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Congrats Nate!
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Many of you may not realize that one of the guys on my team, Nate, is in the Air National Guard. Nate has made many sacrifices to serve this company and his family while serving the US military. He recently received two honors from the Air Force that I believe deserves public praise.
 First, Nate was recently given the Outstanding Airman of the Year award, a distinction given to a select few. The Outstanding Airman of the Year Ribbon is the highest personal ribbon decoration of the United States Air Force. This is no small feat to accomplish!
 In addition, Nate recently earned the “First Sergeant” position. Nate will be responsible for the morale, welfare, and conduct of all the enlisted members in his squadron and is the chief advisor to the squadron commander concerning the enlisted force. n his new role in the Air National Guard, Nate has become non-deployable, meaning that in times of war, his position requires him to stay here in Portland and support the soldiers and their families. This is great news as he was sorely missed for many months in 2002 when he was deployed to Afghanistan.
Nate, you have my sincerest, heart-felt congratulations! You deserve it.
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The Art of E-mail
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I have come to the conclusion that crafting e-mail is an art. If you want to successfully communicate to a group of people, you need to have a healthy talent for articulate speech. Sure, you could argue that any form of communication, written or verbal requires the same skills, and you'd be mostly right.
Readers almost always read business e-mails defensively, disecting words and inferring intentions that don't actually exist. Even if the author of a message expressed no negative emotions or intent in his composition, readers will often infer a negative reaction, especially when there are multiple recipients. I get very frustrated when people assume I am "yelling" at them when I am just stating a fact. Consider the following sentence:
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something?"
In many cases, if you were the person who drafted the proposal, you might infer that I thought your proposal was ineffective or "not good enough". You might also think that I wasn't paying attention in the meeting or perhaps I am trying to highlight the failure of the presenter. The literal interpretation of the message is almost always coupled with a negative emotion stemmed from a defense posture of the reader.
I do acknowledge that some of the posturing comes from the political nature of a business environment. Still, the communication itself can complete change emotional reading by adding to it. Now read the e-mail.
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something? :)"
Online communication has a fairly short history, but it has unique cultural implications that aren't prevalent in other forms of communication (that I can tell). For example, to solve the often mis-interpreted emotions behind my communication above, I used an emoticon to steer the emotional intentions of the message to a more nuetral or positive plane. The smiley face ":)" or wink ";)" are typically used to ensure that the reader isn't taking the message too negatively. While many forms of online communication (forums, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, etc) use emoticons, e-mail typically the only form of communication where emoticons are used in the normal course of business.
In short, this drives me nuts. Because I tend to be a straight-shooter, I am often misread and people assume I am upset at them. Lately I find myself overusing smiley faces and winks to prevent the problem. I suppose it's possible to express a neutral or positive tone without emoticons, but that usually requires adding irrelevant information to the e-mail which reduces the brevity.
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something? Sometimes my bone-headed nature fails to grasp the obvious! Please help!"
Now I've had to call out a potential fault in myself, which takes any pretext of assumed failure out of the message. For the most part, this helps to set the readers at ease and puts them into a more helpful mode of thinking. However, it added easily 20-30% to the size of the message that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Now I am no fuddy-duddy by any means. I don't have any sticks in places where the sun don't shine. I don't mind the subtle and intricate nature of human speech and the english language. But, darn it all, I type a gabillion messages a day and it eats a lot of my time to compose my messages in ways that won't be misinterpreted. If my original sentence were in a book or a newspaper I don't it would have the same emotional response that e-mail generates. For some reason, e-mail is more personal and affecting.
Additionally, I find brevity to be critical for business communication. If you want someone to read it, it had better be short! 80% of e-mails that are as long as this blog entry won't be read in their entirety. They will be skimmed, often looking for their name or key words that might affect them.
Because I work in IT, I often need to communicate complicated messages to people that just don't want to read lengthy messages. I could use smileys instead of fluffy speech, but then my e-mail doesn't look serious. How serious can my message be when it's littered with :) and ;) and :( ?
