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Alright, I'm doing it. I'd promised I wouldn't give up on this once it got tough, but that's exactly what I'm embracing.

I've walked down the path of "busy", across the meadow of "stressed", through the bog of "swamped", and down the perilous cliffs of "overwhelming";  I'm now munching carrots in Old Man Ineffective's garden.


Part of getting things done is prioritizing tasks within the allotted time, so, I have to look around and make choices.

Part of my job, being I.T., is accepting the "service industry" aspect of it. Unfortunately, this is the worst of all months of the year, traditionally, for us, and this year's is the worst example to date.

So, looking at all the changes our shop is under (substantial), looking at the current workload (mercy), looking at the rate of incoming work (GOOD LAWD), and looking at tasks that have already been slipping, I have to draw my line in the sand, and embrace the wisdom of the cut-and-run when it makes sense.

My contribution to my daily photo blog is dead, my Chicken-and-Stars sessions have suffered, my Let's Do Toast sessions have suffered, and today I pulled myself out of the LDSC; there's just no way I can manage the time out of the office this week.

Then, after I made THAT choice, I got news via email of even more work that was unplanned but tightly deadlined. That one will make me angry, so if I can just get it done and not think about it, everyone will be happy. So, I have to cut the daily blog loose too.

I'm keeping up with everyone's posts via RSS, so I still plan to visit and participate on these when I can, but now is not the time.

For those of you still in it, kudos, keep at it. It's still a great project with lots to discover and learn in-the-doing; and I may revisit it soon, too. But, for me, I'm out (for now).

OPML throwdown.

Very short post this time, but it's something I'd love to see catch on.

What's in your reader? RSS readers commonly export/import content in the OPML format, so I've always thought it would be fascinating to see what's in other peoples' readers.

Me? I'd have to tweak my OPML before I unleashed it. I've got some feeds in there that are not for sharing, not safe for work, or just non-interesting junk that no one would have any interest in, so I'd have to do some adjusting.

Still, who's up for an OPML throwdown?

What I'd love to do is collect a ton of OPMLs from alot of people, and jam them all into a masterfeed and post for sharing.

Anyone in?

Have a great weekend!

Okay so, I'm falling behind.

This post-a-day business is insanity. Well, no it's not. But of all months to do this... why now. Why, during LDSC, during my house relocation, interviewing candidates for 2 long-open positions at work, during everything else (gripe gripe gripe).

Well it's my fault because I started two podcasts on top of my 437 other blogs and online presences, and my fault I jumped in to DO the blog-a-day. My fault I silently added my own rule that I would read AND comment on everyone else's blog-a-day.

Okay, so, evidently my favorite thing to do of all time ever is to take on too many tasks. No, really! So, this always happens, and the backside of this yin/yang swing is to tackle the wild horse and figure out what has to change to correct the downhill scream into a controlled fall again.

I had planned to NOT do a daily post today, so the ONLY satisfying solution is to post about NOT doing a post. So, that's what this post is about. See what I did there? Masterfully done.

So yeah, got the satisfaction of not doing a blog post, but still doing it. Tadah. But yeah, SOMETHING's gotta give, so, I'm letting the reading slide another day, and I'm letting commenting slide another day. Good thing about RSS, it keeps track for me of what I have yet to read, and therefore yet to comment.

That said. I had a miserable day with Intuit, makers of, among other things, Quickbooks Point of Sale (Yes, Quickbooks POS (spot the red flag, kids?)). I am cooking up a blog post about these scurvy shyster bastards, but that, too, will have to wait.

Also among the victims...
- Chicken And Stars EP007 with Gingerwalkerrunningbear (recorded, not posted)
- Chicken And Stars EP008 (first week to MISS recording)
- Let's Do Toast EP002 "Socks" (recorded, not posted)
- WiP from last week (snapped, not prepped/posted)

I've got some catching up to do!

I'm deviating from my original plan of topics. I had the idea of Collected Discussion, and decided it was far more interesting than Dedication: Levels vs Handoffs.

RSS is one of the best things that ever happened. I've been toying with RSS for a few years now, and have gone from 3 feeds to 20 to more than 30,000 (yes, feeds), back down to the under-1000 range and finally am in the 200+/- zone comfortably. There's several readers now, some local apps, some cloud-based, some sync, some don't, some are absolute beasts about updating, and some are alot more slow than should be. But it's what it does that's the neat thing.

