Family Man & Software Developer
The past few nights I have not been sleeping properly. A couple nights in a hotel and getting ready to go meetup with my team have led to some tossing and turning.
This afternoon has been great though. Getting together with family and friends we went for a two hour hike through the woods to get to a little waterfall area. The kids did really well and didn’t complain at all until about the last five minutes that their legs were getting tired.
For the past two weekends our family has stepped into the world of dance competitions for the first time. All three of our oldest daughters have been involved with dance at some point. Alexandria no longer does as horse riding has become her main activity. Although Noah loves to shake it around the house hasn’t been interested in following his sisters when we’ve talked with him about it. He’d rather soccer and basketball.
Caile still takes one dance class currently, it’s a musical theatre class as she really enjoys drama and this gives a good mix of that with dance. Ella though I’m pretty sure would dance all day everyday no questions asked.
This year we put her into a dance troupe within her dance company Dance Conxion. They have been practicing and rehearsing a bunch of dances this session and last weekend was the first of dance competition season.
If you had of told me not many years ago that I would be spending my weekends driving to and watching dance competitions I would have called you crazy. So fast forward and seeing the fact that I am actually enjoying myself very much is a shock to me.
I’ve always known dancing is hard and takes a lot of skill, strength, and memory, but these weekends have really blown me away. Watching all these dancers perform dance after dance and pretty much nail it every time is so impressive. At such a young age to be able to do the moves they are doing, remember all the steps for all the songs, and do them in sync and in precision timing, has just blown me away.
I’m still not sure at my age that there is anything in this world I’m as good at as they are at dance at their young age.
Even if Ella and the rest of her fellow dancers weren’t raking in the awards and medals I’d still be proud of what an awesome job they all are doing. I’m very thankful for the dedicated, kind, and creative instructors who have choreographed some wonderful numbers and helped get them to this level.
The challenge I had given myself for March was to read and become more productive. While there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of progress I can make I did come a ways.
Typically I would read maybe one book a month, and this month I was able to read three. Each one was a recommendation and they lived up to them. With the help of the books I have been able to increase my productivity especially in this last week.
Managing Humans was the first book I read through. I’m not sure how I’ve made it this far without at least reading Rands blog previously let alone his books. This book has a lot of ideas and concepts which I believe I will help me as I look to move into a leadership role in the future. It also gave me new insights to the way I think myself. As it turns out I believe I really am a nerd.
The way I think and get into a project is really put well into words by Rands in this book. It helped make some of these things clearer while at the same time allowing me to gain perspective on how I come across to others. Both things will serve me well going forward.
The next book I read was Game Storming. This was introduced to me last year on my teams meetup by co-worker Simon Ouderkirk, who if you are interested in support or remote work you should certainly be reading his site. He led our team meetup project last year and used Game Storming to do it. At my upcoming team meetup I’m going to facilitate a similar type of activity to help our team build a road map for where we should go in the coming months.
With Simon’s help and this book I’m feeling confident that I’ll be able to help run this and get some meaningful work done with our team. The concepts of using games to brainstorm hard problems and come up with creative solutions is really interesting. Seeing it first hand last year not only did we come up with a good road map, I think it helped bring us together as a team. Hopefully we can duplicate that this time.
The last book I finished is the Effective Executive. Don’t let the title fool you though this book I believe can be a benefit to almost anyone who wants to be more effective in their life or job. My co-worker Andrea Badgley recently read it as well and wrote a great review and the part that stuck with her most.
The part that stuck with me the most was a bit different than Andrea though. One of the instant things I was able to take away and put into effect is to know my time. The author Peter F. Drucker says this of time.
Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, more over, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.
Thinking about this I took a look at my time. I didn’t go super deep or keep records of what I spent time doing, but I looked at my schedule for a typical day and then restructured things and to hide things that could be a distraction. In the past I’ve noticed, and had co-workers say, that adjusting their schedule helps them be more productive. This book helped me realize why this is and the importance of revisiting your time frequently.
If you adjust your schedule it forces you to think about your time. Just the act of doing this has helped me get more focused work in this past week which has helped me get more done. I’m now going to be more purposeful about revisiting often where my time goes and how I can organize my day for the best results.
