On the campus where I spent most of my college career, the English department was housed in one of the oldest buildings there. It featured stone-surfaced stairs with grooves worn into them from thousands of students trudging up them with the grit of salt and sand of a Minnesota winter on their shoes.

Because I majored in English, I practically lived in Riverview and grew to love it in its neglected charm. I still associate that musty smell and the clunking of radiators with 19th century British literature and it’s drafty windows distorting the sun with forcing the angst-ridden poetry that only a 19 year old can write into sonnets and pantoums.

And, in nearly every one of those memories is one of my favorite professors and my advisor: Steve Klepetar. Wildy gesturing, his curly dark hair flopping about onto his dark-rimmed glasses which slid down his nose as he explained for the 1000th time how the English ballad’s meter combines iambic tetrameter together with iambic trimeter.

He’d climb on the desk in the front of the room and sit, cross-legged as he’d expound on the deep significance of early 20th century poetry, clearly as excited to be talking about it as he had been the previous semester and the semesters before that.

Dr. Klepetar is the kind of professor I can only hope for other college students to have somewhere along their journey. I was blessed to benefit by spending 3 years taking classes from him regularly.

While lots of things from those classes have stuck with me, one thing has come up over and over on the job and elsewhere in my life.

See, Dr. Klepetar had a novel way of approaching written assignments. While the assignment itself was typed, students could add the kinds of notes that he would be adding later himself to the margins before handing it in.

One of the things that was to go in those margins, if you felt it was appropriate, was a series of capital letters: JJDIATT. It stood for “James Joyce Did It All The Time”.

If the last time you saw an English class was in the rear view mirror after your freshman year as you ran away, that may make absolutely no sense.

James Joyce is an Irish author who’s most famous book, Ulysses, is a shining example of someone breaking the rules. Grammar, punctuation, and literary convention were all open to some breakage when Joyce put pen to paper.

The most obvious example is that Joyce has run-on sentences that go on for PAGES (including the ending, which is a sentence that goes on for 40 pages). Yet, despite (and some would say because of) that rule-breaking, it’s considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.

Thus, Dr. Klepetar advised us that we were free to break the rules. Start a sentence with “And” or “But”. Slap Grammar across the face. Make up our own spelling of a word. But, you had to put JJDIATT in the margin to indicate that you did it on purpose.

If you started a sentence with “But” or “And” (one of my favorite things to do, by the way) out of ignorance, you weren’t some rebel out to make an artistic statement. Rebellion isn’t something you do accidentally. You need to actually know what rule you’re breaking and have some goal in mind for it to “count”.

To do that, you need to actually have an understanding of the rules in the first place.

When students were bristling at the rigid structure of the sonnet, and would ask to be allowed to write free verse instead, he’d point out that your free verse gets considerably better when you have mastered writing within the confines of the rules. The confinement of 140 characters on Twitter has spurred some of the biggest growth in my ability to write since those English classes in college.

Beginners always seem to want to leap right past the rules without learning them. Yet the Dreyfus Model makes it clear that rigid following of rules is exactly what you need to do when you are new to something. Only when you move into competency and into proficiency does the rule breaking become a viable strategy.

Many people who haven’t studied art look at one of the cubist paintings of Picasso and comment something along the lines of how it’s too bad he couldn’t paint things the way they actually look. However, if you go and look at Picasso’s earliest work, it’s clear that he actually learned the techniques in drawing and painting representationally. He then spent the rest of his life breaking those rules in an effort to discover the essence of how images work and are recognized.

If JJDIATT ended there, it would be a worthwhile technique. However, Dr. Klepetar took it one step further and here’s where I think his technique was genius. Putting JJDIATT in the margin wasn’t a “get out of jail free” card you could use to write a sloppy paper. If you wrote a bad paper, had your friend proofread it and just slapped JJDIATT next to all of the mistakes, that wouldn’t fly.

That’s because JJDIATT was actually an invitation to Dr. Klepetar to have a conversation. It was waving the cape at him to examine what you were trying to accomplish in that instance of breaking the rules. And, he wasn’t one to hold back when he thought that the result didn’t accomplish the goals that launched the rebellion.

