The dog I needed

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Last October, I adopted Nala, the most adorable puppy in the world. That’s not a surprise to you if you’ve interacted with me at any level since the beginning of last August. If we’ve had more than a five minute conversation, you’ve probably also noticed that dog training and behaviour has become an all-consuming hobby for me, definitely bordering on an obsession.

If you’d asked me to bet on that happening a year ago, I’d have laughed at you. In fact, I distinctly remember talking with a friend about how little training I planned on doing a week or so before I brought Nala home. I had enrolled her in a day training program a coworker recommended, and completely assumed that at the end of it I’d have a perfect well-behaved dog who was all set up for life.

If I had brought home a different dog, that might have been all I did. Sometimes I see people out in the world with puppies who are perfectly chill in any situation, and just totally content to settle in a crowded space, and I’m pretty sure if I had that puppy I wouldn’t have felt the need to work on anything past basic manners. I did not get that puppy.

From the first day, Nala was a rambunctious fireball of energy who did not want to stop moving for even an instant. She was incredibly confident approaching any new situation whether it be a tennis ball or a new person and I was in no way ready to direct her energy. At some point, I stumbled across a Reddit post talking about an online dog training course, thought the results sounded pretty great for not that much money, and signed up thinking it couldn’t hurt. The course, and the podcast which went with it, helped me to learn that there’s so much more to dog training than just “lure and reward” and got me onto this path.

After finishing that course, I started reading (and listening, I really love podcasts) to other voices in the dog training community, and learned a ton more about what’s going on at the forefront of animal behaviour research. I’ve started geeking out on the learning theory behind the training even past the specific skills I’m working on with Nala (thanks to every group class instructor who has dealt with my very esoteric questions you were not expecting in your basic life skills class).

I’ve also gone from loving dogs as a general concept to seeing dogs as real individuals who have real personalities, skills, and needs. I’ve thought a lot about applying the compassion I feel towards those individuals not just to dogs but also to the people in my life.

Without Nala, I could not possibly have learned everything I have and would be a hugely different person than I am today. If I’d known how much I would enjoy dog training, and how much was possible to train, I’d probably have told my past self to adopt an adult dog and put in the exact same amount of effort, but I doubt I’d have had the motivation to put in all the time without needing to do so for Nala.

As it was, Nala was the exact perfect dog I needed in my life. She needed a level of attention that I couldn’t skimp on, and a level of experience that I didn’t possess. Thanks to her, I started building towards having that experience, and realizing I enjoyed it along the way. I also have the most absolutely adorable puppy with the best personality who I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. So, like so many things in my life, I don’t think I made the best decisions I could have, but I’m insanely glad I made exactly the decisions I did.

Recycling some old electronics

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One of the things I decided I wanted to do this year was write more blog posts.  I’ve said that many times in the past, and it’s obviously failed to a fantastic degree, however, here’s to another attempt (or to ignoring reality/the past).  I’m going to start off with a rather inane post with the hope that there’s no way I can become more pointless as time goes on.

Earlier this week, I “recycled” some old electronics.  Having moved recently, I’ve done many passes of cleaning out some old stuff, but I think this is the first time I parted with things that felt significant at the time of buying them.  I recycled the first tablet I had ever bought (also one of the first electronics in general that I purchased completely on my own) along with the first digital camera I truly considered mine (and though I ordered it, I’m reasonably sure it came as a high school graduation present from my mom).

The tablet was shockingly the least hard thing to get rid of.  Despite having bought it right when it first came out (it was one of the original Nexus 7s), I had left it sitting in a closet untouched for the past two years and even before then had not given it any attention.  In essence, I had already parted with it nearly four years ago, but it still felt a bit strange abandoning that part of my electronics life.

For the camera, it felt a bit harder setting it aside.  I remember ordering it near the end of my senior year of high school after a lot of deliberation…this was still in the age of cell phone cameras being hopelessly behind real cameras and I wanted something that could at least take reasonable pictures.  I think it was one of the biggest purchases I (or more likely my mother on my behalf) made at that point and through its life

This past year though, I pulled it out to check how it was doing thinking it might be handy to have a smaller camera along for hiking trips and discovered I could no longer turn it on.  I had used it to take a few photos when I first moved to New York (it still felt nicer to use than my cell phone), but hadn’t touched it since.  I plugged it in, left it for a while, and still nothing.  At this point, there really wasn’t anything else I was able to do and I had already acquired several new cameras lately, so attempting a repair didn’t feel worthwhile.  Still, even as I walked to Best Buy to recycle it, I felt like there was so much meaning in it still.  I could hold it in my hand still and think back on the various scratches it had, remembering for many of them the first time I noticed them (as much as I liked that camera, I still just left it sitting in my backpack much of the time; I’ve always felt it better to have a device nearby and risk some damage than to never be able to use it).  Eventually though, I had to accept that the camera, like the tablet, had become more of an ornament hidden on a dark shelf than anything I was likely to use again, and discard it as well.

One of the most striking things for me was that these were not only two of the earliest electronics that I made the decision to purchase on my own, but also two of the most recent purchases I made where I had some illusion I would keep them forever.  Even as I look around my apartment at some of things I own I like the most: my espresso machine, my camera(s), even my bike, I can’t help but think that someday in the next ten years or so I’ll decide I’d like to try the newer version.  I remember my parents keeping their old bikes from decades ago in the garage and can’t help but wonder whether the realization that I’m never going to do that is a generational difference, or just a difference in how I think.  I wonder how much this is a true departure from my earlier inability to throw anything away, and how much of it is just me trying to strip off any emotion from possessions as I adapt the the necessities of living without a garage.  And finally, I wonder what my mother thinks knowing that I can’t bring myself to regard any possession I have as falling into the category as a heirloom, and especially how this affects those kind enough to give me gifts that I may enjoy but never consider permanent.

