Consolation Champs

Continuing with the theme of work and how we get it, here are some things that have certainly popped into my head before, during and after job interviews in the past. I wish I could verbalize some of these things with the people I’m considering working with:

• I think I’m smarter than 90% of the people you have working here. I may not be as focused or even as motivated, but I’m capable of being focused and motivated.
• I’m a little scared that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
• Whatever you think I haven’t done enough of, I can easily learn.
• But what if I can’t? And even if I can, what if I hate it?
• I don’t think that you’re telling me the truth about what it’s really like to work here.
• I’m not sure yet if want this job, but you’re not going to give me enough time or information to make a good decision.
• I’m a little scared that I really want this job, and that I’ll come across as too eager.
• I’m worried that I’ll become restless in six months and want a different job.
• I really have no idea what I want to “do” with my life.

What are some things you’d like to say in a job interview?

This past Sunday, Brooke and I ran our second race of the year and I felt considerably better than I did about the Spring Run-Off 8K I ran last month, even though I only fit in one training run of 8K in between that race and this one. The Sporting Life 10K is a fun race because most of the route is south on Yonge Street, and Brooke and I live within ten minutes walk of the starting line. As well, it’s mostly flat or downhill. But the best part is that this race might very well be the largest in the city, attracting nearly 10,000 runners each year. The weather is usually better by this time than it is in early April, too.

That being said, it was pretty cold when we headed out at 7:00am for an 8:00am start. The temperature was around 6° Celsius, though it did get up to about 10° later. Since I’m still without a functioning watch, I had decided to stick with Brooke for as long as possible, but she started to slow down around the 7K mark, so I took off. I wasn’t feeling particularly speedy, but my regular pace is faster than hers. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I struggled a bit for the last few kilometres. I’m definitely not in as good shape as I’ve been in past years. I need to get out and run more between races. But I was still quite happy with my time. I’d hoped to run sub-55:00 and I accomplished that. The discrepancy between gun and chip times is because we were quite far back from the starting line. Unfortunately, gun time is still how races rank you for placing.

Brooke has already signed us up for two more races in June, with a strong possibility that we’ll do a third. The Alfie Shrubb 8K is a small race held in Bowmanville, Ontario on June 1st. And the following weekend, I’m doing the Bread and Honey 5K in Streetsville, while Brooke runs the 15K. The third is the Pride and Remembrance Run, a personal favourite that we’ve run every year since 2003. There is a possibility that we might be in New York City that weekend, so we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully I can secure my Garmin Forerunner 405 before my next race! And run faster! (P.S. Brooke ran 55:10.4)

Gun Time: 56:17.7
Chip Time: 54:32.1
Overall Place: 3072/8590
Gender Place: 2106/3895
Age Group (M40-44) Place: 318/543

2007 Chip Time: 51:22.7 (wow, forgotten how well I did last year!)
2006 Chip Time: (didn’t run)
2005 Chip Time: (didn’t run)
2004 Chip Time: 52:30.9

Full results from 2008

Here’s a wonderful story. Terry Fallis is one of the founders of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the most social media-savvy PR firms around. Terry wrote and self-published a political satire last year called The Best Laid Plans. Not only did he publish it himself, but he used the book’s web site to market and promote it. As befits an innovative PR practitioner, he used all the social media tools at his disposal, making the whole endeavour a truly DIY affair.

About a month ago, Terry was nominated for the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, in the company of such literary luminaries as Douglas Coupland and Will Ferguson. The happy ending came this morning, when he found out that he had won. Bravo, Terry!

I’ve been a very bad runner of late. Brooke and I started running to keep fit back in 2003, and for the first few years, I was motivated. One of the tools that helped me was a great heart-rate monitor watch I bought from Sports Instruments. That watch is now on its last legs, and it’s time for some new gadgetry to help get me back on track, so to speak.

I’d always loved the Garmin Forerunner series of GPS-enabled watches, but they were enormous and ugly, and often didn’t work in the city, where tall buildings interfered with their ability to pick up a signal. I kept telling myself that when they got smaller and more capable, I’d pick one up. I believe that day is now at hand. Behold the Forerunner 405:

This thing will do everything: track distance, time, map routes, even heart-rate (on one model). Best of all, it can upload its data to the web, where you can analyze it or compare yourself with others on Garmin’s new Connect community.

This is exactly the sort of tech geekery that gets me excited and motivated to exercise more. There are only two notes of caution here. One is that there won’t be any Mac support for the 405 until November 2008. The other is that Apple has long been rumoured to be working on a much fuller implementation of the Nike + iPod kit. While it’s doubtful that Apple could build something as sophisticated as the Forerunner (though it would play music!), I might still try to wait a while. Although I’m sure I could use Windows under Parallels for a few months to sync my data with my iMac, there could be some potential hiccups.

Don’t be surprised if I go out and buy one this weekend, though!

Tonight, I attended CaseCamp for the first time. Inspired by the original BarCamp “unconference,” CaseCamp is a marketing event where people present case studies and lessons learned, and the crowd can comment and ask questions. Pioneered right here in Toronto in 2006 by Eli Singer, the event is now in its seventh iteration, and has been wildly successful. Perhaps it’s become a victim of its own success.

