I’m simultaneously looking forward to it and somewhat apprehensive about the whole thing. The distance is one thing. Eight miles? I could do eight miles and not really be phased. In my mind’s eye, I can picture eight miles from here & it’s a ways, but it’s not too bad. I think after about eight miles, I get into more urban and more bicyclists, and the roads I’ll be crossing are more major crossings, and more people, etc, etc. After eight miles, I don’t really have a sense of the trail I’ll be bicycling on either. Not that I haven’t done it before, I just haven’t done it for something like 16 years and I’m kinda foggy about how it all goes. I think I can just keep following the yellow brick road (and all the regular bike commuters), but still. I like to be able to visualize this stuff.

I’m also not a super confident rider. I’m ok. I’m not particularly fast, even with an electric-assist, I average out at about 10mph unless I’m going downhill. You know, gravity helps everyone out there. Being slow like that means the silly lycra/spandex people zoom past me. As does pretty much everyone else, but… whatever. I like bicycling. I just don’t like going up hills & I have help with that now. Also, my bike is real purdy.

I think my best bet tomorrow is just to let myself be a tourist. That’s more fun anyway. That means instead of being all boring and serious and focused, I get to look around and stop and smell the wild roses and take pictures of the lakes and generally dawdle & annoy the boring, serious, focused spandex people. And if I’m late to work, eh, I’m late to work. It’s an experiment, after all…

In other news, got the article draft out to the people who need to contribute to it. A little (a lot) later than I wanted it going out, but… it’s out & hopefully they get it back to me in time to revise & send on to the editor so we can go through the whole process again. Also did a walk through of a webinar presentation. I’m the host… which of course brings to mind, “I am your host und sagen wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret!” I fear the presentation will be nowhere near so interesting as Cabaret, certainly not choreographed as well (I mean, really — who can compete with Bob Fosse?), but it’ll be interesting.

And if I’m going to be coherent enough to be peddling a bicycle, electric-assist or no, I need to be going to bed in the very near future. So that’s that for now.

The keynote by Axel Roesler was excellent. Of his many good points, one of his sidenotes was that he had been a designer, then an engineer, and was now back to a designer. It was at this point that I started thinking about how management is at least partially about designing an experience for the employees that allows them to be as productive as possible, in both directions — I want the folks above and below on the org chart to be happy and productive. How can I facilitate a work experience for them that will set them up for success? With that in mind, I thought about why I’d been hired again and what sorts of things I would be able to find at this conference that would aid & abet me in meeting some of those larger scheme goals.

To that end, the first presentation I went to was Designing Experiences Beyond the Screen (Ariel van Spronsen) — services design. It was during this that I jokingly told one of my former co-workers that for the weekend I should change my title to Employee Productivity Designer. She laughed at me and said, “It sounds like you’re a manager that doesn’t want to say you’re a manager!” Totally. She then said, ‘and you’d have to work with a lot of people to design that experience, facilities to set up desks, IT to set up computers, HR arranging onboarding…” Um, yeah, I’m a manager, what do you think managers do? Heh.

Then it was lunch. Yay lunch. Met up with P who went to WikiLeaks: Information Between Legal Borders (Brian Rowe), which was the other one that looked interesting to me, but not as likely to provide the lateral ‘I Can Use This’ sort of thing. After lunch we both went to Intro to Sharepoint (Quentin, Greg) — it was *way* intro for us, but as we both have staff we’d like to pull over to SharePoint, it seemed like an optimal time to step back and see what other folks were telling noobs about SharePoint. I also got some good ideas of things I can tweak SharePoint to do, helloooo key performance indicators. I’d love to figure out a way to ping off the incident management stuff to SharePoint to track my team specific metrics there, but have yet to figure out a way that won’t just add a zillion additional steps to the workflow. Still, in time…

