I like the idea of my own blog, but the reality is I like interaction and readers and I have a LOT more of those, engaged readers, on Google+ than I have on either blog.

It’s the engagement of the readers that’s attracting me. Granted, I’m pretty careful about who I circle, and while over 2k people follow me I don’t follow that many at all. I’m just over 300 that I read, but I add more all the time, and sometimes remove people. There’s such a feeling of community, of conversation, of participation on Google+ I find I’ve spent far more time there than here.

I need to figure out what’s going to happen next obviously. Mirroring or merely importing those posts to here is a possibility but it seems like it’s diluting things. If you’re on Google+ look me up. If you’re not… the conversation there is absolutely incredible.

He’s a 20+ Iowan teaching in Chile. Here’s the thing… he went down there and THEN looked for a job! If you’ve read the 4-Hour Workweek I think it was? It suggests that the best way to see the world is GO where you want to go and get a job there. Become a local and see the sights. I hope I got that right. It seems especially timely with the death of Steve Jobs and his oft replayed and shared 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

(If you haven’t seen it go watch it. It’s worth it.) Jesup seems to be following Steve Jobs’ advice to do what he’s passionate about and it’s paying off in a rich and interesting story that he’s living. Go give him a read, add him to your news feed and let his example inspire you.
 

I’m over on google+ and invite you to circle me if you’re over there. It’s NOT just another Facebook, or just another twitter in my experience. There’s more content, more community, and more discussion. It’s still growing and this morning I wrote this over there and thought I’d share it with you over here as well.

I find myself going to things like group.as and wondering what group I want to be a part of… where to look for like-minded people… then I find myself wandering off… the little snippets of description aren’t enough to hook me so I wind up not using it.

I find I’ve no time at all for the Seth G.’s and Guy K.’s and Robert S.’s out there any more. In the same way Kim Kardashian is famous for making a sex tape and then claiming to be a celebrity I find these three famous for… I don’t know what. I know I’m the only one, but it seems like if the three of them talked about why Downy fabric softener is blue within a week there would be a million thought pieces about it on the internet and I don’t find the things they talk about interesting. They plant seeds that others pick up and re-plant just because they are who they are, and don’t seem to pay much attention to what they’re saying and their qualifications for saying what they say is that they’ve said so much before that other people have listened to and parroted. I know that’s unkind, but I can’t get past that feeling I get from them.

I wonder if every morning they wake up feeling like they’re playing a part… being a character created by our perceptions of them and hoping like hell that they can keep running long enough…. because the rest of the Internet follows them so they’ve got a perfect Papier-mâché backside but the front is all just bamboo framework holding it all up, an empty facade that they go to sleep at night praying nobody notices.

Perhaps once they were fresh and new and exciting and that’s why people followed them, but now… now I don’t get that feeling. I didn’t like them then either though… they’ve always seemed affected, put on, like an act.

I’m sure they’re wonderful people underneath the Internet personae that they’ve cultivated. I just don’t click with them at all. When I find myself following a link that winds up at their place I close the tab. I just can’t be bothered to get caught up in the cult of personality they have built around themselves…. did they build it on purpose? Did it happen accidentally and then the beast was so big they didn’t know how to stop it? I can’t imagine it was an accident, but I can’t imagine anybody setting out to have as their job “personality” either. It just feels creepy and needy to me… and vaguely unhealthy.

Their words carry weight not because of their content but by virtue of who said them. That is troublesome to me… That’s the short version.

The sweat comes in when I’m not working. When I’m just me and I’m dumped into a social situation where I know the people who invited me but nobody else. I’m awful at those things. They’re exactly the same as the work situations in numbers of people or how well I know them… but my comfort level is off. Suddenly I’m no longer chatty or friendly or smiling. I’m stand-offish, and could just as easily stand in a corner, sip a drink until it’s gone, find the host, thank them for the invitation and sneak out the door after having “made an appearance.” What I’m describing isn’t rare either. It’s really normal social behavior for me. I don’t know why it’s so different. I’m confident, social, affable, and outgoing at work functions. Throw me in with non-work people though and I’m an awkward self-conscious wall flower.

