It’s November 14 2008. Charles Windsor is 60 today.
Forty - Oh yeah?

Tags: 40, Charles Windsor, Happy Birthday, Prince Charles, Stephen Pierzchala

Have I mentioned that Greg House is one of my mentors?

more lol celebs!

Tags: greg house, gregory house, house, hugh laurie, personal ad, personals

This is the year I turn 40. As a result, I am looking back upon my life, my career, and trying to determine what I do best. If I could make my life into an elevator pitch, what would it be?

I decided to take what I do right now and see how low I could take it. What does my career boil down to?

It came down to three simple words: Educate, Guide, and Solve.

Each of these describes a facet of my career that provides a profound sense of personal satisfaction. Each of these is unique in that they give me the chance to share what I know with others, while still gaining new experiences in the process.

These three things are simultaneously selfish and selfless. I believe that in order to have a successful, productive, and fulfilling career, these three things need to serve as the foundation of everything I do.

Educate

I work in a small community of Web performance analysts. I have spent years training myself to see the world through the eyes of a Web site and how it presents to the outside world. As I taught myself to see the world this way, I was asked to share what I knew with others.

At first I did this through technical support and a training course I helped develop. Then I moved into consulting. I began to blog and comment on Web performance.

I needed to share what I knew with others, because it is meaningless to hoard all of your knowledge. While I am paid well as a consultant, it is also important that as many people as possible learn from me; and that doesn’t always need to sold to the highest bidder.

Guide

While some may say that there is no difference between Guide and Educate, I see a profound chasm between the two.

We have all been educated at some point. We have sat through classes and lectures and labs that convey information to us, and have provided the foundation for what we know.

But we have also encountered people who have shown us how to step beyond the information. They place the information that they are giving us in a larger context, allow us to see problems as a component of the whole.

That is what I strive to do. Not only do I want to give people the functional tools they need to interpret the data, I want them to then take that data and see the patterns in the data. I work closely with colleagues and customers, helping them see the patterns, understand how they tie to the things I say everyday, and then be able to solve this type of problem on their own the next time.

A guide is only useful when the path is not known. Once I have showed someone the path, I can return to my place, in the knowledge that they are as experienced on the path as I am.

Solve

Once you have shown someone what the data can do, how to see the patterns, it is critical that they have an understand how to take that pattern and change it for the better. Seeing a pattern and understanding its cause are only the beginning.

I can share my experiences, share how others have solved problems similar to this one, help them fix the problem.

And then be able to show that the problem is solved. An unmeasured, yet resolved problem, is meaningless.

Summary

This is the skeletal description of what I want to achieve in my career. I could expand these topics for a lot longer, but the question I propose is: What three concepts can you boil your career down to?

Tags: career, educate, functional tools, guide, solve, three concepts, three principles, three things, Web Performance, Web performance analysts, Work

The title is a deliberate misspelling. An event in the last two weeks has got me thinking about EWaste, and the way it is treated in the US, and likely the entire developed world.

About two weeks ago, #1 son told my wife to “STOP THE CAR!” as they were driving down the road near our house. Thinking he was mad, she did. #1 son leaped out and returned to the car with an HP Pavilion Desktop, in the vain hope that it could replace his current dinosaur computer.

This morning, I completed the configuration process by adding a wireless network card to this machine and they are now up and running with a computer from 2006-07, rather than the one they had been on up until then, which was from 1999 (seriously).

This leaves me to wonder why someone would dispose of a machine that is still perfectly functional. A machine that could have been donated to anyone of a number of causes to help those far less fortunate than we are.

I may complain incessantly about my lack of a MacBook ($|Pro|Air), but in the area of technology, I am well off. I have an excellent pair of servers that host my sites. Have a number of older machines in my basement to serve a variety of purposes, including development. I have my personal laptop and a very powerful work-provided laptop. And my wife has the most powerful machine in the house, to get e-mail and cruise Craigslist.

We are not computer-challenged. Yet, I do not take the disposal of any of this technology lightly. If I do dispose of technology, it goes into the city garbage ONLY on hazardous waste days. If I can, I give the machines to organizations who can use even a very old machine.

The processing of EWaste is a shameful burden that the wealthy of the world impose and throw down to the down-trodden. We pass along the poisons to those who are least able to say no, without a second thought.

