“I just spent 2 hours in front of my computer, but I didn’t get anything done! WHY?”
….

Now you know!

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1. How to Waste Time on the Interwebs

Sounds like some sort of weird bet, doesn’t it? I’m actually talking about paradigms; points of view; ways to see the world.

Ever have it where you’re trying to explain your view to some one and they just don’t seem to see it? When that happens to me, 3 questions keep circling through my mind:

• Is there something wrong with how I’m explaining my position? Can I explain it better?
• Is my point of view wrong? Maybe I don’t understand things as well as I think I do.
• Is the other person just unwilling to even try to see things my way? I’m not expecting them to agree with me, I’d even be happy with a “I can see how you’d see things your way, but you’re wrong because….”

Obvious misunderstandings bother me. Communication is impossible when you can’t understand the other person’s position.

No related posts.

It’s National Public Safety Telecommunicator’s Week and what better way to show support for our public safety dispatchers and operators than by pointing out ways to show our support year round. 9-1-1 Cares has many ways to help dispatchers and operators.

Some ways to show your support:

• Become a fan on Facebook – An easy way to say thanks.
• Send a card or supplies or just donate to a dispatcher in need. Check out this list of 9-1-1 Cares activations to find a dispatcher that needs your help.
• Buy something for a dispatcher or just donate to 9-1-1 Cares using their online store.

Related posts:

1. 10 Reasons Being a Dispatcher Rocks
2. Emergency Alerts in On-Demand World
3. Week in Review: Feb 10, 2009

“We the People” – 3 really big words on a really important document. 3 really big words that mean that we (the people, that is) are in charge of the country. 3 really big words that I still believe in. Our government represents the will of the People. It is up to the People (that would be us), to make sure our governments know what we want.

Now “We” is a lot of people. There are about 206 million adult citizens in our country. “We” consists of right-wing nut-jobs and left-wing wackos, Christians, Jews, atheists, pagans, socialites and shut-ins, butchers, bakers, candle-stick makers, etc. You could fill every NFL football stadium (2,165,404 seats) and every major league baseball park (1,303,268 seats) with people who feel the same way you do about an issue and you could still be very much in the minority. When I hear people shouting that the government is no longer following the will of the People, I wonder if they realize how many people make up “The People”.

Our system of government works best when our representatives get lots of feedback and input. Think of government like a car, the more involved you are in steering your car, the less likely your car is going to veer off the road. Government is the same way. The more involved we are at steering our governments, the more likely it will reflect our collective views. Unfortunately, 75 million American citizens still did not vote in the November 2008 elections and right now in Colorado 33% of the registered voters are considered inactive. If we are not involved in our government, it will not be able to work for us. It is important to be involved (even just a little bit) in every level of government that represents you.

So how much effort does it take to be involved in your government? Not that much. Here’s the easy way to get involved:

1. Make sure your registered to vote from your address - If you live in Colorado, you can go to the Colorado Secretary of State website to make sure you’re registered correctly.
2. Find out who your representatives are – Congress.org is a great resource to find your federal and state representatives, just type in your zip code and it will give you a list. For your city and county representatives, check your city and county websites.
3. Party with the party people - If you’re affiliated with a political party, go to your party’s website and, at the very least, sign up for their newsletter.
4. Communicate with your representatives – I am subscribed to an email newsletter or RSS feed for every one of my representatives that has one. At the very least, keep informed on your representatives actions so you can respond the them and be more informative when elections come around.

So please, do us all a favor and get involved!

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1. 2010: The Year Of The Battered Incumbent

If you’re a user of Facebook (and who isn’t), you’re familiar with the little “Suggestion” box on the right side of your home page. It usually suggests fan pages or groups or friends you haven’t interacted with in a while. Sometimes it recommends new friends to you because you have some mutual friends. Sometimes it recommends completely freakin’ random people to be your friend. For example:

Facebook thinks you should be friends with Bob Smith. Bob Smith is 17 years old and lives 2000 miles away from you. You have no mutual friends and he’s into men’s bikini volleyball. Send friend request?

No! Why would I be friend’s with Bob Smith? Why would Facebook possibly think I have anything to do with Bob Smith? These suggestions are usually met by me cocking my head to one side and squinting at my monitor like I’m going to somehow look through the screen to devise the purpose of this suggestion.

