Week of May 19th

I suppose my blogging is evolving, and I would hope for the better but it isn’t always the case.   In the past, I thought my approach would be to construct posts that were a mix of things going on in my life, which mattered to me, with a bit of philosophy thrown in.  I fear the smarter sounding bits are falling by the wayside.

My day job has become focused more on social media endeavors, and has consumed more of my creative energies, but perhaps that pays greater dividends than trying to sound clever on a personal blog.

Monday, I’m presenting to an SVP on the state of our social media efforts - the highlights and lowlights.  I suspect in many companies, those driving social media must feel like sole proprietors, working long hours to forge the fundamentals of their little business within a business, to demonstrate the value, to develop volumes, metrics, goals and accomplishments in order to secure more funding and resources and cross that tipping point whereby the processes become ingrained throughout the business.   Social media becomes not a thing, but a way - a set of doors and windows through which to shorten the path, to increase clarity, and amplify voice.

Tuesday, I’m off to a conference and will meet many of my peers who work in other large companies and manage online communities.   This trip will take me across the continent to parts of the country I’ve never visited.   I think this will be one of those career milestones, and a definite add to my life resume’.   Lot of potential on this trip.

Going into this, I have some thoughts about how communities can be leveraged both upstream and downstream of a business.  In most cases, the focus is only downstream - a company launches a community (forum) to interact with it’s customers.  Why not participate with suppliers and partners as well?  I’m going to come back to this in a future post with some details on how that works out.

Those thoughts are reflective of the macro level under which I, and I’m sure my colleagues aspire to be operating.  However, the daily reality is also filled with applying metaphorical band-aids to many skinned knees.   The humble shop-keeper not only charters the growth of his business, but provides service with a smile, and remembers to take out the trash.   As a good friend and colleague once told me, “startups are flat”.    Work boots, not wingtips.

 

Conserving our way to higher prices

Following the drought, Raleigh, NC has been under water restrictions. The restrictions have reduced the volume of water used by about 20%, and the city’s utility revenue along with it.  Since the infrastructural costs to support the utility, largely born by the revenue aparantly contain a significant fixed cost base that doesn’t scale downward with the reduced usage, the city is facing a funding shortfall.  The proposed solution?  Increase usage rates.

So people use less, and pay more.   And, with the continued economical development in the area, new users will continue to be added, and the total usage is likely to continue to grow despite the belt tightening measures asked of the individuals.  In the case of a monopoly, the usual marketplace forces on supply and demand don’t seem to work as one would expect to maintain the price.

This led me to wonder about our energy policies as well.  One present focus is to use less fuel, to drive less, to increase efficiency standards for new vehicles, etc.   Given the oil and gas industry is an effective monopoly as well, I believe the price per gallon will continue upward regardless of demand.  I also believe that some external forces will be applied to limit the upward movement and prevent total economic collapse. 

Water, air, land, energy, all these resources are finite, and the truth is that an increasing population demands increased usage.  Efficiency breakthroughs only serve to increase the number of people the system can support.  They do not fundamentally change the basic equation.   I’m not arguing against improvements in efficiency, as they do buy time and forestall the inevitable.  However…

I believe the truth is that we must move from a policy of growth to one of sustainability and equilibrium.    The sooner we collectively understand and make this shift, the better individual quality of life can be preserved in the system.

 

Free for the weekend

Leslie and her mom planned a little beach getaway for them to spend some quality time together, so I’ve been free as a bird since Thursday.  So, what to do?

That’s a good question.  I’ve been married about a year and a half, and the partnership creates a comforting sense of normalcy like breathing the air.  Try holding your breath for a bit, and you quickly realize you’ve developed a bit of a dependency you hadn’t realized.

Friday night, I grabbed some Chinese food at our favorite restaurant - the food was good but”party of one” isn’t conducive to scintilating conversation.  The irony here is that in the prescence of others, I’m prone to lengthy conversations in my head. 

What else to do?  See a movie that you might enjoy, but your spouse might find lacking.  I tried “Iron Man” and wasn’t disappointed.  The special effects were great, it delivered a lot of action and eye candy, and threw in enough humor to avoid taking itself too seriously.   As expected the plot was paper thin and contrived, but it is based on a comic book and is supposed to be fantastic, after all.   

