Being Busy

I just started a large project for a client, but one that involves more than just my labor. I have to direct the efforts of others. As I've mentioned previously, I'm not that good at that. It's just not something I do well without preparation and thought. So in addition to having a lot to do, I also have a lot to worry about.

Also, it means leaving the house during the day to be at the site where this work is occurring. Even when I had an office, my wife was always there with me. It's sort of odd to come home in the evening and see her for the first time that day (I leave the house by 6:45am). It feels odd to bellow "I'm home" without the irony of having seen each other all day.

We've started a diet, and being busy has kept me from straying. There is no readily available source for snacking at the job site, so I'm not having any problems with temptation, plus I'm not really sedentary for the majority of the day like I normally am. I lost 8lbs the first week (I know the first week's loss is always greater than later weeks, but it's hard not to see that as a good sign). I hope it's not setting me up for a false sense of facility with the whole thing. Only time will tell. The culmination of the current job involves a trip to Vegas for two weeks, and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable weight gain. Hopefully the stress and activity level will keep me from backsliding too far. But after the project is over, I'll have to start some sort of exercise program just to keep up.

It's an old axiom that if you want something done, give it to a busy person. Now I'm finding I am a busy person, and it's a little disconcerting. I had been teaching myself animation using Blender, and I had just started getting into it when the project landed. I'll have to reteach myself a lot of the basics all over again. And I had a project going with Filemaker that I will probably not be able to finish till it's all over. So much for relying on the busy person.

At the very least I'm sleeping well at night. I have to, what with getting up at 5:30. Still, I had the time to make this post, so what can I complain about?

Vacation

I recently went on vacation with my wife and a friend, and it was lovely. It was a very long weekend, full of diversion and conversation. It makes me kind of mad that I denied myself these things for so long in pursuit of a goal that was never really mine to begin with. There are several things I like about vacations, but oddly enough, getting away from work isn't really one of them. I like my work. Even so, vacations are great because they remove me from the embedded context of my life. You could restate that as 'pulling me out of my rut', but that has negative connotations I'm not really intending.

I probably exercise more on vacation simply by walking around than I ever do at home, so 'relaxing' isn't really the big draw. I tend to be a stress-free person, so stress relief isn't really it either. And while I did see some wonderful things and took a bunch of pictures, it couldn't honestly be called educational. We did nothing particularly extreme, and yet it was all memorable. Up until this last weekend I was honestly puzzled by what I felt I had gained by taking a long weekend, driving a total of over 15 hours, and spending lots of money during a recession. I didn't regret it, but some part of my brain that needs to analyze things just wasn't happy without a decent answer. And that answer was given when my sister-in-law stopped by for a brief visit with her three kids.

I don't have a lot of experience dealing with kids, and frankly I'm a little timid around them, afraid I'm going to knock them over or something. But as far as I can tell, these kids bounce pretty well, and by the time they left, I was feeling much more relaxed. But in all of that, the thing I noticed was that I couldn't withdraw into myself hardly at all. My wife and her sister did most of the actual care and feeding, all I did was make sure the DVD player was hooked up properly, and take photos where appropriate. But despite being evenly numbered (3 adults vs. 3 children), they took up all the available space in my attention. By the time they left, all I wanted to do was crawl into a book and hide, but it felt weird because I was suddenly focused on myself again. It brought into sharp relief something I've known for a while: I'm an essentially self-obsessed person. I'm even writing a blog without an audience, for god's sake. Without my wife, I would probably be a hermit.

After four years of design school, I feel I can take criticism pretty well. When I realized I was allowing myself to fall into bad habits of un-involvement and disengagement, I took it as a clue to work on change. And that is what my previous vacation provided as well. It's like stepping out of my house and noticing that it's a beautiful day. That the neighbors I've been steadfastly ignoring are waving at me as they walk the dogs. It's an opening up of my awareness to the larger world. And for a few moments I blink in the bright sun shine and tentatively wave my hand, then walk back in and close the door. But it is good to be reminded they're out there.

