#105 1/15/2014 three months to tax filing

This was a good day.  Late this PM I arranged a conference call with two

like-industry IT experts for tomorrow.  During my 27-year gig I successfully created a group of IT managers from competing commercial construction firms who agreed to share IT experience and perspectives.  During the formation of this group we created an informal charter in which we agreed that IT advances did not provide a competitive advantage for construction firms given the very short time it was an advantage.  All it did was destroy the IT workers and there was no logic in that.

We shared perspectives and experiences with products and vendors without bias.  There were a couple of local companies that did not participate and as a collaborative group we chuckled at the others who cut their teeth learning what we had already shared.

Our discussion tomorrow will center on how we could leverage that experience into a national platform.

This could lead to an income supplement that would involve exactly what I like doing.

#103 1/12/14 Well it might as well be a full week of meh

7:00 AM...
The alarm went off.  Actually I've given up on alarm clocks and become totally hip, using my iPhone.  That's really not such a huge sacrifice because the iPhone does a much better job of waking me up.  It's almost a paradigm shift comparable to the ever-told paradigm shift of buggy whip manufacturers who thought they were in the horse whip business when in fact they were in the vehicle acceleration business.  The carburator manufacturers likewise missed the move to fuel injection also not realizing they were in the vehicle acceleration business.  The iPhone's alarm app, which could have been put on an alarm device the size of a gnat or included in any watch (which are also passe') just does a better job giving me all kinds of pre-sets and options.

I swiped my finger on the iPhone and turned it off.

8:30-11:00
Worked on internet stuff with poor results.  I'm trying to get a proxy server to work and have been exchanging support emails with a faceless support person all day, actually for a couple of days.  This seems important to get in place in part due the Target fraud event.  I'm careful about online transactions but should be more careful.

11:00-2:00
We went out for breakfast which was a disappointment but sat and talked for 45 minutes which was unusual and perhaps good and then headed off to Costco to get a chicken.  Costco roasts about 500 chickens a day and sells them for $4.99.  Every fifteen or thirty minutes they put out a new batch and people fight over them.  Just as we arrived someone bought fifteen chickens.  That annoyed fourteen people.  We walked around and bought a few things, including some Starbucks caffeine drink that I'm now addicted to and returned to the chicken zone.  Rather than being MN nice I just jumped in and grabbed the biggest chicken of the first three hat came out.  As I think about jobs and second careers I'm pondering the self-description of "I roast chickens in a big rotating Costco oven, checking their internal temperatures.  When hot enough I take the chicken(s) out put it in a plastic container on a shelf that says 'Warning Hot' and watch people fight over them and grab them saying "OH!!! That's really hot."  I do that all day long, over and over again.  Costco is a good place to work."  This might be an option but everyone has to wear a hairnet and people with facial hair have to wear sort of a beard cover, a beardnet perhaps?  It made me wonder about nose hair.

2:00-7:00 PM
I have a lot of domain names that are registered with three different companies, Network Solutions, Fatcow and MyDomain.  The result is a web of pointers and DNS entries for browsing and email, not all of which makes perfect sense.  Of course there is the issue of user names and passwords which complicates it all.  I used an open source application, Keepass, to store user names and passwords.  Every time you save the file it sends all that information to the Russian mafia.

Network Solutions was one of the first in the domain registar business.  Now they seem to make money by charging way too much for everything.  Fatcow was committed to wind energy and support people who spoke English.  Somewhere I started using MyDomain which is the cheapest of the three and 25% less than Fatcow.  Now the Fatcow and MyDomain software is identical.  There must have been an acquisition.

Recently I did an upgrade of the small business web site using www.wix.com  which is not bad.  They host their own websites so that added another twist to the mess.  As I worked through all this making sure that the right domain names were correctly pointed and email was getting where it was supposed to be I would pause and wonder "what exactly was the point of this or how is this supposed to work or prior to the internet this would have been time spent outside, skiing."

7:00-8:00 PM
This was primarily blog time, both writing and reading.

8:00-9:00 PM
Haul some tools over to the real estate project and pulled off some molding and pulled up some carpet and had a thirty pound wall mirror fall on me.

