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December 31, 2007

games, food, cleaning

I am so proud.

Kara just had to play one more game of CakeMania on her DS before going to bed tonight.

GRIN.

We spent the day cleaning, shopping, and cooking...Kara had her apron on and made some cinnamon-sugar bread, and some brownies. Robin and her roommate Amanda are coming over for a very very nice and pleasant and low-key New Year's tomorrow night. I'm making pizza for the main course, and I brought the deep fryer out of the basement so I can fry battered shrimp and buffalo chicken niblets. I made salsa yesterday, and I'll do some pita chips, some dill dip, and maaaybe even soft pretzels...we'll see.

I'm working on renaming the MP3 collection right now. I'm updating the ID3 tags on all the server files. Tomorrow I'll work on sorting out the genres and that sort of thing.

The house looks great. Kara spent most of the morning cleaning up things, and I joined her in the afternoon. Like the sailor's creed, a place for everything, and everything in its place.

Posted by Mark at 03:42 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2007

ds-es, gifts, grades

What a Christmas it was for gifts! I made out like a bandit. It's funny that I asked for--and got--more toys this year than I probably got when I was a teenager.

I was hoping for a Nintendo DS, and I got my wish...times two! Kara mentioned to Mom that she was going to get me a DS, but neglected to tell Matt, and so immediately after opening my "big" gift, I opened a package that Matt had sent to Rockport to find another DS nestled inside. Now, I don't want to be greedy, and I want to make certain that everyone understands that a) I asked for a DS for a gift because it's something I would never actually buy for myself, b) I would never buy Kara one for a gift unless I wanted to be killed, and c) I would never actually go out and try to get a pair of video game systems unless I knew that both were really wanted. However. Given the circumstances, I thought it would be nice to try to get Kara into video gaming via this very friendly little handheld, so I convinced her to keep both of them. So I am now the proud owner of an Onyx DS Lite, and she the owner of a Red and Black DS Lite.

This, in a way, is the best gift of all...the opportunity to maybe, just maybe, get my significant other into gaming. Just in the last few days, I've picked up a total of 7 games. I've made a point of picking up not your average 3D platformers and shoot-em-ups, but games that appeal to the casual gamer--that's Kara--and the bored-with-FPSes gamer, which is me. On Christmas, I got the Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (excellent game and worth playing), the DS remake of Mario 64 (a fun remake), and Brain Age (EXCELLENT "game"...I'm going to try to keep up with doing the daily exercises. If nothing else, it should make me better at math).

Kara was obsessed with a game she saw--Cake Mania--so I picked up a copy of that, along with Cooking Mama and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Round that out with a copy of Puzzle Quest, and I've got plenty to keep me occupied...and hopefully some good games to re-introduce Kara to gaming. Cake Mania is a puzzle game about baking cakes, Cooking Mama teaches you how to cook, Phoenix Wright is an interactive Law and Order, and Puzzle Quest is basically Bejewelled RPG. There's a lot of fun stuff to choose from, and it's not about just blowing stuff up. Not that I have anything against that, but I've been blowing stuff up since the airplanes looked like they were made out of bricks, and I'm looking for something a little more esoteric.

Plus, some of the games are two-player, so we can sit on the couch and play against each other. Or, she gets to watch TV and I can sit on the couch with her and play games.

Other highlights of the holiday season include:

And of course there were lots of other things: various kitchen implements, some small tools, Legos, a subscription to Cook's Country magazine, gift cards, decorative tidbits, a neat Star Wars game that you plug into the TV, and, of course, socks. I like socks.

The actual holiday was good. We relaxed in Rockport, we did family stuff, we ate, we sat around, I slept, I played video games, and came back here a few days ago. I've been on vacation and I have no idea what day it even is right now. I love it.

Last night, I did a huge audit of all the clothes I own, and came up with 4 garbage bags to donate and one small bag of "vintage" T-shirts for Mike to go through. There's some real good stuff in there...tech company giveaways, old high school shirts, random souvenirs. I now have much more space, and consequently, I spent today redoing one of the hall closets so it is full of shelves instead of being used to hang coats. This means I have more room for my tools, and we have more room for storing other stuff.

Finally, got my grades: B in Leadership, B- in Econ. I am quite happy. I thought I would have done worse in Econ. At the end of the day, I know more now than I did going into the semester, and I can sit down and intelligently analyze and discuss the financials of a company from an economic perspective, and that's good enough for me.

Posted by Mark at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2007

fall 07 over

That's it for the semester. I got a B in Leadership, and I felt good about my Econ final, so there's a chance I got even better than a C. We will see how it goes.

