originally posted january 25, 2004
yak, yak, yak
It's a standard-issue Pittsburgh January. The weather outside is horrifically cold and windy, with piles of snow as far as I can see. I am now a true start-up employee: on January 20, I vested in a few thousand stock options. My options aren't worth anything since my company isn't publically traded, but it's nice to know that there's at least one way for me to get rich quick in a few years. Meanwhile, there's not enough of myself to spread across the Internet.
photos everywhere
This year, I decided to dress my cubicle down. I took down a couple of old posters and bought several picture frames. Now at work, I can glance over at pictures of my family instead of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. Once my photos arrive from Shutterfly, I'll put up two more picture frames at home. It's still too cold for me to think about greenery, but the photos are a good start towards making my apartment more personal and less like an IKEA showroom.
typing about typing
The newest buzzword to hit the 'net is "social networking." Friends pulled me onto Friendster and Orkut. Friendster has become a victim of its own success, returning errors on most searches that I perform; Orkut was up for less than a week before I received the following message upon login:
We've taken orkut.com offline as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut is in the very early stages of development, it's likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months.
So now I have thousands of connections on two distinct sites. If Sixdegrees relaunches with all of its old databases intact, I'll have another set of data to prune and maintain. I signed up with an on-line personals site last year; that has borne some fruit, but I won't jinx myself by commenting further about that. Should any of these sites go down or become unpopular, I'll need to re-create my personal network again from the ground up.
There's also three journals I maintain now: the one you're reading now, the micro-content "Weill Real-Time" that appears as a sidebar, and my work blog on my company's intranet. That last blog has commanded the most interest: I take about 10 minutes every day to write something about my day's activities. My boss encouraged me and all engineers to create a work blog, and now comments on my entries both to me and to other engineers. I can't help but wonder whether my professional life is way too important: I only find enough important stuff to write a personal update once a month, but I fill pages upon pages at work.
I just finished reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's an interesting text, one that I will have to read again sometime. The seventh, unifying habit entitled "Sharpen the Saw" contains an interesting quote about writing that I feel is appropriate.
Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. Writing good letters -- communicating on the deeper level . . . rather than on the shallow, superficial level of events -- also affects our ability to think clearly, to reason accurately, and to be understood effectively.
I have a lot of respect for people who can maintain personal web sites, journals (both public and private), social networks, and active participation in virtual communities. Sometimes, it seems like all of this is just words floating around; a sea of information with few islands of memorable content. Maybe sometime soon, I'll come up for air and see what this "real world" is all about.
Back to January 2004, or to the year 2004.
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