 

 

Oh, and as a last note (phew, the prior last paragraph felt way too long for a closing), I realized right as I was finishing the last sentence that I do have at least one possession that still has some kind of emotional attachment to me: a stuffed animal mouse that I have had since I was a child.  Fortunately, the panic triggered by realizing I didn’t remember unpacking it is over and I managed to find it in the “junk box” (hey, no room for a drawer in my last apartment) I had moved from the previous apartment (and added a few last-minute items to as the last things I packed).  Turns out there were also a couple old calculators I’ve had since high school (including a TI-84 with a *very* assertive personality) and some old smartphones…so I guess I’m not completely done being emotional over possessions.

Rent and La Boheme

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Woah, I’m posting again!  It’s strange, I’ve written about a half-dozen half-posts that are all insanely more substantial than this one.  Anyways, here’s just a fun rambling of me on Rent!

Today, I watched Rent again after what must be almost a decade.  This was prompted by having watched La Boheme yesterday (at the Metropolitan Opera (vague thoughts on that below)) and then deciding I really did not want to do much today after work.  About two minutes into the movie, I realized I was going to have a lot of thoughts on it, so, here’s a blog post covering a couple of those thoughts.  I apologize in advance for the lack of organization here, this is pretty much just me jotting down all my thoughts in a quick rush.  If you want to read some of my less intellectual thoughts on the movie, feel free to check out Twitter.

First off, wow, I’m so much grumpier than I once was…  I don’t think think this is actually the first time I realized it, but it is absolutely amazing how much I fail to emphasize with the main characters here.  I mean, the entire premise of this movie is that there is a group of artists who managed to get away with not paying rent for a year and then are absolutely grumpy because the landlord says they have to start paying rent.  I mean, I’m already grumpy having to pay rent…but I really don’t think anyone deserves to get off rent-free just because they are “bohemian”…  So, yeah, I’m the grumpy person.  I’m bitter about them getting what looks like a pretty sizable apartment rent-free and I’m definitely grumpy about the fact that they are on the subway singing and disturbing passengers, I mean, what kind of person would actually take a stranger’s hat? (also, first side note, hats get stolen at least twice in this movie)

I had seen the opera once before, as a recording, and it honestly was nothing like seeing it in person yesterday.  First of all, it was my first opera at the Metropolitan Opera (yeah, I know, took long enough), and it was impossible to not be absolutely in awe of the scale they worked at.  When they opened the curtain on the second act, they had what seemed like an entire city on stage with multiple levels built up, multiple buildings you could see into.  It was amazing.  It made me think back to the way that in Phantom of the Opera they used some dummies onstage in order to make it look like the room was actually full.  For this opera though, that was insanely unnecessary as the stage was completely and totally crowded due to the presence of real people.  And that is before they brought an actual horse-drawn carriage onto the stage…or a marching band…yeah, it was crazy.  I’m insanely impressed just having the chance to behold something at that scale.

One of the other amazing things about the opera was how much intermission time the Met gives you.  At least a third of the entire time I was there was spent wandering around.  It was a great chance to people watch, but honestly in general just made me wish I had gone with someone to chat with during those breaks.  I had always been thinking of the opera as more of an activity to actually see the performance (the way I had at school), but it felt almost like it was there to play a more social role based on actually going.

Anyways, moving back to Rent for a bit, I think one of the coolest things is how much of a difference there was between some parts of the two and how similar they were in other ways.  I actually almost did a class project on this in high school once (I totally could have justified this for World History, comparing all the adaptions of La Boheme) and think there is a ton that you can focus on for this.  I want to just touch on a couple of the differences that really stood out to me this time watching through them though, so here goes!

First of all, there’s the way Mimi and Roger/Rodolfo have their first meeting.  In both, Mimi walks in with a candle that needs to be relit and it is not long before some heavy flirting begins.  In the opera though, it is Rodolfo who decides to blow out his candle to make her stay longer and then hide her key so she’ll stay even longer right before he starts professing his undying love.  In Rent, Mimi never really had an actual candle problem and Roger only takes her heroin to try to help her (or at least that’s how I always saw it).  It’s a continuous stream of watching Mimi try to come on to Roger and him being less than receptive, a far stretch from the original opera where they both declare they are in eternal love after only knowing the other person for about five minutes.  On this point, the musical is far more believable, and I like the decision to add that conflict where Roger is struggling with whether he is comfortable being in love with anyone knowing that his death is approaching.  When he finally comes around to deciding that he is willing to be with Mimi, I think it makes the moment a lot more emotional.

Oh, as a side note, a vaguely amusing piece of writing I remember from a long time ago: Light My Candle from Roger’s point of view.  Reading it now, the writing sucks, but there are still a few funny quips in there.