I'm a little miffed at my peer review...the person I was assigned to as a peer coach did not get along with me too well, and vice-versa, but I was at least nice about it in my evaluation. Not truthful, but nice. She was not so kind. I'm annoyed about it, which is why I'm blogging it, but there's probably no point in sending a snarky email or anything like that. After all, much of what she said was true.

One thing I have still not quite learned how to do is how to deal with somebody you just don't like/respect. Sometimes it's a boss, sometimes a peer, sometimes a subordinate...how does one get past the fact that a person adds nothing positive to a situation? A lot of what I've learned in the class has to do with how to put forward positive credibility oneself, but not how to deal with someone who has no credibility.

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge now. I have a meeting tomorrow morning, a few things to wrap up at work, and then I'm done until the new year.

Posted by Mark at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

gifts, rockettes, upgrades

I finally finished my Christmas shopping yesterday, and I'll spend part of my afternoon wrapping gifts here in the office. We're having our little office Christmas party, along with a Yankee Swap, so pretty much everybody who works for Curaspan is here right now. It's odd to see the office so crowded...I told one of our newer employees that this is the only time you'll ever see everybody in the office at once.

I'm really in hibernation mode right now...I can't seem to find much energy. I'll be excited once December 22nd passes...that's the Winter Solstice, and the longest night of the year. I'm always happy once I know the days are going to start getting longer. Maybe it's just an excuse, but, I don't know...I'm pretty much all for shutting down.

We have a bit of a parking situation. The city of Boston thinks that one of our rental spots is a sidewalk. So, while the condo association we rent from tries to get things sorted out, we're parking one car on the street. This wouldn't be as bad if not for the Nor'easter we got this past weekend. We had a couple of late nights of shoveling and trying to get the car over snowbanks.

We did miss most of the actual storm, though, because we were visiting Kara's friends Steph and Alex in New Jersey this weekend. On Saturday we went into the city for dinner at an Argentinean restaurant (Alex is from Argentina) and on Sunday we went to see the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall--that's the Rockettes show. Pretty amazing choreography, and I'm glad we finally saw it. We also walked by the window displays at Macy's and the tree at Rockefeller Center.

This weekend, we'll hang out with friends on Saturday for our annual friends Yankee Swap, we'll wrap gifts and finish up some minor gift-making, and on Monday, we'll head to Rockport where we'll stay through the 27th. I'm taking the whole week off between Christmas and New Year's, and Raytheon is shut down, so we both have some time off. We need it...it will be great to spend a few days lounging around, watching movies, playing with our presents, reading books, and doing nothing much. Plus, the house is a disaster area and needs a few hours of TLC and some rearranging of the too-much-stuff that we own.

Unfortunately, I need to get through my econ final tomorrow night first. Honestly, I don't think I've ever gotten a C in a class before in my life, and I'm perfectly content to start now. Do I understand fundamental principles of economics? Absolutely. Am I able to work out those principles in a spreadsheet and give reasonable support for conclusions I make from economic perspectives? Yes. Can I do the math? No. No, not at all. And that is why I will never be an economist. But I know as much as I need to, and if I someday need to know more, I have a basis for it.

Unrelated, but, Alex and Steph have a great downstairs home theater/video game setup. I believe it's a 50" Sony Bravia with an Xbox 360 hooked up to it. We watched Shrek in HD-DVD...amazing.

Now, that said, I don't think I'm going to rush out and buy a 360. Instead, I'm going to spend some money next year upgrading my PC. Reasons including, I don't think it makes sense to buy a next-gen video game system without a next-gen TV, and I'm not ready to spend money on that yet. Second, I don't like monopolizing the TV to play video games; watching TV together is more of a Kara and I sort of activity. Third, the best monitor I've got is my 24" LCD on my computer. Fourth, I like the ability to put on headphones and play a game in the study when Kara is there doing work or whatever. And fifth, most of the Xbox games that I really want to play are coming out for PC...at some point, anyway.

I looked at Ars Technica's latest guide, and I think I can do a new system for $700-800, depending on whether or not I buy a new hard drive for it. I can get their recommended motherboard for $150, processor for $200, 2 gigs of RAM for $40, and video card for $300...those are the essentials (really what I need is the video card, but because my current mobo doesn't have PCI-E, I need to upgrade the mobo, which means I need to upgrade the processor, which means I need to upgrade the RAM). Now, my 250 gig HD is IDE, as is my DVD drive and CD burner, but the mobo comes with SATA connectors and one IDE. A new 500 meg HD is about $100. A DVD burner/CDRW combo is about $35, so there's not really any good reason not to just get one while I'm having all that stuff shipped. The hard drive...well, not sure about that just yet, because I can hook it up to the one IDE connector. Also, I should probably buy a legit copy of WinXP so I can stop running Windows 2000 on my gaming machine.

