So the shiny new Apple iPad has been released.  Sorta.

This mes­sage appears at the tail end of a video trailer from Apple describ­ing the won­ders of their new prod­uct and in an rather anti­cli­mac­tic close sug­gests that FCC approval for the device isn’t quite in place yet.  As a cus­tomer (or poten­tial cus­tomer) this felt like a bit of a buzz kill, right after a drink­ing the big-gulp sized cup of Apple hype.  From a busi­ness per­spec­tive how­ever, it makes com­plete sense. I mean, really, is there any­one out there that believes they won’t get the approval?  Some­times it’s bet­ter to get the momen­tum started and worry about the fin­ish­ing details later.

By odd coin­ci­dence, as the announce­ment came through this morn­ing, I was watch­ing this video pre­sen­ta­tion by Seth Godin on the mer­its of ship­ping, get­ting your prod­uct to mar­ket, and fast.  His com­men­tary on pro­duc­tiv­ity revolves around hash­ing out details in the begin­ning of your prod­uct devel­op­ment and then reject­ing the impulses of what he calls “the lizard brain”, the lit­tle voice in our heads that resists suc­cess in the long term.

In essence, he’s describ­ing the con­cept fol­lowed by count­less suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies and entre­pre­neurs which is, ship, then bug fix. Per­fec­tion it seems, is a long lost con­cept.   As a com­pany this makes you more mar­ketable (not to men­tion sol­vent) but is it good for clients to receive an imper­fect prod­uct for their hard earned dol­lars?  Or do they even care?  What do you think?

Peo­ple use their com­puter desk­top in count­less dif­fer­ent ways.  My uncle uses his to store short­cuts to all of the appli­ca­tions that he uses reg­u­larly.  Sev­eral of my friends pre­fer to keep theirs entirely bar­ren, pre­fer­ring instead to work out of fold­ers buried some­where deep in the com­puter.  I had a man­ager once that insisted all of the files and fold­ers on my com­puter should be arranged alphabetically..

Per­son­ally, I’ve always treated the desk­top as a work area and tend to group files con­tex­tu­ally or by project. Hav­ing groups of files directly in view helps me keep tabs on what I’m try­ing to accom­plish and keep­ing them grouped log­i­cally sig­nif­i­cantly sim­pli­fies the task of find­ing them when you need them.

The Achilles heel of this sys­tem though is when things get busy and I stop orga­niz­ing my files.. This is when I know I’ve taken on too many projects. If you expe­ri­ence the same thing, this arti­cle is for you..

The last sev­eral days have been com­plete and utter bed­lam for me, and this evening I real­ized why.   Upon a quick review of my desk­top I found this unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter; full of files and snip­pets of par­tially com­pleted and stalled projects. In a word, unmanageable.

So, what to do about this?

The obvi­ous answer is, fin­ish a few projects. But what if this isn’t possible?

1. Start by delet­ing any unnec­es­sary files
2. File any­thing that you don’t need imme­di­ate access to in your ‘doc­u­ments’ folder
3. Orga­nize the remain­ing files in to log­i­cal groups.   This will be dif­fer­ent for every per­son, do what works best for you whether it be alpha­bet­i­cal, chrono­log­i­cal or by color of icon.

On occa­sion, if I know I’ve got a few ongo­ing projects that need to be orga­nized I’ll take one addi­tional step that helps keep me in check.

4. Cre­ate a desk­top back­ground in an image edit­ing pro­gram like PC Paint or Adobe Pho­to­shop (or Pixlr)  with dividers between which you’ll store your work­ing files and fold­ers.  I use smaller boxes to limit the num­ber of files I can store for a par­tic­u­lar project (thus lim­it­ing the amount of unfin­ished work I will allow for each).  Label each box to enforce a place for every­thing and don’t for­get to leave your­self a sand­box where you can place files through­out the day while you’re deal­ing with them..  I try to ensure that my sand­box is empty at the end of the day to make my life eas­ier the next morning!

A few addi­tional notes:

• To find the size of your desktop
  • In Win­dows: right-click the desk­top and choose prop­er­ties and click the set­tings tab to see the screen resolution
  • On a Mac: Open the dis­plays pref­er­ences panel and click the dis­play tab to find the res­o­lu­tion for your cur­rent monitor
• Con­sider cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple desk­top arrange­ments for dif­fer­ent groups of tasks or addi­tional screens

I’d love to hear your thoughts!   How do you orga­nize your desk­top, and does this sys­tem work for you?

