a map in my own mind

I am more than a bit wowed by technology and generally cool stuff. I love American Science and Surplus for so much stuff you never knew you needed.

In December, I visited Milwaukee on a corporate wife function. But first on MY agenda was a visit to SciPlus — in the snow!

[Thank you Jill, the talking GPS. Sometimes, not so affectionately, referred to as the “bitch in a box.”]

Oh, the things you can find there. And the fun you can have later with airport security when your suitcase is filled with rare earth magnets and blocks of aluminum. And that’s not even mentioning the Nun Chucks! It’s this great little plastic shooter that tosses little bitty nuns across the room!

But this morning I found a fabulous post over at Geeks are Sexy about

Johnny Lee, whose amazing Wii Remote hacks - which turn the $40 device into a digital whiteboard, multi-touch display, and 3-D viewer

Oh, I SO want one of these. Imagine how you could trash the competition who’s just using that nasty old PowerPoint!

And so it goes!

… but were we ever in the first place?

Twice in the last week, I’ve received a sorta automatic email from someone I’m pretty sure I don’t know asking me to change their contact information from some old unknown email address to a new one.

In each case, there has been a real name associated with the change. But I sure don’t recognize it.

I manage a bunch of websites and I write for several publications not to mention the times my address could appear in someone’s address book or contact list because I know someone they know and so we were on the same distribution list one time.

So while I certainly appreciate the world keeping me updated with where they are, do I really need to know it? Nope!

And really, isn’t one of biggest the reasons to change email addresses is because you were getting too much junk at the old address?

If I move, I’m not gonna share my new address with Publisher’s Clearing House. (Note to PCH: I just don’t believe you any more, I really don’t care if you find me ever again. No offense, but you’ve been telling me for more than 30 years that I “may have already won” and I never have! So please find someplace else to peddle your magazines!)

I sure AM gonna tell Rolling Stone. I want them to know where I am. We’ve got a life time subscription!

And if one day I need to find somebody I once corresponded with over the value of a particular drip irrigation system, I figure it’s my responsibility to keep up with that! It’s sure not that company’s responsibility to keep up with me — especially if I only wrote to them one time!

How many people can you actually keep up with? Seems like I read a study about that one time and maybe it was some number close to a couple dozen. (If you know, please shoot a comment thru!)

I just checked my list — for laughs. There are about 500 names in my current Eudora address book. That doesn’t count those in the master excel spread sheet of old contacts from another computer or the contacts in my current outlook list. That doesn’t count the single names that are really lists of names.

I also noticed as I went through, that I have no idea who some of those people are. So do I think they’ll care if they never hear from me again? Nope! I suppose I ought to spend some time deciding which of these addresses to keep and which to archive to that master spread sheet just in case. But that would take time I just don’t feel like spending right now. And I know that the longer I wait, the longer it will take to actually go through that list. But putting off for tomorrow always seems like the easy choice. I do think that backing up that list of contacts is an excellent idea! THAT I think I will do now.

You know, I’m thinking this could be the same kind of put-off exercise as backing up your computer files. But you do have a plan for that, right?

Back in the day, the size of your Rolodex was some sort of measure of your worth as a business person. But now, the list in the computer is invisible to the untrained eye.

So do me a favor, if you don’t really know me, or you don’t particularly want to either give me something, or ask for something, don’t bother telling me that you’ve moved.

Hey, if you think a person should care, ask yourself this question: “When was the last time you had contact with them?”

Friends, even acquaintances and business contacts, need some kind of attention from time to time if they are to be of any kind of use when you really do need them.

As the old song goes, “Reach out and touch me.” But if we’ve never met… then let’s have a formal introduction first.

Is this a rambling? Probably.
Thanks for reading.

Now that I’ve shared my 1/2 brain cell with half the western world, I just gotta ask… What’s the big deal about the mistaking an “r” for a “t”? (See yesterday’s stupid pet trick)

Genetic, generic… are they really so different?

