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Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power. -- Clint Eastwood
I read that Mike Huckabee is gaining ground in the polls. Tamara met the governor and his wife at the Iowa Straw Poll that we attended. Mike Huckabee's wife said that she loved Tamara's skirt... (of course she did - my wife has excellent style)
But I can't vote for Mike Huckabee. For a few reasons...
Reason Number 1: The boy loves him his tax increases.
Reason Number 2: The boy is soft on criminals.
He urged the parole of a convicted rapist, who then left prison and raped and killed a woman. He regrets the decision now, and maybe it would influence him to not be soft, but c'mon...
Reason Number 3: The boy loves him illegal immigration.
When he was governor, Huckabee held the following positions on illegal immigration: He supported higher education benefits for children of illegal immigrants, opposed a federal roundup of illegals from his state in 2005, opposed a 2001 bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in the state, and in 2001, a member of his administration pushed for legislation to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
Under Governor Huckabee's watch, state spending increased a whopping 65.3% from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation (Americans for Tax Reform 01/07/07). The number of state government workers rose 20% during his tenure (Arkansas Leader 04/15/06), and the state's general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion...
And for all those very sound reasons, I can't get behind the guy. He's Jimmy Carter in Republican clothing. I don't think so.
Just thinking out loud... I want to contrast two pilots.
The first pilot knows the river. She senses the channel as if it were connected to her. She understands exactly where to steer the craft and moves it expertly up river. Her arrival time beats others because of her familiarity. Everyone esteems her confidence and experience. They need her to guide them safely, and people follow her easily.
The second pilot knows no river. He searches out the unfamiliar and explores endlessly. His boat has more patched holes than a kindergartner's jeans. He finds what paths not to take more often than what paths to take. He scares the shit out of most everyone, and few want to follow him. His value is always in question - until he charts that course that shortcuts the trade route or finds something more valuable than was known previously.
Every organization has at least one of the first pilot.
Some organizations have a pilot or two of the second variety.
Almost all organizations espouse the virtues of diversity, but diversity is more than just skin deep. Through variety, organisms and organizations evolve.
Strength and stability come via the deft skill of the first pilot.
Growth and adaptation come through the embrace of risk by the second pilot.
Every organization, like every species, needs both to survive. The tragedy is that most managers hire people who feel comfortable to them. They seek a "fit" for the organization. Pilot Number Two will never feel like a "fit." They won't conform to the company norms. If they did, they wouldn't have a passion for exploration.
This makes it quite hard for managers to recognize and hire really good adventurers. Here's what a few people have said about the qualities of the good adventurer:
"It's important for the explorer to be willing to be led astray." - Roger Von Oech
"Explorers have to be ready to die lost." - Russell Hoban
"[Explorers] never stop because they are afraid - they are never so likely to be wrong." - Fridtjof Nansen
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be too cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down." - Ray Bradbury
Some people mistake the rebel for the explorer. They're not the same. The rebel can be a cynic; the explorer is never cynical. The explorer thinks nothing of working feverishly, optimistically chasing flirtatious ideas. The rebellious cynic sees no solutions. It's not just being a misfit that counts; it's being a romantic. The adventurer sees hope in the pursuit, and isn't running away from the company, but running toward the opportunity that few others can see. A pilot, if they're a pilot, always has a destination in mind. Managers can identify a good explorer when the job interview feels like a ride through the jungle - with the explorer driving at breakneck speed.
An explorer isn't worried about being a fit. An explorer wonders if you dare...
My high school friend, Rik Schwinden, took this photo in a park in Des Moines when we reconnected several years after high school. I've since lost track of him somwhere in Minnesota.
This is what I looked like when he knew me in high school.
That picture was taken by Mike Langley, high school friend and a musician from Sioux City, Iowa, when we were hanging at his parents' house. I traded a few email with Mike a couple of years ago. He had a web site, but that appears to no longer be active. He still Googles though...
Funny how we lose track of people through the years, and then occasionally intersect.
My habit is to wake up each day and check the news, and to then our reconcile our checking account to our budget.
I woke up this morning to see that we were about $1,000 less than what I expected to see. Scanning the details of it, I saw that Sprint, my cell phone provider, took out my payment. I have autopay with them, so I go to my Sprint account online and find this:
They took out a payment of $1,197.23.
I had called yesterday, as is my habit, to ensure that I knew what the payment amount due is. It was $148.85.
If you look at the image above, you'll see that my account now has a credit (circled in red) of $1,048.38.
That's a gross error.
I'm now on the phone in the customer service queue - 20 minutes thus far - with Sprint. I'm obviously not the only one affected by this.
Nice little Christmas trick. I hope I have no problem getting my money refunded.
ETC: I get through to customer service, and they tell me that they have to create a "case" for my refund. That process takes 3 - 5 business days, and then they issue me a check, so I have to then wait for the mail to arrive.
