I met Helen Stortini (no relation to Zack) at a recent Net Tuesday event, and she told me about her entertaining project. She was laid off earlier this year, and instead of accepting a new job that she maybe didn’t want, she decided to do a tour of a bunch of possible jobs she could have:
I’m shadowing people at work to find out what they do, what sort of skills they need to do it, and whether or not it would be a match for me. In a sense, I’m still hopping around in the career bouncy castle, but this time I’m looking before I leap.
It’s kind of like bring your daughter to work day, but it’s bring your unemployed 33-year-old friend instead. It’s an opportunity for me to test drive careers, but also to explore the myriad of work (be it weird, wonderful, or ordinary) that people do everyday. And to find out what it is that makes people truly enjoy the work that they do.
So far she’s tried a melange of jobs, such as stock broker, chef and reporter. It’s a fun project, and exactly the sort of thing that gets one a book deal.
Helen comes into your workplace for a day and kicks the tires. She’ll do “whatever menial or mundane task that needs to be done” assuming it’s legal and doesn’t involve removing “all of my clothing”. Can you provide a new stop on her tour?
In our UBC course last Monday, we wanted to teach the students a lesson about real-time collaboration. We divided them into groups of four and assigned them the following tasks:
You’re going to create a soup recipe. Collectively, decide what kind of soup you’re going to write about.
Each of you works on a different section of the recipe. One person lists ingredients, another writes the procedure, a third writes a review of the soup and the fourth finds links to other similar soups.
Open up a Google Docs document and start working.
After you’ve all contributed, review each other’s work and make changes and corrections.
It went surprisingly well–we achieved five apparently tenable (and all vegetarian, as it happens) soup recipes. Here’s what they came up with:
Last week was a research-intensive week, and in my online travels I encountered three interesting new blogs. I have little sense of their relative popularity, so apologies if you all have seen them already:
Regretsy - You’re likeliest to have seen this one, which is kind of a People of Walmart for crafting. The site features the worst and strangest products advertised on Etsy. Speaking as a craft-free zone over here, the site comes off as rather cruel: “ha, ha, look at the crap people are trying to sell”. But, each to their own.
Hey Oscar Wilde - “This website, now in its tenth incarnation since being launching in June, 1998, is an extension of a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character.” A source of excellent illustration and portraiture work–I quite like this vogon.
2000 Dollar Wedding - These folks are, you guessed it, planning their $2000 wedding online. I found this site because she was a Blog Action Day participant.
I don’t like reading braggy, boastful blog posts. I know I’m as guilty of them as anybody else. But when I read somebody writing about their recent award, weight loss or awesome new job, and I’m sitting at home all awardless and fat, I feel the little green Kobolds of Envy and Jealousy whispering in my ear canal. It’s petty, I know, but what’re you going to do?
This is one of those blog posts.
Today I ran five kilometres for the first time in my life. I know that five kilometres isn’t very far–for most runners it’s trivial. My siblings are all long distance runners of one kind or another–just this morning my elder sister, bless her, ran her first half-marathon.
But you need to understand what an unlikely achievement this is. I was an indoor kid, and I always hated Phys Ed class. As I said recently:
Whenever we did any kind of long distance running, I would usually come third to last in the class. I’d beat the corpulent Chinese kid and an asthmatic Brit with skin the colour of fluorescent light.
My chief torturer in Phys Ed was one Wayne Desjardins, who owned every cliche a gym teacher could. Once, after executing a particularly awful flexed-arm hang, I cursed under my breath. He made me do push-ups on my birdlike arms while the rest of the class took their turns. We did these things in alphabetical order.
I’ve always hated all kinds of exercise, except for some competitive sports and the occasional hike. I especially despised running. I mentioned running to my step-mother recently and she just sighed and said, “ah, Darren, it’s a hateful thing”. Indeed.
A little over two months ago, I wrote aboutan iPhone app that helps you get off the couch and running five kilometres in nine weeks. I predicted it would take me 12 weeks, and I was right. I blame lethargy and busyness.
It’s All For Vanity
Do I still hate running? Pretty much, yeah. Though it has granted me 30 or 40 minutes of much-needed free thinking time during a particularly busy couple of months. So that’s a plus.
Will I keep running? I think so. Frankly, I’m motivated by vanity–I don’t want to get corpulent–so that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
How is it that Ms. Hayes isn’t world famous yet? She’s a great singer-songwriter and, as you’ve probably observed, rather easy on the eyes. See also the single from her new EP.
For you kids out there, ‘EP’ stands for ‘Extended Play’. Ironically, it’s shorter than a full-length album.
Oh those clever, clever Swedes. Some smart folks from a Swedish think tank (I think–my Swedish is not strong) devised a way to motivate people to take the stairs:
I really like approaches like this, where we use natural human behaviour to motivate better outcomes. I wonder, though, whether the piano stairs have long term stickiness. Won’t the gimmick wear off and people will return to taking the escalator?