Having a feed reader set up puts you out of the surfing business, and lifts a good deal of load off your bookmarking tool, both good for the unclutterer in you (yep, there's an Unclutterer blog, good one to sub). With your reader, you can hit a large amount of websites and blogs, rapidly, and only bother with what's new. This takes you from browsing to running through information at a good clip. And in these days of "not enough time", being more agile becomes a skill that throws around a good deal of muscle.

Now, "input" has been turbocharged. I can soak in information as fast as I can push my brain, tapping through dozens and dozens of articles rapid-fire. Awesome, gimmie that.

Alright, now what.

Yeah, outputs.

Now that you've got a nice tight seat in the eye of the information hurricane, what about 2.0? Remember that? Interaction? Participation? Conversation?

Where's my RSS for that?

As it is, some blogs have RSS feeds for the comment stream. Some go so far as to allow you to sub to ONLY the thread you've commented (participated) in. Some do not. Some conversations are at forums, without feeds. Some are mailing lists. Some are Twitter/Plurk/Pownce/Friendster/Chatterous/Friendfeed signal (lots of noise/signal, except perhaps Pownce with threading).

Which is great, we can still interact and participate and converse. But what I'd love to have is a standard to collect my conversations. Give me the universal modularity of RSS feeds in my reader with the thread management of a forum, and THEN we've got something special.

Hopefully, I'm not the only one thinking this, and hopefully someone with some apps skill can put something together.

If I could manage conversations I've chosen to involve with, track those threads, keep tabs on updates and WHO is updating, conversing with me; we could turbocharge the interaction, keep it unforgotten, unlost in the flurry of information out there.

As it is, it's tough to track and keep up with all the places I'm conversing; and I feel many times the conversations are going somewhere special, but will fall fallow and into inaction.

RSI? Really Simple Interaction?
Web 2.1?

Maybe it's on the way... 

A huge part of what makes people tick is organizing things. It's cosmic, ultimately, but let's keep this narrow. Organizing things is no less a part of I.T., and in many ways, it's a huge part of the job. Purchase, acquisition, setup, maintenance; all these things can get out of control fast, not to mention scheduling and coordination with the customers.. the people that actually need and use these tools. As with any given list of items, a certain percentage just never work out as planned. Sometimes, that percentage of broken things can seem bigger than the full list itself.

So what happens, then, when the tools you use to herd those cats are broken? There's the real challenge; there be the probletunities.

Zefrank calls it getting from Zero to One.. it's the moment between great ideas, and beginning of actions, where all the real magic of creativity is, or productivity, or collaboration, or whatever you want to call it. Mastering that moment is the real exciting bit of it.

It's also there, I think, where certain tipping points live; like the "working smarter not harder" one, and the skill of learning how to invest into a project when you don't see the immediate payoff. We're geared toward payoff; customers call, and we're a service organization... get it done. But the Beggar's Canyon here is the trap of falling into "react mode".

The zero-to-one I think we're in at the moment is "once you can define the problem, solutions can begin". And specifically, without airing too much dirty laundry, it's the tools we're using to organize.

Very exciting things are happening at Penn State right now. Things that won't be in the Paper media, and won't be on the Newswire, and won't bring in funding, and won't win us any football games (don't get me wrong, these are all good ingredients!), but there's a community of primordial ooze in place and growing, and it's the right kind of meta.

It's good to be meta, but only a little bit. It's my slant that you're only ever doing two things; you're either being meta, or you're being Creative (creative, proper - in the act of creation; making, doing, in the verb sense). Too much doing and you're off track; too much meta and you never do, but the right kind of meta is the right kind of garden.. seeds that get planted become big things, and the garden is forgotten (but this is good, trust me).

This kind of meta is the catalyst that seeks and finds the broken tools; allows us to see how others work, see how their works are smarter-not-harder, see how the Ones got unZeroed.

So, once we've meta'd out all the faults, we can fix what's broken fundamentally, then use the repaired tools to fix the real issues at-speed. We've created that garden of investment, and rather than growing one seed at a time, we're farming en masse. Then we've got new problems... lots and lots of cabbages to harvest.

That's a tasty probletunity.

