High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I just had a lovely lunch with two former co-workers. (Sorta. I worked there for such a short period of time that we barely count as co-workers.) And it got me to thinking.

I think maybe Digital Dog is to the Nashville web industry what Kevin Bacon is to Hollywood.

The analogy only goes so far, because I've never heard that Kevin Bacon drives the people that work with him crazy. But just as when you play a "six degrees" game, you can always join movie people through Kevin Bacon, I doubt there's a web professional in Nashville who's more than a few degrees away from Digital Dog.

In fact, I think it should be a drinking game. Who's in?

In my day job life, I need Outlook. I live by Outlook. A few days ago, Outlook on my work laptop starting perpetually claiming to be "Disconnected" even when it had no good reason to claim that. As far as I could tell, though, none of my other apps were messed up.

So I took it to IT and asked for help, and it clearly had them stumped. For hours, the VP and director of IT worked on trying to get Outlook to behave normally. When I got my laptop back, Outlook worked, but a lot of other stuff was messed up. They'd performed some sort of broad-scale restore process that wiped out my system preferences, a good many installed applications (like Life Balance, which I use to manage my time and priorities), and all kinds of odds and ends like Firefox bookmarks and add-ons -- that sort of thing.

Believe me, I'm grateful that Outlook works again, but man, trying to get things back to some semblance of normalcy has been a real productivity killer and extremely frustrating. I don't even have a complete picture of what's not working -- I discover it as I go, like when I tried to sync my Treo just now and found out that all the Palm software was gone. Gah!

Again, I am grateful for what works -- I just wish I'd known there would be such far-reaching consequences to taking my laptop to IT. I would have backed everything up. I guess I'll know to do that next time.

Ah well. Back to the tedious process of restoring my programs.

The power just went out briefly at work. On a Friday at 4:20 PM, that means one thing: "early weekend!"

Well, it also meant that I ALMOST lost changes to some mockups I'd been working on. AGAIN. I made these same changes yesterday and then had to shut my force my laptop to shut down after it froze up, so I somehow lost those changes even though I'm sure I'd saved them - but the document was still open so it must have gotten horked.

And then I had just made the same changes again when the power went out. Luckily I'm on a laptop, so the battery was my backup power supply and I was able to save my work.

Maybe it's a sign that I'm not supposed to be redesigning this page.

And maybe I should heed that early weekend call after all.

Yeah. Sounds good. I'm out. Have a great weekend everybody!

I've been chastised by multiple people in multiple circles within the past week for not posting enough. I think about it a lot, but I never seem to make the time. Part of it is I feel like I'm scrambling to keep up with my work responsibilities, and part of it, if I'm honest, is a increased feeling of restriction on my posting since I started this job. Not that anyone has given me reason to think I need to do that... well, other than letting me know that people at work know about this journal/blog. But whatever. I know I have options. I could always use friends-only posts, but at this point a good deal of my friends and readers are outside of LiveJournal and I don't want to ignore them. I could adopt a different persona, set up a different blog, and talk freely about whatever I want, but I've always enjoyed being myself online. I could talk about things in a veiled way, but there are always those who know what's being described and who's who and all that. I could just throw caution to the wind and write whatever I want, but I'm not sure I'm up for that.

But I think the latter is closest to what I'm going to have to do. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, by way of update:

• I've been at the "new" job almost 3 months now and it's very cool but very demanding.


• I haven't really had time to think about songwriting since I started here, but I'm still holding out hope that that'll change.


• The staircase and front porch have been gone for several weeks now but we still don't have a new staircase yet, which looks really funny.


• My mom got elected to office at the local level last week. She's now a politician. That's weird.


• I was part of an amazing gathering of women bloggers over the weekend, and was very humbled to have been invited.

And by way of apologizing for my lack of recent activity, I give you a picture of a robin.



There. Isn't that better?

A former coworker just directed me to a picture he has up on flickr, and I noticed he had a bunch of coworker pictures -- he's always taking pictures, so he catches some interesting moments. So anyway, that got me exploring to see what other pics he had sitting around. I found two from October of last year that he took of me in the office (I kind of remember that, but clearly I was engrossed in conversation) and they made me do a double-take. People, I look SO pissed off in these pictures. And of course, I can't remember why. I mean I have a vague idea, because I remember some of what was going on at that time, but as far as what specifically made me so mad, I have no clue.



