the anonymous senator

Monday night, out at a bar with some friends, I told the story of how my father sat next to Mark Hamill on a business flight sometime in 1977 or 1978. I told this story because @TimothyHuang was showing us a picture on his Blackberry of himself with Mark Hamill. Of course, my dad had no idea who he was until they made polite conversation about they did for a living. Mark did autographs for my brother and I - we were about 9 and 3 at the time.

It turns out that two of these friends, @gooddirt and @TimothyHuang, who had never met before Monday night, lived in the same small rural town in Taiwan when they were very young. And they both happen to be my age. So while dad was chatting with Luke Skywalker at 35,000 feet, those two might have been toddling down the same street in Taiwan. It's a small world, after all, especially in New York.

PS - I always thought my brother's autograph was way cooler - "May the force be with - Micheal."

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The other night I was thinking about the intersections between the requirments for success in adventure racing and the common themes in the cult of entrepreneurship, productivity and lifestyle design that is all the rage with the tech kids these days. And I came up with this.

Rapid success in any endeavor will depend upon your willingness to ignore many or all of the following:

1. rules
2. physical discomfort
3. boundaries
4. sleep
5. uncomfortable conversations
6. ridicule
7. conventional wisdom

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A friend of mine posted a question to Facebook, asking for recommendations of online project management software. She works at a mid-size consulting company, but that's not what this was about. She's trying to get a non-profit group off the ground.

"Basecamp" replied another friend, a web developer.

"Yes, Basecamp" I added. "Or Actionmethod, which has many of the same features at half the price, and is free for non-profits."

This got me thinking about these new tools for project management.  Where my friend works, like most consulting companies I'm familiar with, they rely heavily on people for project management. There is a designated project lead to keep everything on track, nag their collaborators both within and outside the office, and keep things on time and within budget. Then there is a section manager responsible for nagging the project leads, and so on. Sure, there is probably a central timekeeping and budgeting system, but actually planning what to do is spread across emails, meeting notes, and reference files on a big internal network. Maybe there is a shared calendar system, but I'll bet nobody uses it. Tools like you'll find in Basecamp and Actionmethod - shared task lists with transparent assignment and delegation, message boards instead of email - are absent.

In order for this to work, it depends on a lot of face time, email, and status meetings. There are two ways to look at this:

1. New project management tools solve problems that you simply don't have when you're across the hall from your coworkers and the boss for eight hours a day, or
2. The old ways work well enough, and the boss likes things the way they are, so there's no incentive to change things.
   

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At my Grandmother's for Easter today I found an Olympia SM-7 manual typewriter in the office. Made in the 60's in West Germany, it's in beautiful condition. You can see that John couldn't keep his hands off it, even for the few seconds it took to take a photo with my phone. I have absolutely no use for a typewriter, and my touch typing skills haven't improved since typing class in the seventh grade, but I can see how someone with a weakness for the past would like to have it around. Frankly, I don't even know what it would feel like to type without backspace and spll check. See, just now I mistyped the work spell.

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As I sit in my kayak, drifting about at the spillover, I find myself wondering what they'll do to me when I get back. It's 9pm, and I'm alone on a dark reservoir near my home, under a cloudy sky threatening rain. Fifteen minutes behind me is my car, parked at the end of a short gravel road. When I first arrived, a Ford Bronco appeared, paused for a few seconds a hundred yards behind me as if checking me out, then made a u-turn. The Bronco reappeared after I had unloaded and was ready to launch, this time parking across the road and turning off it's lights. I thought about walking up and saying hi, and I might have if this was Oregon or Iowa, but this is New Jersey, my home, where minding your business is usually the best course of action.

Just a few minutes before I was reminding myself not to fall out of the kayak, as I leaned back to watch bats flutter overhead and a quartet of egrets take off from their roosting tree.

So, as I readied to turn around and head back to the car, I ran through the range of explanations for their presence: they're there for a prearranged meeting for an affair or drug deal, it's a gay pick-up spot, they saw me drive in and thought it would be a good opportunity to clean out my car, or even the crime drama worthy: they're going to wait for me to return so they can steal my car and everything I have.

This kind of mysterious driver behavior is something I've almost gotten used to from heading outdoors at night, where you're always starting from out of the way parking lots, the kind of parking lots people go when they don't want to be seen or bothered.

On the way back, I see bright flash out of the corner of my eye. I think "Could be lightening, but I don't hear any thunder. Could my headlamp have flashed on for a second? No, there's the thunder." I dig in to get home faster.

A couple hundred yards from shore I can see my silver car. No sign of the Bronco. Got bored and went home, I guess. Thunder's stopped, so I pass the launch site and glide under the bridge to the few minutes of shallow water on the other side. And I hear - spring peepers! Not the whole chorus that will come later, but just a handful of frogs.

Heading back under the bridge a few minutes later, I notice I've only been out for 45 minutes, so I decide to head down to the spillover again. It starts to drizzle. On the way back it becomes a steady rain. I fasten the spray skirt that had been flopping around my waist for just this eventuality, and start thinking of warm pajamas and what I'm going to eat when I get back. But before I even reach the car the rain has stopped, and I can see stars. I turn on the headlamp as I approach, and notice a fat toad waiting for me at the take out.

   

Click here to download:

night_paddle.zip (4235 KB)

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ZOMG I should not be doing this right now, I'm under multiple deadlines. But...

You know what's wrong with the blog platform? It's strictly sequential, so it's tough to talk to different audiences simultaneously.

Let's say you're working on multiple things at once, and you've got a lot of interests that wax and wane over time. You've got things to say about your industry, things to share about your side projects, things to share about your hobbies, lists of vacation spots and things to do, photos, silly personal data. To present all this, you've got a few options:

• You can include all these things jumbled together in the continuous stream of a single blog, in which case your blog is unfocused and you risk driving away people who don't care about your "project of the month"
• You can pick one main focus for the central column - the articles - and relegate the rest to widgets and links in the sidebar(s), without saying very much about them
  
• You can update three different blogs, and no one gets a complete picture of who you are

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