The third session of the day, we went to Google Book Settlement (Brian Rowe) — it was good. Kind of a coaster session with fairly minimal cross-over immediate ‘can use’ stuff, but interesting from a copyright and intellectual property standpoint. The final session of the day was Discussion/Idea Generation: Next Gen Internet-making taxonomies & social media work (Pam Green). We didn’t actually get around to the social media aspect of the session, but there were a lot of my peeps there, and Pam is awesome. Looking at how to organize a massive intranet effectively is an interesting exercise. There were a lot of assumptions that had been passed on to Pam by people who tend to make the decisions, and there were a lot of assumptions by people in the room who lacked background and context (not the least, how long Pam had been doing work along these lines). But there was some good signal in the noise.

We went down to the info parties — I had a tasty Manhattan, although the bartender asked me a question a couple times and I just couldn’t hear her, or rather I could hear her, but not distinguish quite what she was saying, to her annoyance. It got made sweet, which is fine. It was tasty. We stood around and talked about random things, then headed to a place down the street with the claim that they had better beers (plus you didn’t have to order food at the bar). That was fun. Would like to do that more often with those folks. I really miss working with them, though I think ultimately I’m in a much, much better place, that’s a much better fit for me.

This morning the presentation was a presentation on search engines, search & the like by Vanessa Fox. It was also a great presentation. She in relation to tracking real time search trends based on tv advertising, she asked how many of us watched the Super Bowl last February. In an audience of around 300, only four people raised their hands. This reminds me of the PM that started out using sports metaphors in a meeting I was in where there were a couple of librarians, a nice content lady, and an Israeli database guy. We all gave him blank stares. He shifted to military metaphors and the database guy got what he was saying and started laughing… I can’t remember if he ever came around to a metaphor that the rest of us would actually get. But Earnest Tom was so earnest that we didn’t really mind. We kinda got it, the metaphors were just really not well thought out for the audience… ANYWAY (it’s my blog, I can go on a tangent if I want to). Apparently 50% of people are on both the computer and tv at the same time (I don’t know where the statistic comes from or the full context, I’m just sayin’ that’s what I heard). I leaned over to P & whispered, “That’s because we only have one computer in the same room as the tv right now…” But search trends and information seeking behaviors are an interesting thing to take a look at, I find my interest drops fairly quickly when the only interest in them becomes focused down to “how do we use this to push traffic to sites”, but that’s not what this presentation was about.

The first, and only session I attended today, was Using Humor to Convey Information (Jess Hagy & friends). It was put on by Jess of Indexed, a site I’ve been following for about three years now. One of the things I need to do is present information about what my team is doing. While at the moment, I need to present my information seriously and get taken seriously, I think that using humor and the unexpected in other areas helps engage people and bring stuff home that would be otherwise much less accessible. For instance, this example of what’s changing in a MARC record is completely amusing to me & made much more of an impression than it would have had the example been, for example Lawrence Whelk.

Then to lunch, where we met a nice library student from PDX, and a SharePoint widget designer & a SharePoint dev, all of whom we had good discussions with. Then when we were done eating, we wandered over to KW and talked to him and I got from him what I was hoping to hear someone at the conference talk about — namely, storytelling and creating compelling narratives. Got some book recommendations, or rather, re-recommendations because he’s talked about them before (and that’s why I asked him, I knew he’d have some good resources). His opinion was also ‘maybe not so much employee productivity designer, but productivity engineer.’ Which lead to an entertaining, brief discussion on design v. engineering. “Don’t call me an engineer! I’m an artist!”

And with that, we went home a little early. It was good, but we needed an infonap & at least a *little* bit of a “weekend”. Also a chance to recover from being around that many people. Introvert much?

Kind of general stuff, we saw more whale tails & ass cracks than we really needed to. Pull those pants up or wear longer shirts, yo. All in all, it was good. From an lateral usability perspective, I got what I needed. Networking and keeping in touch too.