Jen and Ella were singing some Jordan Knight song tonight. Caile didn’t care for it so Jen warned her that it was the New Kids On The Block she was talking about. Caile replied
That’s not the New Kids On The Block it’s just some old man.
Yesterday I did something extremely exciting, I booked my flight and accommodations so that I can attend SupConf! Previously I’ve written about choosing support as a career, and about how we can make support cool. The community behind SupConf, Support Driven, and the conference itself is a great way to help accomplish this. If you are in support, and are passionate about it, I highly recommend checking out both Support Driven and SupConf both.
Some of my colleagues at Automattic are helping organize the event, and some are also speaking. The line up of speakers and topics looks amazing in general. I’m very much looking forward to spending time with people from a bunch of different companies all dedicated to providing excellent support.
The icing on the cake is that the venue is Automattic HQ in San Fransisco. Getting to visit the company office is pretty neat. To get to visit it while learning and participating at SupConf so I can take home new ideas to help bring happiness to the people who use our products is awesome!
This weekend, although filled in with a lot of fun, had some home repair items take place that I thought were going to cost me a lot of money. As it turns out I was able to fix both without calling anyone in!
The first thing ended up being really minor, at least for now. The toilet down stairs at my In Laws wouldn’t flush. The pump downstairs wasn’t kicking in to push it up out of the basement so it just wasn’t going anywhere. With the help of Google I was able figure out how to manually run the pump. After I did that the pump started kicking in by itself again as normal and has been working fine! Hopefully it stays that way.
Last night we had family and friends over for dinner and a games afternoon. We were playing Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. During a break a bunch of stuffed chicken breasts got put in the oven. We continued on with the game and then when it was close to time to eat Jen went to check on things. The veggies on the stove were all done, but the chicken breasts were still frozen.
Luckily with Jen’s parents down stairs we were able to use their oven to cook and things were just a little later than planned. While they were down there cooking though it was time to do some troubleshooting to figure out what’s wrong. Probably the the element just burned out and we’ll have to get a new one. Nope element looked and tested fine. Uh oh. All burners on the stove still worked, and the broil worked, just not the bake element.
Taking things apart a bit further we found the we got to the control board and noticed some slight burn marks right near the bake line. We did a few things to troubleshoot and it seemed the problem was somewhere in the control board. After a quick search it looked like the control board was around $150 USD plus shipping and who knows how long it would take to get here.
Right near the burn marks there are two relays, one for broil and one for the bake elements. Since the broil worked and based on the way they were connected it seemed logical that it was the bake relay that was the problem. They two replays looked the same, but I couldn’t see the component numbers on the bake relay. This seemed like a good excuse to get a new soldering iron. My old one died a few years ago and there have been a few times where one would have come in handy, but never bought on.
Once everyone left I ran into Canadian Tire and picked up an iron. There wasn’t solder removing braid or wick though. After asking around I found somewhere I could get some today.
As far as I know we haven’t used the broil on our oven since we got it, so I figured if I removed the bake relay and it was the exact same as the broil one. So I swapped them and put things back together and now the baking works and the broil doesn’t. I can live with that!
The solder job wasn’t the greatest, but it works. There may have been a bit of burning when I was trying to get the old solder off to get the parts out. I’ve never been good at soldering though. My instructor in college years ago said I did well enough to pass the high reliability soldering part of my course, but he asked me, or begged me, to never to do it in a job.
My lovely daughter Caile is just one of those kids you don’t need to worry about. She’s our middle daughter as well. She just kind of goes about her business without needing a lot of interference or help from Jen and I.
Every day she comes home from school and just goes into the office and gets on Jen’s computer and starts doing her homework. We never need to ask, or remind her, she just does it. Because of this it has sometimes become a bit to easy for me to not stay up on what is happening in her life all the time. What sort of things she’s working on etc.
Jen helped her a bunch recently with a science fair project which has earned her a space in the regionals. We do talk as well, and I do feel we are close, but I worry about her falling into that middle child syndrome. The other day I sat her down and let her know how proud I was of her and thankful I was for her making things so easy on us as parents.
