. Restore my Google Calendar view by clicking on all the other calendars so that all the calendars are displayed.
6. If you notice conflicts for meetings over the next three days, include those conflicts in an e-mail to me. Do not e-mail me if no conflicts or removed events have been found.

I love strawberries. They’re not that easy to get in the Philippines, where I’m from. Strawberries are grown in Baguio and are occasionally available during the cool months. Strawberries are also imported from Australia and other countries, but they’re expensive.

So I’m thrilled that I can grow strawberries here in Toronto. I now have four established strawberry plants. We’ve picked seven homegrown strawberries (one or two a week) of varying sweetness. Not content with that, I ordered a hanging strawberry planter bag online, and I’ve just filled it with eight small strawberry plants (some of them from runners).

The strawberries almost make up for the complete lack of success I’ve had in growing cantaloupes, which I loved having in Manila. =)

It’s the little joys in life.

Even my leisure ties into my long-term goals.

One of the reasons why I’m interested in learning more about sewing and gardening is that these are hobbies that I can pursue throughout life. In fact, they’re stereotypical elderly pursuits, like golf is. These are hobbies that people can enjoy for decades, where there is plenty of room to grow, and where deep experience results in great satisfaction.

I like imagining what it’ll be like when I’m older and more experienced. What will it be like when I can make whatever outfits I want and whatever organizers I need? What will it be like when I know how to grow my favourite fruits and vegetables, when I understand the rhythm of the seasons and the lay of the land? The same goes for my other interests, like cooking, writing, taking pictures, and playing the piano. The learning curve stretches before me.

I know that even misshapen seams and wilted plants can help me get there. It’s all part of the learning process.

When I shared this realization with W-, he smiled. He said, “Not like computer gaming.” Hobbies like computer gaming don’t seem to have as much depth or longevity, and pastimes like watching television, well, they just pass the time.

I suspect this is worth thinking about. Can your hobbies grow over the long term?

From last week’s plans:

• get better at making design documents, thanks to my team members’ feedback They’re happy with the design documents I wrote, AND I learned how to use the documents to improve my programming thinking, too!
• prepare background research for upcoming talks More talks to prepare! =)
• develop a presenter’s guide for internal conferences Put some basic notes together, yay!
• spend some time going through some of the great learning resources we have at work Haven’t done so, but blocking out time to do this on Saturday
• mentor a colleague on Drupal application development It’s fun to help!
  
• sew a skirt Finished my red wool skirt =)
• sew a muslin for a blouse Haven’t started
• sketch five new stick figures Drew some cats
• … and continue to have and share tons of fun! Totally!

I also:

• Submitted my personal business commitments and individual development plan, with plenty of insights from my mentors (yay!)
• Got the hang of playing Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 No. 6, yay! Next: Pachelbel’s Canon, then Memory.
• Planned and planted our garden: garlic (from last year), rosemary (from last year), basil, oregano, thyme, hot peppers, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, strawberries, and mint. We’ll see how many of them survive this week. =)
• Played lacrosse catch with W- and J-. Fun!
• Handled more errands on my bicycle.
• Learned a little about playing the flute.
• Attended Isaac Ezer’s totally awesome house party. Feeling the urge to attend social dancing sessions again.
• Attended a charity gala. Interesting excuse to dress up in a terno. Made a wrap myself using some pretty (and inexpensive) sheer blue fabric.
• Coached people on virtual conferences.
• Helped out at a training session in SecondLife.
• Hired another virtual assistant (hi Mylene!).
• Discovered that Linda Ristevski’s also into sewing clothes. Looking forward to swapping stories and pictures!
• Chatted with Dries about Drupal, fun!
• Read a whole bunch of books, improved my book workflow a little bit more (borrowing idea from Mel about using Goodreads+VA to manage to-read list)

Next week:

• Work: Merge development changes into release-4
• Work: Build event calendar system
• Work: Get feedback on presenter guide
• Work: Attend speed mentoring event in SecondLife
• Work: Mentor more people on Drupal
• Garden: Encourage plants to survive
• Piano: Learn Pachelbel’s Canon, Memory
• Sewing: Pin-fit blouse pattern, start making muslin
• Sewing: Make spring skirts
• Blog: Write monthly report

When people ask me about virtual assistance, I usually start off with a few stories about things my assistants do, like:

• Renew my library books and e-mail me a list of the books they couldn’t renew
• Look up information in my e-mail and call me with it while I’m out and about
• Call stores to find out if something I’m looking for is in stock
• Double-check the dates and times of appointments and talks, because I sometimes mess that up and it’s embarrassing

My reasons for experimenting with virtual assistance are to:

• Learn how to delegate
• Understand and improve my processes
• Learn how to scale
• Help other people grow

I use Timesvr for 15-minute tasks and well-specified processes, and I work with virtual assistants I hired through oDesk for more specialized skills or more extended projects. Definitely worth the experiment, and quite affordable considering what you can learn and how you can help yourself and other people grow. =)

To get started:

1. Make a list of things you do and things that you’ve been meaning to do.
2. Identify things you frequently forget to do, don’t like doing, or can delegate to someone else easily.
3. Set aside some money in your budget for outsourcing. Timesvr costs USD 69 + tax a month, and oDesk virtual assistants can go from USD 3 – USD 20 or more per hour. The virtual assistants I work with generally charge about USD 5 per hour, with specialized skills like illustration costing more.
4. Try to estimate how much time it would take to complete each of those tasks. If your list has a large number of 15-30 minute tasks on it, consider signing up for Timesvr. If you have extended projects or projects that need specialized skills, consider posting on oDesk. You might even try both.
5. Try a few small tasks. Timesvr has a free 3-day trial, and you can hire people on oDesk on an as-needed basis (< 10 hours a week, with no charges if you don’t assign them work).
6. Think about your processes and your outsourcing experiences, and look for ways to improve. You can ask experienced assistants to help you learn, too. For example, I have Timesvr e-mail me a list of sample tasks every day.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat. =)

Resources for people getting started:

• Tips for getting started with virtual assistance
• Tips for managing virtual assistants (with links to other blogs)
  
• Five reasons why I’m experimenting with outsourcing to virtual assistants

My experiences

• Imagining more possibilities
• Finding finishers, building a team
• The surprising benefits of transcription
• Ethics and egos in virtual assistance and relationships
• From reactive to proactive, from inboxes to goals; thinking about the big picture
• Wake up calls
• Five favorite Firefox add-ons for virtual assistants
• Tasks I’ve tried delegating to TimeSvr so far
• Virtual assistance and a review of TimeSvr, ODesk
• VA Days: Rethinking web search and virtual assistance

Processes

• My process for managing talk deadlines and information
• Calendar management with Timebridge
• Manage Toronto Public Library books
• Wake-up call
• Tungle for the win: kaizen and calendar management
• Refining web research process for virtual assistance
• Calendar Management

Check out my blog category about managing virtual assistants, and feel free to ask questions or share your experiences through comments or e-mail!

I frequently give speeches. During some months, practically every week involves a presentation or two. I usually post presentation, recording, and notes for these presentations, but it would be handy to have a transcript. Timestamped transcripts also make it easy to search within presentations, synchronize audio with slides, and even remove ums and ahs.

I’m not an auditory learner. I find it difficult to sit still for an audio-only session, even if it’s my own. ;) I’ve transcribed some things–my research interviews, a few of my talks–using the handy Transcriber program, which made it easy for me to associate text with specific audio segments.

And maybe transcripts can help me learn how to be a better speaker, too! I speak at about 200 words per minute when I’m excited. While that’s below the 300 words per minute I often joke about, it’s still well above the recommended 140-160 words per minute for persuasive speeches. Transcripts make my rambling sentence structure and my verbal crutches painfully obvious, too. ;)

If I can get word counts and review what I’m saying without the large initial effort of transcribing things myself, I think it’ll be well worth it. It gives me metrics, and metrics are useful. Like the way that people work on getting into a target heart beat zone when exercising, these numbers can help me get into a target speaking rate zone, providing me feedback about going too quickly or too slowly. And like the way that listening to music and practicing on the piano will eventually give me a feel for how long a quarter note is in different tempos, listening to good speeches and practicing myself (either through actual presentations or through podcasts I make on my own) can help me adjust my speaking rate.

On to the actual process of transcription:

I posted a job notice on oDesk looking for people who can edit and transcribe audio files. While waiting for candidates to respond, I asked one of my virtual assistants to download Express Scribe and give it at try – it might help her develop new skills. I like having plenty of timestamps in the transcribed text because it makes it really easy for me to recheck the transcript, so I also sent her a link to this shortcut for timestamping files.

A few good candidates responded to my oDesk ad. One of them had an excellent sample transcript, so I’ve also added her to my growing team. I sent her the audio recording for the talk I did yesterday, and I’m looking forward to getting it back.

Here are some notes on my preliminary experiences with transcription, and I’ll add more as I explore this:

• More effort is required to transcribe ums, ahs, repeated words, sounds, and other things accurately. If you don’t need them in the final transcript, tell your transcriptionist to skip them. If you want to make it easier to edit the file, you can ask people to add timestamps and a marker like “!!!” during the ums and ahs. Work backwards from the end of the file in order to remove the ums and ahs, so that you can keep the timestamps useful for as long as possible.

  There’s probably a better way to handle this audio editing. Maybe a transcriptionist could remove ums and ahs along the way? Maybe I can ask an audio person to clean up the audio before handing it over?

• I need to pause more when giving presentations. ;) Pausing more helps transcriptionists figure out sentence punctuation and paragraph separation.
• If there are unclear words, ask the transcriptionist to indicate that with a timestamp and a marker like ???. That way, you can easily review and fix it.

I wonder how I can take advantage of Dragon NaturallySpeaking here, as I already have it. Even better if I could get someone else to train and correct my user model, but I think Dragon NaturallySpeaking wants me to upgrade to the super-expensive version in order to do that. =|

Hmm… How can I tweak this process…

Do you outsource transcription, or do any of your friends outsource transcription? I’d love to hear about experiences and tips!

I had tea/hot chocolate with Ida Shessel at Linuxcaffe last Monday. She had come across me through a Google alert when I first blogged about Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon’s book, “Make Your Contacts Count”. When Lynne featured my recent story about using online social networks to turbocharge offline events in her newsletter, Ida reached out with some questions around networking.

One of the key ideas that came up in our conversation is how many authors and coaches who focus on social networking haven’t quite made the jump to making full use of online social networking. I’ve come across this multiple times. Each time I meet someone who has mastered traditional forms of social networking but is curious about the things I take for granted, I love sharing what I’ve learned. I learn so much in the process.

Last night, at a small get-together I quickly organized for a colleague from the US, I briefly chatted with Will Pate about social networking. He’s another Gen Yer who’s given networking a lot of thought and who makes full use of social media. He’s starting to do a lot of work related to venture capital, and he told me of a study that showed that in that area, the size of your social network correlates with success. I told him of my interest in scaling up networking, creating structures to facilitate connection, and experimenting with things like LifeCampTO. Plenty of follow-up conversations to come, I’m sure!

This weekend, I’ll be talking to Jeff Widman about similar things. He’s also Gen Y and well-connected. (Come to think of it, I need to introduce Will to Jeff. I think they’ll get along really well.)

So, what’s different?

I’m starting to pick up a pattern. I often find myself talking about scale and structure. I also bring a different collection of skills than those I see in primarily business-oriented networking books.

Let’s talk about scale. I enjoy finding opportunities to help or create value for as many people as I can. I rely heavily on associative memory, my notes, the Internet, and group get-togethers in order to do so. Whenever I meet a new person, hear about an idea or a need, read a book, or experience something new, I can get economies of scale because I can connect that person, idea, need, book, or experience to people I’ve met, resources I’ve come across, and things I’ve learned. The more input comes in, the more combinations I can make – so I get network effects as well. It’s a huge game of connect the dots, and I love it whenever I can bring people, ideas, and resources together.

The Internet lets me scale that initial value-creation much better than I can in face-to-face events. I might create less value and I may not be able to make as deep a connection, but I can reach more people and open up the possibility for some people to come forward and continue that conversation with me.

So then networking isn’t a way to gain power or get favors, but almost a game of finding out what could help a person rock, and how to help make that happen. This is related to Granovetter‘s theory about weak ties. If I can build a large network of weak ties, then I can help span boundaries, spread good ideas, bridge gaps. I don’t need to be best-friends-forever with everyone, but I can create a lot of value if people feel comfortable telling me what could help them make things happen and if I’m good at finding people for whom that’ll be a win-win proposition. As for ideas and resources – I can share those practically for free!

That’s why I’m interested in scale. The more people I know, the more ideas I come across, the more resources I find, the more connections I can make between them. As I learn more about this, I’ll be able to reach out to more people, and I’ll be able to connect more dots.

Scale requires structure. While I’ve read about networkers with prodigious memories who could remember every little thing about people even after decades of not seeing them, I’m not one of those yet. I suspect most of them had some kind of cheatsheet anyway. ;)

What I am, however, is someone who enjoys exploring or building the tools needed to try scaling up. I know the ins and outs of my contact management system, and have heavily customized it. I tinker with mail merges that cross-reference all sorts of data. And I’m really curious about the next level: building structures to help other people connect (hence my interest in events). That’ll help me scale even further. I don’t have to know everyone directly. If I can help people effectively connect to a connector–one of those people who just loves playing this game of connect-the-dots–and I can help the connectors connect to each other so that they can refer requests, that would be awesome.

In order to build that kind of structure, I’ll need to develop my skills. The quirky thing I bring to networking is my computer science geek background. I happily build tools, analyze networks, take measurements, draw graphs. As we figure more things out, I may be able to build more of that into systems for more people to use. I’m a big fan of relentless improvement, and I’m always looking for little ways to make things better, little ways I can experiment. I enjoy sharing as much as I can, which is why I think out loud on this blog. I’m not the only one with this combination of quirks, but it’s certainly not something you’ll find in a typical business networking book. ;)

I’ll still need to develop all the other skills. I’m still unpolished when it comes to conversation. I squeak when I’m excited. ;) My communication style isn’t very flexible yet. I can learn how to adapt better. I could probably use a gradual wardrobe update, and over time, I’ll develop my personal style. I can get better at nurturing strong ties, too. And it’ll be fun building on my quirks and seeing where they take us!

There are interesting opportunities opened up by my quirks and interests that traditional networking may not have explored yet. I’d love to help figure things out and make lots of things happen for lots of people along the way.

Thanks for letting me think out loud! =) What do you think about networking, and how would you like to grow?

To encourage people to save, the Canadian government created a tax-free savings account. You put after-tax dollars into it, and the interest is tax-free. The contribution limit for this year is $5,000.

PCFinancial and ING Direct are two Canadian banks with great interest rates. Currently, ING Direct (0.27%) is better than PCFinancial’s Interest Plus (1% on 0-$1000, 2.75% on $1000 and up) for amounts less than $53,000, and you probably wouldn’t want to keep that much money in a savings account anyway. PCFinancial does have an anniversary bonus and it’s easier to transfer money back and forth between accounts, and sometimes PCFinancial’s rate is a little bit higher than ING. ING Direct’s GICs seem to be a better deal, though, and they come with more options.

