Posts

Posted on

Phillyist: Find a place with Commonspace

( #Commonspace, #Phillyist )

Hi readers – a new Phillyist article has been published in case you were interested. The article is about a new Philadelphia-based social planning tool. When I first took the assignment, I was planning to be an asshole about the service (my thought was “great – another fucking social network”), but as I explored the site, I realized it was less a social media site and more of a tool (that could actually be useful), so I changed my approach…

Check it out:
Find a Place with Commonspace

Posted on

A note about confidence

( #Confidence, #Rant )
I was thinking about interactions I had over the last few weeks and a pattern I have been falling into: sitting in a circle and listening to friends or co-worker’s issues and offering advice. I get feedback from my social circle that I am “so confident.” This perceived confidence was all bullshit until recently and even now, it isn’t really confidence as a lack of confidence in everyone else.

I was never confident as a child – never trusted my own impulses. In fact, I spent several years of my life training myself not to follow my own instincts. One thing I always craved, produced, and excelled at was instituting order. I always needed to follow a plan or clear direction, it helped me to sleep at night. This served me well until I found myself repeatedly questioning the plans and methods of others. I noticed that other friends, teachers, co-workers, managers were just fucking winging it, and these ideas I silently kept to myself would have produced better outcomes. This my friends is not arrogance, it is the truth.

Having no confidence in yourself can produce several personalities traits, in my case I didn’t become sullen and quiet – I had enough self-hatred and well-bred Italian spite to force myself to learn. Learn what? Anything I needed to overcome that pit in my stomach because I didn’t know what to do. This involved reading, asking for advice (and learning what advice not to take), research, finding mentors, finding models to base examples from – and over the years, I have built up a decent database of experiences to draw from (either my own or through others). That internal spite and hatred was eventually unleashed at the people making my days longer and less productive. That doesn’t mean yelling and getting nuts, but I won’t lie to you – it definitely means letting people know in subtle ways that your time is being wasted.

So what does that have to do with confidence and what am I driving at? The only way to gain confidence is by action. That action might be reading a book (or building a bench), but it is a step in the direction you want to head in. Do you think the people setting direction and offering you advice are making efforts to better themselves and the decisions they make? How many people do you know at work are losing sleep over the bad, uninformed decisions they are making (unless they are about to lose their job)? The only way to avoid going down with the ship is to learn how to swim (and to know when to get off the damn boat).

PS – To keep with the swimming metaphor, learning to swim does not have anything to do with confidence, is it all about survival. There are way too many people drowning out there.

Sink or Swim.

Posted on

Hunter S. Thompson Job Reference

( #HunterSThompson, #Gonzo, #JobReferences )

This is a letter Thompson wrote to the editor of the Vancouver Sun…

By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

UPDATE: Boing Boing found the whole damn letter:

Vancouver Sun
TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN

October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City

Sir,

I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.

Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.

By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers.
If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.

The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.

Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.

I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.

I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.

It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.

If you think you can use me, drop me a line.

If not, good luck anyway.

Sincerely, Hunter S. Thompson

This letter and many more like it were published in The Proud Highway (links to Amazon in case you are interested in purchasing – I think I am going to buy it).

Posted on

Last Night’s Assignment….

( #Bloggergate, @PhiladelphiaGov )

I thought it would be cool to document my thoughts about covering an event for another blog and “playing it straight”. I didn’t feel like I was reporting much at the Flugtag event last week, but covering this happy hour was another beast entirely.

I was asked to cover the “bloggergate” happy hour hosted by the city at National Mechanics in Old City. I am not going to get into what too place, you can read my article about that here. What I did want to talk about is everything else.

National Mechanics is small and was crowded with bloggers and reporters. People came up to me and asked me who I was and it was very weird saying I was with The Phillyist and covering the event. I felt like I was bullshitting the real reporters. NPR and WHYY (didn’t know they were not the same) both interviewed me. I was not what the WHYY reporter was looking for (pretty easy to tell: two questions no follow-ups) but NPR might use a sound clip (if I was a betting man “The city has a right to make money”, hope it isn’t taken out of context). I think it is odd that one reporter interviewed another “reporter”. When they both asked why I was there, I said the same reason they were – to cover the event. I didn’t have an agenda.

The event itself was not optimized: National Mechanics is small and the city was given the back section of the bar with little seating. I guess they didn’t know how many people would show up. I ended up standing in the middle of the main “isle” with a group of people blocking the waitresses’ path to the kitchen (sweating my ass off I might add). It drove me nuts, I can’t imagine how the waitresses felt. Like I said in the article, the city officials were really nice – I give them points for that. They really gave the impression that they wanted to help and not piss off the “little guys”. Words are one thing, actions are another.

The guy I use to take us to the airport when we go on vacation always tells me about New Jersey’s commercial drivers license laws and how things are always changing for the worse for the small businesses (in favor of mid-sized and large). He can’t use part time or emergency workers without getting them registered which is an administrative nightmare. As the nice city officials talked, that’s all I could think was – “even if they have the best of intentions, in 10 years this is going to turn into a total money grabbing cluster-fuck”. I hope I am wrong for the sake of the small guys and for the idealistic city workers because we need more of them.

Posted on

All about Brain Freeze

( #Brainfreeze, @heyyumsugar )

During my normal RSS scouring, I came across an interesting post by YumSugar regarding Brain Freeze.

The pain is caused by a change of temperature to the head. The introduction of cold causes the blood vessels to contract resulting in feeling like “you just got pimp slapped by Huggy Bear“.

Looks like the old solution of pushing your tongue to the roof of your mouth works because it heats up the impacted area.

Check out YumSugar’s post for more information.