Your message and other things you say

Sometime in the last month (when I wasn’t posting), comments got hosed on the blog.  A few short minutes with our best friend Google, and an obscure option has been changed to allow comments again.  Can’t explain why they were working before and no changes were made, and I’m not sure what effect this will have on the hundreds of spam comments per week that I receive — hopefully they won’t trickle into the blog.

Sorry if this caused you any consternation or inconvenience.  Most of you comment directly to me anyway

Matthew tagged171 me, asking for details beyond the surface. It sounds like a chain letter, but I enjoy reading the posts of folks I know (a lot more than I enjoy writing this), so I’ll play along.

Five things you didn’t know about me:

1. I have a Commercial Driver’s License. It was for my first job after college, and probably the most enjoyable job I ever had — as a tour bus driver. I took groups (from church youth groups to space center VIPs to basketball teams to tourists) all over and got to do whatever they did. Perhaps my most memorable trip included a historical tour of D.C. Philadelphia, Gettysburg, Niagara Falls, and New York City.
2. I majored in Aerospace Engineering and then Applied Math in graduate school. I never worked a day in the commercial sector of either after graduating. I worked for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company Space Systems Division for all three summers during college at the Kennedy Space Center. There I got to see some awesome stuff first hand (including an up close tour of the Shuttle and launch pads), but mostly just got turned off at the incredible bureaucracy of the space program and ended up wanting to (and did) teach high school.
3. During college I worked for the NCSU Sports172 Information Department, which meant I was in the press box for football games and on press row for basketball games. I never stood in line for a ticket a single time in college and got to see some of the best teams and players play up close and personal. I worked for NCSU radio during and after grad school carrying the parabolic microphone on the sidelines so that the folks listening at home could hear the pops and grunts (and likely some cursing).
4. I was the youngest of three kids, and we hosted exchange students for a year two times (Germany and Spain). While we still are in regular contact with one of those adopted brothers, the other went back, sent us a cordial thank-you note, and we never heard from him again.
5. I was probably one of the first kids in America to take a computer programming class in public schools.  My middle school science teacher (who we riddled mercilessly) had two homebuilt computers (no case - bare wires hanging out the side) that ran BASIC.  A few short years later my dad bought an Osborne and then a Commodore 64 (which launched at least one computer nerd’s career when we donated it a few years later).   In college I had a PC-AT 12MHz clone (with a whopping 40MB hard drive).  I’ve used and abused computers ever since and consider myself an advanced user/hobbyist, but took only one formal computer class in college (FORTRAN).  I’ve since progressed through a Gateway 486-33, Gateway P2-133, P3-800 (homebuilt), Dell P3-1000 (laptop), Dell P4-2.4 (current laptop), and have only threatened to kick the Windoze machines out of my life, but will likely make that a reality at the next purchase.

This exercise has caused me to notice that almost almost none of my (personal) friends blog. Which leaves me a little short in the tag department. But I’ll reach out and tag Jeff173, Joe174, Andy175, and Matthew176. And soon, Wyck177 (dad) — when I show him how to do it.

Start blogging!

Evidently some mass spammer has figured out how to defeat the mechanisms in place to post completely idiotic and what I consider to be rather offensive comments to my blog.  While I am not the author and don’t condone, approve, or appreciate these selected comments (I LOVE the discussion comments, and wonder why there aren’t more of them — I get more comments directly to me in email that are posted to the blog.  Whatever.), because they are on my web site, I am in some way responsible.  I have deleted these offensive posts (and left all the others), and taken more aggressive action against such things in the future.  This means that if you use some slightly marginal words (I won’t list them here :-)) they get sent to a queue for me to approve rather than directly posting.  I’ve been deleting a half dozen or more per day of these for some time now, and hopefully these measures will protect the reading public a little more.

Rest assured I will not delete real comments that add value to a discussion (or are even about the discussion, but random comments about human physical behavior do not apply, methinks).

Thanks for reading, and again, sorry if you had to catch an eyeful of that *%!@.

If you publish it, you’re responsible for it.

If you’ve got things left to do this year, now would be a great time to do them. In fact, there’s no better time.

It’s a peculiar time — the end of the year and the beginning of the year. But this is the cyclical nature of life. As you end one job, you begin another. As you end a relationship, others wait in the wings. If you finish a book, the next thing you read is starting another. If you tie up a conversation, you’ll speak again to start another.

I draw great comfort from this little mental exercise. I’m so glad we can start anew. I’m glad all my conversations are not continuations of those miserable effotrs I’ve made. I’m glad that prior mistakes can be corrected. I’m thrilled that not everyone will have the same input into my life again this year — it’s all new, exciting, and filled with possibilities.

Happy New Year. May 2006 be your best yet.

An ending is the next beginning. Start strong in 2006 (and in all your communication efforts!).

Back to our friend’s sales call earlier in the week…

This person had clearly not analyzed the audience. He didn’t know even how to pronouce the company’s name, had no idea what sort of activity the people in the room actually did, and proceeded to present with confidence to topics that were marginally offensive.

A comment was made that “All XYZ is junk.” Bet he’d have liked to have known that one of the people in the room had authorized $1M for an XYZ solution this year. Oops.

A sample product (not sure it was even his company’s) was passed out with nearly offensive pictures on the cover (target audience of the sample product was supposed/presumed to be young males). The group in the room was 33% female, the company is right at 50% female, and average age around 40. The comment, “I’ll bet this looks just like your work force here…” was downright uncalled for and sent credibility to zero.

He demoed several application/solutions that were a little out of the box. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but none of them were related to the problems the folks who were watching faced, and if similar things were deployed, I know for a fact the CEO would have fired people on the spot had he seen it. One phone call, 15 minutes of Googling, and a conversation starter instead of the canned “introduce yourself…” beginning could have circumvented all that, and the sales call could very well have had a decidedly different (and six-figure) outcome.

One simple rule to live by:

Know your audience, and meet their needs.

This will be a place to add tips and tricks, to log all the thoughts and observations on what works and what doesn’t in presenting content. Come on in and enjoy. Come back and enjoy some more…