If you do set up an ING Direct account (and deposit at least $100 into it), you can use my referral code (Orange Key: 29083948S1) for a $13 bonus. I’ll get a $13 bonus, too, so everyone’s happy. =)

I’m setting up some transfers. Looking forward to taking advantage of that tax-free deal! Maybe another set of laddered GICs…

1. Change to Ubuntu
2. Set up virtual machine for my Windows partition
3. Use Emacs to handle my mail? Hard to do calendar acceptance
4. Set up regular backups
5. Resize Windows partition
6. Clean up my Firefox extensions
7. Clean my keyboard
8. Set up personal or team bugtracker – not needed, projects have ClearQuest
9. Set up website with talks
10. Improve visual communication skills by practicing illustrating Enterprise 2.0 concepts
11. Improve random information management tools – book quotes, stories, etc.
12. Add automated testing framework to projects
13. Uninstall unneeded programs
14. Set up IE5 on Linux
15. Move orangechair blog to Slicehost
16. Convert orangechar blog to Drupal
17. Set my desktop background to my work goals sketch
18. Set up an easy way to crosspost Enterprise 2.0 sites
19. Figure out team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT)
20. Write an article on Enterprise 2.0 for managers
21. Guestblog.
22. Organize a teleconference with an external speaker.
23. Build a conference tool
24. Write a well-researched blog post for orangechair
25. Post a book review – Generation Blend?
26. Help write a book
27. Help plan our menu of services
28. Help IBM partners and account teams learn more about Drupal
29. Organize other IBM Drupal developers into a community
30. Do SWOT analysis for IBM and Drupal development
31. Develop more IBM Drupal extensions
32. Record a vidcast or slidecast about Enterprise 2.0
33. Summarize resources
34. Segregate my blog topics a bit more, making it easier for people to read Enterprise 2.0-related news
35. Organize IBM Web 2.0 for Business resources
36. Publish newsletter
37. Build aggregator for community
38. Build IBM voices aggregator
39. Help draw vision for smarter planet
40. Ask my network for help in identifying potential clients.
41. Create blog alerts for Enterprise 2.0 topics
42. .. and more!

One day I’ll post a generalized version of the Makefile that makes my Drupal life so much easier, but in the meantime, here’s the general structure I use:

1. Lots of configuration settings:

   DB

   Database name for Drupal site

   DB_USER

   Database user for Drupal site

   DB_PASSWORD

   Database user password for Drupal site

   ROOT_DB_PASSWORD

   Root MySQL password, used to drop and recreate the database, and grant permissions

   SVN

   Subversion branch for source code control

   SVN_USER

   Subversion user name

   SVN_PASSWORD

   Subversion password

   SITE_DOMAIN

   Particularly useful when working with sites that use Domain Access, but handy even with other sites because of BASE_PATH

   SRC_DIR

   Location of source code, needed for Drush

   DRUSH

   Drush command line, just in case I want to fiddle with it

   DB_PREFIX

   Database prefix, for make clearcache

   BASE_PATH

   Base URL

   DRUSH_GROUPRE

   Regular expression to match against simpletests using my modified Drush_simpletest that lets me run all groups of tests matching a regular expression

2. An include statement

   -include *.mk

   This is really useful. This lets you override the variables using a file like local.mk, dropped into your current directory and kept out of your source code control system. I use this to make my Makefile just Do The Right Thing when it’s in different directories or on different servers. Do not forget to tweak your included file (or make sure there is one) if you need different configuration settings.

3. Lots of targets:

   backup

   Uses mysqldump to back up the database.

   restore

   Drops the database and restores it from the backup.

   clean

   Drops the database

   install

   Calls the site’s install.php with the appropriate profile.

   cron

   Calls the site’s cron.php

   mysql

   Starts a MySQL connection to the Drupal database. I don’t have to remember what the database name is or what the connection details are, hooray!

   clearcache

   Clears the {cache}, {cache_menu}, {cache_views}, {cache_content}, {cache_filter}, and {cache_page} tables

   revert

   Hits the panic button and reverts my tree. (because svn revert . -R is too long)

   tags

   Regenerate the TAGS file that lets me find function definitions really quickly

   test

   Use Drush to run all of my simpletest functional tests for this project

Sometimes I’ll have an “rsync” target to deploy files to a server and a “doc” target to regenerate my low-level documentation using doxygen, too.

This Makefile is seriously cool and seriously time-saving because it means that no matter which project, branch, directory, or server I’m working on, I have a consistent set of commands for the most common things I need to do. The less time I spend thinking about fiddly administrative tasks, the more time I can enjoy in the coding zone.

This is also one of the reasons why Drupal development is _so_ much easier on Linux or other Unix-ish systems, or even Microsoft Windows with the Cygwin environment. If you see yourself doing a fair bit of Drupal work, it’s well worth investing the time in setting up a virtual machine or a second partition, learning a new operating system, and re-setting-up your development environment.

make awesome. =)

What’s in your Makefile, or what other tricks do you use to increase your developer happiness?

I joined my current Drupal project two weeks ago after documenting and wrapping up my other Drupal-based project (which I’m happy to report is chugging along quite nicely without me). Since then I’d been quickly going through my task list. I’ve also been poaching other people’s tasks, such as the configurable group home pages and the deployment scripts. As I told my cat, I’m having fun rocking Drupal. ;)

Today, one of my project team members demonstrated the site to members of the other consulting team. He wasn’t sure if the reception would be neutral or even hostile. He walked through the various features we’d built in two weeks of work, a short period of time that included the numerous issues other people encountered and my ramp-up time as a new member of the team.

One consultant from the other team couldn’t help but say, “Wow.” And the rest of the team really liked it, too!

So I guess I can count that as my first “melting a tough client” story. =)

What worked well?

• Even though I was new to the team, my team members gave me plenty of latitude in building tools and reorganizing things. There were a couple of changes that we needed to discuss, but usually, the practices I suggested made things a bit easier and the changes weren’t difficult to get used to.
• I set up my local development environment (my uber-tricked-out Emacs) to make it easy for me to quickly shift between files in different branches of code, look up definitions of functions, and re-build the site.
• As a lazy programmer, it’s in my best interest to automate as much as I can. I kept tweaking the build process until I could get it to work without manual intervention, and I plugged it into the web-based deployment script I’d written for my previous project.
• I reused as much as I could, relying on a combination of grep, var_dump, printf, tags, and asking coworkers what’s responsible for what.
• Also, starting work at 5:15 AM turns out to be pretty good for me. I get almost a full day of work into the morning, I can spend a little time in the afternoon attending to things that require less creative energy, and I can even take a short catnap in the afternoon sun (complete with purring cat!).

I’m looking forward to tidying this site up, and I’m sure I’ll have lots of fun getting the next site off the ground, too!

One of the videos we watched last weekend was Ever After, which is my favorite Cinderella reimagining because Drew Barrymore plays a no-nonsense Cinderella who doesn’t wait for anyone to rescue her, isn’t pining away for a prince (or the fjords), and is a bit of a bookworm.

The prince is amazed–and a little perturbed–at how Cinderella lives with such passion and conviction. She’s alive in a way unlike her stepsisters, her stepmother, and all the people at court are not.

It’s tempting to let my passions lull, to lose them in the bustle of everyday, to moderate them in order to be like others, to fritter away time and energy. But I know what I love doing: I love helping people connect and collaborate. So I’m going to. =)

Last weekend was a weekend of making things. W-, J- and I built a scratching post for Leia, our cat. We took a 4×4 and wrapped it with sisal rope, sprinkling catnip between the coils. Leia loved it. She climbed up the 3-foot post easily, and we often found her precariously perched on the 4×4 end on top of it, all four paws crammed together.

So W- built an extension on top of the scratching post, screwing a short, flat piece of wood on top of the post end and covering the platform with a scrap of carpet.

Leia’s so spoiled. =)

I like having my name as my domain name. It makes sense, and it’s very searchable… if you can remember how to spell my name, that is. But people misspell my name even in respected print publications, and there’s very little chance people are going to be able to figure out my name if I mention it in a Q&A session. I needed something easier to spell.

So now you can look for me at livinganawesomelife.com, and you’ll get to my blog. =) How’s that for fun and memorable? And it’s true, too!

Inspired by WordCamp Toronto (and the Flutter plugin in particular), I decided to spend some time figuring out if I could use WordPress as a tumblelog/lifestream without overwhelming people and while still making my regular blog posts easy to find. I also wanted to bring in some of the weekly and daily planning that I do. Here’s what I have so far:

Draft firehose interface

It’s currently running off categories of posts that are excluded from the default RSS feed and from index.php. I’m half-tempted to make it run off files instead, because I can very easily rsync those from my computer… and that will probably end up involving Emacs. ;) That would be pretty sweet, wouldn’t it?

… or a blosxom instance that feeds RSS into WordPress…

… or an Org/Planner export that feeds RSS into WordPress…

Oh, the possibilities.

What do you think? I’m planning to offer several interfaces to my blog. Firehose might become the default interface (there’ll be a mainpost-summary version for people who like scanning and a main-post full version for people who hate clicking). There could be a traditional reverse-chronological everything view and an almost-everything view (excludes tidbits). There could also be an explore view full of random posts and “On This Day” goodness. And maybe another view for people coming in from search engines…

What do you think? What would make it easier for you to browse?

• Attend WordCamp
• Cut out sewing patterns
• Set up my blog as a tumblelog/lifestream without overwhelming people

wordcamptoronto on Twitter
#wpto08, #wcto08, which one?
Joseph Thornley
search.twitter.com
sociology + technology
RSS changed it from pastime to productivity tool
Magazine analogy – doesn’t make sense to keep physically checking newstand
Asked audience who has developed plugins, nice interaction
Check out category enhancements
wpdiso? profile plugin
live-conference.ca
phug.ca

Matt Mullenweg
If it takes you more than five minutes [to upgrade], you’re doing it wrong, as the lolcats would say (good idea for another presentation: bring in lolcats picture)
2 Wikipedias a month posted on wordpres.com
5 billion spam comments caught, 99.925% accuracy
camp vs conference, open source vs closed source
kudos to Davao WordCamp for being awesomest, mentioned karaoke sound system, pool, lumpia, super-passionate people, awesome shirt
Release cycles, time-based, 2 months dev 1 month cool-down, 1 month testing – reminds me of what Mark Shuttleworth said re cadence
Top 10 WordPress plugins
Looking into better multimodal support

Other notes
Wordpress help desk
Role scoper
Flashpress
Wordpress developer’s toolbox, Drupal version also
Flutter
Comicpress
Theme test drive
Wordpress e-commerce
Contact manager

Conversations
Himy – misses Emacs Planner PIM bliki
Brian Anderson, Mireille Massue, Elena Yunusov – storytelling
Mireille -SecondLife, presentations, storytelling, visual thinking – introduced by Tania Samsonova
Stuart Dykstra – SecondLife, virtual culture

In my Mozilla Firefox, iMacros and ScribeFire were fighting over the F8 keyboard shortcut, and it was driving me crazy. I liked both extensions, but I wanted to remap them to different shortcut keys. The Keyconfig extension lets me do just that. Hooray, hooray, hooray!

"I don’t know what I’d talk about," people often tell me when I encourage them to think of topics for conferences and events. "I don’t know what to write about," they say when I encourage them to blog. "I’m not an expert. I don’t know anything."

I get that imposter feeling as much as anyone else. I wonder what I know and why people are interested. I worry that the next presentation, the next article is when I’ll be unmasked as just another newbie. Sometimes I think that my enthusiasm is the main reason why people listen, because they already know everything I’m saying. I hate wasting time by not adding anything new.

You might recognize these things as reasons that stop you from standing up and speaking. Before you can think of improving your presentation skills or even becoming comfortable in front of the crowd, you need to find your _why_–your reason to speak, something worth talking about.

I struggle with this every time I see a call for participation or come across a conference I want to attend. These questions are helpful:

• Who will be at the event, and who do I want to get into my session? This gives me an idea of the audience.
• What do they care about that I also care about? If I can’t find something that I’m passionate about and the audience is probably interested in, then it’s not worth presenting. I’d like to avoid presenting on things I don’t particularly care about, and no one’s going to listen if I’m passionate about something and I can’t show people what’s in it for them. If I can find something we all care about, though, then it’s easy to go forward.
• How can I help them? What can I do to save them time or help them work more effectively? If I spent a lot of time learning about something, I can save lots of people time by summarizing what I’ve learned, pointing out good ways to do things, and helping people avoid the pitfalls.
• What do I want to learn more about? Teaching helps me learn something new or deepen my knowledge of something I’ve learned. Every presentation should stretch me at least a little, even if it covers similar ground as a previous presentation. Each presentation is a good excuse to learn. I’ll often submit stretch presentations where I know maybe half of the material, and this helps me learn even more in the process of preparing the presentation.

The next time an opportunity to share comes up–a call for participation, an educational community meeting–ask yourself:

• Who will be at the event?
• What do they care about that you also care about?
• How can you help them?
• What do you want to learn more about?

Chances are that you’ll find something you want to share. Good luck and have fun!

So I _finally_ pulled everything together and got my Gnus chapter out the door. Hooray, hooray, hooray!

• Reading Mail with Gnus (PDF)
• Reading Mail with Gnus (HTML), produced by Org

Disclaimers: It’s rough, it probably makes a few assumptions about whatever version of Emacs I’m running, it’s probably missing your favorite tips (and I’d love to add them!), and it probably has typos. Meep. But it’s out there!

Hooray, hooray, hooray!

Next step: write about web-browsing in Emacs…

I _really_ should have blogged this when I first wrote it. That would’ve saved me time writing it again!

Sub ReplaceDingbats(optional doc)
	oDocument = IIf(IsMissing(doc), ThisComponent, doc)
	oSearchDesc = oDocument.createSearchDescriptor
	for i = 1 to 9
		oSearchDesc.searchString = "(;; )?\(" + i + "\)"
		oSearchDesc.searchRegularExpression = true
		mFound = oDocument.findFirst(oSearchDesc)
		do while not isNull(mFound)
			mFound.string = chr(&HF08B + i)
			mFound.CharFontName = "Wingdings"
			mFound = oDocument.findNext(mFound.End, oSearchDesc)
		loop
	next i
End Sub

It’s a macro for OpenOffice.org – replaces the widgets I use in formatting the book chapter…

Inspired by Lennart Borgman’s recent post on help.gnu.emacs about binding Caps Lock to M-x on Microsoft Windows, I set my system up with the Linux equivalent.

To make Caps Lock a shortcut for M-x, add the following lines to your ~/.emacs:

(if (eq window-system 'x)
    (shell-command "xmodmap -e 'clear Lock' -e 'keycode 66 = F13'"))
(global-set-key [f13] 'execute-extended-command)

Today, I want to talk about grassroots adoption, when you’re trying to influence people around you to try out something new–a new tool, a new idea, a new way of working–without dictating to people. I hope that I can help you get a better sense of where other people are, what might be stopping them from moving forward, where you are, and how you can get better at helping other people learn.

I’m interested in this because as a technology evangelist, I’ve talked to a lot of people about social tools like blogging and wikis. Over the next few blog entries, I want to share some of the objections that I’ve come across. I also want to share some of the methods I’ve tried and observed.

But first, let’s talk about what technology evangelism is. You might be wondering why I use the term “evangelism”, considering its religious roots and sometimes negative connotations.

For me, evangelism has that hint of being more than just a dry list of facts. You want to inspire people to action, and you want to do this in a way that sticks even when you’re not around.

The technology you want to promote is not going to be a perfect fit for everyone or every time. Technology evangelism is not about convincing people that your way is the right way. It’s about showing people what their options are, helping them find something that fits them, and helping them learn how to make it part of their work or their lives. (I forget this sometimes, too.)

So if a technology isn’t going to be a perfect fit for everyone immediately, how can you encourage grassroots adoption?

One way is to scatter the seeds as widely as possible. If you reach out, you might find a lot of people who can benefit from the technology you want to promote. Help them, and their success stories and influence will help you reach out to even more people.

You might not have that option. You might have been asked to help a team get up to speed on a tool. You might want to explore a collaborative tool, but before you can take advantage of that tool, you’ll need to get other people on board too. (After all, you can’t collaborate on your own.)

This is where it can get frustrating.

Next post on Monday (or earlier =) ): Sowing seeds: Five common objections

As promised, weekly report on Friday instead of Sunday! Let’s see how well that works.

