Giant Freakin Robot – recipes for Bachelor Chow and Slurm

February 9th, 2012

Courtesy of science fiction blog Giant Freakin Robot -
Futurama Fans: Make Your Own Slurm

I wish they’d published these recipes the day BEFORE the Souper Bowl party at work last Friday. It would have been fun to bring (clean) dog food bowls filled with Bachelor Chow.

In case the post (or the site) is gone by the time the next SouperBowl party rolls around, here’s the recipe for Bachelor Chow:

Bachelor Chow

  • 1 box of cereal (such as Corn Chex)
  • powdered sugar
  • 1/2 cup peanut butter
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1 cup chocolate chips
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Heat peanut butter, butter, and chocolate chips over medium heat in a large pan (large enough for the entire box of cereal), or heat in a small sauce pan and have a large bowl handy to mix. When the peanut butter, butter, and chocolate chips have been liquified, stir in the vanilla extract. Remove from heat, and combine with cereal. Mix well until all the cereal is coated. Put some powdered sugar in a Ziploc bag, add the cereal, and shake until the cereal is covered (to keep the pieces from sticking together)

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Forbes.com – Who Are the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers

January 26th, 2012

A Facebook Friend congratulated another of her Friends on her placement on Forbes’ Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers.

It’s an indication of the early state of my own development as a social media guru that I have only heard of the few of the names on this list. I recognize Guy Kawasaki (#3), Gary Vaynerchuk (#4), and Robert Scoble (#6) — who doesn’t? I encountered Ann Handley (#2) by finding

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Free ebook – How To Really Use LinkedIn

January 4th, 2012

The company where I work has instituted a policy forbidding current employees from recommending other current or former employees. The policy explicitly includes LinkedIn Recommendations under this policy.

Unhappily for me, I was not concerned with getting LinkedIn Recommendations for myself until recently, and thanks to this new policy, I’m not likely to get any from current co-workers.

I’ve begun looking at ways around this policy, besides asking former employers. For example, I’ve thought about doing projects for local non-profit organizations, and getting Recommendations based on such work.

Another idea I’ve had is to form a sort of tontine with other current co-workers, where we all write Recommendations for each other – and as soon as a member of the group leaves the company’s employ, he or she publishes the Recommendations he/she has written for the others.

Looking for other ideas, I found a reference to a new free ebook, How To Really Use LinkedIn. If you’d rather buy the paperback version, that’s available too.

I’ve just skimmed the book so far. I haven’t found any great revelation vis-a-vis getting around my employer’s policy on Recommendations.

However, I did pick up one tip on making new connections through existing connections. Instead of using LinkedIn’s standard “Get introduced through a connection” link, author Jan Vermeiren recommends emailing the shared connection directly, explaining your reason for wanting to make the connection, and making sure that your 1st-level connection knows the 2nd-level target well enough to introduce you. If your 1st-level friend is agreeable, he or she can write an email to the target, suggesting that the target send a connection request to you (which you’ll certainly accept – after all, that’s the point of the exercise!).

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Mashable.com: Eye Tracking Studies of Social Media

December 1st, 2011

From Mashable.com: Here’s How People Look at Your Facebook Profile — Literally
Mashable worked with EyeTrackShop to find out how people look at social media profiles on different sites. The conclusions:

  • Profile pictures matter – especially on Facebook, Klout, Stumbleupon.
  • Job titles matter — on LinkedIn, while the profile pic gathered a lot of eye-tracking “heat”, the job title was the “hottest” target in the heat map.
  • Profile pics matter for your contacts too
  • Placement matters — like every other website, the further down the page, the less attention the content gets.

The article includes screenshots of eye tracking on a dozen sites – Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, Youtube, Klout, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest. It’s good stuff to keep in mind if you’re concerned how you show up on popular social networks.

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11:11:11 on 11/11/11 – edwardspurlock.net, reloaded

November 11th, 2011

One year, one month, one day, one hour, and one minute ago, I wrote a post titled

10:10:10 on 10/10/10 – me, reloaded.

For 11:11:11 (PM, not AM) on 11/11/11, I thought I would revisit the reload, by reloading this site – that is, after over a year since my last post here, I’ve decided on a focus for this site.

When I first got the domain net edwardspurlock.net, it was a few weeks after my 30th high school reunion, and I decided to start a site to network with people I knew. That was the reason I got the .net TLD – that this would be my business and personal networking site.

Since then, I’ve drifted away from that purpose and used this more as a general-purpose personal blog, before abandoning it over the past year.

Since I am still interested in business and personal networking, and since this domain and its content has accumulated a good bit of “Google juice”, I’m intend to maintain the existing content, but use the site once more for its intended purpose – that is, focused on business and personal networking – but not just my own networking.

After several years of studying business networking, it occurs to me that I might have something to say to others on this subject. I plan to include reviews of business networking how-to books, articles on using LinkedIn and other networking sites, and essays on the philosophy of networking.

I also plan to use this as a repository for discussions and comments from Facebook – some of my friends there have wisdom worth sharing and remembering. More than once, I’ve thought to myself, “I wish Facebook had an easier way to find that comment again! That one’s golden!”