I think we all want to be “super” in some regard, to distinguish ourselves from the rest of humanity, to do great things, and to satisfy that part of our ego that tells us we matter, even when we are reminded daily that we may not matter as much to the world as we like to believe.    Iron man was appealing to me, as I could most identify with the way the character became super - through application of technology and the intellect to conceive it.  His “superness”, didn’t rely on exposure to cosmic particles, a bite from a mutated spider, or the virtue of traveling from a different planet. 

Saturday I hung out with a friend, discovered the new mass air flow sensor I ordered for one of the cars has the wrong pin out (I hate mid-model year changes) and spent the evening working on the stone for the fireplace, finally reaching the ceiling along the front.  The sides have a bit more fill in required, and I’m going to need some help when Leslie gets back.

Today, I’ll do some yard work and then try to get a jump on the work week.   We are Kicking off a new project  and I must remember to take my smart pills along with my daily multivitamins.

Pouring the shop slab

As an update from my last post, I poured concrete for my new workshop last Thursday.   My prep work of the footings, forms, rebar and remesh all passed the county inspection.  I had pumped the water out of the hole for the last time,  lined up the concrete finishers and ordered the concrete.   I was all set.

The first two truck loads of concrete were to arrive at 8:00 am, and the first members of the crew arrived at 7:20.   They stretched a string across my forms and had me cut pieces of rebar which they drove into the ground, setting the tops of the pins as interim screed points.  This old school method with the string quickly uncovered a problem.   The slab was supposed to be 4″ thick, and I had planned to double that, setting the forms 8″ above grade.   I had checked individual points inside with a laser level, but the string showed that several areas would only be about 3″ thick.   We had to fix this, and fast.

Option 1: Raise all the forms and relevel them.  This would take 1/2 a day.  No good

Option 2: take up all the remesh and plastic and remove some of the gravel to lower the middle.  Again, likely to take 1/2 a day.  We had 30 mins.

Option 3: Dash to the store and bring back a load of 2 X 2’s and nail them around the perimeter.  32 mins.  Done.

8:02 am, the first trucks arrive and the crew begins to pour the footings first, bringing the concrete just above the bottom of the form boards.  We spaced the subsequent trucks 30 mins apart, each emptying it’s 9 yard payload.

36 yards into the pour and the footers and about 1/4 of the slab are done.

The stiffness of concrete is measured by slump on a 10 point scale.   The scale is rooted In a lab test where concrete is poured into a cone and then inverted on a surface and the cone removed.  The amount the mounded cone of concrete sinks when it spreads out is measured in inches of fall, or slump.  Nearly dry concrete wouldn’t slump at all so it would be a zero, while very wet soup would just collapse into a puddle and would be a slump of 10.  The trucks arrive with a slump of about 4-5 which is the most liquid state that it’s safe to travel with.   We added water and remixed each batch to a very wet 6 ” slump so that the concrete would easily flow and the crew could rake it around.  Note the light colored 2 X 2 strips on top of the forms to increase the finished depth.

 

72 yards into the pour and we were down to one  last quarter to go.  I had estimated the job at 65 yards, but the extra 2 inches I added to the depth, just added 15 more yards of concrete to the job.  A quick phone call to increase my job site credit and call for more trucks.  The crew took advantage of the break to drink some water and take a quick rest.

The 9th truck arrived and it was back to work, filling in the corner and working their way out.  Those not still engaged with work on the main slab, filed down to the house and began to form up an entrance to the garage for the house.   I had previously leveled the gravel there setting a slope away from the garage and laid out more steel mesh and form boards.   This second, much smaller job found us ordering a tenth truck, lightly loaded with 3 more yards to finish up, bringing the total to 84 yards, or about 336,000 lbs of concrete.

After floating out the driveway with a bull float, and the concrete began to set, the crew grabbed scraps of boards to use as knee boards and worked to hand finish the slab, first with magnesium hand floats, and then with rectangular steel trowels to ensure a smooth finish.  I elected not to apply a “light broom” finish as it tends to trap dirt and quickly collects stains.

While the crew was troweling on the driveway, the foreman was hard at work with a power trowel, polishing out the 2400 square foot slab for my workshop.

By the end of the day, things were shaping up nicely and by early evening, both surfaces easily supported foot traffic.  Early Saturday,  I snapped chalk lines and used my concrete saw to cut expansion joints to relieve both slabs and further reduce the likelihood and severity of cracking over time as the concrete continues to dry and harden.

