Testing the new Site

This is just a test of the new site.

 

Chart: Color Schemes

As part of my learning to be a better blogger/communicator, I have been extremely bogged down in learning the world of Graphic Design.

The book I am currently reading is on Color Theory. At the end of the third chapter, the author details several different color schemes but did not show any graphics. I decided to create those graphics to see how they look. It ended up taking significantly longer than I had initially intended.

This is the result of that work. I think I really dig the Monochromatic scheme. I truly hope that this does not mean that I am boring.

*Updated 6/11*

I wanted to see what more individual items looked like so I created the following image from 6 different prime complimentary schemes.

 

Monochromatic. By far my favorite.

 

Complimentary. This seems very festive and party like to me. This scheme maximizes the potential contrast.

 

Split Complimentary. This scheme adds a third color but cuts down on the contrast a bit.

 

Double Complimentary. This adds a fourth color to the scheme and is comprised of two sets of complimentary colors.

 

Triadic. Three colors equidistant from each other on the color wheel.

 

 

Micah Norman

Personal Branding: Skill asset and acquisition cost

As promised, key takeaways first.

Every skill at its most basic level brings with it fundamental truths about the universe. Economics taught me about value. Physics taught me about energy and transition. Art taught me to look at generalities first while sports taught me to operate accurately within 3 dimensions. All of these fundamental truths were obtained within my first few dozen hours of study, yet each of these truths is applicable to everything I do in my life. The artist does not hire painters for her loft and the architect does not buy overpriced storage unites from home depot. Yet the architect who is also a conversant artist is able to see the shapes in his designs while his competitors are waiting for the model to render. Diversifying skills results in an exponential increase in ability to reliably and predictably asses the world at large in interesting and financially advantageous ways.

We only have so many available moments in our lives. What do we do with this time? The answer to this question is most often some spiritual platitude or vague reference to ‘The Good Life’. Family, Friends and professional accomplishment seem to top the list. What does this mean and how do I determine the best course for my life? It is only through this introspection that we can get away from the meaningless platitudes and put some real meat on the question, “What is the best possible life I can lead?” I would like to explore the relationships between time and value spent on skills and the output we receive from them in terms of capability.

Several common fears reduce our capacity to live the best possible life. We are naturally scared of so many situations. Next time you are at a busy bar, just think of how many great people are within 30 feet of you. How many of them will you talk to? I would love to know where this social aversion comes from. In fact, I have a hard time talking to random people at meetups when the sole purpose of the meetup is to get random people to talk to each other. I cycle between crying and laughing about this personal defect. I have spent my whole life learning to converse, then when the opportunity comes up, I sit at the table and pull out my phone to check Twitter or Facebook. This is such a ridiculous fact, but a truth none-the-less. Take the idea of sunk cost. Sunk cost is a fallacy. We say, “I do not want to get into cycling because what if I end up hating it”. This fallacious belief results in one of two scenarios.

• We stick with something we do not enjoy because we have already spent so much time and/or money.
• We do not try something that could be great fun because we do not want to spend the time required.

Occasionally I will read some author who thinks it is an amazing new truth that socialization or conversation is a skill. What annoys me about this is the fact that everything is a skill. From communicating to grabbing the best public transportation in a scenario. Some of these skills are mundane and others are much more exotic. The girl scaling Everest also has to balance her checkbook. For each skill in our skill arsenal, we neccasarily have a tier of accomplishment. Since our time is limited, we make intuitive decisions about where to spend our time. Should I work on my writing this weekend or go work on my marathon time? Should I get a start on deploying a fourth edge server or read the latest draft of 800-35 to get a jump on the new requirements. Answers to these questions often border on simple emotional platitudes. “Do what your heart wants.” These platitudes hide the fact that we are making decisions on incomplete or unidentified variables. Every time I have said, “My gut told me to do it” or it “was an intuitive decision”, I was saying nothing more than, “I was unable to figure out the variables so it just felt right to do X”. It feels great to believe that we will magically get the right answer because our gut tells us, but without identifiable variables, even if true, it is unverifiable.

So how do we drop the platitudes and emotional baggage and truly analyze our skill development decisions for their potential impact to our value to us as a person? It is a truism that we have no more than 100% of our time available. I hate the sports cliché, “Give 110 percent!” The irony is, if you could give 110 percent it simply turns into your new 100 percent.

I am not interested in the specific numbers used in the examples below, only their relationship to each other. We have an internal ‘Skill Asset List’. For each skill in this asset list, we must determine to what extent we will develop these skills. Each step we take to become more competent in a skill exponentially increases the requirements of gaining and maintaining that skill while decreasing the actual gain from that skill. An artist who is 6 months into his training is significantly better than an artist who is four months into his training. Yet in 20 years, the difference between these two artists in terms of skill will be so inconsequential it will barely be noticeable. It is all a tradeoff. For each skill you increase from tier three to tier four, you give up the value to get x number of other skills to tier two. For each skill you increase from four to five, you give up the value to get x² number of skills to tier two. We must decide how to best utilize the value we have.

In a world of increasing specialization, it is important to remember that being well rounded requires interest in disparate skills. It is worth noting that the leaders portrayed in media are often not the people at the top tiers of skill. Odysseus, like Captain Kirk and George Clooney in the Oceans series, was not the best at anything in particular. Odysseus was not the best fighter, navigator or strategic threat the Greeks had. He was however, competent in every skill required. It was his competence across this broad spectrum that generated his value. Just like George Clooney’s character, his ability to see all angles of the situation without preconceptions was the ability that resulted in millions of dollars of income. This is a skill itself. The ability to draw connections and correlations. Connections and correlations of this nature are like free knowledge. It is knowledge and value that you have, not because you learned it by rote, but because you were able to apply existing knowledge in such a way that you did not have to bother learning it. The weekend softball outfielder who realizes that the apogee of the ball is the place that it appears to pause in the air is simply applying a little geometry to the problem. This person will rarely over run a fly ball. She did not have to spend hours on the field to learn this fact. This is what I mean by free information. It is internally self-generated and is more likely in an individual who has lower tier knowledge in multiple areas than a person who only specializes in a couple of skills.

The graph below shows this relationship. You will notice that the Value required for each step increases exponentially. In other words, the gain from tier 1 to 2 requires very little value but pays huge dividends. This jump from four to five requires a huge amount of energy with very small amount of return. The result line in red is only linear because I have adjusted for the value exponent in the requirement on the Y-axis. Otherwise, the result line would be a bell curve.

Assume that you have the energy to move from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. Assume that point ‘A’ is 20 ft from point ‘B’. Assume that each step you take will cover half the distance remaining from your current location to point ‘B’. Our table would look like this.

Step	Distance Remaining	Total Distance Covered	Distance this Step
0.00	20.00	0.00	0.00
1.00	10.00	10.00	10.00
2.00	5.00	15.00	5.00
3.00	2.50	17.50	2.50

 

This is something we all instinctively know. If we only move half way from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ at each step, then we will never reach point ‘B’. This is an infinite set. The set of all half way points between point ‘A’ and point ‘B’ is infinite. In fact, the value of this infinite set can will always be less that 20ft. Let us look at steps 15 through 20.

As you can see, the distance per step at this point gets very small.

Now for the correlation I have been building. Imagine the ‘Steps’ are ‘Level of Skill’. Let us also assume that that ‘Distance this step’ has an inverse correlation to ‘Time required in attaining this level’. Now let us throw some arbitrary requirements.* Let us assume the following:

• Tier 3: Conversational
• Tier 5: Amateur
• Tier 7: Low end professional
• Tier 10: Mid professional
• Tier 12: Good professional
• Tier 20: Thought leader

I do not like magic thinking, and I do not like chalking skills up to ‘natural talent’ or ‘divine providence’. It is certainly true that some of us are naturally better writers, artists, musicians or ball players; however, the contribution from biology is not sufficient to render anyone incapable of attaining a high level of skill in any endeavor. If I want to be an outstanding painter or singer 10 years from now, it is within my grasp. The only question is do I spend the ‘personal value’ to do it. I use the term ‘personal value’ here as an aggregate of Time, Money, Psychic Energy, etc.**

So let us say that I, Micah, need to be:

• An acceptable writer to support this blog.
• Have the ability to Illustrate and cartoon my own posts.
• Help guide IT Policy and Procedures.

This will require:

• Tier 5: Writing
• Tier 5: Illustration
• Tier 20: Governance

We all have 2000 of my made up ‘Personal Value Coefficient’ to spend per month and I would like to attain all my goals within a year. Notice that we lose a very small percentage of available times from the 1,3 and 5 tiers. Look at what happens in tiers 7 and up on IT Governance. Note the exponential increase in value requirements as the requirements increase. With my made up model, the requirements I listed are not doable within a one-year period. Yet in that same time, I could have gotten another 10 skills to Tier 5. This is what I mean by the tradeoff.

 

 

*These requirements are arbitrary. I have not researched this table. I am just putting it out there to make my point.

** These coefficients are made up for the purposes of this post. I do eventually want to try to quantify and qualify the requirements in a true model.