In this whole process, he taught me the importance of understanding the rules, recognizing when they are in the way of my vision, breaking them and evaluating whether the result was actually better than if I’d followed the rules in the first place.

For that, Dr. Klepetar, I am deeply grateful.

PS: It looks like I’m not the only one of his students who has a high opinion of Dr. Klepetar. His ratings on one of those "rate your professor” sites is nearly 100% positive, despite his “easiness” indicating he isn’t handing out A’s like candy.

photo credit: Usonian

A few years back (I can't really remember exactly when), my lovely wife looked at the calendar, and, seeing my birthday a week ahead, asked me what I wanted to do for the day. That wasn't the first year she'd asked that question. However, it was the first where I came up with anything other than a shrug an "I don't know".

When she asked that time, I stopped and gave it some thought. A few moments later, an answer tumbled out of my mouth, "What I really want to do is spend the day sitting on my butt and watching movies, with the laptop in front of me".

Once said, I realized that it was really exactly what I did want to spend my birthday doing. Holidays all celebrate something. Birthdays are celebrations of specific individuals and the things they enjoy. For lots of people, that celebration involves large groups of people, noise, loud music and a great deal more activity than I have ever really enjoyed.

I do, however, really enjoy chilling out and watching movies in my home theater, while messing around online and writing code for my own purposes. Thus was born the first Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day.

The first one turned out to be an amazingly great day, humble though the activities may be. I chose movies entirely based on what *I* felt like watching, had a couple of tasty meals, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

After that, when people asked me how I spent my birthday or how I was going to spend an upcoming one, I would relay my new tradition. What surprised me is just how many people seemed to stop for a second, think about it and say, "You know, that's a really good idea.".

Clearly, this day has an appeal for lots of people and every year, more and more people join in. However, I have been asked for what the "rules" are. Given how I didn't exactly start this as some sort of grand vision, I have pretty much just made on-the-spot rulings on people's questions.

My birthday is coming up this coming Sunday, and I figure I might as well share a more "structured" version of the holiday for those who want to join in on the laid back fun. Since the main day is on the weekend this year, things are wide open if you'd like to join in.

Suggestions on this list are welcome and those that strike my fancy will be included in next year's revised definition.

Your Guide to Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day

1. Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day is a laid back holiday. Where any rule would cause you stress or discomfort, the rule should be deleted.
2. Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day is celebrated on October 5th (J Wynia's birthday), your birthday or the birthday of someone nearby.
3. If those days are inconvenient, choose the nearest weekend day.
4. There is no limit to the number of celebrations in a calendar year.
5. Whenever possible, the day should be without work, either employment or house-related.
6. The number of movies to be watched must be at least 2, ideally 5-8 and limited only by your definition of "day".
7. The primary celebrant shall be the holder of the remote control and, should an all-in-one universal remote not be available, the holder of all of the remotes for the duration of the celebration.
8. The movies to be watched must be either personal favorites or movies you haven't seen before. Any movie which might inspire a "meh" should be left in the DVD stack until later. There are to be no compromises or sacrificial choices for the sake of others in the room.
9. Any movie which causes the celebrant to think to him/herself, "Why am I still watching this?" should be ejected immediately and the next movie on deck begun. Letters to the producer/director/lead actors about how they ruined your own personal holiday are entirely optional, but should wait until the next day.
10. Because the movies can't be paused while you visit the bathroom or get snacks at a theater, Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day is best celebrated in a home theater.
11. There should be a comfortable seating arrangement, temperature adjustment and lighting levels. Suggested configurations tend toward dimmed lights, slightly cool temperatures and an overstuffed recliner or sofa. Seating choices which allow the feet and heart to be on the same level are optimal.
12. There shall be no talking during the movies. Or, if the celebrant is one who is prone to talking during movies, there shall be little silence. Whatever. Either way, recitation of catch phrases and favorite lines along with the actors are welcome, but should only begin when the celebrant starts it.
13. The snacks must be many and diverse, covering all of the snack groups: salty, sweet and savory.
14. The meals should be delivered or otherwise easily obtained during short intermissions.
15. The celebrant's beverage of choice must flow freely. While the official beverage of Sit On Your Butt and Watch Movies Day is Coke Zero, that should in no way influence the beverage choice.
16. In case the snacks and meals may prove to exceed the digestion capacity of the celebrant, antacids and/or Pepto Bismol must be readily accessible.
17. To provide the best movie roster, the movies should be planned in advance, saving particularly desired movies just for the day.
18. Showering or communicating anything more sophisticated than grunting is entirely optional.
19. Finally, should the nearest celebration be too far away to be bearable, emergency celebrations can be declared at any time. It's *somebody's* birthday.

