shaking the dust off [oneself]

It’s a new year. What better time than now for a cliché self-reflective. Cliché or not, its something I need to do. The marking of a new year is just a milestone like any other. Its a blatant reminder that we need to take a moment pause look back where we’ve been, where we are, and make sure we’re headed where we want to go. I used to be move reflective (note the parallelism in reflecting on reflection..I hope that doesn’t break the space-time continuum) . Here it goes…

 

The Past

Social

I wanted to improve my social skills. Be more extroverted. This is something I’ve been working on since Dec ‘06. This goal is one of the main reasons I decided to pursue my MBA and even jumped on the social networking bandwagon. I even wrote a blog post back in April about it. I had a follow up post (a part 2) that sadly never made it out of draft.

I feel I’ve made really good progress on this front. Moving to DC was a great choice for me as a person. There is just an amazing abundance of social outings, gatherings and people to interact with.

Activities

I joined a kickball league to meet new people. It was a mixed experience. I didn’t end up making many friends from that, but it was absolutely surreal to be kicking a red rubber ball yards away from the Washington Monument. I blame the lack of friends mainly on the way the team was formed. We had 6 or 8 people (I forget) on our own and a sweet name (Kick Ballers), but that wasn’t enough for a full team. We ended up being placed with another group that had less people than us. That kind of killed moral for us as we lost our name and felt like it wasn’t our team. Part of that was just unlucky as the folks we were teamed up with. I might try it again next year if we have enough people for our own team.

I had good intentions on taking advantage of the DC meetup’s, but haven’t had time.  After kickball I thought it’d be fun to participate in a Ultimate Frisbee “league”. The one I found plays on Saturdays, which I’ve since devoted toward being in class.

Social Events

I’ve meet a bunch of really great people in my MBA Cohort. I’ve made it a point to attend all the related social outings. We just need to find some more social things to do together.

Online Social

I’ve tried to take advantage of online social tools. I could do better. I’m on Facebook, but I don’t interact much there. I mainly use it as an aggregation spot for all my various online social tools. That was somewhat a conscious decision, so its not all bad. I do use it to see what’s going on with people and so they can do the same with me. I use twitter. Its fun. I don’t interact like I should. I can’t say I’ve done much interaction with people on twitter. Its fair to say I use it similarly as Facebook.

Learning

Blogs

I certainly don’t read all the insane amount of blogs that I used to. At one time I was reading over 1,000 posts a day. Its one of those things that I had to let go of when time became constrained. I mainly just a handful read DC related blogs and get to the technical ones when I have a chance. I now get a fair amount of my news by following twitter related news sources.

Books

I did pretty good reading [non-technical] books.  I started keeping track of the books on GoodReads. My to-read list has grown and I should make some goals to keep reading.

Photography

I’ve done mediocre here. I’ve bought a couple books on exposure and aperture in hopes of becoming more proficient. I did take a couple photowalking trips and did upload some results flickr, but clearly I’d like to get better and do more. I don’t bring my camera around enough and I need to stop breaking it (my wide angle doesn’t focus like it should). 

Technical

As far as hard-core nerd learning outside of work, I’ve backed off quite a bit. I need to make sure my technical skills stay current. I have learned a great deal more about core networking as part of my new/current job, so I can say that I have done some learning this year. When the year started I had planned on developing some applications for my blackberry (like a really cool one for notifying you when you had to leave to catch the Metro), writing some cool apps in Silverlight or making some applications in SharePoint.

Experience

So far the most progress was made in the experience department. This is best in bulleted form.

Notable experiences

• Running past all the landmarks on the National Mall
• Random walking adventures through DC’s neighborhoods (Capital Hill, Adam’s Morgan, West End)
• Finding to dining places and experiences (sushi and Ethiopian food)
• Walking past the Whitehouse
• Traveling to NYC
• Caught a documentary at MoMA
• Morning run in Central Park
• My brother’s wedding in Maine
• Participating in the Great Lakes Relay
• Being in DC on election night
• Trips to Museums and such
  • National Aquarium in Baltimore
  • Museum of Natural History (a couple times)
  • National Gallery of Art

Health

Physical

I’ve been able to take good physical care of myself. (my WiiFit age is equal to my actual age). I love being able to run outside in the “winter”. Something I was not able to do (err. not willing to do back in Michigan). I ran the equivalent of a marathon in the Great Lakes Relay. I’m looking forward to doing that again next year as it was just a blast. I also ran my first 10K at the Marine Corps Marathon. I finished with a time of 41’05” (6’36”/mile pace) which ended up being 48th place overall (out of 5,000 registered runners)

Mental

I’ve seen the most improvement here. Not to talk ill of Michigan, but the environment there was very negative. That takes a toll on someone who tries to be positive.  I’ve noticed I just don’t dwell on the small stuff any more. I’ve learned to let go of things. Simply, that I cannot control everything. Or I suppose more accurately, you don’t need to control everything. I feel like I work just as much (or possible more) as I did in Michigan, but I get more done. Probably because I’m around people who are more positive and don’t look to block good ideas that aren’t their own.

I’ve been able to learn a lot from my brother and sister-in-law and their friends on openness and goodness. A trend I hope to continue.

 

I think that’s a fair recap on my progress for 2008. There’s been forward and backward progress. Some planned, some not. Next I just have to lay out the plan moving forward…The Future

being social.