Micah Norman

 

 

Personal Branding: A fun little pit stop on the way to my personal logo

Have you ever sat down and just started letting your thoughts go? It is so interesting to track my thought processes. It amazes me that I can go from thinking of my Chai Latte and 10 steps later, I am considering why the concept of ‘reputation’ is a horrible measure for self-discovery. This post is nothing more than my mind rattling from one visual concept to another. These were just ideas.

Keep in mind:

• Numbers 2 and 10 were just me looking at an idea.
• Number 5, 6 and 11 were accidents on the way to something else.

Whenever I see a new twitter follower with the default image, I am very cautious about following them back. This made me pause and think that people on WordPress likely think the same thing when they see my default blog image. Now, I have been reading books on logo design, Illustrator and Illustration as an art. The problem is I am not yet ready to create a professional looking logo. I decided to create something quickly in Illustrator for a stand in until I have the skills to create a real logo.

As this is not a requirement for my job, I have removed any constraints from this process. The only real take away from this post is my belief that overly constraining creative and intellectual endeavors can really take away from the results. Aside from this point, this post is just plain fun with really no overarching theme. Just a small glimpse into what happens when I remove constraints from my creative process. It is fun to see where the connections take you.

Note: Still no temporary logo. I may end up going with the process one from number 3.

 

*Updated 6/2*

I have a few more to add.

I’m going to go with the rotation temporary logo. I need to choose from one of these options.

 

 

 

 

This one was fun but reminded me a bit too much of a toilet.

I took the toilet logo, sliced it up and played a bit. This might be something; however, it reminds me too much of Reading Rainbow.

I got an interesting chevron shape out of this.

 

I started by doing this quick tutorial of logo design from YouTube.

1. Result of tutorial

1. This resulted in me making a piece of cheesecake.

1. I was thinking, “How do I put Process oriented in a logo?” Behold!

1. Still it is missing something. So I played with it some more and realized I had created the hurricane warning symbol.

1. I started seeing what I could do with this and discovered that I had made cute ducks!

1. This led me to making, “Green Man!” He will by my first illustrated superhero once I can draw well enough. J

1. So went back to the original hurricane logo from step 4 and played with the colors. I decided on a sunny day with blue sky. This!

1. Then the colors struck me. They made me think of the British Petroleum logo. I had to drop some social commentary. This is what happens when the largest oil spill in history interrupts your “Sunny day with blue sky”.

1. What about the poor ducks?!?

1. This got me on the subject of ‘Armageddon’s”. What could be more armageddon-ish than a ‘Black Hole’ eating our sun! (or a balloon in this case)

1. This made me think of two neutron stars orbiting each other. The idea was a dud, but on the way, I made headphones!

1. Star-ish?

1. I was trying to cut my first initial out of shapes. Somehow, the result became a state capital.

   

2. Ferocious Frog! Who wants a mascot?

    

   

3. The letter ‘M’ also gave rise to a couple of heart shapes

    

   

    

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Micah Norman

 

Skill Development in Pictures

 

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog are aware with my interest in the processes involved in Skill Development. When I decided to start blogging, I created a list of skills that I needed to develop. I know that my introduction stated that I was only doing this for myself. While this is still fundamentally true, I would be lying if I said that the people reading this were not looking forward to new posts. The problem is that usually, skill development is amorphous. We have a sense for how our skill(s) are developing but rarely do we have a chance to sit down and look at the results in relation to our increase in skill.

In my post on ‘Personal Logos‘, I mentioned that Art and Illustration were giant holes in my ‘Skill Asset List’. I went out and purchased several books on Drawing and Cartooning/Sketching. I then signed up for the Adobe Creative Cloud and got books on Illustrator and Photoshop CS6. I created a schedule that requires study on these skills every night for the next 2 months. I am happy to say that I am quite ahead of where I expected to be.

My ego and pride usually get in the way of publicizing unskilled work for public consumption. Well, this blog is part of my attempt to break out of my own self-limiting habits. Below, in pictures, will be my attempt to climb the Drawing/Illustration/Cartooning ladder. I am only 3 weeks in so my work is very poor. I intend to update this post from week to week. My hope is that eventually I will see a very significant difference. For those of you who are artists, use this series to remind yourself how much better you are than I am. J

I am able to look at my sketches and able to easily separate three skill groups. I am excited about this process. Just by looking at the difference between the three groups, I may be doing decent enough work to illustrate my blog around Skill Level 5.

*Updated 5/30*

I think I am starting to see a Skill level 4 come of my drawings.

Skill level 4: 5 weeks to?

 

 

Skill level 1: 0 to 5 days

Just beginning. No skill at the outset.

This is a devil head. I have an idea for a blog post that will take advantage of this.		I was playing with shading. Went to far.

 

 

Skill level 2: 5 days to 1 month.

I’m starting to get a sense of how the faces layout. It is still too much copying of other peoples work. Still nothing original.

 

 

Skill level 3: 10 days to 1 month.

Skill actually appears to drop a bit. I think this is due to me trying to do my own work and not copy others.

I was having issues with hair. I did this while listening to a YouTube videa on drawing hair. I did quite poorly in this, however the quality of hair does start to increase.	Someone said, “Draw a character based on the letter ‘A’. This is what happened.
On of my firs tattempots to create something on my own with no input.
The admin at my company. First drawing I did that looks anything like what I intended.	Just a fun girl from a book.
My first attempt to draw Tre. Source is below.	This is the image I am most proud of at the moment. This is based on a picture from the central girls wedding. The source for this is below.	The drawing is not good, but I only did this so I could play with the compressed chalk that came in the drawing kit.

 

 

 

 

Micah Norman

Personal Branding: Viewing the world

The last six days have been incredibly busy.  I tried three times to put up a quick blog post but each time, the word count got away from me.  I have resolved to do several additional things on this blog.

1. I have turned on the passive voice grammar checker in word.  I will endeavor to eliminate as many passive form statements as I can.
2. I will break up some of these long-winded posts into more consumable chunks.  At the end of a series, I will use a summary post to bring it together without a seven or eight page commitment.
3. My summary statements will be at the top of the post.  This is a form of writing called, by at least one blogger, inverse pyramid.  It imparts knowledge without the creation process or assumptions getting in the way.  My assumptions and process will still be in the post, but further down.  It allows for a quick read and filter of the knowledge.  I am going to accomplish this by writing the post and then summarizing the points at the top.

There is another five pages easily here so I am going to split this up into at least a two parter.  As always, any feedback is certainly welcome.

Human beings are unable to consume the vast amount of what occurs around us.  In response to this deficiency, our brains have developed a deep understanding of what is and is not important in many situations.  This understanding is our ‘View’.  The ‘View’ has a hierarchical nature.  It flows down from the most abstract concept of ‘Me’, to our  primary roles in life, then down to individual activities we partake in.  ‘Views’ change and adapt as our skill level changes.  The more skilled we are in something, the less minutia our brain processes.

‘Views’ relate our experiences and expectation.   Our views are described by our skill in that particular view.

When the skill level is low, the ‘complexity of view’ or ‘maturity of view’ is low.  This results in:

• Lots of information handed to brain for processing.
• Easy to incorporate new information into the view.
• Easy to incorporate wrong information into the view.
• At this level of skill, the view is ‘High Maintenance’.
• I use ‘High maintenance’ because the view requires greater amount of energy as it is constantly changing and adapting to new information.
• I use ‘High maintenance’ because it is easy for faulty information to get incorporated into this view.
• Hard to sink into selection and confirmation biases at this level.  The view is not yet mature enough to seek confirmation or select agreeable points intentionally.

When the skill level is high, the ‘complexity of view’ or ‘maturity of view’ is also high.  This results in:

• Inputs easily filtered.  You know what you are expecting.
• ‘Low maintenance’ as little energy is required to maintain views at this level.
• Incorrect data is less likely to be entered as valid because of your ability to correlate at this level.
• Very difficult to change this view.  You have seen it a thousand time.
• Easy to sink into confirmation and selection biases at this level.

This is why driving is such a forgetful experience.  We are so skilled at driving that we rarely remember what happens on our drive unless something contradicts our accepted ‘View’. When we are poorly skilled at something, our ‘Views’ do not know what is important and therefore feed us all data.

The top-level view is a view that contains little more than the basis for our personality.  Our sense of fairness, tolerance to cause pain, etc. all exist inside of the default top-level view. For example, when I rode a horse for the first time, this default top-level ‘View’ knew not to randomly hurt the horse.  This view did not know how to make the horse go up the hill without stopping for food.  My memories of this experience, even though they are 6 months old, still are seared into my brain.  However, the last 15 times I walked to work, not much of anything in memory, and it happened over the course of the last 3 weeks.

This is my ‘View’ of my ‘Views’.