Imagine my surprise this morning when Facebook suggested I become friends with some random guy named Martin St. Louis. I don’t know of any friends or family named Martin St. Louis. I didn’t graduate with any one with the last name of St. Louis. As a matter of fact, there is only one Martin St. Louis that I can think of, but no it couldn’t be that Martin St. Louis, could it? So I check out his publicly available information on his profile. He’s in Tampa Bay, FL and this is his profile picture…

Yep. It’s 5 time NHL All-Star and Stanley Cup Champion, current alternate captain of the Tampa Bay Lightning, (mar-tan san loo-e). What can I possibly have in common with a 5 time NHL All-Star player? Apparently Facebook thinks we have something in common.

This entertains me to no end.

So I do what any self respecting person who’s easily entertained would do, I take up Facebook’s suggestion and send Martin a friend request along with this message:

Facebook said I should be your friend

I am so entertained by this bit of internet randomness, I thought I’d send you a request just for the hell of it. I’m not sure what Facebook thinks we have in common except that you play NHL hockey and I watch it. Anyways, enjoy the rest of your season and stay safe!

-Scott

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1. Week in Review: March 24, 2009

One of the worst things about working the night shift is planning your sleep. On most days, I sleep in the morning, right after I get off work and get Ashlynn to school. Other days, I may have to stay up and sleep later in the day. On my transition days (days where I switch from being a normal night-sleeping person into a batty nocturnal person and vice versa), I usually have to fit a nap sometime during the day. When it works, it’s great!

But when it doesn’t work, it’s oh-so-bad. Being unable to sleep is harder on us night shift workers than it is for the rest of you folks. We do the same thing you do when you can’t sleep. We toss and turn. Watch something crappy on TV in hopes it lulls our brains to sleep. We eat crappy food which bothers our stomachs and keeps us awake longer. But we also have to deal with what I like to call night-shift insomnia guilt or I-have-something-better-to-be-doing-isis.

What is night-shift insomnia guilt or I-have-something-better-to-be-doing-isis?

See when you normal people can’t sleep and it’s 2:30 in the morning there’s nothing else you can do. Your goal at 2:30 am, the goal that you are spectacularly failing to achieve, is to be asleep. This is what is expected in normal people land. 2:30 am is not the time to clean your house, mow your lawn or run errands. While you may do some of these things anyway, you don’t feel guilty about not getting them done.

Now imagine it’s 2:30 pm and you can’t sleep. The sun is out, the grass is long, the kitchen is a mess and you’ve been laying there for 2 hours trying to sleep. 2:30 pm IS a great time to clean your house, mow your lawn and run errands in normal people land. It’s also a great time to work out, go for a hike, kick a puppy or hang out with a friend. While I don’t operate by all the rules of normal people land, I still like to feel like I belong so I end up feeling guilty. “Why am I laying here when I could be doing something better with my time?”, “I should’ve tried to nap some other time so I could be getting something productive done now.” These are the thoughts that run through my head while I try to hide from the sunlight.

This happens a lot to us night-shift-types. I wish I knew how to fix it, but I don’t know how. Oh, and I was kidding about kicking puppies. I was just curious if you were still paying attention.

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1. Week in Review: March 24, 2009

Here is the reaction from my congressional representative on the passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act…

“Our health care system is in desperate need of reform but this massive government takeover is not the answer. I cannot support a bill that burdens families and small businesses with half a trillion dollars in new job-killing taxes, strips half a trillion dollars from Medicare to fund a new entitlement program, drives up the deficit, and buries our nation in debt. The assumptions given to the Congressional Budget Office by Democrats are completely unrealistic and disingenuous – the real cost is more than $2.6 trillion dollars. Our nation simply cannot afford this bill and there are better, common sense solutions that Americans support.”

And here’s my response…

Maybe it’s a symptom of getting most of my news online, but when people start using terms like “government takeover” , “job-killing taxes”, “unrealistic and disingenuous”, I expect to be able to find the source of your information. So far, I haven’t found any resources to back up your claims.

The “government takeover” argument is “bogus” according to this article: http://www.slate.com/id/2247393. The government already pays for almost half of our health care expenses. Even if this hadn’t passed, government would already pay for over half of our medical expenses by 2019. The author uses information from the Center for Disease Control and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to back up his claims.

I skimmed through the Revenue Provisions section of the TECHNICAL EXPLANATION OF THE REVENUE PROVISIONS OF THE “RECONCILIATON ACT OF 2010,” AS AMENDED, IN COMBINATION WITH THE “PATIENT PROTECTION AND AFFORDABLE CARE ACT” report by the Joint Committee on Taxation (http://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=3673). Granted, it was 63 pages of technical explanations so I may have missed something, but nothing popped out at me as “job-killing taxes”.