Dude. That is one humorless, pissed off chick.

Two lessons from that:

1 - As much as I loved the people at the former workplace (and I did -- and still do -- adore them to pieces), the day-to-day work stuff got pretty intense sometimes.

2 - Is my job really worth getting that upset about? You know what I mean? Because, as a passionate person with a solid work ethic, and because at the end of the day I really want to have contributed something worthwhile to a meaningful project, I sometimes get really caught up in the little dramas and minutiae of my work. But seriously, it's not like I'm curing cancer or defusing bombs. I could probably stand to take my work -- and myself -- a little more lightly.

You know. More like this.

Have you seen the news stories about Netflix having a flexible vacation policy? I've been seeing them everywhere for the last week or two, and have been avoiding reading them. Yesterday I finally read one, and I'm sorry I did because of quotes like this:

"I've never terminated a salaried employee for being tardy or being absent," [Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord] said. "There have been issues when people didn't come to work -- but the issue is the work, it's not the time off." [...]
"You're not measuring my daily hours, so why are you measuring the number of days I work?" [an employee] asked. [...]
And the culture allows the company to hire independent, creative types like Director of Product Management Todd Yellin, who spent much of his first several months on the job traveling to Los Angeles to complete work on an independent film.

Why does this bug me? This is exactly the way I've always managed. And I work hard and have always felt like I should be managed that way, too, when it can be arranged.

See, my tenure at Netflix was perfect posh and wonderful except for ( one thing )

###

In other news, I stayed home sick from work today. My body is horribly achy, I have miserable cold-like symptoms (a fever, a cough, head congestion), and I feel run-down and totally worn out. Both Karsten and my boss have stated their suspicions that it's a mind-body connection thing, which is probably true, but that doesn't help me feel any less physically miserable.

I had a bit of a ( breakdown last week )

It's funny how I sometimes think I'm so good, but I'm really just learning such basic things. Life has a funny way of smacking us down sometimes, doesn't it?

I've finished up with the music technology gig. I was thinking about staying on in a full-time permanent job, but decided against it.

I now have a job lined up at an e-commerce company in Cool Springs (any local tech people reading this probably already know the company in question by that description, but I'm opting for search engine anonymity) and I start Monday. Some of my friends probably remember me talking about this company back in October when I was first approached for the job. It's been a long road to making this decision, but now I'm psyched about getting back into e-commerce directly, and dealing with fun concepts again like navigation, conversion, web analytics, etc.

I'm not psyched about the long commute to shopping mall central. I plan for me and Karsten to test-drive a Prius and maybe some of 2007's other hybrid models, and if we take the plunge on that, it'll definitely be an extra expense we don't really need, but I'd just feel much less bad about the environmental impact of the commute that way.

So now I'm spending the day with a big stack o' library books refreshing my mind on e-commerce concepts and getting ready to hit the ground running on Monday.

Heck, I don't even know yet what the zip code there is to use for my location tag. So much to do!

I'm a relatively organized, efficient person, but I can definitely stand to improve. So a few days into 2007 I thought I'd take a closer look at the whole "Getting Things Done" methodology, and revisit Life Balance from Llamagraphics. GTD is practically a cult, and I'm not interested in going overboard with it, but there's certainly some sound project management and time management wisdom there. But the real kicker is that, in the week or so I've been using Life Balance, I've been having amazing improvements in my productivity.

I tried Life Balance once before, a few years ago. I remember liking it somewhat, but thinking it a bit heavy and clunky for what I felt I needed at the time. Too bad, because if I'd invested the time and effort to learn it then, I'd probably be a billionaire today. OK, maybe not. But I almost surely would've been more effective at both my day job and my songwriting "job," not to mention the other areas I pay attention to.

See, here's the thing. You know the big rocks analogy? That's basically the way Life Balance can work. You set it up with your high-level goals and then iterate them into achievable tasks, which you cross-reference with "places" or contexts. And behind the scenes, the software is keeping track of the importance you assigned to each task and the lead time you specified in order to present you with a viable dynamic to do list. It also presents you with a dynamic picture of how well you're meeting your balance goals by showing you a nifty pie chart of where you're spending your time.