This week:

• Drupal: Our CSS person started work. Hooray!
• Drupal: We switched over to the next phase of configuration management. Instead of dropping and recreating the database from scratch, we now have to work with a live database, making sure that we don’t lose the editorial changes that users have been making. It’s pretty straightforward with Drupal, actually. Database changes are added to module .install files as modulename_update_() functions. Edits and other system changes are handled in the .profile and through the Web interface. I should blog about this soon.
• Drupal: I handled lots of little defects and a few larger changes.
• Speaking: Prepared another presentation for the upcoming IBM Academy of Technology conference on collaboration. “Sowing Seeds: A Technology Evangelist’s Guide to Grassroots Adoption.” Uploaded it to internal file-sharing site.
• Speaking: Got the survey results back from the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange! Blog post about that later.
• New hires and networking: Had lunch and tea with some of the other new hires and older employees. =) Good stories. Also, started working on a guide for new hires.
• Work: I wrote two short Ruby scripts that analyzed internal blogging, bookmarking, and file-sharing activity for one of the communities I’m active in. Posted the results in internal blog posts.
• Work: I started putting together some resources for fellow IBM newbies. It’s in our internal version of Pass It Along.
• Fight/fitness: Not much this week. Just one class of yoga because the gym was closed on Tuesday and I was feeling tired last Thursday.

Next week:

• Drupal: Survive the demo. Plan tasks for the next phase and clarify my responsibilities.
• Speaking and presentations: Write blog posts / speaker notes / articles for my upcoming presentations. Make plans for conference travel.
• New hires and networking: Make a one-page list of tips about IBM and Web 2.0

Last week:

• Posted the last of my notes from my conference, adding the other tips people shared from my packed session on “The Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools Every IBM Consultant Should Try”
• Did community consulting for several internal groups
• Prepared for two teleconference presentations on Web 2.0 next week
• Got my internal login problems resolved, hooray!
• Realized that intranets don’t need A-lists, and that concentrating on celebrities can actually be harmful – must blog about this later
• Submitted the revised 7th chapter of my Wicked Cool Emacs book after some frustration about how to write about moving targets
• Watched Joe versus the Volcano and a lot of episodes of Human Weapon with W- and J-.
• Read through a fair bit of Prince Caspian and devoured a number of other books as well.
• Tried to figure out how to do surveys in Lotus Notes. No luck.
• Met a new mentor.
• Prepared spreadsheets of my finances – doing well =)
• Realized teleconferences will probably be a big part of my life, so I might as well get good at them ;)

Next week:

• Two teleconference presentations
• Client work
• More progress on my permanent residency application
• My first meeting with a financial advisor – hence the spreadsheets
• More yoga
• Another article for chapter 6 of Wicked Cool Emacs book
• Driving lessons

“It is the choices we make, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities,” said Albus Dumbledore to Harry Potter in JK Rowling’s The Philosopher’s Stone.

It’s always been a little intimidating, having all these doors open. It can be a struggle to find and listen to the small voice of my intuition when I’m surrounded by so many good suggestions and opportunities. I need to make sure that I’m growing at a sustainable rate, that I don’t overcommit or burn myself out, that I don’t lose myself. I need to make sure my priorities are right, and that I actually follow them.

You know what it’s like to make a choice you really don’t want to make, but have to because it’s the right thing to do?

I will probably not be bringing my cat over from the Philippines.

I have to confess that I’m more than a little anxious. That’s a lot of time spent in conference centers and airports.

“Next time I do this, I’m going to have to find a day job that isn’t this similar to my hobby,” I said as I took a three-minute break from writing. Even with the break-reminding program I have on my system, a full day of working at the computer was still tiring–and I had nearly half a section to go.

“This isn’t a hobby,” W pointed out as he massaged my shoulders. “It’s more like a second job.”

He’s got a point there. Because I want to meet some goal dates, I put schedule pressure on myself. It’s work. I do a little bit of it even when I’m not in the mood for it, and I consciously work on getting into the right mood for it. And hey, I’m thrilled about my progress. =) I can almost feel my writing muscles getting stronger.

I’m settling into a good rhythm for writing. For example, this section took me 2 hours and 19 minutes to write. Just enough time between a post-dinner break (take a shower, read a book, chat a little, look at Your Personal Penguin (so cute!)) and bedtime.

Getting speech recognition to the point where I can trust it would be nice, too, so that I can give my hands a rest. =)

Must remember to write about non-Emacs, non-writing topics sometime, or I’ll bore all my friends!

The section on projects introduced tags as a way to differentiate
active and inactive projects. In this section, you’ll learn more about
tags and how you can use them to filter your task list.

What’s a tag, anyway? In Org, tags are keywords at the end of
headlines. Each tag can contain letters, numbers, and the symbols ‘_’
and ‘@’. Tags begin and end with colons, and a single colon separates
multiple tags. For example, you could have headlines like this:

 * Personal                                     :PERSONAL:
 ** TODO Buy milk                               :@ERRANDS:
 ** TODO Call Mom                               :@PHONE:
 ** TODO Send letters                           :@ERRANDS:
 * Work                                         :WORK:
 ** TODO Call John about report                 :@PHONE:JOHN:
 ** TODO Prepare for presentation on Monday
 ** TODO Call Mary about the presentation       :@PHONE:URGENT:MARY:

One way to use tags is to filter your task list by priority. For
example, you may want to focus on your urgent tasks first without
getting distracted by other items on your task list. Another way to
use tags is to keep track of the context of your tasks as suggested in
GTD. By doing similar tasks together, you might be able to work more
efficiently. For example, if you’re on the phone at the office, it may
be a good idea to do all of your work-related phone calls. If you’re
going to go to the post office, you might want to drop by the
supermarket on your way back. You can use tags to categorize your
headlines any way you want.

Tags can take advantage of the outline structure. For example,
although the tasks “Buy milk”, “Call Mom”, and “Send letters” have one
tag each, they also inherit the “PERSONAL” tag from the parent
headline. A tag search for “PERSONAL” would display all three
tasks. To customize this behavior, look at the documentation for the
variables org-use-tag-inheritance and org-tags-match-list-sublevels.

Tags can help you organize and filter your task list. In this section,
you’ll learn how to add tags to your headlines, view tagged items in
your Org file and in your agenda, and define custom agenda
views. You’ll also learn about custom tag searches and other
interesting things you can do once you’ve tagged your headlines.

Adding tags

You can edit your ~/organizer.org file and add tags manually by typing
in :tagname: at the end of the headline. You can also add tags by
typing C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c) when the point is on a
headline. Use M-TAB (complete-symbol) to complete a tag based on all
the tags used in the current file. If Alt-TAB is not processed by
Emacs, you can use ESC-TAB instead.

Separate multiple tags with a single colon, like this:
(:@PHONE:URGENT:). The beginning and ending colons are optional when
using C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c), because the function will
automatically add them.

If you add certain tags frequently, you can set up single-key
shortcuts. For example, if you frequently tag tasks as “URGENT”, you
may want to define a shortcut (at least until your life gets under
control). You can assign shortcuts globally by adding this code to
your ~/.emacs and evaluating it:

   (setq org-tag-alist '(("URGENT" . ?u)
                         ("@PHONE" . ?p)
                         ("@ERRANDS" . ?e)))

You can also set this on a per-file basis by adding the following line
to the beginning of your file:

 #+TAGS: URGENT(u) @PHONE(p) @ERRANDS(e)

You can then use these C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c) to enter these
single-key shortcuts, ending it with RET. If you are assigning a
single tag, type C-c C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c, next change exits) to
make it even faster by skipping the RET.

If you use single-key shortcuts, you’ll need another way to enter tags
that start with the shortcut key. You can type them in manually, or
you can use C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c) and type TAB to enter in any tag.

To remove a tag, you could use C-c C-c (org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c) again, or
delete it manually. To remove all tags, use C-c C-c
(org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c) and press SPC.

Viewing tagged items

Whether you want to view tagged headlines by themselves or in the
context of your other headlines, tasks, and notes, Org has some nifty
tagging features for you.

Agenda view

To view tagged headlines by themselves, use C-c a m (org-agenda,
org-tags-view) and specify the search tag. For example, you can view
your urgent tasks by specifying “URGENT”. Note that this command
displays the top headlines matching that tag, whether they’re tasks or
not. For example, if you searched for “WORK”, you would just get the
“* Work” headline. To view tagged tasks, use C-c a M (org-agenda,
org-tags-view with a prefix argument). This shows only the tasks that
have that tag.

To search for a combination of tags, you can combine tags like this:

WORK&@PHONE           only your work phone calls
PERSONAL-@ERRANDS     personal tasks, but without errands
JOHN|MARY             Anything tagged with "JOHN" or "MARY"
                      For example, if you're going to have a meeting with both of them

If you check certain lists often, you might want to create a custom
agenda command for them. In the section on Projects, you configured
custom agenda commands for active and inactive projects by adding the
following code in your ~/.emacs:

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
      '(("p" tags "PROJECT-MAYBE-DONE" nil)
        ("m" tags "PROJECT&MAYBE" nil)
        ("a" "My agenda"
         ((org-agenda-list)
          (tags "PROJECT-MAYBE-DONE")))
        ;; ... put your other custom commands here
       ))

You can use the same idea to create quick custom views for your other
tagged tasks. For example, to create custom views for your urgent work
tasks and your phone calls, modify the org-agenda-custom-commands
setting in your ~/.emacs to be like this:

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
      '(("u" todo "WORK&URGENT" nil)               ;; (1)
        ("c" todo "WORK&@PHONE" nil)               ;; (2)
        ("h" todo "PERSONAL-@ERRANDS" nil)         ;; (3)
        ("p" tags "PROJECT-MAYBE-DONE" nil)        ;; (4)
        ("m" tags "PROJECT&MAYBE" nil)
        ("a" "My agenda"
         ((org-agenda-list)
          (tags-todo "URGENT")                     ;; (5)
          (tags "PROJECT-MAYBE-DONE")))            ;; (6)
        ;; ... put your other custom commands here
       ))

• (1) “u” is for “urgent”, “todo” specifies that TODO headlines are to be shown, “WORK&URGENT” is the query string, and the last item means that there aren’t any options
• (2) “c” is for “call”
• (3) “h” is for “home”
• (4) The second item here is “tags” instead of “todo”, which means that the highest-level matching headlines should be shown whether or not they’re tasks.
• (5) This is how to add a tag search for tasks into a custom agenda command.
• (6) This is how to add a tag search for headlines into a custom agenda command.

Sometimes you’ll want to see more context instead of just a list of
headlines. You can jump from your Org agenda to the corresponding
headline by pressing RET (org-agenda-switch-to) on the entry. You can
also quickly browse through the headlines in another window by
pressing f (org-agenda-follow-mode) while in the Org agenda view, then
moving your point to the different lines. These commands work with the
summary in the Org agenda view.

If you want to show only matching headlines in your ~/organizer.org
file, you can use Org’s sparse tree search commands.

In your agenda file

A sparse tree shows only the matching headlines in the context of the
headlines above them. This is useful when you want to see your tasks
within your outline structure. All other headlines are collapsed so
that they’re easy to skip. To do a sparse tree search, type C-c \
(org-tags-sparse-tree). You can then expand and collapse subtrees with
the TAB (org-cycle) command. To limit the search to only task
headlines, type C-u C-c \ (org-tags-sparse-tree with a prefix).

Other cool things you can do with tags

And if you ever want to know how much time you spent on urgent tasks,
you can call the following function from your organizer.org file with:

M-x wicked/org-calculate-tag-time RET URGENT RET

to see something like this:

Time: 98:44 (98 hours and 44 minutes)

You can call it with a prefix in order to be prompted for a start time
(inclusive) and end time (exclusive).

Here’s the code to add to your ~/.emacs:

(defun wicked/org-calculate-tag-time (matcher &optional ts te)
  "Return the total minutes clocked in headlines matching MATCHER.
MATCHER is a string or a Lisp form to be evaluated, testing if a
given set of tags qualifies a headline for inclusion. TS and TE
are time start (inclusive) and time end (exclusive). Call with a
prefix to be prompted for TS and TE.

For example, to see how much time you spent on tasks tagged as
URGENT, call M-x wicked/org-calculate-tag-time RET URGENT RET. To
see how much time you spent on tasks tagged as URGENT today, call
C-u M-x wicked/org-calculate-tag-time RET URGENT RET . RET +1 RET."
  (interactive (list
		(read-string "Tag query: ")
		(if current-prefix-arg (org-read-date))
		(if current-prefix-arg (org-read-date))))
  ;; Convert strings to proper arguments
  (if (stringp matcher) (setq matcher (cdr (org-make-tags-matcher matcher))))
  (if (stringp ts)
      (setq ts (time-to-seconds (apply 'encode-time (org-parse-time-string ts)))))
  (if (stringp te)
      (setq te (time-to-seconds (apply 'encode-time (org-parse-time-string te)))))
  (let* ((re (concat "[\n\r]" outline-regexp " *\\(\\<\\("
		     (mapconcat 'regexp-quote org-todo-keywords-1 "\\|")
		     (org-re
		      "\\>\\)\\)? *\\(.*?\\)\\(:[[:alnum:]_@:]+:\\)?[ \t]*$")))
	 (case-fold-search nil)
         lspos
	 tags tags-list tags-alist (llast 0) rtn level category i txt p
	 marker entry priority (total 0))
    (save-excursion
      (org-clock-sum ts te)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward re nil t)
	(catch :skip
	  (setq tags (if (match-end 4) (match-string 4)))
	  (goto-char (setq lspos (1+ (match-beginning 0))))
	  (setq level (org-reduced-level (funcall outline-level))
		category (org-get-category))
	  (setq i llast llast level)
	  ;; remove tag lists from same and sublevels
	  (while (>= i level)
	    (when (setq entry (assoc i tags-alist))
	      (setq tags-alist (delete entry tags-alist)))
	    (setq i (1- i)))
	  ;; add the nex tags
	  (when tags
	    (setq tags (mapcar 'downcase (org-split-string tags ":"))
		  tags-alist
		  (cons (cons level tags) tags-alist)))
	  ;; compile tags for current headline
	  (setq tags-list
		(if org-use-tag-inheritance
		    (apply 'append (mapcar 'cdr tags-alist))
		  tags))
	  (when (and (eval matcher)
		     (or (not org-agenda-skip-archived-trees)
			 (not (member org-archive-tag tags-list))))
	    ;; Get the time for the headline at point
	    (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
	    (setq total (+ total (or (get-text-property (1+ (point)) :org-clock-minutes) 0)))
	    ;; if we are to skip sublevels, jump to end of subtree
	    (org-end-of-subtree t)))))
    (if (interactive-p)
	(let* ((h (/ total 60))
	       (m (- total (* 60 h))))
	  (message "Time: %d:%02d (%d hours and %d minutes)" h m h m)))
    total))

Now you can slice and dice your timeclock records any way you want, thanks to tags!

Random Emacs symbol: cc-imenu-java-generic-expression – Variable: Imenu generic expression for Java mode. See `imenu-generic-expression’.

On Technorati: wickedcoolemacs, org, emacs

I didn’t have a lot of energy today, and even my IBM team mate noticed
it. Perhaps it was the stress of fighting with the wiki I was using
this morning. Perhaps information overload from trying to organize so
many case studies and thoughts. Perhaps it was last night’s
high-energy DemoCamp, when I was out until 11. Perhaps it was the
embarrassment of being late and needing help finding the meeting room
this afternoon. Perhaps it was the effort of forcing myself to stay
awake (or at least not nod off too obviously) during the
conference-call interview. (I have to get better at sitting
still in one spot and listening actively.) Whatever the reason—or
combinations of reasons—today wasn’t one of my best days.

I did find the energy, though, to give one of my friends a big warm
virtual hug and a pep talk that she much appreciated. There’s always
energy for the important things in life.

Good thing I learned: many people don’t mind helping if you ask them
nicely. It makes them smile, too, remembering what it was like when
they were new. =)

How can I make this better in the future?

• No more late nights. No matter how much fun hanging out with the DemoCamp folks is, I need to set a curfew and stick to it.
• After stressful episodes, I can give myself some re-centering time.
• Shifting between writing on the computer and writing by hand helps me push myself awake.
• I shouldn’t be embarrassed about excusing myself for a stretch, a glass of water, or other kinds of breaks.
• Maybe I can bring mints or sour candies to stimulate my senses.
• More active participation in interviews can help. Maybe I can ask Kathryn if I can take the lead in asking the questions based on the outline, so that it forces me to learn how to ask questions and logical follow-up questions.