9:00-10:00 PM
Off to the small business to drop off and pick up which seems to be never-ending and then stopping for a bite to eat.  Over the years we seem to be eating later and later.  We should probably live in Chicago or New York where such style is not all that odd.

10:00-11:00 PM
Write this, right?
MON I'm headed back to check on the furnace after a couple of AM projects, one of which is calling two headhunters back.  I am committed to not going back to work until after the end of FEB but at the moment I'd take a gig for MON AM.

#102 1/11/14 Some days are not as good as the day before...

The Week in Review...
Monday:       sucked...furnace issues in the cold
Tuesday:       sucked...furnace issues in the cold
Wednesday:  sucked...furnace issues in the cold
Thursday:      sucked being three days behind self-imposed schedule
Friday:          OK.  Made some small forward progress.  Re-birth of Samsung Chromebook was good.
                     Installation of Seagate Goflex was good.
Saturday       sucked...pulled in multiple direction...struggling with some computer issues.

Sunday is the seventh day of the week and according to some doctrines this should be a day of rest.  I have this hope of waking up and getting some things done, feeling good about them and being able to feel content and better at the end of the day.  This is a hope that I've had many, many times.  I still hope for that hope but realize that it's more likely to be like the recurring reality than the vision with which that hope in intertwined.

This blog posting should have been titled "Some weeks are not as good as the week before" rather than what it is.  I have this hope of titling ever blog posting to be correct, interesting and engaging.  I know that as much as I wish to title them as such, some will be, well, not that.

#101 1/10/14 Work where you make it...

High speed internet was a bit unusual in the 1990s but I recall having a slow DSL connection in 1999.  Connectivity, portability and collaboration venues now thrive where ever one might be.

Working at home is nice and I lobbied for that for many years at the 27-year gig with limited success.  The pundits liked designated desks and cubicles, people at their stations and the opportunity for the occasional meeting room.  Now as a bit of a roving worker (although without a real job [yet]) I'm struck with the opportunities that more or less public places offer. 

The Starbucks and Caribous are jammed with users staring at their Apple devices and nursing day-long coffees.  I think most of them are listening to music or cruising.  Rarely do I see heads-down keyboard work (I dislike the new word 'keyboarding').

So far I've found that working in public spaces is nice but only if I can get a little distance from others.  The Ramsey County libraries, the less-freqented fast food places and the city community centers seem to work fine.  Serious consideration was given to membership at the MPLS CoCo but I found it sort of jammed with people.  Their focus is on collaboration and the closeness probably encourages that.  There are a number of writers there and some SIG (special interest groups) for things like WordPress but I'm still in the early discovery stages of this re-alignment.  I've been conventional long enough and there is a danger in hip conventional, too.  The twenty-year shot clock is running.

The next vocation will certainly be minimalist in nature.  In the early 1970s I moved once with all my possessions in one VW bug trip.  Now I want to be able to work from one messenger bag.  Given my Samsung Chromebook failure I'll probably be a vagabond with two computers but that's OK.

I'm off to handle life logistics.  My iPhone is ringing with calls from the small business place. 

#100 1/9/14 Real work and computer work

Real Work...
The short version of the story is that the oil furnace quit working.  I'd have been suspicious of a bad batch of fuel had it not failed a couple of weeks earlier.  When your furnace is in the basement or a closet it's bad when it fails but it's a different program when it's 100 miles away and it's -27F.

There really was not choice but to drive.  It was less than 50F in the house upon arrival and even after four hours of wood in the wood burning furnace, wood in the fireplace insert, a catalytic heater and a big kerosene heater it remained cool but above the ever critical 32F.

Tuesday I began the quest for a repair person and my first call to a nice guy I've used before was cut short when he responded "I can't help you.  I just had my knee replaces."  My first thought was he could come over and talk me through the diagnostics and I could tell him about all the people I knew who had had knee replacement surgery and what they did right and what they did wrong but he ended the call before I could offer up that idea.  He did give two other names and I called each of them and left messages.

Upon receipt of the first response late in the day I started an explanation of what was happening and what I'd don and what I thought was wrong.  "I only work on gas furnaces.  What you said about your oil burner might be right.  I don't know."  It was still -24F.  I was a bit warmer.  This was day #2 of a three-day "fix."

