8r4d Consulting Ltd.

Blog

  • down by the bay

    down by the bay

    I was lamenting the latest stage of the long, slow collapse of Hudsons Bay Company, once a literal icon of the Canadian retail landscape.

    The very history of this country is tangled up in the complex colonialist role played by this company in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and if for no other reason than that I’m sure there are justified cheers at the karmic collapse of this once epic company. Still, the collapse of the modern Hudsons Bay retail enterprise is nothing to celebrate, what with the scope and variety of employment it offered in many communities, its status as a signature anchor tenant in many shopping centres, and too, as one of the last historic holdouts against the dominance of Amazon and such. 

    I could probably write for pages on this complex role it played in communities, its decline and now complete disappearance from many cities, including my own. But instead, I woke up in the middle of the night and was tossing and turning in bed thinking about—I kid you not—the customer experience at The Bay.

    Maybe it was tradition. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was stubbornness. But the experience at that store never seemed to adapt to the modern retail world. From the ancient point of sale systems to an online experience that, on the three occasions I made use of it, revealed the reason Amazon holds a place of utter dominance in this domain. It was slow and cumbersome, like so much at The Bay. 

    But my strangest late night insight was in an unfair comparison to Ikea.

    We all laugh at the maze-like design of the furniture retailer, but the truth is the user experience in that store does two things very well. First, it gives the customer a little mini-adventure upon each visit. There are shortcuts, true, but I suspect many or even most shoppers walk the Ikea mile dutifully. Second, the maze walks you past virtually every product the store sells. The net result of this is that I, even mediocre consumer that I am, rarely leave without at least one purchase.

    The only thing that The Bay ever coerced any customer to walk past was the fragrance department, and the only adventure I got from that was testing my ability to hold my breath.

    I have no great insight upon this sad and seeming final chapter of a once-proud Canadian retailer, at least nothing that countless other online commentators haven’t already written on, save for maybe that even corporations get old and senile. And maybe that’s the lesson we should take from it, that everything has a time and place, and we should remember fondly the good times rather than shaking our heads at some analysis of a business failure, and rather accept that nature and the passage of time can take its toll on most anything.

  • genuine

    genuine

    The temptation felt by the potential of a blank page as I sit down to type these words each time I post is sometimes bigger than I can explain.

    We all want to be more than we are, don’t we?

    I see this blank page in front of me and I yearn to manifest some sort of great and compelling wisdom through my fingers, into the keyboard and out into the universe. I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want to make people think and wonder and philosophize.

    There are a handful of great communicators out there doing just that. Men and women who each day sit down at a blank page and turn their thoughts into a missive on life or business or success or coping with failing at any or all of those things.

    I read some of those words.

    They do genuinely inspire me.

    And here I sit, yearning to have even a fraction of the impact.

    Yet, their secret to success probably has little to do with the effort they make, and likely almost entirely to do with the truth of their situation: when they sit down at that canvas to write or paint or shape bits into meaning, they have something that is unique and genuinely worth communicating.

  • discomfort

    discomfort

    I was in class this past weekend, continuing the work on my Business Analysis Certification, and the topic we were discussing was “solution design.” One thing led to another and we were going round the table talking about interfaces and user experience and people-centric innovation.

    This all came to me bringing up my current desktop computer setup, specifically that I’m using an eclectic and expensive mechanical keyboard and running Ubuntu Linux as my operating system.

    Both are interesting choices, and the instructor called them out, not to question the choices but to forward a discussion and drive a point.

    “Why do you use a mechanical keyboard?” he asked.

    I fumbled through a reply that manifested in my brain, a jumble of words that I’d heard on keyboard video reviews about typing sound profiles and tactile feedback.

    “So why do you run Linux?” he followed up with.

    Here I said something about it being a better coding platform and free and so on.

    Neither of my responses were wrong, but I got to thinking later that they didn’t really tell the whole story. And the reasons are not disjointed, either. Sure, mechanical keyboards are aesthetic choices and Linux is a fairly mature platform with particular benefits, but both are costly to me in either money spent to buy them or time spent to understand them.

    So why did I use them?

    Here’s what I think: both the keyboard and the operating system–and a dozen other things I could list if I were to wander around my house and point at my eclectic choices–have a higher “friction” associated with them.

    Or, simply, they are slightly uncomfortable.

    Uncomfortable to acquire. To use. To maintain. To explain.

    I realize that I often choose interfaces and tools that bring me mild discomfort because it forces me out of complacency. Discomfort breaks the surface tension of the world, just a bit, and makes everything a bit more interesting. There are dozens of so-called benefits, as well as any number of disadvantages to these choices, but the tension of those things is really, deep down, my personal allure.

    And there is lesson there, isn’t there?

    Some things need to be simple, frictionless, and invisible.

    But, too, we should try to do things that challenge us. We should do things not because they are easy, but exactly because they are not.