I'm now on hold to see if I can cancel my Sprint account without paying $200 per phone to get out of my contract.
I hate this company.
MORE ETC: I finally got through to someone who cared, a guy named Sam. He will personally track this to ensure that I get a resolution ASAP. He promises daily contact with me to keep me updated. Cool.
He also explained that they can't do an immediate refund to our bank account because the error is over $1,000 and some department has to determine that this is not an effort to defraud Sprint.
One of my favorite pictures of my daughter when she was maybe 8 or 9 months old. This started as a very messed-up picture, but I was able to clean it up to a decent state. Here's the original:
While browsing the news after waking up this morning, I saw that a British schoolteacher might suffer 40 lashes because she named a classroom teddy bear "Muhammad."
My first thought was, "Will the feminists in this country stand up for the woman?"
A spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women said the situation "is definintely on the radar, and N.O.W. is not ignoring it.
But she added that the U.S.-based organization is "not putting out a statement or taking a position."
Radio personality Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angles chapter of the National Organization for Women and past member of their board of directors, criticized the organization for not taking a stand.
"We have a duty to make a difference for women around the world," Bruce told FOX News. "The supposed feminist establishment is refusing to take a position in this regard because they have no sensibility of what is right anymore. They're afraid of offending people. They are bound by political correctness."
"The American feminist movement has not taken one stand to support the women of Iraq, the women of Afghanistan, the women of Iran," she said. "It is the United States Marines who have been doing the feminist work by liberating women and children around the world."
Tammy's right - how weak is that? Geez - feminists used to have backbone. Today, they're just a bunch of chickens who don't truly stand up for women.
And how weak is your religion when an elementary classroom names a teddy bear the same name as your prophet and it makes you think that you need to whip a woman for doing so? In addition to feminists shouting out about this, Muslims ought to do the same - if they disagree with such an abhorrently ignorant reaction to the naming of a teddy bear.
I remember back when I was a Christian, it always struck me odd that people say "The devil is in the details." I get what they're saying, but the Christian in me wanted to correct that with "No, God is in the details." I can look at the works of man and the closer I look, the more imperfections I see. But I can look at the works of God, and the closer I look, the more beauty and wonder lie therein. God is all about details, evidently.
Back when I started my window washing business in the 80's, I learned quickly that windows are clear, and that imperfections are not unnoticed. Smudges from my shammy, a missed spot in a tall window, water accidentally left standing on a window sill... I didn't think back then that washing windows would become an effort in perfection, but because I was self-employed and doing residential windows, I had to push myself into the effort. It doesn't come naturally. There's always that little voice that whispers, "Don't worry. It won't matter. No one will notice." At first, I took the lazy way out. But later, another voice competed for my attention.
"You can do better. Do it right."
The more I had to live with my lack of diligence, the more I paid for it later. It sometimes meant a poor reference and the absence of much-needed word of mouth for a hungry would-be entrepreneur. It's not that I wasn't a good worker. It's that I wasn't the worker I could have been.
Every job is important. Every detail matters.
I say this because today I find that more mature voice in my head, spotlighting every detail and analyzing every scenario with the web site that I'm finishing. I'm very close to finishing the core work, and all that will be left is clean-up, testing, and then client feedback and tweaking before we go "live." A small part of me wants to whistle past things that no one else might notice. But I know better. The details matter. The success of my enterprise hinges, in no small part, on my ability to consider every detail I can before we open the doors to it. And so I obsess until 2 AM some nights to wrestle the smallest of code into what I expect it to be for my own standards.
But frankly, I'm getting tired and I'm itching to pick up my paintbrush and get back to regular schedule.
Don't get me wrong - I'm excited as I can be doing this. This has the potential to do well for my family. I just miss my normal life. But even that won't deter me from obsessing about the details.
Every line of code is important. Every detail matters.
...psst... on a cool note, a guy recently found my web site and sent me this picture.
It took in a whopping $25,000. Now granted, that's only in Mark's 15 theaters that he owns, but by any standard, that's bad.
I copied and pasted the Box Office Mojo stats and filtered to new movies only and then sorted them by how they did at each theater. Click on the image to see the larger, more readable view.
Of the ten new movies listed, it finishes second to last in terms of gross receipts per theater. It managed to beat just one movie, a film about gay soccer players that is playing in only 1 theater.
Mark, you savvy maven you.
None of Hollywood's antiwar movies have done well. In its second week out, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs is doing worse per theater than Redacted.
The reason these films tank is because they don't tell the real story. The people who make them tell a sensationalized fiction to paint our guys maliciously, and the majority of Americans are smarter than that.
It's smarmy as hell to put out an antiwar film while our guys are actually in the field winning the war they're fighting. These filmakers get what they deserve - which is lost money. I hope they lose a ton of it. I'm laughing at them - all the way to the box office.