The third guy called and said it was probably the filter.  Only a couple of weeks earlier I'd discovered that this burner actually had a fuel filter.  This confirmed that I am an idiot.  The guy said change the filter and that will fix the problem.  He asked "do you have a filter?" and recommended the hardware store about 15 miles away as a source.  A trip to the Ace Hardware store and an expenditure of $2.45 set me up for the filter changing process after watching a couple of YouTube videos.  Changing and cleaning was pretty simple, as was "bleeding the line" but I did find that the #2 fuel oil was red and it shot out farther than anticipated.  The furnace ran fine for eight hours and then did not come on.

On day three the third guy showed up.  These oil burners are pretty simple.  The pump moves the fuel oil.  A transformer generates a spark that ignites the fuel oil that shoots out of a jet and an electric eye looks for sparks and fire and shuts the hole thing done if it's not working.  He replaced the transformer.  His time and the transformer were about $300.  I learned all about his life and made a few suggestions and shared a few perspectives on life as guy just trying to make things work.

Real Work...Computers
Computers really don't fail as much as they did twenty or more years ago.  The real failures are infrastructure issues and back office issues and cloud issues and major application fixes, upgrades and glitches.  This was a pleasant reminder of a simple hardware failure.

In many venues I've recommended the Samsung Chromebook which sells new for $249.  As a web appliance used in conjunction with web applications such as Google's it's a great device.  It's my goto PC and I used it far more than my desktops or high-end notebooks.

The case is grey and looks like aluminum or titanium or some other metal that is probably polluting and destroying the earth but it's plastic which is polluting and destroying the earth.  When using it I try to remember to not lean on it too hard with hands.  Starting with my furnace failure on Monday this was not a good week and the Chromebook accompanied me as I went about in the -20F and colder weather talking to people and getting ready for my furnace repair trip.  Usually it's carried in a fairly tight slipcase but the six-hour battery was a bit low and I jammed the power adapter in. 

Somewhere during the day on Monday I either leaned on it or threw it in or out of the car a bit too aggressively.  The screen image is pretty interesting, certainly not something I could have created if I had even had a vision of that image.  My first inclination was to order a new Chromebook and throw this one into the nearest river or stream where it would ooze plastic into our drinking water but YouTube clued me into a site called www.screendoctors.com or something similar and a new screen is on it's way for $67. 

So No Work...
Both of these events have consumed my time and my mind and prevented me from chasing real work...but I did have a call from a headhunter today and will call him back on Friday.  The end of the week looks more promising than the beginning of the week.

#96 1/5/14 Throw some stuff away...be done with it

Throw some things out...
After 27 years at the last gig, a gig that took a lot of time and energy, there is an increasing awareness of how much was left undone during that time period.  Some are simple.  The gazebo roof is collapsing.  The back entrance door and frame is rotten.  The front porch is collapsing.  The garage is full.  The fourteen boxes of my aunt Helen's "stuff" is still in the garage and she died seven or eight years ago.

Some progress has been made.  All the beige computers that seemed to multiply and stack up have been recycled.  My electronic files are backed up in the cloud and on multiple storage devices, necessarily totally organized, but at least they're on media one can read.

My mother passed away a year ago on New Year's eve.  Within a couple of months I went through all her things and donated her clothes, furniture and miscellaneous household items paring it down to six boxes labeled "mom."  The six boxes have been sitting in the same place for ten months.  It hit me last week that I need to finish that project.  If I don't do it they'll be sitting there when I leave.  Some of it will evoke memories but only for me and it's time to process those and put them away in my head and heart for later retrieval.  The six boxes contain no memories for anyone else.

A Most Helpful Guide...
This blog has been an effort to bring focus to my effort and interest in the "what's next?"  The outplacement firm that I've been working with focuses on getting your personal marketing plan in place, getting a good resume put together, networking, hitting the street, etc.  That's great and they're good at that.  They also talk about the option of retiring and doing what you want.  They are not very good at that.  They also talk about having your own business but they're a bit of an advertisement for franchises.  That's good if you simply want to replace some income by spending some money but it's a bit afar from my notion of creativity and innovation.