I’ll tell the manufacturer that I’m finally ready or the shipment of steel girders and beams and in about 4-6 weeks, I’ll be craning the first girders into place.   That should provide time to strip the forms, put in drains and gravel to backfill around the slab, and allow it to harden to reach maximum strength in 28 days.

Perseverance

Last August I optimistically dug footers and made plans to start my workshop in earnest, a project that has been a dream of mine for almost a decade.  Building my house took almost two years, and enough time had passed that I conveniently forgot the early months of hard slogging just to get out of the ground.  Work, other projects, life obligations and a healthly dose of inclement weather during the winter have delayed, and even somewhat deterred me.

I’ve learned that perseverance pays off.  Harnessing my stubborn streak, I finished the rebar yesterday and called for an inspection.  It rained hard off and on all day and I pumped the footers out 3 times before the day was over.

At 24″ deep, 20″ wide, and 200 linear feet, it’s amazing the volume of water that can accumulate.  

Fortunately, I have the help of an 8500 gallon per hour pump, and ten or fifteen mins later ….

With the water gone, I was clear to run two lengths of #4 rebar (1/2″) around the perimeter, and the wire mesh which will help prevent cracking and movement of the slab.  Hopefully the weather will hold for tomorrow.  

I’ll snap some pics of the pour tomorrow…

Observations from a theme park weekend getaway..

Leslie and I took a short four hour drive to a neighboring state for a weekend theme park getaway in partial celebration of her birthday last week.   I packed the camera, but forgot fresh batteries and the charger, so I’ll be doing the blog equivalent of singing a capella. 

We did take along one of her birthday gifts, a Magellan GPS navigation system.   It’s one of those things you don’t know you really need until you have it.  In short order we were entranced by the colorful scrolling scenery and bird’s eye view of our surroundings.  The depiction of the complex clover-leaved highway interchanges, especially those where 3 or 4 major interstate highways came together made me wonder what sense this system would make of a bigger challenge, say the concrete spaghetti of the LA freeway system.

We arrived at our hotel, which surpassed all expectations of what one should expect for a mere $40 a night.  Several nights prior, Leslie was shopping hotels, reading reviews and trying to find the best value for us, since I had stated the requirements as “somewhere to crash at night”.   I’ll describe the hotel as “historic”, not in it’s architecture, but by the archaeological studyof it’s history made possible by analysis of the layers of paint applied to most surfaces.   Sleeping in a King size bed, I had forgotten that a double bed’s length ends somewhere mid calf for me.   The room had all the requisites one would expect, and a few extras like refrigerator, microwave, and a coffee maker which produced a single cup of coffee.   The exfoliating towels were certainly an unanticipated feature.

The park visit was awesome, full of colorful attractions and amazing sights - and that was just the crowd.  Tatoos, piercings, and bizare clothing attire (one guy sported a giant milk carton over his head with “missing” emblazoned in block text above the cutout for his face) were all well represented.

Then there were the rides and other attractions.  We managed 4 of the 5 coasters, the biggest of which was a 210 foot drop and 73 mph track speed and that was a fitting finale’ for the day.  The 5th, which neither of us could quite psyche ourselves up for was a 205 foot verticaldrop, precipitated by a full stop hang, looking down for a healthy 3 second count.  Not even forty, and we both  wussed out on that one.   Sad really.  

Between bouts of brain squashing G loads on the coasters, we entertained ourselves with interactive “4D” shows,  animal exhibits like bald eagles and grey wolves, tamer rides like the log flume, bumper cars, and the sky lift.   Diets were abandoned, and we stuffed ourselves with things like “the smokehouse sampler platter” and large waffle cones packed with top shelf cookie dough ice cream.

I’m always amazed by the art of time and crowd management.  The psychology and creative construction of the serpentine  impoundments for those waiting on a ride.  How do you keep people entertained for 45 to 60 mins?  Pack in lots of sights and sounds, thematically designed to build anticipation for the ride.  Keep the full size of the crowd hidden at all times, allowing only portions of the line to be visible from any one vantage point by interposing walls, hedges, switchbacks and drastic changes in elevation.   Ascending and descending stairs, traversing bridges, or passing through doors create interim achievements to reduce frustration.  These way points are used in combination,  and are designed so that they are seen and established in the audience mind as the next objective to cross.    Attention spans are managed point to point.  I wonder how these tactics might be applied in other industries to improve satisfaction while awaiting the delivery of a product or service?  This was the only conceit to work I allowed myself during the trip.