OK, OK.. I’m sure my DNA string musta snapped someplace and I’ve totally embarrassed my parental units.

And for that I do apologize!

I just got a really short email. Maybe it really was spam. But it sure made me laugh. It came from a yahoo address that looked like a real guy, I mean no collection of letters and numbers that are clearly fake. The subject was Hello, which normally I don’t open. But sometimes I get a flash of ESP or something and I do. Here’s my reward for this morning:

I don’t need a life coach, but your picture shows a really lovely woman! Kudos to your folks’ genetic material.

Hey guys.. that picture? It’s me! It’s not very recent, but I still look pretty much just like that! I had a professional photographer take it because I wanted a good shot for this website and I wanted to control (to the best of my ability) the picture they run with my obituary… And no, I’m not planning on going any time soon. (Check out my article on the value of a good photograph here.)

And by the way, I don’t have “folks.” It’s just me here, doing the coaching and the marketing and everything else that needs to get done around a small business office. I have a lot of experience running a business, and sometimes, when I get in the flow, it seems pretty easy. But if there’s something going on in my business, it’s only because I am doing it.

Thanks for visiting.
Come back soon.

Sometimes the little things can surprise you!

We’ve got huge computer issues in my house. We’re O-soo-cutting-edge here. But our latest upgrade rendered my connection to the network printer just about nonexistent–painfully slow when it worked and sporadic in its choice of what it deemed worthily of ink.

So I decided, as a stop gap, I’d buy the cheapest littlest printer I could find. I could just put it on a table in my office and stop running up and down the steps to see if my print jobs happened. If they ever get the network set up right, then I could ditch the little printer and go back to the mother ship for quality.

I bought a little HP Deskjet F2120 — all-in-one printer, scanner, copier. I paid about $39 for it at Target. There was just one printer cheaper at $29 but that only came with the color ink cartridge and the black cartridge was another $15, so I picked the HP. In fact, I did not know about the all-in-one virtues, or the OCR or the double sided print capabilities. I just wanted little and cheap.

What a surprise! This little baby is F A S T .. much faster, at least in the black and white mode, than the fancy Cannon we run on the house system. I’m not sure how it will last. But as most of what I print is just to read, mark up and then toss, I’m thinking this could be a nice little addition to my office equipment.

Looking for a good flick? (And I’m not talking movie here. But rather an activity for flicking. See what I mean here.) Check out JacksonPollock.org
Move the mouse, click it.. and keep doing that.
Here’s what I got.
I think Jaspar Johns said, about art, (and oooo babies! .. I am sure I am butchering this quote)

First you do something and then you add something else and you keep doing that and pretty soon you have something.

Have fun! Oh, I know I did.

Tis the season for anxiety and stress..
And so be on the look out for signs of heart attacks in women.

Huh? What about the searing pain you ask?

If a person complains about intense pain in their chest, we seem to have learned to ask about deep pain or throbbing in one or both arms. I can never remember if it’s generally the left or right arm. So it’s best to check both. You might also ask about back pain, breathlessness, and clammy sweating.

But studies are showing–and women are saying–that the signs of heart attacks in women are just different from those in men.

Depending on which study you read, between 30% and 43% of women who had heart attacks did not experience any type of chest discomfort. But 95% of women did experience some collection of early warning symptoms–either daily or several times a week–for a month or more before having a heart attach.

According to an article called “Women’s Early Warning Symptoms of Acute Myocardial Infarction,” published in Circulation, by the American Heart Association, on line Nov 3, 2003 here, the most common early warning symptoms for women are:

And ain’t this the season for all of those!

They also mention

• general weakness
• cold sweat and
• dizziness

And the most interesting of the lesser named early warning symptoms were

• Vision change
• Cough
• Choking
• And a change in the taste of cigarettes!

When women did experience chest discomfort, they generally didn’t call it pain, but rather aching, tightness, or pressure. (Although, once upon a time I had a dentist who told me I was feeling pressure and not pain… so I’m pretty sure I’d equate pressure and pain!) They also call it sharpness, burning, fullness or tingling.

