• On Life and Love

    Meetups: does there have to be That Person?

    That Person (not to be confused with That Guy or that Guy) is the one who usurps the attention at a meetup. From a post by Aaron Diaz: The modern independent professional (and I include myself in this group) benefits from self-actualization in the sense that he or she does not depend on institutions or other individuals to provide core professional motivation. While this is a sound strategy for general success, taking it to its extreme has produced a generation of distinctly self-absorbed individuals of a different sort than those that came before us. Unlike the quiet narcissism of the Baby Boomers or the naked, unmotivated consumerism of Generation X,…

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    When ignorance is allowed to win

    Or: When to Say No and Bow Out Ungracefully A couple of months ago, I stumbled across a local woman who was trying to get her non-profit of 3 years off the ground. She was looking for grant writers, web-ish folks, etc., and her cause was awesome. I was like, “Sweet! I’ll do a website, help with program organization, and either move on or keep helping if there’s room.”

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    Linux command of the day

    I needed to kill all of the target=_blank’s in a site: grep -lr ' target="_blank"' . | xargs sed -i -e 's/\starget=\x22_blank\x22//g' Ran in about 1 second over ~750 files (unusually fast for grep on my system).

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    One-on-one meetings

    I’m going to put on my team lead hat for a minute. Many moons ago, I stumbled across and read Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby’s excellent Behind Closed Doors. One of many great managerial practices and recommendations in the book is to do one-on-one meetings: a regular (weekly) meeting between a manager and each of her charges to discuss project statuses, job satisfaction, progress in and reevaluation of professional goals, etc. I’ve done and seen this done with two different mindsets, each with their own uses and problems.

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    OpenID: why is this so complicated?!

    So, I set up a Google Profile in the hopes that I could centralize my identity on the intarwubs using this new-fangled OpenID thing. My first target was Yahoo(!). I know, Yahoo is so not cool, but the Charlotte Camarilla LARPs have their mailing lists there. (Side note: I would totally host and maintain forums on a server for them. Mailing lists are so 1998.). I just wanted to start to sign in with my Google info, because I hate making 15 different profiles. Even Facebook Connect would be fine. Turns out I’m stuck using my antiquated Yahoo(!) account for that (and Flickr). Of course, it wants to be my…