Romance goes to the dogs

Since Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and I’m on a bit of a dog roll, here’s something from those clever folks at Subaru. Or at least those clever folks at Subaru’s advertising agency.

It’s got just the right mixture of suburban ennui and wistfulness.

Although I’m thinking that that poodle is way too much car for our golden retriever.

Out of chaos

As follow-up to my post on de-cluttering, I’ve got a couple of things for you.

I realized that, while I find the chaos of clutter really, really disturbing (almost literally unsettling, as though I’m in a swamp with no solid ground), it occurred to me that clutter actually serves a purpose.

Because when something is all covered up by mess, and you literally can’t see it, then you don’t have to deal with it. I’m not saying that not “dealing with it” doesn’t have consequences, or that that hidden thing can’t reach out and strike like a snake just because you won’t lift the cover of a few (inches of) papers off it.

But once I have it in full view, I just can’t winkle it back into oblivion. I have to take action, because I can’t pretend it’s gone the way I can pretend it’s hidden.

So, while de-cluttering is really a good feeling, it’s not one long E-ticket ride, nothing but yippees, let me tell you.

I was telling my BFF about my clearing wheeze, especially getting my kitchen counter back; she sounded a little envious. “You’re lucky that you’re not living with a male. Because as soon as you clear a surface, he comes along and thinks, ‘Hey—countertop. Let me put these things right here!’”

I know what she means. But in the spirit of full disclosure I replied, “Yeah—but I can clutter for Cal. It’s in my genetic structure.” I do not like to think what this place would be like if I had to contend with that. But maybe the Santa Clara County Jail has good food? And whatever space you have while awaiting your manslaughter trial probably doesn’t include the opportunity to import stuff to leave lying about. So it’s not all downside.

But on another note, I got an excellent idea for motivating the ongoing de-clutter project from my friend Hanne, which I share with you for free, because it is elegant in its simplicity and ferocious in its effectiveness:

“Pouring a glass of your favorite spirits while you are going through piles, helps. When I tried to get my home office organized I bought a bottle of Grey Goose, and I was only allowed to have a drink out af that bottle is I put in an hour doing Office-organization LOL. It works.”

You’re welcome.

Paws de deux

Oh, the things you pick up on the Interwebs.

Apparently there’s freestyle dog dancing, and… Well, just watch Sandra Roth and her Australian shepherd, Lizzy, from their performance at the Open European Championships in Heelwork to Music and Freestyle 2014, last November.

Yes, one of those early moves is an arabesque.

Frankly, I wonder about Roth’s hairstyle (or is that some sort of hat-like object?), but there’s no getting around how much you find yourself grinning at the two of them together.

Better than Fred and Ginger.

Foot in mouth

If you live anywhere there is any type of media, you’ll no doubt have heard of the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, whose career has crashed and burned through self-inflicted RPG fire.

In case you haven’t heard, Williams claimed he was in a helicopter that was shot down by RPG fire while covering the war in Iraq in 2003. As it turns out, this was completely a figment of his imagination—the chopper he was flying in during that incident may or may not have taken small arms fire, but it was not shot down. He might in fact have arrived on the scene up to an hour after a chopper was taken out by an RPG; it’s hard to know at this point.

It’s not clear to me when Williams started telling this particular story, but he’s repeated it over the course of years, and it seems like in every telling the danger to his person magnifies. It’s mildly interesting to me that a man who makes his living by reporting news, and who ought to be aware of how easily such fabrications can burn and crash once a spark ignites the surface (think Hindenburg here) would walk on this particular wild side. But Williams told the porky, and because he got away with it, he kept on telling it.

The story broke last week, and as of this writing, Williams has apologized and, when that didn’t stem the tide, he announced he’s taking a “hiatus” from his anchor duties. He may be trying to find a cave somewhere that has no Internet connectivity and no cell reception.

But that’s not why I’m here today. No, I’m here because the Twitterverse just went to town on Williams, just as it did on Nicolas Sarkosy horning in on the A-list participants in the unity march against Islamist terrorists in Paris, and on that Fox News self-proclaimed “terror expert” who assured us that no non-Muslim dares to enter the UK’s second-largest city, Birmingham. The hashtags #BrianWilliamsMemories and #BrianWilliamsMisremembers were trending like the Left Shark at Superbowl.

Viz:

Everyone with Photoshop gave Williams just that little bit more of a hold on immortality. 