Podcasts. I really like podcasts. I drive a lot for work so I listen to a lot of them. One of my favorite episodes was from Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker from Quick & Dirty Tips. She talks about how to talk to people. She talks about her Mom starting to talk to people in line at the grocery store and how mortified she was by it. I’ve started trying to do this. It’s a little thing, a silly thing, a safe thing. Nobody gets better at something without practicing it so I’ve been practicing my chatting people up out in public with strangers. That way if I botch it I won’t embarrass myself in front of people I know. My hope is that this will help when I get to the next social function I attend that’s not work related. With the practice under my belt, and the confidence of having done this before in non-work related venues I’ll be able to do it a little better with people I will probably see again, and hopefully for more than just “making an appearance.”

So, if you’re shy or reticent to just jump into a social setting give this podcast a listen. Then, most importantly, practice it on people you’ll never see again.

The latest sensational “The Internet is going to steal my crap” wave is here in the name of pleaserobme.com and no… I’m not linking there. I think the site is ridiculous as is the concept.

Here’s the idea. It harvests information off twitter from social sites like gowalla.com and foursquare.com that people use to “check in” to places when they go eat, shop, tour, whatever. The two sites use the phone’s GPS to show where you are and you can collect badges by visiting places. What pleaserobme does is gather into one spot when people FROM a certain area, say Austin, TX are checking into somewhere. The idea is if they check into starbucks then they are obviously NOT at home. So… using the gowalla.com and foursquare.com sites is the same as saying to the world, “please rob me.” Or at least that’s what the folks at the site want you to think.

They’re onto something. What they’re onto is that in the US right now, since 9/11, fear sells and business is good. The idea that Bad Guys are sniffing the twitter stream to see when someone goes to McDonalds’s so they can go bust into their house is ridiculous.

• It doesn’t say that NOBODY is home, just the one who is posting that they aren’t home.
• Bad guys have always been able to tell by if your sidewalk is scooped, grass mowed, lights on/off, mail picked up etc. if someone is home or not. This isn’t new or as effective as ANY of the old ways.
• If your twitter profile gives your street address you were an idiot before this site existed, and not because you’d get robbed but because you don’t put your real life address out there on the internet for safety’s sake ever. That’s just stupid. People who “check in” to their own homes… they’re the ones who are saying please rob me, attack me, go stare at my kid’s through their windows. Not the people who say “I’m at McDonald’s”

So, before you call all your relatives and tell them that the social GPS game sites are going to get their house robbed, calm down a little, take some deep breaths, go check in at a Starbucks and tweet them to meet you there. If they’re friends with you on foursquare or gowalla.com they’ll know where you are and can meet you there. If you’re worried about your friends breaking into your house while you’re away maybe you should get a better class of friend.

Commons sense tips for using the GPS enabled social-web.

1. Don’t ever GPS identify your house or your friends and families homes.

OK. Any questions?

This post prompted by the usually sane Solo-Technology blog and my guess is sometime this week he’ll not be home because he’ll be at work during the day while his wife is at work and his kids are at school… he lives in the Denver area knock yourselves out!

EDIT: I should clarify: I don’t mean to imply the author of Solo-technology is an old woman. I’ve met him and he’s an old MAN. lololol. His post about the site is what I’m referring to. I don’t believe he’s hysterical or over-reacty. (No, not a word I know.) But the topic he’s blogged about has been over-sensationalized by others out there and I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to give them any link-fu. I won’t link to hacks or nutjobs… that’s why solo-technology got the link.

I’ll break it down into Use Daily, Use Weekly, and Mean to Use But Forget. I almost included a “Can’t imagine a use for” or “Never use” but that just seemed mean. I’m going to include things I use for work and personally.

