Constant Improvement
One of my fun side projects is participating on the board of the KCIBR. It's a fun road relay that runs from Haines Jct, Yukon to Haines, Alaska. http://kcibr.org
This year is the 20th annivesary so we had a custom Sugoi jersey designed up that racers will be able to purchase when they register for the race. All this will also be on the KCIBR website soon, but this is too awesome to wait!
The jersey is currently slated to be the Sugoi Event Cycling Jersey (CJ47U/F)- made of FinoTech. Whoosh!
Here is a sneak peak of the design.
Updated: In the 4.1 release they have removed the requirement to enter your phone number; it can be skipped. Still I worry about my use of this application. If your business model requires that you sell my information to keep operating perhaps you need to charge more for your service.
A while ago I purchased a little utility app called SmartSync (not linked for reasons below) They just released a new version, 4.0.
I like this app. It pulls Facebook pictures, birthdays and addresses that my friends on Facebook have made public and puts it into my contacts on my iPhone. Super handy and I like seeing smiling faces in my contacts and I like getting birthday reminders outside of Facebook. Apparently they are also working on some LinkedIn and Twitter integrations as well. The issues I have are the following:I have long been a believer in being a generalist in my career in IT. I believe I should be able to speak to almost any point but then leave the details to the expert - delegation at its finest - when it is not in my particular speciality. I do have some specializations but I don't have the deep focus in one particular area of study. Currently, I am developing a deep focus on business analysis but there are so many specializations within the BA role that the fractal nature of this problem reoccurs.
I bring this up is because I saw this post in my RSS feed - http://tynerblain.com/blog/2012/02/01/specializing-generalist .
From an HR perspective, I was taught about “T-Shaped People” – people who have breadth and depth of skills.
- Specialists are “I-Shaped People” – people who have depth of expertise, without breadth
- Generalists are “Minus-Shaped People” – people who have a breadth of skills, but no depth of expertise.
- Specializing Generalists are “T-Shaped People” – people who have depth of expertise in one area, combined with a breadth of skills across many areas.
I like this notion of "T-shaped" people. I have been lucky to work with some and they are awesome colleagues and mentors. A "T-shaped" person may not solve your problem but provides a sounding board that allows you to have an informed conversation.
These "T-shaped" people are the ones that my current employer, Yukon Gov't, should focus on hiring; the reality of a small organization with broad responsibilities requires resources on staff that can back-fill other roles and work collaboratively when larger projects get spun up.
You remember WAAAY back in March of last year when Netflix applied a 3% credit to my account for an outage that I didn't even notice. Here's the link: http://blog.justwerks.com/attention-yukon-this-is-how-customer-service
Big customer service win. I have remained a customer even though I don't watch all that much Netflix these days.Today I can demonstrate the polar opposite.Today NWTel caused an outage through the application of a software update that did not work. See the below image generated from their Twitter feed.
Tweet 1: https://twitter.com/#!/northwestel/status/157503757905702913
Tweet 2: https://twitter.com/#!/northwestel/status/157506940505817089
Another week, another bunch of sun, fun and food. We are now comfortable with buying food off the local trucks that drive around Sayulita selling seafood, vegetables, or cooking gas. There is room to negotiate but it feels wrong given how inexpensive and good the food is. Case in point - I purchased 1kg of fresh jumbo shrimp for 150pesos - just over 12$ CAN. And they were HUGE!
Week 1 in Sayulita.
We have now been in Sayulita for one week. Our casa, Casa Namaste, has been very excellent.R and I have been taking Spanish lessons from the iPad - Etonces Beuno. It's $45 on the App Store, it's kinda aimed at a younger market, but it teaches you the language quite well. So far!
Next posts will talk about travel options, food options and other random bits. With pictures (maybe - our internet is brutal)
We are finally in Sayulita.
We were supposed to be here on the 11th but that morphed into the 16th due to Hurricane Jova and some hastily rebooked flights. Alaska Airlines, the only airline that cancelled flights due to the hurricane, couldn't get us to Puerto Vallarta before Oct 22nd so we switched to American Airlines - saved $300 and over-nighted in Dallas - and arrived on the 16th. Happy happy. And we finally have interweb. God, I was going into withdrawal here. I almost stole the iPhone out of the hands of Israel - the property manager of Casa Namaste- just so I could look at the internet again. Sayulita - it's hot here. I mean damn hot. And muggy. When you think that letting the A/C run to get the bedrooms down to 26 is a reasonably cool temperature then you know what I am talking about. I am taking 3 cold showers a day. Thankfully our casa has filtered water so I don't have to worry if I forget where I am and drink the stuff coming out of the tap. We are about a 5 minute walk to the beach from our Casa. The ocean is a giant salt water bath. I don't think I have ever experienced ocean water this warm - it's glorious.The family is adapting to the 2hr time zone difference and we are adapting the kids to a slightly shifted schedule that takes advantage of the 8a to 8p daylight. More will come. Pictures as well. Like I say, we just got internet up and going.
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