Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘work’ Category

David Monroe moved to Buffalo and found he missed rockwiki – the people’s guide to Rochester, NY – and decided the way to stop missing it was to create a similar resource for his new home town. He invited me and a few other people to help get it started, and you know how I feel about building new web sites to connect people!

In fact, I’ve been mulling over the idea of a wiki about Buffalo for a while now, but recently, when folks from out of town were going to visit me, they asked me for a list of things to do while in Buffalo, and my Google search didn’t find any one web site that was dedicated to an encyclopedic description of our fair city. So I was ready to help, and that day I set up the framework of a wiki site so that we can start filling in the blanks.

On his blog, David wrote:

To that end, I’ve started a Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/buffalo-wiki?hl=en that is made up of Buffalonians, and computer savvy folks from outside of Buffalo to create a wiki just like the one I know and love. So far, we have some excitement and interest. If you want to lend a hand, join the group and give your opinion.

What do you say, are you the wiki type? Want to start writing wiki entries about the Buffalo topics you love?

Well, what is a wiki type, anyway? To write entries for a wiki, you just need to know about your topic, you don’t have to be a computer nerd. You just log in, do your best writing, and then wait for someone else to come along and try to prove that they know even more about the topic than you do.

Just be sure to proofread your work carefully, because otherwise, you’ll be one of the writers we post about on ShamefulTypos.com.

I hope I’m always capable of seeing the bright side.

Last night, when I was riding up Delaware Avenue, I overhead two men greeting each other from opposite sides of the street. The first one must have asked the other guy to join him, because the answer I heard from the second man was “No, I’m on my way home, I had a great night!”

The second man was pushing a shopping cart down his side of the street, and as it hit each crack in the sidewalk, the bottles and cans rattled. The cart was full, and he had a couple large plastic bags full of more bottles and cans that were hanging over the sides of the cart.

It made me think of how often people ask me how the bike taxi business is doing. My definition of a “great night” varies, because some nights are great for different reasons. Sometimes it’s a great night because I earn a decent amount, but some nights are great because the weather was perfect, or because I met good people, or saw old friends, or made a new contact with a future customer or potential business partner.

I know the cynical among us have already dismissed my comments above as sentimental and lacking any real social commentary. Bah to them.

The cynical among us need to take a moment to think about the fact that the two men I saw last night are real men, not something made up to tug at the heartstrings of the liberal and sentimental. If the cynics can’t step outside of their postmodern grumpiness long enough to think, just think broadly and considerately, then they are stuck in a rut of recycled, ready-made conclusions, and aren’t living a real life themselves.

I think most intelligent people agree that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. A cynical approach to everything may seem like they’re examining life, but if they’re always coming to the same grouchy conclusion, is it?

A colleague in an unrelated department has been working on a project that is producing greater efficiency for everyone in my department. I say “unrelated” department, because he has no explicit duty to help our department at all, but is more or less generally obligated to help every department.

The project isn’t complete yet, but I wanted to thank him for what he has done so far, so I sent him an email that outlined one additional feature request (which he says will take a few weeks to complete).

Since the project isn’t really done yet, I put this footnote on the word “thanks”:

*By accepting these thanks, the thankee agrees to the following terms and conditions, which are subject to change at the thanker’s option without notice:

1. Thanks do not imply completion of the above-referenced project(s) or final solutions to problem(s), and do not release the thankee from any responsibility, real or implied, to complete and/or resolve the above-referenced, related, or unrelated projects or problems.

    

2. The thanker reserves the right to request from the thankee additional assistance on the same topic or issue, with or without regard to whose responsibility the project is, or whether or not pertinent information was provided by the thanker to the thankee in the original, or subsequent, requests that would have allowed the thankee to complete and/or resolve the project sooner or with less effort.

    

3. The thankee may be required to share this “thanks” with others who have helped the thankee on this project, but the thankee is not implicitly authorized by the thanker to do so.

    

4. Thanks do not imply any obligation on the part of the thanker to provide reciprocal assistance to the thankee.

 

Come on, that’s funny.

At work (both my day job and my bike taxi business), the opportunity to make a first impression comes often. At my day job (computer guy at a college), I meet a lot of new students as I hand out their username forms and tell them about the computer-based services we offer. On the bike taxi, I ride past hundreds of people every day.

From the very beginning of my work on the bike taxi, I recognized that when I smile, people are more likely to want to be passengers, so whenever someone was facing the bike taxi, and I was facing them, I would try to smile and make eye contact. (Oddly enough, this habit started to cross over into my regular bicycle riding, when pedestrians have no idea why I would be looking at them and smiling.)

One evening while I was pedaling the bike taxi up one of Buffalo’s slight inclines that passes for a hill, a person who knows me from my day job saw me. The next day, when she said that she had seen me, I asked her why she didn’t say hello. Her answer changed the way I ride the bike taxi. She said something like I looked like I was working hard, that my facial expression gave her the impression she should let me keep riding instead of stopping me to chat. Now I assure you, I’m not bragging about my hill-riding ability, but Buffalo is pretty flat, and with an empty bike taxi, I can’t imagine I would have had anything like a strained look of effort on my face. But that’s apparently what my neutral face looks like.

From that point on, I’ve been trying to smile all the time, not just when I see that someone is looking directly at the bike taxi–because obviously there are times when I don’t see who is looking.

I hope my smile doesn’t look like one of those fake smiles. You know the kind, when you’re sitting for a family portrait, and 13 of your nieces and nephews have to sit still for waaaay too long, so you have to hold the smile until your face feels like it has gone through a workout. When I’m riding the bike taxi, I really am having fun, so I hope that comes across to potential passengers.

Well, one day recently, it dawned on me. Duh, how could I not have thought of it sooner? When I get home from work, I usually have a plain face, not a frown or a smile, just neutral. But my neutral face doesn’t convey neutrality, as my co-worker observed that time she saw me riding the bike taxi. And that same neutral face is what I usually have at my day job, too, so I’ve also made an effort to greet new people with a more friendly face. So why not make an effort to enter my own house with a smile, so that my family knows I’m glad to see them?

The effort so far is paying off. Right away, any trace of a neutral mood is gone, as I laugh at myself for the simple effort of smiling. And when I walk through the door, no one has to ask how my day was, because they can see from my smile that I’m just glad to see them. It sets a positive tone, and it helps me take a more patient approach with the kids. I may have ruined Fathers Day, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of many other good days.

It almost seems disingenuous, putting a smile on your face when you may or may not have anything in particular to smile about. My attitude as an adult and a professional has been that I will just smile when there is something specific to smile about, and at all other times I’ll be a serious adult, a serious professional. Blah blah blah. If we wear nice clothes to work, or out with friends, or to a family get-together, why not wear a nice face?

I spent some time today working on a couple web sites for guys I know.

The first one is HouseToHouseBook.com, which I created for David, an Iraq-war veteran who wrote a book about a major battle in Fallujah.

What I changed for David’s site is adding a banner to the top of the page that encourages people to buy a copy of his book and have him personalize and sign their copy for them. I also had to fix the guest book on his site, which for some reason was being stupid on me.

The next site I worked on is for my friend Kyle, whose stylish T-shirt designs are available at Viva La Gaunch. What I did for Viva La Gaunch was add three short music clips that play (if the visitor clicks on the “Listen to Music” link, that is) while the visitor browses Kyle’s T-shirt designs. Actually that part is not quite done, because I need to link to the artists’ web sites so that people can buy the music if they like it.