  • business analysis

    business analysis

    It’s only been a few months, but I’ve been putting in a tremendous amount of time and effort this year to work towards my Business Analysis Certification. Previously, I spent twenty-plus years working in non-profit, non-governmental agencies, and then municipal government doing a lot of work implementing and running projects, products, and programs. And so the decision to formalize some of that knowledge with a few classy letters behind my name was obvious. And now, being most of the way through the program, I’m confident that is was a good fit and a good choice. I’m actually pretty good at this stuff, if you don’t mind me bragging a little bit.

    Now? In a little over a month I should be done.

    I guess that means I’m officially open to work. And I suppose that also means I need to start poking around job boards, contracting agencies, and other places that might be looking for someone like that.

    Then… I also figured I’d put some good vibes out into the universe. So, hey all out there in my little professional network. Big ask, I know, but if you hear anything or have any advice, I’d love to hear from you.

  • little experiments

    little experiments

    Goals are out.

    Experiments are in.

    I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago and an interesting idea was suggested by one of the guests. We have these big ideas about goals and resolutions and accomplishments, but maybe we’re wrong about all that. Thinking about self-improvement or personal projects as zero-sum must-achieve-end-state goals may be leading a lot of us to premature notions of failure.

    Instead, the guest suggested, we should be thinking about these things as experiments.

    Rather than saying “I’m going to blog every weekday, forever.” maybe we should be saying something like “I wonder how many days in a row I can blog before I run out of ideas.”

    The first is a goal that is (probably) bound for failure.

    The second is an interesting experiment in personal acheivement that ends with an answer and some self-knowledge.

    It’s a little mental shift, but a big change in attitude, huh?

  • blogging for bits

    blogging for bits

    I used to blog all the time. You know, back when it was cool—and I was younger—and people still, uh, read stuff.

    I should probably start making tiktok videos, but, well, that’s not my style.

    I had a short but lively online tiff this past week with some guy who was complaining that he lost years of content because he was forced (for politically ideological reasons) to flee Twitter and abandon everything he’d ever posted there. You need your own website, I suggested, one that you contol. He lashed out at me and told me he had his own website but—and I’m paraphrasing here—that the world should just work how he wants it to work, and I could just—well, I won’t repost the rest of his opinions about my opinions.

    I honestly didn’t think that suggesting being in control of one’s own words in this vast and changing ecosphere of technology and politics would be so controversial. Boy, was I wrong.

    Yet, it did get me thinking that I haven’t been holding up my end of the bargain there, either. I’ve been writing… a lot. But I stuff those words away onto sites off the beaten track, or put disposable discourse into social media, these days Bluesky. I’ve been neglecting the simple blog.

    I’ve been neglecting just writing for the sake of writing.

    So. Here I am. Back. Simple. Just posting. Let’s give this a whirl again.

  • measuring up

    Capitalism has done great things, sure, but it has also forced us all to weigh our worth against a single accounting ledger.

    That is to say, of all the ways to measure a human being, tallys of the good and bad parts of ourselves set against a moral backdrop or a social yardstick or an artistic canvas, the dominant one of western culture of the year 2024 seems to be monetary value.

    Morality is mistaken for poiltical persuasion. Social worth is too often singularly measured in online engagement clickthroughs. The value of expression, music and art is flawed in its tracking merey by record sales or performance revenue or delivered commissions.

    All of it loops right back to money. 

    Of course, the counterpoint ledgers by which could alternatively judge our success are less quantifiable, less fungible, less ready to be assigned a number. How do you put happiness on a scale that has objective value for all? Is there a stock market equivalent for intellectual enlightenment ourside of acedemia? How many hamburgers does musical expression of the soul buy?  We don’t track any of these things, at least not with the bank-balance, black-red precision of our monetary worth, yet each of our lives are affected by the surplus or debtor status of these invisible ledgers.

    Money can’t buy happiness, they say—yet it seems to come from somewhere and vanish again into the mists of life—so perhaps we should each of us figure out what does buy a smile and a warm feeling and all those other things by which we can measure our worth.

  • hammer meet nail

    Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.

    Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.

    Motivation without a project to constuct.

    That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.

    Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.

    And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.

  • negative stimuli

    As much as we like to think of ourselves as reflective and thoughtful creatures, the hard truth is that our brains are highly reactive. They are, perhaps literally, hard-wired to respond to stimuli from our senses.

    It may even be true that much of this reaction occurs outside of our conscious perception of it: visual cues give us thought, sounds that make us spin our head to look, slight variations in the terrain below our feet as we walk shift our gaits, scents wafting in the air trigger memories—or any of a hundred thousand million combinations of things we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel cause a reaction outside of our awareness of it.

    Each of these cause a cascade of neural energy through our nervous system and into some part of our brain that has been evolutionarily adapted for self preservation and to react in a way that will keep us alert and alive. 

    We probably don’t think about it enough, but I’m almost certain that the same reactivity holds true for the words and images that we watch and read. These things enter our brains and as much as we are able to logically think about them and be rational, thoughtful human computation engines about big ideas and moral philosophies, and social insights, it is also likely that these same stimuli pass through our unconscious selves and drive reactivity that we can neither sense nor control. 

    They say you are what you eat, and you probably only feel as good as the media you consume, too.