11:11:11 on 11/11/11 – I’m still here, and edwardspurlock.net is back.

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10:10:10 on 10/10/10 — me, reloaded.

October 10th, 2010

This strikes me as an auspicious time to “reload” – that is, restart my blogging in a serious way.

I got away from blogging for a while, and just recently got the bug again. I messed around trying to get some blogs started using BlogEngine.NET at another hosting provider, but I haven’t been able to work the bugs out yet Until I get some other blogs online, I’m going to continue with this one.

For the past couple of years, I posted a “State of the Edward” sort of post around my birthday. I’m overdue for this year’s post (I had my birthday back on August 18), so let’s lay out some facts and figures:

  • White Male
  • 51 years old
  • born in Detroit, Michigan
  • currently living in Austin, TX
  • went to school at Parkman Elementary (Detroit), Black River Elementary (Black River, MI), Harrisville Elementary (Harrisville, MI), Alcona Community H.S. (Lincoln, MI)
  • College / University: Michigan State University, The University of Texas (Austin), Austin Community College. Studied Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Philosophy, Linguistics, Electronics Technology, and other subjects. No degree awarded, alas.
  • Married to Carol – one stepdaughter, no other children.
  • 5′6″, 164 pounds — I lost weight down to the low 150s last year (yay!), and gained back a few pounds on purpose over the past few months when I was working on building up muscle. I’ll tell more about that story when I can get one of my other blogs (http://geekmyfitness.com) online.
  • Bisexual, although most of my sexual experience has been with women.
  • Employed since November 2006 by Fiserv as a Production Control Operator, which is just about as boring as it sounds. My lack of a degree has limited me to my current dead-end job prospects for some time now, but at least my current job keeps food on the table and a roof over our heads.
  • Politically liberal / progressive, but nowhere near as militant as some. Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity speaks to me more than a lot of the diaries on DailyKos.com (where I’ve done quite a bit of posting over the past few years.
  • Atheist, former Catholic, Not as militant an atheist as some. Sympathetic to most any religion that’s willing to let me go to hell in my own way.
  • Interests include blogging (although you might not know it to look at my spotty posting over the past few months), Toastmasters, NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), computer programming (especially Python and Microsoft .NET technologies), bicycling (mostly just commuting to work and back these days), and working out.

So here I am, still. Stay tuned for more.

So you want to be a Program Manager

February 26th, 2010

I’ve been reading Joel Spolsky’s blog recently, going back through the archives, and I found this gem of a post from about a year ago:

How to be a program manager

What does a program manager do?

  1. Design UIs
  2. Write functional specs
  3. Coordinate teams
  4. Serve as the customer advocate, and
  5. Wear Banana Republic chinos

…

It is possible to be an effective program manager without being a coder, but the burden of earning the respect of the programming team will be higher.

…
How do you learn to be a Program Manager?

Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer’s approach to designing technology with a politician’s ability to build consensus and bring people together. While you’re working on that, though, there are a few books you should read:

As far as I can tell, Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen is the only book that’s been written that pretty much covers exactly what a program manager has to do, so start with that. Scott was a program manager on the Internet Explorer team for many years.

Another big part of the program manager’s job is user interface design. Read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, then my own book User Interface Design for Programmers.

Finally, and I know it sounds cheesy, but Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book How to Win Friends & Influence People is actually a fantastic introduction to interpersonal skills. It’s the first book I make all the management trainees at Fog Creek read, before anything else, and they always snicker when I tell them to read it, and love it when they’re done.

Huh.

I’ve been having a big pity party over the past year and a half.

I’m too old.
I don’t have a degree.
I’ve got a crappy dead-end job.
I can’t get a real job without a degree.
I can’t afford to get a degree.

Anyway, what the hell could I do? In my 30 years of working for a living, I’ve not seen anything I really wanted to do. I’ve gotten involved in things like technical writing, involved to the point of forgetting to go home at the end of my work day — but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that. Back in college, I got involved like that with computer programming – but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that, too.

But that list — design UIs, write functional specs, coordinate teams, serve as a customer advocate – I could DO that! I could even wear Banana Republic chinos (although I usually buy Dockers).

I may look into becoming a software Program Manager. I’ve got “month-end” coming up next week at work, but after that, I’m going to pick up Scott Berkun’s book and see if being a Program Manager still seems like a good idea after reading that.

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“Can’t afford your medication?”

February 8th, 2010

You know those blurbs at the end of pharmaceuticals commercials on TV? “If you can’t afford your medication, Prescott Pharmaceuticals may be able to help.” Who is the intended audience for those blurbs?

According to DailyKos commenter Ralphdog (a rural family-practice physician), those programs involve a LOT of paperwork for the doctor – so much so that some doctors won’t fill out that paperwork without charging the patient (who can’t afford their medications, remember) a paperwork fee. So the pharmaceutical companies don’t seem to be knocking themselves out to make these medicines available to low-income patients.

OTOH, people with reasonable insurance will probably hear those blurbs at the end of the commercials and think, “Well, that’s good. If the pharmaceutical companies are helping out, I guess I don’t need to be concerned.” This is straight out of psychological studies of “Social Proof.” Robert Cialdini writes about this in connection with the Kitty Genovese case, IIRC.

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