8r4d Consulting Ltd.

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  • gossip

    Realizing that someone is talking about you behind your back can be a jarring experience.

    Realizing that two strangers are talking about you through the trees more difficult to categorize.

    I had gone for a walk in the sweltering heat.  The last few days have been marked by temperatures that are neither unexpected nor unseasonable, but definitely uncomfortable. I was out for my morning coffee and had spent a couple hours in a local cafe writing, and on my way home the thought popped into my head that I should go for a walk at the botanic gardens when I bought a pass earlier this summer. It is a beautiful park full of flowers and shaded paths and quiet, contemplative places to sit, even in the heat—maybe especially in the heat. Yet, to say that I had not thought this out nor planned accordingly was an modest understatement. I didn’t wear sunscreen, I neglected to bring my art supplies, I had not a drop of water with me, and I was dressed head to toe—literally—in black: black shoes, black shorts, a black t-shirt, and a black baseball-style cap.  My walk took me back into a sheltered garden near the far reaches of the park, and as the heat had grown over the morning my lack of preparation was catching up with me. I sat down on a bench to plan my next move.

    Set far back from the roadway, and at least twenty kilometers from the city limits, the ambiant noise there was limited and I could hear the voices carrying through the trees. Kids on summer camp field trips were laughing and shouting in the distance as they played near the edge of the pond with aquatic nets, the summer gardening staff were rustling about with their equipment whilst they pruned and watered and tended, and just past the copse of trees where I had been walking a few minutes prior some stranger was gossiping about me and having a detailed discussion about my poor choice to dress in a black wardrobe.

    They were not wrong.

  • hot and cold

    It’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down.

    See. I figured out why I prefer the winter to the summer. As I sit here writing this the outside temperature is climbing into the thirty Celcius range and simply existing outdoors is legitimately uncomfortable. Living in Canada I get to experience both ends of the thermometer, and six months from now I’ll no doubt be lightheartedly complaining that there is ice on the windows and how cold it is outside. In fact, I was sitting in this exact seat in this same cafe on the coldest day in January of this year when the glass a foot away from me layered in a thick coat of frost seemed to be slurping the heat right through my sweater and leaching the warmth out of my skin. 

    Yet, in this heat I am reminded that we seem to have many more options to warm ourselves up than we do to cool ourselves down.

    In the winter I can turn up the heat, put on a sweater, bundle up on the couch with a blanket and watch television, tug a toque down over my ears, or even go for a run and work up a warm sweat.

    In the summer we crank the air conditioning, turn on the fans, splash ourselves with cool water, eat a lot of ice cream and run from puddle of shade to puddle of shade—but at the end of the day it just seems more difficult to maintain that thing we call comfortable.

    In the last week we’ve not only been thinking about turning down the air temperature, but we’ve been hearing a lot about turning down the political heat, too.  I think the same sort of axiom applies: it’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down. 

    Not that we can’t do both.

    Heck, we’re a fairly advanced technological civilization that has stepped foot on the moon: heating and cooling technology should be a piece of cake, right? It doesn’t change the basic fact, though, that pulling energy out of any system—the air or politics—is just plain trickier than putting more energy into it.

  • sum total words

    You have a finite number of words in you. 

    Oh, sure, that finite number may be huge.

    But it is finite.

    And there is absolute truth in the notion that every word you say or write removes from the remining tally one more word and brings you one word closer to the sum total of every word that you have sad or written and will ever say or write.

    Should this thought paralyze you or make you rethink each of those words?

    On the contrary. This notion should implore you spend every word that you can and get those words out into the universe sooner to be enjoyed, cherished, listened to or read sooner. You shouldn’t hesitate to send as many words as possible now—today, tomorrow, and then again every day after that—to grind down from the list of words you have left and spend every syllable in your due with raw abandon. You must do this because the more those words swirl and whirl around the world, through the eyes, ears, and fingertips of anyone who might hear or read them, the sooner their effects can be enjoyed, compounded, and folded back to you in a vast loop of feedback and communication. The sooner their value propigates. The sooner you will feel their purpose and effect.

    The list of your words in is in of course fininte, but surely none of us know what that total number will come to until at the end our days and maybe into our last moments, we’ve typed our last keystroke or muttered our last gasp.

    Thus, I implore you—don’t let that number come up short.

  • little ol’ you

    You are self-contained.

    No matter how much you may think that you are interconnected with other people, interdependent with someone else or aligned in either a positive or negative way to the existence of another, at the end of the day biology and physics dictate that you cannot be merged, combined, subdivided, or otherwise change the definition of you in any meaningful way.

    You are just you.

    Forever and always.

    And as this is the case, the fact that you were born as a singular unit, will ultimately die when the vessel known as your personal body ceases to function, and are the only one who will experience the whole of your life from start to finish, what any other person—spouse, parent, child, employer, politician, religious leader, or even the friendly barrista at your favourite coffee shop—thinks or says about you is only as important or worthwhile inasmuch as the self-contained object known as you allows it to be.

    Of course we can hurt each other.

    Of course we can love another.

    Of course we can have an affect on or be affected by anyone and everyone around us, but in many more ways we can mediate and moderate all of those things and be open to the good things and regulate the negative from having an undue influence on each of us as individuals.

  • beta testing words

    I’m kinda hung up on the idea of beta testing my writing these days.

    How does that work? Well, the thing is that each time I’ve written something—anything—and then published it online there is usually a bit of metrics attached to that. Clicks. Read throughs. Search presence. All of those things form a pretty robust picture of what people find interesting.

    I’m not here to get rich writing blogs. It’s not in the cards for me.

    But I’m also not here to scream into the wind and pretend to have an audience. I really do want people to read what I write and find it useful.