Social Networking

I'm still new at the whole social networking thing. I only joined Plaxo at someone's advice as a simple way to transfer contacts from one program to another. Then Linkedin, which I'm still not really using to any real benefit. Just the other day I joined up with Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised - a lot of my old friends are already on, and while I'm not exactly having big conversations with them, it is nice to hear from them from time to time. Even the trivial data about what they're doing is a pleasant buzz of familiarity.

It made me think about what I'm trying to accomplish here. Most of these entries are far too long to be palatable. If this were a regular blog, trying to attract readers, I'd have to be much more brief and update much more often. When I look at my "wall" in Facebook, it reminds me of the things I've heard about Twitter - short missives during the day, with occasional links so people can follow them. It's an entirely different experience, and I find I like it. When I first heard about it I assumed it would be a constant distraction, much like the proliferation of RSS feeds I compulsively follow now. But in many ways, it is less distracting, and more immediate, because these are people that I already have some connection with.

Now keep in mind that I am essentially a self-centered person. I can tune out the world pretty thoroughly. This was a real handicap in running a business, but not when I'm working for myself. As long as I can keep off the web, I can get a lot done. The big downside is that I rarely think to reach out to people, even people I like. Very out-of-sight, out-of-mind. It also means that the thoughts percolating in my head are very self-referential, and I let them perc till they are fairly bursting. This results in few but long-winded blog posts, rather like this one. So I'm wondering if the social outlet of Facebook will let me 'bleed off' my ideas, and mix them more with those of my peers.

Coffee anologies aside, I am, tentatively, a convert to this new media. Whether that will result in more or fewer posts here has yet to be shown.

Trade shows must evolve

I just recently got back from a job in Vegas, setting up a trade show display for a client. I had a local union laborer there to help me with the heavy lifting, and we got it done within budget, with a happy client. By any standards, it all went well. But there were a lot of small things that made me think that trade shows, at least the big ones, are on the way out.

Now, keep in mind, I've been involved in designing, building, installing and maintaining tradeshow booths for clients for the last twenty odd years. I've been to just about all of the big Tradeshow cities at one time or another. The economy has gone up and down, and will go up and down again and again. But there were some signs that things are coming to a head in this industry. For tradeshow people, a lot of what I say will seem simplified, but the teeming millions that read this might not be as informed.

These are small things, as I said. Any one of them would barely have registered on me in the normal course of things. The first was the freight. We shipped to the advance warehouse. The big advantage of the advance warehouse is that when the schedule says you can start setting up at 8 in the morning, you go in at 8 and your freight is there, on the floor. If you had shipped direct, 8 would be the earliest possible time they would unload your truck, which means you might get it at 8:05, you might get it at 10, 12, 5, you never know. But we had gone to Advance - we were good. Not only that, but my labor company had checked on it the day before, and the freight desk had said they would get to it that evening. When I got to my booth, there was no freight. It was 7:30, so I wandered to the freight desk and asked when I'd get my stuff. I was told it was in a truck being unloaded, 45 minutes, tops. My labor shows up at 8 and I tell them to stick around, we'll be able to start any moment. at 8:45 I go over to the desk and ask again. They say it will be any minute. At 10:15 I get my first bit of freight. I've paid my guy for over two hours for nothing. Well I've been in the business for a while, being lied to by union people is something I'm used to. But when I go to complain, they try to tell me that Advance works that way. The start time is when they start bringing stuff in. I should be grateful I got stuff in that morning. They later admitted lying on that point, but by that time, they had lied about enough things that I wasn't interested in what they had to say.

To make a long story short, similar things happened with electrical, and with the pipe and drape people. And they all were similarly dismissive - being screwed is how it is supposed to work, just put your face in the pillow and think of England. This is now a standard operating procedure: Lie, and if they call you on it, say that it's always like that. It was system wide, and showed a contempt for the exhibitor that this industry just can't afford.

Now, as I said, we still got everything done. The client was happy with the job I did. But the show was about 65% of what it had been the year before. All of my clients are pulling back. But those numbers are heavily tied to the economy, and the economy will turn around. Eventually. I'm confident it will. Any day now.

