The good folks over at the Online Education Database ran a great list of lectures and commencement addresses that are sure to inspire.  My favorite, of course, is Randy Pausch’s famous Last Lecture and Steve Job’s Stanford commencement address is on there too, but there are some surprises on their list (like Conan O’Brien’s Harvard speech) as well that make it a worthy read.

Technorati Tags: inspriration

I have a cool aunt.  

If you don’t have one, I highly recommend seeking out some very cool older lady who knows a lot of stuff and start calling her your aunt even if she isn’t.  It’s just one of those things everybody needs, really.

Among the impressive things about my cool aunt (who really is my Dad’s sister) is that she made an unusual career change from thoroughbred horse trainer to self employed accountant and has been extremely successful at it.  When I doubt whether or not I can accomplish certain things, it’s one of the things I point to when I’m in a “If she can do THAT, then surely I can do what I’m trying to do” mode.

She recently found a nice list of how to deal with stress, whose original author isn’t clear that I wanted to share (some silly, some serious):
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Technorati Tags: stress management

I was watching MSNBC the other day when a guy came on whose job title was “NBC News Presidential Historian”. How cool is that? Then another guy came on who was their “Pop Culturist” I have title envy as I recently went from: 

“HP.com Chief Architect” 

to 

“Marketing and Internet Platform Solutions IT Portals and Applications Chief Architect” 

not because I changed jobs but because of a reorganization. 

So, I asked over at LinkedIn Answers: What’s the best or the worst job title you ever heard?
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Technorati Tags: job titles

Nate Silver has had quite a year.  Not only did he and his team at Baseball Prospectus correctly predict the Tampa Bay Rays would have a big year (they reached their first World Series), but on the side he launched a political prediction career that culminated when he correctly predicted the popular vote of the recent US Presidential election within four tenths of a percentage point.   He’s been working on a round of post-election analysis and had a rather heated exchange with a conservative pundit that he commented on a week before Thanksgiving:

There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with this assessment of political conservatives, read the quote again but replace the word “conservatives” with the word “engineers”.  That version I’ve found it is absolutely true.
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Technorati Tags: perspectives, persuasion

The nice folks over at Web Worker Daily were kind enough to let me share some ideas with their audience on the topic of multitasking during long phone meetings.  It begins:

As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

For the rest, head on over to WWD. 

Technorati Tags: meetings, web worker daily

If you can at all avoid it, you don’t want to have a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles moment. Sitting on a plane for hours at a time isn’t fun for anyone, but it can be much worse if you get into it with airport security. You never want to be the person who draws the angry stares as you hold up the line for 15 minutes while you get all your stuff in the little gray bins.

How can you expedite this process? Here are 3 tips:
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Technorati Tags: travel, wrinkles

Why would you need to translate from English to English when it’s the same language? Because in an international workforce, the de facto standard language might be English but that doesn’t mean that everybody is speaking the same English. Throw in a stressful situation and sometimes you need to call in an English to English translator to help determine what everybody is really trying to say versus what others think they are saying. There’s a subtle but important difference there.
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Technorati Tags: language, mediation, perspective

Last month’s Running Diary was about a team building exercise I really enjoyed because I thought it presented a group of people with a microcosm of the kinds of problems you see during a regular project schedule. I wondered what kinds of experiences other people may have similarly enjoyed, so I put the question to LinkedIn users:

What is the best team building you’ve seen done during an offsite, where your group is sequestered away from normal operations for a few days to focus on a particular task?

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Technorati Tags: linkedin, team building

Note: This article originally ran on October 25, 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

Sometimes, you get asked to do things for work at hours you don’t want to do them. Especially if you are working with an international work force, time zones occasionally necessitate that you be available when you’d usually have family time. Maybe it is as simple as a checkpoint meeting or perhaps it is as a pressure situation like tagging along with your boss’ boss to a high powered affair.

Regardless, there come times when you really can’t make such a meeting because you have something personal going on. How do you bow out of a work commitment for personal reasons?
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The nice folks over at DZone were kind enough to run an article I wrote today entitled “Five Reasons Software Developers Hate Software Architects“.  Here’s how it begins:

I remember it well.

In 2005, after twelve years as a developer and project lead inside HP IT, I agreed to a promotion that gave me the swanky sounding title of “HP.com Chief Architect”. I went to a friend of mine who I’d done a lot of both Java and .NET development with to tell him my good news, and what was his reaction? He immediately began to hum the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back and congratulated me on joining the software engineering dark side. “You’re one of them now,” he teased with a nod and a knowing smile.

For the rest, head on over to DZone.  If you like what you see, a bump using the Digg-like voting system they have over at DZone would be a huge help to get this seen by a wider audience.

Technorati Tags: architects, best practices, dzone