Anyway, I'm using it now and I love it. It's expensive as hell, but I'm thinking I really am going to plunk down the money when the trial is up. Here's my testimonial: this past week and a half at my day job has been incredibly crazy, and I've had to manage my already-full task list and add a whole bunch of extra stuff that just came up. Yet somehow I managed to get it all done AND get songs written and pitched AND keep up with household chores AND make progress on my organization projects around the house AND maintain a reasonable social life. I mean, maybe that doesn't sound like as much as it is: we're talking about insane levels of productivity here. I just don't know if it would have been feasible without using Life Balance to keep me focused on what needed doing next.

I don't know if that makes me sound like a cult member, but whatever. I'm pretty well convinced. I'm getting things crossed off my to do list that have languished there for months, without sacrificing timely response to the current stuff.

It's the last day of November, in case you hadn't noticed, and that means all November writing projects are pretty much at their end. In my case, that signals the end of my 30-songs-in-30-days "NaSoWriMo" challenge, which I have once again failed to complete. But I don't really care. All I'm really shooting for when I set about to do these things is to make myself write fast and get some ideas down, and I did do that.

I managed to draft 13 songs. I can't say I really finished even one. But that's OK. Because this was also a crazy-ass month. At work, we had a major scramble with a deadline of 11/30 (yep, that, too, is today!), and my weekly average number of hours shot way up. I've also been sick twice this month, including right now, which is why I'm not expecting to be able to churn out any more than I already have before tomorrow. And my current tummy troubles have me in a really bad mood and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on anything. So yeah, not the best conditions for creative writing.

So it's over, and the count is 13 songs in 30 days, sort of. There might even be a few ideas worth going back and polishing up, which is a bonus because I was really just thinking of this as an exercise. Maybe I'll try the challenge again in a few months when it's not looking to be a crazy month at the day job and I've loaded up on multivitamins and echinacea.

In the meantime, the month of December is usually a wash for songwriting. Too many weekend activities, too much commotion, not even time to sit idly with my laptop, my guitar, and a cup of coffee and mull over an idea until I find just the right thing to say. So this is probably pretty much it until January. But I'm pretty satisfied with where things stand, so I'll be happy to take a break and then get back into it come the new year.

Hope everyone else who participated in a writing challenge this month got something good out of it!

• I got a flu shot today, and almost immediately began experiencing a strong metallic taste in my mouth. Within twenty minutes, I began to feel woozy. The nurse who administered the shot said she'd never heard of the metallic taste side effect, but advised me to eat and drink something. I did, but both symptoms have continued throughout the day. Only after getting the shot (and starting to experience my weird symptoms) did I have a conversation with a coworker who told me what she knew about the suspected hazards of flu shots (with mercury looking more and more like the culprit for my metallic taste), and now I really wish I hadn't gotten that damn shot.
  
  
• Work is pretty hectic right now, and looks as if it will continue to be hectic for the rest of the month. Can't really talk about it, but hey! Great timing for NaSoWriMo, right?
  
  
• But Rummy is out and Webb is in, so Democrats appear to have the Senate, and we can all wish Donald a fond farewell. That's at least a halfway decent consolation prize for the shock and frustration that was the landslide passage of Amendment 1 in Tennessee.
  

Update: Just adding a link, for my future reference, to the entry I went back and found from three years ago when I got a flu shot and also described my state as "woozy." So... I'm thinking this'll be my last flu shot.

So if you love me, you noticed I was offline for about a week. Lie and tell me you love me, dammit.

On Thursday, my employer took us on an overnight retreat to a cabin on a lake in Alabama. We did some "strategizing" and then got really, really drunk.

On Friday, one of my coworkers and I decided to stay an extra night at the cabin and get our respective spouses to come down and stay with us. It was great fun for all five of us: Karsten, me, the other couple, and their parrot. Their parrot, in fact, may have had more fun than anyone. He even developed a crush on me, I'm afraid.

Good thing he didn't see me on Saturday night in my cat costume.