What do you do during low-energy days?

On Technorati: :(, life

Random Emacs symbol: x-uses-old-gtk-dialog – Function: Return t if the old Gtk+ file selection dialog is used.

From last week:

Other stuff: submitted two abstracts for the Technical Leadership
Exchange, had two somewhat tense conversations but still very much
loving conversations with parents, and did some shopping.

Little work on Emacs, aside from a few things I did on Org to make it
easier for me to keep track of my work. This was the first week I
spent using Org to organize my work tasks (and timing it, too!), and
that’s been going well. It’s good stuff. Other than that, little
progress on the book.

Most of the weekend was taken up by family stuff. I also spent five
hours shopping, which was much longer than I expected but which did
help me fill out a two-week wardrobe. This might simplify the process
of getting out the door in the morning!

I’m a little anxious because I’m supposed to go to an
infrequently-scheduled orientation course sometime soon, but I haven’t
received the notice or anything. To err on the side of safety, I’ll go
up to Steeles tomorrow and call the HR person as soon as I get there.
I can always work from there.

I’m also planning to take care of some errands like picking up my
convocation tickets, getting passport pictures taken, and sending off
my visa application and RRSP forms. The convocation tickets need to be
picked up during business hours and I should do that sometime this
week to avoid line-ups. I’ll work in the evening to make it up. I need
to find out the proper procedure for sorting out schedule. Maybe
Wednesday.

One of the things I did well this week was planning and tracking my work day.
I’m happy with that, and I’ll continue to tweak it.

One of the things I want to do better next week is sorting out these
numerous little gremlins that have crept into my system. The little
quirks are really starting to bother me. If it means doing a reinstall
now that I’ve figured out what little things help me be more
productive, so be it. I don’t think I’ll need to go to that length,
though. I do need to follow up about Dogear, because I’m _really_
missing it. =)

Another thing I want to improve on is keeping track of food and
left-overs. We had an incident with green wontons. =( Fortunately,
none of them were eaten – W- warned me in time.

Goals for next week:

• Attend newbie orientation at IBM, or find out if it’s been rescheduled.
• Plan Activities screencast, write script, and make storyboard.
• Go through one Learning@IBM class.
• Set up my RRSP.
• Apply for Canadian visa.
• Donate to Ateneo, finally (may end up giving in and doing this through Ayala Foundation if that’s easier; can look for a cheaper way next time).
• Cook food instead of just letting W- have all the fun.
• Consume all leftovers before they go bad.

On Technorati: weekly

Random Emacs symbol: w3m-ccl-get-ucs-codepoint-with-emacs-unicode – Variable: CCL program to convert multibyte char to ucs with emacs-unicode.

Day 2. So far, so good. I did another fifteen minutes of core
exercises today: five minutes of crunches, five minutes of leg raises,
and five minutes of push-ups. Granted, there’s a fair bit of resting
in those five minutes, but I feel better about this than about making
it to X crunches (that just makes me feel guilty when I rest!).

Tomorrow, I’m going to try reps until failure.

Random Emacs symbol: w3m-process-start – Function: Run COMMAND with ARGUMENTS, and eval HANDLER asynchronously.

I’ve just added Postreach to my blog. That’s the row of little icons that shows up on my website. If you’re reading this through RSS, you can see this post for an example. It seems like a good way for people to leave feedback. Think some posts are cool? Click. Confused? Click. As a bonus, you’ll also get recommendations of other posts with similar ratings. Let’s see how this works out…

Random Emacs symbol: custom-browse-only-groups – Variable: If non-nil, show group members only within each customization group.

I compiled Emacs from CVS yesterday, badly breaking it in X11. It would die horribly in a segmentation fault whenever I started it in graphical mode, even if I specified -q —no-site-file to make it skip all the configuration files. It worked just fine in console mode (-nw), but I happen to like being able to see images and different fonts in my Emacs, so that was a no go.

For a moment, I was worried that Emacs had finally outgrown my computer’s memory capacity. A little searching and some help on #emacs suggested that the problem might lie with fontconfig. I had removed a number of font packages in order to free up enough space for a system upgrade. Maybe that was the reason why Emacs was crashing on me! I tested it with this command:

emacs -q --no-site-file -fn '-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

and Emacs loaded. Whee! I added the following to my ~/.Xdefaults to
make this happen automatically whenever I start Emacs.

Emacs*font: -misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Life is back to normal.

Random Emacs symbol: planner-low-priority-task-face – Face: Face for low-priority tasks.

Clearance was surprisingly easy to do. My quest for signatures took me
to labs I’d never once set foot in, like the machining lab in the
basement. Cool stuff!

I’m still a little nervous about the timing of my post-graduate work
permit. I’ll breathe easier once I get that sorted out.

I’m a little less disappointed in Yiorgos the Cobbler, who (once
again) didn’t have my shoes ready when I dropped by to pick them up.
He finished them in ten minutes, though, and I was happy to see that
the rubber heels were secured by nails instead of just glue. That
should be sturdier than the heels I had repaired in Chinatown. We’ll see.

Library run: dropped off a whole bunch of books. Picked up 6,
including one on photography.

We’re celebrating J-’s first day of school by making chicken fried
steak with mashed potatoes and fried corn for dinner tonight. We
enjoyed a lot of good conversation while preparing dinner, and I look
forward to even more while eating. I wish my family could have had
this. I guess there are some downsides to growing up with cooks,
although food at home *was* always excellent…

Tomorrow: Go to IBM and work on social computing booklet. Maybe
schedule driving lessons?

Thursday: Driving lessons, pick up letter (if I’m lucky; if not,
Friday), work on social computing booklet.

Random Emacs symbol: life – Command: Run Conway’s Life simulation.

My birthday’s coming up next week and I still don’t have any plans.
Somehow, that realization makes me feel lonely.

Is this the first birthday in several years that I’m not celebrating
with a large group of mutual friends?

Random Emacs symbol: ibuffer-map-lines-nomodify – Function: As `ibuffer-map-lines’, but don’t set the modification flag.

The only way to keep sane is to not wish that I was somewhere else,
but I really really miss my family. I’m so proud to be part of my
family, and I’m looking forward to setting aside more time to write
letters and keep in touch.

I love hearing news about what’s going on at home. My mom’s blog is full of her stories and insights, and she e-mails me about things that aren’t bloggable. I read and reread the remarkably mature letter my sister wrote to the
admissions committee of the photography school she had been dreaming
of attending, declining their offer because circumstances have changed
at home.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the exciting things I can do here,
but I need to protect that me-time I use to write and catch up with my
family and friends, and with myself too. When I write, I get to know
myself better, and I get to know wonderful people better too.

Random Emacs symbol: smime-decrypt-region – Function: Decrypt S/MIME message in region between B and E with key in KEYFILE.

Also, Wayne gave me a wonderful housewarming gift: a collection of
rainbow-colored socks with messages like “I’m cute, so put me in
charge.” ;) His daughter had told me about them previously. They’re
awesome!

(And great timing, too, otherwise Rigoletto would’ve been so sad…)

Random Emacs symbol: ignore – Command: Do nothing and return nil.

Sunny day, chocolate, clarity, life is good. =)

Random Emacs symbol: mail-complete-style – Variable: *Specifies how M-x mail-complete formats the full name when it completes.

I signed the lease the other day, and picked up my keys yesterday. I’m
so excited! Wayne helped me make a floor plan. The space isn’t that
large, so I’ve decided to drop the bookcase divider and the dining set
from my shopping list.

The living room will have two square coffee tables and eight floor
cushions for maximum flexibility in seating (and the possibility of
hosting board game nights). People who need to sit in proper seats
will have to wait until my next apartment or reorganization, I guess.
;)

I’m thinking of making Sunday afternoons visiting hours for tea, which
should give friends an opportunity to drop by and keep me company
without significantly raising my grocery budget. I can always keep
good tea and biscuits on hand (yay things that keep almost forever!).
I’m planning to spend Sunday afternoons cooking for the week, too. I’m
going to have my own kitchen – I can finally do that!

I’ll need to figure out a nice storage solution. Small spaces can’t be
cluttered…

Happy happy happy happy happy happy happy…

Managing my own place is on my checklist of things to do in life. ;)
I’m looking forward to trying it out!

Random Emacs symbol: term-magic-space – Command: Expand input history references before point and insert ARG spaces.

(Catching up on a lot of unblogged events! =) )

Last Friday, I attended another session of krav maga, the Israeli
self-defense martial art.

I have had _far_ too little practice throwing punches. I had to keep
getting reminded to keep my thumb tucked in and my first two knuckles
forward. The fighting stance was also difficult

I have the habit of biting my lip when I’m concentrating, which is not
good in a fight. How can I avoid biting my lip? The easiest way, I’ve
found, is to smile. Evilly.

I have a growing collection of bruises, too. Good thing I’m starting
this in winter, when everyone’s covering up in long sweaters as well.

So if I smile before I hit someone, you know why.

I’m thinking of getting into it. The class is a great aerobic workout,
and someday I’m going to figure out how to do a full pushup instead of
the half-pushups I’ve been doing. I don’t feel dreadfully out of
shape, just a little bit so, and I’m sure that’ll improve over the
next month.

How am I going to make the time for this, considering my schedule?
<laugh> It’s a good investment of time: exercise gives me more
time and strength to deal with other things. Mens sana in corpore
sano, too.

Budget? It’s $100 per month, which I should actually still be able to
squeeze into my budget if I take it from other things. I was thinking
of taking a month to figure out my post-apartment budget, but momentum
is important when it comes to physical exercise and other things that
I’d like to make into habits.

I can do a lot of other things for exercise, but this one seems to fit
the best. The instructor is good, too. I enjoy observing the way he
teaches with encouragement. The class is small but friendly. The
lessons are practical. And yeah, I want self-defense training and
aerobic exercise more than I want tango…

I’ll need to practice a lot in order to make things more instinctive,
and I’ve got such a long way to go in order to catch up. I’ll figure
out how to get there by TTC and I’ll give it a month or two to see if
I can make it part of my schedule and what effect it has on everything
else. =)

But it’s so much fun… <laugh>

Random Emacs symbol: clear-abbrev-table – Function: Undefine all abbrevs in abbrev table TABLE, leaving it empty.

… and I was happy to see that the average audience age was well
under 60. I wouldn’t have minded having to dress up, though. ;) I have
a baro’t saya just waiting for warmer weather.

Yay surtitles! Yay cheap tickets! Yay culture!

Thanks to Wayne for the invitation. =)

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-article-hide-text – Function: Set text PROPS on the B to E region, extending `intangible’ 1 past B.

… but opera is heaven. =)

I can’t believe it took me this long to finally see a live performance
of opera!

We watched Rigoletto yesterday. It sent me into transports of joy.
Complex counterpoints and musical themes… yay!

I can’t wait to watch La Traviata in a few hours…

Random Emacs symbol: Snarf-documentation – Function: Used during Emacs initialization to scan the `etc/DOC…’ file.

The Internet is still crawling. Takes me back to the days of BBSing,
when you could type faster than the modem could send. I have to
remember not to do my one-gazillion-tabs style of web browsing, as
it’s really inconvenient when the browser times out.

Life.

Do you know where I can find carrier pigeons? ;)

Random Emacs symbol: browse-url-w3 – Command: Ask the w3 WWW browser to load URL.

… sometimes even more so.

I’m beginning to hate the stress I feel about this thesis. The best
way to deal with it is not to fight a long, protracted war. Nor is it
to give up and walk away. No, the best thing to do is to finish it as
quickly as possible so that I can get on with the rest of my life.

Let’s make that happen.

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines – Command: Strip all blank lines.

I felt tired this morning. Things weren’t working smoothly. It turns
out that the Philippines is probably not part of the toll-free area
for by my research manager’s call-in number. I found a workable but
expensive solution for the moment: a roaming call off my
Canadian-based cellphone. 30 minutes is going to be a whopper on my
phone bill, but it’s all part of the job.

Not only that, I couldn’t log onto IBM’s virtual private network. When
I tried rebuilding the module, I started getting kernel version
mismatches. I don’t think I mistyped my password the first few times,
and that password worked just two days ago. I may need Stephen’s help
sorting that out remotely, or I can ask IBM Philippines to see what we
can do about getting on the network.

My thesis threatens to stretch even longer unless we can figure out
how to cut it down to size. Fortunately, the people I’m working with
are old hands at managing risk.

So yeah, I was in a bit of a funk. But I kept working anyway. The main
thing on my plate is my talk tomorrow, for which I have prepared a few
things – business cards, feedback forms, etc. Fairly mechanical, which
was good, because I felt out of sorts. Now I’m feeling a little
better. Water helps.

Now I’ll make the slides. After that, I’ll revise and rehearse my
talk. It’s only 30 minutes, and the challenge is really choosing from
all the material that I could put into it.

When I’m done with the talk, I’ll clean up the minutes for this
morning’s meeting and send them. I should probably have written them
all down earlier, but I was feeling stressed about the business cards
because that had been on my TODO list for the past few days without
much progress. Now they’re done!

The minutes might be a bit difficult to reconstruct. It was hard to
deal with my cellphone and the computer keyboard. Next time, I’m
taking paper notes.

Things are going to be okay.

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines – Command: Strip all blank lines.

I should’ve tried dialing into the IBM conference center last night to
confirm that our landline could connect to it. Had to go for Plan B:
make an expensive roaming cellphone call for 30 minutes… Ouch!

All in the line of duty…

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-start-date-timer – Command: Start a timer to update the X-Sent header in the article buffers.

Bryce Johnson e-mailed me to ask me why I
hadn’t signed up for Enterprise Camp. I sent my regrets and explained
that I was in the Philippines. Oh, to be able to be in two places at
the same time! But it’s nice being missed…

E-Mail from Bryce Johnson

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-secondary-select-methods – Variable: A list of secondary methods that will be used for reading news.

I’m at the first Global Network of Technology Evangelists conference,
and I’m practically bouncing out of my front-row seat. In front of a
hundred of Silicon Valley evangelists and other way cool people from
as far away as Beijing, Scott Thompson of Sun Microsystems talked about
JEDI as ultimate evangelism. Right. jedi.up.edu.ph. He even showed pictures of the Java teachers from all over. Glowing testimonials about the Philippines. Wheeeee!

I couldn’t help but whisper to Betsy Weber: “Psst! That guy in the blue shirt in the top photo – that’s one of my best friends!”

Yes, Mario Carreon, you are Internet-famous… ;)

I’ll look for the webcast ASAP. =D

On Technorati: gnote, evangelism

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines – Command: Strip all blank lines.

Ever found yourself confronted with an inbox overflowing with general
messages that you can ignore and messages that you and only you can
act on? Here’s something to help you sort the wheat from the chaff.

This indicates how personal messages are so you can immediately see which messages are just for you and which are part of a long Cc. Stephen Perelgut showed me the feature in Lotus Notes and I wanted to steal it sometime, so I did it while waiting for the Instant Rails archive.

To use it, add %ur to your gnus-summary-line-format.

(add-to-list 'nnmail-extra-headers 'To)
(add-to-list 'nnmail-extra-headers 'Cc)
(defvar sacha/gnus-count-recipients-threshold 5
  "*Number of recipients to consider as large.")