Clinicians need to include this longer list of descriptors when assessing women with suspected of having a heart attack or at risk for one rather than asking only about chest pain.

The study would not say whether the symptoms were predictive of an attach. But in my mind, it’s sure worth paying attention to. They also acknowledge that most of the women in the study were white, so they can’t be sure if ethnicity might make a difference.

Women often brush off these kinds of symptoms as sort of the cost of doing business as a woman, a mother, or a general over-achiever. But when you’re body keeps feeling just not right, pay attention! Don’t brush it off.

If you ain’t right.. you probably ain’t right!
I want you back here reading again next week!

In college I saw a Ziggy card whose sentiment has always stuck with me. It said:

Think of all the people in the world worse off than you…
There must be at least eight!

And then I stumbledupon this website that compares the earth to the
largest known star.

Man when you see how small the earth really is in comparison… Well, I gotta say that my problems truly are pretty insignificant.

How about yours?

I have been thinking about intuition lately. I have some decisions to make that aren’t life altering, but they are important. My intuition will play a big part in my process.

Once a man I knew fairly spit at me, “Your intuition has landed you on your feet for a long time, but you shouldn’t trust that it will always work!”

Uh? Why not?

It does work for me. And when it doesn’t I do have find a way to fix the mistake. (Yep, it does happen!)

However, I also like to think that if I make a decision I have considered at least some options. I like to think that I’ve made the right choice. (After all, who makes decisions, on purpose, and believes they are wrong?)

How can you tell that your intuition is giving you the straight scoop and not just reflecting some history or gossip or something else that’s really just getting in the way? What is it that makes me just know when something or someone is just right, or just isn’t quite right, or maybe more accurately, isn’t quite as it seems?

Dori Molitor wrote a piece called The Sensory Potential about using all five senses to connect with customers. The article published by The Hub click here. She said:

Intuition is a felt understanding that’s capable of sizing up a brand and judging whether it’s authentic, credible and worthy of our trust — all in the same millisecond. Many times, intuitive feelings seem contrary to reasoned logic, but more often than not they prove to be right. … Our intuition tells us, right away, whether we should trust a brand or not. And if you don’t earn your consumers’ trust, you have nothing!

Authentic is a word that coaches throw around a lot. And it’s one that just feels particularly INauthentic to me. But maybe real authenticity does matter in the recesses of my brain that are my intuition.

I depend on my intuition to make all kinds of decisions in my life, from whether I should fly or drive to a vacation in Vermont to whether this is the right plumber for me to whether these pants really do make me look fat.

It’s your intuition that tells you the red car will make you feel faster. It’s your intuition that tells you that a coach really will help you figure out how to make your life work better. It’s your intuition that tells you that I am – or am not – the right coach for you.

But you have to engage your intuition. You have to consider that that still small voice in side you really has learned something from all those years trapped in your head. Maybe you should let it out for a little exercise.

Call me.. see if I’m the right coach for you.

I just saw a post on the Poynter website about the awards given by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Texas Monthly Magazine is a real magazine and they won a prize for the best cover line: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face.”

I just love the joke of it!

I have done a fair amount of graphic work for my own marketing and advertising and for a few clients. I still do pretty much writing and editing for several publications, in particular, these days for the ADHD Coaches Organization. Sometimes I think of these kinds of headlines myself. But generally someone else tells me they’re inappropriate or I chicken out before I actually use them.

I admire Texas Monthly for having the stones to use this cover!

So what’s this got to do with me and Map the Future?
Coaching is all about the client and not about the coach… or what the coach might think is funny or not. It’s likely you’d never see this side of me in a coaching relationship.

So, while I think working with me should feel fun, or at least not onerous, sharing these little bits of my humor in my blog show more of me than you might see when we work together. I hope that you’re not offended by what I find humorous. But if you are, then maybe we’re not the best match. But if you feel like we might be on the same page because of my humor, that’s a good thing.