    So the idea that each of my posts on this site, for example, are not reambling screeds about my life but instead encapsulated and focused ideas that have been on my mind, each fleshed out in a couple hundred words, means that I can tell from my metrics how each of those encapsulated ideas has tested out in the real world. Are people interested? Do they click? Do they keep reading?

    And once one has beta tested something, one then refines and iterates: I write another piece on the same idea, a few months wiser and with some clarity of having written those thoughts out once before, maybe twice before, and again and again. Does the idea get the same broad level of attention and interest? Was it the idea itself or a fluke of word usage or timing?

    Write. Test. Repeat.

  • on entropy

    There is an inbuilt and inherent temporary-ness to everything, which means that everything, eventually turns back into it’s sub-atomic components of atoms and energy.

    You and I, our homes, our cars, our cell phones, our refrigerators, beds, toothbrushs, shoe laces, those television shows we stream over the internet, the film we watched last weekend and especially these words and the device or paper upon which you are reading them. 

    Temporary. Nothing is permanent. 

    This idea, that entropy rules the universe may be daunting to think about at first, but then after you have been thinking about it for a time one is bound to realize how entirely and creatively freeing such a concept can be.

    The impermanence of the universe means that any effort that we make to instill order into that same universe by creating, buying, building, growing, cooking, writing, or generally making anything is ultimately done only on this fragile and finite timeline.

    Perfectionism becomes a truly pointless exercise because even perfect things will decay and degrade into atoms and energy eventually. 

    And it is the impermance of everything that makes it special.

    So one may as well take the risk of making something, anything no matter how imperfect and fleeting because everything is at some level already just that.

  • nerd-vantage

    I posted an article a while back called raw code in which I detailed the notion that having skills in technology (though the lesson is transferable to virtually every refined skill, trade, or art) means that one can get a leg up on others without that skill for simple things.

    In my example, I talked about how I have solved many little problems or puzzles by writing a bit of code to support the effort. I hinted at this, but one of the biggest and most cost-savings of those has been in the realm of meal planning.

    It’s no secret that groceries are expensive.

    And eating isn’t exactly an optional activity.

    We’re all kinda stuck between a quac and hot spice.

    At least a dozen years ago I wrote the first version of a little piece of personal software we called MealPlannit. It’s simultaneously stupidly simple but also fairly complex. In essense it is a database of all our recipes, everything from elaborate and complex meals to favorite freezer meals whose sole cooking instruction is remove from box and heat.

    The end result of this after a dozen years and a hundred code tweaks is that we have a database of about four hundred recipes that can be added with the click of a button to a rolling weekly plan and from which we can generate a shopping list. That’s all it does.

    As simple as that sounds, we have used it faithfully for over a decade to plan meals and grocery shop. And all that simplified planning means that our nerd-vantage in the grocery store has probably saved us a few dollars each week in food wastage and impulse shopping. In fact, by my wife’s estimates we probably save about twenty bucks a week in both planning our weekly meals but in the savings that come from knowing what our core, regular recurring favorite meals are and buying ingredients when they are on sale. And that number is probably a low-ball estimate.

    But if you add up twenty bucks per week over even just ten years that means this little bit of code I put together in my spare time has personally saved us about ten thousand dollars—which is a pretty nice vacation and a pretty nice advantage from just being a nerd.

  • snippets of thoughts

    Writing every day and posting to a blog every day is like beta testing any product.

    Words are a means to convey ideas, and you don’t know how useful that idea is until you expose it to the pressures of the user, which in the case of any piece of content like a blog post and the chunk of writing it contains, is your audience.

    Anyone who aspires to write anything could benefit from taking the time and effort to beta test their words and ideas in the real world and rather than saving up everything to compile and publish in one big paper-bound volume with fingers crossed that those ideas have value, spitting them out into the universe to see what has value and what sinks to the deeps forever.

    Just a thought.

  • unsocial media

    In theory, social media is an amazing idea. Tens of thousands of interconnected people sharing, creating, reacting, conversing and communicating in one space.

    In reality, the costs to run this technology has led to every single social media platform of scale ever created with any broad success turning into a hungry beast that needs to be fueled by advertising and any number of other algrorithmic pressures that erode at the effectiveness of the social aspect.

    I have advocated professionally and personally for many years for people (and businesses) to keep a toe in each of the two pools: one each in social media platforms and private content platforms. That is to say, the wisest among us know that relying exclusively on social platforms means your content is only as valuable as someone else’s company bottom line. And alternatively, leaning one hundred percent into a private platform like a blog or other website orphans your connectiveness to the wider internet community to the hours per day you are willing or able to promote it and help people find you.

    Both have their advantages and disadvantages. So be smart and dabble in both. Have strategies for using both. Don’t rely exclusively on either alone.

    Personally, I have leaned more heavily into building content on my own platform and then working to promote it on social media. It does make me a tad unsocial, but also the risks of losing control, access, or moral standing of that content for participation on one of the big social networks is lessened. And at the end of the day, I have retained full control over the vast amounts of content I have created through the years while still having it read and used by many.

  • day by day by day

    I can’t write enough about incrementalism.

    The classic proverb asks: how do you eat an elephant?

    One bite at a time.

    I have been writing and creating and writing and making and writing and posting. If I went back in time a year to when I set out on this little writing life adventure and looked out upon the quantity of work that I have banked in the intervening year, I know I would be completely overwhelmed.

    Think of what you can accomplish just doing a little bit each day or even each week.

    If you record ten seconds of video every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have over an hour of footage.

    If you open a document and write one paragraph of one hundred words per day every day for a year you will have a document over thirty six thousand words long.

    If you post one thing online a day every day for a year, you will have over three hundred and sixty posts at the end.

    Incrementalism. One bite at a time.