Many years ago, Dave Packard noticed that his accounting staff had to put in overtime at the end of December in order to process all the necessary paperwork to close out the financials for the year and he didn’t think that was fair for them to have to give up family time in that way. So, he moved the start of the fiscal year to November 1 (moving it back to December 1 complicated Thanksgiving plans) and thus HP’s unusual financial quarter boundaries were born.

That’s a really long-winded way of saying I’m late when it comes to completing my mid-year accomplishments list, which I should have done in May but am only getting to now.

Why make a mid-year accomplishments list? Well, what did I do last November? Uh, off the top of my head I can’t remember. If I can’t remember that now I have no hope of remembering it in October just before my performance evaluation. Hence the need for a mid-year accomplishments list.
(more…)

Technorati Tags: accomplishments, performance evaluation

My 6 year old daughter is wrapping up her year in Kindergarten and it’s been a fun time. Volunteering at her school, however, is surprisingly competitive. There are only so many slots to help out in the classroom and they lock up so quickly that up until now all I was able to get into was a book fair. It turns out, though, that not every parent builds web sites for a living and that was particularly attractive to the school’s computer club, who I recently showed the basics of HTML editing.

If nothing else, the experience reminded me that it’s a good idea to get out of your regular work environment every once in awhile. It helps you see the world from a different perspective and, for me at least, let me appreciate the cool factor of my job I sometimes take for granted.
(more…)

Technorati Tags: computer club, elementary school, html editing, Running Diary

Of all the connections I’ve made since starting this blog, this one was the weirdest.

Back in January, I wrote an article on Web Worker Daily entitled “Get Mad But Don’t Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor” and a fellow HP employee invited me to appear on her internal podcast as a result. So, I made a connection on the inside by doing something on the outside. That’s still very strange to me.

In preparation for this interview, which focused on the soft skills topics I write about here, I listened to a few she had done before with a wide variety of executives from our printer division to get a sense for her questioning style. I wrote down a few bullet points I wanted to cover and then tried to forget about it for a couple weeks before we’d record the session. I worried about being too prepared and sounding stiff, instead wanting things to sound more natural and off the cuff.
(more…)

I have shocking news: Pizza attracts college students.

I know, you’re probably thinking that pizza and beer would do better, but I couldn’t exactly justify an alcohol expense for an official company visit to a college, now could I?
(more…)

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, which started yesterday and prompted an attempt to record the events real time, I got hosed. Two canceled flights caused what should have been an easy 4 hour trip from Portland to Cincinnati into an 18 hour ordeal of a lot of waiting. To top that off, I’d miss the Pop-Up Video version of the Lost Season 3 finale. I suppose that’s what Tivo is for.

Mostly, this turned into a recording of absurd observations, although I did score yesterday with my tactics to get access to ticket agents that I’m particularly proud of. Then again, I did spend 9 hours at the Portland airport yesterday so I can’t be that smart.
(more…)

I’m having a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles kind of day today. It is Wednesday, January 30 at 2:25p, PST as I type and I usually don’t go for stream of consciousness entries. Even my usual Running Diary’s are typically told in past tense and, truth be told, I write them after the events have transpired not as they are happening.

But today is different. Everybody has had a bad travel day and I’m having one right now. But with wireless access and 5 more hours to kill before my next flight, I thought I’d try to find some humor in this situation and share. This entry might end up sucking and it is admittedly more for me than it is for my faithful readers, but I’m guessing everybody can at least relate to what I’m going through today.
(more…)

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, I discussed how I hoped not to repeat a failed trade show presentation from 8 years ago and what the process was for my coworker Slawek and I went through to get our submission accepted was like. While contemplating how to pronounce “Slawek” (you say the “w” almost as a “v”, but not quite), you’ve likely been on pins and needles wondering how it all turned out.

Good thing for you, that’s exactly what this entry is about.

The actual presentation

Once at the conference, I borrowed an old trick I learned from high school football: case out the venue first. The first thing we used to do when we got off the bus at a road game was go walk around on the field. The idea is that you want to get a feel for the environment before you have to perform in it and there’s a ton of people starring at you.
(more…)

In 1999, when I did my first trade show presentation, the room I was given sat 150 people. Unfortunately for me, 138 of them were vacant. That wouldn’t have been so bad had I not worked with 6 of the people present, including my boss, my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss. It was a nice show of support, but it turned pretty embarrassing when one of the 6 strangers who showed up left half way through.

I swear, though, I had those other 5 entranced. Heck, one of them even asked a question and that’s 20% of my audience engaged enough to start a dialog. I’m sure that impressed the big bosses of mine in the room. Not.

It’s been awhile since that nightmarish debacle. This two part Running Diary tells the story recent presentation a colleague and I gave at a vendor trade show with my buddy Slawek (and who among you has a buddy named Slawek, I ask?). Here in Part 1, the genesis and creation of the presentation is covered and in Part 2 I’ll go over how the actual event panned out.
(more…)

We’ve all been there: you take some time off and you come back to an avalanche of email. As you may know, I recently went on my annual vacation (last time I mention it, I promise 8)) and when I came back I had 259 emails to read. This Running Diary tells gives a rundown of how I reduced it to zero in about three hours.

The Goal

Every time I do this, the goal is the same: figure out what’s important.

My biggest and constant fear in my work life is that somebody can’t get their job done because they are waiting on me for some decision or crucial piece of information. Be a roadblock too often and it’ll show on your performance evaluation in a bad, bad way. So, the key is to get down to what those things might be as quickly as possible.
(more…)

Originally, this was going to be a 2 part series on my experience writing an article for the Java developer community website The Server Side (TSS). But, enough happened in the week after the article went live that I thought it warranted a third entry. In Part 1, I went into how I got hooked up to write the article in the first place and some of the struggles I had in the first draft. Part 2 discussed the review process and how easy it is to get defensive when you get feedback on something, especially when you spent a lot of time on its initial creation.

Here, I’ll cover the aftermath. There was a lot of interaction after the article went live, some expected, some unexpected. A random list of what happened:
(more…)