• Micah Default View (Skill level 0) – Many aggregations, lots of excess data to interpret, lots of data loss due to misunderstanding, poor interpretation and data loss events due to aggregation and abstraction.  This is the view assumed when entering an unknown situation.  This is the basis or ‘root’ of all other views.
  • Micah Work Views – This is the basis or ‘root’ of all other work views.
    • Micah at work creating policies (Skill level 5) – Somewhat competent.  Small amounts of excess data processed.  I know what is and is not important.  Easily incorporate unexpected information into model.
    • Micah at work deploying exchange server (Skill level 10) – Extremely competent.  Little to no excess data processed.  Expectations rarely deviate from reality.  Difficulty incorporating new information into model.
• Micah Non-Work Views – This is the basis or ‘root’ of all other non-work views.
  • Micah Illustrating (Skill level 2) – Just learning.  Many excess data to interpret.  Competing instructions without ability to filter.  Very easy to incorporate new information into model.  Very easy to incorporate wrong information into model.  Continuously analyze model to define best practices.

You will note that the pictures of the more developed views have darker lenses.  I believe this is true because they filter a greater amount of the junk out.  The view controls what we find important in any situation.  It controls the data that our brain inputs for processing, how it processes that data, and what to do with the results.  This process is important to understand for many reasons.

• Why we notice certain things and not others.  Are some of those things we are not noticing important?
• How we develop and master new skills.
• ‘Views’ can be used to ensure that we are living up to our vision of ourselves.  Each view is a step down the chain from our strategic selves all the way to our operational actions.  To utilize this, first we must understand our views.
• Highly developed ‘Views’ can make us unresponsive to change.  We all know someone who refuses to do X+1 because they are amazing at X.  It brings to mind people who refuse to embrace digital photography because they are amazing in the dark room.

You are late for work again.  The stupid light at Lakeshore and Belmont just went yellow.  It is going to cost you 5 minutes to wait for this light.  So you do what I would do and punch the gas.  You get through the light and off to work you go.  But what happened after you left?

Hitting the gas caused your car to convert additional chemical energy into kinetic energy.  The road absorbed some of that energy as heat and movement.  That transfer caused a slight vibration.  That vibration knocked a leaf loose from a nearby tree.  That leaf fell into a pedestrian’s eye.  The pedestrian paused for 3 seconds to clear the leaf before moving on with his commute.  He was not in the crosswalk when a distracted drive blew the light thus narrowly missing being killed.  I assume we all recognize the ‘Butterfly effect’ at play.

Let us go even further.  1.4 billion years ago, the sun fused four hydrogen atoms into one helium atom.  That process released a little packet of energy called a photon.  That photon spent a billion years working its way out from the center of the sun to the surface.* It then spent 8 minutes traversing the distance from sun to the earth.  It bounced around the atmosphere being absorbed and reemitted.  Eventually, a newly formed fern in a Paleozoic swamp absorbed it. ** That fern used this energy through photosynthesis to create material for its growth.  Eventually the fern dropped the leaf, which absorbed the photon to the bottom of the swamp.  400 million years of compression and chemical change later, a drill from a BP Oil derrick brings a gallon of oil to the surface, which contains some of the atoms, which were in that leaf.  Three months later, you pump the gas resulting from this oil into your car.  The spark plug triggers an explosive expansion event in a piston because you punched the gas to get through a light at Lakeshore and Belmont…

All around us, every second of every day, an untold number of reactions and interactions are occurring.  The vast majority of these specific events are below our notice.  We cannot possibly watch all of this.  Wind blowing, trees swaying, water moving is all nothing more than a transition of energy state and input/output system.  Do not quote me on this, because I have lost the source (I believe the source was an NPR podcast episode on multitasking), I heard that the average human male’s brain has the capacity to process 3 related bits of data at a time.  The average human Female outstrips us simple males by being able to process 7 related bits of data at a time.***  That is 3 and 7 individual datum’s at a time.  That is appallingly low.  Since we cannot consume all of these interactions, nature has provided our brain with an automatic modeling, abstraction and aggregation capacity.  These are our ‘Views’.

This controls more than how we see the world.  It colors all of our interactions.  Language and pattern recognition.  Love, hate and everything in between are derived from these views.  Nothing is outside of their purview.****

Even though the IPO (Input, Processing, and Output) diagram has lost some favor in the business community, I still like it for analysis purposes.  So let me use an IPO diagram to give my perspective of ‘Views’.

This is the basic IPO chart.  It has an input item, a processing item and an output item.  Interpret these terms as broadly as possible.

To my point, imagine the input item saying, “A round hard object nearly a foot in circumference is moving towards me at 40 to 90 feet per second.”  What does processing do here?  Without a view to apply this to, we have no idea what models or aggregates to apply and our output requires processing to function.  So in essence, the processing portion of the IPO chart looks to the ‘View’ for a definition of appropriate abstraction models and aggregations.  So let us do a couple.  (Because I see views as the way we perceive the world, I drew a set of sunglasses to help illustrate my point. I am in the process of learning to Illustrate and cartoon so please be understanding for the next few weeks.  The quality will increase over time.)

The overall point in these images is that the exact same input can result in completely different output based on the Model Lookup, which the view provides to the processing function.  I am going to add one piece to the basic IPO Chart.

*Not sure if this number is right.  I think I heard this somewhere but regardless it takes an enormous amount of time to get out of the sun to the earth.

** Some of these ages may be inaccurate.  400 million years ago was the Paleozoic era, and I believe ferns were around back then, but I have not sited any sources for this.  The exactness is not important for the point.  Just think long ass time!

*** As I said, I have lost the source and do not want to delay this post trying to track it down.  The point is not the exact number, which is certainly debatable, but that our ability to process is severely limited, which is not debatable.

**** I have heard that some cytotropic drugs limit the ability of the brain to filter.  I have no idea if this is true or not.  I have not researched this at all.  Purely hearsay and anecdotal.  Statement not to be derived as evidence.

 

Micah Norman

The Value of Money

Recently I have been thinking a lot about my personal brand and reputation.  This led me to question what I value, why I value it and how I can put those terms down on paper in an organized fashion.  It is this activity that will allow me to take control of those variables which are ‘me’.  Too much of this ‘me’ is exposed through unconscious activities.  Without identification, the perception of ‘me’ is exposed through socialization routines, biology and unconscious decisions.  It is only through tough analysis that ideas can be properly related and connected.  This conversation with myself is the result of asking the question, “What makes ‘me’, me?”

When I was a kid, I remember asking my dad, “Is $100 a lot of money?”  I don’t remember his response exactly.  It must have been something like, “Asking if something is a lot or a little is only answerable if you relate it to something else.”  Of course if I said, “Is $100 a lot of money to purchase a brand new BMW?”  There is an obvious answer here.  Now had I asked, “Is $100 a lot money to purchase a snickers bar?”  This also has an obvious answer.  The point being that asking about $100 is shorthand for, “Is the work required to obtain the value represented by this $100 bill a good trade for my perceived value of this thing?”  The $100 bill as an object has almost no value.  As an abstraction though, it is worth precisely $100 at this moment in time.

What follows is my interpretation of how currency has hidden so much of its true value.  This is not an attack on our monetary policy.  It is meant as nothing more than an examination of value which I believe is too rarely addressed.  Remember, cash is made up.  It represents only those things we allow it to represent.  Rich people with lots of money are only better than us if we allow ourselves to believe that cash can be used as an accurate representation of who we are as individuals.  I reject this notion directly.  While currency is a requirement for our world to function, what it represents must remain in our thoughts.  We must be cautious not to let our beliefs assign value to currency which was never intended in the original models.

The problem with currency specifically is that it’s so far abstracted from reality that the subcomponents have been replaced by the model.  Currency is nothing more than a representation of value.  The question of value has hundreds if not thousands of individually identifiable variables.  These variables are buried so far down the stack that a dollar is spoken of as if it were an actual thing and not simply a representation of value derived from a model.

This is an issue with all aggregation and abstractions.  They hide details.  That is their intent.  Models are the basis used to form these abstractions.  It is the goal of models to limit the variables in order to express complex ideas is simpler, testable terms.  There is an accuracy loss when this happens.  Aggregations, abstractions and visualizations all contribute to what I call, ‘Accuracy Loss Events’.  Each step up the chain simplifies the view, increasing the amount of consumable data, but at the cost of accuracy.  Running these numbers back down the chain can often lead to very different starting points from the original.  Extreme care must be taken when aggregating and abstracting individual values.  Consider this very general example:

As you see, through rounding, averaging (mean and median) and averaging over time, the individual details of the transactions are stripped of much of their accuracy.  Imagine that this was a large number of stores.  We could even calculate standard deviation from norm.  This would take a figure, say $4.728 million, a relatively exact count of money, and turn it into an abstraction such as 1.2 sigma.  The process to go from $4.728 to 1.2 sigma is much easier than going from 1.2 sigma to  $4.728 million.

In fact, at the top of the triangle, these numbers have changed state from approximate values to colors on a dashboard.  While there is nothing malicious about the process, as I said before, extreme care must be taken so the data is not misrepresented.  Each step up decreases the difficulty in misrepresentation and increases the likelihood that the misrepresentation will go unnoticed.

I have mentioned the Economics class I am taking from Coursera in the past.  As part of this course we learned how to evaluate value and compare its components against each other.  This technique removes the question of currency and displays the value of the X axis in terms of the Y axis.