To find and reincarnate a computer on the street is the act of a truly geeky family. To have thrown the computer to the curb in the first place is a sign of the shameful ignorance in our society for what is done with EWaste.

Are you being a responsible computer owner, as a person or a corporation?

Tags: corporate citizen, developed country, e-waste, ewaste, personal responsibility, recycle

Ok, all I have to say is: If you do not have the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, go get it. The update took all of 30 seconds.

Thanks to the authors of that extremely useful piece of code.

Tags: automatic upgrade, plugin, wordpress, wordpress 2.6.1

The post says it all

Burmese Refugee Children Love Macs from Joyce Kim on Vimeo.

Tags: Apple, Burma, children, Mac, refugee

For FriendFeed has become my replacement for Google Reader, which I only visit occasionally now to see if there are blogs I need to add to my feed.

But, if you are going to replace a reader with FriendFeed, how do you manage the flow of content. While tools will likely improve over time, I have adopted a simple strategy.

1) Scan for items with obvious links

As I power through the front page of my feed, I look for items that are obviously links to longer articles. I can then decide if I want click through to that article. But rather than opening it in a new tab right in front of me, I use the wheel-click option in Firefox and open these articles in a background tab. This allows me to scan through the fees and read the articles when I want.

2) Read Twitter/indenti.ca/Jaiku/etc. last

Personal conversations come second for me. If there is a thread I am interested in, I will wheel click the Twitter page for the person and pick it up that way…or use Twitter Search. Being the kind of person who processes personal communications last makes this easier.

3) Use the FriendFeed interface as much as I can

If there was a way to open posts in a frame such as the way that video and images are embedded in FriendFeed, I would never go to anyone’s actual site. While that may be a feature of the future, the storage implementation for the FriendFeed team is potentially enormous - unless they choose to retrieve the content on the fly.

And finally…

4) Gripe about TinyURL, etc. links and how I don’t know where they lead

A great feature of the future for FriendFeed would be to translate obfuscated URLs to their base URLs in a rollover

And there you have it. Not the world’s most intense primer on using FriendFeed, but it works for me!

Tags: friendfeed, google reader, optimize, strategy, summize, tinyurl, twitter, twitter search

The latest “rage” flooding through the social-media world is identi.ca, a Twitter-like micro-blogging service that is built on open-source servers and code.

As with anything that becomes an overnight sensation, the problems of success tend to follow. Using GrabPERF, I have been monitoring the HTML download time of my personal message stream. The results have been interesting.

Much has been made of social-media leaders that says that this is a clone, and that it is slow, etc. But, as has also been noted, it is:

• A one-person operation
• open-source code
• willing to admit that it needs to grow.

So, one-day never makes a performance trend. Over the last week, in my day job, I have watched a large online retailer suffer a similar fate to this newcomer to the social-media arena.

And if everyone who was willing to wait for Twitter to recover waited ten seconds for identi.ca to catch up, then there is a good chance that it may stand a chance of becoming a true competitor, pushing performance improvement.

Plurk was a non-starter for the twitterati. Jaiku has lost momentum, and is failing Google in the same way that Orkut did. And Pownce…what is that?

I hold out high hopes for identi.ca, if only to keep Twitter truly honest.

Tags: GrabPERF, identi.ca, jaiku, Orkut, performance, pownce, social media, twitter, Web Performance

My grandmother died a few months back, and while this was indeed a very sad day for all of us, she left on her own terms, and with her mind intact, facing the next adventure with grace and dignity.

What this sad event did is provide a focus for the entire Pierzchala clan to reconvene for the first time in more than a decade. Tomorrow, we will going to the ancestral heartland in the Crowsnest Pass to spread her ashes, and celebrate her life.

I am staying at my Aunt Heather’s home, someone I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. And tomorrow, I will see my aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, etc. and feel a part of the family that I had left behind.

I am sad that I couldn’t bring the rest of my family with me, to feel a part of this larger family, and understand just how many people they are related to, this is very important to me.

These are my people. My clan. My tribe.

And it is good to be among them again.

Tags: cro, EAD, IE, IM, it, LAN, Om, One, pr

Got six of them. FIFO.

Gone!

Tags: invites, Xobni