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My Life
Posts that directly relate to my life.
Support Your Local Farms
Aug 16th
Buy Local Foods
My family has been participating in a crop share program with Red Fire Farm in Granby Massachusetts for a few years. This year has been especially rewarding and has really demonstrated the value to me in supporting local farms. At the beginning of the season we pay a lump sum and on Tuesday, every week, we head to Forest Park in Springfield to pickup our share. It’s a crap-shoot each week as whatever the farm has available, they setup tables and distribute the rations. It’s on an honor system which I’m guessing works for the most part. They put out ‘x’ amount of food, you cross your name off on the “I showed Up List”, and then you follow the signs that display the allowed amounts for that week. In selecting, the vegetables are in whole numbers, like a head of lettuce for instance, while at other times you simply use a scale to measure your squash or cucumbers, etc. I really enjoy going every Tuesday because Red Fire Farm isn’t alone. There are multiple local vendors there selling their goods. The majority of it is organic, locally grown foods, but usually there’s flowers, a musician performing, an ice cream truck, and more. Last week I ran into a ‘small shop’ out of Southwick. The gentleman was very nice and he had a specific item I was looking for. Local, unsprayed or untreated raspberries. I picked up a jar of pickles from him too. Honestly I wasn’t blown away by the pickles but I’m glad he’s there offering local products, and I’m glad I can help support him, as well as the others.
For those of you who know me, you know I have chickens and enjoy making my own maple syrup. Being part of the local farm gig has really inspired me to do even more. Next year we’re going to take a whack at our first vegetable garden. My wife did grow a few tomato plants and a handful of potatoes this year but we’re going to attempt alot more next year. We have problems with insects, bugs, and animals out where I live but I’m not going to let them deter me from trying something I just want to do and learn more about. It’s hard to describe the reward or feeling you get, knowing you’re literally providing food for your family. You know where the food comes from. You get dirty, sweat, and spend some of your own money to deliver the product but you can’t really put a price on it. Not when it’s from your own back yard. Our primary source for 2010 has been eggs from our three hens and about six months worth of maple syrup. It’s not much I know but it’s plenty of production for our family. Hens are cheap to purchase and maintain. At times you may get a dozen eggs per week, maybe less, maybe more. Our syrup is cooked outdoors on an open flame which allows some of the smoke sense or taste to get into the syrup. It’s not overpowering at all, it’s perfect, and it’s the real deal. Curious about having ‘backyard’ chickens? Check out this site. It’s a great way to get started.
Whether or not you have the best yard for owning chickens, planting a garden, or tapping maple trees, I highly suggest you look into your local farmers markets. They’re out there and have been expanding greatly over the last 5-10 years. In fact, in the western Massachusetts area alone, (#westernma via Twitter hashtag) the number of farms selling to the public has increased 50%. Get involved. Care about your health, care about what you’re eating, and care about where your food comes from. Visit buylocalfood.org and mass.gov/massgrown for more information.
Why I Canceled Cable TV Service
Jul 24th
Cable Go Bye-Bye
This week something amazing happened. My wife and I decided to kill cable. Since our latest Charter bundle had expired and we were paying out the nose for television service we were considering jumping into a new package or canceling the TV service. I was very close to going with a package that wasn’t too expensive but after all the nickel and dimeing combined with poor customer support, I decided to pull the plug. Charter phone support and even local office support can be really bad. The added fees to make changes and the extra dollars each month for just a few channels (even children’s) is ridiculous. Sometimes I think people forget that you’re a customer and that they have jobs because of you. Also, what happened to respecting customers who auto-pay or never miss payments? No one cares about great credit or customer history anymore either. I do need to say that, of the two or three service people we’ve had come to our house for cable related issues or tasks, they all have been phenomenal.