For instance, should I stay home tonight and clean, or should I go to an Industry networking event and pay a service $40 an hour to clean for me.  My initial reaction has always been, “I am not paying someone to do something that I can do for myself relatively easily.”  In the past, I viewed the cost simply in terms of the money I loose.  In this case, the cost would be $80 I would pay for the service.  If someone asked what it cost to have my house cleaned, I would respond, “It cost $80.”  This is a vast over simplification of what I am trying to express with this statement.  5 words and I have communicated a large amount of information in such an abstract and aggregated way that there is no way to get the details.

This is the problem with over reliance on currency to represent value.  It has so far abstracted the concept of value that with the simple use of the phrase $80 dollars, I have aggregated a large number of variables so far that I don’t even see the individual properties.  It is a classic example of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Let’s pretend there was no aggregate called money which is represented by currency.  In this case, my response would have been.  “The service to have my house cleaned cost me X number of hours.  This relationship of hours work to value earned is based on a cost/benefit agreement between my employer and I.  Its terms consist of the value I bring to the organization compared to the cost of keeping me as a member of the team.  The value I bring is an aggregate of:

• The money I bring into the company.
• The value I provide to my fellow team members.
• The percentage of hours per week which I, on average, am available to service requests.
• The amount of time it takes me to honor my agreements compared to the average.
• Etc., Etc., Etc.

My cost to the company is an aggregate which is composed of my salary, my office space and my insurance.  The insurance cost is an abstraction of my likelihood to suffer injury compared to the general population in my age range which is yet another aggregate…  The cost of my office space has even more hidden details comprised of the city my office is located in… and on and on.”

It’s a game how many times can your child ask why.  Every abstraction of value is supported by yet another abstraction of value.  From here on, its turtles all the way down.

My fondness for opportunity cost diagrams is due to their ability to remove layers of the aggregates built into our currency.  With this model, I don’t say something “cost me $80”, I say the “cost of cleaning my house is 1.2 two hour networking events.”

Because we are discussing value, abstractions must always exist.  However, right or wrong, opportunity cost graphs give me a feeling of control over my decisions.  So, without further ado, I am going to do one of these diagrams to answer this specific question.  “Should I stay home and clean or go to the networking event?”

Assumptions I am going to make:

• I make $20 an hour.
• The networking event will take exactly 2 hours.
• Cleaning my house will take me 3 hours.
• A professional service cleaning my house will take 2 hours.
• The networking event will provide some number of actionable leads.  For each hour at the event 2 hours of work will be generated.
• The networking event will provide 2 additional industry contact.  Each of these contacts is worth 2 hours of work over the course of the next year.  They can introduce me to other contacts.  They can help answer questions which save me time at work.
• Being seen at the conference will increase my visibility in my industry resulting in 1 more hour worth of work over the course of the next year.
• The stress of maintaining these new contacts, missing out on relaxation at home and being around family members who make me feel great will cost me 1 hour worth of work.  This stress could consist of thank you emails I have to write, lunch dates I have to attend, kids play date requirements etc.
• The happiness gained from accomplishing the house cleaning myself and making sure everything is specifically where I want it is worth 3 hours.
• All other variables have been removed from consideration.

So, to calculate my value coefficients for each option:

I clean my house

• -3 hours time lost
• 0 work hours cost of cleaning
• 0 hours of work gained from contacts
• 0 gain in social circle
• 0 gain in visibility
• +2 hour family time
• 0 hour stress cost
• +3 hour gain from happiness

I go to networking event

• – 2 hours of time sunk
• – 4 hours of work cost of cleaning
• +4 hour of work gained from contacts
• +4 hours of work gained in social circle
• +1 hour gain in visibility
• -1 hour family time
• 0 hour gain from happiness

The results:

I clean my house: +2 hour net gain

I go to networking event: +2 hour net gain

This means that each hour at the networking event is worth the total value per hour (2) / number of hours (2) of spent resulting in a 1 hour of work net gain per hour at the networking event.  The cleaning took 3 hours for a total of +2 hours of work net gained so the result is 2/3 or .67 hours of net gain in working time.

Another way to say this would be: that .67 hours cleaning = 1 hour networking or 1 hour cleaning is worth 1.3 hours networking (accuracy loss event: rounding).

Now let’s hold everything stable and play with 10 total hours.  You could spend your 10 hours cleaning your house and other people’s houses or go to 10 hours’ worth of networking events.  You could also mix it up.

The graph shows the value of the networking event in terms of the house cleaning.  The yellow section is unreachable as there is no way to get there with the resources allocated within the 10 hour time limit.  The red section is an inefficient usage of resources.  The blue line however is known as the ‘Production Possibilities Frontier’.  Every point along it represents an efficient usage x axis in terms of y axis.

So in conclusion, I think it is important that we pay attention to the actual value of our time regardless of the monetary assignment given to it.  I certainly understand that at some level of the economy many decisions are made of necessity and outside this sort of analysis.  It must be accepted that to even ask this question means that the original $80 is available to pay the cleaning service.  Regardless of the functionality of this sort of analysis, I still find it quite insightful to ask these particular questions.

 

Micah Norman

Setting up Google Drive Sync to automatically update from PC to Google Cloud

I cannot find a built in method for automated syncing from your local machine to your Google drive from within the Google drive app itself.  Here is the process I go through on every machine that I would like to have access to my personal docs.

I use SyncToy 2.1 along with the Google Drive app.

Note: I place commands between tick marks (‘).  Do not include the tick mark or the preceding or trailing white spaces when entering the commands listed here.  Keep in mind that this does not apply to Quote marks (“).  Quote marks must be entered as shown.

• Install the Google drive app.
• It will create a folder on your machine called Google Drive.
• Create the structure you want by creating your folder structure on the Google drive site.
• Let it download your changes from the cloud.
• Check the Google drive folder to insure that the structure is as you want it.  By default, on windows 8, this will be installed to “C:\users\username\Google Drive”
• Download SyncToy 2.1 from the MS site.
• Install SyncToy.
• Execute SyncToy.
• Create a new folder pair.
• Add your left folder as the folder you wish updated from your local machine.
• Add your right folder as the folder you wish to update to on Google Drive.
• Synchronize: This is what I use for most syncs.  It will not delete files either direction, and will make sure that all files exist in both locations.
• Echo: It will copy everything from the left to the right.  Deletes and renames on the left will also get pushed.  This is great for keeping a repository up to date from only one machine.  Can be viewed as a method for keeping an online backup available.  Do not use if you have multiple machines connecting to the same folder as each time you set this up it will update with the folder on the current local machine and will delete anything on Google drive that does not exist locally.
• Contribute: This is a repository selection.  It will handle multiple local machines copying from left to right.  Does not process any deletes on the right.  Will ensure that your Google Drive folder contains everything from contributing machines.  You will have to manually delete anything on Google Drive that you don’t want any more.

I’ll be using the ‘Contribute option’ for this process.  I use multiple machines for personal work and want my Google drive to have a copy of everything I store locally that is personal.

So I set up:

• Left Folder: \mydocs\personal
• Right Folder: \googledocs\personal\docs
• Contribute

• Name your folder pair and preview.  It will show you what it is planning on doing. Watch specifically for Delete or Rename items.
• If everything looks as you expect it, hit run.

You can make as many of these folder pairs as you would like.  If this is on a work computer, make sure you review your Data Management/Classification Policy.  I keep my personal files and work files separate on all machines so I won’t be going into any details on this.

If everything goes as expected and you do not want to automate the sync, than you can finish here.  If you would like to automate the process, keep going.

Note:  If you are going on to automate the sync process, make sure that you check the active status of your pairs by:

• Open the SyncToy interface.
• Click on ‘All Folder Pairs’ in the left bar.
• Verify that each Active box that you wish automated is checked.

To automate this we need to use the “CMD exe” that comes with SyncToy.  If you selected defaults during the SyncToy installation:

• It is located at either:
  • “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe”
  • “C:\Program Files(x86)\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe”.

• Verify this location before proceeding.

Open up a CMD window.  You can do this by:

• Hit the Windows Key and R simultaneously.  In the box that pops up, type in ‘ cmd ‘ and hit ok.
• Type in ”C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe” or “C:\Program Files(x86)\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe” into the cmd window and hit enter.
• If all is correct you will receive a few lines of help regarding the switches the SynToyCmd.exe will accept.

Now, assuming that everything went correctly in the above step, Type the following into the cmd box:

•  “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe” -R

If the sync worked correctly, you will see output indicating how much and what was transferred.  Right now I am dropping the results.  I may come back later and capture this in an email or event log.

If that went as expected, then it is time to create our task and tie it to a trigger.  I would love if Windows would implement something like the Linux inotify.  But as I have found no direct way to receive this sort of notification on folder change to cause a trigger, we are stuck attaching to a simple datetime.

• Open up your task scheduler.  This is different based on version of Windows.  For XP or 2003 and prior, just hit start, run and type tasks.  That will bring it up.
• For windows 7/2008 and later, open explorer, right click computer then click manage.  It will be one of the top items.  (For those who want to create an easier way to get this, just pop up an mmc console, hit Ctrl-M and add the Task Scheduler then save it wherever you would like.  Might be helpful if you would like to configure the task on several machines at the same time.)
• Right click on your ‘Task Scheduler Library’ and create a new task.
• Name it.
• Select how often you want it to run.
• Select your recurrence.
• Select ‘Start a program’.
• In ‘Program/Script’ enter: “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\SyncToyCmd.exe”
• In ‘Arguments’ enter ‘ -R ‘
• Open the property box when you are done.
• Select only run when logged on.
• Close the properties window.