Helping OJ:

Hanging with JC:

Advising Macarthur:

Or just:

And, in fact, his combat experience predates even WWII:

But you didn't need graphics software to get in on the fun:

But then there were the corrections:

And these are only representative of the Twitter tsunami that has swept the planet several times since late last week.

This is one of the things I really love about social media: while pols and pundits flap their hands about and bemoan this and that, the Twitterati just get stuck in, skewering the perps. It—alongside Death—is truly the Great Leveler.

As for Williams, he gives new meaning to the expression "shooting yourself in the foot".

Gratitude Monday: Addressing chaos

Today I am grateful for space. As in, uncluttered space. Meaning, space that I have made a conscious and concerted effort to de-clutter. Space that is now clean and beautifully empty, waiting for me to do anything (or even nothing) with it.

My problem is that I have a tendency to just dump things. Well, by “have a tendency”, I mean “always”. Yet I hate clutter; it not only gets on my nerves, it makes me feel constricted and out of control at the same time. I spend way more time looking for things than is rational, which makes me feel like I can never quite get to doing whatever needs doing.

Well, a few weeks ago, a woman named Kathleen Ronald was the guest speaker at one of my meetups. Her topic was “De-clutter Your Way to a New Job!” To be honest, that sounded just the teensiest bit of a stretch to me, but she had me at “de-clutter”, so I went.

There was indeed some woo-woo involved (“Each mess is a lock on the gate that keeps abundance away.”) But this one resonated: “Open up space and something new can come in.”

Ronald spoke of getting out of the “just-in-case” mindset. You know, the “well, I might need this for some unspecified activity at some unknown time in the future so I’d better hang onto it” line of thought. Which is also the road to clutter.

She had us list all the areas in our physical environment that could use a good clear-out: closets, garage, office, bedroom, kitchen. And then she suggested some ones we hadn’t thought of—like the car; that alone would take me half a day.

She gave us some guidelines: get rid of things you don’t use or love, things that are untidy or disorganized, too many things in too small a space, anything unfinished. (Think about that last one for a minute; how much could you chuck using that criterion?) And then the usual advice: divide it, like all Gaul, into three parts: one to ditch, one to keep, one to give away.

But the true game changer for me was: “Every thing has an address. Your hairbrush has an address—probably in the bathroom, maybe on the counter or in a drawer. Give everything an address so you know where it lives.”

Well, let me tell you I found this inspiring, energizing and liberating. In my first 15-minute spurt I cleared off two dining chairs of papers, holiday detritus and miscellanea. Then it was the basket next to my armchair. I’m not going to tell you what was there. But this was just the perimeter of de-cluttering.

Because the ninth circle of clutter hell is the loft. And it’s not even just “bunch-of-stuff”, it’s all papers (and books and some stuff), but mostly papers. The magnitude of this problem—because for three years I basically just heaved stuff up there and then ran back down the stairs as fast as possible—was beyond daunting. And even though I only see it when I run up to heave some more papers there, it’s like the Sword of Damocles—I always know it’s hanging there, waiting to cleave my head wide open.

So, I developed a plan:

First round of de-cluttering: go through the loft and put everything into stacks. Don’t try sorting papers, putting away books, finding the “addresses” of things; don’t do any thinking beyond papers-books-things. Just a stack of papers, a stack of books that need to be shelved, a box of things that don’t fit into those two categories.

The next round was sorting through the papers, filing things that already have addresses and putting everything that didn’t have a known place into a “TBD” box. Then shelving the books. Then sorting through the miscellaneous things.

And you know what? First thing that happened was I discovered my clips (my writing samples), which I literally have been trying to find for more than two years. (Thinking I'd lost my clips was like thinking I'd lost photos of my children; it was a cataclysmic loss.) They weren’t in the filing cabinet (which was their rightful address), but in a stack about four feet away, where I wouldn’t have ever thought to look. 

This alone was worth the effort.

After three or four passes, I had both printers on the printer stand, a big bag of paper to go to recycling, all the stray books back on the shelves and a whole lot of crap in their proper files. Papers that I need to refer to currently, and those I know I want to take action on (story ideas, reference materials, etc.), are in a file box I can access quickly. I still have to do some major sorting of that TBD stack—what things I should let go of and the keepers I really do love or will use. And in the latter cases, they need to get addresses and put away.

Meanwhile—that god-awful sword has become considerably smaller and not quite as sharp.

Then, I got so annoyed by the pile of papers, mail, coupons and whatnot on my kitchen counter that I hauled out a carton and just swept everything off the counter into it. No sorting, no putting away, just off the counter.