Although it’s only been a few days, I completely feel that we’ve made the right decision. Please don’t forget that channels are still broadcasted over the air and you may be able to pickup your local stations by using an antenna. This includes some HD channels as well. Our current home entertainment setup is pretty basic now. We have a Roku, DVD player with up-conversion, and a Macbook. All three devices are using HDMI cables to transmit video and/or audio connectivity to a HiDef LCD. The Roku (our latest toy) delivers a ton of streaming media depending on your subscriptions. Netflix being the blockbuster, MLB TV being the second charmer, and Amazon Video being third. Roku offers free and premium channels that clearly show where home entertainment is headed. The ‘Newscaster’ channel is all the news you need with feeds coming from CBS, NBC, CNN, ESPN, and ABC, just to name a few. Streaming my Pandora channels is an awesome feature as well. The more I dig and research on the Roku, the more I love knowing I have one. Just recently I found a private channel code online that unlocked the USB plugin option. Simply connect a usb hard drive or memory stick to the back of the Roku and you can play .mp4 video right on your TV. My initial testing of this functionality hasn’t been perfect but I’ll give it more time.
Our Philips DVD player was $40 about a year or two ago and still works like a charm so we’re not changing it at this time or upgrading to BluRay. The Macbook HDMI video out is impressive and I’m looking forward to using my laptop for media streaming more. Do you realize how many series and episodes are available online? Our son began watching Special Agent Oso on the Disney Channel a few weeks ago and I felt bad cutting him off completely. He likes to watch it on Saturday mornings so alI I do now is plug in the laptop to the TV, goto disney.com and launch one of the episodes and set the video to full screen. He loves it and I love that I can do it all without paying for cable TV. For my own enjoyment, I began watching an FX show called Justified. Hulu.com was streaming the episodes as the season was moving along. Although I can’t watch them on the night of their release, I can watch them shortly after and on my schedule. Now if only Hulu would do the same for Rescue Me, I’d be thrilled. What I need to buy next is a wireless keyboard and mouse that works from 10-14 feet away. I feel my setup is fairly minimalistic and anyone with broadband internet could be utilizing the same technology. My cable connection is about 10mb and I can’t complain. Web browsing and downloads are fast enough for me. Gaming online and streaming video and audio is flawless. Honestly, I wish I switched 6 months ago instead of picking a new cable package at that time.
In all seriousness folks, television is going to change and we can help make it change. I just downloaded the Roku SDK and I’d love to get my hands dirty on their BrightScript programming language. I’m surprised other major networks and distributors haven’t jumped in and begun designing their own premium channels. Imagine not paying for cable TV. Imagine only paying for cable internet or broadband and using a small HiDef box to stream what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. Honestly, how many networks or shows do you religiously watch? First of all, if they were taken away tomorrow, you’d most likely get by just fine. Second of all, if a network like FX or HBO offered their original series for a small monthly or annual fee, would you pay? I sure as hell would and that’s the message we need to communicate. To summarize, if you’re a Netflix subscriber, go buy a Roku. Within one week, if you’re not blown away, and don’t see the potential, I’d be shocked. I truly hope customer after customer begins dropping their cable TV service in order to show the networks that they should be delivering their content in a new and modern medium. The bandwidth is here and it’s about time we start using it for more than just web browsing and email.
Checkout this post on WiseBread/Living Large on a Small Budget: Stop Paying For Cable Television But Keep Up With Your Favorite Shows
My goal here isn’t to make you call your cable provider and drop your service now. My goal is to inform you of what’s possible, let it all sink in, and realize how much time you waste channel browsing and simply watch shows just because they’re on. Of course, saving money on a monthly basis isn’t bad either. Also, reading more rather than watching more is a good idea. If you have a broadband internet connection do yourself a favor and think about the possibilities. Do you own a laptop that has a high quality video output capability? Purchase the right cable and begin testing it out on your big screen.
Social Media Strategy v1.0
May 28th
Social media and online community involvement and collaboration is not a fad, it’s the future. As Don Tapscott might put it, the Net Generation get’s it, uses it, and is going to change the way web technology is used and perceived. Even better, social media tools are expanding and getting the online communities offline as many users are meeting in person to discuss issues, news, entertainment, work, partnerships, you name it.