I selected only run while logged on because I am using this as a cloud repository.  If you would like to use the Synchronize option, it may make sense to run this even when the machine is not logged on.

So to perform a test of our new task:

• Find your task in the scheduler window.  If you closed it, re-open it.
• If you cannot find your task make sure to click the arrow next to ‘Task Scheduler’ and then click on ‘Task Scheduler Library’.  It should be in the window.
• Right click and Run.
• You should be able to tell if it worked successfully by watching the ‘ cmd ’ box that pops up.
• After you verify, you should be all set.  Just keep an eye on it for a few days.

I like this to run every couple of hours.  If you would like to as well:

• Right click on the task.
• Select Properties.
• In the triggers window select the Daily Trigger and click Edit.
• Under the advanced section you will see ‘Repeat task every’.
• Since we have a recurrence of the task running every day, make sure the ‘For a Duration of:’ is set to 1 day.  What this means is that the task will:
  • Start at a specific Date/Time.
  • The ‘Repeat Every’ will run the task once an hour for 1 day.
  • At which point the task will Start again, because we set it to recur every 1 day.
•  Enter your preference and hit ‘Ok’.

 

Micah Norman

Extracting Notes from Kindle using grep and Notepad++

Copy and paste notes from Kindle site into Notepad++

(Normal) Replace ‘Add a note’ with Null

(Normal) Replace ‘• Delete this highlight’ with Null

(RegEx) Replace ‘Read more at location .*’ with Null

(Normal) Find ‘Last annotated’ and cleanup around title.

Add ———————– after title to make finding it easy while scanning

(RegEx) Find ‘\n\r’ and replace with Null.

Micah Norman

Chart 1: Opinion Change over New Information

I enjoy charts.  I like the associations of XY scatter plots or even a brightly colored Pie Chart.  They help me to deduce correlation and causation for different variables without the interruption of all that minutia flying around in the real world.  They don’t care about my personal opinion or feelings.  Done correctly, they simply show how it is.  Life becomes much simpler when you remove the philosophical ‘aught’ from the equation.

I recently read a book called ‘How to be Interesting in 10 simple steps’ by Jessica Hagy.  In it, she creates quite a few graphs showing how to be an interesting person.  This seemed like a lot of fun so I have chosen to copy her idea.  Some of the charts I’ll be putting here have been inspired by her book.

I believe that with the addition of new information, opinions and beliefs should change.  Even if it is simply to a more detailed state.  I’m not saying that information will turn a Democrat  into a Republican, or force a Ford lover to run out and buy GMC, but only that with additional information, more detailed and complex opinions emerge.  Those who refuse to change their opinion in the face of new information are ‘Extremists’.  Those who change their opinion without sufficient new information are ‘Wafflers’.  I find fault with both of these groups.

I am often shocked by the change of opinion I have on one subject when learning about another.  For example, the two years I spent in high school learning Spanish taught me more about the construction of English than many of my English classes combined.  This exemplifies to me the advantage of knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge.  It does not have to be a subject that will get you paid more or impress your friends.  Sometimes, knowledge simply to know is completely worth it.

As information changes, so should Opinions even if it is just a more accurate belief than existed before.

 

Export your Twitter Followers to text and MSSQL Database

I would like a better Idea of who is joining and who is leaving my twitter feed.  The apps I have found are just short of horrendous.

Note: Thjs works for me based on the twitter feeds that I follow and follow me.  There is a holy grail expression that says all lines not starting with @, however I am having difficulty getting this to work in Notepad++.  Even after this, there are still about 5 lines I have to clean up.  This is a dirty way to do it, and hopefully Ill find a better way as I go.

In the meantime, until an app that actually works is released, below is the process I take to clean up the list.  I use notepad++ for this.  Note that the search functionality has three types, all that are used.  If you select the wrong type it will error out or give unexpected results.

This is something I am doing on the fly.  I may have typo’s or a not completely efficient system.  I do this at least once a week and will update this process as I go.

Note that items within the ‘ ‘ are the actual terms.  Do not include the ‘ in the actual field.

Note that when copying the terms from this page, do not inadvertently include the blank space prior to or after the ‘.  This will effect the results of RegEx expressions.

Copy paste follower list from twitter.com into notepad++.  Make sure to get the entire list.

Notepad++ (RegEx) Find all in current document ‘@.*’ .  Select and copy all results to New tab

(RegEx) Find/replace ‘.*:’ with null
(Extended)  Find ‘ ? ‘ Replace with \n \t

(RegEx) Find ‘ .*[^\r][\n] ‘ Replace with Null

(RegEx) Find ‘ \t ‘ Replace with Null

(Normal) search ‘Protected account’ and ‘Verified Account’  replace with null

For some cleanup.

(RegEx) Find ‘ \n[^@]([A-Z][a-z].*) ‘ Replace with Null

(RegEx) Find ‘ \n\s[^@]([A-Z][a-z].*) ‘ Replace with Null.

(RegEx) Find all in current document ‘ @ *. ‘ and copy to new doc.

(RegEx) Find ‘  .*:  ‘ and replace with Null.

Manual Cleanup

If you are planning on putting this into a database by turning it into an Importable CSV, I reccomend running the following on the results which should simply be a list of all of your followers starting with potentially a space or two and then the @ symbol:

• (RegEx) Find ‘ ^ .* @ ‘ replace with ‘ <Date Format of your choice>, @ ‘ For instance I put the following in the replace field, ‘ 5-15-2013, @ ‘.

After running through this process you should have a clean import file.  Take a quick look through the file just to be certain.

Once I have verified it is clean I use Microsoft SQL Import utility to do a quick import of my csv file into a database.  I created a database named ‘Social’ with a table named ‘Twitter’.  The table has only two fields at the moment.

• Date – datetime
• User – varchar[50]

You can let the import utility create your table for you the first time you run it.  After selecting the imput file, be certain to change the name of the fields and the type of field under the advanced section.  The User field time is fine with the default.  Be sure though to change the Date field from the default varchar to Date.

After configureing the input, be sure to name your table.

All subsequent times you run this, be sure to name your fields in a consistent manner and select the correct variable type.  When you get to the table selection field it will default to creating a new table.  Be certain to click on the table name and select the table you created in the first import.  By default, when you select an existing table, it should change the import type to append.  It doesn’t hurt to hit the ‘Edit Mappings’ button on this just to be certain.

So far, just because I wanted to see who left me, I wrote a quick and dirty query.  Ill create a more advanced view with appropriate parameters in an upcoming session.  For the time being, this is the query I use to see:

• Who I lost

use <databasename>

select *
from Followers
where Date = ‘2013-05-13’
and [User] not in (select [user] from followers where Date = ‘2013-05-15’)

• Who I gained

use <databasename>

select * 
from Followers
where Date = ‘2013-05-15’
and [User] not in (select [user] from followers where Date = ‘2013-05-13’)

The above queries allow you to compare Date 1 with Date 2.  This should be used only if you have two single dates to compare.  If like me, you want to know who left or who gained over a time period, these queries will help.

• Who I lost

use <databasename>

select distinct([User])
from Followers
where Date between ‘2013-05-13’ and ‘2013-05-15’
and [User] not in (select [user] from followers where Date = ‘2013-05-16’)

• Who I gained

use <databasename>

select distinct([User])
from Followers
where Date = ‘2013-05-16’
and [User] not in (select [user] from followers where Date between ‘2013-05-13’ and ‘2013-05-15’)

Basically the first query says, “Make a list of all unique items which have an associated date from date1 to date2.  Then make another list of users with a date from date2(+1 day).  Then show me a list of all users from the first list who do not have a corresponding entry in the second list.”  More simply, “If an entry exists in the between dates, but does not exist in the current date, then the follower has left.”

(If I can figure out the Not Operator in Notepad++, this should cover everything I am looking to do in one step .*[@].*  Ill look at this next time I do this.)

 

Micah Norman

Daily Prompt: I Want to Know What Love Is

Today’s Daily prompt is very vague.  It asks, “Is there a single idea or definition that runs through all the varieties of “love””

I think there must be.  The Wikipedia article on love discusses four forms of love.

• Kinship
• Friendship
• Romantic
• Self-Emptying (Divine)

I did not see anything that addresses a love of ‘Objects or Concepts’ aside from a very broad interpretation of ‘Self-Emptying’.  Because I believe this type of love exists, I am going to add it to the list of 4.  Ironically, because this new form is the least emotional type of love, I will use it for most of the discussion below.  So we now have:

• Kinship
• Friendship
• Romantic
• Self-Emptying (Divine)
• Concepto-entity

From these 5 categories of love, many English words are derived.  From the top of my head I can think of Romance, Infatuation, Maternal/Paternal, Patriotism, Brotherly/Sisterly and Religious.  This makes these English words hierarchical, each word is a member of a set that describes love.  This can only be true if there also exists a set that describes all love.  Meaning that there must be a unifying theme.  I am going to explore what those unifying themes may be.

