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“I found out what my special purpose is for”


Steve-Martin-in-The-Jerk-006.jpg

I really suck at blogging. I tend to get distracted and move on to something else rather than stick with it and make it a habit. 

The past 6 months have been interesting. Last summer I left my job at BigDoor while we visited Seattle for a couple of months, after moving across the country the previous year for my wife’s new career. The distance wasn’t working for me – being the only remote person made me feel much less involved, and I certainly didn’t expect the culture to change just for me. And with some of my favorite people taking on new adventures at Tagboard (Go Tommy!) and TriggerMail (Go Fayez!), it felt like a good time to be honest with myself and move on.

I started spending more time at The Iron Yard in the coworking areas and events, but it’s tough to get to know people when you don’t really have a definition. Being an introvert doesn’t help. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t feel comfortable just walking up to people busy with their own concerns and striking up a conversation “Hey I’m not really sure what I’m interested in these days, but let’s get to know each other!” 

Regardless, I knew I needed to be a part of this community somehow. The energy and brains felt just like the big open TechStars Seattle space BigDoor used to share when we were all running around figuring shit out. I eventually annoyed Peter and Eric enough that they allowed me to pitch in and help. It’s been a few weeks now and I’m loving every minute of it. I love the personalities on this team and the big goals we are trying to accomplish. I love that I’m again in a position to continue learning and trying new things. It’s going to be an amazing year.

In other words, I’ve found my inspiration again in that combination of startup chaos and potential. Bring it on.

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trying out Medium

Last week I took a stab at writing something for Medium to see how the tool works and go through the process of publishing. I chose to write about my mom.

https://medium.com/human-parts/1e8791d78857

Overall, I love the simple way posts are handled. The blank page is easy to use and focuses only on your writing, not on fancy additional functions. Just write, write, write. 

Because it’s tied in to Twitter it’s very easy to see how these posts become an extension of that public persona. Rather than worry about traffic to your own blog, you post in Medium’s environment and the response essentially accrues to your Twitter identity. It also made it easier to focus on the message, rather than the potential traffic – no concern over the SEO aspects of the content. My intent was solely to get something off my chest regardless of traffic. 

And the flow was so smooth that now I’m already thinking of my next Medium post. 

 

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thinking about time

Lately I seem to be noticing timelines more often. I’ve seen that there are some really horrible timeline utilities used in various news articles, and lots of one-off graphic treatments when a certain event includes highlighted times to recreate a scene (think crime reporting). Of course there are also timeline apps that let you do project timelines for work, or historical timelines for education. Some open source scripts exist to help include time data in a web page, but there does not seem to be any easy to embed tool/service that has become a best practice in any way.

None of these options really seem to offer strong narrative design customization – all more attacking the complexity of managing sequential data rather than the output. And I don’t see anything that easily lets you bring in existing data from a verified source – is there not some central Wikipedia style time event API that lets you layer in verified (and filterable) historical data to integrate into your own views of time? Scenarios such as seeing what is going on in the world layered on your own family history, or for seeing what happened in the business news last month when your marketing numbers had some unexpected spikes. 

Going to keep thinking about this and try to determine if there’s anything really there worth pursuing…  

 

 

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moving too slowly

I moved to Greenville, SC over a year ago, but I haven’t really done much to start a new life for myself. Mostly I’ve focused on making sure my family is all set.

Now that my wife’s new job is going smoothly, and both kids are enjoying their schools and making friends, I feel like I can really start something new. 

But what should that be? I want to remain flexible: my wife is working toward tenure, so she needs support for teaching, publishing, travel, etc. And I want to be available to my kids for all their events. So really a new 9 to 5 job isn’t the answer. 

Now it’s time to make my own path. Lifestyle business I think they call it. So I am piecing together some contracting gigs and volunteering a bit, but I still hold on to a dream of starting something more substantial. I’m getting older and can make up plenty of excuses not to do something – but really none of those reasons matter. It’s time to just throw myself out there and do something.

So I decided to make this site to force me to do so. I’m too private – by opening up a bit more I hope to stop the excuses and just move forward.