Yesterday I bought a good dress shirt. Yes, it’s purple, but you’re going to have to deal with that. It’s from Jones New York (amusingly, I can’t find any men’s clothes on their website), and I got it at the Bay. After wearing it last night, it occurred to me that it had pretty much everything I look for in a dress shirt.
Thick, opaque cotton
I see plenty of dress shirts that are made of this thin polyester/cotton blend that’s vaguely translucent, particular in light blue or white. I’m kind of a hairy dude. In a strong light, I don’t want to be able to see my chest hair through my shirt.
Removable collar stays
Collar stays are one of the hallmarks of a well-made shirt. They say “I’m serious about keeping your collar straight”. Plus, it’s cool to have a shirt with removable parts. Just remember to take them out before you send the shirt to the dry-cleaners. I frequently forget this. The plastic collar stays come back as sad bent little things, good only for, I don’t know, shoveling cocaine, maybe?
Enough length
One way lousy shirts cheap out is by trimming the volume of cloth that you tuck into your trousers. Be wary of this, because the last thing you want is to have the shirt creeping out at your hips.
French cuffs
Obviously these are more of a stylistic choice than a indicator of quality, and only a few of my shirts have this feature. That said, I don’t see many cheap and cheerful shirts with French cuffs. Cuff links can be fun for an otherwise accessory-free man like myself. They’re earrings for your shirt.
Seamless placket
This is another personal preference, but I think a shirt looks crisper and a little more formal without the extra stitching and fabric of placket. I’m no opposed to plackets per se, but if I’m looking for a shirt to wear to business functions, cleaner lines are better.
Horizontal button hole
If there’s a litmus test for a good dress shirt, it’s the horizontal button hole. I’ve written about this before, but I’ve never had a bad shirt that had this feature. It’s a tiny detail, but it implies that someone cares enough about crafting the garment to make this effort. Bonus points if the thread used on the button hole is a different colour than the rest of the holes (not the case with this shirt).
There are other shirt-related topics. Obviously if the shirt has a lot of loose or unfinished threads on it, stay away. I’m not a fan of monograms anywhere–they just strike me as odd little coats-of-arms. Your shirt should be cut round at the bottom, called a ‘tail’, unless you’re planning on wearing it untucked. In that case, I think having it cut square usually looks better.
Check out the awesome cake my nephew Paul enjoyed for his fourth birthday party (click for buccaneer bigness):
It comes complete with licorice cannons and Malteser cannonballs. Paul’s party was pirate-themed, coincidentally coinciding (can one say that?) with International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I wonder, is Paul destined, therefore, to a have a lifetime of pirate parties?
I’ve recently had an insight into the unfortunate phenomenon known as ‘flying low’. That is, forgetting to zip your trousers zipper and, you know, wandering around in public. Wikipedia, incidentally, lists an excellent set of international euphemisms for this.
Zipping one’s fly and buttoning the top button are rote activities. Two simple gestures: zip and button. We do them several times a day for most of our lives. I’ve done it for, what, at least thirty years.
I’ve realized that my risk of flying low increases dramatically when my trousers have more than two fastening steps. For example, a lot of suit trousers have a hook-and-bar system in addition to the usual button and zipper. This makes for three fastening gestures, with the third being the critical zipping step. On auto-pilot, I’ll sometimes get through the first two and just stop.
This is doubly bad because my wearing a suit often implies a speaking gig, where I’m able to advertise my misstep in front of dozens or hundreds of people.
Similarly, I have a pair of surfer shorts which have two buttons at the waist. Again, three gestures makes for a high risk operation.
Button flies, interestingly, never cause a problem. I guess this is because, in one sense, the fastening process is one gesture.
Am I alone in this? Should I just concentrate more when getting dressed?
For the fifth time, I’ve been at Gnomedex this weekend. It’s the usual melange of fascinating speakers, good friends and general nerdiness. Derek aptly described it as “a web society annual family reunion”.
I’ve been collecting a few of the better quotes I’ve heard over the past two days, and thought I’d share:
Phil Plait: “You know what you call alternative medicine when it works? Medicine.”
Phil Plait: “Your lips say 0, but your eyes say 1″.
Todd Friesen: “Pay Per Click = PPC = ‘Pills, Porn, and Casinos’”
Chris Brogan: “Twitter is a good way to tell the world what you’re thinking, before you think about it.”
Jim Ray: “Are there any Django or Python hackers in the room? Well we got the guy who invented Django. So [with a certain gangster pose], what?”
Jim Ray: “Every journalist in the country discovered Twitter on January 15 of this year.”
Chris Pirillo: “Does anybody still use Second Life? [A very quiet room] One person?”
I don’t like reading braggy, boastful blog posts. I know I’m as guilty of them as anybody else. But when I read somebody writing about their recent award, weight loss or awesome new job, and I’m sitting at home all awardless and fat, I feel the little green Kobolds of Envy and Jealousy whispering in my ear canal. It’s petty, I know, but what’re you going to do?
