Category Archives: General

Canadian citizenship questions are kinda funny

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My friend Julia is getting ready to have her Canadian Citizenship test, as she’s tired of being merely a Permanent Resident, and now apparently wants to have more say in these taxes she’s been paying.

To that end, she’s received and is now reviewing the requisite materials for the test. (I offer you the list of questions she gave to me, unaltered, as a starting point.) As one might expect, the test has a number of questions that, yes, an average born-and-raised-in-Canada Canadian would flunk. (I would imagine the same is true of most countries.) Some of these are taken for granted, as just about everyone just accepts things as they are.

But some of these questions are … well, let’s say that they just scream for alternative answers.

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…I’m not old

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Happy birthday to me! 13,505 days and still counting! Whee!

20 years of blogging (and Post #1,000)

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Well, okay, not so much “blogging” as journaling, but most of them are now online for everyone to ignore.

Twenty years ago, I got to do something that (comparatively) very few westerners got to do, and will never get to do again: I went behind the Iron Curtain. I visited the (former) Soviet Union. Believe it or not, the journey was a field trip, organised by one of the teachers in my school board. We had to do prerequisite classwork and had to write two length reports, all of which added up to academic credits.

And we had to write a journal.

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WordPress 2.8 acting weird?

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I just finished a rather arduous upgrade from WordPress 2.7.1 to WordPress 2.8 (arduous only because I had to do a massive migration to get rid of a lot of old kruft in my previous WP install).

But it’s acting really weirdly. The dashboard isn’t working properly, some of the JS functionality refuses to work in any browser (and returns an error in Firefox: “commentReply not defined” when I try to use the reply shortcut). But no 404s.

Anyone else seen weirdness?

Failure is an option

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One afternoon, a few years ago now, the head of my department uttered something completely heretical while we were in a fairly high-stressed meeting about some technical difficulties we were having on a project. It was one of those utterances that made everyone take pause, look at him, and wonder if he was off his rocker.

He wasn’t, for the record. In fact, he was striving for us to not view impending doom as a bad thing. While his two words were at first shocking (especially to the Account Managers present, who’d ultimately have to deal with the client), it was also one of those moments you sat back and actually thought about what you were doing.

So what did he say?

Embrace failure.
- Allard Losier

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How to handle a problem

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Problems fill our daily lives. Sometimes they’re trivial (“where are my keys?”), sometimes they’re pretty significant (“how do I hide this dead body?”); sometimes you can solve them on your own (“they were in my jacket pocket”), and sometimes you need help (“Mr. Wolf”).

How you approach a given problem shows not just your critical thinking process, but also a lot about your character. People will react in different ways to the same problems, even seemingly trivial ones. Some people try to solve problems on their own, while others will look to others to solve the problems.

In a busy work environment, problems are frequent. And I’ll argue that putting the solutions in the hands of a few people is a recipe for disaster.

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The importance of delegation

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Delegation is the act of assigning work to other people, generally people who report to you. It’s supposed to be a way to ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs, and that large pieces of work will ultimately be completed. It’s something every manager will ultimately encounter, and their effectiveness at delegation often reflects the performance of a team (or department).

In many ways, it’s more art than it is skill. You have to know a lot about other people: their knowledge, their abilities, their sense of dedication, how much information they need before starting a project, their trustworthiness. It’s not something that comes easily. 

Which leads to a sobering fact: some managers don’t delegate well, or even at all.  

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Why didn’t I get a promotion?

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Aside from “I quit”, the worst thing a manager can hear from someone on their team is: “Why didn’t I get a promotion?”

This is something I’ve run into a few times in my management career, and it’s always a tough one to explain. It’s a tough one for someone to understand (notably if you’re the one asking why you weren’t promoted). That one question exposes all sorts of issues, not the least of which are communication, transparency, process, skill, value/worth, responsibility, and objectivity.

The problem, as a manager, is that you have a decidedly different view on these things than your employee. It’s a point of view that you’ve learned over years of managing, often going through the same pains that you’re now seeing from someone else. You’d think it would be easier to explain. 

You’d think that, right? 

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I missed the 2009 Oscars

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Crap. 

I just realised that I missed this year’s Academy Awards. I’ve been so bloody busy I totally forgot when they were on. 

Damn. 

I love watching them, too. 

I suck.

A few of my favourite tweets

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Wordle: @sowrey's Twitters