Category: Observations

what3words | Addressing the world

April 28, 2015 / Carl

what3words is a global grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares. Each square has a 3 word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity.

Source: what3words | Addressing the world

This is a fascinating project to give a location anywhere in the world when standard addressing fails or does not exist.

I take a train from clown.stay.themes to palace.bride.single. Just be sure to get your words right. Trying to meet me near palace.bridge.single will not help you.

Even in developed countries, addresses can change. In my lifetime (about 3 decades) my father’s address has changed three times.

First, it was a Rural Route and a Box number: Route 2 Box 4794.
Then, when the county decided it needed to have real addresses to aid emergency response, it changed to 1511 Kimble Road. Finally, it has changed yet again to a new road name and number because of a shift in how the county decided to handle addressing.

So even in the United States, 60 miles from the Washington, D.C. addressing is still a problem. He lives out near hogs.dogs.improving which is a fitting address for my hometown.

How to Verify your YouTube account

April 15, 2015 / Carl

I have experimented with Twitch and recording my Destiny gameplay. I do this so friends can watch and just to play with the format.

Twitch can export video straight to YouTube but it requires a verified account to export anything longer than a 15 minute clip. Since the raid I recorded was 90 minutes, this was a problem.

So I asked The Great Sage, How do I verify my YouTube Account?
And it replied: https://www.youtube.com/verify

The process is surprisingly easy. Choose your home country then select whether you want an automated voice message or a text message with a code in it.

I received the text message immediately and entered it.
Congratulations! I now have a Verified YouTube Account™.
Now, to figure out what I can do with it.

Minimal Viable Meeting

April 1, 2015 / Carl

It is very hard to write and to think when all I want to do is to crawl into bed and sleep. I want to ignore my alarm and stay firmly held between blankets and mattress. I Want to pretend the day is not existing and no one needs me for anything. I want to make-believe.

But instead, I am at work. I left my bed. I rode a train for an hour. I got to work. Work is happening.

Slowly.

As the Internet is down for everyone. The cafeteria is unusually busy. The water cooler chatter is high. The paper-thin walls surrounding my office are even more annoying than usual because all I can hear is the office next door socializing, laughing and carrying on. All I can hear is people having fun.

A workday holiday. However temporary it may be.

Meanwhile I field calls about this afternoon’s event. With questions I can’t answer because I simply do not know. How will this work over a tethered connection? I don’t know. I laid out the options given the setting for the event. It’s what we have to work with. Will we be back up by then? I do not know. No one knows.

If we are, great. If we are not, prepare yourselves for a Plan B experience.

These things happen. They are not ideal but I’ve found in my professional career things are rarely ideal. The best we can do is to come up with a workable plan. What is the most important part of the session today?

The audio. You want people to be able to hear what is going on in the National Office. You want the voices heard and the questions answered. The slides are a nicety. The video is a bonus.

The point of this event is to answer questions from your staff and to share the directions of the agency. That can be done, in its simplest form through text.

Email. Web page. Nothing fancy.

When unexpected things happen, focus on what the point of the session is and build up from there. Don’t get hung up on what you planned to do. Focus on how to get your message and information out to your staff. The rest is just windows dressing.

The Ruralist

March 25, 2015 / Carl

The older I get, the more I miss the small barely two stoplight town I grew up in. It’s only 60 miles west of me. It’s a place where my father still can’t get land-based broadband internet. It’s where I grew up without cable TV because the cables stopped at the end of my road. And there weren’t enough people to justify running them back to the few houses that sat on acres of land.

J.D. Bentley writes in The Ruralist

The most redeeming quality of big cities is that their people choose to congregate in small, dense areas, leaving the bulk of the earth to the rest of us.

As I’ve entered my third decade on this earth, that line resonates deeply with me. I grew up with cows and deer for neighbors. I grew up without a working knowledge of the Nickelodeon schedule. I grew up in a quiet place. Where I could sit outside and barely hear another sign of humanity. I’d walk in the woods and take long bike rides past apple orchards and corn fields. I relished the silence. The wind in my ears as I raced down hills and pedaled like a maniac up the next.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to move out of the little town. I could not wait to spread my wings in a bigger city. I escaped to Richmond, VA for college and lived there for a several years afterwards. Then I returned home to the outskirts of Washington, DC. First living in Northern Virginia across the river from it, and now in Maryland to its north.

I like the area where I am now. It’s quiet enough it could almost be mistaken for rural. There are deer and rabbits nearby. I pass geese, ducks and the occasional heron (I think?) on my walk to the Metro.

That’s where the illusion ends. When I cross the barrier from wildlife to concrete and board a train descending underneath DC and into the heart of the city.

By day, I am city dweller, though at least I am close enough to the National Mall and Capitol Reflecting Pool I can still enjoy the ducks, green spaces and people-watching.

But I miss the quiet nights. I miss falling asleep to the wind whipping through trees and across open fields. I miss the cows and occasional rooster.

I miss hearing a world not powered by motors and processors.

Be Personable

March 16, 2015 / Carl

When you work in tech support, you often don’t know who you are talking to. You don’t know if they’re high-powered or the new intern. You don’t know their level of technical ability or their patience.

But one thing you do know is they are human. So talk to them like it.

So many times, I get an email back from a tech and all it says is “This account has been deactivated.”

That’s nice, computer. I am happy you processed my request in an efficient and timely manner. But it would have been even nice if I knew you were a person too.

Now let’s compare that to:

Good Morning Monica,

I’ve deactivated the account for John Morris effective immediately.

Is there anything else I can do for you today?
Thank you,
Carl T. Holscher

I address Monica by her name.
She is a person. I am a person. There’s no reason I can’t address her by her name. It’s add a little humanity to our interaction.
I told her exactly what I had done.
That way, she knows immediately what this request is about. It doesn’t rely on her to remember what she had asked me for. She’s busy. She doesn’t have time to sit around and wait for me to get the work done. She is doing other things, so don’t make her guess.
It also verifies to me that I have made the correct change. It’s easy to make a mistake, especially when dealing with a large number of requests. Repeating back the action I took helps me to double-check myself.
I used my name.
I am not a team. I am not a group. I am an individual and I did this work for her.

Whenever I am about to send an email to someone, I ask myself if this is the email I would like to receive.

If it is, I hit send. If not, I take a moment to improve upon it. Spending those extra seconds can make a big difference in how you come across to your customers.

It’s hard to be as warm and friendly over text. But it is easy to impart some humanity in your words. Use them.