From this point forward I am going to ‘wing it’ using no external resources; only my own brain.

I accept that love is not an absolute, it is a continuum.  This is what I see in my head as that continuum.

 

The most obvious commonality that jumps out is ‘relationship’.  For us to love, we must have a connection to the thing or person being loved.  This appears to be a truism as I cannot imagine loving something I am unfamiliar with.  So the first requirement for our set is ‘relationship’ requiring ‘familiarity’.

Can we love things that we are indifferent to?  I am a technologist.  I have a slight interest in Marketing.  Could it be said that I love Marketing.  I think the answer is an obvious ‘No’.  While I may love some people who are accountants, I can say I certainly do not love accounting.  In fact, I may hate it.  As a Technologist, there certainly are components I love.  I am going to add the requirement of ‘Strong to Very strong Positive Interest regarding the object or person’ as a requirement to love.

There still seems to be something missing.  I have a relationship with my television.  When I need to just veg out and dull my mind, it is there.  When I hear about an interesting new show that may challenge the tired and old ‘Hero’s quest’ story line, it never denies me.  I am familiar with it, I have a relationship with it and I have an interest in the content it presents.  Do I love it?  Absolutely not.

There is an attachment component that must exist for love.  It is not as simple as, “My life would be worse off without you/it”.  My life would be worse off without my TV, the suit I just bought, my coffee table, or my guitar.  Yet I don’t love these things.  Simple attachment can fade.  I am attached to my new messenger bag.  In time however, I will likely replace it.  This is a special attachment of some kind.  Perhaps it is a super set of other properties.

My baseball cards, I might say I love.  They, as a set, are unique to me.  I invested a good deal of time in my youth cataloging and arranging them.  I traded them and played games of chance with them.  When I lost, I was hurt.  When I won, I was ecstatic.  Are these the sub-components of this special form of ‘Attachment’?  ‘Uniqueness’ (as a set and specific to me) and ‘Investiture’ of ‘Time’, ’Treasure’ or ‘Talent’?

I think I have something here.  But what do I call attachment that is made up of ‘personal uniqueness’ and ‘Investiture of some personal limited resource’?  I cannot think of a word at the moment.  I’m going to call it, ‘Uniqueness Infused Attachment’.

How do we add this component to the requirements of the ‘Love Continuum’?  Uniqueness and Attachment are not words to be qualified as negative or positive.  Can we qualify Investment?  If I gamble and loose, I think that would be a negative investment.  If I gamble and win, that would be a positive investment. What is the absolute value though?  If I have my set of 1000 baseball cards and gambled 100 and lost, there was still the absolute investment into the set of cards.  Would I value 900 baseball cards collected over the course of my youth as less valuable than 1100 baseball cards?  Monetarily, of course this is a true statement, but in terms of my recently invented ‘Uniqueness Infused Attachment’ is it a true statement?  I say not.  So I am placing this as an unqualified requirement on the set of all things I love along with familiarity.

The way my continuum looks right now, there is no sense of where love begins and ends.  Up to this point, I have been running under the assumption that there is some point near the right side of the chart where we say love begins.

Somewhere, around the beginning of the yellow portion of continuum is where love begins.  This may be a variable area which depends on our moods, emotional state, current levels of dopamine, etc.  All we can know for sure is that the exact point is indefinable.  Like the ancient Greek concept of Suartes (sp?) (I said I would use no external resources and I do not remember the spelling) which claims that when creating a ‘pile’ of pebbles, there is not a point at which the group of rocks goes from not being a pile to being a pile*.  It is a soft boundary.

There is one more question I want to ask and potentially answer.  Do we only love those things on the right side of the continuum?  Do we love things of the left side?  It seems that love requires an extreme emotional response.  Does this have to be a positive emotion?  Does the day love the night?  Does good love evil?  Do any of these things have meaning without their counterpart?  I don’t think so.  What is day without the night?  If there were no night, would we even countenance the day?  If there were no evil, who would cheer for good.  I think this continuum is less linear than I had initially envisioned.  Perhaps the top and bottom half are different kinds of love, or love for different reasons.  It however, must exist**.

 

*I believe I am using the term correctly.  This is based off my memory which is not always 100%.  Let me know if I got this wrong.

** I am exhausted and fading fast.  Sorry for the quality of the last graphic.  I took some shortcuts to save some time and instead of wrapping the continuum, I just created another circle and added it.

 

Micah Norman

Personal Branding: Logo edition and notes on language and style.

First some notes on my writing style (or lack thereof):  I am very self-conscious about my ability to write.  I read a lot, but until recently wrote rarely. When I did write, it was for work and the results were very dry.  This has become my natural writing style.  I am actively trying to write more conversationally.  I want to be able to emulate those I consider great communicators.  Mitch Joel*, Phil Plait** and C.C. Chapman*** to name a few.  They show an ease of communication that I find enviable.  Part of the purpose of this blog is to resolve my self-consciousness in writing by increasing my ability.  Empty compliments might make me feel good but they do nothing to fix the underlying issue; my lack of writing experience and ability.

Recently I met a friend-of-a-friend on twitter.  She has the writing capacity that I lack.  She offered to review my blog which I enthusiastically accepted.  Her first recommendation was for me to eliminate compound sentences.  I will, to the best of my ability, do that in this post.  I am shocked at how hard it has been even up to this point.  This post won’t require too much brain power.  I’ll be discussing my travails with designing a logo.

Personal Branding: Logo edition!  All of my social networks use pictures of me as an avatar.  I rotate these quite often.  This means that there is no image which is immediately recognizable as Micah.  There is the one with me and my softball team.  There is one of me at Science Ranch.  Another one were my girlfriend is staring up at the Bears game in great lighting. Two that mark my political and philosophical beliefs.  And one more which shows my allegiance to the abysmal Chicago Cubs.  Each of these images has represented me in some capacity at some time.  If you don’t know me in any of these contexts, you won’t associate them with me.  If you do know me in any of these contexts, they change so frequently that they do not create a lasting impression. Without consistency across media how can anyone draw the associations?  They are simply more images in a world already overladen with JPEGs.  In May of 2011, Flickr alone saw nearly 6 million images uploaded. This is my justification for creating a personal logo.  A simple, visually appealing image which draws an immediate subconscious connection to the idea of Micah in whatever context you know me or my work.

I think it sounds like a fun project.  How can you not love playing with Photoshop for hours?  I have effectively zero training in art.  Aside from one required junior level class, I also have zero training in marketing.  That is why this is going to be fun.  Everything I will learn in this process will be new.  I do realize that people spend their entire lives on the subject of logos.  I’m not trying to be flippant or disregard the enormous commitment they give to the craft.  I’m just giving myself permission to have fun by doing something that might be a silly waste of time.  So what?

There was a point in my life were I decided to learn to draw.  I bought a bunch of pencils, a sharpener, a giant pad of  paper and a book called ‘Drawing for Dummies‘.  Three days into it and I realized I could not draw a straight line.  That was it, end of story.  However, there is one concept that I got from the book.  It said to see the world in simple shapes.  Where a tall building is incredibly complex, it said, see it as a simple rectangle.  Later, when the task of learning ‘File System Forensics‘ turned my brain into jelly 3 hours at a time, I picked up a book called ‘Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks‘.  It seemed like a good compromise between, “I can’t draw a straight line’ and ‘I need to stare at something other than hex DD output but everything on TV is crap’.  It was this time in my life that I learned how to get around in Photoshop.

Not sure what I was thinking or even how I got here.

Playing with my initials.

I decided to do this logo a week ago.  Initially I had no inspiration.  That caused my nightly 8 hours of Photoshop to devolve into some pure randomness that was a good deal of fun.  While I produced nothing of value during this time, I had fun and got some of my Photoshop chops back.  I started looking around for some sort of trigger or inspiration.  What do I want the logo to say?  Hard work?  Thoughtfulness?  Intelligence?  Playful?  Powerful?  I began taking pictures of everything that I thought might be inspiration worthy.

I got a picture of a really neat girder (I think that is what this is called). I really find the lattice structure interesting.  I was hoping that I might incorporate it along with the bolts.  These two pictures made me look at the bigger picture.  This is the underside of the ‘El’ Bridge at Lake and Jefferson.

Im having issues with the WordPress Add Media function so in order from left to right:

‘Cool Girder’, ‘Cool Bolts’, ‘Under the Bridge’, ‘Girder Photoshop’, ‘Photoshop Bridge frame’, ‘Two Bridge frames Photoshopped’

  

          

I still think I may be onto something with the bridge idea.  When I first took these pictures I had to run to 7-11.  It is right under the tracks.  I came out and got blasted by the sun.  The image below was my memory of that moment.  I showed it to a couple of friends.  They gave me some tips.  One did not recognize it as an ‘El’ bridge.  I need to make it more distinguishable.  Another said it was too complex.  I need to remove some of the extraneous lines.  This same person told me to address composition using the 2/3rd’s rule.  I am reading up on this rule to understand what she meant.