In the middle of both stories (well, technically missing from the movie, but you have a nice deleted scene for those of us who need emotional roller coasters) you have Goodby Love (or, well, “Addio dolce svegliare alla mattina” if you are thinking of the Opera), a song that is equally emotional in both stories, but the exchange between Roger and Mark has a lot more emotion in Rent than the equivalent exchange in La Boheme.  Personally, I think removing it and just having Roger having decided to leave without having that emotionally charged moment between him and Mimi removes a lot from the story.  According to the commentary track (which I did not listen to this time but remember from many years ago) it was removed because there were too many funny points and miserable points mixed in and it confused audiences too much.  I’d disagree, and say that that is life, and having that scene in there was crucial to the movie. (side note: opposite couples ended up reconciling at this point in Rent and La Boheme)

Finally, you have the end of the stories.  In La Boheme, Mimi dies.  Silently.  Without anyone actually noticing.  It just happens.  That feels a bit real, and I absolutely applaud the way that was set.  In Rent, Mimi “dies” with everyone surrounding here worrying about her, and everyone notices, but then she comes back to life with a tragic story of how Angel spoke to her in a dream.  Now, ignoring the whole fact that Mimi is probably still pretty close to death and going to die from AIDS anyways, it’s supposed to be a powerful moment.  I personally think that the ending with her death was better, but Rent already had the necessary tragic death, and I understand why the decision to have that hope was taken.

Going away from the arc of Mimi (I really love just being able to use one name here) for a bit, there are a couple huge character changes I also wanted to touch upon here briefly.  First of all, the characters of Schaunard and Colline from La Boheme.  They translate pretty closely to Angel and Colin in Rent, however, are clearly not in a relationship in the opera.  By adding that extra dimension, Larson managed to have a much greater message than was ever in the source material.  Having Angel die in the middle of the story was also a huge emotional tie to everything else that was happening and created a great point for the characters to rally together and realize what was happening in their lives.  It gave Roger his excuse to consider his need to move to Santa Fe, and it did a great job of giving Mark a chance to reflect upon life as well (though, seriously, I don’t get why he had to quit his job).

Another lesser change is moving to having two Marcellos.  In Rent, Mark was always my favourite character.  I had to identify with him as the “techie” of the group (and so much more now…it used to annoy me to no end how he managed to fix all the problems instantly, but now I understand that’s really what it is like in the real world, I’m sorry for doubting).  They also add Joanne who is in an actual relationship with Maureen throughout Rent.  It was kind of sad watching Mark be alone throughout the whole thing (someone really needs to make a montage of awkward Mark being alone moments), I think getting to see the nice dynamic between Mark and Joanne was definitely worth it.  You could still have Mark playing the part of the sad guy who will never actually get over Maureen (much closer to the role of Marcellos) while now getting a super powerful character in Joanne who would go head-to-head with Maureen over all her crazy stuff, call her out on things, and in general make sure we got a much more interesting show to watch.

Finally, I wanted to touch upon the increase in death that you see in Rent.  While Mimi survives, the threat of death hangs over the characters so much more than in La Boheme.  In La Boheme, while they are all starving artists, Mimi is the only one facing an actual threat of death hanging over her.  This is another area where I believe Rent manages to add a lot of depth to an already incredibly emotional opera, moving it from conveying emotions about abstract concepts to the emotions being things that you are capable of somewhat relating to.

For the longest time, Rent was my absolute favourite musical.  Even after it was no longer my favourite musical, when it was initially taken over by Wicked, I still absolutely loved the story.  That slowly drifted away though as I started to realize that I identified more with Benny than with any of the actual bohemians.  I still have a nearly unlimited level of respect for those in creative professions, but I can no longer believe that that allows them to feel the level of pity for themselves that you see in Rent.  They have responsibilities they need to worry about, and I think that Rent does a great job of ignoring those.

Watching Rent again, the music was more amazing than I remember.  I completely grok why it was my favourite musical for so long, even ignoring the fact that it probably just counts as my rebellious phase of being a teenager (hey, I was a pretty non-rebellious teenager).  The story has so much emotion built into it, but it is sadly not in a way that I can identify with anymore.

I’m using Twitter now!

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So, recently, I’ve run into a class of things I think that are way too short to put into a blog post, but I just do not feel like posting to other places.  I mean, there’s Facebook, but anytime I post to Facebook I feel like I’m making way too big of a deal out of something.  Then there’s snapchat, which works, but I think my snaps are pretty boring and then there is no way to remember things.  Plus, it feels too targeted.  To be clear, here are some examples of things that I have thought about posting the past few days:

How to ship code: 1. Change the DNS rules; 2. Upload the files; 3. Fly out of the state without a laptop #doingitright

I just wrote a letter to my sister and managed to start every paragraph with “So,” #ashamed #toolongtorewrite

Finally got my laptop back! #twoweekslater #canfinallywritethispost

Now, at first, I came up with what I thought was a pretty wonderful solution, and I’m sure it is exactly what everyone is thinking of.  I was going to write a small wordpress plugin that would let me make tiny updates that would show up in a module (or whatever wordpress calls the tiny things to the side) with the last couple of them visible.  It solved all my problems: I’d have a chance to do a tiny bit of wordpress development again and I would have a place to post these things.  Then I realized that this really alread existed…in the form of Twitter.