Last fall, after a late frost ruined all of the fruit on two apple trees in my back yard, I made the deci­sion to leave it all as fod­der for the birds this win­ter.   Much to my cha­grin, the squir­rels are the only crea­tures that have been mak­ing use of the offer­ing and mostly that’s been hap­pen­ing over the last month or so.  We haven’t had a par­tic­u­larly hard win­ter, but I sus­pect that the more palat­able win­ter food has been con­sumed and now these lit­tle ver­min are hav­ing to settle..

I’ll be clear that these lit­tle crea­tures are ver­min, and a nui­sance, they’ve chewed through more than one impor­tant bit of the house, and make a habit of skit­ter­ing along the stucco out­side my bed­room at ungodly hours of the morn­ing. I yell at them, shake my fists, and even pound on the walls  on occa­sion, but I must admit it’s dif­fi­cult to NOT enjoy watch­ing them scam­per through the snow and scurry up the trees to pick fruit nearly the same size as their lit­tle carcasses.

I caught this lit­tle guy the other day camped out on a sunny win­dow sill and quite enjoy­ing his meal (until I came along that is..)

I still have no idea where the impulse came from, but I dug up a copy of Baz Luhurmann’s 1999 release Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sun­screen) this morn­ing.  As I lis­tened with a decade of addi­tional expe­ri­ence under my belt, I’ve real­ized how sim­ple wis­dom can be, and how we tend to ignore that of those who are fur­ther down the path then ourselves.

As I progress through Lead­er­ship Cal­gary, the focus shifts fre­quently back to build­ing wis­dom in to our ways of think­ing and being. At times the prospect (and in fact the process of get­ting there) seems immea­sur­ably daunt­ing.  After list­ing to this record­ing for the first time in ten years  though, I real­ize that wis­dom really can be sim­ple.. to those that posses it.  It’s the getting-there that’s difficult.

Baz Lehur­mann: Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Ladies and Gen­tle­men of the class of ’99, wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sun­screen would be
it. The long term ben­e­fits of sun­screen have been proved by
sci­en­tists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reli­able
than my own mean­der­ing experience…

I will dis­pense this advice now.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had an inter­est­ing encounter this after­noon when I met the Postie out in front of the house..  I intro­duced myself and as we chat­ted, he com­mented about some stock he’d pur­chased in a com­pany that I haven’t worked for in over a year.  For the first time I caught a glimpse of a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, a world where the only con­nec­tion to your client is through the outer mark­ings on an enve­lope.  When I real­ized this, I even felt a bit silly for offer­ing my first name.  I’m the only one who gets mail at this address after all, and why wouldn’t I be me?

When I worked at tech­ni­cal sup­port sev­eral years ago, I knew clients by their user­name alone (save a few regular-callers), and often I would recall a plethora of infor­ma­tion about the spe­cific con­fig­u­ra­tion of their com­puter, pre­vi­ous prob­lems and addi­tional email addresses with­out much thought.  Sev­eral of the reg­u­lar clients I could still list off by user­name, but any fur­ther details of their lives are for­ever lost in the Telco archives..

This really high­lights to me what a huge impact our envi­ron­ment can have on our ori­ent­ing sto­ries, our way of see­ing the world. I’m curi­ous now, has any­one else had this expe­ri­ence, or can you relate to the tech-support or postman’s side of the equation?

In the begin­ning of Sep­tem­ber I posted a note about the youth photo ini­tia­tive that I’ll be run­ning in con­junc­tion with the Cal­gary board of edu­ca­tion and the Boys and Girls Club of Calgary..

The first few weeks have gone very well, and we’ve man­aged to select approx­i­mately ten stu­dents to com­plete the for-credit pro­gram. Dur­ing the last class we dis­cussed some of the cur­rent events that stu­dents felt strongly about, and in the end the group agreed to focus on the com­mu­nity of Bow­ness here in Cal­gary, which is an incred­i­bly diverse and (dare I say) unique com­mu­nity. Given said diver­sity, this will prove to be an inter­est­ing project as time goes on!

With the help of Jim at The Cam­era Store, we sent requests to sev­eral cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers to spon­sor the pro­gram with equip­ment.   Unfor­tu­nately the requests were not met favor­ably and as a result the school will have to pur­chase the cam­eras out­right.  I’d really like to give a plug to The Cam­era Store and par­tic­u­larly Jim for being so sup­port­ive of Boys and Girls Club pro­grams. They’ve helped on a few projects already and their com­mit­ment to help­ing the com­mu­nity should not go unnoticed!

I’ve sent the stu­dents out with the fol­low­ing home­work and next week (if all goes accord­ing to plan) we should begin to actu­ally work with cameras..