I took a picture of the security cameras around the corner from my office.  I have just started playing with it.  This is what I have so far.

  

I thought it might be fun to play with some lenses which resulted in this.  Satellite dish is next for this series.

This is what my brick idea devolved into.  Ten minutes into it and I realized nothing was there.  So I started screwing around.  🙂

            

That is as far as I have gotten.  As always, feedback is appreciated.

* Mitch Joel: The Canadian C.C. Chapman.  He runs the podcast ‘Six Pixels of Separation‘.  He does an amazing job at speaking authoritatively while still retaining a human connection. He interviews some of the most brilliant people in marketing without seeming to strong arm or get pushed over.  His podcast on Friends vs. friends is amazing.  I can’t find it on his site so I am hoping that I am not mis-remembering.  This is by far one of my favorite podcasts.

** Phil Plait: The Bad Astronomer.  The only man I have personally met with his own Wikipedia page.  A rock star in the Astronomy world.  He blogs at Slate.  He does an amazing job at disseminating information into understandable chunks.  He and his wife are the creators of ‘Science Getaways‘ which brings interested citizens together with extraordinary scientists.  I attended the one last year in Colorado.  The best vacation I have ever taken.  I recommend it to anyone who is interested in Physics, Astronomy, Geology or Ecology.

*** C.C. Chapman: The American Mitch Joel.  I found him through his podcast ‘Managing the Grey‘.  Very conversational in his writing even while giving a great deal of information.  Quite relaxing to listen to.  This is also one of my favorite podcasts.

 

Micah Norman

My Personal Branding Story: Introduction and Why

A book I am the process of reading called “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes the assertion that “People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives” and “as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.”  I find both of these statements if true to be truly transformative.  Recently, a friend of mine posted to twitter her realization that she had become so comfortable with the drive to work that she barely even noticed it any more.  I have noticed the same effect in my life so I began researching the causes of this.  What happens to us when we ‘Space Out’?  I have always assumed that when a task becomes automated we are able to spend our cognitive energies on other things.  In the book ‘Incognito: The Secret Lives of our Brain” the author David Eagleman states, “awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations”.  I have read other books that seem to indicate that our conscious does not start to ‘spend our cognitive energies on other things’ but in fact goes below the surface until some else requires its input.  I found this quite scary.  My belief that our consciousnesses has 80 some odd years worth of value and then blinks out of existence could not be resolved with the realization that the majority of that time would be spent below the surface waiting for something requiring its intervention.  Since reading “Incognito” I have set alarms and invented triggers to force self awareness on things that in the past I would consider beneath notice.  Specific shades of red, certain words and an absolutely annoying application that pop’s up an alarm randomly on my work computer became triggers for forced initiation of self awareness.

All of this is leading somewhere, I promise.  With these fears in mind and my haphazard attempt at resolution I began asking myself “Why am I the person that I am?”  Why do I enjoy boxing when most people react negatively to being hit in the face?  People exaggerate how much it hurts, but that does not mean its not still somewhat painful.  Why do I love long conversations with knowledgeable people on the concepts of Quantum Physics?  I am not a Physicist.  Therefore it is quite likely that I could spend the rest of my life with zero knowledge on the subject of Solar Fusion and not have the slightest negative impact.  Yet I expend what is a biologically and cognitively a huge amount of energy on stuff that doesn’t matter in my life.  Now certainly every once in a while something pops up in my extracurriculars that becomes applicable.  The concept of ‘Opportunity Cost’ in Economics for instance.  Yet when I began my Economics class from Wharton via Coursera, I had no expectation that this would occur and only knew that it was going to cost me up to 12 hours per week.  So I asked a simple, “Why?”  After a good deal of soul searching, I realized that I had no means to answer this question, but I figured out who did;  Western Capitalism!

Businesses in many cases integrate thousands of people across disparate fields of study.  They do an amazing job at aligning and enabling every individual in the organization to move towards the same goal.  How do they do this?  It seems logical to assume that Finance wants to get costs as low as possible, Executives want to control messages, Marketing wants free reign to push the business, IT wants all the cash in the world to experiment with toys after the business needs have been answered.  How is it that these organizations do not Spaghettify*  under the constant pressures pulling them in multiple different directions at the same time.  These were the same questions I was trying to answer for myself.  It seems that business has the answer.  ‘Policy Documents’, ‘Mission Statements’, ‘Vision Statements’ and a host of other control mechanisms.  These items tell everyone in the organization how to answer questions at different levels of abstraction and specification.   The ‘Procedure Document‘ might tell you how to tag a file for backup, but why back it up?  This is answered in the ‘Guidelines Document‘.  The ‘Guidelines Document’ determines its requirements from a ‘Standards Document‘ and our ‘Standards Document’ is an outgrowth the ‘Policy Document‘.  None of these things matter without a good ‘Mission Statement‘ to give us the details and measures the company cares about.  Without a ‘Vision Statement‘, outlining the reason for the company’s existence, how can you know anything?

I think this holds some answers for me.  I have decided to go through the process of working these items out for my life.  While it is possible that I will go through this process and realize in the end that it is pointless, I seriously doubt I will be less complex** for having done it. I will be blogging the process.  As i said in my Inaugural Post, this is mainly so I can keep my thoughts in order through the process.  It however is possible that like the ‘Opportunity Cost’ knowledge from my Economics class, I will stumble upon something important and useful for my life and others lives.

In the original posting I forgot to mention that as part of this process I am going to learn enough about logo theory and science to design one of my own.  I am totally going to have capes made!

* This word Spaghettify comes from the best possible end of life scenario.  If you are interested in Black Holes, check this article out.  Also check out ‘Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries  by Neil deGrasse Tyson  I promise it is worth it

** I use the term complex as it is a primary point made in the book ‘Flow’.  The author claims that Complexity should be a primary goal in our lives.  Two quotes he makes on the subject, “Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.” and “more complex because it involves greater challenges, and demands greater skills”.

 

 

Micah Norman

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

Having just started blogging, I was unfamiliar with the ‘Postaday’ challenges issued by WordPress.  I was quite thrilled this morning to receive an email from WordPress

DJ Tre P. Never should have told me that she hated this name. 🙂

highlighting the ‘Post Ideas’, ‘Challenges’ and ‘Photography Prompts’. I was leaving to spend the day at the Adler Planetarium with a Meetup group and my girlfriend ‘Tre P’.  I have chosen this as her DJ name.  While the title of the Challenge was, ‘From Above”, I have taken artistic license and chosen to interpret this as ‘Change your Perspective’.

Adler

The idea of perspective is an interesting one.  Every day, all around us things are happening.  Many are conscious decisions; parties, people driving to work, a couple meeting for a date, the crew at Lake and Canal erecting what I guess will be a new condo building.  An innumerable number of consciously chosen interactions.  Our socio-biological derived perspective places all of these interactions into nice little buckets of prediction.  I intentionally conflate society and biology here.  Among the evidence from cross species cues is this article which asserts that Dogs can catch the yawning bug from humans.  I believe that a portion of our social cues are biologically derived.  Socially derived cues are so obvious as to be a truism.  The clinking of glasses after a toast, a couple holding hands, a finger held up while you read a text message.  There is more than just communication across the entire spectrum.  This is what I think of when I hear the word perspective.  Our perspective is the socio-biological derived rules to be followed by a functioning member of society.  This is how we coexist.  This is how you know to step away from the curb when the driver in front of you puts his arm around the back of the passenger seat and looks back.  This is how we know that the hug from a friend is harmless and not a prelude to assault.  This is how a quick touch of someones horn is a ‘Heads Up’, but a longer held horn indicates annoyance or anger.

I almost feel like I could run up the Hancock.

This perspective does more than simply protect us from danger and allow us to communicate   It also colors our world view.  We can predict the vast majority of our lives.  People wanting to talk to us will try to approach from the front.  In most cases they will present with a smile.  After an introduction, a handshake is expected.  The light that just went yellow means you still have a good 10 seconds to get through the intersection.  Roads in the city core will attempt to follow a straight path.  Danger is likely to come from front, back, left or right.  When was the last time you looked up or down before crossing a street?  The height of a curb is easily predicted so you can hop down without a though.  When this predicted model fails, danger, anger and humor is often the result.

There has been a crack on my street for 2 years.  It causes a disruption of no more than 2 inches in the cement yet still I trip over this damn thing at least twice a month.  Two years ago the city of Chicago fixed a monster pot hole (read gateway to hell) about a mile down Lakeshore.  I still catch myself changing lanes before I get to this spot.  We all do these things because they have been ingrained into our perspective of the world.  This perspective allows usually for a pretty accurate albeit often boring model of our world.

What happens when we intentionally change our perspective?  What happens when the flowers or tree are no longer viewed from the front, back, left or right side, but from the bottom up?  What happens when the marble floor and wall are viewed from a very close perspective thus eliminating the context of the entire field of view?  The images in this post are my answer.

Recently Bloomed flower

Lets all try to change our perspective from time to time, the world morphs into something more beautiful or weird than expected.  I hope everyone finds this subject as intriguing as I do.

