Dark Side of the Carton

I’m not sure what the stats are for the current American workforce in terms of workplace happiness, but I am sure they are not very high. Corporate America seems to be running rampant with unhappy and disgruntled employees.

I am happy to say I am not one of these people. I love my job. I love where I work. I love getting up in the morning and coming to work.

I’m also very passionate about what I do and I am sure that goes a long way when it comes to overall job satisfaction. I also work with an incredible team of guys that make the day seem less like work.

What about you? Do you like your job? Why/Why not?

Seriously Kobe. Are you blind enough to actually believe that Fisher didn’t foul Barry on that last shot? Even the Zen Master admitted that Fisher bumped him.

My mother in law owns a local flower shop and during rush times my wife goes up to help with all the orders. Often times this results in her working about 40 hours over the course of 3-4 days. During these times, I get to wrangle the kids and boy does it get tough.

So here is my chance to give a shout out to all the parents that do this each and every day. I don’t think that most people realize just how tough it is. You guys really deserve a pat on the back for keeping it together.

Having kids is a daily challenge. Most things you can get through by counting to 10 and taking a few deep breaths. On occasion, something happens that is a little more difficult to get through.

Rewind to yesterday.

My 4 yr old son decided to conduct a science experiment. I haven’t concluded if this was an intentional or accidental experiment, but it took place nonetheless. The experiment hypothesis would read something like this if you were preparing it:

Will a 3″ Lightning McQueen racecar shatter the display on my parents LCD TV if thrown hard enough?

What do you know, the answer happens to be a resounding YES! As proven by my son. I’ll take a picture of the damage later today and add it to this post. So painful.

UPDATE: Let me clarify that it was my son writing the hypothesis and, yes, it was my TV that suffered said fate.

I really scaled back all my sports posts because I realized that I don’t really have anything interesting or unique to stay on the topic and I really come off as a blatant Spurs homer, which I am.

I did want to take a moment to give the Spurs a shout out for showing up last night and showing the Hornets what it’s like to play a Championship caliber team. They weren’t prepared and didn’t bring it. The result is that the Spurs have a chance to engage in another battle with the top of the West, the Lakers.

Before the playoffs started, I was pretty sure that Boston would sail through the East and whip up whoever came out of the West. After all, the West is a battle this year. I was wrong. I think that the Spurs or Lakers, whoever comes out on top, is going to crush either Detroit or Boston. Boston has shown they don’t have the composure to compete at this level and the Pistons are just passed their time.

Regardless of how it all plays out, I think this is hands down the best post season ever. I’m sure my wife will be glad when it’s over as I’ve watched almost every single playoff game to date.

I’ve been a staunch supporter of Windows Vista since well before release. I’ve used it for well over a year and defended it’s use for a long time before arriving at this conclusion. That changes today. As Microsoft would say, my support has gone EOL. For you non-techs out there, EOL stands for End of Life. In short, I am no longer defending Vista or using Vista on any machine that I own. I give up. For all the benefits and things that I like about Vista, I just can’t deal with it’s bloat any longer.

My desktop is already XP and my current and future laptops will be downgraded as soon as I get them.

Viva XP!

If you walked up to me and asked me if I was competitive I would probably say no without even thinking about it. After all, I don’t consider myself to be a competitive person. I’ve been one of those people that honestly believed it was more about the effort than the outcome.

At 27 years of age, I am beginning to realize that people who tell you “It’s not about who wins, but about how you played the game” are just lying to you. After all, if you aren’t striving to win then why bother playing at all?

Last week was the orientation for my new job and of the group of 85 of us, we were organized into 10 tables. Each table represented a team. At the beginning of the week, we were told that there would be a points competition. At the end of each day there would be a 30 minute wrap up session where we would be quizzed on the presentations for the day and awarded points based on correct answers. Pretty cool right?

When you look at the mechanics, the organizer just incentivized the whole week of training. Pay attention, get the answers right, and you get points. What are we playing for? No clue. It was SECRET!

It didn’t take long for the rivalry to heat up with the competitive personalities at my table rearing their heads. Mine included. I took notes better than any class I’d attended in college. Just for the chance to win. It didn’t matter what we were playing for, we were going to win.

In the end, the prize was small and nominal and yes we did win. We felt good too. We felt accomplished. It was as if someone walked up and told us “Your table payed attention better than any other table in the room.”

We were all beaming with pride. It wasn’t until just then, at 27 years of age, did I realize that winning IS everything. You have to believe this or you won’t give it your all.

So why do we tell our kids that being a good sport is the most important thing and that winning is secondary? I guess it is to foster good social skills above domination.

This is something I am struggling with as I coach and Under 4 YMCA soccer team. Each and every week I have to hide my game face and encourage a group of kids to foster their love for the game. This is easy, but it isn’t easy to suppress the competitive spirit. After all, I pretend like it doesn’t matter, but I want to win and I want to win big.