Daily:

1. Android Phone – I switched from Blackberry to Android the day it came out for Verizon and was in love immediately. Personally and professionally it’s changed my work flow completely. The syncing with the Googleverse made using it immediately easy and seamless on and offline. I couldn’t imagine using a different phone. Just like TechCrunch‘ commented on it’s seamless integration with Google Voice was a huge plus. The transcription of voicemails to text messages and e-mails, even when not perfect, and it rarely is, is a huge time saver. Aiming it at whatever phone number I want to aim it at is a huge plus as well.
2. Gmail – I really don’t understand how anybody would use anything other than Gmail for their mail. I use it to grab my work e-mail from the work servers and still act as if it were coming from our work domain when I send mail. My bosses don’t know I’m not using their godaddy web-interface, they just know that I can find any e-mail they’ve ever sent me in seconds. They believe I’m very organized. I just know how incredibly useful the search function is on Gmail. The huge mailbox size is also a huge help. While my work mailbox could fill up (It doesn’t due to Gmail gobbling the e-mail out of it) my Gmail box doesn’t. Co-workers get full e-mail boxes. I don’t.
3. Kindle – Technically a kindle2, but that’s splitting hairs. The e-book reader from amazon has changed the way I read in the less than a year that I’ve had it. For one thing I read a lot more often now and a bigger variety of books. Now that they’ve added PDF support to it I have an even larger selection of reading material to choose from. I can carry enough books for months of reading in my backpack on a work trip. I can get more books while I’m in my hotel room without having to get out of bed. I can bookmark, annotate, search, highlight, and mark-up a book from within the kindle and nobody accuses me of tearing up a book.
4. iPod nano (and itunes)– I know I finally sold out completely and don’t just refer to it as an mp3 player. The features of the iPod and itunes together, and it’s the magic of the two of them together that I love mind you. One of the things I like personally about the iPod is that it works with the Nike+ site and the iPod doo-dad that helps me with my running. No other mp3 player does that for me. Audiobooks, audible.com, and podcasts are what I primarily use the iPod for. I have music on it, but I’m mostly a spoken word person and itunes is excellent at grabbing my podcasts and managing them for me on the iPod.
5. Dropbox – This one is surprising to me when everybody doesn’t use it. It’s a small program that sits in my taskbar and syncs some folders I aim it at with a site on the web. I can then choose to make those folders on the site public, private, or share them with only certain people. The default is to make them private. I recently went from a Macbook Pro to a PC Laptop and it was the easiest transition I’ve ever made. I had all my work stuff in a folder in Dropbox already (called “Workrap” respectfully enough lol.) Now, imagine if you have multiple computers… you install Dropbox on all of them, log onto them with the same account and suddenly your “Workrap” folder is on all your computers and if you update a file at work it’s automatically updated on your home computer and on your laptop as soon as they get on the internet. If you update it while you’re offline, when you get online it’ll sync up just fine. Seriously changed my workflow. Using another person’s computer? Log onto dropbox online without installing anything and get the file you want to show them and you’re set.
6. Evernote – My brain. I’m not exaggerating. I store everything on Evernote. It’s similar to Dropbox in that it’s “in the cloud” and I can keep things synced across multiple computers and my phone. I store all my information in there. Online, offline, on my phone. If I need to find Mom’s Gumbo recipe and I’m in the grocery store I fire up Evernote on my phone and grab it. If I’m on my laptop and someone calls I automatically open Evernote as my capture device.
7. OpenOffice.org – I haven’t paid for Microsoft Office since the early 90s when I bought Works. I’ve used the free open source alternative for Word, Calc, and Presentations. I love OpenOffice, couldn’t be without it.
8. Laptop – I use it every day but I don’t love it. I loved my Macbook Pro but it wasn’t working out for me at work. I found myself running in parallels all the time for stuff so I’m back to Windows. Now, I prefer Windows 7 to Vista, but it’s hard to come back to a PC after being a Mac user.

Weekly:

1. Google Docs – I should use this one more than I do. I use it weekly to save work documents that I get e-mailed to me by my boss. I open them with Google Docs to make sure there’s a copy out there in the cloud as well. Since I’ve started using Dropbox I’ve used Google Docs less and less. I use it primarily when I’m on the net tracking something a lot and don’t want to wait for OpenOffice to open up. I track my fitness stuff on Google Docs but other than that and the one work document that’s about all I use it for.
2. WordPress & Blogger – I’d like to say I use these two blogging platforms more often than weekly, but I’ve been a little slow lately. I’m getting better, but I love my blogging and both platforms offer something that makes me keep them both.
3. Digital Camera – I love my Canon Powershot. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most megapixels thing out there but it fits in my pocket and allows me to get the shots some of my friends with fancier cameras can’t or don’t get because their camera takes too long to prep for the shot. I enjoy taking pictures, and while I took fewer this year than previous years it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it as much as it was because I wasn’t as happy. Work was/is affecting my quality of life and one of the measures of how happy I am is how many pictures I take. The quiet months are unhappy months. I know, more than you wanted to know, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.