Inspired the latest book I read, Linked, I few weeks ago [more like a month ago, after how long it took me to get this post written] I decided to take the plunge into the plethora of social sites/networks out there.

 

Facebook

About 6 months ago I started actually using Facebook as my first real foray into participating in social networks (treading slowly). The purpose of Facebook for me was introduce myself into the social, reestablish communication with people of present and past. One of the most enticing properties of Facebook is that it was built based on what I would term, identity realism. An alluring (and comforting) tenet of the Internet is the ability to exist in one of three ways; anonymous, alternate persona or self. Facebook compels people to participate with their self identity giving the network a sense of realness.

But lets face it, there’s a lot of problems with trying to portray the real you. Extending your personal self with previous mechanisms on the Internet it typically boring (i.e. “My cat’s breath smells like cat food”) or filtered to fit the identity they want to portray.

Facebook was able to create a social network of realness by creating mechanisms to document what people are doing, not just what they are saying. This allowed Facebook to become a content producer without requiring people produce content (which all gets neatly packed up into one’s personal news feed). Become a friend with someone, that action is content. Write a message on someone’s wall or tell the world what you’re doing through a status update, that’s content. Heck even dumb things like throw a zombie or fight the ninja/pirate battle, that’s content And its real. The open application developer platform allowed people to develop more apps (some less purposeful than other) to further contribute to content creation. And a lot of these apps allow you to bring content from other Internet sources into your Facebook profile, which helps further add to the content to your real. Facebook apps somewhat solve the problem of aggregating all these disparate social network and applications into a holistic unified “me” that is your identity realism.

 

Flickr

Shortly after feeling a level of comfortableness with Facebook, I decided to join Flickr.  As a hobby I started getting into Digital Photography a couple years ago.  As a present to myself (I forget for what) I picked up a Nikon D50. The challenge I outlaid for myself was to attempt capture the beauty in everyday things (I was mainly into macro photography at that time). Since then I’ve taken many pictures (very few, if any, that are any good) and they sat on my hard drive on my computer pretty much never looked at. Flickr gave my photos a chance to be seen (assuming that’s a good thing). Why Flickr and not some other photo hosting site? Flickr is a community of professional and amateur photographers. Its a place were these people go to view and contribute pictures. I’ve personally spent a good many hours just looking at the different photos people have taken and posted. As a way to learn and challenge myself to become a better [amateur] photographer. Although I’ve been posting pictures to my own Flickr page, the real value is participating in groups. Not just becoming members, but sharing photos with them. Flickr groups are the networking hubs. Groups are the way you increase the visibility of your photos. Accompanying the higher visibility is the increased responsibility of sharing quality. I find I’ll upload some pictures that are “okay”, but I try to only share the ones i really like with a group. being that I want to share more, I’m pressured to learn more and try and shoot better photos.

Additionally, Flickr has open APIs which you can use to write your own applications to interact with photos posted. Although I haven’t done any development yet, I really really want to (probably with silverlight).

 

WordPress

There’s a lot of information on the Internet for one to consume. But consuming isn’t a value adding activity. going back to the Linked, its the hubs that are the key pieces of any network. The way to become a hub is to produce content. As part of my personal goal of being more extroverted and creating a personal brand, i decided i should start blogging as a way to share things i know. A way to participate in the conversation (ala ClueTrain manifesto). At first I tried Microsoft’s Live Spaces. It was…not good. The look and feel was not good. I gave WordPress a try and I love it.  They have a lot of themes that look good and I can write posts to it using Windows Live Writer (which is just awesome in its own right)

So far, I’ve found the hardest part of blogging is the actual act of blogging. Its pretty time consuming. I think this is why a lot of the other social sites I’m using get more activity. Its a fine line between writing something so your participating and writing something to contribute value. At first I was annoyed at myself for “not blogging enough”. But I realized that if I’m not writing something that contributes something of value, its probably best that I’m not. There are a lot of things I’d like to share, but a blog isn’t necessarily the best way to share them (like re-posting links to other blog posts). The key to a blog isn’t just about writing things, but having it scoped to a particular topic (find a voice they say). Which is something I haven’t done well. You need to find a topic so you can build an audience. I need to work on that.

 

Twitter

I think one of the features of Facebook that everyone really honed in on is the status update. Short action statements about what your doing. The fact that all status messages start with “Steve is” and they give you a little text box forced people into having tiny quick updates. That’s basically what twitter does. You follow friends, post your own updates, they follow you. quick and easy. I can update from my phone (via text message or mobile browser), a web page or any of the plethora of apps that have been written using their open API.

I really like twitter because I’m able to capture and share what i’m doing, how i’m feeling quickly. I can go back and look at my “tweets” and really get a sense for how my days/weeks/months have been. So its sort of a nice way of keeping a journal or log of what’s going on without any real reflection.

Likewise its a great way to keep up to date with others. Its nice because it speeds up conversations and interactions with others when talking over other mediums. Instead of asking someone how their day was, i can see that they tweeted about being something and ask them about it. For example, a tweet of “stressed because of all the work I have to do”, I can ask them if they need any help or want a break.

www.twitter.com/geeksteve

 

Technorati Tags: twitter,facebook,wordpress,social networks