shaking in up!

Lots of fun cool stuff going on. Trying to wrap my head around it, so looking at where to start. So much going on I'm starting to get a little stuck on what to do next or where to turn my attention. I just need to slip things back a bit. Relax my focus so that I can take in the big picture, then sharpen and focus on what I want to do next.

I have an idea for a last minute entry for the Firefox 3 content. I may join, I may skip it. we'll see. Got stopped working on my PZero paper by some distractions from that corner of the world. We'll see where life leads then.

This came from Joe and provides what seems to be good advice on blogging. I'll try to apply it as well as I can.

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A few flying ideas ...

but very few landing.

I want to use the Cake Framework to store my current reads and maintain the data local to my web site. I'd also like to cross post this information to my 43 Things, my Amazon account and a few other places. The local publish is easy. The remote publish shouldn't be too bad as each of those destinations support a REST interface.

Also have a few ideas for Firefox Plugins that should be simple to implement if I can just remember the details. Need to pick up the pace on my Zero Article. Still haven't finished the application, more database work to do. Found a good hint in the Project Zero discussion forums I'm going to try and take advantage of.

how many roads must a man walk down?

... and how many sites must a grown man have?

Ok, perhaps there is a such things as too much. I have the following sites:

• Jay.Palat.net
• Slackers
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Thinking Out There
• QuoteURLText
• Resume

I suspect I'm going to grow this list before the summer is out, and adding feed related info.

Blargh.

Insomnia is a bit of a pain. Having trouble sleeping two nights in a row is bad news all around.

On the plus side, got a new side project done. I rewrote my homepage. I developed a new look and wrote it up using CakePHP. It took a few tries, but I got it todo what I wanted. Some portions were fairly underdocumented, like using the webroot to serve files. Once I figured out how webroot worked, my last piece fell into place. I have reached a little beyond parity with the old site.

I have a few ideas that I may want to try next.

• Set my reading list as a database
• Modify a version of quoteurltext to save to a Cake Plugin.
• JavaScript updates -- rollover previews of menu items from the mainpage

Also have some cleanup to do, including fixing the stylesheets, and tightening up some of the html. Still, pretty happy with the effort and the time it took.

Purposing this blog

So I started reading the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, a good start so far and I look forward to seeing where he goes with all the rules. I just finished the 3rd rule, the Rule of Process. The point of the rule is that leadership, like many things in life takes time and care. It is the daily preparations and work that lead to the overall win. Like the Dynamic Path Maxwell emphasizes the need for continuous improvement. Evaluating one's progress on a daily basis and striving to improve every day. Continuous practice and work can pay dividends.

So what does this have to do with purposing this blog? I am going to use this blog as my experiment log. I will record my plans, execute and evaluate here. Keeping it public to give myself some accountability. We'll see how it goes.

On to article two, or part two whichever to call it. Still more articles in the pipe so I need to get writing. Made some good progress last night and today. Finally got my head wrapped around the ZRM. The basics are easy, now just need to figure out do the stuff they left out of the examples. I think my article will show how to do LCRUD with ZRM in order to get to where I want to be. I can feel the edges of the groove now, so hopefully the writing will go faster.

Drained

Slept well, but just a few too many calls today. Need to recuperate.

If I ever need to go to a cube, I nomimate this one.

busy weekend

Let's see lots going on. Had a happy father's day today. Kicked of with the Pittsburgh Father's Day 5k -- Did a decent time I clocked 29 minutes 26 seconds. About a minute better than my Greenfield Glide time, keeping a much steadier pace. Average pace was about a 9 minute 30 second mile. I am much happier about how I kept the pace. I expect to do much worse with a poor night's sleep and some stomache issues. Neither turned out to be a terrible hinderance. I do need to get more practice in as I think my worst problem was a lack of confidence. Not having the mile markers on the course to get a feel for how fast I was going was a big minus.

Had a dinner with A's family in the evening which was nice. Ate well, but not too horribly. Spent time talking with folks and playing with Z. Z hasn't slept much today, and got up extra early, so she's to bed a bit early. A plan I plan to follow!

Saturday was busy with errands. Hit up Half Price Books and got a nice mix of stuff. Picked up a copy of Book 6 of the Bone color graphic novels, one of the New Destroyer Adventures, a business book : Never Eat Lunch Alone, and a Men's Health 2008 exercise guide. I've read thru the exercise guide. Some good advice and exercise plans I look forward to trying. An excellent article on montivation for exercise that I plan to keep in mind. Also an article on LeBron James focused on career/personal development. The young man has done alot, by taking his natural talent and applying a ton of focus. He is on the Dynamic Path. Some inspiring ideas to work forward with. My favorite bit: Instead of asking "what do I want to do with my life?" he asks "What am I doing with my life?" This skews the focus in a direction of proactive work.

Other items: picked up a new Xul Workbench for eclipse, and giving it a test run. Tried QuoteURLText with FF3.0rc1, looks good so updated it on the site to handle the new version. Looking forward to playing with that again.