Equal but Separate (grouped but not group minded)

If there's any one single "good" thing that comes of all this hoohah about social networks, it's the chance that you'll learn how helpful you can be, and how that gets returned, usually when you need it most. Somewhere in my tangled up psyche, I think I believe that the cosmic job for me is to be an agent of understanding. What separates us from other animals is communication, so that's quite an important thing. But the critical bit about communication is its effectivity; how well does one person create and convey information, and how well does another collect and process it. That dynamic of greater understanding is what makes communication reach its own nirvana, the ultimate goal out of its nature, which is just pure noise.

As an individual, you can do amazing things. I've seen it happen. But as a group, you can do astounding things. When you've got several people working together, bigger things are possible that you alone cannot make happen. That's a tiny spark that becomes a bonfire given just a little bit of breathing room. For those of you that met by way of last years' TLT Symposium, think about your social groups and community both before and after that event. Notice any differences? I could list more than a few.

Granted, these connections are not directly beneficial, in the sense that these are people that do not work in my local area of influence, but I get the tertiary benefit of seeing how other departments are making their approaches to I.T., that I perhaps would not have known before. So, the value appears, perhaps, farther down the road. That grouping of distant people has created a greater flow of knowledge, and that's the ultimate benefit.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...
As I've mentioned before, we've recently shifted our office dynamic from one of 'greatly distributed, geographically', to one of 'most everyone in one spot'. This affords us alot of interaction. I no longer have to use some other tool (phone, IM, IRC, SL, email, etc etc) to pull in some other skill-sets into a project, I honestly can just raise my voice and shout down the hall. At that same time, though, of the 14 or so coworkers I deal with, only one other uses Twitter, for example, so our individual "social" circles are quite dissimilar. It's not that Twitter is so great, but that simple difference suggests that our choices for using technology are different. We all seek out different ways to find the people we connect well with, so our choice-dynamics and focus-flows are different. Which is good, don't get me wrong; diversity and all that: but at the same time, we don't share a propensity to use the same tools.

So now begins the real fun. You take a group of differently minded folk, who happen to be I.T., load them in a box, shake, pour, heat&serve.

You've got people that are their own thinkers and their own doers; they are leaders in their own realms, but are now in a place where considerations of others is a priority, like it or not. We've got OUR plan for labeling the closet, or inventory, or tracking. Only now it's instantly evident when that clashes with someone else's method, that just a few weeks ago, worked perfectly well. In worked FINE in fact until someone DECIDED that it didn't. Everyone's wrong, and everyone's right.

Interesting!

The challenge now is to find a way to nudge all these boulders, rolling at top speed, toward a common downhill run. I really believe that for all the contradiction and misfires, we've got some real talent and some real energy that can be put together into a compelling machine. Tough part is finding where the pieces fit. It would be daunting if it felt like we had a box full of dead pieces that may or may not fit, and then maybe, maybe, by piecing it all together, something will start up. But luckily it doesn't; it feels like alot of individual nanobots racing around, doing their own things, that if organized, could connect up and create some serious momentum toward a common service.

Yes, a good deal of me thinks that should already be happening, or have already happened, but it hasn't, so there's still a long way to go. But I still believe. So I'm still working to see those connections click, and to see a thing grow better than any of us could make it alone.

The plan by which your I.T. group addresses the supported community at large is a fickle mistress. It's your plan to lay out and direct, but to think it's yours to control is to neglect the need as it approaches, which is, ultimately, the whole point of your being there.

- Of Bakeries and Windchimes:   Fix This And Shut Up [STFU and GBTW]
Among other odd jobs I've had, in the 90s, were a Bakery and a Windchime Factory. Both were factory at the core, but at different ends of the spectrum. They did, however, share the approach to I.T., in that I.T. was a minor ping on the radar. Product matters, product is made by hand, so, make product; everything else is distraction. But, being that they both needed accounting at the very least, a small amount of I.T. would crop up from time to time. Usually, these were limited to their computer "crashing" (not a crash, in fact, nothing damaged or broken; just a freeze or other operator error). I was tapped, normally, to offer advice, since it was known that I had a computer at home, so that made me the De Facto expert at hand. And yes, restarting was normally the answer, and never with any consideration of what happened, why it happened, will it happen again, are our financial records in jeopardy; fix it, shut up, go make some doughnut holes [windchimes].