All that stuff still needs to be addressed, but in the meantime it’s no more poorly “organized” than it was on the counter, I pretty much know (generally) where it all is and I’ve got that beautiful, clear expanse of space in the kitchen. I see that space first thing when I enter my flat, and I can’t tell you how lovely it is to see it empty and waiting for whatever I might like to cook or bake.

Now, one thing I have to work on as an ongoing project is that tendency to just dump. I’m too lazy to put things away when I bring them in or when I’m done using them, so I just leave them in situ. (E.g., knives. I leave washed knives next to the kitchen sink. And for why?—the knife block is right there!) It’s amazing how quickly that “I’ll put it away later” or “I’ll figure out where it goes at some point” stuff metastasizes. I started doing it with that counter space, so I’ve developed a solution: I created a “To Be Addressed (TBA) Depot”, a basket where I put things that don’t have a current address. Everything else has to go to its rightful place. Right away.

Even when “right away” means I have to go back and deal with it in 30 minutes when I realize I just dumped it.

This part is going to be ongoing, but it’s totally necessary if I don’t want the chaos to encroach on my exquisite empty spaces.

I have plenty of work to do on this, of course. But if I take it in 15-minute chunks, it’s totally doable. And the thing about de-cluttering is that—even in little bits—you see results immediately, which motivates you to keep at it.

There’s also work to be done on non-environmental clutter, but that’s another story. And today I’m just so grateful that Kathleen Ronald was speaking right at the time I was ready to clear the clutter.

Ah, romance

As we approach Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach a new market in the machinery of love this holiday has evolved into has come to my attention: candy hearts such as men would produce.

You know—those little sugar hearts with less-than-Twitter-sized snippets of sentiments stamped on them?

Someone has reimagined them to capture genuine male feelings around the whole courtship ritual:

The only thing I find astonishing about this is that I’m unable to locate anywhere on the web where you can actually buy these things. I’d have thought that, in a marketplace where an Australian guy makes a killing by sending your enemies an envelope full of glitter, roMANce candy would at least be worth a flutter. But evidently I would be wrong.

Perhaps one of my readers will take it up. 

Social constraints

For some reason—and I really don’t know why—two wineries have started following my professional account on Twitter. You know—the account I use to follow software companies and people involved in technology in one way or another, and to tweet tech-related things so I look, well, professional.

Meaning: the really boring account.

So I really don’t see the connection between cyber security breaches or social media tips and wine making and marketing. But once Kendall-Jackson followed me, for some reason Murphy-Goode did also.

I’ve certainly supported their product lines over the years, but I doubt they know it. At least, I really hope they’re not keeping direct tabs on what I buy when Safeway has those 30%-off sales.

Anyhow, when I looked at their profiles, I found something I thought quite interesting:

I’m not quite getting this you-must-be-21-years-old-to-come-to-our-exclusive-yet-completely-public-Twitter-feed thing. Yes—seems like every liquor website that uses English as its language makes you swear that you’re 21 (or, in some cases, 18). If it were strictly an e-commerce relationship, I could see that—but since when does going to a company website (or Twitter feed) require proof of age? If you’re not old enough to purchase or consume the stuff legally, you shouldn’t be able to know anything about it?

That’s like saying that you shouldn’t provide sex education for adolescents because they’re not really old enough to make intelligent decisions about those activities. And that has been shown over the centuries to be entirely wrongheaded as an approach.

Well, I clicked on Murphy-Goode and so we’re now following buddies, woo-hoo. But, interestingly, when I hit the Follow button on Kendall-Jackson, here’s what appeared:

People—it’s a public freaking feed, not the Illuminati! What could you possibly be tweeting that’s not for the eyes of the under-21 set? Okay—perhaps a little food porn in your timeline. But, really—I have to show government-issued ID to see it?

Plus—is there anyone who, when confronted with your little faux-authentication step, isn’t going to lie about his or her age?

Tell you what—I’ve just looked up one of my favorite-most wineries ever, King Estate. They don’t even have that twaddle about being 21 to view their precious tweets. And so I just followed them instead of Kendall-Jackson.

They have the best Pinot Gris on the market, anyhow.

Social media gotta be free, dudes.

Academic relief

It may or may not come as a surprise to you, but apparently every semester, in a lot of colleges and universities throughout the land, there’s an epidemic of grandparent death, for which professors and teaching assistants are asked to either extend deadlines for coursework or exams, or perhaps remit them altogether.