Need to get my Zero work and my DataPower Projects up and running. Also catch up on follow up items from Project A. Busy week ahead, but some up sides I look forward to exploring.

A week off

And back at it.

Projects are swarming me like biplanes on King Kong.

Lots of good stuff to play with. Lots of opportunities to try things out. Not a lot of time to execute. Can you see a problem here? Or perhaps a trend. Not sure. Working out of the hole will be an interesting experience. Working on Paper number 3 slowly while I try and cobble together some other projects at work.

Realized how much I want to spend more time with my daughter. I may need to reconsider my work from work goal.

Found this while cleaning browser tabs. Oddly appropriate. I need to think about how I focus my attention. One of my homepages uses this quote as the header:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. -Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001) "

I think I need to really think about where I spend my attention. Attention is now more valuable than time, and I should treat it as such.

90 Posts

So this is a little later than I intended.

Of course I thought I was going to send that 2 days ago. And then I thought I would post this yesterday. So much for that intent.

Well this is post number 90. By a few different metrics I've made my goal to post for 3 months. It has been an interesting experience. I'm not sure what I want to do with this next. I found some value of thinking things out on a blog. As I haven't shared this site with many people, I can't tell how much I should value how well it does as a communications tool. Overall, I'm happy with the experiment. I didn't think I had 90 days of posts in me, I'm glad to see I was wrong!

We'll see where my writing habit will take me next. My article is online and has made the Top Story for the WebSphere Category. The writing has been fun, and I look forward to doing more.

back and forth...

So read a really great book the other day "The Dynamic Path" by Jim Citrin. It was a present from some friends of our as part of a Mother's Day package. VERY interesting book. It helps shed some light on career growth and development. Essentially Citrin captures a very interesting path: From Champion, to Leader to a Legacy. Citing examples in sports, business and public service Citrin identifies people who made the transitions from Champion individual contributers to leaders and from leaders of a circle of people to leaders who leave a legacy. I can see how these ideas apply in the technical field. Within IBM there are many technical champions, and then there are technical leaders (STSMs, DEs) but at the top of the career chain are those who have left a legacy in technology. These are the IBM Fellows. They have changed the course of the industry by leaving a legacy. I am sure other companies have similar traits and paths.

I think I have found my way thru to be recognized as an individual contributor, but now I need to think and grow as a leader. It is a segement of my role that I'm still learning in. I confess I still like doing the things that got me recognized as a Champion, but I think I need to keep growing myself. That means working harder as a leader and building those skills.

That said, there are other things in my life that I want to focus on. I've been really horrible at my social life for the past few years. I'm starting to connect to people again, on places like Facebook. I'm slowing trying to grow my social circle again. Still needs work.

I'd like to work on that a bit more. I need to get in shape. I saw some pictures of me and realized -- Wow, I'm still really out of shape! I've made some great improvements, but I still have a good ways to go. My healthy weight is about 20 lbs lighter than where I am now. I can fix this. It just took a bit more realization.

Most important to me right now is spending time with Zoe and Amy. She is growing up much faster than I'm ready for. 9 months have gone by SO FAST! Soon other milestones will be blown by. I don't want to miss any of them. The past few days I found a groove that I was happy with. I think I can continue on that track and make progress. Will I continue to hone my leadership skills and career plans... probably, there is some intersection with my goals there. But I think I need to make sure I keep the rest of my life going as well. And look for opportunities to build my skills in other spaces.

Greenfield Glide & other health.

Greenfield Glide went out this morning. Did an ok performance. Really happy with my first mile, ok with the second and disappointed with the third. Did my first mile in 8 minutes 4 seconds, second mile was clocked at 17:48 (9:30) and completed at around 30:30. So average time per mile is probably around 9:45. A little slower than I wanted but I pushed things a little too fast at the beginning. Lesson learned and something I can apply to the Father's Day 5k in 2 weeks. While I was a little disappointed with the 3rd mile, I do I can learn to push myself a bit farther to try and get that 8 minutes for longer. It would be nice to finish out the Great Race with an 8 minute mile. It is good to have goals to train for. The biggest setback was getting a stick after about a mile and a half from breathing hard. It made the last hill a little too tough, so I ended up slowing down to walk a bit. I'll need to start running my inital mile faster to try and get past that.

I'm also looking at building up my strength training again. June is a new month and I'm resolving myself to hit the workouts a bit harder this month. I've found a plan that looks interesting to me. I will follow the plan for the next 6 weeks, then find another plan and continue. If I can setup a new plan every 6 weeks I think I can make some good improvements.

Making a goal to eat better. I'm fairly horrible at eating on track, with more than a few regressions in the past few months. June is the 6th month of the year, and I've been slacking since Thanksgiving. I can do better and I will. Heavy on the fruits and veggies, more protein, and less processed carbs. Drink more water! These goals are not hard to meet, and I enjoy eating well, they just take a little more effort. Fruits I like are now coming in season so time to enjoy!