But by that time, will people really want to go through the truly monumental and growing inconvenience for these shows? What about virtual meetings, teleconferences, and smaller venues? Short answer will be yes and no. There will always be a need for face-to-face meeting, for hands on demos of products, for socializing with your peers. But will those needs be met by trade shows? Or are there more accessible, more convenient, and ultimately more profitable methods? If an exhibitor spends 60k on one show, would that more profitably be spent in online, possibly viral, marketing backed up by a more decentralized and mobile sales force? Or even inviting all their customers to a big party? I should note that most of my clients have been talking of downsizing their shows for years now. Maybe now is a good time. Maybe someone with a great out of the box idea for getting people together will find a way to capitalize on this.

My point is this - trade shows are enormous beasts. They are one of the first things to be trimmed when the budget shears come out. No one I know really likes doing them - that's why they hire me to handle all the details. Almost all the talk I hear about economic growth is not in heavy industry but in ideas, software, the sciences, things that don't require a lot of hands on, with personel who are already intenet savvy, so online meetings will grow. If we get socialized healthcare, a lot of small business are going to spring up, and they will mostly be going to smaller local shows. The field is changing, and the dinosaurs need to evolve. How can I sell a client on a big trade show booth production when everywhere I turn, people are trying to make the experience as difficult and torturous as possible?

Long time no see

I've been feeling really guilty about not posting more regularly. Previous posts were from thoughts I had had previous to starting this thing up, and I was worrying that I just wasn't having good enough thoughts any more. Nothing of great intrinsic value, anyway.

Then I started looking at other blogs and realized that mostly they're about things other people have bumped into and found, rather than what they have created. I'm not sure if that's what I'm going to do, but perhaps I shouldn't feel too guilty about not being deep and meaningful at least once a week.

I've also wanted to start doing several projects, pulling my limited time in a bunch of different directions. The only thing stopping me is that I am afraid that I will suck at any and all of them. It's a common problem with the beginning of any project and is hardly worth the effort to mention it. This is a variant of why I'm not blogging as often as I have in the past - fear of not being as great as I think I should be.

But the closing of the woodshop has in several ways liberated me. I've already 'failed' at something big and important. Sure, it was a qualified failure, and it has left me in a better position, and I wonder at times why I bothered - but it feels like a failure all the same. And yet I survive. I haven't really lost any clients through this. I've lost a lot of obligations. It's like the first time you take a shot to the nose: it hurts, but not as bad as you imagined. And after that, a fist isn't as frightening.

Secondly, now I have more time to consider what else I might do. Before, any time not spent on work was potentially cheating not just myself, but a number of employees who depended on me. So any personal work of any real scope was tainted with guilt. I could sketch, but I couldn't draw - not really. The time it takes to finish a drawing was too self-indulgent compared to the needs of the company. So not only do I have more free time, but that time is entirely my own. I don't have to validate it to anyone except maybe my wife, and she is very supportive. It may be illusory, but it feels like I'm getting more done in the last two months than I had in the previous year.

And lastly, it has provided a better sense of scope. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I was feeling guilty about not posting, and worried about the quality of my posts. But frankly, as far as I can tell, no one reads any of this, so I can spout gibberish and it wouldn't matter. It's essentially a journal meant for me, to put down recurring thoughts that I want to record but have no other forum for. It's a vain hope that in a decade I'll look back and think I wasn't a complete couch potato. It isn't obvious how losing the shop ties in with that, but I'll try to explain. Toward the end, as things were becoming more and more of a struggle, my dreams about expanding the business were overshadowed by concerns for just keeping it going. The future looked bleaker and bleaker, and only a gordian solution kept us out of eventual bankruptcy. My previous optimism had been replaced by a sense of overwhelming pessimism and I was becoming more cynical and serious. But now I am feeling a dawning optimism again. My wife has noted it as well, in terms of my joking around more and generally being more outgoing and social. This blog is something of a reflection of that. But so is my failure to regularly post - because I'm picking up a lot of those scattered and abandoned projects and dusting them off. So dear imaginary reader, please forgive my tardiness. I have other things to do, places to be, people to see. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

My wife and I own a small business that for eight years has resided at one place, and consisted of a design office and a woodshop, for building custom tradeshow and retail displays. My education is more in the design and CAD end of things, and we bought the company with the woodshop already integrated into it (I worked at the company for 12 years before we bought it).