Interestingly, in a study of this catastrophic recurrence, it hits hardest at mid-terms and finals time. And evidently some students have an endless supply of dying grandparents.

Well, The Chronicle of Higher Education has solicited advice from a variety of instructors (although I notice they’re pretty much all in the humanities—no mathematics, engineering or physics profs here) as to how they would reply to a student seeking academic relief in their hours and weeks of need.

The responses are just cherce. No, really, you have to read them, but I’ll give you a couple of samples.

Takiya Nur Amine, associate professor of dance, UNC, Charlotte:

“I only consider make-up work when illness or family crisis is documented via official letter from the Dean of Students office. Please do not show up with an obituary or a copy of the funeral program or have your mama call me and leave nasty voicemails about how I had better accommodate you because your granny has just died. Upon receipt of the required documentation, I will make an appropriate arrangement concerning the midterm for you. And I am sorry you had a death in the family. That truly sucks.”

Angela Jackson-Brown, assistant professor of English, Ball State:

“Dead grannies no longer impress me. In fact, dead grannies are so 1990s it’s not even funny. And to be honest, the way my luck has gone this semester, I probably have already taught your mother and/or your father, and if DNA is any indicator, they most likely “killed off” your granny years ago. Thus I’m asking you to forgo that little granny dance of death with me. And it would probably only take me a half a minute of Google searching to find your granny taking selfies of herself in real time. So let’s save each other the trouble.

“Drop my class and keep your granny from dropping dead … again.”

Lisa Guerrero, Associate professor of critical culture, gender and race studies, Washington State:

“I believe in karma … both mine and yours. And if you are fine with tempting karma by virtually knocking off family members on a whim simply because you can’t get your act together, then you have bigger problems than the grade you’re going to get in my class.”

Well, you get the drift.

This whole spate of quasi-inventiveness reminds me of the last lecture that my zoology professor gave before the final exam. He informed us what we’d be allowed to bring into the room for the test, and all the measures he’d taken to prevent us from cheating. Reciting that preventive list took a lot longer than the part about what we were allowed. And he was quite clear that he’d amassed that list over years of teaching and discovering all the ways students would cheat.

(For example, he allowed us to bring in one 3”x5” note card with whatever we wanted to write on it. But he stipulated that it was a single card, with only two sides written on it. Because in the past, students had used razors to split the note card so they’d have four sides of notes.)

I remember thinking at the time that if people had devoted any fraction of their cheating effort on actually studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat. But obviously I would be wrong.

Power to the people

Well, here’s a historic anniversary: Magna Carta is 800 years old. To celebrate, Brits have moved all four surviving copies to the British Library.

Technically, the birthday dates as of 15 June, but the four documents, from the Library, Salisbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral, will be on display together for three days. Then—for some unaccountable reason—they’ll spend a day at the House of Lords. (Perhaps to remind those archaic residues of hereditary privilege of that notion that no one is above the law, not even those who claim some sort of divine right to rule.)

(Or possibly because they squawked about not being able to score tickets to the exhibit at the Library.)

I mean, the principles laid out in that original document were the first step towards a system of parliamentary democracy. And, even if it took about 700 years to filter down into something beyond oligarchy and plutocracy, it was out there in ink and sheepskin to be referred to whenever someone tried taking the political piss.

While Magna Carta essentially curbed the excesses of King John, it primarily only expanded the powers of the aristocracy. However, it formed the basis for our own Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are not insignificant things.

So for the next few months, take some time to pour yourself a nice glass of whatever appeals to you and drink a toast to those barons who muscled the first inklings of democratic government from a hereditary king.

Gratitude Monday: Unknown security

Today I’m a little surprised, but deeply grateful, that I’m spending a good five hours interviewing with six people for a product manager position with one of the leaders in the computer security arena.

I’ll be speaking with the hiring manager, another product manager, a developer, a business development guy, a tech support guy and a product marketer. I’m doing this understanding that my knowledge of endpoint security (not to mention encryption) is quite limited—they understand that, too. The hiring manager said that while, of course they’d prefer someone who already understands that stuff, they can work with someone who’s interested in it.

Well, that’s me.

I'm also very grateful that a friend-of-a-friend spent an hour the other day walking me through a lot of endpoint/encryption issues, and gave me pointers on what information I might want to acquire from each of those six interviewers. It turns out that he worked with the hiring manager for a few years, and he gave me very good gouge on her, information which tells me that she'd be a great colleague and that she runs a smooth operation. This is invaluable.

So here I go, stepping out into the largely unknown. Should be interesting.