I long for a world where people can just relax and stop reading more out of a message than is literally there. For the record, this message does not count concise or necessarily the most effective ordering of english words and sentences. I refuse to spend as much time on my blog as I do on my work e-mails. ;)
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November Update
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After an exhausting trip to London, November was a whirlwind of work, work, and some more work. I was hoping that after the London trip, the end of the year at work would settle down a bit and give me and my team some time to catch up on a few things. Unfortunately, it actually kept a steady pace and in the past week, has been incredibly busy. I took a nice vacation during the week of Thanksgiving though which was much needed.
Much of my Thanksgiving vacation was spent working on the home theater. Rebecca and I decided to move the home theater into another room which required us to demolish an existing wall and rebuild it. The existing wall was ugly to say the least. It has weird indoor windows and a small door made from 2x4's. We removed the workbench that was in the room and stripped the wall down to mere studs only to discover that we needed to add 4 more. Luckily, Kelly popped over and helped me frame the wall and pickup drywall at home depot. Framing the wall required re-wiring the electrical romex through the new studs, but it wasn't too hard. The next day Jeff helped me get the drywall up and later in the afternoon, Andy relieved Jeff to help me finish the job. After some corner bead and mud, the wall was looking pretty good.
 Rebecca and I then spent the next day sanding, priming, and painting the room. We went with "Red Red Wine" for the walls and black for the ceiling and accents. It came out awesome! We then moved the carpet to be flush with the rear wall, leaving bare floor in the front of the room where the TV and equipment are. Eventually we will replace the carpet to fill the room, but for now, we needed to work within the budget. I bought new brown outlets and faceplates and spray painted them all flat black. This worked out well. We were able to paint, do the carpet, and move all of the theater equipment into the room in one long day. The end result is awesome and we are very pleased with our quick DIY makeover. It's not perfect and not 100% completed, but it's a million times better than it was.
For Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Steve and Kelly's and had a wonderful dinner and a great visit with the extended family. It's always a pleasure to visit the Patterson's, but this was a particularly warm event.
Rebecca and I decided to give each other computers for Christmas. I've always built my own computer, but I finally decided to order a Dell. I'm just too lazy to bother with the research necessary to choose the right parts, order them, and put it all together. Needless to say, I was a bit apprehensive about how the computers would perform. The computers came in this week and setup was pretty painless.
 I got a Dell XPS 400. It has an Intel Pentium 830D processor (3.0Ghz dual-core) with 2GB of RAM. It also has two DVD drives (one read, and one RW). The media card reader is particularly handy as I can take the SD card from the camera and plug it straight into the front of my PC. The computer is absolutely whisper quiet which is a stark change from the 747 jet engine I'm used to. I did move my Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS from my old computer to this new one though as it's a fairly up-to-date device. Rebecca got a Dell E310 with a 3.0Ghz P4 HT and 1GB of RAM. She also got a new flat panel monitor and seems to be impressed with the performance so far. I was able to get both computers up and running in record time. In fact, it took longer to backup the data on Rebecca's computer than it did to get everything restored onto the new one. Sheesh! Of course, she upgraded from a 733Mhz with 256MB of RAM. Night and day there.
 By far, the highlight of this computer is my new video card: the Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB. This is the fasted video processor on the market currectly and runs my favorite game (World of Warcraft) at 1280x1024 with all detail turned up at 4x AA at over 100 frames per second. Wow! My monitor doesn't support higher resolutions, but I would love to see how it performs at even higher resolutions. I also checked out the Half-Life: Lost Coast demo and it ran smooth as butter with detail turned up as well. I'm happy. :)
Lastly, we took some pictures of the kids recently that came out great. I'm not posting them as the outfits they're wearing will likely be in our Christmas cards when I take some pictures this weekend. Just know that cute pictures are coming. :)
Oh yeah, Happy 53rd Birthday to my dear ol' mum! :)
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