(defun sacha/gnus-count-recipients (header)
  "Given a Gnus message header, returns priority mark.
If I am the only recipient, return \"!\".
If I am one of a few recipients, but I'm listed in To:, return \"*\".
If I am one of a few recipients, return \"/\".
If I am one of many recipients, return \".\".
Else, return \" \"."
  (let* ((to (or (cdr (assoc 'To (mail-header-extra header))) ""))
         (cc (or (cdr (assoc 'Cc (mail-header-extra header))) "")))
    (cond
     ((string-match gnus-ignored-from-addresses to)
      (let ((len (length (bbdb-split to ","))))
        (cond
         ((= len 1) "!")
         ((< len sacha/gnus-count-recipients-threshold) "*")
         (t "/"))))
     ((string-match gnus-ignored-from-addresses
                    (concat to ", " cc))
      (if (< (length (bbdb-split (concat to ", " cc) ","))
             sacha/gnus-count-recipients-threshold)
          "/"
        "."))
     (t " "))))

(defalias 'gnus-user-format-function-r 'sacha/gnus-count-recipients)

Random Emacs symbol: dired-listing-switches - Variable: *Switches passed to `ls' for Dired. MUST contain the `l' option.

On Technorati: emacs, gnus, pimpmyemacs, emacslisp

One of the things I want to do is develop a good sense of how long it
takes me to do something. Better time estimates lead to better
scheduling, better sense of what I can commit to, and ultimately less
stress and more happiness. =)

Fortunately, Planner makes it easy for me to do really detailed
time-tracking. When I mark a task as in progress, the clock starts
ticking. When I postpone or close a task, the system clocks out
automatically.

I find that my attention occasionally strays. Sometime ago, I wrote a
function to help me keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing.
Today, I’ve decided to try estimating task completion times for more
of the tasks on my list. I modified my old function to tell me how
much time has elapsed since I started the task. This doesn’t take into
account previous clock-in/clock-outs, but it will do for now.

We’ll see how well it works. =)

;; I've bound sacha/planner-what-am-i-supposed-to-be-doing to F9 F11. I
;; start out by clocking into the task (use planner-timeclock.el and
;; C-c TAB to mark a task as in progress). Then, when I find myself
;; getting distracted, I hit F9 F9 to see my current task in the
;; minibuffer. C-u F9 F9 jumps back to the task so that I can either
;; mark it as postponed. M-x planner-task-pending (bound to C-c C-p in
;; my local config) and M-x planner-task-done (C-c C-x) both clock out
;; of the task. If I want to jump back to the previous window
;; configuration from that planner page, I can just hit F9 F9 again.

(defvar sacha/window-register "w"
  "Register for jumping back and forth between planner and wherever I am.")
(defvar sacha/planner-current-task nil
  "Current task info.")
(defadvice planner-task-in-progress (after sacha activate)
  "Keep track of the task info."
  (setq sacha/planner-current-task (planner-current-task-info)))

(defun sacha/planner-what-am-i-supposed-to-be-doing (&optional prefix)
  "Make it easy to keep track of what I'm supposed to be working on.
If PREFIX is non-nil, jump to the current task, else display it
in a message. If called from the plan page, jump back to whatever
I was looking at."
  (interactive "P")
  (if planner-timeclock-current-task
      (if (string= (planner-task-page sacha/planner-current-task)
                   (planner-page-name))
          (jump-to-register sacha/window-register)
        (if (null prefix)
            (message "%s %s"
                     ;; Minutes so far
                     (timeclock-seconds-to-string (timeclock-last-period))
                     planner-timeclock-current-task)
          (frame-configuration-to-register sacha/window-register)
          (planner-find-file (planner-task-page sacha/planner-current-task))
          (planner-find-task sacha/planner-current-task)))
    (if prefix
        (planner-goto-today)
      (message "No current task. HEY!"))))

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs, planner, productivity

Random Emacs symbol: cal-tex-mouse-filofax-week – Command: Two page Filofax calendar for week indicated by cursor. (Hey, I didn’t know we could print Filofax calendars from Emacs cal…)

Check out my May, June, July, and August indices, too. =)

Uh oh.

I now know how to bake brownies from scratch, and I can make them as
moist and chocolatey as I want.

I have vanilla ice cream in the freezer.

I am so dead.

…

Hmm.

IF I promised a tray of chocolatey desserts for a potluck dinner at 7:00,
AND I have enough ingredients to bake a second batch of brownies…

Don’t even think about it, Sacha. That way lies danger.

They won’t mind if I try a bit of it first.

Maybe a bit more.

Hmm.

More cooking misadventures

On Technorati: cookordie, baking, chocolate

(I think about this a fair bit even as a 22-year-old because I want to
know my values, and reflecting on my values helps me see opportunities
in which to practice them. I don’t obsess about it. It’s just that I’m
used to thinking out loud, so I find it easy to write about things
like this. =) )

One of the thoughts I took away from last night’s Social Tech Brewing
session is both discouraging and reassuring: we really can’t have it
all.

Reassuring because I am not expected to even try to have it all—but
discouraging because I am multi-dimensional and stubborn and want
it all anyway!

Many people address this problem by dividing their lives into stages:
single-mindedly focusing on business, then developing their personal
lives and finding their meaning when they’ve established themselves,
when they have enough. Or the other way around: building their family
and deepening their ties to the community, then returning to the
workforce when the children have left the nest or when they’ve
accomplished something meaningful enough.

But what is enough, and what happens to the rest of their selves?

I believe I can have the strength to walk away from opportunities.
I’ve done so before, and it gives me great pleasure to pass those
opportunities to other people. (It often works out much better, too!)

Still, I see how it’s difficult for my mom to disentangle herself from
the business and pursue other things that would enrich her life. I
also see how it’s almost impossible for one of my friends to abandon
her family and pursue a career.

I am more than a technologist. Social conditioning or not, it makes me
happy to lift someone’s mood with a smile or a hug, just as it makes
me happy to make someone’s day with a snippet of custom Emacs Lisp
code. Sometimes, the best thing I can do with my time is to write
about my research. Other times, it is to take a friend out for a
massage and listen to her intently. I hack, I geek, but I also mediate
and nurture, whether I do so by teaching or encouraging or listening.

If I choose to focus on one aspect of myself, how will I nurture all
the other aspects of me? I will not have a life that addresses only
one side.

I want to be myself every inch of the way, even if it means walking
slowly as I figure out each step.

On Technorati: reflection, life

Today’s Social Tech Brewing event about Women in Technology gave me
much to think about. I’ll blog a bit more about it tomorrow, but I
just wanted to get some thoughts out before going to bed.

Someone jokingly mentioned a study that claimed that the probability of marriage was proportional to a man’s IQ but inversely proportional to a woman’s. Quinn added that this study has been ripped apart in blogs before, but the factoid nonetheless sparked an interesting discussion about alpha females and relationships. And yes, despite my consensus-building, nurturing side, I’m still very much an alpha-type geekette.

This should make life interesting.

On Technorati: women, relationship

Damian Conway is t3h c00l, _totally._ What an awesome speaker!

I was going to videoblog showing my latest hacked T-shirt (FITC2006:
Technology and Design Festival, turned into a beaded halter/tube top
with a bolero-style thing), but I seem to have left my camera at No
Regrets. Oops. Well. Hope the restaurant lives up to its name! =)

I didn’t leave my Moleskine notebook (whew!), which would’ve been far
worse considering all the fun conversations. Here’s a brief list:

• Floyd of InfoQ, faceted search and browsing
• Cameron, technology design, NY
• Joey, Wendy
• Paul Baranowski: encouraging independent media in developing democracies. He wrote that tagline in my notebook himself! Way cool. Always good to meet people who can express their purpose.
• Ian Irving, false positives. Err, not much detail otherwise. I don’t read
  his blog yet, so that introduction didn’t leave me with much to go
  on, and I saw someone I wanted to talk to.
• Chris, intentional programming.
• Olivier Yip Tong, Toastmasters: must tell about Toast I.T.
• Michael Bodalski, Toastmasters: must tell about Toast I.T., also GTD inboxy things
• Lionel Fogler, knowledge management (remember sewer technician story)
• Quinn, data
• Brent Ashley, Emacs
• Malgosia Green, totally funky pair of glasses
• and other conversations not written down for some reason or another

Did totally smalltime Emacs demo, too. =) Should do a proper Demo soon.

Random Japanese sentence: 振り袖で仕事はできぬ。 The cat in gloves catches no mice.

One of the juggling shops in Toronto:

Browser’s Den of Magic

www.browsersden.com

Magic tricks for professionals and hobbyists.

Books, videos, DVDs, juggling equipment, ventriloquist dolls, jokes

Since 1975 – Mail order and retail shop

John Cardella

875 Eglinton Ave. West, #10, Toronto, Ontario, M6C 3Z9

Tel (416) 783 7022 Fax (416) 783-3560 Toll-free 1-888-469-3616 browsersden AT sympatico.ca

On Technorati: juggling

They stock diabolo, too.

Random Japanese sentence: この猫は、いわば、我が家の一員なのです。 This cat is, so to speak, a member of our family.

I need to buy more bookends. That will temporarily fix my shelving
problem. In the meantime, I can… hmm… move the rice cooker onto
the TV stand and move some of my books from my personal bookshelf to
the living room shelves.

Random Japanese sentence: 猫は暗いところでも目が見える。 Cats can see
in the dark.

With the long Canada Day weekend drawing to a close, the three things
I can do today that will have the best influence on my life are:

• Sort out the Toastmasters records so that the new Secretary/Treasurer can step right into my position
• Draft my research proposal and find a few related papers
• Go to the Democamp afterparty and meet lots of interesting people

Random Japanese sentence: この鼠は私の猫に殺されました。 This mouse was killed by my cat.

When Dave Brown was in Toronto last weekend, he insisted on taking me
shopping for clothes. He picked out things I would never have tried
myself: a cropped top, a black asymmetric tube, shorts around the same
length as the miniskirt my sister gave me… <laugh> Although I
was initially quite hesitant about wearing things like that, they
turned out to be quite fun. (I still prefer skirts to pants
or shorts.) “Now you look more like your age,” Dave said.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I’m just turning 23 this August.
I don’t need to have my career figured out yet. I don’t even need to
have people figured out yet, either. Such a liberating thought!
<laugh> I can take risks. I can explore. I can screw up and
recover (for the most part).

I really appreciate how many people around me are either going through
similar issues or can remember and empathize. Wisdom can’t be taught,
after all. Wisdom can only be learned, and I’m glad I have all these
opportunities to experience so many aspects of life _and_ people with
whom I can share those experiences.

I’m really glad things worked out the way they did, and I’m looking
forward to the future. =)

Random Japanese sentence: テーブルの上には猫がいた。 On the table there was a cat.

A fragment of a e-mail I sent at 4:43 AM:

Can you help her figure out what it’s like there? She just has 5 minutes’ difference…

No, I have no idea what was on my mind. I do want to point out,
though, that even when I’m too sleepy to be coherent, I can still
spell correctly… ;)

Random Japanese sentence: その子はねこの尻尾を掴まえた。 The boy
caught the cat by the train.

Happy birthday to JM Ibanez, Javaman and geek at large! =)

On Technorati: friends

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がバスの真正面に走ってきてひかれた。 The cat ran right in front of the bus and was run over.

Last night’s party at Mike Fletcher’s house was terrific. I met many
interesting people and chatted about everything from Philippine
history to personal productivity to religion. And hey, anything
involving strawberries and chocolate or bread and melted cheese is
totally, totally cool.

I wore my malong, of course. The red one’s pretty much my standard
go-to-something-for-the-first-time outfit now as it can fit both
casual and formal occasions. I really should sew a new one so that I
have different patterns. =)

Happy girl.

On Technorati: friends

Random Japanese sentence: 猫をよく観察してみなさい。そうすればよくその猫のことがわかりますよ。 Just observe your cat and you will get to know him.

The Tipping Point – excellent book! – describes three kinds of people
who are critical parts of massive change: the maven, the connector,
and the salesman. Connectors are “people with a special gift for
bringing the world together.”(p.43) Mavens are information
specialists.(p.59) Salesmen have “the skills to persuade us when we
are unconvinced of what we are hearing.”

I’m _supposed_ to be a Maven. That’s what computer geeks do – they
geek. They grok. They learn something inside out. Strangely, though, I
have the feeling that this isn’t quite my thing, that this isn’t quite
what I’m meant to do. I guess it relates to my teaching philosophy.
I’m not the expert! <laugh> I don’t know everything, and I’m
much happier helping people learn than trying to teach them everything
they need to know. Besides, hanging out with people far more brilliant
than I am makes me feel decidedly un-Maven-ish. =)

You know what I have _tons_ of fun doing? Connecting people with other
people. I really, really want to help people make things happen, and
if I can connect them with other people with similar or complementary
passions, that would be totally awesome! I also _really_ have a lot of
fun listening to people. I sell, sell, sell – not stuff, but ideas,
passion, confidence… I sell people themselves. I sell dreams of what
they can do. I _love_ doing that! (And to think I used to be an INTJ…)

So I need your help figuring out what I’m going to do with my life. =)
Software developer? I can do that, but there’s just so much else I
_also_ want to do. I’d love it if you could help me imagine what my
future can be so that I can prepare for it better. =D It’s not exactly
the kind of thing you’d find in, say, What Color is Your Parachute…

On Technorati: purpose, aha

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がソファーでねむっている。 The cat is sleeping on the sofa.

We had another executive meeting for Toast I.T. Toastmasters. I’m really glad to have this opportunity to serve the club as the secretary / treasurer, and I’m starting to get the hang of things. I’m planning to run for either VP education or VP membership in the upcoming elections. I know the position of vice president of education involves a lot of work – keeping track of people’s progress, thinking of ways to help them improve their speaking skills – but that’s exactly the kind of coaching I want to do. =) The VP of membership, on the other hand, is in charge of keeping in touch with members old and new, and reaching out to guests too. Either will really help me grow! =)

On Technorati: toastmasters

Toastmasters from 6 to 8 means I usually can’t meet anyone for dinner
on Tuesdays, which is why I was surprised to get a call from Trevor at
8:30 or so. He invited me to a barbecue with Brian. The Kensington
market I usually go to for meat had closed already and I didn’t feel
like chancing Chinatown. I also didn’t want to walk to Dominion and
being even _more_ late. Fortunately, I had some hamburger patties in
the freezer. Hooray for the well-stocked pantry!

Although the weather was a bit cold (it snowed a little bit today!
argh!), standing around in a coat and chatting with friends was worth
it. I defrosted the patties in a microwave, put one away, and grilled
the other patty under the guidance of Brian and Trevor. The potatoes I
wrapped in foil and started grilling were nowhere near done by the
time the burgers, porkchop and steak were done, so I took the potatoes
off the grill. Brian thoughtfully anticipated that and included me in
his calculations for rice. Awwww. =) (The man cooks rice with a pot!
_Proper_ rice, too, not instant rice! Coolness. =) )

Keynan dropped by with a platter of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.
She found the cookie recipe on the Net. I wonder if I can share
Kathy’s Top Secret Cookie Recipe with her – but then it wouldn’t be
Top Secret, would it?

I washed a number of their dishes to thank them for hosting me and
teaching me how to grill, following the strange rules of my
dinner-party etiquette. Also, it’s kinda fun. Eventually Trevor took
the sponge away from me and put it on the other side of the room.
Spoilsport.

Keynan brought a DVD of Terminator. I finally got to watch the thing.
=)

After the movie, Brian pulled a scary face to stop me from finishing
the rest of their dishes. I couldn’t help but laugh, which made him
laugh, and then no amount of coaxing could get him to do the scary
face again.

It’s nice to have friends.

On Technorati: cookordie, cooking, friends, gh, gradhouse

Random Japanese sentence: ネコが車の下から出てきた。 A cat got out from under the car.

One of my friends scoffs at Toastmasters, but moments like this make
it definitely worthwhile.

Today one of the members brought his girlfriend to listen to his first
speech. The girl was painfully shy and clearly terrified of public
speaking, even during the Table Topics and guest comments section.

She approached me afterwards, though. And oh, the stories I could see
inside her… CN Tower Stair Climb T-shirt, colored bands around her
wrists: these are the marks of someone who cares deeply about some
things. I listened to her fears and shared my own experience learning
how to speak – at first starting out because I couldn’t stop talking
about technology and I wanted to get into conferences for free, and
then realizing how much fun it was to help people learn. I told her
that the real trick to speaking in front of an audience – or at least
in front of Toastmasters – is to speak to them one person at a time,
treating them as your friends.