When we are falling behind, I know it shows in my behavior.

So here I am. Telling you that yes it is important to be a good sport, but by golly you better be out there playing to win.

I’ve been working in my field for a very long time now, roughly 10 years to be exact. In those 10 years I’ve managed to keep learning new things year after year. Sometimes these new skills were learned with specific purposes or through on the job encounters. On the other hand, I’ve also had jobs that really didn’t challenge me and that I could easily get by without doing much or without growing professionally.

While these types of jobs can be “easy” or “fun” for people that know how to fill their free time, they can be really detrimental to your professional growth. To combat this negative growth I’ve really had to be deliberate about growing my skill set and expanding my knowledge. I’ve not always done a great job of making the most out of my situations at all times and there are times where I’ve looked at myself and thought “I really could be doing a lot more with my time.”

When you find yourself in that type of situation, how do you keep yourself from growing stagnant and becoming irrelevant? You never stop moving forward. I don’t mean this in a truly literal sense. I mean it in the sense that in most jobs the industry will continue to evolove and expand. When you find yourself stationary, you will find yourself becoming irrelevant as the industry passes you by. If you commit to forward movement though, you will either maintain the status quo and merely keep pace with the industry or if you work really hard you can be a trailblazer and lead the industry.

It takes a lot of dedication and work just to keep up, so it stands to reason that being a trailblazer is immensely difficult and it is. That’s why there are so few of them.

So just how do you keep up with a growing industry? For starters, you need to analyze what your current skill set is. If you don’t know where you are, how will you know where you need to go?

Once you’ve established where you are you need to get a feel for where the industry is headed. You can do this a number of ways, and I do all of them with some regularity.

Check out current job listings

It might seem like an odd thing to do and your employer might look at you funny if they notice, but what better way to see what future jobs will require than to look at current job openings. Don’t limit your scope to local jobs either. Check the regional areas that are the epicenter for your industry and see what skills are in demand.

Join an onilne community

It’s easy to see where an industry is headed if you are part of the community of that industry. Not all industries have online communities so you may have to venture out and do some networking.

Subscribe to some periodicals

Get a subscription to a few of the industry magazines or start reading their respective websites on a daily/weekly basis. This will introduce you to new concepts/technology in your field and give you cues on where things are headed

Once you gather all of this information, just how do you apply it? That really depends on your job/industry. For me, it’s reading and doing. Getting my feet wet with new technology in some sort of demo or building a new application using a new language or framework. The hard part is figuring out what skills are hot and getting in on the action early. It’ll be up to you to take charge and make yourself one of the elite.

Nick Halstead runs a programming blog and is one of my favorite reads. His insight is very good and he has a lot of experience. His post today was about becoming a better programmer and was a very good read. I totally agree with what he was saying, but I had something to add. I think we would all write better code if we had this in the back of our minds:

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. –Martin Golding

If you didn’t already know, consider yourself now informed that installing SP1 for Vista removes the GPMC from Vista. Running the GPMC from a Windows Server 2008 or Vista machine is the only way to access the 700 additional Group Policy settings available for Vista and Server 2008 machines. With the release of SP1, Vista no longer has the GPMC bundled with it.

I don’t really know the exact reason that it was included in the first place, or why it was quietly removed, but it was. If you managed a domain with Vista based workstations then odds are that you’ll want to take advantage of the GPMC from a Vista based machine.

With v2 of the GPMC not available as a standalone download, what exactly are your options if you’ve already installed SP1? For starters, you could roll back and remove SP1. This is probably more trouble than it is worth and not the path I’d recommend.

Your best bet is the Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools vor Windows Vista. RSAT is available in x86 and x64 variations. Simply download and run the installer to get started.

Once the wizard is done, there are a few additional steps needed to enable the features that have been installed.

1. Open your computer’s Control Panel and click on Programs and Features.
2. Under Tasks on the left, click Turn Windows features on or off (Fig. 1)
3. Once the list of available features is populated, find Remote Server Administration Tools in the list and make sure it has a checkmark next to it (Fig. 2) and then click Ok.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Next you can start an empty MMC from your start menu (”mmc” + Enter) and add in the previously available GPMC span in from your File menu and get back to editing those GPOs.

Credit goes to Matty-B from this thread for the tip on grabbing RSAT.

A few notes about RSAT from the Microsoft website:

• RSAT should not be installed on a computer that is running the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack or Windows 2000 Server Administration Tools Pack. Please remove all versions of Administration Tools Pack from the computer before installing RSAT.
• Only one copy of RSAT can be installed on a computer at one time. Before installing a new package, remove any existing versions of RSAT, including any copies that are in different languages.