This year's stack of DVD's looks like this, with a couple of slots still open:

• Iron Man
• Run Fatboy Run
• Leatherheads
• The Forbidden Kingdom

photo credit: j wynia

When my grandparents on the Wynia side moved out of the farmhouse and into senior/assisted/nursing homes, a lot of their things were spread to various family members. We all went to the house and the question was posed whether we wanted any of their stuff (yes, those kinds of moments are weird).

Many members of the family had always wanted the china or the old baby buggy, etc. When I was asked, I thought back to Grandpa's slideshows, in the dark, those old images up on the screen. I asked if I could have the slides. There was a strange look and I remember someone asking if that was really all I wanted. I said "Yes" and have had those big boxes for several years.

I started scanning them a couple of different times, but life got in the way. However a month or 2 ago, I decided I needed to get back on it and committed to getting them all scanned. I've been slowly and steadily working my through the boxes in my evenings and weekends for the past couple of weeks as well as figuring out and improving the workflow for scanning them.

At first, I had hoped to use my Mac to do the scanning, in large part because I do like Applescript for chaining things like Photoshop together with other apps in a workflow as well as easily attaching actions to folders. Alas, my slide scanner (the one with 7200dpi optical resolution) does NOT work with anything but Windows.

So, I set things up on Windows, with a Photoshop macro to do the triggering of the TWAIN driver and capturing the image and an Autohotkey text snippet to uniquely name the output files with a timestamp. Autohotkey does a pretty good job of that sort of thing. You can either have a keystroke like CTRL+ALT+T that spits out a chunk of text or an abbreviation that always gets replaced when you type it, no matter where. If it wasn't obvious, you want to be careful you don't name your abbreviations into something that might get triggered by accident.

For this one, I just used this one line in an .ahk for CTRL+ALT+T inserting the current timestamp. I hit that key chord when Photoshop prompts for a name.

^!t::Send, %A_Now%

Makes the whole process a series of quick actions, punctuated by waiting for the scanner to do its thing. Click. Wait. Punch the naming chord and Enter. Wait. Repeat.

Now, I can't move on from the scanning without mentioning something that I find puzzling. From all appearances, scanning software and drivers appear to be written on The Island that Time Forgot.

I bought my first scanner in 1994 for something like $300. It was a little handheld gizmo that did all of 256 shades of gray. The software that came with it for Windows 3.1 looked like nearly everything else that year. It had that look of "multimedia CD-ROM" that was all the rage.

What's strange is that with 4 scanners in my office right now, all of the software that came with it looks almost exactly the same and has the same kind of crappy problems. These apps (it should be noted that this is on the Windows side of things. It's better on Mac and even Linux) do things like lock the mouse during the nearly 1 minute the scan actually takes, put progress windows on top of everything else and ensure that you can't minimize it, etc. All of this TWAIN stuff has the same big buttons with crude bevels and horrible usability.

It really seems like they keep TWAIN driver developers isolated from the rest of the world on some island. Every year, they ship a new batch of scanners and requirements to the island and get back a bunch of drivers on CD. They're somehow given copies of Windows stripped of all modern interfaces and keep using the same tools.

I'll grant you that Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) makes that much simpler. Unfortunately, a 3000 dpi scan of 35mm slide film isn't one of the handy presets and WIA doesn't provide a box to enter the DPI, even if the scanner supports more than the maximum in the drop down.