Most of all, I looked into her eyes and told her in many different
ways that she had stories worth telling.

When I felt her tentatively reaching out, I closed the loop and we
hugged. The hug was one of the best I’ve ever had, and her thank you
one of the sweetest.

This is what I live for: that deep connection, that chance to help
people find their voice.

On Technorati: toastmasters, teaching

Random Japanese sentence: 猫がソファーでねむっている。 The cat is sleeping on the sofa.

Also, _totally_ cool Web 2.0 conference yesterday. Will blog more about it soon.

On Technorati: nextweb

Random Japanese sentence: 私が出掛けている間、猫の面倒をみてください。 Please look after my cats while I’m away.

Shared lasagna and vegetable stew with Mike Tsang last night. This
informal potluck dinner thing is working out quite well…

Random Japanese sentence: 「はい、でも私は、ただのみっともないねこでございます」と、こねこは言いました。「だから、あなたが、どのねこが一番きれいかと、お聞きになったとき、私は何も言えませんでした。」 Oh, I’m just a very homely little cat, said the kitten, so when you asked who was the prettiest, I didn’t say anything.

Shared lasagna and vegetable stew with Mike Tsang last night. This
informal potluck dinner thing is working out quite well…

Random Japanese sentence: 「はい、でも私は、ただのみっともないねこでございます」と、こねこは言いました。「だから、あなたが、どのねこが一番きれいかと、お聞きになったとき、私は何も言えませんでした。」 Oh, I’m just a very homely little cat, said the kitten, so when you asked who was the prettiest, I didn’t say anything.

I got the robot to do what I wanted to. It was a nifty program. Didn’t
work in the real world, but well, that’s life.

I don’t feel like much of a computer scientist, though. I’m supposed
to be thrilled that I got it to work, but now that it’s done, I find
that I don’t care about the program itself. I don’t care that I got it
to work. It exercised my brain, but so many things do…

Open source has gotten me hooked on making people happy. As a CS
person, I’m probably not even supposed to care about making people
happy, but I do. Hacking on the LEGO code was fun, but it wasn’t
something I would do by myself. I did it because it was fun to hang
out. I enjoyed the stories, the banter, the demonstrations of
particularly nifty things we’d gotten to work. I’m glad I had the
opportunity to help Calum breathe life into his machine. I’m glad I
got to meet Iain, Derek, Sandy, and the others.

Those who have known me since childhood know how far I’ve come. I find
it scary sometimes. Do I need people too much, now? But I do… I’m
glad that my friends at Graduate House now feel comfortable enough to
give me a hug without anyone worrying about improper intentions. I’m
glad that I can do nice things for people and make their day better.
I’m glad that I have the warmth and love of friends and family to keep
me going.

I’ve given myself enough time for fun. Tomorrow: work on my FIS paper.
If I need an emergency shot of warm-and-fuzzies, I’ve got my
collection of letters and good karma…

On Technorati: lego

Random Japanese sentence:

１匹の猫がカーテンの陰から現れた。 A cat appeared from behind the curtain.

I didn’t get back until after midnight, so here’s a birthday blog post for my sister, Kathy:

Happy birthday, kathychua.com!

On Technorati: family

Random Japanese sentence:

強盗は屋根からあの邸宅に入ったに違いない。 The cat burglar must have entered the mansion from the roof.

Today we finished the code for Calum’s robot. The robot’s job is to
give blocks to other robots, and it scores points based on the unique
colors of blocks it collects and the number of unique robots it gives
blocks to.

I’m proud of the robot because it’s pretty smart. It’s smart enough
not to shoot multiple blocks at the same robot unless desperation mode
kicks in. Quite slick, as Calum said.

Calum will no doubt post wonderful pictures on his blog sometime. I’ll
ask him for a copy of the source code and I’ll post it here. Whee!

On Technorati: lego

Random Japanese sentence:

ほら！台所に猫がいる。 Look! There’s a cat in the kitchen.

Congratulations to Alvin Chin on his successful proposal – and I don’t
mean the scientific kind! Eiffel Tower, eh?

We’re still waiting for the podcast… ;)

E-Mail from Alvin Chin

Random Japanese sentence:

すると、少し先に、またもう一匹、ふわふわした灰色のねこがめにつきました。そしてこれも前の二匹と全く同じくらいかわいいのです。 But then he saw a fuzzy gray cat over here which was every bit as pretty as the others, so he took it too.

(Psst! Clair! Fuwafuwashita neko… ;) )

I went all the way up to Yonge and Eglinton only to discover that I’d
left the form I needed. SIGH. I guess I’ll finish that next week.

I opened a USD bank account with Scotiabank. Am not very happy. It’s a
very limited account! Mumble.

I guess I’ll have to go for the TD secured Visa card. I need a
US-based Visa if I’m going to get Skype Out.

I’m thrilled to report that a large company has given the go signal
for research on social computing. Social search, in particular. I’m
particularly excited about the opportunity to work with their internal
projects. This year is going to be so interesting!

On Technorati: research, tagging, social, search

I spent some time thinking about what to do during my Christmas break. Aside from brainstorming sessions for education, geekettes and making a difference, I’m also thinking of having some round-table chats about our quarter-life crises.

Monday was a blast with a tango party. Then it was back to work, with lots of papers to write and books to read. I took some time out to take the winter clothes pictures my mom’s been asking for, and I also took a self-portrait. I raided the library for a whole bunch of books and started thinking about the classes I want to take next semester. My week wrapped up with an IBM meeting, and my weekend started with a bunch of rants and reflections on computer science education.

Tomorrow I’m going to hand in my MIE1407 paper and then work like heck on the project proposal for IBM due on Tuesday. Then I need to work on my application for the Delta Kappa Gamma scholarship and finish marking the papers for the DSS project. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget to study for my finals exams on Monday, too!

Hectic week up ahead, but with judicious planning, I’m sure I can survive.

The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing. – Winifred Holtby, O Magazine, September 2002

Or, as Joseph Campbell said:

My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it. – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Find out what you are truly passionate about and give your all to it.

• Quotations Page: Motivational Quote of the Day
• Joseph Campbell Foundation

Argh, I think my sense of grammar is slipping. I need to find a good
grammar blog that’s above the level of “your” versus “you’re”. I need
to read a lot of well-edited work instead of just reading blogs and
scientific papers. My textbooks are pretty okay, although they’re a
bit dry. Hmm. I need literature!

It doesn’t help that I’m a geek. Geeks do weird things to punctuation,
too. For example, it’s hard for me not to put punctuation outside
quoted strings, such as the “you’re” in the first paragraph. I can’t
remember how to punctuate embedded sentences. I may just go and get
myself a copy of “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”…

Mumble.

Carl Sia dreads the thought of running dry:

Creativity isn’t something that can be tapped on demand.
Unlike jobs that require a more or less fixed skill set, “getting
creative” just isn’t as simple as the idiom makes it out to be. I fear
that my pen will run dry, starved not of ink but of the thoughts and
passions that fuel it. And this, my good audience, will in turn starve
the erstwhile author, yours truly.

But the world is one of abundance, and life is too rich and wonderful
for us to run out of things to say. There are a million things I want
to write about, and the main thing that frustrates me is that I can’t
find the words to express them as well as I want to. They are there,
dancing just beyond my fingertips, waiting for me to describe them…

Read Carl’s blog post

One of my best friends is discovering how agonizingly wonderful life
is when you find the sweet spots where your passions and skills meet
the world’s needs. He said:

Working in GMA has gotten me back in touch with the side of me that has and will always be immersed in Communications. In combination with WAVE, I have to say that despite the stress, dammit, I love my work. Both of them.

Add to this his love for teaching…

I’ve been drawn into Philosophy from day one with it, and there’s just an amazing feeling you get when you have a student walk in and think how irrelevant Philosophy is to life only to walk out and think otherwise.

… and you have a very talented person wondering which way he should
go, what he should do.

Mr. Bulaong told me to look at myself carefully, because
the universe is molding me into something with an amazing potential.
The question is for what that potential is meant to be, because it
seems like this time, I can’t expect to have my cake and eat it, too.

In the book “Built to Last”, James Collins and Jerry Porras show how
successful companies find ways to combine their strengths and explore
their full potential. Success is not about the tyranny of the OR, but
rather about the genius of the AND.

Why shouldn’t people be able to do that too? It’s not about OR:
communications OR philosophy, radio OR teaching. Marcelle, keep
thinking, keep wondering—you’ll find a way to have your cake AND eat
it too!

Not all teaching is done within a classroom, and not all communication
is done from the DJ’s booth. I know Marcelle will find a way to live
as all of himself instead of just one part, as I trust I will find a
way to fully, truly live.

• Read Marcelle’s blog post
• Look for Built to Last in a nearby bookstore or library

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with words of warmth and support for a
teaching assistant going through an imposter-syndrome-identity-crisis.

Thanks also to everyone who would’ve written had they had the time to
read my blog. You’ve been busy, but that’s okay. I know you care.

Thanks to all the people who poured me a cup of chocolate, virtual or
not. Special thanks to my mom, who sent a gazillion packets of instant
chocolate mix by airmail. I can buy instant chocolate mix at any
store, but I can’t buy that kind of love.

Thanks to my professors and my students for having more faith in me
than I had in myself. Thanks for challenging me to do better.

Thanks, world, for reminding me that no matter how bad a crisis looks,
I don’t face it alone. I’m surrounded by people who are happy to help
in whatever way they can. I can only hope that I will have
opportunities to pay them back—or pay them forward.

What’s crisis in the time of chocolate and friendship? It is an
opportunity for shared troubles and shared joy.

Whoa, went way out of my comfort zone there. Giving in to social
pressure, I volunteered to do a humorous speech for our Toastmasters
club contest. I did a riff on my usual productivity schtick, talking
about the power of procrastination. It wasn’t a rolling-in-the-aisles
success, but it wasn’t completely horrible, either. I got at least one
or two smiles. So I guess it was just _slightly_ horrible.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Still. It was a good experience, in the way that jumping into the
cold, deep end of a pool is a good experience even if you’re just
flailing about while all these Olympic swimmers are watching you.

I guess I’ll be up for the area contest… Yikes.

I’m quite pleased with my household chores whirl. It’s all neatly pipelined.

Roughly:

1. Sort clothes into hand-wash and machine wash piles. Strip bed and put linen into machine wash pile.
2. Set up hot soak in sink and cold soak in large bucket. Soak hand-wash laundry.
3. Dump machine wash pile into washing machine. Set the timer when I get back.
4. Microwave rice, roast chicken + barbecue sauce, and frozen vegetables.
5. Enjoy meal.
6. Scrape leftovers into trash can and soak dishes in soapy hot water.
7. Transfer machine-washed clothes to dryer.
8. Hand-wash clothes and hang them up to dry.
9. Wash dishes.
10. Dust surfaces.
11. Vacuum floor.
12. Pick up dry clothes, fold them, and put them away.
13. Make bed.
14. Do other tasks.

There are so many things that my mom and I should do before school
starts, before she leaves, before everything else happens all at once.
But all I want to do is rest my head against her shoulder and hug her,
to breathe in and out with her, to drink in her presence and savor
just being there.

Only those who have the luxury of time can waste it in silence. To be
in the moment, not thinking about where to go next or what to do. To
simply be _there._

I’m such a lucky girl to have such an amazing family. I love them sooooooooooo much.

My mom is _amazing._ I told her about my problems finding a neat and
roommate-friendly way to dry clothes that were too delicate for even
the light cycle on the machine dryer. Hanging clothes on the bath
curtain rod resulted in far too much dripping on the linoleum floor,
and I had no idea how to go about satisfying those finicky dry-flat
clothes. I needed expert help.

And Mom rose to the occasion.

I couldn’t do anything permanent to the bathroom walls, so we searched
for a suction-based portable clothesline. That was easy to find. Then
we needed to figure out how to handle dry-flat clothes.

Mom suggested a boot tray with highly-absorbent towels or cloth
diapers on top, but we couldn’t find a nice tray. We found a sweater
rack with air holes, but we still needed to catch the liquid somehow.

Drawing upon years and years of dealing with spills and messes, Mom
came up with a brilliant idea: use a baby change pad. Highly-absorbent
cotton on one side, waterproof lining on the other. _Perfect._

Wow.

I microwaved the chicken adobo for another minute and a half just to
feel slightly better about it, and fried it together with half the
rice I cooked the other day. Then there was nothing else to do but to
try it, so I did.

It was… recognizable. Well, it tasted cooked, something which always
fills me with profound gratefulness. I think I need to add more soy
sauce and vinegar—and a different kind of vinegar, perhaps—as the
flavor was weaker than the four plates of adobo I cheerfully enjoyed
one summer outing many years ago. But it was recognizable, and that
makes me really happy.

For those who are not familiar with the dish, chicken adobo is the
lazy Filipino cook’s best friend. It is rumored to keep indefinitely,
or at least for as long as needed (which is not very long, as I can
happily eat it day after day). Chicken adobo was what my mother packed
into my luggage when she found out I had to go to India; bags of
chicken adobo and packets of cream of mushroom soup, emergency rations
for a possibly finicky stomach. Chicken adobo is a Good Thing, and
learning how to cook it means I can stop buying sausages and start
buying chicken. Mwahaha.

I’m going to do my grocery shopping after I do the dishes tonight.
I’ve been keeping a list of necessities on the refrigerator door,
which makes shopping far easier. I’ll eventually trim this to weekly
shopping, but I’ve come to realize that I urgently need to do some
shopping if I am to have a decent breakfast and lunch tomorrow.
Corn-based pitas are nice, but the cheese I have—prepackaged cheese
slices selected for their cost—can only be called cheese if you
stretch your imagination.

I have yet to start on the lettuce. I promised myself that I would eat
one individually-sized head of lettuce a day, but so far I have not
done so. Why? Perhaps I just need to mix up salad dressing. All the
books I’ve read tell me that commercial salad dressing is an
overpriced convenience and that mixing up a batch is easy.

But why do I need dressing? I used to pick leaves off the Caesar salad
at Italianni’s before my sister drizzled dressing over it, saying I
didn’t like the sour taste of dressing. Perhaps it was only because
the dressing was white and creamy and looked a little bit like
mayonnaise, and I still don’t like plain mayonnaise. Now I will
experiment with balsamic vinegar and olive oil and see how that goes.

(Perhaps I should do that for lunch tomorrow: inflict two small heads
of lettuce on myself and see how well I do.)

Incidentally, my cooking misadventures draw the most comments: helpful
(and conflicting!) advice on measuring rice for cooking (general
consensus: it’s up to you, really), recipe suggestions, shared
misadventures… I should remember to post something tech-related from
time to time. ;) Thank you so much for putting up with these stories! <laugh>

On Technorati: cooking, cookordie

On mensaphilopen, Alistair Israel said:

The smart ones realize that this it isn’t worth living in this
country, and seek their fortune abroad. The truly smart ones realize
that fortune doesn’t matter, and try to make this country worth living
in.

The wise ones realize that life is inherently meaningless and full of
suffering, and proceed to live lives of emptiness. The truly wise ones
realize that it doesn’t matter, and proceed to create meaning out of
life.

E-Mail from Alistair Israel

On Technorati: wisdom

I had been grumbling about it for all of five minutes as I fiddled
about with various settings, finding it completely unfair that newer
residents got hooked up to the Internet in _one_ day, whereas I’ve
been waiting for _three weeks!_

My roommate helpfully noted that she’d had connection difficulties
before. Apparently, the jacks in our room were miswired. I scribbled a
note on one of my index cards, packed my laptop, a patch cable, and a
book, and decided to head over to Robarts Library to see if I could
get a connection.

On my way out, I ran into Trevor, one of the CS guys I met over
Scrabble and Go.

And… he was holding a sheaf of network activation requests.

Ding! So the mysterious network activation person was _not_ a quirky
and selective PhD student on a long vacation.