This last few months we have had to close down the woodshop half of the business, and it has been a painful thing. My wife helped time and organise things so we are getting out without crippling debt, but the simple fact was we had to borrow money to keep it all going. It was, in essence, costing us money to continue operating, and that's not a business, it's a hobby with too much paperwork.

I blame myself, really. I love design, and having the capability to produce just about anything I designed was a big kick. But I didn't really love building things. I ignored that half of the business, and with that neglect, it stopped making money. In the later years, I let control of things slip. In cleaning things up to sell them, I'm finding things that I know I asked to be taken care of years ago, stockpiles of raw materials and redundant tools that cost me money because I had to re-buy them several times. But the most basic thing was that during lean times, the overhead killed us, and the lean times were getting longer and longer. Even before the economy nose-dived, the writing was on the wall.

There may be personal advantages to this. My wife and I could never take a vacation together, because one of us always needed to be at the office. It took seven years for us to arrange a week off (we went to Italy), and other than that we have only had the occasional long weekend (which were frequently interrupted by business matters). Now, we might look forward to having some vacation time again, together.

Now I'm going to focus on just design, which I know I can control, and which has very little overhead. I'll be working out of my house, and a warehouse that I'm using for storing my client's materials. I still have enough tools to do basic things, but I'm going to be focused pretty tightly on design, illustration, product development (my degree is Industrial Design), and tradeshow consulting and services. I am hopeful, looking forward. My wife is behind me the whole way, and that's the most important thing. Now the company is much smaller, and my wife will likely have to find a job outside, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. One down side to us both working at the same place was that if money was tight it was tight on both our paychecks. A little financial diversity may help, especialy since a freelancer's income is notably unstable.

I am hopeful, but it is still a painful process, deconstructing eight years of my life. I'm just glad my business partner is still with me.

Missed a week

Sorry, my laptop died and was reborn, but I missed a week. Hopefully it's all better now.

My God's bigger than your God

I don't really understand the biblical literalists and people who endorse 'intelligent design'. It's like they want to believe that God is so small that he can't encompass something beyond their ability to easily comprehend. They don't trust God to be greater than they can conceive. God has to fit inside their limitations. To them, God can't use evolution to create life because it doesn't make for a spiffy special effect in their head. No wand waving, or sudden big budget bangs, just a slow process that takes millennia. And for some reason they don't see the awesome majesty of a creator that can do that. Personally, I think God is all the greater without the razzmatazz and shiny bits. I know I can't comprehend a million years. I can understand it in the abstract, I can do the math, but I can't really grok it. But to God its just a heartbeat. I am perfectly willing to admit that God is so very far beyond me.

I understand that the Bible says creation took 6 days, and scholars say that happened 6000 years ago. But for crying out loud, it was an oral tradition passed down for countless generations by people who had no concept of timescales longer than a few (short) generations, who thought the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. I think the Bible contains great wisdom, and is worthy of contemplation, but it is not a science text book. Science has opened our eyes to a greater and larger world, and our refusal to admit God into that larger world is at the heart of this debate. The pursuit of an understanding of the fundamental laws of nature is a pursuit of an understanding of Gods laws, using the gifts He has given us. It is not sacrilege, but as sacred as any endeavor of man. Nothing in science has invalidated the divine, but rather the reverse.

