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Category Archives: work
Nesting, flocking, and the solitary geek
i have now been a telecommuter for almost 15 years – nearly three times as long as I’ve spent in “traditional” work environments. Sure, I’ve spent time in the office on each of those jobs–some more than others. But it’s always been clear to me that I have been operating at a handicap by not physically being in the office–both professionally and psychically. The benefits to my family have usually outweighed those–we haven’t had to move from Baltimore, where we can afford to live comfortably (relatively speaking) and the kids have had stability; I haven’t had to deal with daily commutes, and have had more time to participate in my family’s life (at least until the last couple of years), and there have been other direct and indirect lifestyle benefits.
But I’ve been going out of my fucking mind.
My current company is at least geographically relatively close, compared to previous employers — a 75-mile drive, an hour-and-a-half commute off peak. I spend most Mondays in the office just so people know I exist. It’s certainly less of a grind than my last corporate gig, where I spent nearly every other week flying to New England, and the folks at the office park Sheraton knew me by name. That job drove me to the edge, to dark places I never want to go again, with the lost hours in airports, on Southwest, on the 128 to Needham, in a bad hotel restaurant, in cubeland trying to figure out why things were so fucked and what it was exactly I was supposed to be doing since nobody knew I existed even when I was there.
But I digress.
There is a great deal of what I do that is best done in isolation, with no interruptions. I find that I write best in the dark hours, when the house is quiet, and there are no interruptions– or at least that’s when I am *able* to write. But the inspiration for writing has to come from a more social world, and my brain needs other people to engage it sometimes.
That became clear to me when I stood up and guided a session at the recent SocialDevCampEast here in Baltimore, and then participated in several more. Part of it is ego, and part of it is just plain human need — I like the feedback that comes with gettting up and talking and thinking on my feet, and I like talking about things I’m passionate about. As solitary as I am most of the time, I am a social animal, and given my usual isolation, I find that I need approval and acceptance all the more so when I get the opportunity.
In other words, I’m a needy, egotistical serial loner. Quite the personality profile.
But, as it turns out, a lot of other very smart people are also needy, egotistical serial loners looking to be more social. One of the conversations at SocialDevCampEast was about co-working.
Dave Troy, who I used to occasionally co-guest with on the Marc Steiner Show (on what was then WJHU, along with Eric Monti) , is leading ab effort to bring co-working in the style of Philadelphia’s Indy Hall to Baltimore. Co-working, for the uninitiated, is a social approach to independent info-working, providing the professional and creative benefits of networking and idea bouncing for those who might itherwise spend the day talking to their cat.
So far, the Beehive group has been meeting at Blue House, a Fells Point coffee shop, and doing Tuesday and Thursday “jellies”-sessions where people loosely show up and work in each other’s company and leech off the establishment’s wifi. But plans are in the works for an actual shared space in Canton.
I, unfortunately, have yet to get to a jelly. But I think I’ll be trying to frequent the shared space when it opens, being as it beats driving to Falls Church for a day in the office.
googlement
I’m listening to a speaker from Hampton Roads Transit sing the praises of Google Transit. Last night, the folks from Alabama’s Homeland Security showed off Virtual Alabama, a statewide geospatial application built on Google Earth, which incorporated county data and aerial imagery with utility, law enforcement, school district and other data to create an all-seeing first responder’s application–allowing users, for example, to overlay sex offender data on school bus routes.
Government, especially local and state, loves the word free. And Google’s geospatial and other data standards have made them even more dear to them, since local government data has been locked up in GIS and other databases that would cost millions to integrate independently.
Also, it’ll make the transition to googlement that much easier when the googleplex takes over the world.
No Va
So, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is now my nemesis
Return from the Wilderness
OK, I haven’t been gone, really. But let me just say that when you work at home like I do, and things go wrong with one part of the work/life balance, it all goes to shit.
I have no one to blame, really, but myself. Just because you can do a job doesn’t mean that you should take the damned thing. And sure, the first six months were filled with energy, ego-stroking attention, and other good things.
But the travel killed me. It really did. And the more I travelled, the less I slept, the less energy I had, the more introverted I became, the more useless to pretty much every freaking person in the universe I became. I imploded.
Unfortunately, I denied much of it up until the end. And then one day, WOOSH, it crushed me into a little tiny ball and spit me out.