I began using Facebook in February 09’ and Twitter in December 09’. Used Linked-In since 2008, not sure exactly when. Ya, I used MySpace back in the day but it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. I recently deleted my Facebook account which is explained in this blog entry. Until the spring of 2011 I’m serving as communications officer for the CA Clarity Global Community and I tend to use CA.com forums and community content frequently but am also interested in many other technology and collaboration based sites and communities. A partner of mine recently called me a community evangelist. It felt super cool to be recognized in something I’m passionate about but not really experienced in. At a recent CA World discussion group, I was lucky enough to be on stage with four others talking about social media, the impact of it, and why we all use it and like it. It was staggering to me how many people don’t use Twitter when I see adoption rates are sky high and ever increasing. The more time I spend in the social media realm, the more I realized I would need a personal strategy on how I use each tool which ultimately impacts how I brand myself. I can’t take all the credit really, since I first saw my pal, Josh Shear, with a write-up on his blog on how he uses social media. I feel it’s important to step back and think about your own goals and objectives in using a social media or collaboration based application. Your own strategy is a living, breathing thing that you should most likely revisit annually as your interests, habits, and even role and responsibilities change.
Twitter:
By far, my most frequently used social app. As Twitter grows, I feel it will replace email or at least take away a ton of email traffic due to the simplicity of the tool and the volume of users. Primarily, I use Twitter to learn and stay current. At times I’ll make personal posts but the majority of the time I stay in my technical world. With Twitter I apply fewer rules for myself but am careful about how my tweets are perceived. I use the hashtag, #in, to synch certain tweets to my LinkedIn account which I find helpful from a professional standpoint. Problem is, once you do that, your professional contacts know you use Twitter and may follow you, giving them read access to all of your Twitter activity. You can put a lock on your Twitter account and approve your followers, but to me, that defeats the primary purpose of Twitter. My strategy here is: This is who I am, this is what interests me, and I follow who and what I’m interested in. Tweet while you’re at work in limited fashion, unless it’s part of your job. Lastly, following people and organizations local to you is a great way to break out of your ‘online-only’ shell and connect with some real people. You can also learn about what events are occurring in your neighborhood.
Linked-In:
Ahh, the online resume of choice. Linked-In took me a while to understand, yes, dumb I know. My caution with this app was who do I connect with and why? If it’s an online resume and professional networking tool, why link to friends and family? You shouldn’t… unless they are also professionally connected. Now, I have a few rare exceptions to that rule, but the majority of the time, I eat my own dog food. Why link to your current boss or co-workers? This one is tough as I agree with two sides of the fence. For one, if you work with them every day, why do you need to link with them online to communicate and collaborate? You’re most likely already doing that within your organization, if not, you should be. Two, taking the no fear approach and connecting to your closest team members sends a different message. It says you’re not afraid that they know who you are, where you come from, what’s on your mind, what activities or groups you’re involved in, what you’re doing, etc.. This ultimately leaves you responsible and accountable for your online actions and how you represent yourself and your employer. Accountability is the buzz word for me because I don’t think there’s enough of it in today’s corporate or enterprise environment. Using Linked-In and Twitter together can really help you build a professional network. I’ll end on a pet peeve though. If you’re going to signup for LinkedIn, use it. Many people create an account and login once every six months. If you do that, you’re not doing yourself or your connections any favors.