• (Cur­rent Events) Bring in 2 arti­cles (or pieces of writing)
  • Be pre­pared to talk about what they mean to you.
• (Observation)Find two out­side objects and visit them on at least four occa­sions in one day: Morn­ing, Mid-Day, Evening (sun­set), Night
• Record your observations
  • Shad­ows
  • Colours
  • Tex­ture
  • Con­trast

Now I’ll have to get myself out to do some home­work too; I must admit, it’s kinda fun to be back in school!

In response to a request for gallery con­tent I’ll be assem­bling a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent photo series’ in the next month or two..  I wel­come com­ments, sug­ges­tions or any other input.

1. Belly But­tons
   • After an inter­est­ing exer­cise at the Lead­er­ship Cal­gary open­ing retreat, I’d like to explore Belly But­tons, an anatom­i­cal fea­ture that every­body on this earth shares. My inten­tion is to explore the sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences of said BB’s to high­light our com­mon origins.
   • Please send me an email if you’d like your navel fea­tured in this exhibit.
2. Garbage
   • I was asked to exhibit a series of pho­tographs at a local cafe in Novem­ber and in doing so, I’ve decided to cap­ture some of what we throw away and the places the garbage inevitably ends up..   I’d like to use this to encour­age peo­ple to con­sider the impact of their Christ­mas pur­chases this year, and in the future.
   • As with the belly-buttons, if you’d like to take part in this, please let me know..

I’ve had rea­son to pon­der prop­erty own­er­ship and the break­down of the tra­di­tional com­mu­nity lately and fig­ured I’d share a few of my thoughts with you.

Sev­eral weeks ago, per­sons unknown rifled through my car overnight and took it upon them­selves to relieve me of an iPod that was tucked in to the cen­tre con­sole.  While it is rea­son­ably clear that I must have left my vehi­cle unlocked, I feel a great sense of dis­ap­point­ment that I should even need to lock my doors in front of my own house.. Really, is noth­ing sacred any longer?

Yes­ter­day I looked in to my back yard to find a well dressed man pick­ing the apples from one of the two trees grow­ing against the inside fence.  I was shocked at his brazen­ness and went out to speak with him.  I’m cer­tain he was caught as off-guard as I was, and when I politely enquired as to whether I could be of assis­tance to him he told me point-blank that he’d just stopped by to gather fruit.  I reminded him that it was cus­tom­ary to ask before (tres­pass­ing and) tak­ing someone’s fruit, and that had he done so he would have been wel­come to it.

He tried to explain that he thought the house was unoc­cu­pied (I’ve been here full-time since Novem­ber and owned the place for two years), and that he knew the lady that used to live here (three or more years ago) so I found the argu­ment a bit weak.  I’ve vehi­cles parked both in front of the house and out back as well.  The lights are on at night, and I’m usu­ally around dur­ing the day so really there’s no excuse to think the house is vacant.. or is there?

Prop­erty and entitlement

We live in such a con­sumer state that the quest for ever-more stuff in our lives is becom­ing an all-consuming pas­sion for peo­ple and these two sep­a­rate hap­pen­ings have given me cause to reflect on the nature of prop­erty and what it all really means.

I pride myself on being gen­er­ous and pretty relaxed about my own prop­erty, par­tic­u­larly the abun­dance of fruit in the yard.   In fact, sev­eral peo­ple have open invi­ta­tions to pick fruit through­out the sum­mer just because they’ve expressed inter­est. I’ve given pop­pies and plant cut­tings to sev­eral peo­ple because they asked. It pleases me to share and to be fair I have far more than I can use any­way. I’ve even an arrange­ment with Charles, the man that col­lects bot­tles in this area to set my recy­cles away for him.  He asked, and I was happy to oblige.

What irks me though, is that peo­ple feel a sense of enti­tle­ment to the prop­erty of oth­ers; we’re drawn to the shinier-fancier-prettier stuff that other peo­ple have and we’ve been con­di­tioned to desire it almost at-all-cost..  Why do we for­get man­ners in the face acqui­si­tion? Why is this still desire still acceptable?

Fur­ther, what does it say about me to claim own­er­ship of some­thing that I’ve done noth­ing to cre­ate and lit­tle to main­tain (after all, trees are pretty self suf­fi­cient)?   Am I just part of the problem?

Rekin­dling the real community

This brings us to the real bee in my bon­net, which takes shape in an incred­i­ble lack of com­mu­nity here in my own neigh­bour­hood (and I’ll sug­gest, in all of Cal­gary). I’ve lived in my house for two years, and know sev­eral of my neigh­bours through pleas­antries exchanged over the hedge but I couldn’t even tell you a whole lot more than first names and whether they’ve got a dog. Of the ten houses that sur­round my own, four are vacant and two want noth­ing to do with the out­side world.