I’ll wring something out eventually & feel better. Much like I always worried in school that the paper I just turned in was epic fail and it was usually returned with an A or B+ grade. It’s just getting through the process of getting something, nearly anything, written up. But until I do, it’s going to be a nagging irritation.

I’ve also set out an ambitious course of stuff I want to learn at work over the next year or so. Almost a terrifying amount of stuff to learn. But I think it will give me more of the kinds of work that I’m suited for rather than the hit & run projects my people seem to usually get pulled in on. It’s all there just waiting for someone as far as I can tell, so what the hell. Now if I can just convince the devs & technical architects to let me sit on their shoulders and give me scraps now & again that they would rather not do… Do my own homework & convince people to let me feed them my dogfood… And spend some serious time brushing up on XML & XSLT & some other things to help smooth the tweaky… I’m looking forward to it. No end of stuff to learn though.

It’s late! I have to get up early! And tomorrow at the end of the day at the end of the week I’m being forced to network! EEK! Am I out of my comfort zone? Oh yes, I’m out of my comfort zone. But she’s a nice smart lady and I think it will be good.

Speaking of poor baby, M2 bit the next door neighbor girl. Negotiating play is a hard thing to learn at 5. Apparently the little girl next door wasn’t sharing? Or wouldn’t let M2 draw with chalk how/where she wanted to draw? There’s a repeating dynamic here that I’ve noticed where little girl next door asks if she can play with something & M2 being sweet and generous gives it to her, but then when M2 wants it back, as long as M2 displays *any* interest there’s no way she’s getting it back. This has various manifestations, but is definitely the reigning dynamic. BUT STILL. No bite-y! Bad! I heard about it this afternoon & when I asked her about it this evening M2 went wailing into her bedroom totally upset & appalled to be reminded of the event. But we talked about it. She knows she shouldn’t do that. Not only is negotiating play hard at 5, but so is impulse control when you’re kinda being baited. On the upside, she apologized appropriately and they were BBF again and played nicely the rest of the time they played outside together today. Usually M1 is around to snoopervise & help with the negotiations, but being sick, she was sitting inside probably watching from the window. Ah, learning.

Interviewed two taxonomy candidates today. Really liked the second one a lot. Had an interview last week? with someone I really liked too, but apparently there were concerns that she was very very shy in all interviews & could hardly make eye contact. In consulting, confidence is so key… if you can’t fake confidence in an interview, can you fake it with a client? We all have days where we feel less confident than we do at our best — you know? Speaking of which, I suck at interviewing. On the upside, I think now that K is involved in the interviews, I can get some good coaching & improve that skill.

Got signed up to help with ontology tool evaluations. I’ve gotten some work done, but it seems like I’ve been in a lot of meetings. On the upside, got the full dev/enterprise license (yow! Unlimited terms & vocabs!) so our IT guys can install our new taxonomy tool on the new intranet. License came through this evening about an hour & a half ago. Woo! Feel bad that L has done most of the work on the taxonomy, but I at least got & kept the ball rolling so we can even *have* the taxonomy. What that involved was recognizing the opportunity, recognizing the correct contact, pitching & selling (not that the fellow to convince needed convincing, but he was definitely curious to hear the pitch, even if he was pre-sold) knowing who I needed for the correct & best team to pitch & sell with, and in general gadflying about, nipping just enough to get things done without making a pest of myself over the course of the last two weeks. Not only did I get the taxonomy, I got faceted search that ties into the taxonomy added in too. And really, it isn’t like I don’t have anything going on right now… so, I guess in retrospect I don’t feel *too* bad that I haven’t had much time on the taxonomy itself.

Hmm. I’ve stayed up too late again. I think that’s probably a respectable enough amount to qualify as a random update for beginning of the week. Especially as I have another early shift tomorrow & a lot of meetings & plenty o’ work to do.

Just sayin’.

The app:

What the app does when you click on Mah Bukkit button:

So there.

Edit: Uploaded pix to my other space — can you hear see them now?