There is no question that I'm adverse to self-help books.  That's the Norwegian DNA kicking in.  Work it out yourself.  Don't complain.  It could be worse.  This is probably as good as it gets.  Look around; you'll find someone worse off than you.

Richard Leider is a 69 year old guy who writes like he's talking to to you, like someone who's actually interested in what you might want to do, not what you've done or especially what you've done to make money.  I highlighted one paragraph in the book that was something like "...I'll never do something simply for the sake of money ever again in my life..."

He has a pretty simple plan that involves writing down some thoughts, probably in a journal, committing some time to being reflective about your interests and opportunities, narrowing your options, throwing out some things to simplify your life and most importantly finding a person or a handful of people who will listen to you.

The LHH approach is all outward focused in the networking theme.  Get them a marketing statement and ask them there opinion without asking for a job.  That's sort of like saying here is my resume but I'm not really asking for a job or asking you to do anything.  If you are forty and facing another twenty years in the job space that's good.  If you are a bit past that it's probably important to focus on what you really like.  Find something, or a few things, that you can be passionate about.  That could be a new job or a new business but it's probably not what you have been doing.  Today I sent a link to this book to my LHH contact.  This should be recommended reading for people who are in transition, even people much younger than me.

#92 1/1/14 So what, exactly, is our job?

Warren Buffett...
Working hard, being diligent, putting in the extra effort, being creative, working as hard for others as you do for yourself and communicating clearly, with a little humility,  some chuckles and a smile seem to be good guidelines for any work, not just being a super rich guy.  Mr. Buffet's success is remarkable, but deserved.  He lives modestly and now has given away most of his money, recognizing that the fruits of his work are not gifts for his children, who can help themselves, but gifts to the many who cannot help themselves.  It's a good model.  We need more like-minded people.  I'm planning on being a fractional Warren Buffett.

Re-Imagining Our Work...
This evening, at the end of a week-long effort to move a few thousand pounds of inventory from one place to a couple of others with way too many stairways, elevators, lifting, putting down and two-wheel cart moves we stopped at D'Amico for a couple of small salads.  It was late and we were very tired.  They closed at 8:30 and about that time a nice young guy stopped and asked if he could clear our table.  "Certainly, as long as I can ask you a few questions."  He was a tall, skinny guy who spoke with enthusiasm looking directly at us.  As a second semester college student at a local somewhat liberal university he was pursuing a degree in journalism and ws soon headed off for an internship in New York City.  I always like to ask waiters and restaurant workers if the work they are doing today is going to be their life.  "Oh, God no" was response from the journalist.

The others I've asked at the same restaurant were students at Northwestern College, Billy Graham's college of choice.  They've been nice.  We helped one with a paper due the next day and another talked about wanting work for a non-profit.  "Working for a non-profit is good.  I've found that when you work for a for-profit you are committed to the process of selling (perhaps depleting) yourself.  That might not be the case with a non-profit."

This brings me the point.  My wife was reading the Star Tribune and handed me an article about a 69-year-old guy who has just written a book about one's life re-imagined .  This looked good and with only a few click's effort Amazon has a copy on it's way.  A review will follow.

Reflection on reflection...
On New Year's Eve I posted a short family story in this blog and also on Facebook.  I was reluctant to post it on Facebook, not so much on my personal page because only friends see it, but on another page which has interesting and no so interesting comments about my home town.  Recently there was a post about a particular downtown building.  My father had a part time job cleaning the Elks Club which was on the top floor and it reminded me of a humorous story that my mother like to tell.  The short piece was also a bit personal, mentioned the long-ago death of my father and the passing of my mother a year ago on New Year's Eve.  The Norwegian side of my brain pulled back, suggesting that it was all too personal and people might say something.  My dad's side of my brain suggested just saying it with the humor, the loss, the reflection and the hope.  Someone will like it.  The Norwegian side lost out and I've had many, many positive comments, good reinforcement for my writing and on my life re-imagined.

Sleeping/Working...
Not going to a "job" has dramatically affected my daily schedule, eliminating the 6:00 AM alarm and the 10:30 PM schedule and now I seem to be following a much more natural day not only for sleeping but also for eating and drinking.  This will enhance the next major "work" endeavor.