The Masque of the Green Death

October 14, 2008
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It’s Sunday. We have snacks and beverages ready. We have friends en route. We are excited about watching my team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, whip up on the Denver Broncos. We have smoke and the smell of electrical fire?!?!

I quickly accounted for the kids, my wife, and dogs – all safe. I then started examining the house to see where the fire is. All electrical outlets, light fixtures, the dishwasher, and the oven all check out OK. I crawled up into the attic to examine visually and olfactorily and found nothing. It must be in the walls or inside the AC unit.

So we called the fire department who told us to wait outside. I grabbed the family, our safe, and my laptop bag and headed outside. They only took a couple minutes to show up in two trucks with lights and sirens blazing. They came in and examined the whole house with infrared tools and found nothing. After about 10 minutes of looking around, even inside the AC unit, they came out and pulled me inside. They had the couch pulled out and were looking down at my WIFI router and cable modem (I keep it out of sight…). I think they were going to say it was one of those when a firefighter leaned over a lamp to look behind the couch. He found it.

It wasn’t until he leaned over the lamp that he smelled the burning. Our compact fluorescent lightbulb had burned up. The lamp wasn’t even on. The firefighter said that there is a transformer inside that converts the voltage and that is what is burning up. He said they were too new to the market to know if they were an actual fire hazard but stated that they had been on a bunch of calls for the same reason.

This is the second one that has burned up in only a week. When the first one burned I was sitting right there and watched as sparks shot out and the bulb burned up. I assumed it was the lamp and got rid of both the lamp and the bulb.

If I decide to be more green and use CFLs in my house I am reducing my carbon footprint. But what happens if the CFL burns my house down and I have to build a new one? I’d say my carbon footprint would be significantly higher than if I used a typical incandescent bulb.

Green is “cool” right now and is something that the world needs. But given the option of using a new technology that has already proven, to me, to be a hazard I think I’ll have to opt to be non-green and keep my family safe.

My Blog

September 11, 2008
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Every now and then I ask myself why I maintain my blog. The answer is, despite public opinion, not because of the throngs of adoring fans that my “popular blog” inevitably drives to my doorstep. Instead, it is purely selfish in nature. I write because I enjoy writing and want people to enjoy reading my thoughts. However, if people didn’t read my blog I’d still write.

I have found that through the process of writing I have become a more dexterous writer and speaker and overly more articulate. Part of this comes from the process in which I write. I have never been the write/proof/revise/repeat type of writer. Quite frankly, that bores the hell out of me. I have always been the type that spews my thoughts onto the screen, proof reads once to make sure it makes sense, then hits the publish button. As part of this process words pop into my head and my mind screams, “This is the perfect word for this sentence. Use it! Use It! Use it!”. Sometimes I know the word but more often than not it is a word that I have no idea what it means and even less idea where I heard it. So I look it up. About 50% of the time (a surprisingly high amount) the word is just right for the sentence and I use it. Other times it doesn’t fit at all and I note it for future use. I can’t think of an example word but if you see a word in one of my posts that you don’t hear very often it is a good bet it falls into this category.

In addition to the McDonaldLand groupies, I maintain this blog because it is a stress reliever. Most of my posts I write in a disjointed nature, adding a line or two when waiting for a meeting to start or some other small and otherwise useless time. In fact, two of the posts (to be released later this week) were almost complete and I had just forgotten about them. Because I tap away at the posts in this fashion it often gives me a mental break from the tasks at hand, allowing my “batteries” to recharge.

Finally, I write because I like to create stuff. This is the same reason I became a programmer. This is the same reason I am an avid woodturner. Writing is just a different medium.

The Gray Nature of Priorities

September 10, 2008
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In my last post, I mentioned that I was finding myself a little overextended and needed to stop the blogging for a bit. I am in a little bit better shape now and have started getting things into a rhythm so I am going to slowly start ramping back up again. The decision to hold off, and now to gradually start writing again, is all about my personal priorities and the gray area that separates them.

My priorities, on paper, are pretty simple. My family always comes first – always. My career and job come second, blogging and the Java Users Group comes third, and other personal activities, such as woodturning, come last. While such a list appears pretty simple, there are always gray areas that situations fall into. For example, I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to the time I get to spend with my daughters and wife each night, however at times I have to forego that in order to work a last minute business critical issue or to host a JUG meeting. This is expected and the norm for almost everyone on the planet. Things come up and priorities sometimes shift. The thing that I always try to keep in mind is whether the opportunity cost of the shift makes the action worthwhile or not.

I recently went to visit with clients for a week. In this case the opportunity cost is that I miss out on a week of being with my family, my number one priority. This automatically means that the return from the action, the trip, must be higher to compensate for the opportunity cost. In this case it was. By making the trip I got to know our clients better and started to build report. In addition, I got immersed in the project and got moving much quicker than if I had skipped the trip. The ROI here is that I made the right move from a career standpoint – the customers will be better served, which will ultimately reflect well on me.

So I helped my number two priority but hurt my number one – how can I possibly compare the two when they are so distinct? Enter the gray area. The nature of priorities is that they are often interconnected. Since I am not independently wealthy, the success and comfort of my family is directly tied to my performance in my career. My career has a subtle but existent tie to blogging and the JUG. My personal activities determine my stress levels, which have a direct correlation on my job performance and family life.

Once we take this into account we can reanalyze the situation and see that while I did directly hurt my number one priority, my family, by taking the trip this was only in the short term. Because the potential of furthering my career has a direct impact on my family there is an indirect benefit that comes from me pursuing priority two, work, in lieu of priority one, family. Because my family is indirectly benefited by my other priority it made it acceptable in this case.

As another example, with this switch to a new role I felt that I was going to be strapped for time anyhow and something had to give. In this case blogging fell out because the return I get from it isn’t high enough to warrant skipping family time. Now that things are slowing and the dust is beginning to settle a bit I am slowly starting to reintroduce writing to my daily/weekly regiment. However, if a higher priority comes up it may very well fall out again.

Priorities are odd little beasts that invoke as much emotional response as they do logical. I guess the real goal at the end of each day is to be able to look back and see that you have acted in a way that it serves your priorities in the right order, either directly or indirectly.