Nerdvana

So we’re getting into the final stages of the foster care / adoption process and I thought I’d start to share my experiences and observations here. First a bit of back story.

My wife and I have been married for nearly 13 years. We got married fairly young but it held together despite what people said. We had always said we didn’t want to have kids until we had gotten our act together. We finally decided the time was right about 5 years ago and have been trying ever since. Adoption was always in the plan. We figured we’d have one of our own and adopt one. There are so many children already in this world without a loving family it seemed wrong to “overpopulate” it with more.

But after 5 years of trying, nothing but disappointment and heart ache. We did the Doctor thing in which we were told, she was fine and I was to blame. It was devistating. However we regrouped and strengthened our resolve to go the adoption route. We began the MAPP classes in October of 2008. MAPP class is basically the Department of Children and Families way of scaring the HELL out of anyone thinking about foster care. It’s a serious dose  of reality. They pull no punches and lay out everything pretty straight.

There was intense homework every week, heartbreaking stories, and starke realities show that we live in a world that really doesn’t hold a lot of value in our most precious resource, our children. It made us really rethink the way we planned to parent and we learned a lot. We had to write our “life stories” and there was a lot of paperwork to do for them to build a profile for us. Finally in early December we completed the training. We then had to get fingerprinted and background screened and then we waited…and waited…and waited. Because again because this society doesn’t hold much value for children the program is extremely underfunded and understaffed. There is one case worker who handles the home studies and certification process for ALL of Orange county. And she was severly backed up.

Finally in mid June we had our home inspections. We sat down and interviewed with the woman. She toured our home making notes about various safety concerns. We passed with flying colors. Really only a few things needed to be completed in order to pass on the second round where the case worker who does the certification comes out.

So that’s where we sit now. We’re waiting for the second part of the home study. And if all goes well we should be good to go in about a month. I’ll keep you updated.

Trevor

Lot’s of Trek news flying around and some Trek articles. Thought I might chime in myself.

When thinking about the ultimate leader there’s certainly a split between who’s better, Kirk or Picard. Kirk, the suave young, passionate get your hands dirty take no prisoners leader, or Picard, the older, wiser, more calculated one.

This isn’t about which show was better but more about leadership styles. I work in the development world and you can see this kind of thing every day.

Kirk, who promoted the hero complex. Led his team by pushing everything to the red line. “GIVE IT ALL SHE’S GOT!” faster, harder, more power. Always pushing driving the team to madness. It was any wonder that the ship came back in one piece. Kirk was the first to push things to the line but the last to offer any real suggestions or solutions. So many times you’d hear Scotty bellow “SHE CAN’T TAKE IT CAPTAIN!” only to be met with a “IT’S GOT TO SCOTTY….IT’S JUST…….GOT…TO!”. And Scotty would make a miracle happen and who would get the credit? James T. Kirk. Never once was it “Spock, give him a hand” or “Let’s find another solution” or, hell how about “Maybe we shouldn’t pick a fight with that entire fleet of Romulan Warbirds”. It made for great T.V. but the really amazing part was that his crew didn’t jump aboard a shuttle craft and leave him to his own devices or worse, stage a mutiny.

Now consider Picard. Calm, cool, collected. More directed towards finding a diplomatic solution to confrontations. Things seemed more controlled because the leadership was more solid. If there were problems that couldn’t be worked out the crew helped each other, unlike on Kirk’s Enterprise where each crew member was so busy just maintaining the amount of things they had to do they didn’t have time to help any of the other overstressed crew members.

When someone had a problem the Picard would talk them through it, encouraging them and ultimately crediting them when the job got done. Not the whole “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT! FIGURE IT OUT!” mentality that Kirk instituted. Overall the Enterprise was a calmer and more peaceful ship without the Kirk on it and I really feel that they accomplished more.

Kirk really wasn’t cut out for leadership. It’s probably why he either got stripped of his rank or declined it. He didn’t want to deal with the “administrivia” of being a starship captain. He was in it for the chicks man and it ultimately showed when it came to the wire, his team carried him. It would be easy for him to blame Bones, Spock, or Scotty when something went wrong. Ultimately though it was a red shirt that would bite it as result. If every situation wasn’t life threatening perhaps we would have seen failure and we would have seen Kirk the first in line to blame or admonish whoever was at fault. But they didn’t fail because if they did people would die.

Picard however was a leader. Very seldom was he on away missions. Not because he was a “wimp” or a “coward” but because he was where it made sense for him to be, in the command chair leading the team, managing the expectations, working through the solutions, making sure everyone had everything they needed to get their job done. Usually when things were at their worst was because Picard tried to get involved where he didn’t belong and it made things a million times more difficult. Usually because Riker was sitting in the chair. Another Kirk.

Perhaps you have a Kirk leading your team. Maybe you have a Picard. Who would you prefer?

I’ve got the blogging bug again. Let’s see how long it lasts this time :)

I’m working on a new project called “Geeks in the Kitchen”. More on that soon. I’m back with Izea doing some pretty exciting work and am much happier. I’ve got my health and life balance under control and the stress levels have gone down immensely.

