Category Archives: Opinion

I’ve Been Reading a Lot Lately

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I’ve been reading a lot lately.  Below is the list of books I’ve read since October, almost all of them have been 4 or 5 out of 5 stars.

The Power of Who [5/5] – a great book on the importance of relationships and their use in our growth and achievements as people.  There are people in your life that are willing to help you, are you asking them?  Are you settling for “what else” or are you striving for “what’s more”?

EntreLeadership [5/5] – Dave Ramsey has been known for his personal finance book, “The Total Money Makeover”, but this book on leadership in small-to-medium business is a must read.  Lots of insights into people, planning, and developing a winning culture.

How the Mighty Fall [5/5] – What if you could avoid leading a company into disaster?  What if you were able to turn a company headed for disaster around?  This book has a lot of good material in it and it may be just the awakening that some company leaders need.  Once they read that one, they should read “Great By Choice.”

Great By Choice [5/5] – This great book on what makes companies stand out in a crowd should be read by anyone in the business world looking to evaluate their own company’s success or failure.  The illustrations help make the points in this book and engaging research ties into incredible value for anyone who is looking for direction on how to improve their company and their company’s leadership direction.

Kanban [4/5] – This book is about starting up a “Kanban” or LEAN implementation in a software development environment.  There’s a lot of good material in here, but some of it went on a bit long for me [thus the 4 out of 5 stars].  However, despite needing to be a bit shorter in a few places this book is a must read for anyone looking to bring transparency to their software development projects in a team environment.

I’m also working on Lean Startup and Passionate Performance.  Reports on those are to come!

Serve

Aside

Remember: if you don’t let people serve you, you’re short changing them.

If you’re not serving people, you’re short changing them.

On Grandness of Vision

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I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, but one of those things is having a personal vision, having a vision for my family, as well as a vision in my job.  The theme has come up over and over again since October when I talked to my friend Dave O’Hara who started the dominoes tipping.  I’m not talking about simple goals like, “don’t worry, be happy,” but instead I’m referring to the massively grand vision.  Let me explain a bit.

My grandfather, on my dad’s side, created multi-track recording equipment that is rumored to have been used by the Beatles because it was so innovative.  He’s created special instruments for all sorts of technological needs.  He’s an inventor (still, even in his 80’s).  In his lifetime he’s done some pretty amazing things that outstrip most lives in stories and impact.  He still has a 5 year plan that involves working on projects as well as ministry and evangelism.

My dad has so far turned around two businesses of two different kinds in ways that were unconventional, but really impacted lives by enabling employees and letting them know their ability to contribute to a grand vision.  He saved hundreds if not thousands of jobs.  He’s still impacting lives with an even grander vision as an elder at Holly HIlls Bible Church.

I write software for a living.  I want to create the equivalent to “something the Beatles used,” or turning an entire company around.  My vision for my life needs to be bigger, longer term, and most definitely grand.  Personally I need to have areas I know I’m growing.  As a husband and leader of a family my direction for my family needs vision so I can make better decisions about our stewardship of finances.  As an employee I need to have a vision for the projects I’m given that is bigger than everyone else’s vision for the project because I want to exceed expectations.

Do you have a grand vision?  Can you set goals and make plans without one?  I would contend you cannot push out into deeper waters without a plan, but you can’t have a good plan without a better vision.

Of course vision requires context, but that’s probably better for another post.

Doors

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I replaced the door between my garage and back yard today.  It was much easier replacing that door compared to the door I had replaced between the house and the garage.  Probably because I had the experience of the first to make the second one more direct.  I don’t love door replacements as a whole, but I learned a few things.  The one thing I wanted to point out which may save some time and money: Many new doors have adjustable/replaceable weather stripping so that if you need to pull the weather stripping out of the crack they’re tucked into just about 1/16th of an inch – you can.  If you pull it out that much to create a better seal you’ll have better energy efficiency AND not have spent $15.00 or more on new weather stripping.  Pretty cool [or warm, depending on the season].

Man Up

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I haven’t listened to Dave Ramsey in a while.  Usually I find his dealing with certain issues legalistically to be a bit rough for me.  However, my personal preference for grace aside, he’s got a message that I think is important for humans of the world: grow up.  Be an adult.  When people call him for financial advice he almost always tells them the same thing after hearing their situation: face it.  Face the situation and be an adult.  Don’t ignore it any more.

I hate this advice because it usually points out my own maturity problems, but it is what we need to be encouraged to do as humanz.  If you’re having a problem in life it is possible it was thrust on you by someone else or out of your control.  Doesn’t matter.  Face it like an adult.  You may be facing a financial or other hole where you’ve got to dig yourself out.  Face it.  Man up.  Woman up.  Don’t just ignore it until you’ve really, really screwed things up.

I listened to him a bit this last week via his podcast and I can say that if you’re going to talk about politics, religion, money, sex or any other taboo: don’t be afraid to face the root problem, and don’t be afraid to accept responsibility.  You can’t deal with a problem until you’ve owned up to it and understand it.  This counts for money,  but pretty much the rest of life as well.  Trying to do anything else but be an adult about it is just plain stupid.  Dave says that, too.  I don’t prefer it, but it’s probably true.

Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10 and Web Developers

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I just got done reading the specs on Internet Explorer 10’s tablet ‘features’ in Windows 8.  This new set of features is incredible on the surface, but as a developer I’m flabbergasted that Microsoft has decided to ignore the de facto standards and now has created yet another touch/tablet interaction model.  I’m not flabbergasted a company would do that, because Apple did it with the iPhone and iPad to create the de facto standard that RIM (disclosure: I work for a subsidiary of RIM) and others have followed.  What this means for developers who are trying to reach the widest possible audience is that their web applications are going to have to choose between:

  1. Lots of branches in their code to handle every possible variation of event detection
  2. Send users away
  3. Attempt to use some open source or home rolled equalization library that tries to mask the differences (this way could lie madness)
  4. Give the users a lesser experience
  5. Create multiple versions of the same thing, each with their own special ‘per device’ sauce (this way also lies madness).

Maybe there’s another option, but I just don’t get why Microsoft has done this to devs.

Today BDConf wrapped up.  It’s targeted primarily towards mobile development and I had a chance to go to their first event in Grapevine, TX in March.  One of the things that they talked about was writing for an ever changing web audience that accesses your site/web application through any number of devices.  However, this sort of added complexity from a major player in the OS department means that one of two or three things is going to happen, and one of them isn’t going to be developer buy in.  I’m convinced that Microsoft is going to have to either adopt some method for giving developers a smaller amount of effort to reach their audience on a Windows 8 tablet, or they’re going to really hurt their end user experience.

I want to create interactive, 3D-space enabled applications with rich interactions that happen to live in a browser, but Microsoft is definitely not reaching out to developers to create a “bold”* new experience in IE10.  They’re not making it easy for end users to have a great, familiar experience.  If you’re switching from an iPad 1 or 2 to a Windows 8 tablet you’re going to get fed up, and move back to the iPad.  If you were to switch from the iPad to the PlayBook you’d be comfortable.  Microsoft has created a barrier to entry, and this is not a good move.  They’re distancing themselves from developers, and they’re distancing their users from rich content.

(update:) Don’t misunderstand me to think that all of what they’ve added to IE10 is a move in the wrong direction, but it’s just not cool that they added a bunch of new HTML5 standards support, and ripped the mobile/tablet market a new hole to support.

* Microsoft employees used the term “bold” numerous times during their announcement presentations today and many people in the media and on twitter noted this.

Sign Here

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I was at the dentist today and they had me fill out a 9 (or so) item form about cancer screening. I’m all for screening where it is needed, but the 9 items that required my signature were not necessary. They were just stats. 27% of this (fear here) and some group of (fear there) do not require my initials.

Let me sign that I do or do not want the screening procedure that is more expensive and move on. If I can’t afford the screening, or don’t want it, let me opt out. Let me just check, “No,” sign the form, and move on.

Forms designed like this upset me because they’re designed to scare patients and to earn the office more money through fear and nonsense. Let’s do away with fear as marketing and leave it to the terrorists. They’re better at it anyway.

Today I Called My Mortgage Company

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They sent me some mail telling me that they needed to increase my rates ever so slightly to compensate for an increase in my property value.  I’ll refrain from giving you my opinion about this only to say that their ‘helpful’ voice recognition software was annoying, painful, and completely frustrating to interact with.  Worse: the computer took on a personal tone that implied it was human and was going to assist ‘us’.  Creepy.  I kind of wanted to unplug the server 🙂

Changing Banks

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When it is all said and done it will have taken us several months to actually change banks.  We’re actually leaving our old bank to switch to a credit union.  This is something that I like because firstly it’s a local financial institution, and secondly credit unions are much more service oriented in many cases because they have members who the employees are serving rather than some person that is not directly their ‘boss’.  When I asked the employee at the credit union if I could do various things that my old bank wanted to penalize me (unnecessarily) for he simply said, “Yes, you can do that.”  How about situation two? “Yes, you can do that, too.”  Are there fees for this?  Do I have to jump through this hoop?  “No, there are no fees for that and we don’t own a hoop holder to put a hoop there for you to jump through.” [I made that last answer up, but he said the same thing in meaning, even if my imagination makes him more funny.]

The hardest part is the automatic withdrawals and direct deposits.  Those seem to take weeks and up to months to get swapped over.  And they want voided checks.  And they warn you not to close down your old account until (insert some date/time here).  Seriously: in the age of computers and databases are we that slow that what takes me seconds to enter into an online form takes weeks and months to process?

The Credit Union is not officially supported by Mint [and they are not presently working on supporting it], but I’m OK with that.  I will likely pay for and install You Need A Budget and use that with regular downloads of our data.  There are downsides to changing institutions like re-entering online billpay accounts.  But those are minor in comparison to being nickel and dimes and treated like a money tree that needs regular pruning.

I look forward to being a member of a local credit union with staff that treat me like a human being.