Some interesting points that you could help me with:

• Just curious how do you tend to collaborate with your “co-workers”?
• What tools are you using when working with others?
• How do you communicate? IM, email, skype, phone, smoke signal, something else?
• Do you miss the physical proximity?
• How well do your collaborators work with you? Do they return IM messages, or answer all the questions you ask in an email?
• Any interesting stories about telecommuting that we can share with or friends?

You may ask why I care about this? I’ve recently started some more serious online collaboration and am curious if some of my experiences are shared, or if I’m just an island floating adrift. Like many of my friends, I’ve worked remotely on gigs and had to communicate from time to time, but now I’m having to do it much more often.

Looking forward to hearing from you and about your experiences outside of the cubicle!

The above link will take you over to Seth Godin’s blog, a most excellent place to find yourself. Usually. I’ve been a subscriber to his online writing for some time now, and enjoy his little insights and tidbits that he publishes quite regularly. And while he doesn’t have commenting on his site enabled, I could sort of understand the hassle of dealing with them (the comments) if the volume was consistently high, and there were other things to do with ones time. So, if you want to comment on Seth’s writings, you produce a post (hmmm, like this one!) and say your piece (or is it peace?)

His (mini) rant on the fact that a business has opted to pay the (likely) very big bucks to “sponsor” an athletic event in which the business seemingly has little to nothing in connection with strikes me as curious. I mean, do you watch sporting events at all, Seth? Have you ever watch the “Net Zero Half Time Report”? Or how about “College Game Day, built by The Home Depot” on ESPN during college football season? (Well, on that one, at least they were savvy enough to tie in “building” with the fact that the HD supplies building supplies, but still not sure the connection with college football.)

And while not advertisers connecting with an event, what does Bryant Gumbel have to do with “Real Sports“? Wasn’t he just a regular, run of the mill on air personality before landing the long running sports show hosting gig on HBO?

And while this is simply conjecture, do you think the NBC family of networks is going to have an advertiser or two over the next month or so while they air (do networks still air their programming? I digress. Forgive me!)? If you’ll go with that, just how much do you think those businesses are going to have in common with whatever event they are sponsoring? Obviously, we’ll see a lot of Nike, and likely other sporting goods/clothing manufacturers. And those companies “fit” into Seth’s desired paradigm.

But I’m guessing that we are going to see a few other misfits that will (hopefully) have Seth boiling with consternation. Actually, even though I don’t know him, and have clearly never been to his home. I’m guessing Seth Godin doesn’t even watch TV (or much of it, if in fact he even owns a television set!) so all of this might just be moot!

My point here, I suppose, is that a connection can be forged between to seemingly disparate end points. Pay enough money and I start thinking about All State Insurance when I see a home run hit in baseball (we’ll, okay that’s a stretch, but at least I get what the networks and advertisers are after.)

Anyway, I wanted to promote Seth’s post for two reasons: 1) Even though I wouldn’t consider this particular post incredibly valuable, you should read it and decide for yourself, and 2) Once you get over to Seth’s blog, you might want to consider reading other posts of his, and definitely consider subscribing to his blog so you get all of his stuff. And I hear he’s not a bad book author either!

While tending to shy away from just reposting or regurgitating others posts, I’ve realized that one of the beautiful things about the Internet, the blogosphere in particular is the viral aspects that many of the CMS applications set and promote.

So, with that in mind, I’ve decided to start a new category called “Passing it on!” where I will “judiciously” choose a post or two on occasion to pass on to any and all readers that may not be exposed to it otherwise. As well, if you like the referral and decided to pass it on yourself, why not create a nice link trail not only to the referred post, but back here as well. You’re trackback will show up here, and I’ll be sure and visit your blog and subscribe to your feed as well.

And in that light, allow me to thank my good friend, Joseph Cizek, of BloggingOutfitter.com for turning me on to this post. Joseph actually emailed me this article directly (though you’ll never get him to admit that he actually used email ) To be fair, he actually shared that with me via Google Reader’s share functionality, so I suppose he’s off the hook! Thanks, J.C.

Since my last bout of activity on this site (late April, I believe) I’ve:

1. Had a 43^rd birthday (4/28/65) YIKES!
2. Been evicted from my home thanks to a “lovely” aunt who owned the place. Thanks, AD
3. Moved my Mother and I into a new house that was previously occupied by, well, let’s just say that owning large animals, having 6 or 7 people in the house, doing drugs, and NEVER, EVER, EVER cleaning during their entire six month stay, makes for a little bit of work prior to moving in (oh, and this place is owned by my Sister and her husband. She wouldn’t kick her own Mother out, would she )
4. Finished all start up paperwork (business plans, executive summaries, funds usage, etc) for TheFightChannel.com and have attended several meetings regarding potential investments
5. Updated my resume, since we no longer have operating capital for TFC and one needs some sort of income in order to pay one’s Sister the rent on her house which he just moved into!
6. Sent out said resume (hold, let me count) 37 times over the past 6 weeks (to date, I’ve had about half a dozen responses)
7. And continually fighting to delete the bs spam crap that I’ve started receiving as a result of the resumes posted to Monster.com, Yahoo! Jobs, and others. (Talk about kicking you when you are down!)