Onboard audio is fine. Onboard ethernet is fine. Not upgrading to an SATA hard drive would make it the bottleneck in the system...we'll see. I guess I could always spread the purchases out over a couple months if I didn't want to spend it all at once.

Anyway, that's down the road...got lots of games and things to do before I even need to do any upgrades.

Posted by Mark at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2007

leadership lessons

I thought I would copy-paste some of my final leadership paper into the blog, since I think it turned out pretty well. I'll try to explain the parts that explicitly reference readings that you might not be familiar with, and I'll add some links as well. Imagine that...a research paper with the references simply hyperlinked for easy access. I wonder if we shouldn't all be writing our research papers online...

---

Defining leadership is not hard. It is the process of convincing others to act so to bring about a vision. Throughout this course, my goal has been to take the theoretical and qualitative subject of leadership and reduce it as best I can to quantities and practical examples. I wanted to be able to say, at the end of the course, “If one attempts to do X, Y and Z, in 99% of cases, one will probably be able to provide effective leadership.” I feel I was somewhat successful: I came up with three key components of leadership, which I discuss in more detail below.

Talking with my old friend and former English teacher, Bob Margoles, over the Thanksgiving break, I mentioned my theory to him. He chuckled, asking me if these three components were formal parts of the course. No, I said, I had extracted them on my own from the many things we had discussed. He replied that he found it amusing that I had, on my own, matched the lessons of leadership with Aristotle’s three lessons on rhetoric: ethos, pathos, and logos.

So my own theory is clearly not without precedent. And it is unsurprising, as leadership is fundamentally about formulating and communicating a message to an audience that leads them to take some action. Like actors upon the stage or councilors before a court, leadership is a bit of a performance, and these three essential ingredients ensure most reliably the desired result from the audience.

Or, to use a different metaphor, leadership can be thought of as the process of constructing a building, requiring a solid foundation, raw material, and tools. The end result is the project or task being built. Here, then, are those components:

Credibility – The essential foundation of trustworthiness. Without modeling credibility, no leadership is possible. This corresponds to the Aristotelian proof of ethos, which is the requirement that the audience consider the speaker believable.

Credibility was best illustrated by Joshua Chamberlain’s “locker room” speech to the deserters before Gettysburg; it was effective because the men identified with him, saw that he would do what he said, and realized he was trustworthy [Chamberlain had been given a group of Union deserters from his native state of Maine to bolster his depleted ranks, but was told that he could shoot them it they were not willing to fight. He instead gave a speech that actually inspired them to take up arms again and voluntarily fight with his unit.]. He had not threatened them, he had fed them, he had listened earnestly to their concerns and would try to do what he could for them, but he did not make false promises above his ability to deliver. In contrast, a leader who is always missing meetings, over-promises and under-delivers, blames others, and sets himself apart and above his peers and subordinates, is unlikely to gain their trust.

Keys to establishing credibility include: setting realistic goals, keeping deadlines and appointments, not making excuses, taking responsibility for failures and mistakes, setting a good example, and overall honesty—including humility. All these things say, “I am one of you, I am accountable as you are, I am human, and I will try to go first where I ask you to follow.” They are the traits of one who commands loyalty without asking for it.

Vision – This is the message that is communicated to the audience—the “bricks” or raw material of our leadership project. It is what we say, what we want, what should be done. It is formulated through a combination of the leader’s ideas and the input of the audience; in some cases, the leader may make his own ideas appear to come from the audience. Aristotelian logos, or logical argument, is the basis for vision: a vision must be sensible and well-formulated for it to be accepted. This is why input is essential, from within and without the organization.

Vision is not difficult to find: leaders like Herb Kelleher and Rachel Hubka show that a logical vision, augmented with facts and reason, is key to the success of an enterprise [Herb Kelleher founded Southwest Airlines, the premier successful budget airline, which is known for a shockingly genuine atmosphere of passionate, dedicated, rah-rah teamwork. Rachel Hubka founded an inner-city bus company famous for hiring those whom society gave up on, and transforming them so completely that they were able to move on to bigger and better things--with not just her best wishes, but her support and encouragement.] They both found market niches and exploited them, but they relied on shared vision to achieve success. Kelleher got buy-in from everyone in the organization from the mechanics to the pilots, and the result was a level of commitment to that vision so significant that readers of the case have had difficulty believing it. And Hubka, by making training, pride and professionalism part of her vision for the company, became so successful that some employees were able to move on to start their own ventures.