Mean to Use But Forget:

1. Pandora – I love this music streaming service but I always forget it. Then I’ll remember it for a few days and then it falls off the radar again for another couple months.
2. Stanza – I’ve gotten so hopped up on using the kindle that I really like reading e-books now but sometimes I have my laptop and not my kindle and I sort of stare at the wall wondering what to do next. It’s only later that I remember I have Stanza on my laptop which will allow me to read many e-book formats. (It also converts between formats so I can get some things on the kindle that I couldn’t before.)
3. Windows Widgets – I keep meaning to turn them back on but I forget. Then I remember and turn them on for a while and then turn them back off. I want to like them but can’t find it in me to stick with them. I’ll try them every month or so.

So, what technology do you use to make your job/life easier.

I’m reading The Spark right now, a book that I will review in much more detail later. It will be a weekend post since I agreed to do book reviews on weekend posts. One of the primary themes of the book is that lifestyle changes, whether they be fitness changes, dietary changes, business changes, motivational changes, any kind of personal, internal change, is best made incrementally with a string of small victories building to a larger change. The pyramids aren’t climbed in one step. They’re made up of many steps that are, by themselves doable goals that lead to something magnificent.

So, towards that end 2010’s goals are going to be many, short and medium length goals, that will set up a chain of successes leading to a bigger over all destination of larger success. The advantage is if there is a set-back it’s not a set-back on the huge, overall goal. It’s a set-back on one tiny portion of the goal. That’s not as soul-crushing as blowing a giant goal. As someone who quit smoking 5 times before having one stick I know what it’s like to slip once and blow the whole kit and kaboodle!

When I quit smoking (6/15/2005) I didn’t quit forever. I quit cold-turkey and quit for the rest of the drive home. Then I quit until the following morning. That next morning I quit until lunch. (I didn’t smoke in between those quits, those were just my goals… like getting a first down rather than going for touch down every play.) You can see the pattern. Mentally staring down the barrel of a forever quit was too daunting. I’ve said before I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner and that is still true today, even when I run (Not that I’m a sprinter either as it turns out. I raced a 16 year old a while back at the campgrounds and he beat me like an old rug. I should have tripped him. He’s young. He’d heal!) So I’m going to follow The Spark’s advice and make a chain of small achievable goals.

Just because a goal is small and achievable doesn’t mean it’s a gimme goal. We recently had an Ownership Thinking workshop at my work and someone set forth as our first goal to do something that was not only 70% complete all ready it wasn’t something we could fail on. It was an assignment. There was no challenge to it. It was a gimme goal and it didn’t mean anything when we accomplished it. It was like having every team member get a trophy after a game where nobody kept score. We didn’t care about it as a first step in the Ownership Thinking program because it was as much an accomplishment or challenge as putting on our socks. That’s not what I’m talking about by small goals. (Things improved after that by the way.)

My Goals for 2010 follow, in no particular order:

• Minimum 10 Minutes of cardio every day with no days off. (Yes it’s low, but it’s doable and constant and I will do more most days. Do YOU do this much a day outside of basal movement?)
• Finish SparkPeople’s 28-day bootcamp that starts January 3, 2010.
• Run a 5k road race in spring in under 30 minutes.
• Run a 10k road race in the fall. (Time to be determined when I know what’s reasonable)
• Make at least two positive blog posts a week in any of the three blogs I’m currently maintaining. (simplerich.com, simplerunner, and my fitness blog over on SparkPeople.)
• Hit and maintain a healthy BMI by February and keep it through the year. (BMI = Body Mass Index)