So, anyways,

Operating Systems and Food Trucks

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So, I’m sure the thing everyone is wondering right now is (I mean, assuming you read the title): “What do operating systems and food trucks have to do with each other?”.  My personal comprehensive list is one item long: “They are both in the title of this blog post”.  I’m sure you are now wondering why I chose to put them  in the title, and that’s because the rest of this post is about to cover applying the language of operating systems to working in a food truck (and by that, I  mean the sausage trucks you see at fairs). Why am I choosing to talk about that? Earlier today, I was volunteering at a sausage truck with a Kiwanis club and I kept catching myself using operating system terminology or thinking about the work in terms of different concepts in the field. For those of you familiar with O/S terms, I do understand I am about to make a couple bad mappings, the goal of this post is more to talk about how the terms could be used in everyday speech (which, in my opinion, is one of the best parts of having O/S knowledge)

So, today, after a bit of shuffling around, I ended up working the pretzel station in the food truck. This entailed taking some pretzels, putting them in the microwave for a few minutes, taking them out of the microwave, covering them with salt, placing them in the display, and repeating. Here, I’ll draw a pretty ascii picture for you.  My guestimates about times are included as well (some of these are very wrong by the way).

|-----0-----|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----1-----|-----------|-----------|-----------|
|  insert   | microwave |  remove   |   salt    |  insert   | microwave |  remove   |   salt    |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
|   ~0:20   |   ~2:30   |   ~0:10   |   ~1:00   |   ~0:20   |   ~2:30   |   ~0:10   |   ~1:00   |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|

So, what you see here is a highly serial process. Each task is completed before any other task is started, and only one task is going on at any single time. What you see here is also an incredibly inefficient process and there are a lot of places to improve it. By the way, to start with, let’s say that we are making three pretzels at a time, and it’s taking about four minutes to do that (so ~1:20/pretzel).

Approaching the problem of making this more efficient from a systems perspective, the first thing we want to do is look for resource usage. Here, we can identify a couple major resources: the microwave and the salt. Here’s a nice picture of when these resources are being used at each step of the process.

|-----0-----|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----1-----|-----------|-----------|-----------|
|  insert   | microwave |  remove   |   salt    |  insert   | microwave |  remove   |   salt    |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
|   ~0:20   |   ~2:30   |   ~0:10   |   ~1:00   |   ~0:20   |   ~2:30   |   ~0:10   |   ~1:00   |
| microwave | microwave | microwave |   salt    | microwave | microwave | microwave |   salt    |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|

Looking at this chart, it’s pretty clear that there is a big portion of the time that we are using the microwave, and a big portion of the time we are using the salt, and really not much overlap between those times. There are a couple ways we could approach this problem from an O/S perspective but I’m going to take us out of the picture, assume that everything is being controlled by a robot, and introduce a really awesome concept: pipelines!

So, the idea of a pipeline is that you have a number of resources and while each resource can only be doing on thing at a time, you can have multiple resources working at the same time. One way to think about this in the real world is doing laundry (with only one washer and dryer but with multiple loads): you can load the next load of clothing into the washer before the first load is done in the dryer. For us, this means that we can do the salting at the same time as the microwaving is happening for another batch of pretzels! A diagram of this is below, with all the microwave stuff having been condensed to one step for simplicity.

| microwave |   salt    |
            | microwave |   salt    |
                        | microwave |   salt    |

In this graph, it takes us three minutes to finish one step of the pipeline once the pipeline is in its steady state (the period after warm-up (the beginning, where only microwaving is going on) and before cool-down (the end, where only the salting is going on)) which takes us down to only one minute per pretzel!

Now, the above metaphor of pipelining is actually kind of weak, and that’s because I’m leaving out a pretty significant detail: the person. As a person, one is required to be doing work during most of these steps as well. That graph above? It actually will not work because the first twenty seconds (and last ten seconds) of the microwave step require a person to actively be working as does the entire salting process (the timing ends up still working, but only because salting takes less time). To really get a better picture of this, I’m going to talk about another cool operating systems concept: threads.

In an operating system, a thread is a way to abstract the fact that a computer processor can really only be doing one thing at a time, but we expect our computer to be doing a lot of different things at once. We would all be pretty upset if our phone completely froze up as we tried to load a website and we could not go send a snapchat at the same time. It’s a way for the computer to deal with all the waiting it has to do while doing I/O (downloading that website is mostly just waiting for the data to arrive). Internally, the computer ends up constantly switching between threads constantly so that it is “always” working on something, the same way we multi-task (except it is WAY better at threading than we are at multi-tasking). To think about preparing pretzels in terms of threading, we look at ourselves as the process and consider what thread we are going to work on (i.e. what task we are going to do). For the below, I’m going to label items in ten-second interval for what we are working on at any given time, with each new set of pretzels being on a new line.  “M” is the times we are using the microwave, “S” is anything where we are using the salt dish, and “-” is anytime the food is in the microwave and we are not doing anything with it.

0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8
  SSSSSS
MM---------------M  SSSSSS
                  MM---------------M  SSSSSS
                                    MM---------------M
                                                      etc.

I’m going to condense this down to one line, removing the “-“s since they do not make sense at a global level.

0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8
MMSSSSSS         MMMSSSSSS         MMMSSSSSS         M...

Looking at this, we can see that there is a huge chunk of time that no work is being done (50% of the time actually (not on that graph, but looking at a steady state)), that’s because we are blocking on the microwave. Whenever a computer scientist says blocking (not sure about everyone else, but this is probably the term I use most often in everyday speech), it means that something is not able to get work done because some other resource is not available. In this case, we can’t start another set of pretzels because the microwave is in use. When that happens, all you really can do is wait for other work to come up. In the case of the sausage truck, I was right next to where they were grilling the sausages so I could use the time to move uncooked knackwursts into a pot of hot water. That entire process (getting a bag, opening it, separating the sausages, changing gloves since I just touched raw meat) ends up taking about a minute and a half, which gives us the following time graph:

0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8
MMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKMMMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKMMMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKM...