- The Cubefarm:  We Need All These Stone Horses Put Onto That Moon
So later in my growth as I.T. Supra Guru Internationalle; I ended up in Memphis at a corporate monster of an organization. This I.T. approach, in my perception, was very Iron Curtain. It was clear that the insiders were a crew who's primary duty was to enforce the wall of separation, followed closely behind by core system uptime, and somewhere down the chain was far-end support and client configuration. I.T., in this case, was to be viewed as an entity with no real physical location, but an unscalable wall of delineation; it felt very godlike in a tribal sense, a Lord of the Flies approach. Somewhere, there's a group of people that knows more about computers than any of us do, and it takes remarkable knowledge and time to keep those systems running. Do not disturb these people, for as sealed off as the Council is, it is even more fragile, and to disturb them with questions is to threaten their time such that the whole mountain could fall upon us all in dastardly denumont. Your computer is a tiny window to that world, and if word leaks that you are misusing it, you will probably have your entire system revoked from your desk over lunch. My place in that tribe was different still. I was desktop support, so everything in the office was under my jurisdiction, and I had neither coworker nor supervisor. I was granted access to a phone number that connected me behind the wall, that only I could know, where I could leave voicemail and hope for response. VERY helpful when the office people wanted to do new things, like perhaps a website or enterprise email. "Maybe we can do that.. I left a voicemail."

- The Military:  Petty Officer Organizationalization
My first position at a military post was with the Navy, and it was also a very stark contrast of I.T. setup. Here, there were voluminous layouts of plans and chains of command and acronyms and procedures and policies... that actually meshed and functioned. I learned a great deal about the right way to approach issues and the wrong way to approach issues in every I.T. job I've had, but I think I learned the most in the shortest amount of time here. It could even be stated that there was too much organization. There was so much organization that very little was left to chance or happenstance. But for the most part, somehow it was never clumsy, but wielded with a great deal of deliberate accuracy. I think most of that rested on one guy, though, as odd as that sounds. I attended a meeting with this Commander that officiated a particular meeting that I sat in on, since it was a video teleconference, and I was there for tech support. He ran the meeting, ran the distant table for updates, ran the local table for updates, addressed business both old and new, and ensured that everyone had what they needed before it wrapped in a very workable timeframe; not a rambling endless group of tangents. I was impressed. Once disconnected, he announced that he was never more ashamed or disappointed of his crew at a meeting and it had better never, ever, happen that way again. I was impressed. That year, we, at his direction, migrated 2000 people with their, computers, monitors, keyboards, and mice onto the post in a concert of efforts that was an ovation-worthy ballet.

- The Military:  Airman Punkass
"The only reason I'm here is because if I wasn't, I'd be somewhere stealing motorcycles. That's a fact. This is good for me." Indeed. Good to have goals. Better to know the shape of things, and position such that you have all your barriers where they belong. I mean, if you are not in control, have the good sense to be controlled. I.T. at the airbase was poles apart from my last assignment. The guy I worked with was a double retiree with a personalized mug. His two most used phone answering responses were "Phillips, Lunchtime." and "Phillips... ...YOU DON'T NEED THAT. *click*". But at the same time, Their needs got filled, the way he knew They needed them, even if They knew it or not. The level of integration between I.T. and "user" was so deep that it was inseparable, but I.T. did the job, got it done, and kept people moving. So isn't that what it's all about? At the same time, there was a gulf between "I.T. At Large" and the "local office". That gulf was so large that it was almost not worth thinking about. At least when I started, it was almost the feel of an ocean between. There were shared resources, but little or no communication between the two. Policies were pushed, but never followed up upon, and never cross-pollinated to grow.