You’ll notice an absence or work related goals on there. That’s no entirely an accident. I’ve asked my managers, I have 11 of them now rather than 8. I got three more stores to manage last week. I’ve asked them to get me a list of their goals for the month and year. I’ve also asked them to let me know what areas we as a company most need improvement, what areas I can help them the most, and what they would do if a) They owned their store and what they would change on the first day it was theirs, and b) what they would change tomorrow if there were no rule or policy against it. I’m going to use these to formulate my goals this year. It’s going to be a somewhat bottom up approach to managing this year, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. I’ll still be their manager obviously, but I’m definitely not going to be the only one driving this ship this year. I’ve got to do my job differently than the way I have been. I’ve got too many stores for me to continue doing it the way I was doing it. I finally realized the reason I was so burning out was that I was trying to manage the 8 stores I had the same way I was doing things when I had 5 stores and it was just too overwhelming. Then add to it the insane policy changes and I’m not alone in thinking they’re insane but there you have it… Anyway. Things had to change.

So, my goals that you see here are mostly about me and my fitness. My assumption is, if I take care of those things that work will take care of itself. That’s not as sloughing off work as it sounds. I just believe that I need these things to get me out of the death spiral I was in most of last year with work when I focused on work more than anything else and it wasn’t a healthy balance at all. By the end of the year I would have said “Thank you” if I’d lost my job. I’d have handed my boss the keys and hugged him in appreciation. I would have changed my phone number and never missed those calls again. That is NOT a healthy place for someone to be who is as high up as I am in the company. Attitudes are contagious and it was exhausting to try and be upbeat and positive when all I wanted to do was go home and lay under the covers and hope it all would just go away. I don’t feel like that now. But I did.

So, by focusing outside the spiral, by taking my eyes off the thing that was making me crazy I’m going to work on non-work goals as a primary focus and let work be my job again for a while and not my life. Because you know… as lives go… it wasn’t terribly rewarding there for a while. I think it will be better now that I’m remembering it’s a job, not a wife or husband. It’s a career, not the way I define who I am. I’m not my job. That’s I guess my only work related goal in 2010. Remember that my job is not me.

You’re wondering what this has to do with Tigers.  Tiger’s symbolically are representative of Power, Generosity, Illumination, and Energy and my goal in 2010 is to exemplify as many of those as I can in my personal and work life. To me personally the tiger is all about movement, and the energy of a coiled spring or the pent energy of a crouching tiger about to unfold into a long, lithe orange and black missile aimed at something. Their muscles ripple under their coat as they run and their eyes are fixed on their prize as they tear across the landscape. 2010 I want to have that kind of energy, that kind of feel to it. I envision 2010 as the year I reaffirm myself as interested in myself and developing myself and not just trying to go through the motions.

As I was mowing and getting more and more grumpy and irritated, stewing in my own juices as it were, up popped an ipopin from my playlist "I choose to create a great day." It played and I realized I was choosing to create a crappy day for no reason at all. I am in good health.  It was spring, the weather was borderline great, it was warm enough to need to mow and there was no snow on the ground or in the forecast and I was going to go out to eat, movie, and an ice cream with my best friend of 20 years… and here I sat stewing, brooding, and choosing to be miserable.

Now, I’m not sure where you fall on the affirmation spectrum, but I love them and am a believer. I’ve got a notebook with pages in it of things I’ve written down ten times each morning before I get out of bed. (An idea I got from Dilbert author Scott Adams.) It can’t all be voodoo because some pretty cool stuff has happened that I have pages of proof that I was aiming for. Coincidence? Sure if you want to call it that. Magick? I’m OK with that too. Luck? Fine, whatever you want to call it go for it. I just believe that we can focus our attention on things and have them happen far more often than we give ourselves credit for. This morning I was focusing on being grouchy and the "I choose to create a great day" affirmation from ipopin snapped me out of it.

What has this got to do with a special lady? Ipopin is a company created by Kirsten Harrell and her sister Traci. Kirsten has, I believe, Fibromyalgia. Short description: Chronic pain. Yeah. Two word descriptions are the best aren’t they? They say it enough so you have an idea, but just an idea. Chronic, all the time, you know that three day headache/crick in your neck from sleeping wrong? Yeah, that’s not chronic enough. Chronic is like a full time job, but longer. Pain. Not hurt. A hurt can be a low level throbbing in time with your heartbeat in the pit of your stomach. Think pain… think white-hot coat hanger laying along the inside of your thigh and the thing won’t cool off. Wait! You can’t rub it to make it stop burning because guess what? Touching it makes it worse! WOO HOO! That’s pain. Yeah… now add some of that chronic back in there and what’ve we got?

