It’s official. I’m an old man. Our daughter, Dora Lynn Colin, was born three+ weeks ago, on March 18th. She was much bigger than expected, weighing 8lbs6oz and 21 inches long. She is a healthy baby. She eats, sleeps, and poops, which is all that we had hoped for.
Are you getting much sleep?
No
How is she?
Good. Very cute. I could look at her all day long.
Do you have pictures?
Of course. Here Here Here And here
How is Mom?
She’s enjoying being a mom. And looking forward to getting her arm cast off in a week.
Has your life changed?
Like you couldn’t imagine.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about “effective habits” or other sort of self-help blather. But I was recently tipped to Bob Lewis’ advice column on InfoWorld. He writes about topics that normally turn me off in a way that is provocative and engaging.
I was adding his feed to Thunderbird today, and I ran across an old item on leadership and praise. Good leaders know how to deliver effective praise. Above all, it is specific and timely. It is easy to give. There’s no cost. It doesn’t require bureaucratic approval or signatures. However, praise is often done wrong or so lamely that it becomes demotivating. That’s a great point. There’s nothing less gratifying than the gratuitous thank you. And sometimes it’s more motivating to hear nothing at all.
The best coaches/supervisors I can remember had a knack for delivering effective praise. For those without the gift, it’s a good thing to practice. You’re always willing to do better work when it’s recognized by good people.
[UPDATE] Reading along further, I found out that Bob Lewis is a fellow Minnesotan! Nothing better to do on a snowy week like this than write in our blogs!
Tags: Workplace
In the past week or so, I’ve come as close to a heavy rotation on my iPod as I ever will. I discovered this outstanding podcast, Positively 10th Street. It’s done by a family in NYC: two parents and three kids ages 9-14. Lot’s of talk about raising kids and getting along as a family and tons of great music.
The most beautiful thing about the format is that if you’re bored by the family talk or any of the songs, you can FF through it and just listen to the music. (Did I mention the music is outstanding?)
Anyway, I was listening to the 7/29/05 podcast and GothamGal lays into the music industry and cites Semisonic as an example of what’s wrong with music. She plays Closing Time, and then says,
“That’s one of those songs that you can download on itunes and you can put it in your mix batch because you would never in a million years listen to the rest of the songs on the cd.”
One of the things that I like about this podcast is that it has re-ignited my love of new music. So often, I get a bad taste of a band because the only tracks I hear from them are the one or two that I hear on the radio when in fact. Prime examples of this are Coldplay, Jack Johnson, and David Gray. But the fact is, there are a lot of outstanding tracks behind the “one hit” of these wonders. This podcast has opened my ears to these “deeper tracks.”
This is of course one of the problems with iTunes. People are inclined to buy the one-hit off the CD and then are never exposed to rest of the music. In some cases, the depth and quality of their other music is what got the artists signed in the first place.
Semisonic was truly a great band. Their first three albums: the Pleasure EP, The Great Divide, and Feeling Strangely Fine, were deep solid albums. They blended dreamy mystical songs with some driving rock/funk numbers in their albums. Some of the wordplay in the lyrics were unique and inspiring. And the live shows — the ones that I was on-time for, sorry again guys — tied together great music with witty stories and chat.
Semisonic is far from a one-hit wonder. Their influence on other music continues today. The new Mike Doughty CD, Haughty Melodic is getting rave reviews from many outlets, including Positively 10th Street here, here, and here. The producer is Minneapolis’ own Dan Wilson.
Tags: Music
For those who just like to collect data, here are some ways to use Excel in your daily life. I personally like the idea of using Excel to track grocery costs. Maybe rather than tracking everything, it would be useful to track prices that fluctuate or that there are often specials on that mask the true “price” of a product. (Does anybody buy yogurt when it’s not on “sale”?) It would also be interesting to compare products head-to-head with so-called “wholesale” store prices.
Besides work, I use Excel for quick-and-dirty calculators. Right now, we’re researching our options for dropping our PMI insurance from our mortgage. So, I created a workbook that looks at two variables: appraised value of our home and amount of lump sum payment. I have also set up two targets of equity-to-value: 20% and 25%. I’ve also created a column that expresses the lump-sum in terms of how many months of PMI that equates to. I should add a column that expresses how many months each lump sum would knock off the re-payment of our mortgage.
Joel says: I just learned that my company is being granted two patents – with my name on them.
Shane says: whoa, cool
Shane says: for what?
Joel says: Hell if I know.
Joel says: I couldn’t even comprehend the patent applications. All this tells me is that if you make your application long and confusing enough, and you have a very persistent patent attorney, eventually the patent office will give up and grant your patent.
Shane says: LOL
Joel says: I think we can now sue anyone who uses “scrolling”.
Tags: Workplace
Actually, I’m not at the office, but I am doing what I would consider “work” today. I’m at the TDWI World Conference in Orlando.
Today I attended Stephen Brobst’s class on “Designing a High Performance Data Warehouse”. While the course came highly recommended, I was somewhat skeptical going in that, being software agnostic, it would be too theoretical to really put to use. But I was astounded by how much content was in this course.
We reviewed:
- Join Strategies
- Indexing Strategies
- Database Parallelism
- Partitioning Strategies
- OLAP & Aggregation
There was a whole lot of stuff in between. I’m going to need to bone up on employing partitions and parallelism both in the databases (Oracle and SQL Server) and in our ETL tools (Informatica and eventually SSIS). There is a lot that can be done architecturally that could help our processes scale. He had a particularly good illustration Amdahl’s Law, demonstrating the benefits of parallelism, that I will need to draw out and put up here. The point being that many processes need to be run sequentially, but you get a huge boost out of finding ones that can run in parallel and doing so.
I will hopefully have more details later, but I need to run to a session that Informatica is putting on. I will probably be coding tonight. Put some of this creative energy to work.
I think Microsoft may have a winner here.
Tags: WIMP