- Higher Education:  Lower Extraneosation
So now here I am in this new thing. Well I say new, but it's been years now. But at the same time, it's morphed over time into different incarnations. The big milestone has been the move into the new Borland building, since so many aspects have changed from then to now. Prior to the change, we were an island to ourself, of islands to ourselves. What I mean by that is that we are not connected to "I.T. at Large" as much, but are our own department within the college, and the approach has been "okay, one tech per school; go get it done". That's put us about as internally remote as you can create, making the most difficult situation possible for collaborative effort. Further, it places your individual people into a situation where their load consists of everything from changing printer supplies to configuring servers and everything between. After the move, we are the most of us now centrally located. This lends to many changes that set up many exciting possible outcomes. We are grouped socially, so we can chit-chat about our kids and dogs, but also about Oracle Calendar and "hey I set up a wiki". We are accessible for skills-needs. If I need an assist on IIS, I'm now closer to a couple of people with experience here. If George is stuck with an issue regarding setting up a Tilt smartphone, we've got a guy that just did one, so George doesn't have to discover all the pitfalls himself. The flipside to the new distribution is that now, we have a group of people shoved together that are all leaders in their own normal mode of operation, that now have toes to step on, daily, and often, and frequently, and repeatedly. Now we begin leaning group skills and community skills and social graces. Silk purse from a sow's ear (as they say)? Could be. I'm looking, though, to the greater good; I'm thinking that the neurons now deal each time along a narrower synapse.

Here's to slowly getting better and better.

I thought Cole's idea was interesting. He's decided to do a daily blog post every weekday for August, with the goal of it being a relevant, themed, in-depth article. Some people do this anyway with their blogs, some post less in-depth but more frequently, but to set the goal to chase makes it interesting again.

Mostly for me because I can never stick to my goals. Some of is is that I get bored with it, and don't inject life back into it to keep it interesting. Some of it is that I chase the shiny thing and abandon the commitment. Some of it is that I keep getting ideas that I want to try out; that's the big one, since it's put me in a place of having a dozen unfocused projects on the table.

So why not add another!

Content. That's the issue with this one. Cole mentions that he'll be pulling from data relevant to local and national sources related to the discoveries and experiences that feed into what he's working with. Well, I don't have that so much, being mostly I.T. Support, but I do have personal experience from being in many venues of support, so my take on my particular trench might be interesting.

I decided that planning might be a good ingredient; it's something I don't do a great deal of when I blog: I tend to post when it strikes me (another detriment to consistent content, by the way, for those of you keeping score). So, to start out, I thought if I can't come up with enough topics, I'm not doing this at all. Well, as it turns out, I was able to bang out a list of 21 items instantly, so I think I'm set.

Stay tuned, my August Daily, "In the I.T. Trench" is on the way.

Working support can be weird. The point is availability, but let's face it, you have to manage interruptions effectively.

A layer of the philosophy in more than one place I've worked for is that you get a desk phone and a cell phone, but you only publish the desk phone; because if you publish the cell, "they" will never leave you alone.

I make it a habit to publish both, always have. This harvests a variety of reactions, even the occasional "you're crazy". Regardless, that's what I do. It's on my business card that I hand out to new customers, and it's on my email signature that goes out to everyone I correspond with. I like to reiterate it to the main administrative office desk, so when walk-ins happen, they can be guided to more than one phone number for me. In fact, I keep my desk phone forwarded to my cell, so when I'm away-from-desk, I still catch that input.

What I've discovered in doing this is that not only am I not buried in interruption, but also, in some cases, it's STILL not enough for some customers to find me. Interesting.  I've had an occasion or two that a customer has reported to a coworker that I sure am hard to locate! Really!? I wonder about that.  If I'm going more than halfway to find you passively, how much work do you have to put in actively to meet me?

For what it's worth, I keep myself fairly highly available, and it's been working out pretty darn well.

More and more, my time is less and less. That's not true; time remains the same. But more and more, I crowd my time with all the stuff I want to be involved with. Seems that doing this without focus sets you up for "drinking from the firehose". So, I took a long cold look at my Google Reader. Neighborhood of 400 feeds. It's been more in the past, as many as 650 at one point, but yaknow, some are more relevant than others. BoingBoing? Yeah, sort of a keeper. LOLCATS? debatable. I'm ashamed to list some of the others I had. Yikes. The more I focus down to "more local" items, the less free time I'm making for myself, and that's critical. SO, after the long cold look at Google Reader, I axed a big bunch of feeds. Now, I'm down to 223, mostly local, but alot of tech and a good portion of just mindless entertainment (yeah, lolcats made the cut). Still, I have more items than I really NEED, but at least I can get my "unread" count down below 1000+ on a regular session. Always that quantity v. quality issue, isn't it?