I told him what my roommate told me. He nodded sagely and said he had
hooked _both_ ports in just five minutes ago.

Yay!

Well, there goes all of my night-time strolls. <laugh> I need to
get a really long cable or set up my wireless card so that I can chat
with people in the evenings (morning in the Philippines), although
Skyping from the lab is still best for people’s schedules.

WHEE!

Internet!

On Technorati: geek, ghcommunity

Clair wrote:

Sessinet in Dilimall =) It’s on the second floor of Dilimall. It is
across Red Fox (the photo shop). It’s the net cafe with extra study
tables so students can study/do their homework while waiting their
turn in the net cafe.

They currently use Firefox as the default browser but they have had
customers who want IE. They plan to use Open Office soon. And after
a while use Linux for their OS =) One of the computers in the shop is
currently dual boot Windows XP and Debian Sarge.

E-Mail from clair ching

On Technorati: philippines, opensource

This is my second day of Ruby, a programming language that is rather
popular in Japan. I’m in love. It’s now my second-favorite programming
language. (Emacs Lisp is, of course, the first.)

Yesterday’s script parsed schedule data and checked that monthly cost
and day constraints were observed. Today I wanted to visualize the verified schedule.

At first I tried working with planner (formerly known as
MrProject and not to be confused with PlannerMode). I wrote a Ruby program that converted my schedule.csv into XML, and planner loaded it successfully. However, I didn’t think planner would let me do funky color coding. I thought about using etask, but ended up deciding to write something using libgd-ruby.

It was surprisingly easy to write a Gantt-like visualizer for the schedule
and even easier to manipulate it once I had written it. For example, I could do silly things like

s.to_image((s.schedule.sort { |a,b| a.start <=> b.start }, 0, 2500, 1800, image)

Sorted by start date

to see the tasks sorted by start date. Being a Lisp girl, I had no problems writing silly things like

s.to_image((s.schedule.collect { |x| x if x.person_id == ’08-1′ } – [ nil ]).sort { |a,b| a.start <=> b.start }, 0, 2500, 1800, image)

but then I realized that this was much cleaner:

s.to_image((s.schedule.sort { |a,b| x = a.person_id <=> b.person_id; if x == 0 then a.start <=> b.start else x end }, 0, 2500, 1800, image)

Sorted by person and then start date

Ruby is so cute!

On Technorati: ruby

I replaced the stock implementation of ruby-default-ri-entry with the
following code so that I could use it even if I didn’t have a current
word.

(defun ruby-default-ri-entry ()
  (let (word)
    (save-excursion
      (setq word (or (current-word) ""))
      (if (string-match "[._]+$" word)
	  (setq word (substring word 0 (match-beginning 0))))
      (format "%s%s"
	      word
	      ""))))

../emacs/ruby-config.el

On Technorati: emacs

Creating Passionate Users
is a great blog just full of insights. The latest gem is about upgrading users.

Right, that’s you. (If you don’t use Planner, read on; maybe I can
convince you to try it out.)

Planner probably isn’t interesting in itself. _You_ make Planner way
cool. You aren’t just an anonymous person who uses Planner. You are a
bundle of unique ways of doing things and maybe I can come up with
things that fit you better. I want to know how you think. What makes
you tick. How you keep yourself from going crazy even though you have
to keep track of so many things.

(If this is starting to freak you out, don’t worry; you can pretend
I’m just like any other maintainer out there. ;) Ignore that large
BBDB in the corner.)

I don’t think of myself as hacking just Emacs Lisp. I’m hacking your
process. Your way of doing things. _Real_ planner development happens
inside _your_ head when you come up with a nifty idea or something
you’d like improved. Real planner development happens when you take a
look at the way you do things and wonder if you can do them better. My
job is to keep track of all these little things people want to do and
see if someone else has already done it, I can help you do it, or I
can hack it in myself. The Japanese have a word for continuous
improvement—kaizen. Process optimization.

We make a lot of progress in small steps. Take that +tue feature. It’s
not a big thing, but it brings Planner _juuust_ a little closer to the
way a lot of people think. Who knows what kind of hacks it just made
easier? John Sullivan has plans for that feature, mainly for his
template hacks.

The end result is that Planner is this strange, almost bewildering
personal information manager that just keeps growing and growing.
Sure, the quickstart introduces the essential parts of the system, but
there’s much more to it. I’m here to guide you through it. I’d love to
ask questions to help you figure out how you plan. I’d love to suggest
ways of doing things. =) Whether you’re a Franklin/Covey or GTD geek
or you’re using a funky home-brew kind of planning method that changes
all the time (I’m like that!), I’d like to think we can get Planner or
some other Emacs-based PIM to dance to your tune.

(Of course, there’s the danger of spending too much time hacking your
process and too little time actually doing things, but I think we can
keep ourselves from going overboard.)

So there. Sure, the mailing list is usually where software updates are
announced, but think of it as meant for user upgrading.

Keep the suggestions coming. Share your thoughts!

Creating Passionate Users: Upgrade your users, not just your product

On Technorati: planner

687 words

Linlin couldn’t wait for the fireworks to start. While her parents
watched the New Year’s special on TV, Linlin sat by the window, never
taking her eyes off the sky.

A loud wail cut through the cool night air. She didn’t know they made
firecrackers that sounded like alarm clocks, and she looked around to
find out what part of the city had already started celebrating. The
sky was still dark. It was as if the whole city was holding its
breath.

The ringing continued. She looked down and was surprised to find a cat
nestled against a big alarm clock that was ringing so hard it
bounced.

The cat was fast asleep.

It was not every day that she saw a stray cat on her balcony (they
were on the 15th floor, after all) and this was certainly the only cat
she’d ever seen with an alarm clock. She shook the cat gently. “Excuse
me, Mr. Cat, wake up, wake up…”

The cat yawned and mumbled, “Just a few more minutes, Mouse…”
It then turned over and went back to sleep.

A talking cat! She talked to animals all the time, but this was the
first time one talked to her! New Year’s Eve was really magical. She
wanted the cat to wake up and talk to her.

Linlin had a great idea. She went to the kitchen and got some cat
food. She didn’t think her cat Yumyum would be angry if she gave the
strange cat something to eat. After opening the can, she went back the
balcony and waved it near the cat. “Wake up, wake up, I’ve got food
for you.”

A lazy eye creaked open. The cat’s nose twitched and dove into the
food, followed by the rest of the cat as it slowly woke up.
After finishing the tuna, the cat sat back and licked its paws.
“You’re not Mouse,” the cat said.

“No, I’m Linlin. Pleased to meet you.”

“Thank you, Linlin. I’m Cat. If you hadn’t woken me up, I would have
been late for an important New Year’s party. Hey, would you like to
come? I think the Jade Emperor would be happy to see you.”

“Jade Emperor? Party?” Something clicked in her head. “Who else is going?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just the usual gang: Rooster, Ox, Goat, and lots of
other people… Even Dragon is taking time out from his busy
schedule.”

The animals from the calendar! Her teacher had told that story on the
last day of class. Cat and Mouse used to be great friends, he said,
but then Mouse tricked Cat by not waking him up even though Mouse
promised. That’s why the Cat isn’t part of the Chinese zodiac,
the animals that protect each year.

Maybe this year Cat could make it!

Cat flicked his tail impatiently. “So, would you like to come?”

She really loved fireworks, but how many times did she get to go with
a talking cat to a party? “Let me ask permission first.” She turned
toward the living room and shouted, “Mom, Dad, can I go with Cat to
the Jade Emperor’s New Year’s Party?”

Without looking away from the television set, they said, “Sure, have fun.”

She grinned and turned back to the cat. “Let’s go!” Cat held his paw
out to her. When she took it, she found herself in front of an
elaborate palace. She was shy, but Cat urged her along and introduced
her to the whole gang. They feasted for what seemed like hours and
Linlin made many friends.

When she got back, she was surprised to find out it was still night.
She looked at the alarm clock on the balcony. It was just a minute to
midnight! As Cat bowed and waved goodbye, the sky exploded into
fireworks.

“Wait! Your alarm clock!” She scooped the clock up and held it out to
the cat.

“Keep it to remember me.” Cat smiled and disappeared.

As the second hand on the alarm clock hit 12, she grinned to herself.
No one would believe her if she told them where she was last night!

(Written in response to the “Last Night” prompt on flashxer)

On Technorati: shortstories, flashfiction, fiction

Also, if someone can help me set up logging (split into text files by
day, please) for irc://irc.freenode.net/#emacs, I volunteer to
summarize and anonymize interesting tidbits from #emacs every day.
That way, people don’t have to worry about missing interesting tips or
code snippets. ;)

On Technorati: emacs

I’d love to read more about the wonderful editor/way-of-life that is
Emacs. Know of any Emacs-related blogs? (Occasional off-topics are
fine.) Please e-mail the URL to me at sacha@free.net.ph or use the
comment form.

You can check out http://del.icio.us/sachac/emacs+blogs for a list of
blogs so far.

I plan to aggregate blogs into a general blog feed and an
Emacs-specific blog feed.

On Technorati: emacs, blogs

([[OpenSourceInThePhilippines#note4][OpenSourceInThePhilippines:4]]”[[oss]]”[[l10n]]”[[Localization]])

Eric Pareja and other volunteer translators have finished the
translating level 1 of the debian-installer into Tagalog. Please check
out the completed file at http http://news.upm.edu.ph/~xenos/tl.po .
Comments and improvements would be very much appreciated.
Three more levels to go!

A glossary of terms can also be found at
http://news.upm.edu.ph/~xenos/debian-tl/kartouche .

Eric Pareja also invites interested people to participate on the
Debian Tagalog mailing list at
http://banwa.upm.edu.ph/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-tl

E-Mail from eric pareja

On Technorati: opensource, localization

([[OpenSource#note2][OpenSource:2]]”[[oss]]”[[OpenSourceIssues#note2][OpenSourceIssues:2]]”[[ToBlog#note2][ToBlog:2]])

Open source allows people to work on an individual basis. Developers
can jumpstart their projects by using existing code, creating software
that answers their own needs and perhaps the needs of a small group of
users that often also contribute improvements. Because the source code
is open, people can easily choose the features they want to include or
make minor modifications to get existing code to behave the way they
want. Open source development promotes personal communication with
users, and user requests can go straight to developers without passing
through marketing. How is this different from other kinds of
user-developer relationships, and is this an advantage open source
developers can use?

On Technorati: opensource, development

I used xtla to browse my TLA archives today. xtla’s bookmarks and
missing patch summary made merging missing patches much easier. I used
m to mark interesting patches and . r to replay
the marked patches. Great stuff.

In related news, I’ll really need to migrate the archive. At 98414
characters, our ChangeLog is now 1/5 of the size of the source code
(457478 bytes). Dev’s changelog is much bigger—147672 bytes.

On Technorati: emacs, planner

(PlannerModeMaintenance”[[GoodKarma#note2][GoodKarma:2]])

You point is well taken. I find myself living in an application more and more. At work, it’s my editor
and I’d like it to handle the G.T.D. tasks and my schedule. I never set out to do this, I’ve just seen it
happening.

Tyler will probably love being able to create hyperlinked tasks from anywhere. =)

praytothemachine » Should I defect to Emacs?

On Technorati: happy, planner

([[OpenSource#note1][OpenSource:1]]”[[oss]]”[[OpenSourceIssues#note1][OpenSourceIssues:1]]”[[ToBlog#note1][ToBlog:1]])

One of my students e-mailed me asking for help finding interesting
ethical issues in open source. Here’s the partial list I sent him:

• What is the fundamental ethical issue behind open source software?
  There are zealots in both the open source and closed source camps,
  but the world isn’t as black and white as people paint it. What do
  _you_ personally feel about the issue of open source? Think about
  this a great deal. I think it’ll give you an aha moment. =) This is
  something really worth writing about.
• Think about the difference between open source software and closed
  source software, and the difference between free software and
  commercial software. Note that free != open source, and commercial
  != closed source. Think about what the different combinations mean
  from the point of view of users, developers, and companies.
• Businesses would like to be able to hire fresh graduates and put
  them to work right away without having to train them in the specific
  software used in the business. Learning how to properly use a
  toolset takes a lot of time, and these companies argue that this
  kind of training should be part of students’ formal education. In
  addition, many HR personnel filter resumes based on keyword.
  Students also sometimes become restless when they’re asked to use
  languages or toolsets not seen in the job ads. As a result, there’s
  strong incentive to teach the quirks of vendor-specific products
  like Microsoft Visual Studio .NET instead of focusing on general
  ideas. This is one of the biggest barriers to open source adoption
  in schools. Should schools cater to their market, or should they
  also explore alternatives?
• Large companies complain about the unlicensed distribution and use
  of commercial software (popularly known as piracy). However, it
  actually strengthens dominant companies. For example, would we
  really be so dependent on Microsoft Office if people only used
  legitimate copies? If enough people chose not to buy Microsoft
  Office, then alternative office suites could flourish.
  Unfortunately, the unlicensed distribution and use of software means
  that other people can assume people run Microsoft Office, leading to
  a vicious cycle. What do you think about that?
• Non-trivial software programs have errors. Sometimes these
  errors are severe, exposing your system to attacks. Some major
  software vendors practice ‘security through obscurity’; security
  holes are not publicized, and the companies sometimes aggressively
  go after whistle-blowers who try to point out weaknesses in the
  software. Because the companies are the only ones with access to the
  source, they are the only ones who can fix the broken programs, and
  their resources are limited. On the other hand, open source exposes
  all source code for potential audit. This means that other
  organizations and developers can examine the code for security
  errors, which often results in faster fixes when an exploit is
  actually discovered. On the other hand, it also means that crackers
  who want to exploit systems can find holes more easily. What do you
  think about disclosure versus non-disclosure?
• Many people in the Philippines are not completely comfortable with
  English. We are too small a market for multinational companies to
  develop Tagalog versions, but some volunteers have been working on
  translating open source software. This has met with mixed reactions.
  Some people say that localizing software for the Philippines is a
  waste of time and students should get used to English versions right
  away; others say that localization is the key to helping more
  Filipinos get into information technology. What do you think?
• Closed source software tends to optimize for number of features and
  ease of use, because that’s what draws customers. It makes common
  things easier. Open source software often comes with a high learning
  curve but focuses on power and security, making it easier for people
  to use it to fit their individual needs. Think about the different
  markets for open source and closed source software, particularly in
  terms of security. What are the implications of these choices?
• Open source means there’s a lot of code out there that you can base your
  programming projects on. As a student, where should you draw the line on
  acceptable use of other people’s code?
• Closed source software often carries a “click-through license”
  severely limiting your rights and giving no warranty anyway
  (although this last part is buried in the fine print). Open source
  software tells you right away that there is no warranty. It’s kinda
  funny the way closed source companies keep criticizing the fact that
  open source software isn’t backed by a company. Look into the
  usefulness of support contracts for large and small clients. (Hah.
  Leading question. Sorry. ;) )
• What do you think about NDAs?

On Technorati: opensource, ethics

http://makati.blogspot.com/

Food and leisure around Makati. Found through John Valdezco’s site at
http://www.geocities.com/kaladeth/ , which was news to me too. <laugh>

12/3/2004 12:05:53 PM -
by Vawn Himmelsbach
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&lid=1&sid=54320

Excerpt:

Could Asia become a Linux stronghold? It’s positioning itself to become
one, as governments here try to limit their dependence on the Windows
operating system.

E-Mail from Manny Amador

“Look at the ball!” <grin>

Celsus Kintanar’s blog mentions the TopCoder finals. Go Philippines!

http://programmingprogamer.blogspot.com/

http://news.inq7.net/infotech/index.php?index=1&story_id=16662

Still don’t understand the dialogue, but understood the expressions
and gestures enough to figure out the story. =) A child was left
behind a rock by parents who were having a hard time. Fox-spirits came
along and raised the child. The parents eventually found the
fox-spirits again, and the fox-spirits had to give the child back. The
play ended with a wonderful song.