If I wanted to bor­row the prover­bial cup of sugar I’d be forced to knock on four or five doors before any­one actu­ally answered, there’s really nobody I can share tools with, nor ask for assis­tance with a home project. This may be partly because the neigh­bour­hood is estab­lished, and full of retirees, or may just be an excuse on my part.  I don’t know which end of that state­ment is true because I have not made the slight­est attempt to find out.

Through this dis­con­nec­tion we breed igno­rance of what is going on around us, and per­pet­u­ate it in our­selves. Had I neigh­bours that knew the score, would it have been more likely that my stuff wasn’t get­ting pinched? Pos­si­bly. We can’t know until we find out though..

My chal­lenge next week is to start meet­ing the neigh­bours that I’ve neglected to date, and I chal­lenge you, dear reader, to do the same!

Through Lead­er­ship Cal­gary I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to meet a remark­able lady by the name of Gena Rot­stein.  Her com­pany, Dex­ter­ity Con­sult­ing is Canada’s first and only Phil­an­thropic Bro­ker­age Firm™ and spe­cial­izes in build­ing and main­tain­ing diver­si­fied phil­an­thropic invest­ment port­fo­lios for clients that want to max­i­mize the impact of their char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions to the community.

Dexterity’s unique approach to busi­ness is reflected even by it’s office location–the back of Gallery 213, an art gallery cre­ated in part to sup­port Cana­dian artists by offer­ing up commission-free wall space. And here, here is where the post begins!

On Sep­tem­ber 3, 2009, Dex­ter­ity Con­sult­ing along with a num­ber of spon­sors pre­sented the first Cana­dian taste of the Mile­stones Project, a 35,000+ image col­lec­tion of moments depict­ing a series of firsts for chil­dren around the world. The first tooth, first best friend, first day of school, and first hair­cut are shared by peo­ple the world ’round regard­less of race, color, reli­gion or loca­tion.  The aim of the pro­gram (if I may be so bold as to sum­ma­rize) is to show how sim­i­lar we all are when you strip away the mean­ing­less hatred and igno­rance that seg­re­gates us from others.

Pho­tog­ra­phers Richard and Michele Steckel, the real heart of the Mile­stones Project were on hand to speak about their work and what it meant.  Their gra­cious­ness and com­mit­ment to the bet­ter­ment of the world is to be com­mended, and has been rec­og­nized by such orga­ni­za­tions as the United Nations among oth­ers.. They were a true inspi­ra­tion to speak with!

The open­ing night was by all accounts a great suc­cess with a packed house for most of the night.  We were joined by sev­eral spe­cial guests and a crowd of enthu­si­as­tic sup­port­ers for the open­ing com­ments.  The show will con­tinue until Octo­ber 31, 2009 and is located in Gallery 213 at Art Cen­tral in down­town Calgary..

I man­aged to catch a few pho­tos using avail­able light. With the gallery as packed as it was, I felt it would be a bit igno­rant to use a flash and blind the whole audi­ence reg­u­larly but in hind­sight, the qual­ity of the pho­tos would have been greatly advanced by a lit­tle off-camera flash.

I’ve been asked to build and deliver a 12-week pho­tog­ra­phy train­ing course for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Cal­gary and the Cal­gary Board of Edu­ca­tion, Start Out­reach High School, and yes­ter­day we had a very pos­i­tive ini­tial meet­ing to dis­cuss the logis­tics of such a course.  Need­less to say, I’m extremely excited by the pos­si­bil­i­ties this project will present over the com­ing months as both orga­ni­za­tions are really open to new ideas and encour­ag­ing the stu­dents to explore.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Cal­gary pro­vide a dizzy­ing array of pro­grams for Cal­gary youth to pro­vide them with a car­ing and safe envi­ron­ment in which they can grow and learn.  I’ve worked with them on a few dif­fer­ent occa­sions and I’m chuffed to be work­ing with them again!

Start Out­reach pro­vides high school stu­dents with a self-paced learn­ing envi­ron­ment that allows them with the flex­i­bil­ity to com­plete their high school stud­ies with­out the typ­i­cal con­straints of a tra­di­tional school. As we dis­cussed their philoso­phies and learn­ing struc­ture I couldn’t help but think that I wish this sort of thing was around while I was still in school.   I’m really look­ing for­ward to work­ing with them on this project as well!

The project itself is just in the plan­ning stages at the moment so I’ll pro­vide more detail on how the pro­gram will run later. It will be open to stu­dents at the Start Out­reach High School in Bow­ness, with addi­tional spots avail­able to stu­dents at other CBE Out­reach schools if we have space available.