Family Man, Support & Software Engineer
Since February 16th I’ve had a web cam setup in my office window looking out over my backyard. It’s set to capture an image every half hour when it is light out.
The camera is not great so the quality isn’t very good but it’s still pretty cool watching the snow disappear and the grass take over. This time lapse shows the images from February 16th until May 6th 2015.
Tuesday night I finally did something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Gardening and plants are not anywhere near my specialty, nor do I even particularly enjoy it much but I planted a new plan in the flower bed I dug the other day, and I am excited about it.
It’s really the sediment behind the plant that I really like and I hope that it continues on. My mother has had a Peony growing in her garden for some time now. It originated from her Grandmothers garden, part was taken and moved to her Mothers garden, and then she took some and moved it to her garden.
Since she has moved out of the family home she wanted to dig it up and take it with her. She is renting but took part of it to plant in her yard there. Since we have finally settled down into a home of our own it made perfect sense for me to now plant it in our yard.
My only fear is that I will kill it because as I mentioned I’m not great at this stuff. Luckily if I do it doesn’t for sure mean the end of it. Mom did take some to plant in her yard and my sister took some as well to put in hers. Hopefully between the three of us we will be able to get them through the transplant and have some if it available for my kids to plant in their yard someday.
I never met my Great Grandmother but I find it very cool that I have a plant from her garden now planted in my front yard.
With a bit of luck and work later this season I’ll be able to share pictures of it growing strong.
To me cars are a necessity. If I lived in a big city with great public transportation I would gladly give up my vehicles, buy a good bike and make my way around that way. However living in rural Nova Scotia with four kids having a car, and in our case two, is pretty much needed.
Although we have gotten by for months now on one vehicle as my poor 2002 Honda Civic was first laid up in the driveway and then at a mechanic friends for a while. On Sunday though I was able to go pick it back up.
Something has been draining the battery so especially in the winter if it sat for anytime at all the battery died and wouldn’t start without a long charge and boost. Instead I going through that hassle we let it sit.
It’s only been three years I’ve owned this car but it is by far my favourite I’ve owned. It’s funny because it was already ten years old when I bought it and I’ve owned a couple brand new cars before it.
It’s not the prettiest car and there is plenty wrong with it, but I still enjoy driving it. It runs well, and I get great gas mileage especially compared to the big SUV that is our other vehicle.
There should be things wrong with it, it’s thirteen years old now and has over 200,000 kilometres on it. There are some things that would make people crazy I’m sure, but it’s part of what I like about it.
The fact that one of the back windows won’t go down is no big deal. I don’t sit back there, my window still goes down. The air conditioning is no longer cold, but again my window goes down. Besides that I live in Nova Scotia Canada, there isn’t much of the year we really need air conditioning. The heat still works, that’s the important part around here.
Having to go in through the trunk to open the fuel door every time you put gas in it drives my wife crazy. That’s ok in my books, I don’t have to fill it up often anyway. I could just leave the door open all the time, but it looks a bit better closed.
The trunk release no longer works either but it was causing the latch to get stuck closed so that once the trunk was open you couldn’t get it to close again. A cold winter morning dropping the kids off at school and I took the cable off so I could get it closed. Now I just need to use the key to open the trunk, that’s not a big deal.
There are scratches and minor dents, there are hub caps missing, there are warning lights on the dash that don’t go away, there are some rubber seals and trim coming off, but who cares. It’s thirteen years old! It’s not a beauty contest and it still drives pretty darn nice.
Having it gone for so long really made me realize how much I like it. Not just because of all the extra gas we were burning because we had to take the big SUV everywhere even if there was only one of us going. Jumping in, rolling my window down and taking off in my little standard five speed is fun. Just a different feeling than the big SUV that’s an automatic.
This last thing is causing me a little bit of despair though, but I’m still working on fixing it. To stop the battery from draining it was narrowed down to a fuse. Unfortunately it controls things like my remote door locks, power outlet, some other things, but most importantly the radio. So now I can’t listen to music or the CBC when cruising around. I’m still working to see if I can narrow down exactly what is causing the drain so I can at least get some of these things back.
It’s been so good to me though that I can live with all that’s wrong with it. If it died tomorrow and just refused to go on I’d be sad. But in all reality I’ve gotten more than my money worth out of this car and I really see me driving it for a few years yet.
I’ve been thinking more about my post the other day building relationships and how I can apply it to my work.
When I wrote that post and was thinking about it I was coming more from the personal side. Building relationships with people I meet or interact with. Why not look at it from a work perspective?
At work my primary role is talking with WordPress.com users. What an opportunity! It’s obvious different than spending time with the same people many times, but taking a step back these people might contact support multiple times. It might not always be me they deal with but the are dealing the company in general.
This means through every interaction I should be looking at it as an opportunity to build a relationship. It might take a while and they might only contact us the one time. But as I’ve seen in my personal life building relationships has proven to be good for me in the long run. Therefore if I try to build relationships with our users it will be good for the company in the long run. If it’s good for the company than in turn its good for me as well.
The great part about this is it’s a no lose situation because even if the user never contacts again, by taking this approach it will make my conversation with our users a pleasant and good experience for them.
I’m still not sure how this will change my day to day work exactly, but for now I’m going to try and make things a little more personal and just look at things in a bit of a different way than I have.
Another gorgeous day out today. I took advantage and spent a while working outside at my favourite cafe in town TAN Coffee. Fresh air and good coffee make the work day even better! Kentville might not be as exotic as some of my co-workers “offices” at https://officetoday.wordpress.com but it still felt great today!
This weekend has been a birthday weekend for Jen and the kids. On Saturday they went to two different parties and yesterday we had another one to attend.