I’ve got a new recipe for you guys, I’ll be posting these from time to time. These are things I’ve come up with in my kitchen either by throwing ideas around or modifying another recipe. This is one that I just started tossing ingredients around and it turned out AWESOME.

Chicken and Spinach Italian bake:

1/4 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 Can diced italian tomatos

1 cup of baby bella mushrooms sliced

2 cups of fresh baby spinach

2 cups of diced white onions

2 boneless skinless chicken breasts

3 cloves of garlic

1 cup of grated parmesan cheese

1 cup of ricotta cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a round 8”/4” casserole dish pour the 1/4 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Slosh the oil around to coat the sides. Grate the cloves of garlic into the oil and add onions. Stir and let sit for 20 minutes. Cut the chicken breasts into approximately 1” chunks. Coat the chicken in the olive oil at the bottom of the dish and then set in the oil. Add the fresh spinach, tomatos,mushrooms and half a cup of the parmesan cheese. Cover with oil and put in the oven for 30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and remove the foil. Increase the heat in the oven to 400 degrees. Give the chicken and veggies a good light stir. Dollop the ricotta cheese over top of the mixture and sprinkle the rest of the parmesan cheese over top. Place back into the oven for 20 minutes or until the parm cheese is golden brown and the chicken is done.

Remove from the oven and let stand 5 minutes before serving.

I get the whole free thought movement, “Information wants to be free.”, and I understand that the greatest part of the internet is the free exchange of information. The problem is, in a capitalist society there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The mantra is actually “Information wants to be $19.95”.

There are major discussions out there about monetizing twitter, monitizing flickr, monitizing blogs (yes, blogs are webservices. If you do any amount of reading on the internet make a careful note of the sites you read, a good portion of them are blogs and providing you with content is a service…web-service) and how it can be done. There are conversations on the good side and the bad side of this topic. I’m not going to discuss the good side of the topic here as there are plenty of other people doing a better job of this than me.

I would like to address the folks on the negative side of the topic. Stop whining! There’s a bunch of discussion flying around about how Chris Brogan wrote a sponsored post for Izea. Now that he’s done it for money can you trust him? OF COURSE YOU CAN. His opinions are his own and if you think he would jeopardize his readership by stating anything other than HIS OPINIONS for financial gain you never had much faith in them to begin with.

Why do people read people like Chris Brogan or Loren Feldman, or Jeremy Shoemaker? Why are their opinions important? Because they get social media. They understand how it works. How did they get that level of knowlege and understanding? Through experimentation, education, and trying things out. People complain because they make a few bucks for promoting a product and being completely transparent about it. Suddenly that makes all of their opinions null and void, it’s rediculous.

People are also complaining about the new text ads in google’s image search. Taking a look at them they aren’t so bad. They aren’t any worse than the ads in your gmail and they are content relevant. The development, storage, and hardware involved to make this service possible isn’t free. Yet these same people complaining about it are the same people who complain when the service is down or acts up. What do you want for nothing? It’s not like you have to watch a 1 minute commercial between each page of the search or something equally intrusive. It’s a simple bar of text ads on the top.

People complain about the ads in youtube videos. Come on! The list goes on and on. The fact is, the internet isn’t free. Someone takes their time to provide the content you enjoy or rely on every day. If they put a donation button out there people would complain about that as well. This is a fluid medium that is still trying to figure itself out. Instead of complaining and stating why it’s wrong or making blanket statements like “it’s poisoning the internet” perhaps you could provide some solutions.

The money that is made by these “sponsored posts / service” go back into bettering the service. If people continue to shy away because companies/people are trying to make these things self reliant the internet is going to turn into a ghost town. It was the financial gains that made the internet possible. If people weren’t making money from it it wouldn’t exist, simple fact. People are quick to make a judgement without knowing all the facts and that’s both dangerous and sad. Controversy starts over the topic and everyone’s an expert on the subject.

Disclaimer: I am an Izea employee, my views and opinions are my own and do not reflect those of the company I work for. I am not being compensated for this post.

Wow…it’s been a while. I’ve been crazy busy but not TOO busy to sneak a peek into BenSpark’s Big Box of Awesome!!! I found some really cool Hard Rock Cafe key covers. That’s what I call awesome!!!! This is a pretty neat promotion put on by my buddy Drew over at BenSpark. Some other items can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

I read an interesting article over at Fastcompany that very nicely sums up what I’ve been saying for some time about the notion of “screwing off at work.”. In nearly every job I’ve had it’s been very much a “nose to the grindstone” type situation. You are at work to work. I agree with that, however most of my knowledge and ability to find creative solutions to problems comes from the little bit of digging around I do between productive times.

Now (most) video watching and funny pictures aside, when I’ve hit a creative lull or am fighting through a particularly difficult problem I’ll find myself almost involuntarily drifting off to my news reader. I’ll find three or four different articles that interest me and skim most of them. If something particularly interesting stands out I’ll read the whole thing. It’s usually about 5 to 10 minutes of time. The average “smoke break” for some employees. Sometimes, not always, I’ll find something related to the issue at hand or some other issue that’s on the back burner, or a solution to someone else’s problem I remember hearing about in a meeting. I’ll bookmark it and come back to it either on my lunch hour or after hours or pass it off to the appropriate person and then move back to doing my work.