I noticed a definition of the word “wonk” on the MSSP Nexus Blog. In particular this post says it’s

“a student who spends much time studying and has little or no social life…”

I prefer the definition at Wordsmith.org:

“An expert who studies a subject or issue thoroughly and excessively.”

See, I wouldn’t mind being that latter kind of wonk, but the former kind with no social life.. Well, that’s just not so in my case.

One of the things I feel particularly wonkish about is bylaws. Yea, I know, it’s odd for sure. But I find them fascinating and I really enjoy the coaching opportunities I get when working with groups to figure out what their bylaws should say.

Check out my other website www.fixmybylaws.com

Sometimes I read something I mean to write about, and then it totally slips my mind — like this piece from Possibility Virus blog of Michael Bungay Stanier. It took me so long to get around to this gem that the original post doesn’t seem to be available any more. Good thing I copied the article he referenced.

Nikki Weiss wrote the piece called “Leadership Tips from my Dad.” You can read her whole article here. I was struck by this part:

“I wish she had the courtesy to treat me like a stranger.”

This leadership principle is so amazingly simple. It says: “If you don’t like me you can be indifferent to me, but mean is unacceptable.” I notice a fair amount of meanness in the workplace that takes the form of passive aggression. We’ve all seen it but maybe not put quite that same name to it: gossip, withholding or not fully sharing information, criticizing management, and not supporting colleagues.

If you wouldn’t even treat strangers like that — then that’s mean.

And that for me is the bottom line of respect. Why is it that we treat strangers better than we treat people we know? Sometimes even people we are supposed to love — like spouses or children.

In John Gottman’s book, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make Yours Last, he outlines the Four Horsemen of divorce — criticism, contempt, defensiveness and withdrawal. These are the behaviors that most likely to be evident in problematic relationships. And problems in relationships can feel a lot like mean.

I sure know when I see these behaviors in others. But catching it in myself might be more difficult. How do you keep yourself from sliding into mean? What can you do about it?

Finally, it’s beginning to feel like fall around here!
There’s just something about fall that makes it feel like the real beginning of the year. And here it is October…Does it seem like we’re already behind?

Even thought I’m long out of school and my kids are grown, this seems like the beginning of the planning season. And the next season to make plans for is really the end of the year..

OH.. So confusing.. But the bottom line?

Making plans is all about deciding. Making plans before you’re faced with a crisis gives you the greatest opportunities and options.

I know that sometimes having so many choices makes the decision harder. And if you wait til the last minute lots of options are no longer available, so the decision seems easier.… Hmmm, Is THAT why you procrastinate?

Here’s a story.

My husband and I went on a little vacation last week. He finally had the engine of his ’67 Sunbeam Alpine back together and a road trip seemed in order — a short one, all the driving had to be contained in a 100 mile circle within which AAA would tow us home if necessary.

As time approached, we didn’t seem certain we could go. We weren’t sure the car would be ready, so I put off the real reservations until just about a week before the trip. Let me tell you, trying to make reservations at bed and breakfasts on a fall weekend – with only a couple days notice – is pretty darn tough!

That delay definitely eliminated some options. And it did NOT make the planning easier!

So as we come up on the biggest planning time of the year, whether your thing is parties, banquets or vacations, start mapping it out now. You can eliminate some stress if all you do right now is put on your calendar the stuff you know you’re committed to: the office dinner dance, travel plans for Grandma’s at Thanksgiving and your, or your kids’, vacation schedules through the end of the year.

If planning is something that easily gets shoved to your personal back burner, a coach can help.

Call me (410.233.3274)
Email me (click here)
I can help you consider all the bits and pieces of your plans… before the very last minute. Let me help you make a map for the future.

P.S. If you’re still wondering if this sounds good to you, check out these stories in my blog.