I do believe in God. There are moments in my life where I wish I didn't, but I do. In my heart I do. I just don't believe in organized religion. It seems that all a church is good for is providing a source of income to spiritually minded people. Not a bad thing, really, but it seems they take the minutia of ritual more seriously than the eternal mystery of God. They claim to have the answer, but they debate those answers back and forth more vehemently than any scientist and his theory. And they can't provide any way to test their answers except to die and ask the source. And I ask you, one mortal to another - would the words of Jesus be any less true, any less worthy, if he couldn't walk on water? Is his sacrifice meaningless without the ascension? Are the miracles really necessary to your faith, or are they just there to catch your attention, like fireworks? Is your concept of God really that small?

Santa's Importance to Critical Thinking

I have had a debate before about the cruelty of the Santa myth. My position was: why tell a child a lie when the truth can be just as wonderful. People give gifts because it makes everyone feel better, both giver and receiver. That's about as optimistic a thought on human nature as any I've ever heard, and makes a good moral that could stand to be reinforced once a year. The inclusion of an improbably generous elf just junks it up. Even as an avatar of human kindness, he just competes with your religious icon of choice. The only use he serves is as an implacable judge of Good vs Bad. One who is unassailable by whining and begging, but whose eyes are everywhere. Apparently God needs a heavy, and Papa Noel is it (Santa is the carrot to Satan's stick). But I've had to rethink my prior position. I think Saint Nick does serve a purpose, and an important developmental one at that.

After careful thought, I realized that Father Christmas is not about generosity, and certainly not about Christian faith, but he is definitely the incarnation of Judgement. And not just the good and bad list thing either. He is an important milestone in a child's life, an early lesson in critical thinking. Because at some point, all children learn that he's not real, and suddenly they are forced to acknowledge a painful truth: their parents have been lying to them. Not only that, but everyone else in the world has been lying to them. That forces them to think, what else are they lying about? Is there an Easter Bunny? Am I adopted? Where will it all end? Suddenly, the child is no longer a passive recipient of knowledge but a thinking being, evaluating data based on self-created criteria. Babbo Natale is all about doubt, and the deconstruction of authority. They are becoming the evaluators of good and bad. They have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and are turning into Santa themselves.

Sure, it's a painful lesson. But so is finding out that hot things burn. You hope children find out with bath water instead of a house fire, so you let them play with the taps. You don't let them play with matches. The same goes with Mr. Kringle. Even after the initial let down, you're still left with a popular holiday, and that pleasant thought on humanity. So there is the attention focusing pain to drive the lesson home, but not too much. Not enough to threaten a normal child's psyche.

Plus it gives them a small ego boost of being 'in the club' with the other grownups who are in on the secret, a glimpse into the higher mysteries of the complicated world of grownups, who apparently lie to each other all the time, constantly. It sets them on the path of figuring out when someone is telling them the truth or not, and whether it matters, of evaluating truth in a social context. Lying is fine, even necessary, in so many situations, and the jolly old elf is the key. It's all very modern day Joseph Campbell: a myth that serves the growth of the individual in society.

So my advice is this: Don't leave Santa out of Christmas! Sure, he's a modern commercially inspired symbol subverting a religious event, but he has his place. Sing his praises, and throw in the flying reindeer. Stuff the gullible with tall tales till they eventually puke, it'll be good for them.

IMHO

What is it with the overuse of the expression IMO or IMHO? I understand what it stands for, but why use it? It's like an excuse to say something truly terrible, and then draw back a little bit with a polite euphemism. For all intents and purposes it says, "If you react badly to this I will mock you as overly-sensitive." It's like the Southern expression: Bless his/her little heart. You know if a Southerner 'blesses your little heart' they hate your guts, because it always follows some insulting observation. Example: "He's dumb as a bag of hammers, bless his little heart." It is a cowardly evasion.

Personally I find it contemptible. If you are delivering criticism, you can either aim to hurt (in which case you are usually merely trying to look clever to your peers), or aim to improve something, in which case it should be constructive, not destructive. Using an 'escape phrase' to try to shuck the emotional baggage of making someone feel bad is just lame. Either make them feel bad because you hate them, and own up to your pettiness, or offer something constructive. It takes someone of true and rare wit to deliver witty and sarcastic comments without merely looking like an immature tool. If you have the intelligence to make a worthy observation, you should also have the smarts to deliver it in a way that might actually affect the change you want, instead of alienating everyone involved. There are damn few Oscar Wildes and Mark Twains in the world, and odds are you are not one of them.