As you can see, that shows 100% CPU (i.e. me) utilization, an awesome goal to reach in many cases (in computing, there are many times where you end up with very low CPU utilization because most of the time is spent waiting to read/write things to disks/the network). Thinking back to our pretzels, we still are still only turning them out at a rate of 1/minute, and I can assure you that people at a fair order at a higher rate than that. In computing, the normal way to deal with this is to throw more resources (i.e. money) at the problem, and the Kiwanians chose to do much the same thing adding another human, microwave, and salt tray at the other end of the sausage truck (in computing, we’d also refer to having multiple CPUs (people) doing the same task as adding parallelism). This brings the time per pretzel down to thirty seconds and gives you the following nice graph (yeah, I have no idea what the person at the other end of the truck was doing with the extra time).

0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8
MMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKMMMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKMMMSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKM...
MMSSSSSS?????????MMMSSSSSS?????????MMMSSSSSS?????????M...

There are a bunch of other ways you could look at this from an operating systems standpoint (many of them proving a much better mapping than what I chose to go with), as with many of the mudane tasks we do on a daily basis. Being a computer scientist gives you a lot of new ways to talk about doing work…the only downside to that is you sound like you are just speaking gibberish in many crowds.

The Meaning of a Nomination

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One thing that is common to almost every single student organization is that elections are held. No matter what org it is, we need some way to choose leaders for the following year, and letting the members decide usually seems pretty good considering the values we hold as a people.  With elections, you always need some way to decide who is running, and parliamentary procedure tells us this should be done through nominations.  Through a couple organizations I have been a part of, I’ve seen nominations lose the meaning I think they should have and I would like to comment both on the problems I have seen with them in the past (both with nominations and seconds), and on what I think a nomination should mean.

One of the first times I had a problem with nominations, it was actually from a person seconding a nomination.  The person being nominated was someone I had never heard of, and it turned out that was true for just about everyone in the room.  I did not know the person who made the nomination, but I did know the seconder, so I asked him about the candidate after the meeting.  Surprisingly, he also did not know about the person, and just felt sorry that no one was seconding the nomination.  While I understand the desire to feel sorry for someone, you should give more weight to yourself than to offer your support for someone just out of pity.  One thing to note is that, in actuality, nominations for office do not even need a second (and unless house rules state otherwise, nominations are not even required if voting is done by ballot).

Another problem is using nominations to encourage people to run.  With another org, there is the habit of nominating just about every single person at the nomination meeting, and not even suggesting what position that person would be good for.  Now, I completely understand the logic behind this one, holding an officer position is a great way to get more involved with an organization, and you want to make sure as many new members get involved as possible, however, I can’t bring myself to put any weight on your nomination.  I understand that you are not making the nomination with the expectation that I will care about what you think, that you are just wanting to help the other person, however, that just takes away the meaning from any genuine nominations that are being made.

So, by this point, you’ve probably figured out what I think a nomination should mean.  Nominating someone for an office should show that you believe the person could do a good job in that position.  If you are not even sure what position the person would be good for, but you think that person would be good for something, talk to the person.  It can be helpful to be encouraging to a person, however, that can be better done through a conversation about why you support the person, and learning more about what he or she could be qualified for, than just nominating the person in the middle of a meeting…right after you just did the same thing for a bunch of other people.

Nominations exist so that we know the field of candidates contains people who have some level of support, and the members time does not get wasted.  I should also be able to use the nomination to gauge something about the candidate, so make sure that you think the person would be good for a specific position before you make the nomination.  Like just about anything in parliamentary procedure, nominations exist for a reason, and I think everything works better if that reason is kept in mind.

 

(meta note: this has been typed up sitting here for about a month…I really need to get better at actually posting things)

How I use Trello for Circle K

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Well, the draft for this post has been sitting around since August of last year, so I thought I might as well publish it now.  I’ve included roughly what I had saved, a few cleanups, and then a section at the end that goes over some slightly more modern thoughts I had.  Eight-month-ago Jonathan knew nothing…

This summer, I have had the amazing chance to work at Fog Creek Software on a product called Trello (trello.com). To give a really quick summary, Trello is a great way of managing to do lists (or other kinds of lists), and includes a lot of nice features for working with teams. In addition to working on it, and using it for work, I have started to use it a lot more for personal things. One of the areas I am getting the most use out of Trello lately has been for Circle K.  Trello has done a great job of helping me keep up-to-date with my work as a Subregion C trustee, but I honestly don’t think that is where it is the most useful.  It offers a lot to help you stay useful as an individual, but can do even more for helping Circle Ks stay organized as a group.

Subregion C

I guess the best place to start talking would be about how I use Trello for Subregion C business.  I have my Trello board split into a variety of lists: Communication Points, TODO, Notepad, and Transition Items.  Moving from left to right, Communication Points is where I keep information on the people and groups I talk to.  I have a card that just stays in the list for every person I talk to on a regular basis, and I keep the cards updated with a check-list of everything I have thought to ask the person about.  When the checklist gets too long, I make sure to schedule a meeting and then leave a comment on the card about what we talked about.  This helps me make sure that I am not needlessly bothering people, and also makes sure I have things to talk to people about when I get the chance, and I have a central place with notes about what we talked about.  There are also notes here for things like meetings and emails, just to help me stay on top of those too. (for another perspective on what I’m trying to accomplish with this first list, see http://blog.trello.com/using-trello-for-impromptu-meetings/)

The next list is by far the most boring one, TODO.  This is probably the most traditional list, I just stick cards in here, with actual due dates, for things I need to take care of.  Whenever I find free time, I just look at what is at the top of that list and work on it.  This list has included things such as getting bylaws from the Kiwanis staff or writing updates for board meetings.  Past that list, the other two are for me just making notes.  The first, Notepad, is just where I leave notes that I want to be able to refer back to.  This has included things like my personal notes about what we talked about at committee meetings, to some cool ideas for service projects that I think I might want to refer back to latelr (actually, to be totally honest, that is all that is in the list).  The final list, transition items, is just about the same thing, however, I’m making these notes for whoever comes after me instead of myself.  Honestly, I just wanted a place I could put things I knew should be in my packet without having to be too much on top of things and start my packet.