Most of her school work is done in Google Apps for Education and she knows how to work with all the apps really well. The other night I had a fun thought, maybe we can reward her by getting her a Chromebook of her own. Jen liked the idea and I found a good one on Bestbuy and ordered it. It arrived yesterday but it was a hectic day so I never unpacked it and gave it to her. When she was gone today I opened it up and put it on her bed. Included with it was a brilliant Pug post card that I received from a local artist Tara Andrews. She loves pugs so I was able to tell her I got her a pug and a computer.
For months now we’ve been putting off painting Caile’s room. We had some repair work done to the top of her wall and ceiling so it has been needing done since then. We’ve even had the paint for the whole time. Jen and I finally took the afternoon to get it done. Neither of us are painters but I think it turned out pretty well. Now she has two purple and two green walls.
It seems like I’ve written about donairs a lot on the blog. While I do really enjoy donairs I don’t really eat them very often. Since my month of being really good I’ve been wanting to treat myself with one though. So with that good month and after knocking that off that big item from our todo list we decided to go out for a donair date night.
It might not be super fancy, but anytime Jen and I can go out by ourselves is a big deal. Besides House of Dough makes some delicious donairs. The large just about got the best of me though. But it was so good I had to finish it off. From now on though I think I’ll still with the small as sitting here at home I’m settling in nicely to my meat coma while my arteries harden up just that little bit more.
One of the goals I’ve been working on is to try and get out of my comfort zone a bit and start doing some public speaking. Being up in front of people is not overly fun for me, but I do see the good of doing it.
One area where I can see me potentially able to help people is by talking about WordPress. By no means do I know everything about WordPress, but I do have a pretty strong understanding of how it works, and I help people use it as my job as a Happiness Engineer. So far I’ve done two presentations on the topic. One I wrote about before where I did a WordPress.com 101 for a university business class. Last night I did one at a local meetup for Refresh Annapolis Valley. WordPress is a pretty popular topic because there was likely more people out last night than I have seen before.
My idea was to give an intro to WordPress and show people the basics of getting started. While preparing I went through creating so many slides with screenshots and taking people through the process of setting up WordPress and then working with it. Near the end I scrapped most of it and decided to go against a lot of the advice I had received and do a live demo instead. It still feels like the right move to really give people a feel for how to work through the WordPress dashboard but almost immediately backfired on me.
The talk took place on the same university campus and the guest internet connection is pretty locked down so I couldn’t load one of the pages needed to do the demo because it ran on a different port which was blocked on the connection. Thankfully the organizer fired up the hot spot on his phone and I connected to it and went through.
My intention was to record my screen so I could share it after, but once up there nerves took over and I completely forgot to start it.
One of the things I mentioned in my talk was the mission of WordPress which is as follows:
To democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.
One of people who has given me the motivation to start presenting in public is a team mate Mahangu Weerasinghe. Each year our company gets together and one of the things we do is each person has to do a flash talk while there. It is just a short, up to four minutes, presentation on anything you would like. His inspired me greatly and today an article about his story was published that is both inspiring itself and goes to the mission of WordPress. I encourage you to give it a read. http://heropress.com/essays/breaking-the-silence/
I’m sharing my flash talk below which is certainly less inspirational, but it shows how nervous I am in front of people I think and was my first time up in front of a group of people in a long time.
Two nights ago on Friday night I set out for a long run. Pretty much my maximum distance has been about 10k for my runs. I did do 13k once by mistake when I had gotten lost at one point when out for a run at a friends place.
My original plan for the night was to do 15k but when I make it to the 7.5k point in the run I felt so good that I kept going. I should have turned around then as I had a limited amount of time but it completely slipped my mind. When I made it back to the 15k mark I still felt pretty good but was also lots tired. It would have been a good ending point but the car was still 5k away. Around the 18km mark Jen called and she had to leave the house to pick up the girls, but I still wasn’t home. Thankfully my Mother in Law looked after Noah when he was a sleep so Jen could pick them up.
Not sure I’ll ever try for 20k again though. I made it but my legs are still hurting and very upset with me right now. I am proud that I made that far though and that I did it at a pace that I was running 5k at just a couple months ago.
Sandy McFadden 