Oh yeah, so we got back on Saturday just in time for several Halloween parties, which we graced with our costumed presence. You already know my costume -- here was Karsten's:



He was a hillbilly hockey player, or something like that. The ballcap he's wearing says "Country Western Hockey Tournament" and he found it at a thrift store. It's real! You can't make shit like that up. His hockey stick is homemade, and it says "Puckfucker 1000" down the handle. The mullet wig, however, makes the costume, in my opinion.

Oh, and that's my coworker Jim grabbing Karsten to keep him from escaping the camera. Jim was a futuristic gay spaceman from the 1950s, or something like that. (Not that Jim is gay, really -- only the tight silver gym-queen shirt he wore under his spaceman suit was gay.) He wore a suit covered in duct tape; pretty classic.

Some other costumes seen: witch, devil, zombie vampire, cheerleader, French maid, King Kong & blonde, pirate... oh, and Japanese anime characters. LOVEd that.

Hope everyone's been doing well... and missing me. Lie and tell me you missed me, dammit!

Did you know there's a radio format called "Hurban"? Hispanic Urban. Hurban.

I love that word.

So it's decided: I'm staying on at my job. Maybe you didn't know I was debating this, but yessir, it's a big part of why I haven't been writing much lately: because so much of what I wanted to write was somehow linked to the decision and I didn't want to talk about it openly.

But anyway, I had a really nice offer at a really nice company and I took it very seriously indeed, but several key people at my current employer made really nice gestures to convince me to stay and so I did.

Now that that's all done, I can get back to obsessing about other things, like Oktoberfest and getting the house ready for all the people who are going to be there. Yikes!

There are two major topics I need to cover: the new job and the recent vacation. Regarding the vacation, I had every intention of writing up a long, detailed trip report for my archival purposes, but, well, the new job made that impractical.

So, the job in a nutshell: I started this past Thursday. I'm doing business analysis with a music technology company. More than that I should probably be slow to divulge -- after all, I had to sign fifty gazillion non-disclosure agreements. (Besides, who doesn't like to tease?) The important thing is that the problems I've learned about thus far are relatively comparable to some of the problems I helped solve at Netflix, and it's fun to be dealing with issues like that again. And about music!

So yay for the new job! It's only the end of day three, but so far, it's looking good.

As for the trip: it was just what we needed. Getting to see knekkebjoern and his wonderful woman after so long an absence was fantastic. They were gracious hosts, even though we kept them up ridiculously late night after night with excited-to-see-you-again conversation. We stayed with them in their spiffy new house for three days and then headed down to Santa Cruz for another two days. At that point, we got to hang out with another pair of friends we'd been missing very much, and it was wonderful to see them, too.

There was much questioning of when we'd be moving back, and it's official: as soon as we've written enough number one songs to pay for a house on West Cliff Drive, we are so there.

A longer post is underway. I've started my new job, and I'm also trying to catch up a bit from the trip. But I have plenty to say about the trip, and a fair share to say about the new job. The sneak preview version is this: the vacation was fantastic, and the new job looks really great after the second day.

More later.

In talking about publishing content on the web, Rex Hammock quotes zefrank saying

A wise man once said (okay, it was zefrank and he said it yesterday) "Someone who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who (hasn't done something because it isn't perfect and is) still dreaming of all the applause." He calls these unattempted ideas "brain crack" that people get addicted to and then sings a song with the F-word in its title to illustrate his point. In other words, it's not for everyone.

First of all, part of the value in writing this is keeping a link to that episode of the show, because it rocks. As a songwriter, "where the fuck do ideas come from?" is easily one of the most pertinent questions I could ever ask.

But I'm also writing this to mention the comment I left in Rex's blog, saying

I've been musing on this myself the past few days, having just the other day had a job interview where I spontaneously came up with this chestnut: "If you can't look back on stuff you did a year ago and see mistakes, that was probably a wasted year." (Incidentally, I got the job.)

Which is my way, I guess, of letting you all know: I have a new job. I start next week. More details later after I sign the relevant paperwork.

I guess I haven't announced it publicly, but I'm leaving my position at HCA within the next few weeks (Friday the 13th is my last day). There are many reasons, some more benign than others, but as I just explained in an email to a contact, a big part of my decision is "a cumulative effect of the intranet product reaching a point where my contributions here are less unique and, hence, less rewarding, as well as the loss of my father earlier this year leading me to wish for a new challenge."