Committees/Boards

Now, Trello is great for helping me stay organized personally, however, I think it is much more useful for working with groups of people.  One place I used it in the past was for the Technology Committee in the Circle K club at the University of Michigan.  The Trello board gave us a good way to organize what projects people were working on without me needing to constantly be bothering everyone (or, at least, that was the idea).  For this, we kept a couple lists that were cool ideas we knew we would eventually want to work on.  Once we decided that an idea was good enough (and we had the necessary time/experience), someone would pick it off of a list, and start working on it (by moving it to another list and joining the card).  Finally, once a feature actually got added to the website, the card would get dragged to a list representing what was done each month, which was helpful when I was working on my MRFs.  This was a great tool for me when trying to figure out what people were working on, as well as for when people (finally) finished whatever they were working on and needed something else to do.

For the tech committee, Trello fit extremely nicely (using it pretty much exactly how trello.com/dev is set up), however, this is not how most committees within the club function, or how any boards (yeah, not referring to Trello boards here oddly) function.  When I joined the K-Fam committee at the beginning of the summer, I set up my own personal board to help me keep track of what I was doing.  It ended up looking a lot like my board for Sub-C stuff (two columns, “Communication Points” and “TODO”), and feel free to draw ideas from that.  If I was setting that up for the whole committee, I’d end up using the same idea, but there are a couple more things I’d add that do not apply to me.  First, I’d add a column for weekly projects like helping out at the Kiwanis Thrift Sale, or going to meetings of the local Builders Club.  These would function pretty much exactly like communication points (leaving a comment whenever you did something relative to the project), however, it would be a more specific place to look when thinking about updates for the projects.  Next, since the committee handles a bunch of non-regular projects, I would make a separate list for those.  There are some Circle K events (e.g. Service Day) that may be able to make use of their own separate board, however, I don’t think anything more than a card is necessary for most things.

Modern Comments

I thought I would come back and leave some comments (past the cleaning up and rewriting that I did above) based on the extra eight months of life experiences I have now.

First of all, regarding the Sub-C Trello Board, I have continuously referred to it throughout the year.  That said, there were a bunch of things that I became a lot less diligent about taking care of, most notably notes from meetings.  I wish I still did as good as a job with these as I did at the beginning of the year, however, laziness kind of took over and my notes became hastily scrawled on paper instead of the organized masterpieces they were before (yeah, I fail at notes in general, but they were much closer to masterpieces at the start).  As far as the K-Fam stuff, UofM’s Circle K did eventually try out Trello, and I made the K-Fam board conform to pretty much exactly what I said…and no one used it.  Trello is a fantastic service, however, it’s pretty much useless if no one gets on-board with it and I’m sad that there was not a stronger push towards that than what we had.

I hope that you got some good ideas about how to use Trello from this post.  For me, it is a nice tool for staying organized, and I think it has the potential to help a lot more people out with that.  If your Circle K is not using it already, I completely encourage you to try it, it can be a huge asset for your club, or any subset of your club.

Google Doc Email Notifications

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I don’t think I have made any posts in the past about something this simple, however, I just discovered this and I am wishing right now that I had found it sooner.  In Google Docs (well, technically, Google Drive Spreadsheets) it is possible to set up email notifications for whenever a spreadsheet changes.  Most impressively, this means that you are able to have an email sent to you whenever someone fills out a form!  To set this up, open up the spreadsheet (the one receiving form submissions), click on “Tools” (in the menu bar), and click on “Notification Rules…”.  You can select different options for how to be notified here.  Personally, I think the most useful one is to be notified whenever a user submits a form.  You can set this so you get the email either the moment the form is submitted or you can get a digest every day with a summary.

With this said, I was kind of disappointed when I realized that this does not extend to documents.  There are a couple documents I have where I would appreciate an email when someone else updates it.  Overall, however, I think form submissions are the most important action to have emails for and I wish I had known about this sooner.

WUMCON

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This weekend, I took a trip to Wisconsin for the Wisconsin-Upper Michigan Circle K’s DCON. It was a very different experience from any DCON I had been to in the past (i.e. Michigan Key club and Michigan Circle K) and I wanted to talk about why I decided to go as well as what the convention itself was like. The idea for this started as a much shorter overview post talking about what the differences were, and I might still do that later, but I ended up writing out enough that this is pretty much a play-by-play of the entire weekend. In other news, I succeeded in doing a lot of writing this weekend. Now all I need to do is make this writing more productive.

A year ago, another member of our club had talked about how she wanted to go to the convention. I was quickly talked into going (it was a Kiwanis-Family event, there was not much more I needed to hear than that) and was pretty sad when I was not able to go (I ended up running out of people to ask to go with me last year and did not feel like driving to it on my own). This year, after I realized that it was feasible to go, I decided I would definitely be going to the convention. Looking at the weekend, it seemed kind of infeasible to spend ten hours driving but that problem was easily solved by using the Amtrak to get there. I ended up having to cancel going to see the Lion King in Detroit but going to the convention was worth it.