Digressions aside, scanning these images at nice, high resolution and staring into the past prompted further questions about family's history. After being tempted several times before, I finally registered for the 14 day trial at Ancestry.com.

The site has a couple of nice features, even if the workflow is a bit stilted. As you add people to your family tree, it marks people where they have information that might be attached to that person. You click, examine that information and decide to attach the info or ignore it.

The stilted workflow comes in that it always seems like the thing I'm trying to do next isn't on the screen anywhere or in the place I last used it.

However, the evidence from the few hours I've put into it over the past week or 2 speaks to its effectiveness in spite of those glitches. I've got 577 people added to my family tree and one chain of ancestors that goes back 13 generations to someone born in 1360 in "Warga, Boarnsterhim, Friesland, Netherlands". (Nearly 100% of my tree so far leads straight back to the Netherlands).

1. J Wynia
2. Louis Wynia Jr.
3. Louis S Wynia
4. Sam Wynia
5. Suster DeVries
6. Johanna Wynia
7. Eeltje S Wynia
8. S Jans or Wijnia
9. Foekes or Wijnia
10. Sijtses or Nijda
11. S Sijes or Nijdam
12. Willems or Nijda
13. Willem W Nijdam
14. Willem W Nijdam
15. Sijts Ids
16. S Van Idsinga
17. Ferckje G Aytta
18. Gerbeth Aytta - b1360

I can definitely see how sites like Ancestry.com have consumed all of the hobby time for a lot of folks. This is definitely some interesting stuff to dig through. If you've ever been curious yourself, it's worth checking out.

At some point, you've probably found yourself hating your job, dreaming about your hobby and how great it would be if THAT was your job. If you voiced that desire to someone else, there's a pretty good chance that you heard one of the favorite lines of motivational speakers and self-help authors the world over: "Just do what you love".

The sentence is usually accompanied by anecdotes of riches-to-rags-to-riches stories of high power lawyers who quit their jobs to make a new form of jewelry that turns out to be the next big thing and ends up happy and even richer than before.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of advice that leads people to believe that they can turn their hobby directly into a business. Nevermind that it's extremely difficult to make a living directly doing most unmodified hobbies. Writing poetry, keeping fish, painting landscapes, taking still life photos, playing jazz piano, etc., etc., etc. are all things that people do, indeed, make a living at. However, there are hundreds of people who would LIKE to do those jobs for every one that actually does.

I've seen more than one person get all charged up by this and start drawing up plans to jump right into directly turning their hobby into a business or a career. That's because they didn't have all of the pieces necessary to make money doing something you love: Skills/Talent, Passion and Market.

Passion
This is the part most people start with: Stuff I Enjoy. If you're going to spend a large portion of your days and weeks in an activity, you have to actually enjoy it. Seems obvious, I know. However, it's something that more than a few miserable people ignore when picking a career or field. They see people making a bunch of money and jump in.

If there's an area of life that you already have a passion for, you're far more likely to have put in enough effort to have a pretty good foundation.

If I were starting from scratch and looking for a career, I might look, things that meet this criteria might be: writing software, watching movies, drawing, writing fiction, trivia, playing guitar, singing, photography, and reading.

Skills/Talent
In order to make decent money at anything, it needs to be in the set: Stuff I'm Good At. While there are some exceptions, people who make a living at something despite being below average at it, if you start out at least a little bit above average in your talent and skill, you won't be fighting a headwind.

If I look at my list of Stuff I Enjoy, it's clear that there's not a 100% overlap with Stuff I'm Good At. I'm a pretty good software developer and a decent photographer. However, at playing the guitar, singing, and trivia, I'm actually average at best and am not a very good movie critic at all.

Market
This dimension is probably the one that's least included in these discussions. In order to make any money at anything, it needs to be Stuff People Pay For. The market isn't exactly clamoring for another Great American Novel about the coming of age of an awkward teenager or a 32 year old guy who plays video games, or someone who reads all day. Neither is the market falling all over itself to buy my little experimental Flickr API client in C#.