I should have seen it coming. But few trapped inside the event horizon can see beyond it. Thankfully, the collapse freed me from the things that had prevented me from seeing the problem — a problem that, admittedly, I’ve struggled with before. I had fallen down the not-writing rabbit hole again, and it took all my creativity and ability to think rationally along with it.
And now I have emerged. Well, I emerged last month, really, but I’m still sorting my shit out.
And here’s what I’ve sorted so far:I have to write to live. It has to be the center of my daily existence — it can be for work, or for myself, but I have to write every day. It isn’t a luxury; it’s essential to my sanity.
Working in a blog mine
I haven’t blogged much lately for a very specific reason–I’m now building blogs at work. The first of my efforts is here.
It’s less a pure blog and more of a mash-up of blog and aggregation portal. I’m using XSL transformations and RSS feeds to create a topical site that combines a regular blogger with all of the “traditional” editorial coverage we do on a topic. And, much to my chagrin, it’s all based on .NET.
One down, nine to go. This month.
Turn off delight, the party’s over
Last night, I went to an open house at MICA run by the graphic and digital design group of their Continuing Studies program. I went mostly because Sean Carton was speaking, and he had invited me to come by.
Carton has started writing a weekly column for my day job. Considering he’s now Dean of Philadelphia U.’s School of Design and Media, it was kind of strange on the surface that MICA would ask him to come speak–it almost seemed like GM having Lee Iacocca come speak at a Chevy product launch.
But I was also there to network, and to find out about MICA’s graphic/digital design programs. Plus, it gave me a chance to check out the new Brown Center at MICA, the concrete and glass monster on Mount Royal that’s most famous here in Baltimore for catching a bullet shortly after it opened. And besides, I wanted to steal some ideas from Carton.
And here’s the idea I’m stealing today — to succeed with a product, in bits or atoms, you need to delight.
Here’s the context. After a whirlwind tour through the last 20 years of digital convergence and its impact on culture — and on the amount of available attention people have — Carton talked about how important design has become to the success of a product. Products (be they physical or information-based) succeed because of the total experience people have with them, and much of that experience is a result of design.
The Delight factor is what seperates the iPods, BMWs, Mini Coopers, Muvicos, Googles and such from the rest. People overlook the specs if something engages them in a way that goes beyond just the function of the product.
It’s a dangerous word, “delight.” When I hear managers talk about “delighting the customer”, it usually comes two seconds before they spew out the most idiotic drivel I’ve heard in that particular fiscal quarter. The word itself has lost most of its meaning in daily usage; people just don’t say, “Whoa, dude, this thing delights me.” Typically, it’s used in a sycophantic greeting (“Delighted to meet you!”) or ironically (“I’d be delighted to take that back to the kitchen for you, sir”).
I have a hard time working up to delight. Sure, I covet some of the things that hit the “delight” button hard, like the Mini Cooper, the latest PowerBooks, and so on. But creating a lasting sense of wonder about anything is pretty fucking hard to do. The butterfly on this blog’s header landed next to me on a broken asphalt parking lot…that delighted me, in that moment. Doing stuff with my kids delights me. It’s a real stretch to say that any brand of anything can come close to that level of emotional connection.
And really, that’s the challenge people trying to hack our emotional responses for a buck face these days. Everything has become experiential–everybody is trying to find some way to connect in a scripted, contrived way with the product-consuming public that you really have to do a good job of faking originality to get anyone interested anymore. Everything is derivative of derivative things. To “delight”, you basically have to:
- be original
- be “authentic”
- be inclusive
- not suck
Baltimore has plenty of places that pull that off for me. The fine folks at Atomic Books know how to pull off the experience for their market niche (Yo, Benn and Rachel! And congrats on the Emily Flake book making the Must List in Entertainment Weekly, by the by). The Karzai family has experience nailed at B and Tapas Teatro. WTMD has somehow managed to steal my iPod playlist and make it their programming.
The other key piece of what Sean Carton said is that eventually, the technology or medium used to deliver whatever connection you’re trying to make with people is irrelavant. It’s about making people feel like they belong within the world that the product/website/experience reflects. A cool, makes-you-want-to-come-back web site isn’t just about the graphics, the beveling, the font choices, or demonstrating mad CSS skillz–it’s dependent upon creating a connection with the audience. The content needs to speak to people at a whole level beyond just passing along information.
I look at the stuff my company does. Does it “delight”? I don’t think so. How do you “delight” IT people, corporate executives, etc. with a tech website? It’s hard enough to just suck less, let alone not suck.