A fork in Low Light

Up the tree to the top of the Hancock.

Marble Floor and Wall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Micah Norman

Inaugural Post

In a recent conversation with a friend, I spent some time discussing the opportunity cost incurred to be a true “Couponer”.  I created a quick list of the activities involved in this(listed below) and made the claim that after completing this activity, the result was a savings in the $20-$50 range.  Calculating out the time required and the fuel cost the overall savings were in the few dollars per hour range.  Now none of this takes into account the joy some people feel while couponing.  In those situations where we truly enjoy an activity, we need to take into account that joy and figure it into the opportunity cost.  I might even argue that happiness should be taken into account as much more important than monetary or time value.  The point being, I was not attacking couponing as a joyful activity, but as a purely monetary activity.

• Finding Coupons
• Clipping Them
• Mapping your route to hit all of the stores you need
• Actually going and making your purchases
• Any loss of value due to selecting an item based on the existence of a coupon and not its intrinsic value.

I used this to tell my friend that in the same amount of time you could have created a compelling and informative blog post which might have resulted in a huge payout.  Maybe this result would not have been in dollars, but in the appreciation and respect of fellow internet dwellers.  Who knows, you might get a job three years from now based on a potential employer running across that post.

I stand by my argument but immediately realized my hypocrisy.  Years ago I maintained a couple of IT Blogs.  I love what I do and through this I was able to add to the general knowledge available on the internet.  The problem was that I posted in spurts.  It would always be some new technology or methodology that would get me hyped up but invariably died down over time.  My problem was that these blogs where so niche that it was hard for me to keep them filled with content on my own.

That brings me to the purpose of this blog.  I intend to post on anything and everything which interests me.  This is as much a personal sounding board for me as anything else.  Even if no one ever reads the words I post here, it is my belief that blogging in this format will allow me to:

• Arrange disconnected ideas into coherent thoughts
• Resolve cognitive dissonance issues
• Express interest and search for meaning in apparently meaningless facts and figures.
• Force me to write less technically and more conversationally.  My aversion to absolute statements makes me often use 3 or 4 sentences to express an idea that would have been fine in a single sentence.
• Get me out of this damn passive mode of writing that I always revert to.
• Act as a sort of “Cognitive Vacuum Cleaner”.  I have read that writing something down frees your brain to move on.  My handwriting is so atrocious that even I have issues reading it.

I like lists.  They make sense to me.  They do a great job at separating out ideas and allow for a quick analysis of concepts with a hierarchical structure.  So, things I expect to be posting here and why:

• Charts:  I love charts.  Anything that shows relationships in as pure a method as possible.  Simple graphs that show X in the context of Y.  Many of my charts are equivalent to mathematical rambling.  Meh, so what, they are fun.
• Quotes:  I hate most of the quotes I see floating around Facebook.  They tend to be these feel good statements with no real teeth.  Mis-attribution is rampant.  Thomas Jefferson said nothing about “Dark Matter”.  Einstein did not fail third grade math.  The reason I point this out is because quotes have such poor content and attribution in the Social Media world that when I run across one or even come up with something compelling on my own, I refuse to post it for the fear of being associated with the complaints I noted above.  Here though, steeped in the knowledge that few if anyone is reading this, Ill post away.  I will always attempt to verify attribution and will make note were I was unsuccessful.
• Science Stuff:  I love science.  I don’t like how the media portrays science.  Statements like ‘Global Warming’ caused this flood.  I find these statements, while probably true, to be so large as to be open for all kinds of interpretation.  I will use this blog to work on how I view and understand science concepts and their fundamentals.   Sometimes I am wrong.  Please correct me.  I claim no absolute knowledge here.
• Discussion/Debate/Argument style:  As I said before, I do not like absolute statements.  This goes for deductive statements about the natural world.  If you create an experiment to test a small portion of a system controlling for all but a few variables, the results of that study cannot be evaluated by looking at the result of the total system which by definition does not control variables.  I will make the claim that, Global Warming/Climate Change, whatever you want to call it, works by trapping a greater amount of energy from solar fusion on earth.  This is done because while CO2 and other Greenhouse gasses such as methane are transparent and thus do not react with visible light, they are not transparent and do react with light in the infrared portion of the spectrum.  In other words, greenhouse gasses let the energy in, but not out.  Kinda like a Greenhouse.  This leads us to conclude that some amount of energy which would have left the earth is remaining because more greenhouse gasses exist to absorb it.  Saying that this argument is wrong because today it is colder than average is flawed.  Even average temperatures dropping for years would not invalidate the argument.  The argument above discusses one small portion of the energy and meteorological cycle on earth.  There are an untold number of other variables at play which affect the temperature.  I am not trying to debate Global warming here, but simply explain how I see the world and why I structure arguments in this way.
• Random thoughts:  Some times ideas in my head are not fully formed.  I will use this as a means to put this information in front of me.  Are these two variable Causal, or is there simply a Correlation?  If x is twice y then you can claim that x causes y because x = 2y.  However we could just as easily say y = 2/x.  So does that mean that y causes x?  Even after evaluating all of this we may discover that in fact, x = z and y = 2z.  Therefore z causes both y and x in different amounts.  I think the question of causation vs correlation is extremely important in how we interpret the world.  Many of my random thoughts may deal with this.
• ETC: No doubt there will be more.  Since I am viewing this as a playground for my mind, I wont be limiting my posts to anything specific.  The above list simply encompasses the thoughts that led me to create this blog in the first place.

I love discussion.  I don’t believe that there is a such thing as a stupid question or comment as long as it is created respectfully. It is my guess that anyone reading this is greater than 20 years of age.  Think of the amount of work that your brain has done over the course of your life.  Just the sheer amount of processing cycles?  While it is undoubtable that even through this huge amount of work we come to incorrect beliefs, these beliefs should never be belittled, simply adjusted with new evidence.

Now I say this, however I am extremely anti-pseudo science.  If someone believes that a crystal around their neck helps them, even though there is no evidence for it, than that is fine with me.  I might shake my head and ask for evidence but I wont go to much further than that.  Society is not damaged by this belief.  I do draw a line when a belief presents danger to society as a whole.  Three true statement:

• Evolution is an accurate explanation for the existence and path of life on earth based on current knowledge and evidence.  This must be taught to all american children if we wish to remain the scientific powerhouse that we have been since the late 19th century.
• Global warming is happening and is human caused.  We as a society and a species need to take action as soon as possible to address this.
• Vaccines save lives.  The anti-vaccine study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a farce.  It has been retracted and Dr. Wakefield removed from his position with his credentials suspended.  (http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/02/lancet.retraction.autism/index.html)(http://www.npr.org/2011/01/09/132735944/as-the-facts-win-out-vaccinations-may-too)(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/health/policy/25autism.html?_r=0)

I have no qualms about discussing any of these items in an intelligent and thoughtful way.  I bring this up to contrast with my earlier statement that ‘there is no such thing as a stupid question or comment’.  I am amending that to say, “Accepting that all questions or comments are based on a cognitive concept held individually and provided that the concept is held after an honest evaluation of available evidence and remains mutable in the face of further evidence, any derived question or comment is valid and makes me happy.”

I bring this up as an illustration of how I think.  I believe that the concepts I hold are the result of evaluating the best possible knowledge available to me.  I certainly may be wrong in statements I make.  Please don’t hesitate to call into question anything I put down here.  But also know that in order to change the concept, I will need the supporting evidence.  If you claim that contrails are in fact made up of a chemical released by government agents I will ask for the evidence.  Claiming that it is the kind of thing our government would do, even if I agree that this is true, would not be considered valid evidence.  The best evidence for this would by flying up into a so called ‘chem trail’ and collecting samples.  Then publish those results without bias and let another group duplicate your findings.  This I would accept as evidence.  With additional evidence, I certainly am quite happy to change my concepts.  In fact I believe this process is a requirement for reasonable, well-intentioned, thinking individual.

Now for the disclaimer.  Some of you may know me in real life.  Some of you may only know me from Facebook or Twitter.  Others of you may have randomly dropped onto a post because it matched some Google result.  For everyone let me be very clear.  I speak only with my own voice.  I do not at the moment have any intention for the posts to be collaborative.   If this changes at some point, I will be very clear in stating who I worked with and for what reason.  I will attribute statements as accurately as possible and I will indicate any problems I have in obtaining appropriate attribution.  If you believe I have made an attribution error, simply comment or send me an email.  I work hard to surround myself with intelligent thoughtful people especially when they hold differing views from me. Michael Dell said, “Try never to be the smartest person in the room.” (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eimh45ehjl/michael-dell-never-be-the-smartest-person-in-the-room/)  I would put it as, “Surround yourself with people who hold differing views but are capable of honest discussion in an intelligent respectful way.”  I abhor the vacuum of my singular mind.  I abhor the echo chamber of modern political parties and social circles.  This I why I seek out those who differ from me.  If you believe that statements I make here are concepts or beliefs held by my entire personal or professional circle, you would be incorrect.  Please do not push onto my associate’s anything claimed here unless I specifically stated that they hold the same belief.  It is unfair to me and them and dishonest to yourself.

 

Micah Norman