To start with getting there, the train ride was an absolute blast. To the best of my knowledge it is the longest train ride I have been on but it did not feel long at all. On the train to Chicago, I sat alone for most of the trip which made it much easier to work on homework. Once we passed the Kalamazoo stop, the train filled up completely which made working on homework a bit more difficult. I still managed and got over half of my networking homework on the ride there. Between getting homework done and a train being more fun than driving, taking a train was one of the best decisions I made for this trip. Once we left Chicago heading to Wisconsin, the train ride was pretty similar to the first one, except a bit slower and much shorter. I arrived in Wisconsin in the early afternoon and met up with the fantastic WUM district!

When I got to the hotel, the WUM board was about to start doing script run-throughs. On a side note, this is something that I would really like to see Michigan do in the future to make our DCON seem more organized. Anyways, I started helping out with setting up some decorations until it was time for opening session. The first thing that WUM did at their opening session (after the board had a very epic musical entrance) was to have each club present a skit. These ranged from a comical presentation of an award for not having a skit to absolutely intense musical numbers. One club (Edgewood) even tried to do a live version of the Harlem Shake. I understood it about as well as I understand the video versions and it did seem to be lacking something. Once that was done, we went through nominations which were surprisingly painful. WUM follows the practice that the governor must ask “Are there any further nominations for the position of _______” thrice without anyone saying anything. This made nominations drag on nearly forever.

With the opening sessions over, we embarked upon something that can best be described as a service scavenger hunt. This was an awesome event where we ran between seven different stations with a service project at each of them. The entire time, we were trying to unscramble a message made up of letters given to us at each station. At the end, after doing some awesome projects, we discovered the theme for WUM’s Spring Fling 2013: “Serving at the speed of light”. The whole service scavenger hunt did a fantastic job of serving as both an icebreaker and community service so I was thrilled to be a part of it and will be trying to use that idea back in Michigan at some point.

After we finished the service, it was time for caucusing. I enjoyed watching the candidates and noticed the main difference between WUM and Michigan was how literature was presented. In WUM, each candidate is responsible for making and bringing their own literature while, in Michigan, we simply distribute a packet with a single page for each candidate. After caucusing, we went back to the room and talked about the candidates for a while. The discussion we had about candidates, as well as watching the candidates, helped me to gain a much better idea of what people are looking for during caucusing and I new feel more prepared to caucus myself.

Saturday morning began with a House of Delegates session (not noteworthy) which was immediately followed by some amazing workshops. The first workshop I went to was about how to run an engaging club meeting. It was present by Lena and Jo, both of whom had a good grasp on what made a meeting good and were able to talk about it in an interesting way. They began with examples of good and bad ways to run a meeting (had everyone walk out into the hall and then walk back in as if we were prospective new members) which really helped to get the point across about why it was important to do meetings well. After that, they went over some icebreaker ideas (my personal favorite was called “Do you want to buy a duck?”), talked about how to use technology, discussed bringing speakers in, and talked about some great social ideas. The workshop was very well-done and helpful, but was nothing compared to the next workshop I attended.

My second workshop was on team-building and was presented by Jane Erickson, the Kiwanis International Board Councilor for Circle K and Cody, the Subregion C trustee. They did an absolutely fantastic job going through three extremely fun team-building activities. The first activity we did was to shake hands with five people and to learn their names (there was more to it, I am not going to give full details for any of these). The next activity was to close our eyes and fallow her instructions for how to fold and pip a sheet of paper. When everyone ended up with completely different-looking sheets of paper, it did a great job of illustrating the problems we can often face when trying to communicate. The next activity was to put a rope around our wrists, link up with a partner, and try to get the ropes separated. My partner and I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work, even after we had the solution demonstrated to us. Once we finally got it to work, we both had to do it a couple more times before we believed that it was legitimately working. Finally, we did an activity with the same person to put our hands behind our back, pull out some number of fingers, and then be the first one to say the sum number of fingers. This workshop was able to present some new team-building activities that would be easy to do with other groups and make us think about different aspects of leadership at the same time. I went into the workshop having met Jane that morning and thinking a workshop with her would be interesting but I did not expect to walk out of it with that high of an opinion.

After the workshops, the next event on the schedule was the K-Family Eliminate Project lunch. This started with a showing of one of the Kiwanis ICON videos and then switched between the MCs (oh, yeah, each event had two board members serving as MCs) talking about a country where MNT had recently been eliminated and a K-Family member talking about his/her experiences in the family. The Eliminate presentations were not terrible but the K-Family members definitely stole the show. Some of the presenters were a K-Kid getting up to the microphone and telling her advisor that the advisor does not get to decide everything (“No! It is called K-Kids“), a Builders Club member getting up to the microphone and saying something similar to “Let’s do this” (I forget his exact wording) before beginning his speech, and a Circle K alumni talking about a crazy 5-hour board bonding canoe trip which involved the canoe running aground multiple times. All these presenters did a fantastic job, and a good number of them were absolutely adorable while giving the presentation.

After a simple caucusing session and a bit of service, it was time for the big recognition events. It started with a Governor’s and Administrator’s reception where most of the outstanding district officer awards were presented. Following that, their was the Presidents’ and Parents’ banquet. For WUM, most of the board members walked in escorted by their parents which was extremely touching to watch. We had a fantastic dinner (it was definitely among the best I have had at a K-Fam convention) followed by an even more fantastic keynote.