And lastly, just about anything that comes out of my cake-hole is either a fact/fiction or an opinion, and it's usually easy to tell which is which. If I say, "I can't afford that Ferrari", that's pretty much a fact, with just a smattering of opinion (because I could sell my house and buy it, but that's just stupid). If I say, "I hate Ferraris," it's either fact or a fiction (because it's obviously sour grapes), but it is definitely a statement of my opinion. If I say "Ferraris are great cars," that is again my opinion. Is anyone really confused by this? Do I really need to label these things with an IMO?

About the only time it has any use is when you are differentiating between statements of someone else's opinion and your own: "Everyone thinks Ferraris are high maintenance status symbol cars, but they're really an excellent tribute to a long standing racing tradition." Now either God's own truth is spilling out of my mouth, or it's my opinion there at the end. You decide.

It irks me when I see it used constantly on forum debates, because 9 times out of 10 it's a pointless add on. It doesn't increase the value of the message, or refine the meaning. And usually, it's just a way to insult someone and try to be polite about it. At some point, the rules of etiquette have to catch up with the digital age, and I for one am hoping we ditch this cowardly abbreviation. 

Expletives and taboos

There is a show called Inside the Actor's Studio where the host asks, among other things, the same ten questions to each guest. One of them is "What is your favorite curse word?"

Mine is f**k. It's short, attention getting, and best of all, onomatopoeic: it sounds just like what it means. Picture this scenario. You get up in the middle of the night to pee, you're walking across the hall and stub your toe on some piece of furniture that shouldn't be there. What sound would be more appropriate or descriptive? You were doing fffffine, ffffeeling good, everything is ffffabulous, when it all comes to a sudden stop: **k! See? It means exactly what it sounds like.

You could argue that the real definition of that word has nothing do with any of that and you'd be right. But we're not talking about real words, we're talking about curse words. An expletive is an ancient psuedo-verbal vocalization of distress, not real speech. It's halfway between a grunt and true communication. "Meaning" is irrelevant. No one is thinking about intercourse when they just stubbed their toe. They just want to invoke a taboo, which is why curse words have to be impolite. And most importantly, cursing needs to be reflexive, requiring no thought whatsoever. Speech requires thought, which might take too long.

Here's another scenario: In prehistoric times, a group of hunters spread out to flush some game from some tall grass, shouting and beating the grass with their hands. One of them comes across a tiger. Now, time is of the essence, so saying something like "TIGER!", would be optimal, but something like "Hey guys, its one of those things with the claws, what was that name again..." would mean getting eaten. A wordless cry might work, but everyone is yelling, so the message might get lost. A random word might draw attention, but it would confuse everyone for a potentially fatal second or so. But a taboo, something forbidden, shouted out brazenly, would draw attention. It would focus thought on the fact that something bad just happened, and need to be reacted to. Most likely by running away, but that's another matter.

Another proof that cursing is handled differently in the brain from speech is provided by sufferer's of Tourette Syndrome, specifically those with coprolalia (which means almost literally "potty mouth"). For those too lazy to look at the links, it's a disorder that, among other things, causes sufferers to curse uncontrollably, often in very inappropriate settings. The point here is that they don't shout random words, they shout curse words. They invoke taboos. These words must be stored in a different way in the brain. They have no meaning, just a purpose. A genetically encoded need to focus attention on a pressing and immanent problem. The exact taboo and the words are determined culturally, but the internal mechanism is universal.

And therefore, the need to suppress extraneous cursing is also universal. A taboo that is acceptable to the general ear is useless. It has to shock, or it subverts the survival mechanism it sprang from. So, for the good of society, I'll try to limit my f-bombs to actual emergencies, like when I'm driving in heavy traffic or playing video games.