The party was at Roo’s Playland. It had been a few years since we had taken the kids there, but they used to love it. It is a giant indoor playground with all kinds of different things to do. Noah didn’t remember being there in the past at all, but he didn’t want to leave when it was time.
After the party we headed to our local zoo. Everyone else had been there once already this year, but it was last weekend so I had missed out. It was a beautiful day so it was a perfect way to spend a bit of time outside. We managed to arrive right at feeding time which always amazes me. Especially the lions. Gail one of the zoo owners will go right into the lions area and hand feed the them.
She used to get audience participation when it came to feeding a black bear they had at the zoo but, he was old and passed away. They have a younger black bear now but I don’t think they do the same with him. They didn’t today at least.
The zoo started out as a farm with some exotic animals and grew into a really cool zoo. The owners still live onsite and really consider the animals part of their family. Their Facebook page has all kinds of great pictures. I really enjoy the pictures of the lions the most. The old ones where they have some real cool interactions and the new ones documenting the growth of the new pride.
After the zoo we stopped for a quick ice cream snack on the way home too. The proper way to take advantage of one of our first t-shirt weather days this year.
It felt like spring yesterday! It was about 12 degrees Celsius and sunny. Seeing as I procrastinated for way to long doing our taxes again this year I didn’t get to enjoy nearly as much of the day as I would of liked.
For the morning and part of the afternoon I spent my day sorting through a years worth of paper work and calculating numbers out on the computer screen. It eventually came together and was able to get them submitted.
It was supposed to be my last Saturday’s job but that would have been hard to do from a hospital bed. Luckily there was some mistake made in some notice that went out from the Canada Revenue Agency so there was an extension on the filing deadline. So it turns out I didn’t get them in late.
Once that was all done I was able to spend some time outside in the yard. Managed to get some of the lawn raked and the rocks back in the driveway. Still more to do there but got a good start.
As it was apparently World Naked Gardening Day we did some gardening as well. Cleaned out the beds from last year and dug a new one in the front yard. Don’t worry though, my neighbours were safe as I did it all fully clothed.
I’m not opposed to doing things naked, in private that is. However even if was completely secluded and warm enough outside I don’t think gardening is one of those things. All I can picture is dirt in bad places and rose bushes or other prickly plants causing pain.
This past year as likely been the best year I’ve had in a long time for reading. By reading I mean actual books that aren’t a school text book or something technical like learning JavaScript.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading or think it is important because I do both. After a recent team meeting that we had where we ended up talking about books. Hearing them talk made me realize that I’m missing out on a lot of great reading.
Like most things in live though it’s one of these things that I just have to make sure it is a priority and make it a habit. That reminds me of the next book that I want to read that was recommended to me on our team meetup in Barcelona, The Power of Habit. In the past I’ve done good at making things that are important to me a habit and I’m at a point now where I need to do that again for a few things. Reading is going to be one of them.
If you’ve read something really good recently that you think I should take a look at I’d be grateful if you shared.
For the past while I’ve been slowly working my way through Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. It has been out for a while but I hadn’t heard of it, or at least didn’t recall hearing of it. I stumbled across it recently at a second hand store and the title grabbed me. Maybe something to do with my job title. I then realized it was by the CEO of Zappos.com and figured it would be a good read. Just because I’m taking my time getting through it doesn’t mean it isn’t good, I’m really enjoying it so far.
One section that stuck with me was when he was talking about building friendships and relationships. For the most part I’ve always been a pretty shy and find it hard to just approach people and start up a conversation. I’ve attended a few traditional networking type events before but always felt like they were mostly a waste of time. Probably what I made of them.
This section Tony included was from his excerpt in Ivanka Trump’s book, it talks about making real relationships.
If you are able to figure out how to be truly interested in someone you meet, with the goal of building up a friendship instead of trying to get something out of that person, the funny thing is that almost always, something happens later down the line that ends up benefiting either your business or yourself personally.
Then continues
So my advice is to stop trying to “network” in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you’ll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendships later down the road. You won’t know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2-3 years later down the road.
I’ve never quantified this before but what he says holds very true in my own life. It would be difficult for me to look back and see just how much having good relationships with people have helped me along my path which has led me to where I am. Whether it was a friend who ended up helping me get a job or even just having a good relationship with a previous manager ended up resulting in a lot of great contract based work much later on.
It almost sounds like what some people would call karma, if that is something you believe in, but I think it is just in human nature. In general I think people want to be nice to others so having good relationships with people is naturally going to bring opportunities.
When I was running my own business it seemed work always came in peaks and valleys. Helping people get online was always my favourite part of it. Having to worry about making sure I had the next project to work on when one was finished, I hated.
Not knowing when I would be paid for from someone was hard too. Really I guess it comes down to the fact that I didn’t like and wasn’t good at the business part. It felt like a catch 22 situation, I could find someone to help with the business part but was never really busy enough to justify or afford that.
In the past few months I’ve ended up having more inquiries and people looking for web development work than I did in a long time. If I wasn’t 100% sure that I’m in the right spot at Automattic it would almost be tempting to take a look.
Just one of the great parts of working at Automattic and supporting WordPress.com is that I still get to help people all day get setup online without having to make sure there was a next person to help. There is a steady stream of users looking for help from me.
It’s not quite the same thing as going from the beginning to the end with one client but everyday I get to help many people. Some it might just be a small question but others it’s finding out what they really need and if WordPress.com is the best option for them. I wish I had of used WordPress.com more when I was doing client work. For many of the sites I did it would have been more than enough without having to worry about server side aspect of things at all.
Sandy McFadden 