That new challenge, for the moment, is figuring out what to do next. Part of what I want to do is spend more time at home working on songwriting. Going back to contracting for my old agency is, therefore, one possibility, and one I've been exploring. On the other hand, I don't really feel like Karsten and I are in the ideal financial position for that kind of flexibility, and I'd feel more secure with a steady income for maybe another year or two. So I've also been exploring other full-time staff positions.

In order to do so, I've been contacting some of the people who've known me in this capacity, and it's a very reassuring process. I knew that I'd done good work in the past, but lately my confidence has been shaken by all the time off I've had due to my father's illness and death, and the lack of focus I've had since getting back to work. But I must have established good relationships with people, because quite a few are coming through with leads and possibilities. Not solid openings, per se, but ideas that could turn into some really good career moves.

So although this was initially a difficult decision to make, I am increasingly excited and optimistic about what the future holds.

And what a perfect way to finish this madcap rollercoaster year.

[Edited to add: a link to my resume, for anyone who might want to point me in any good directions.]

It isn't easy being back at work, that's for sure. It doesn't help that things around here are kind of nutty what with problems that have arisen since the latest software release in mid-October, so there's a whole damage-control element to the work I got back just in time to do.

Still, it's distracting, and sometimes that helps. But other times, I just want to curl up into a ball in a corner and cry and miss my daddy.

My mom has made her plans to come visit Nashville at Christmastime. She's traveling on my dad's birthday (December 21st) and will arrive that evening, so she'll be here for my birthday (the 23rd), as well as the 22nd, when we always used to celebrate both my dad's and my birthdays together. I imagine that's going to be tough for both my mom and me, so I'm glad we'll be together. And then she's staying through the 27th or 28th, I can't remember which. Still not sure if my sister and her kids are coming down -- they've been invited, but I don't know if they'll be able to swing it. And I think my brother and his wife are stuck working around Christmas, so they can't get away.

Anyway, that's that. I'm glad we have plans. Christmastime is going to be hard. I don't even care that much about Christmas, but because of the timing of our birthdays, I associate the whole season so much with my dad; it's just going to hurt like hell.

I can't decide if I should have a birthday party (or rather, get Karsten to throw me a birthday party) to help distract me or if I'll just be miserable. Guess I'll wait and see how I feel in the next few weeks before I make up my mind.

I feel very disconnected with LJ and email lately -- I've barely been able to keep up. I apologize to everyone for not reading enough to know what's going on in your lives. I'll catch up soon, I'm sure.

In the meantime, work is tough -- two of my colleagues and my boss are all on vacation this week, we have a new director (the former Boss's Boss and the new director were assigned to a permanent job swap, with very interesting results for our team), my project manager is getting ready to go on a month-long vacation, we have interns coming in who need to be ramped up and made productive, and a big governance issue that's very stressful as it requires me to be the bad cop.

But I have a new Treo 650, and I love it! And the cats are settled into the house, and Karsten is very kindly finishing up the move from the apartment to the house without my help. There's only a little bit left over there, mostly books and artwork, and he will probably have it all here by the end of today and the place cleaned by the end of tomorrow. And then we're DONE with that apartment, thank the gods.

The house is coming along. I took some quick pictures this morning [edited] and they're on flickr with a few descriptive comments if anyone wants to see them.

There's more to say, but I'm too tired to get into any details about any of it. Maybe more later, if time permits.

It has been brought to my attention by multiple people that I haven't been posting. Thank you, multiple people, for missing me. :-)

I've been trying to keep focused on work while I'm at work, and to stay productive when I'm at home. One of my goals this year was to cut down on LJ and email use, after all, and I'm doing it. I set up a series of filtered friends lists that capture varying degrees of keeping up: the narrowest includes just a few close friends about whom I always want to know the latest. And the rest are increasingly broad. When I find myself with a little bit of time, I hit the personal friends list and read up. I try to comment, if I have enough time. If I have more time, I'll hit the next broadest list, and so on. It seems to be working. I just haven't been good so far at keeping my own journal updated within the pinched time constraints.

Anyway, ( here's what's going on in my offline world )