I really should get around to making UTF-8 the default…

Might be a good idea to get an international youth hostel association card.
Offices:

Other places to stay

I’ve always been curious about capsule hotels. This is the only one in
Osaka that accepts female guests…

Capsule Inn Nanba

We took up haiku in class today, just for fun. I wrote a lot. =) Then
just for kicks, I translated them to English and coerced the
translations into haiku form as well.

Ź

Beagle — http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle

Beagle is a tool for indexing and searching your data. It is in a very
early stage of development and should be considered highly
experimental.

E-Mail from Jon Trowbridge

Next!

He was interviewed for the Secret of My Success segment. Among other
things, he told a very censored story of his youth…

In other news, I’ve been playing http://www.albartus.com/motas/ . Fun!

Debconf4 will be held in Brazil from 2004.05.26 to 2004.06.02. I wish
I could go. Hey, maybe I can!

E-Mail from Pablo Lorenzzoni

I forced myself to write today (last night?), and here is the result:
A Fairy Tale. Like many things, this story will
mean different things to different people. It has some meaning, but
should not be taken as definitive. The true test of it as literature
would be if complete strangers can understand it, but what complete
stranger reads my ShortStories, anyway?

It doesn’t feel very fairy-tale-ish. Perhaps I need to make the plot
formulaic. ;)

That hated bell! Although it provided music for her every move, it
stopped her from being sneaky – and being sneaky is very important to
a cat. She must be rid of that awful bell! She tried working her jaw
around the collar, twisting and turning every which way. A little too
clever by half, and not quite clever enough – the bell was attached
not to a makeshift ribbon like we tied around her neck before, but to
a real collar with a cat-proof snap. She began quietly, a patient
prisoner working her way loose of the chafing collar, and had it
halfway past her mouth – now only to work it past her nose and off her
head! Yet the collar remained firm and unyielding. With the tough
collar-strap pressed against the back of her mouth, she lost her
composure, yowling and struggling to either restore the collar to its
previous position or get it entirely off. From the sounds you’d have
imagined her locked in a battle of epic proportions.

Ah, my poor cat! I felt rather than heard her yowl over the quiet
after-dinner conversation in the living room. Throwing open the door
that separated the sanctum of our rooms from the public part of the
house, I found her writhing on the floor in what appeared to be
boisterous play but upon closer inspection was sheer panic. I knew I
must get that collar off. I plunged in, mumbling soothing words while
frantically searching for the buckle that would undo the ill-fated
collar. The cat lashed out, all pointy claws and teeth. I grabbed some
towels from the linen closet in an attempt to still her enough to
remove the collar, but those I had were too small to cover my hands
effectively.

Noises from our quarters worried our guests. Distracted by the arduous
task of subduing the cat, I was startled to find one of our guests
working beside me. More mindful of the scratches he’d receive than my
own, I dashed to find a larger towel. Before I got back, however, the
collar was off – whether through our guest’s efforts or through the
cat’s luck, I do not know. Unbelled at last, the cat calmly preened
herself as if nothing had happened. Life returned to normal – at
least, until the numerous little gashes she’d torn on our arms started
stinging.

Such hospitality, I thought, to make one of our guests suffer this! I
had no time to blush. My mother took charge of the situation, sending
me to retrieve some antiseptic from the bathroom cabinet and showing
our guest the kitchen sink. I fetched the antiseptic and some cotton
buds and offered them to our guest. I was ashamed to see my cat had
drawn blood, and mumbled pathetic excuses for my cat’s behavior. He
cleaned his hands with good nature and grace, assuring me that he was
fine. Then it was time to examine the scratches all over my own hands.
I was not sure what to do, but he helped me spread the antiseptic over
the fresh wounds.

Perhaps it is true that no matter how small a crisis is – like a
too-clever cat needing rescuing from an evil collar) – it can still
reveal something unexpected and wonderful about a person’s character.
Times like this test us, and he has shown himself a remarkable friend
- quick to aid and good-natured even in suffering. If these moments
form the mosaic of friendship, this jagged piece is one that I am
happy to have.

- een kus, twee kussen
- ik kus, jij kust, hij kust, wij kussen, jullie kussen, zij kussen

Looks like my bot implants are working. Remember that hack I added to
../emacs/bbdb-config.el to let me hippie-expand factoids? Earlier
in #linuxhelp, a newbie asked about executing files. I wrote a really
long factoid under the name “executing” and another one under “chmod”.
I wanted to use it in channel, so I addressed the newbie, typed
“execute” and hit M-/ – whereupon the thing hippie-expanded to a nice,
long factoid. I didn’t mind it until I glanced at my scrollback and
went, like, “I don’t remember typing that recently.” A quick look at
the minibuffer history later, I discovered I’d had an old factoid
lying around my .bbdb – and it was better-written, too! Neato.

http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2003/08/opensource/

The most successful effort so far has been uPortal, which has produced open-source code for campuswide Web portals at more than 100 American colleges.

- Should check that out…

While searching for Google:linux+academe, ran across
http://www.spaceants.org/bloz/2003/Apr . Reference to
http://www.emacswiki.org, my OnLove page, and Linux; I _must_ have
written this person before to comment on that…

I need to find a way to touch-up the leatherette on my trenchcoat, as
it apparently got stretched beyond its capacity in some areas and
needs fixing. Same with my skirt, too.

That said, the leatherette’s much lighter than a corresponding leather
coat, so I still think it’s a good idea.

Hmmmm. I need to get conference wear.

Apparently, I need to be at least 21 for the checking account. I guess
I’ll just set up electronic bank transfers, then.

E-Mail from Alice V. Garrobo-Realuyo

Reader feedback:

This just interest me, sacha? is that a feminine name? if
thats so, wow, I hardly ever knew that there are Women Computer
Scientists. Well, its just coz, mostly male dominate the computer
science realm. Anyways, What made you interested in Computer Science?
What have been your obstacles during your student life as a computer
science student?

http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/hc/doos/cat_jiplish.html

- Finished my ACM test cases (yay!) – I had to scale the bounds down a bit.
- Picked up a book on Flash MX and another book on Java by dissection.
- Explored concept mapping and downloaded a number of packages.

Quick links:

• http://www.innovationtools.com/Links2/linksnew.asp : Links to other sites
• http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/info/ : Concept maps are useful for curriculum planning
• http://www.business-training-schools.com/bus/a-lesson-in-concept-mapping.php
• http://radio.weblogs.com/0114870/2003/02/04.html : about the IHMC tool. Eduresources weblog
• http://holton.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/blog/archives/cat_open_source.html : Ed tech web archives

March 9, 2010 – Thanks to Courtney Barnett for the update!

Project idea: maybe students can work on making
freemind networked, but this is a
fairly big project and I haven’t wrapped my mind around it yet.

Concept Mapping on the Palm for kids! Hi-Ce Palm.Tech Project Hi-Ce -
Lab for Highly Interactive Computing in Education at University of
Michigan

http://sourceforge.net/projects/picomap/

<grin> I am relatively certain that the current ACM contestants
way, way outclass me. Kudos to everyone for training very hard! I’m
going to have to read and catch up – _after_ the contest…

Maybe I should’ve just said no to Chipi. ;) That way, I could have
joined or trained. Ah, well, s’okay; looks like they’re having tons of
fun.

http://barclaybarrios.com/tsk/blog/academics.html

Thanks to extreme teaching link blogged earlier, have discovered how much fun it is to brainstorm course content on index cards.

There is a CVS-version (21.3.50.1) available at http://www.crasseux.com/emacs/ .

This is actually a pretty cool project… Wow!

B2B R3 RICE
B2B R6 SUGAR

Send to
2333 for Globe subscribers
211 for Smart subscribers

Medical transcription, wearables, taking notes

May I please drop the pronoun “I” from my entries? Darn thing’s making
me feel quite self-conscious. Which is not necessarily a bad thing,
but still, “I” is way overused. (I just said I is! Meep.)

Do forgive if suddenly writing style is abrupt. For some reason, am
hearing Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones in head.

Starting to shape up as a teacher. Very good. Having a lot of fun
compiling exercises and writing them up neatly. In fact, spent all
afternoon cleaning up CS21AFirst03#Exercises.FiveByFive, only to
have Dr. Sarmenta suggest focusing on single-dimensional arrays for
now. Ah well. Less work to do in future. Took off from work to spend
time with mom, but still managed to finish
CS21AFirst03#Exercises.Aquarium at relatively decent hour and with
(in own opinion) good quality work. Looking forward to fun and student
appreciation, as some students had expressed desire to see “fishies
swimming about” or something like that.

Bought some useful books at the fair and shared some stuff from “The
First Year Teacher’s Survival Kit” over lunch earlier. For that
matter, went to the canteen _thrice_ today as highly value
conversations with other faculty members.

Also, am slowly resuming CS123 duties. Have e-mailed C++ experts hello
world exercise to be disseminated to everyone else. Will follow up
with more on Tuesday. Somewhat better. Have a bit more structure.

Accreditation re-review soon. Not certain what fuss is
about, but am keen on being observed if observer plans to be in school
when am organized teacher with funky lesson plans. Not good if will
have one of those off days. Must not plan any off days, then.

So that’s two lab exercises written today, yay! I’d have settled for
5×5, but Dr. Sarmenta did loop() and I guess I need to go over 1-d
arrays a bit more before going into 2-d ones. I’ll still go through
with the quiz tomorrow, though; I want to check what they know about
declaring, creating and using arrays. How will I do it? Ah.

From Miguel Paraz:

Yup. It reinforces the idea of attributes and minimizes the problem
with same-named parameters and local variables.


>

(They should know that they can omit this. most of the time, but it's
still a good idea.)


Just be careful with constructors that set the field from a parameter, as in:
http://www.jspwiki.org/Wiki.jsp?page=WhyUsingThisIsBad

loop

Bouncing ball
act method, Actor interface
5 ball version of the pong game

args

object array and casting?

luis: bouncing ball thing, projectile thing, convenience method, today – searching, lastIndexOf, indexOf, break, convenience method

0.5 of the class 30 minutes for find nth occurrence, other people longer
find all indices, return them as an array that is exactly as long as the number of indices. two approaches. space vs time.
next – sorting and searching of grade records

fanny – arrays pa rin.

vectors

cs21a – basics, arrays, vectors
cs21b – style

http://niffty.sourceforge.net/

From the webpage: Niffty is a Java applet which allows a composer to
display NIFF formatted music notation on a web page. The user can
format the page and print it using the browser’s own Print function
and, with the right Java version, play it as MIDI.

- students who get a low or high score on the first test
- intro courses, later courses, and preferences
- proctoring

scheduler not responding
Doc Gerrald

Friend-of-a-friend descriptions are up at http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/foaf.rdf

- Berris, Dean Michael – sent
- Carreon, Mario – sent
- lastname, Aimee – sent c/o Mario
- Cimafranca, Dominique – sent
- Garcia, Nix – sent c/o Martin
- Gonzales, Orland – sent c/o Mario
- Gonzalez, Mike – set c/o Paolo
- Goss, Ranulf – sent c/o Jerome
- Ibanez, JM – sent
- Lazaro, Diane – sent
- Ledesma, Gino – sent
- Nieva, Jeanie – sent c/o Gino
- Ongkingko, Neil – sent c/o Mario
- Paraz, Miguel – sent
- Patacsil, Martin – sent
- Punzalan, Jerome – sent
- Punzalan, Mark – sent c/o Jerome
- Santos, Bit – sent c/o Paolo
- Sevilla, Anton – sent c/o Jijo
- Sevilla, Jijo – sent
- Sevilla, Mae – sent c/o Gino
- Velasquez, Darla – sent c/o Paolo
- Venegas, Paolo – sent
- Yu, William – sent

(Other friends: separate party or dinner sometime)

If I’ve extended an invitation to you and I seem to have forgotten
about it, please remind me. =)

http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/Women+Tech/readings/Margolis.html

Link from JM Ibanez

Calen is referring to the “Rethinking the Java Curriculum” article:
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/08/21/javaxp.html

With some interesting follow-up commentary here:
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/000454.html

- http://marc.free.net.ph:80/message/19991216.121601.49226c7e.html
- http://marc.free.net.ph:80/message/20011213.093356.e7625d7b.html
- http://marc.free.net.ph:80/message/20011213.180210.24306ae0.html
- http://marc.free.net.ph:80/message/20011214.010850.5f9e91ed.html

http://cleo.eng.monash.edu.au/teaching/pbl-list/

is there any reason why I like getting notebooks?

why do I do that and no one else does?

i am interested in their progress.

i want to know what they think.

i want to know what they think is important.

i want to get them used to sharing what they know with others.

The Association for Women in Computing (AWC) is a professional
group created to give women a leg up in the technology sector.
The organization currently consists of 2,000 members and about 20
active chapters throughout 13 U.S. states and the District of …
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/0502f.html#item15

Cross-reference: PlannerMode#4

Alan Shutko on debian-user@lists.debian.org links to
http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/nealstephensonOS.html . Coooool. Well, as
if the OrdoEmacs reference in Cryptonomicon wasn’t a giveaway…

NealStephenson is cool.

EmacsWiki:ProgrammingEffectivelyWithEmacs has a lot of productivity-boosting tips. In particular, it links to a Kuro5hin article about making Emacs stand up to Microsoft Visual Studyio 7.

Another cool project can be found at http://cards.sourceforge.net . It
was started by Sam Watkins, one of my friends and an all-around nice
guy. Check it out and add your card!

On the compsci mailing list, Migz Paraz mentions the
Hacking Society, a pretty cool
idea.

I’d love a real-life space like this. Currently, I get this sort of
stimulation in irc.freenode.net#emacs, which has a high concentration
of – what else? – Emacs geeks who speak little LISP snippets like
it was their native language.

It would be nice to have this happen in real-life; a space where we
can pair-program on anything that comes along. All we really need is a
space with computers (or bring your own!), a common time to meet, and
a common desire to learn something new and hack on something cool.

I’m all for it.

- http://www.sniksnak.com/cathealth/howto10.html

Susan Fox (SIGCSE) has a student double-majoring in CS and Psychology. From the message:

A part of her project is collecting anecdotes on personal experiences
with gender stereotypes, primarily but not only from women in the field.

If you might have an anecdote to contribute, she has an online form to
use at: http://www.enderton.com/maria/womeninCSrequest.html

This is the Nth bad sector that I’ve come across. It’s starting to get a little annoying.

The anonymous person from 2003.02.26#6 contributes another puzzle
link: http://www.claymath.org/Millenium_Prize_Problems/ . This one has
heavier problems with big cash prizes.

The deadline for applying to the graduate school of education in Ateneo is the second week of May, or 2003.05.05.

Yesterday I had a thanksgiving party for the computer science faculty
and staff. People who went: Dr. Vergara, Dr. Manalastas, Sir Olpoc, Sir Mike,
Sir Maguyon, Ate Lisa, Ate Marivi, Reagan, Sir Mark, Ate Nanette, and
Maan. We played Trivial Pursuit for a short while, but found the
questions too America-centric. Taboo! was a lot of fun. Here’s an excerpt:

Sir Maguyon (? Who was it?): Doc Mana is a… ?
People: Pervert! Sex maniac!
(Turns out the word was “sexist”.)

Then we had grilled steak, salmon and sausages, with portabello
mushrooms and vegetarian pizza for Doc Mana.

It was lots of fun.

Also, got invited to the faculty R&R this 2003.04.14 and 2003.04.15. Practically
required to bring games along.

Gosh, today is stressful. I thought I’d finished all the bugs already, but of course there’s always one more bug – probably caused by my, ahem, editing earlier. Lemme see if I can convince mom to let me go back early. I am such an idiot!

Just remember, Sacha. Even big, well-known companies like Microsoft have bugs. Serious bugs. Bugs that let people get away with stealing other people’s money.

Alright. Today I’m going to clean up my schedule…

I’ve learned a little more about emacs. Right now I feel really, really sleepy, so I’ll probably turn in soon. I have to learn more about the different tools I have on my system, but let’s take care of my requirements first!