Your claim that the cost of this reform is $2.6 trillion and not $940 billion is serious. That’s a $1.66 trillion difference! I can’t find any resource to back up this claim. Now, I understand your problem with the 10 year estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that you voiced in your March 20 article in The Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14712241). If anyone were to make money for 10 years, but only spend 6 years worth of that money or course they’d come out with a surplus (or in this case, a reduced deficit). However, asking the CBO to accurately estimate the national deficit in 10 years is a large undertaking. Asking them to estimate the deficit in 20, 30 or 40 years is asking for the impossible.

I’m not saying the reasons for your reaction are wrong. I just can’t find anything to say that they’re right.

-A Colorado 6th District Resident

Related posts:

1. Coffman Responds To My Email About Health Care Reform
2. Finding the Truth About Healthcare Reform – Revisited

Is there something you really want to do, but never think of doing it until the wrong time?

For example, I really like blogging. There is almost always thoughts that are wandering in and out of my head that I want to share with people. Unfortunately, I always seem to come up with really good points when I’m not able to write them down. I’ll think of good points to make about politics while I’m cleaning my garage. I’ll come up with a witty view on parenting while driving to work. I’ll figure out my best way to express my thoughts on technology while taking a shower.

But it never seems like I think of these things when I’m in front of my computer. So here’s what I’m gonna do. Every week, I’m going to sit down for at least 30 minutes and focus on blogging. I may write a post, start a post or just come up with ideas for future posts. Giving myself that time will allow me to contribute more to my blogs and get more involved in conversations.

So I guess the question really is: Can I sit still for 30 minutes every week?

Related posts:

1. Over 1 Year of Blogging Teaches Me That I Need Purpose
2. Week in Review for Jan 13, 2009
3. Week in Review: Feb 10, 2009

I know as a blog author, I should write these sentimental, nostalgic posts in a more timely manner.  My first blog post was Nov 4, 2008. My website was started Feb 12, 2009. All this is archived in detail so I can write posts that say “Exactly a Year Ago…”, but if you’ve read this blog you know I’m not very good at deadlines, especially my own.

So what have I learned about blogging from this always present social experiment?

• I started blogging just to get my thoughts out to others who might want to read them. I guess in that regards, my blog is a success. Yay me!
• Aside from getting thoughts out of my head, my blog doesn’t really have any purpose so no one really follows it that much.
• My top 3 posts contain passion, knowledge or both. This is not surprising news, but it’s nice to have it backed up with data.
• If I’m going to write more, and get people to read more, I need to have a purpose to my blog.

Does that mean I’m going to find a purpose for this blog? Turn this site into a resource of useful knowledge for a specific subject? Nope. Not gonna happen. I tried that once when I said I’d use this blog to document my lessons in business. That, as you can tell, didn’t really happen.

What I did decide to do though, was start a new blog! That’s right! Since I have such a hard time keeping up with this blog, I’m gonna start another one. Why this makes sense to me, I have no idea.

But anyway, check out Slap Shots & Chip Shots. A new blog about all things in the Denver area pertaining to hockey and golf. I hope it works!

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1. Can I sit still for 30 minutes every week?
2. Business Communication (pt 2): Advantages and Disadvantages of Corporate Blogs
3. Business Communication (pt 1): How Many Companies Use Blogs?

As much as I like arguing politics with people, I try to keep my political thoughts out of my blog. When it comes to arguing politics on the internet, I prefer to do it under a screen name because there are some people out there who just get scary when it comes to their politics and I don’t want them knowing my real name.

There is one thing I noticed that I have to talk about though: This has to be one of the worst times to hold any political office at any level. At every level of government, from city all the way to the federal government, there are too many needs and not enough budget. And it is painfully easy to campaign against those who currently hold office!

Here’s how: Right now citizens want 2 things from their governments..

1. Balanced Budgets – We’re reigning in our debt, so our governments should too, right?
2. Help! – There are tons of people without jobs. Businesses are struggling. Those of us who have jobs are performing more work for less money. The government should be helping us, right?

The problem though, is that governments can’t help all the unemployed, the struggling businesses and the debt-ridden consumers while working under a balanced budget. The 2 needs go in opposite directions! So challengers, here’s the painfully easy way to campaign against an incumbent….

• If the incumbent works towards balancing their budget, they don’t care about the struggles of the every day American. They are putting the needs of the government over the needs of the people.
• If they want to spend money to help people, then they’re fiscally irresponsible. They want to bankrupt America and spend all your hard earned money by taking it and giving it to everyone else.

There, I just wrote the campaign strategy for just about every challenger for political office at every level. If I was in office right now, I’d retire or refuse to run again, too! Does anyone else find this as ridiculous as I do?

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1. Get Involved in Government!
2. My Response to Congressman Coffman on the Health Care Bill