The keynote speaker for the convention was Jane Erickson, the same person who had presented the second workshop I went to. She shared some great stories that really captured what it meant to be in the Kiwanis Family and why the work we do is important. I left the room feeling emotional and inspired, something that is not the norm for me and keynotes. I know I am not alone in that sentiment and I really hope that Michigan can look into having her come to our convention sometime in the future.

After the dinner, there was the awesome talent show competition where clubs (or in one case, a division) got together and presented a skit of some kind. The talents included, among others, a Dr. Seuss book, a massive song-and-dance number that I believe was based on the movie “Pitch Perfect” (still need to see it), and an entire division having a huge rap battle. The amount of work that must have gone into each of the acts was astonishing, it completely blew away th skits from the previous day (at the time, I had wondered if those would be on Youtube so I could show Michigan). After the talent show, there was the dance. I ended up leaving that early because, well, dances… I went back to the room, talked for a couple hours, drifted in and out of sleeping and listening for a while, and then went to bed (this weekend was not at all good for my sleep schedule).

Sunday morning, it was finally time for the main event of the weekend: House of Delegates (the real one). I was absolutely thrilled to hear the announcement of the governor results but the rest of the house was pretty uninteresting. Hearing the credentials chair chair make a motion after each individual resolution (but not have seconds be asked for or voting be done) was mildly amusing, but not much else was amusing.

Finally, it was time for the closing session (i.e. crying time). The board was very well-bonded and emotional and it really was inspiring hearing Morgan talk about many of the things she had gone through. She gave some amazingly touching awards to all of her presidents along with some board members, Kiwanians, and family. Knowing some of the people she was recognizing, it was very touching hearing the presentations and I actually almost cried once (during a presentation of a black diamond (referred to by the rest of the world as a governor’s appreciation award) to Emily). At 1PM, the session was done and WUMCON was sadly over.

The train ride back home was about the same as the one there, except later and nicer. I grabbed a business class ticket for the Chicago-Ann Arbor leg of the journey and this was reasonably nicer. I got to board first (and was guaranteed to be facing forwards), was not sitting next to anyone, had more leg room (and a more comfy chair overall), got a comped beverage, and was given a free copy of the Chicago Tribune (not that interesting of a newspaper unfortunately). Overall, I would say it is definitely worth the extra twenty dollars to get business class on Amtrak and would recommend it for anyone traveling with them in the future.

This weekend was absolutely fantastic. I got to spend time with some amazing friends, meet some new ones, and then steal a lot of great ideas for future Michigan DCONs. I felt welcome at all times and really enjoyed talking to all of the WUM members. In addition to the actual convention activities, I had a nice chance to talk to some people I really respect about my personal activities for next year and I am now more excited than ever. We only have a month left before Michigan’s DCON and I cannot wait to see if we can manage to give WUM a run for their money.

Tablets

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I currently own two tablets: an iPad (third generation) and a Nexus 7.  For a while, I thought that tablets seemed like a complete gimmick and did not even vaguely consider purchasing one.  Since then, I have had time to think about what I want from my different devices and, most importantly, have been overpowered by the shiny devices.

When deciding to purchase the iPad, the main item that convinced me was the presence of a lot of extremely well-made aviation apps. Many of the apps for aviation (most notably Foreflight) are available only for iOS so that helped make the decision a lot easier.  In addition to these apps, the iPad did bring with it a slightly added status boost and looked cool. Thinking that I could use the device for note taking as well as for aviation, I decided to buy one in October.

Since I bought the iPad, I have used it for a variety of tasks, none of which actually had to do with flying (one exception here, but ignoring it). The two main uses I have had for the iPad are reading the New York Times and using iAnnotate. The New York Times is an outstanding source of news and being able to simply grab the iPad from my nightstand and start looking at todays news the moment I wake up is very nice for me. iAnnotate is also extremely useful and has made reading pdf documents a much less painful experience as well as  improving my productivity whenever I need to do so. In addition to the apps, I love the navigation that Apple built into the device (the multi-finger dragging). In spite of these great apps and the couple nice UI features, I can definitely say that the iPad was not worth its cost to me. In general, the iPad has been an excellent gadget to amuse myself with, and one that has helped me be slightly more productive.  I cannot, however, say that it was worth its cost.

A few months later, becoming jealous of the Nexus 7 that was to be my mother’s Christmas present, I decided to purchase one of these tablets for myself.  Primarily, I really liked the simple Google UI, Google Now, and the smaller size. Of these three, I still love the UI and Google Now, but the size has not actually affected the way I use it. Coming from a phone with motoblur, the fact that everything was simple and worked the way I would expect was refreshing. Regarding Google Now, the first time I turned the device on was as I was about to leave for the airport and it immediately pulled up my flight information along with directions to the airport and travel time. That was enough to sell me on it being useful and cool and was the main reason I became sold upon the device. Since then, I have found a lot of other cool features in Google Now, but it has become kind of useless with a tablet that does not have a constant internet connection. As far as value goes, I use the Nexus a lot less than I do the iPad, however, it also cost a lot less. If I no longer had the iPad, I think I could switch to using most of my common apps on the Nexus and still be satisfied. At $200, it is definitely worth it to get a Nexus 7 if you do not already have one, however, there is not enough of a bonus to purchase one if you already own one.

Using these two devices, I have learned a lot about how I use technology and what I expect of it. Tablets are never going to be able to fill the role of a primary device for me, however, they are a fun amusement and I am often glad I have at least one of mine. Owning two is a bit excessive for me, however, I am happy enough with each individually that I cannot imagine giving either up.

On a side note, I have had time to think about what apps I use the most while writing this and will be making a post soon about those.