Rand Wacker

So here we are in another new year. It seems a little anti-climactic as 2006 ended very surreally for us. I haven’t really said much about it here, and most of my regular readers will know, but on Thanksgiving 2006 (more specifically, 4:16am the morning after) my beautiful wife Alexis gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Alana Corrin.

So things have been, shall we say, insane, and absolutely wonderful. I was able to take about three weeks off of work, then go back for a week and then head down to Lex’s parent’s in LA for a week, so December was a surreal blur of diapers, no sleep, an unbelievable cuteness.
Now I’m back to work full time, and Alexis and Alana are enjoying full-time baby fun at home. New schedules are going to require new routines, but whatever I can do to maximize time with the girls is important because I can’t believe how fast they change.
Babies are fun!

No, not gardening, the show.

I’ve been so caught up in the plethora of excellent series on HBO such as Deadwood, Rome, Entourage, The Wire, and the ever-controversial Big Love, that I’ve completely missed some of the programming coming from Showtime. One show that caught my eye due to the actors that I like in it and the rash of Emmys that it won recently is Weeds. This is a simple half-hour show about a suburban mom who has taken to selling pot to her escape-needing suburban neighbors after her husband died. Now that sounds like it could be a dark and depressing subject, but its not the illicit activities that make the show, its the backdrop of her neighborhood in the picture-perfect “Agrestic” planned community.

Great cast, snappy writing, and good story lines got me hooked after just a couple of shows. I saved half the first season for Alexis and we plowed through six episodes in one night (she got hooked as well).

Season one is out on DVD now, season two should be soon, and season three should start broadcasting in the next few months. Check it out, I highly recommend it!

I hate buying pre-packaged frozen food at the store because I think its bland and bad for you, but I love to put together various one-dish dinners and freeze them myself because they are tasty and convenient.

Long a staple in our freezer has been various forms of lasagna we like; with turkey sausage, without, zucchini, sometimes with goat cheese, yum. Well I tried a new “format” this weekend that I say wins hands down over the traditional long wide noodles and stacked presentation.

Basically instead of going through the palavra of boiling the noodles and laying everything together, I instead simply used some penne tossed in tomato sauce as the main component and then mixed in layers of mozzarella, parmesan, and basil leaves. The result was a fantastically tasty baked pasta dinner that could provide an excellent canvas for the addition of any of our other favorite ingredients, and doesn’t suffer from the sometimes dried-out ricotta layer that is so necessary for structurally sound lasagna. Yum!

(Shoot, I should’ve taken a picture)

A couple of sites to investigate for printing your own books/photo books:

Blurb - Makes it easy to do semi-custom books with more text than iPhoto

Lulu - Self-print any sized book from a PDF file

I finally got around to upgrading to Gallery 2 for my pictures. Took me too long, but the wait was worth it. I was even able to leverage a Debian backport to make it easy to maintain but still maintain our crazy ExecCGI environment where the code runs as my user (and more importantly, under my quota).

This is the first step in a few changes around here, but is a major step before I add some very key content…

Joseph Crawford � Blog Archive � Scary iSight Trick

Das Keyboard - The Blank Keyboard for Demanding Users.

I was using one of these over at a friend’s house last night and the clickity-click was as comforting as an old IBM PS/2 tank keyboard. I also liked the black color and NO LABELS on the keys.

Unfortunately thought they are still holding onto the old num-pad layout, which I’ve ditched in favor of getting the mouse closer to the right side using one of these.

If I was still using X as my primary environment and was using the num-pad to replace the mouse for getting around it would be great, but I guess I’ll have to wait until they come out with Das Kompact Keyboard.

I don’t spend a ton of time listening to podcasts, so for me they have to be short, entertaining, and of high-value. I recently decided on about five individual subscriptions, which are diverse enough to keep me interested (you can find these all on iTunes):

• BusinessWeek - Cover Stories
• Ebert & Roeper
• Endgadget
• NBC News - Meet the Press
• NPR: Story of the Day

And a recent subscription: 43 Folders Podcast.

I started my career as an Engineer, as from an earliest age I was always driven by building things. Through a few convoluted steps, I eventually dabbled my toes in “the dark side” * of Marketing (Product Management to be exact). Having been on the Eng side of the table has helped me immensely as a PM (and sometimes been a problem, but old habits are hard to break). I know very well the innate distrust of Marketeers by anyone who does technical work for a living, and I try every day to keep that in mind.

I think one of the most important clarifications to make when describing what marketing does is to clear up the misconception that “marketing is just about telling people what to buy.” That may have been the old approach for companies like Coke, but in my line (Enterprise Software), you can’t just build something cool and then tell people to buy it, you actually have to build something they want.

“Marketing” is most importantly understanding the customer. Market research, customer interaction, etc. If I ever have to explain very quickly to someone what it is I do I sum it up as, “Work with the customer to understand what they want (to do), work with development to get it built, work with Marcom to communicate that value.” I think the fact that “Marketing” is mostly associated with the last item is our biggest problem, maybe we need a new name for all of this which isn’t so loaded with preconceived notions (or maybe its just that most people only see part C, so that’s all they associate with Marketing).

Anyways, it is definitely true though that there are a lot of bad marketers out there who encourage the stereotypes and re-enforce the distrust. I’ve been following a number of good blogs these days that talk about the importance of sincerity and clarity in outbound communication: Seth Godin, Joel Splosky, and perhaps a new guy John Dodds.

It was the latter that had a post which inspired me to write something: Geek Marketing 101. His top points that really resonated with me include:

1) Marketing is not a department. (Exactly what I said above)

2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don’t speak geek. (One of the reasons I think I’m good at this)

7) Technical Support is marketing. (I would expand this to say that every single person who touches the customer is marketing, and you want feedback from them all)

* - After spending enough time in Marketing I started to realize that the real dark side is Sales…somewhere that I hope to dabble a bit in the future just so I can better communicate with the other side of the table in my day-to-day dealings.

Update Dec 3, 2007: I have recently switched over to OmniFocus for managing all of my projects and actions. It actually took me a couple of tries to get into the groove, and at first there were things that infuriated me. Now, I use OF for the majority of my day-to-day actions, but I still maintain a freakish amount of checklists and other notes in my old OmniOutliner file. I still definitely hold to my recommendation below that you begin GTD in a tool-agnostic way and use something simple to start for you: text files, OmniOutliner, OneNote, whatever…but maintain the flexibility to customize your system so that when you decide to switch whole-hog into a “professional” tool you’ll have a good idea of what features you really need, and don’t end up tweaking your system to match the tool.

GTD has been a tremendous boon to me in managing the insane number of responsibilities I’ve been juggling between work, school, and home over the past six months. Only now during the relative calm of summer break have I sat back to look at the major change its had for even those non-panic’d times of my life. I’ve recommended the book to a number of people, and while some have dabbled, its sometimes hard for them to take some of the first steps. One of the most helpful things to really get me started was some pointers by my friend Mark as well as him letting me poke around in his personal organization system so that I could get an idea of what a “real-world” solution that works for someone looks like. When Mark later came to me and asked about the system I developed and said that was helpful to him, I realized it was time to get around to acting on one of my deferred actions and put together this article.

Read more »