Work/Life Balance Management

ok, here's my philosophy of work/management/etc. in a nutshell. Note that this applies now and is subject to change at any time.

Work is part of life and life is part of work. You cannot separate the two. At any given point you are asking an individual to choose between priorities.

When you have a newborn at home, you have little room to prioritize work based on another's ego.

When you are engaged in a work project that can impact the world in a meaningful way you have little room to prioritize a distant relative's concern over making the same dish for a potluck.

If you succeed enough in selling priorities (by treating people as adults, spirit rallies, friendliness, money, profit sharing, flexibility, stability, paint color, cafeterias, t-shirt of the month competitions, whatever the fuck works), then the people that you spent so much time and money to find will surprise you because they care.

Or you could just focus on making sure that your HR policies won't get you sued and that people are fearful enough of losing their jobs to show up when they're required to be there.

Blog refresh

Ok, I'm going to post to my blog, which I really haven't done much. It helps that very few people (if any) actually subscribe to it.

This, in case you don't know, is my personal blog, rather than my professional blog. As such you should  as soon as possible become acquainted with the idea that I'm more focused on conveying my raw personal insights (possibly crap) rather than fully formed academic ideas.

Others before me had letters that they sent, which I must assume they presumed to be private, while recognizing that they could eventually become public. I would like to make this blog along those lines. I don't want to censor myself,  but at the same time it would be foolish to treat this as something that no-one will ever see. That is for my private journal (which may or may not exist in an undisclosed location).

So to you dear (and possibly non-existent) reader, I re-dedicate this blog.

Experiment

I'm thinking of getting this going again (instead of posting randomly long posts on Facebook). Is anyone out there?

Thorough Review of the iPhone 5

meh

Ground Meat for guys

Ok. I haven't thought a lot about this post, but that's what blogging is about anyway.

A brief man's guide to ground meat:

1. Buy your ground meat. Doesn't matter if it's grass fed beef, turkey, chicken, veal. I don't care. Bulk is awesome.
2. Use a kitchen scale (you have one, right?) to divide it into 1lb portions put in Ziplock freezer bags.
3. Put it in your freezer.
4. If you happen to think of it far enough in advance, take it out of your freezer and put it in the fridge a day before you need it in order to thaw it.
5. If you don't think of it that far in advance, just take it out and put it on a microwave-safe plate. Put it in the microwave and use the auto defrost feature. Enter the correct weight of meat you are defrosting.
6. Every time you microwave beeps, take out the meat and use your hands to scrape of the outer thawed portion for use.
7. By the time the microwave is done everything should be defrosted completely.
8. Use the ground meat in any number of dishes. My favorite is still chili. You can do amazing things with ground meat, beans, onions, garlic, peppers, and other savory stuff. Add it to rice and make burritos, or have it raw. It's all good. Have fun!

Stats

98.56% percent of people who take stats find it to be seriously painful. This is a fact that I just made up. I also made up a p-value of .000000001, which means that it's statistically significant within my own mind.

Maybe I should be a writer?

I've been wondering what I should be when I grow up.

I've posted before about ROWE. It occurred to me tonight that there are some jobs that really are now already quite focused around results. Years ago I thought I was choosing one of these careers (software development). For the most part I was wrong.

There is much that has caused me to become disillusioned with the software and technology industries. Someday these will advance. I know this, but from my vantage point, they have a long way to go.

I've though about continuing on for my PhD in order to become a college professor (which I do believe is generally about results...again maybe I'm fooling myself).

I've mostly thought about starting businesses. Then I could create the environment I want.

But maybe part of what I should be looking at is writing. I think that I could enjoy communicating with writing, whether it be opinion or instruction. Developing my skill with writing can only serve me well with whatever I do.

So now is probably a good time for me to start practicing. Blogging seems a natural way to do this. Especially since no one really reads my blog anyway....at least for now ;)