Facebook:
The largest social network in the world today and yes, I’m going to create a new personal account. I’m not a big fan of Facebook given their history on selling customer data and lack of privacy concerns. Since I deleted my account though, I realized that there are specific family and friends I want to stay in touch with and they all use Facebook. I’m at Facebook’s mercy because it’s the easiest way to share family information. Facebook is a great way to share stories of your kids, pets, hobbies, or whatever you have or love. To keep this one simple, my strategy here is: Share my personal life with family, let them know I have a blog, band, career, children, etc. Keep them informed of my life. You’d be surprised how many people miss you as you grow older. I think many people are like me where they either move away or are consumed with their own immediate family and responsibilities that they let their close friends and family fall by the wayside. I may ‘friend’ close friends, but under limited circumstances. Initially, I let Facebook get out of control and I was friending people I hadn’t seen in 10-20 years. I was bombarded with news of all of the game-playing they were doing and not real life wall posts. Another thing that killed me is I would remove friends and they would continue to ask me to be friends again… they didn’t get the point the first time I guess. One recommendation I do have is not to turn it into a photo gallery of hundreds of photos. I say, keep your Facebook wall relatively clean, delete old data, and keep your photo albums up to date and limited. For all the youngsters out there, I’m not sure Facebook is the place you have your social/party club/girlfriends/boyfriends, etc. unless you’re going to keep your family off your friends list. How you use social media is crucial. Each app for the most part, should be tailored on how you want to use it. I guess the friends part is tough because I’m the eldest of the Net generation and I don’t have a need for that level of social activity. My needs are really family driven. If you’re in your teens and twenties though and want to enjoy a rich ‘social’ experience, just use caution. Maybe create multiple accounts.
Passion and Intensity
May 6th
It dawned on me last Saturday evening, following my first band gig, that all of the effort, practice, and technicality meant nothing. We’re a foursome, guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. We have all been around the block in the local band scene, all been in multiple bands. What really made the difference for us was the emotion, realism… no script. Tony, my best friend and our bass player agreed with me that it was ‘passion and intensity’ that people want to see and feel. Good music helps, good melodies help, as do good lyrics, but all of them are meaningless without passion and intensity. Needless to say, I’m planning on writing our next song based on that concept.
Keeping that in mind, think of yourself, think of now. What are you doing (besides reading this blog), are you on autopilot? That’s the theme and that’s the poison. Step away from yourself and use a third person perspective. Analyze what you do everyday, what you work on, who you love, what you care about. If we approached everything we do and everything we care about with passion and intensity, not only will you reward yourself, you’ll reward others by your actions. Ok, so you may have trouble pouring your heart and soul into your 9-5 job or role in your organization but try it! What do you have to lose? This week for me was different, the autopilot was turned off, and I have multiple changes coming my way. My primary job role has changed, I have an idea for the first eBook I’d like to publish, I can’t wait to record our two song demo and contunie writing, I want and need to blog more, and I happened to turn 33 this week.
What if Success = Passion + Intensity + Opportunity? I found this blog post online and it fits my new perspective. Although Kimberly’s blog post is minimal and references quotes from Biggest Loser’s Gillian Michaels, she focuses on being authentic. So it appears I’m not the only person to apply, understand, or respect the combination of passion and intensity, big deal. What really matters is how one can use it in their own life. From this point forward, I’m going to ingrain this combination in my head. Never again will I ever step on stage without putting all of the raw emotion I have into a song, I will sincerely be vested in what I am doing for my employer, and I’m going to try and take less shortcuts in my life overall. Easier said than done, sure. All I want to do is show how to succeed with passion and intensity.
MIA and for Good Reason
Apr 28th
Wow, I knew at some point my blog would get neglected I just didn’t think it would be this soon. Due to spring activities, family responsibilities, band development, and normal workload, it’s been difficult to make the time to blog but I really enjoy doing this and am trying to make it a professional objective or habit. Excuses aside, I’ll primarily cover personal items in this post surrounding my latest adventure, my band, as well as my recent pursuit in social media, community involvement, and collaboration.
The band I sing in and write lyrics for, Against Apocalypse, was mentioned in The Valley Advocate this week. The article covers our drummer interviewing with the writer, Gary Carra, about the band and how we came up with our name. Our previous band, Nitro Nine, from 2003-2004 was mildly known in the Western Mass local scene as we were given opportunities to open for such rock acts as Seether, Shinedown, and Ra. It’s been over three years since I did the band thing and I forgot how rewarding it was. Knowing you have a show booked, seeing your name in the paper, getting some demo material ready, starting a website, …. it’s too much fun. This coming Saturday night (5/1/10) we’ll be on stage at Finnegan’s Tavern in Springfield MA. It’ll be exciting for us…. all I need to do now is find an outfit so I can pretend to be a rock-star!