• Deciding what to acquire
• How do you know when the decision is the right one?
• Or check out the archives of my posts about deciding in general. Click here

I love words that are used to describe something they weren’t meant to describe… but they make such a clear picture. I bet there’s a grammatical name for that, but I can’t think of it.

So for now, let me start this archive that I’ll call “Just what does that word mean?” with this reference I found over at Off The Record | Anonymous Real life tales from the tech trenches

He was what is commonly referred to as a “seagull” manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, then leave.

I’ve known people like that. Haven’t you?

P.S. If you think of other words that seem to fit in the category, please share ‘em in the comments below.
Thanks.

I’m working up to some over hauls to my website. I already have a “Special for ADHD” page which I hope is helpful for some people… You know who you are. But that’s not my whole target audience.

I also love working with business owners and technical types. So I’ve been toying with making a page specifically for each group: for business owners and for “engineers and geeks.”

Today, my engineer husband explained to me that I would offend both groups if I did. He says, “Engineer is a profession. Geek is a life style.” Further, engineers do not want to be called geeks which is somehow “less than” and geeks see engineers as old farts.

I don’t know if it’s true. But it’s an interesting predicament for me.

I see the best of both groups as people with lots of ideas, showing creativity in ways that would not necessarily impress a 7th grade art teacher. BUT it’s precisely their kind of creativity that gets bridges built, gets electricity to work in my iron (Ha! If I knew where it was!), gets this blog to work so simply that probably my mother, if she wanted to, could figure out how to comment on this.

Geeks didn’t really exist when my dad died in 1982. Nerds, yes. But they were different.

Here’s a story. My father played piano — methodically, not beautifully. You could recognize the tunes. But he was an engineer. And so his greatest pleasure was figuring out how to make a piano play itself.

This picture is of one of the plans he made for building a Wurlitzer snare drum beater. He’d borrow a part. Build two like it. Return the borrowed one. Keep the one he needed; one he’d sell. He’d also make up the plans and sell them. I found this set on eBay about 25 years after he died!

Now that’s creative!

That whole different way of seeing things fascinates me. And what fascinates me is what keeps me doing this coaching work with people I really like!

What do you think about this? Let me know.
Am I far off? Or is my husband? (Which, by the way, would make ME happier!)

Thanks again to the Poynter Organization for sharing the info about a new search tool.

“Omgili, a relatively new site that searches online discussions very effectively … scans millions of online discussions on more than 100,000 message boards and forums.”

What I like about this as opposed to a Google Alert, which returns results on the recently posted, is that Omgili scans — or crawls — forums and discussion groups.

Perhaps I’d get the same results from the Google groups scan, but my recent check for engineers and geeks seemed to turn up none of the same info in the top page or two of results.

It is with deep incredulity that my family talks about my college independent study in game theory. It was way cool, but pretty out of character given my deep dislike of games in general.

I am also terrible at video games. Maybe it’s an eye hand coordination problem but I couldn’t even make the Donkey Kong jump in the right places. I could, however, play Dr. Mario with complete disregard for everything else going on around me. Heck, I could even play that in my sleep. I’d watch those pills keep dropping for hours. (It is true: You shouldn’t play video games, even solitaire, right before bed. Keeps your brain fired up when it should be slowing down. Read a boring magazine instead!)

However, I am so tired of people, parents mostly, complaining that video games killed play time or that video games made a kid commit unspeakable violence. If your kids can’t tell the difference between video games and reality, then you have a much bigger problem than thinking the games are making him do it.

But I digress.

I was tickled to find that librarians are being encouraged to play video games or at least to acknowledge that people who do play video games view the help desk differently. InsideHigherEd.com is an online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. The June 25 article reported on the annual meeting of the American Library Association.

Ever watch a little kid with a new video game? Notice him furiously reading the directions first? Na.. didn’t think so.

“With video games, ‘you can play while you are inept,’” said James Paul Gee, the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul , You can poke around in a video game. Try the same things in different orders and get different results (Or, so I’ve heard). Gee also said there are “lowered consequences of failure.”