We’ve got a lady who has that(1)… and as ONE of her businesses, she creates a positive affirmations website where she sells positive affirmations. In her About page she makes passing mention of the pain, but does it in the past tense. She makes no mention of it being here now. She has mentioned it briefly on her blog, but never as something that defines her. She is an example to me of someone who lives with something but doesn’t become it. There are people who endure great pain and suffering and you know about it because it defines them. There are people who have something happen to them in the past and it defines who they are for the rest of their lives. There are people who are defined by what has happened to them. Then there are people who live their lives and while things happen to them and around them they don’t define them.

I have no doubt that there are days that Kirsten lays in bed pulls the covers up over her head and cries into her pillow. I hope those days are also filled with chocolate pudding, soft music, and the love of her friends until it passes. We’re all allowed that sort of day. Oh! Germane to nothing, she loves Princess Bride. Anybody who loves Princess Bride automatically scores an extra plus ten in my book by the way.

So, today, while I was in good health, mowing my lawn in beautiful weather before a day spent with people I love, I was managing to work myself into being miserable for no good reason. Kirsten reached out from Ohio, through my headphones and slapped me up-side {sic} my head and snapped me out of it. If you’ve never considered positive affirmations before you should go grab some. There’s no chance they can hurt. There’s a greater than zero chance that they will help. It also will help a great lady that I respect a great deal.

If you’ve got a blog reader like Google Reader you should subscribe to her blog as well. If you don’t know what a blog reader is stand by for an introduction in a future post. I realize I have some readers who still bookmark my site and come her that way. While I appreciate it that’s very 1990s of you. It’s 2000+ let the Internet come to you!

To tie this post up I’d like to finish the way I started, with a "thank you" for Kirsten Harrell for getting my head out of the gutter and reminding me that "I choose to create a great day!"

(1) I may have taken some artistic license with my descriptions of the pain involved. As far as I know she’s never described it to me so I’m going on what I’ve read about it online. It can vary in intensity, duration, and well, just about every thing.

One of the things that helps me with focus was recently mentioned by Walletpop.com here where they talk about sparkpeople.com believe it or not. It’s the Seinfeld calendar. The idea is you get a big honking calendar and every day you work to your goal you put a big X through the day. Soon you’ll have a small chain and you won’t to break the chain. It’s a constant visual cue to get going on the goal, and anything can be done if you do a little every day. At least that’s what the folks said who built the pyramids, dug the Panama Canal, and got men on the moon.

But back to fitness! When you’re done with this article go check out walletpop’s five mostly free fitness tips to jumpstart your fitness mission.

I’m forty at the time that I write this and being fit isn’t as easy as it used to be. It takes some effort on my part. Not a supreme amount of work honestly, but it isn’t something that just happens. I’m not the most disciplined person you’re likely to meet and I need reminders. I need something that keeps my focus on task. It’s like the Moleskine cahiers I was talking about earlier that I use for work. They’re low-tech, but they’re fast, easy, and cheap. All things I need in a system for me to stick with it. Sparkpeople is a good system for tracking fitness and things that impact fitness.

I’m not that hung up on weight. I’m technically overweight for my height (10 lbs), but I see me in a mirror and I’m far from a house. I could stand to lose a few pounds. There’s no way I’m in need of a diet site. I’m in need of a reminder that vegetables are edible, exercise won’t kill me, water is free and I don’t drink enough, and all sorts of things I’m willing to do ARE exercise. I don’t have to own elaborate weight machines, and walking, which I love, counts. Not as much as jogging or running, but it counts!

If you’re of a mind to try and get some fitness focus give Sparkpeople.com a look. It’s got a heck of a lot of information on there which is both nice, and supremely distracting at times. Use it for a week or two and see if you don’t like it too. If you don’t, and have a better site you use that’s free please, let me know in the comments! I’d love to try it.