CA World is just around the corner and I’m going to network as much as possible during the event. I’ve been invited to multiple discussion panels on web portal usage, external social media, and product specific user forums. CA as a company has always made me feel welcome. They listen to comments and ideas whether good or bad and always seem to appreciate me, the little guy, out there supporting their Clarity product and helping other customers and organizations to be successful. Based on my experience with CA, they are top on my list as a company I could see myself working for. By the way, CA used CrowdVine to setup a community site for the CA World 2010 event and I love it.
It’s official that I have spoken to my manager about my interest in social media, communications, and collaboration. I did some research on Twitter usage in the enterprise and submitted my ideas and analysis as a PowerPoint to her. The result? A meeting with an AVP in collaboration services as well as the hiring director. After meeting with both of them, it was clear that the only way I can find a job opportunity in this space is to make one for myself. Why? There’s no current positions open and it’s been difficult for us to sell the community and collaboration concept to senior levels. My goal over the next couple of months is to research social media usage in the enterprise and the benefits of it. I’m not simply talking micro-blogging. I’m talking user profiles, resource skill listings, blogs, groups, document storage, version control, retention, … you name it. If you have any adice or pointers, please feel free to send them my way. It would be greatly appreciated. It seems like the biggest roadblock I continue to run into as far as technlogy and process improvement go is culture. Driving and changing coprorate culture must be one of the most challenging things to accomplish and that’s what I feel we’re up against where I am. Prove the value exists, the return on investment is high, and the level of risk is low, and it’s hard to knock the recommendation.
So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ll be back …
CA World 2010 Planning
Feb 3rd
This year marks a special time in my career. The momentum started last summer when I was elected communications officer for the CA Clarity Global User Community. Since that time I have molded into my enterprise Clarity Application Owner role well and decided to submit an idea for CA World 2010. To my surprise, I was fortunate enough to have my idea selected for CA World participation. Not only was my idea selected but CA made me the customer committee member to assist in CA World 2010 planning. What was my idea? The CA User Forums are extremely valuable to Clarity technical and functional specialists. Clarity specific forum participation is higher than any other CA application. My thought was to setup a booth or table completely dedicated to expanding the user forums and community. To reach out to as many CA customers as possible, regardless of which product they used, and do everything possible to communicate the benefits of using the user forums and how it has benefited Clarity customers.
The content found in the user forum is quite in depth. The more users who participate, the more companies get involved, and the more problems become solved with little to no CA support interaction. The forum is primarily customers solving problems for other customers. This not only benefits CA as the application is becoming more successful for their customers but it also tells them common areas customers have issues or may want to customize, or areas that need further enhancements, etc. It also benefits each forum user by means of social networking. Update your forum profile with valid contact information and you now have the opportunity to network with other Clarity resources in many organizations.
Contributing to the company and application you support can be very rewarding. One really cool thing I got to directly impact for the CA World ROI kit is CA’s validation memo. When visiting the CA World 2010 website we want the interested candidates to have any and all content available to help them attend CA World and obtain approval from their manager to attend. The validation memo didn’t exist until I suggested providing reasons why an individual would want to attend and how can they sell their manager on it in a pre-filled document or template. Not every attendee knows how to properly justify the expense and attendance to such a conference so why not help him or her in the process? To follow up that I also feel it’s beneficial to provide the attendee with a conference summary template because many managers also want some form of write-up covering what you’ve learned from the conference. I plan on writing up my own summary template and sharing it once we’re closer to the event. Check out the validation memo here, I am a proud contributor. It’s inspiring to see your ideas come to life and CA has been so good to me in considering my feedback that my opinion of their company and products has skyrocketed. Nowhere, have I ever been given this level of opportunity.
I plan on blogging and tweeting from CA World 2010 this year and am hoping to expand the CA user community. Be on the lookout for a few related blog posts as we get closer to the event. Thank you for this opportunity CA.