So, what have I discovered thus far about all this “activity”? Well, I’m beginning to think that job searching is very much like mate searching. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for full time or part time, a male or a female (or whether you’re a male or a female). I’ve just come back from a second interview with a local employer. I had to shower and shave and put on some nice clothes. Make that good first impression. Well first impression for my potential boss’s boss, with whom I met.

Say all the right things. Not sure if I did that, however, I didn’t really shy away from values that I believe in regarding specific aspects of the gig. Smile. Show humor where necessary. Empathy when appropriate, etc., etc., etc.

Where I reside now days, in the Verde Valley, in Northern Arizona (central really, like Nor Cal is really central) is clearly not NYC, SF, LA. But we’re not BF either! We have a movie theater, and some restaurants, and just opened a new car wash (because the previous 3 or 4 were just not enough.) And when you want to go out on a date here (assuming you can actually find someone to ask! Really, that is not a joke…) All the same activities need to occur.

One should be clean and shaved (again, male or female!) Say the right things, try and get the core of their values across, and still be funny and poignant if at all possible. Oh, and if you’re going to the interview or a date, remember not to shower with your colgne or perfume. You’re potential employer is likely to wonder what other smells you’re covering up, as will your date. And you’ll never be able to properly taste your wine with that much smell mucking up your olfactories! (Assuming here that we’re referring to the dating process, of course!)

So, finally, I’ve taken 10 minutes to slap something up on the blog. Feels like I got a notice from my WordPress install, “If you don’t publish something within the next 48 hours, your blog will lock down and you’ll lose all access to it!”

Hmmm, now that might be an interesting WP plugin to create…

Has twitter always had the “blog this” option right from their web pages? I thought at one point I had added a GreaseMonkey script that would allow that to happen.

Anyway, this image was captured by our friend Will Norris, just to show his gratitude at my tweet of exactly 140 characters. Unfortunately, most of those characters were not broken by spaces, causing any page that my tweet showed up on to be jacked all to hell!

Taking bets on how long it takes the great folks at Twitter to fix this with an overflow: hidden in their css (or some other equally groovy solution)

Geesh, and I was just trying to be me. At least I’m not known as Glitch, hey Joseph?

Ubuntu

Initially, a lot of that had to do with Microsoft products. Much, much less so now days. In fact, other than using XP Media Center (though I’ve yet to do any media using with it! Go figure) and the ubiquitous Internet Explorer (only for web development, I PROMISE!) the only bit of MS software I’ve used of late, and really enjoyed, was Windows Movie Maker.

The bigger picture, I imagine, is all the software goodies that we tend to use based upon the operating system we employ. My forays into Linux in the past have yielded much confusion and angst regarding not only finding software to do a job (yes, I realize there is TONS and TONS of good Linux/Open Source stuff out there, give a guy a break!) but more importantly, to installing it. You tend to learn a lot when you start your annual (tri-annual for me) Linux experiments. You learn until you get tired of learning to use the tool instead of actually productively using the tools.

Already, I’m unsure about this install. Yes, Firefox came with the install. Yay! And I ran through a bunch of extra applications I’d like (and a bunch of games I’d not like), only to find that when the OS finished and required a reboot to finalize (not unheard of) when I came back up, everything that I thought I had installed was not installed. For some reason the installation doesn’t seem to finish all the way at boot up, and I’m forced to “quit” (which is a bit confusing with “cancel” but hey, what do I know?!)

The other disappointing aspect of this “trial” is that it installed almost the entire disc on one of my drives in order to allow me the luxury of checking out Ubuntu on this computer without wiping off the XP install. I’m cool with that, though.

Oh, another disappointment is the fact that I’m not able to get my two widescreen monitors to work during this trial. The OS clearly tells me it sees the second video card, and attempting to activate it required a reboot. And guess what, yupper, it reverts back to the fresh trial install. Again, no big deal, but I’d have severe reservations about transforming this machine to all Linux before knowing “for sure” that I was going to be able to use both flat panels.

What I am seriously considering, however, is going ahead and wiping my 17″ widescreen laptop and putting this install of Linux on it. That might be fun, and I really don’t depend upon the laptop now days except when I decide to go to Jerona, one of the few (if not only) Internet cafes here in Cottonwood, AZ.

That’s it for now. Going to publish this Ubuntu powered post, and reboot to Windows. When I get it installed onto the laptop, I might do a follow up and create another series; something called “Living between Linux and Windows” or something more creative.