The Sweet Spot
Now, there are plenty of things that overlap in 2 of the 3 circles. I was a decent technical writer and the market was there for it, but it turns out that I don't actually enjoy it. I enjoy photography and am pretty good at it, however except for wedding and high school senior portraits, there isn't a huge market and the market that DOES exist is much smaller than the supply of people who want to do it.

Whenever you don't have all 3, you're looking at a situation where you'll be fighting uphill the whole time. However, when you find something that lands in The Sweet Spot, you've got something that you can really run with.

In my case, developing custom business software is The Sweet Spot. I enjoy it, I'm good at it and there's a market. Now, of the software that I aim to write, business apps aren't what I'd write if money were no object. That stuff I write in my spare time. Because I know there's not much market demand, I don't try to push it.

The added benefit to specifically seeking out the sweet spot is that it's highly unlikely that the thing you enjoy the MOST is what will end up in that little patch. As such, your day job ends up being enjoyable, but the thing you really enjoy is saved from the destruction of your intrinsic motivation.

In short, if you're dreaming of a new career, and it doesn't land in The Sweet Spot, you might want to re-think your dream.

Photo: Tony

Because I do the mercenary geek-for-hire thing doing wholesale consulting, I've got lots of formulas for how many billable hours to plan for, how many I need in order to cover the bills, etc. For instance, I typically project an average of 156 billable hours per month.

That comes from:

(52 weeks x 40 hours) - (8 holidays x 8 hours) - (18 days of sick/vacation/personal days x 8 hours)

Tack on a few hours for doing paperwork and the like as well as the overhead time of unbillable travel to the client site, etc. and it ends up being a pretty busy schedule. However, take a month like June and the billable hours got out of hand. In order to keep all of my client projects moving forward, I racked up 215 billable hours for June.

While on vacation, I decided that this just plain has to stop. Sure, I made really good money for that month, but at what cost? I was too busy to do much of anything else but work. I was stressed out, constantly tired, missing days at the gym, etc.

Fortunately, in order to get their IT budget back on track for the rest of the year, my main client was also wanting me to cut back on hours, asking for a cap (rather than average) of 148 a month for the rest of the year.

That sounded great to me. The only trick was to figure out how exactly to make it work. See, I've *tried* to show up, put in 8 hours and leave. It just doesn't work. Stuff comes up and needs to be dealt with, people schedule meetings at the end of the day, etc. Combine that with the fact that Shelly and I are carpooling and she often works 9+ hours a day herself and a 9 hour day becomes the standard pretty quickly.

I had a couple of options. First, I could just take longer lunches to turn the day into only 8 of the hours being billable. I don't like that approach because I've never liked taking a long lunch. It breaks up my rhythm.

Second, I could just "punch out" at 4:00 and not work on their stuff. Unfortunately, because I'd still be on site, I know from watching it happen that if I'm busy just reading feeds, or writing for this site, even if I'm not billing the client, someone who doesn't know that (and won't bother asking) will complain to the higher-ups at the client that "one of the consultants is just browsing the web". That leads to questions of why they're paying me, etc. Best just to avoid it.

Third was to just embrace my "natural" 9 hour day and switch to a 4 day week. With a half hour tweak here and there, it'd come in right at 148 every month. And, I'd get an entire day every week to work on my own stuff. Believe me, I've got a LONG list of stuff to work on with that time.

When I suggested the 4 day week, everyone seemed OK with it and figured I'd just do Friday. However, I've never really minded coming into the office on Fridays. People are generally in a much better mood than any other day of the work week. Plus there's free donuts and bagels. If I'm going to be onsite 4 days a week, I didn't want to skip out on Fridays.

Mondays, on the other hand, I could do without. People constantly complain about Mondays. They're still "attached" to the weekend, which can let you keep going on something you started on Sunday afternoon and the week always seems shorter when you don't have to work on Monday.

So, for the rest of 2008, I'll be in my home office on Monday's, working on my personal projects. With no commute, I'll effectively have from the time I get up at 5:00am until about 6:00pm or so to charge through things.

Given that several of the things on my list will result in non-consulting cash flow if they are successful, I'm hoping to bootstrap this whole thing into a permanent cut in consulting hours. We'll see.