I remember my engineer husband’s frustration when my geek son first started tinkering with the insides of computers. “HE DIDN’T READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! He doesn’t understand circuit theory.”

Says the kid, “Don’t worry, Dad. They’re designed to only go in one way!”

On demand learning is a very powerful thing.

Maybe it really doesn’t matter if you know all the rules before you jump in. In fact, what if waiting until you have all the information just keeps you from getting started.

So start now; or start over. Click AA,BB, jump, jump in a different place, see what happens.

If there is no blood, you can always change your mind.

When I was growing up if food hit the ground, my mother just said, “You can eat that.”

When I was in college, back in the 70s, my engineer not-quiet-yet-husband first told me there was an actual rule about eating food that fell on the floor. He told me food was safe to be picked up from the floor and eaten a full SIX seconds after it fell!

I know other people who actually believe that food is safe up to a whole TEN seconds after it falls!

And now today I have learned that the five-second rule has, in fact, been scientifically proven. I read it first in Kevin Cowherd’s column in the Baltimore Sun today. I checked it out on The Connecticut College website where they reported that two smart women, Molly Goettsche and Nicole Moin, both cellular and molecular biology majors, took it upon themselves to prove the rule using apples (who would eat them after they fall on the floor), Skittles (which everyone knows actually DO last for ever) and agar plates (that’s real science!)

The results prove, Goettsche and Moin said, that you can wait at least 30 seconds to pick up wet foods and more than a minute to pick up dry foods before they become contaminated with bacteria.

They’ll be great mothers one day, I feel certain.

Whoever says that engineers and geeks don’t have a sense of humor is just nuts!

Richard Reardon over at his R&R Business Development Blog started talking about the difference between “wanting change” and “wanting to change.” That’s an interesting distinction.

He suggests that looking at what you have now is the place to look for clues to what you need.

I’m thinking that what I have now is not much help in deciding what to change. I have stuff and I have plans and that’s precisely what keeps me stuck where I am. Perhaps if YOU look at my stuff, YOU might get a clue about what I need. But it’s not your life.

But if I think I want to move to a new house that would indicate a specific change and a plan of action to be developed — lots of stuff has to go away from this house and lots of little things need to get fixed on a more immediate time table.

But if I didn’t know that moving was the change I had in mind, then no amount of looking at my stuff would give me the impetus to rent a dumpster.

So I’m thinking a different first clue is to ask what is it that you don’t want? Then look at the opposite of that and see if that is what you DO want — or if maybe it points at least in the right direction.

Personally, I need pencil and paper to figure out the opposites and that gives me a nice list in the end. And I love lists.

For so long I have hated Power Point presentations.
So many speakers making stupid stuff jump and fade and zip… just because they can. Too much attention to the process and not enough to the product. Reminds me of when I built my first website and my hobbiest webguy wanted things to blink… Just because he knew how to do it!

YUK!

Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, AU) reports on a study done at the University of NSW.. oooo, science. In part the paper says:

… the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

They also make a point for presenting students with problems including the answers — instead of asking students to figure them out for themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about that so I won’t comment on that for now. But I digress.

I originally caught up with the story at The Register (whose tag line I just love: biting the hand that feeds IT)

I was also glad to read comment after comment reminding the world that presentations are performances. It takes a certain kind of person to actually enjoy standing in front of a crowd and sharing information — not reciting it from memory, or from notes, or horror of horrors, from a prescripted page.

All this speaks to my current frustration with conferences looking for speakers. They want quality presentations but then they don’t include a way for the judges to hear the speaker or even to get references from people who have heard the speaker. (Hm, maybe speakers should ask for contact information of anyone in the audience who would be willing to say they heard you speak. That sure would be an easy way for people to give you a “tip” for your time.)

No matter how interesting the topic, a poor performer won’t teach much. But a speaker who is really engaged with his or her audience, someone who knows the subject and can make it real, doesn’t need much more than the illustrations on a blackboard, er, powerpoint slide to make the points.