The Fastcompany article discusses this very thing. It mostly talks about how it relates to twittering at work but the same thing applies. “Microsharing” as they call it relates to “microblogging” or “twittering” both very social activities. But I believe it goes both ways. The act of reading micro blogs or twittering is also “Microsharing” because social knowledge is a two way street. As they state in the article “Knowledge is fundamentally social.”. This is very true in this day and age. With all of the facebook, and the twitters and the other social networks of the world, the knowledge bases and the user group lists have been condensed down to throwing out a question to your collective network and having it answered. ChaCha is another example of this. They’ve built a huge network of people to answer questions. You text your question to a number and within minutes you have an answer. Literally any subject is dealt with. With blogging and social media, information is read, rehashed, repackaged for a particular audience and reported at record speed.

In the act of writing this post I have taken something I’ve picked up along in my travels and repackaged it for my readers. This is “Social Knowledge”. As the article mentions, “What are you doing?” has given way to “What have you learned today other people should know about”. The free exchange of information on the internet is alive and well if you know where to look, and if you have the freedom to spend a few minutes daily to digest it. This isn’t to say you should be reading the news / browsing the internet a majority of time at work, but sometimes a little brain candy can go a long way to give you the extra mental energy you need to tackle the toughest of problems.

I was discussing this with my wife last night. In either case, be it Obama or McCain I think we will be in a better situation. That’s pretty sad considering that Georgy boy has us scrambling to get someone else in office.

It’s simply a matter of how better off will you be? My personal belief is that we will be better off with Obama. Sure he’s a smooth talker and frankly both candidates make me nervous. I’ve been pretty much on the line all the way and this is the first election I’ve been really excited about.

I have a few issues with Obama. First, I take issue with the fact that he’s playing the line when it comes to the whole Muslim thing. Typically he steers away from acknowleging the mud slinging. However as bad as McCain is for slinging “Muslim” as a bad word, Obama appears to be avoiding associating with any of America’s many Muslim voters. Being a member of the Muslim faith is nothing to be ashamed of. Being a member of ANY faith is nothing to be ashamed of. Obama’s not Muslim so why avoid them for his image? Muslim has been synonymous with “Terrorist” since 9/11 and that’s unfortunate. While I might not agree with their views, that doesn’t make them “Terrorists”. It’s not up to Obama to educate people to that fact however, but by staying away from them he’s sending a clear message and losing out on that vote.

One of the things that also makes me a bit nervous is his ability to smooth talk. He’s an excellent motivator. He can get people rallied around a cause almost to the point of being “foaming-at-the-mouth” crazy over it. That’s a bit unsettling. That said, I think that’s kind of what we need right now. The last 8 years have been a perpetual stalemate when it comes to our government. No one can really agree on anything. Getting congress rallied around a cause, getting foreign leaders rallied around a cause, these are things I think he’ll be able to do. Like it or not, the President is the face of our country. He’s our main representative to the world. We’ve had an ugly face for a long time. It’ll be nice to have someone who has the social skills not to drool on himself or turn into a rabid idiot when faced with a foreign leader with different views. Frankly, right now we look pretty dumb.

Now on the McCain side of things, let me say this first. McCain, overall is a pretty good guy. Sure he’s made mistakes and has had issues in his past, but so has everyone else. I don’t want a perfect person as president. EVERYONE has made mistakes and if you can’t find something on someone that just means they are *REALLY* good at hiding things. That makes me nervous. I liked McCain back when he was running for the republican convention in 2000. However I think his views are closer to Bush’s and don’t agree with him on a lot of the issues. Do I think he’d make a bad president? I don’t think he’d be any worse than Ronald Regan, who was a good president but certainly had his share of problems. Comparing him to George W. isn’t fair as George was SUCH a bad president I still don’t understand how he made two terms. My biggest problem with McCain is really how he’s running his campaign and his running mate. Sarah Palin is an absolute joke. She’s completely unqualified and frankly I’m insulted every time she opens her mouth. I’m not sure what McCain is thinking bringing her on board other than just trying to grab the female vote(which seems to be working in a lot of places). It frankly scares me that if anything happened to McCain, this woman would be president! Had he chosen Charlie Crist as everyone expected him to, I’d really be on the fence about things. Also his campaign is all about mud slinging. Compare his site with Obama’s sometime. Obama’s typically sticks to the issues and what he plans to do. McCain’s is all about how he’s so much better than Obama.

Anyway, those are my views. I think in either case there will be change for the better and change is good. Personally I’d love to see Obama pull it off. I can’t wait to see the outcome.

In other news, I’m working on a themepark blog. It’s a work in progress so there isn’t much content on it yet, but I plan on adding a lot. If you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see drop me a line. Check it out at themeparkjunky.com.