Keys to establishing vision include collaborative relationships with peers, drive to innovate, looking for new ideas from all sources, challenging the process and taking risks, looking for diverse viewpoints, and having conviction about goals and processes for reaching those goals. Vision cannot come from one individual alone: without buy-in, vision is simply a list of orders. The best way to get buy-in is to find viewpoints from multiple sources. And, of course, vision comes from looking at the way things are done, and trying to do them better.

Communication – This is the need to match the message with the receiver, and is probably the most “traditional” part of leadership—it is the toolset, the hammers, scaffolds, drills and levels. Aristotelian pathos is the use of emotion to get a message across, and emotional intelligence is essential in determining how a given person will react to the manner in which information is presented.

The LSI [The Learning Style Inventory is a self-test that measures how you learn--how shocking to realize that perhaps you didn't do as well in some classes as others because the teacher didn't teach in a way that best resonated with you... Some people learn best by reading books or articles, some like lectures, and some learn by doing.] shows that different people “hear” messages in different ways, and the differences between self-scores and observer scores in the LPI [The Leadership Practices Inventory is a survey where you ask people to answer questions relating to how you handle leadership situations. These can be friends, family, bosses, peers, or subordinates, and the results show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie, as well as the gaps between your self-perception and the perception of others] shows that there can be gaps between self-perception and the perceptions of others. The right message delivered in the wrong way will be rejected and the desired course of action may not be followed: a speech can come off as hollow and insincere, a request can come across as bossy and dictatorial, or a requirement may sound wishy-washy.

Good communication requires the right tools and the skill to use them: a wide arsenal of communication and leadership styles, a high emotional intelligence, a clear and open dialogue with peers, an understanding of the cause-effect nature of interpersonal relationships, a selection of sticks and carrots and a knowledge of what works in what situation, and plenty of experience. Experience is the hardest component, as it comes only with time, but continuous self-challenge and a commitment to learning can accelerate the process. Peer review and mentorships are a good way to gain feedback on communication styles.

Posted by Mark at 12:06 AM | Comments (1)

last class 07

I had the last class of the semester tonight, and turned in my final paper. So that leaves only my Econ final on the 20th, and Semester 3 is down.

I'm kind of exhausted from it. It was a mentally and emotionally challenging semester, with a lot of introspection. The whole topic of Leadership--that was tonight's class--starts with looking at yourself and trying to figure out what your values are, how you relate to people, how you communicate. It's immensely rewarding but the size of the reward is paid for in internal effort.

That said, it's been enormously satisfying. I feel like I have a simple, straightforward blueprint for how to be a better and more effective leader. Putting it into practice is the harder step, but at least I sort of know what I'm doing.

Most of my classmates in this class are in their final class or next-to-final semester at BU, but I'm really glad I took this elective long before I was done with my MBA. I feel kind of like I found the secret treasure cave at the beginning of some video game where you get all kinds of cheats and overpowered weapons. If I can really put what I learned into practice, I'm going to be in a great position compared to even classmates with more technical knowledge.

I really do like being in school. I'm mentally pretty tired, but I think that's a good thing.

Posted by Mark at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2007

tree, school, history

We went out on Saturday and got our first Christmas tree for the condo! We got a great deal on it, and it looks perfect. All the lights are up, and I'll post some pictures later on.

Our big econ presentation is coming up on Thursday. We're putting the finishing touches on it today. Then I've got one more paper due and a final exam, and the semester is over. Between school stuff and trying to wrap up our Q4 software release at work, the next few weeks are going to be busy.

I need to plan better around this time of year next year...I always want to hibernate between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it's fairly difficult to do that when you're really busy.

Speaking of Christmas, I found this to be a very interesting article. I hate it when people complain about "how bad things have gotten" because I think we tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses...I call it "We didn't start the fire syndrome," from the Billy Joel song. No matter how bad things seem like they are today, if you really compare the statistics and look at the reality, the truth is that every era has had its share of problems. Seems like there's a lot of teen violence? Guess what? Teen violence is actually down in recent years. War, killing and disease? Yeah, but a lot less than there used to be. That doesn't mean to ignore problems, but it does mean to not blame all the evils of the world on "progress."

So, that article talks about Christmas, and how it's always been materialistic and commercial...and about the origins of Christmas as a pagan holiday, etc. etc. If anything, things are today about the same as they've always been...maybe even a little better.

Posted by Mark at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)