While the hotel did advertise “free wi-fi”, my laptop stayed wisely in the car’s trunk, stowed neatly beside my best intentions to work on some reports during the drive there and back.

I was glad for the break, and for all the little adventures of the day.  

The work week looms.

Dogs bark, people blog…

Each morning, somewhere around O’dark thirty, our dogs start to bark.   They bark at the deer grazing in the field behind our house, or at a cat skulking through the woods, and more often than not, the dogs seem to bark just because they can.   I know the barking is a form of communication, a challenge to anything that moves, or even smells like it might be in their territory.   But, it’s the underlying “why” of this behavior that interests me.  Why, the dog is compelled to communicate, to assert it’s presence.  It’s something fundamental about being alive perhaps.

Humans experience some of those same primal motivations.  We need to communicate and be heard.  This itch has been scratched in so many ways - public oration, authorship of books, newspaper, radio, TV, and now social media - blogging.

Perhaps blogs are just a human way of barking at the world.

Instant messenger ESP

 It’s 5:53 pm and you’ve got a hot issue to resolve.  You pull up your list of colleagues, double click the one you need an answer from and start typing your urgent message.  A dozen keystrokes in and their window greys out - offline.  What?!! 

 

You double click them again only to be informed that they have gone on to other things, leaving you with the option for email.   As if somehow they knew trouble was headed their way through the ether…   instant message ESP.

Inspiring innovation in the workplace

How does a corporation inspire an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit within it’s employees?

Innovation flows from the people, pervades the culture, and is reflected in the environment. It is upon this last point that I wish to focus on today, because I believe that we are influenced by our surroundings.   A few banners hung from the ceiling emblazoned with “Be innovative” would hardly be effective.   No,  the entire environment must be carefully thought out - the lighting, the architecture, the choice and variety of color and juxtaposition of textures.   Subtle prompts might also be interspersed within the officescape.

On each floor of our buildings at work, a different colorful and thought provoking quote greets employees and guests as they disembark the bank of elevators.

This example from the third floor reads “Small Opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises“.

Each day on the way to and from my desk, the second floor greets me with John F Kennedy’s inspirational challenge to the status quo:

“There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

I find this one especially meaningful, as it speaks to the courage to undertake change, to risk bold steps for a better and brighter tomorrow. It’s appealing to me, and I find it motivates me to take on the more challenging issues today, rather than comfortably defering them until later.

Passing a few moments before entering a conference room, my eye is drawn to the discrete plaque affixed to the frosted glass wall by the door. Each room’s plaque features a different person of significance. The facts and circumstances of their greatness are clearly outlined, but each also provokes further thought, sparking inspiration and innovation. For example:

Aparantly, Hedy was an actress who also happened to dabble in spread spectrum technology, specifically code division multiple access, or CDMA which later became the basis for cell telephone and wireless network access, though initially conceived for torpedo guidance.  Who knew?

From this I conclude that innovative ideas may come from anywhere - one doesn’t have to be solely a scientist or engineer by formal position in order to produce an innovative idea which in time, may become something far larger and more foundational than what was originally envisioned or intended. Small breakthroughs today may become the basis for revolutionary thinking tomorrow.

It is these sorts of little details woven into the workplace tapestry that catch workers eyes, and keep their mind active, sparking diverse thought patters which in turn, can lead to breakthroughs of their own.

Hats off to those who planned this out.

Drystack stone - almost done

Standing on the third section of scaffold, I’m within about two feet of the top of the chimney and just past the 90% mark on the project.  I’m well over the hump of disillusionment that usually creeps in around the 50% point where it feels like I have been working forever on something and as far as I have come, there is at least that much yet to do.  Now, with the end in sight, I have some mixed feelings.

I’ve grown to enjoy picking through different stones, trying to find just the right one to put into place next.  Randomizing color and texture while matching height and width to the space required has just the right mix of repetitive manual effort and mental stimulation to be therapeutic.   While I’ll be glad to finally have the use of the living room, once this is complete, I’ll also miss working on this project.  

To the observant - yes, one of the spot lights burned out.  No, I can’t reach it from the scaffold.  Why again did I think a 21 foot ceiling was going to be a good idea ?