Before I continue, I want to recognize all the hard work done by Eli and his group of volunteers and sponsors. But now that I’ve made that disclaimer, I’d have to say that I came away slightly disappointed this evening. Part of it is my own fault. Today was a very long day for me. I was up at 6:00am to travel to a financial services conference being held in the far northeast of the city. My journey by transit was an hour each way. I was only able to attend half the day because I had to get back to my office for a 90-minute conference call with a “social media platform” (ie. blog software) vendor, whose sales representative seemed incredibly unprepared, not to mention tacitly unconvinced by the product he was selling. So as I headed over to Circa night club, I was already feeling pretty exhausted. Nevertheless, navigating a crowd of close to 500 people in a night club setting where the music was turned way up was not conducive to any kind of networking for me. Call me old and crotchety, I don’t care.

The actual case studies were enjoyable, and I took some notes that I think will be useful. But the large setting (with haphazardly arranged plastic patio chairs) made it difficult to find a seat. And the size of the crowd made it difficult to hear all the questions. Overall, I’d divide my complaint into two:

1. The venue was unsuitable: A night club might seem like a “cool” place to hold a business function, but not if the music drowns out attempts at conversation. As well, their inexperience putting on “conference” type events showed, with poorly-arranged seating.
2. There were simply too many people: Close to 500 people is unmanageable for this type of event. Even had I been a bit less tired, I still don’t think I could have managed to introduce myself to many people in a crowd of that size. I recognized about a dozen names on the wiki signup page, and thought I’d have no trouble finding some people I knew. I was wrong.

I was hoping that CaseCamp would be similar to another “unconference” event that I attend as often as I can, Third Tuesday. Though more narrowly focused on public relations practitioners, the events (at least in Toronto) are held at a pub with a function room. The volume of music is much lower, the vibe is more laid back, and you actually sit around tables to listen to speakers. In this way, you can introduce yourself to the people around you first, and continue the conversations there afterward. Most importantly, the number of people hasn’t (so far) exceeded 100. I believe that this is a key issue. While online social networks can scale significantly, in the real world this isn’t possible. Groups larger than 100-150 become difficult to navigate. I certainly felt that way tonight.

What I’d like to see for the next CaseCamp is a “soft” cap of 150 attendees. After that, another group should be created and another venue found for the next 150. In this way, there is value for everyone. If that means featuring different cases at each, then so be it. Presenters could be rotated for the next event if necessary. As well, this makes finding venues a bit easier and certainly less expensive.

Part of tonight’s CaseCamp schedule was the afterparty, in which 5 DJs would spin tunes for the campers to dance to after all the case studies had been presented. People were invited to join from a few other events taking place tonight, such as StartupCamp and CopyCamp. I’m glad that the organizers extended the invitation to these others, and I’m sure they’re leveraging the very expensive rental of Circa night club, but honestly, the last thing I want to do at 9:00pm on a Tuesday night is dance, especially after a 15-hour day.

In conclusion, I think the exploding popularity of the event has even caught the organizers by surprise, and I’m sure that some of these thoughts might be crossing their minds as well. I very much enjoy the concept of CaseCamp and will look forward to seeing what the next one looks like. For any of you who were there tonight, first of all, sorry we didn’t get to talk! Secondly, what are some of your impressions of the evening?

UPDATE: All fixed now. Pay no mind.

My friend Neil just let me know that my RSS feed is, in his parlance, “borked.” The problem is that it seems to have happened just over a month ago, at the confluence of a few different events. First, I added the Disqus plugin, changing my entire commenting system. Second, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. And last, but not least, I was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, seemingly as part of a strange hacker SEO contest.

So, as brilliant as I am (!), I’m having a hard time figuring out what’s happening. The feeds all validate fine, it’s just that they’re completely empty.

My feeling is that the culprit might be the upgrade, since a few other people have experienced this over on the WordPress forums (or is that fora?). But no one seems to have a definitive answer as to how to fix it.

Any suggestions? Of course, anyone subscribed to my feed won’t actually see this, but I’m hoping there are at least a few of you still coming to look at the pretty pictures.

I’ve been thinking about the wonderful world of work again, and the more I think about the way we “get” our jobs, the more bizarre it seems. We go to a meeting where someone asks us about our skills and about what other jobs we’ve had, and then, based on that, and more than likely also on how we look, dress, smell and shake hands, they hire us. Or they don’t. It’s akin to getting married after the first date.

I’m worried that making that sort of commitment after such a one-sided and inadequate evaluation is hurting both parties. Although the good interviewers encourage you to ask questions about the company during your interview, most of us aren’t as well-prepared as we might be. How do you ask questions about a place you’ve just seen for the first time? Also, most people aren’t that comfortable asking about things like what operating system do they have to use, or whether they can ever work from home, or take a “sick” day when they’re not sick. Many people are even too afraid to ask about salary and benefits, desperately hoping that the interviewer will volunteer that information. The good ones do, but that doesn’t mean they can anticipate the other questions you might have. Like the ones that won’t pop into your head until you’ve been working there for six months.

Why can’t working be more like dating? Why can’t there be a process of gradually getting to know each other to decide whether you like each other, and only then to commit?

I’ve been a big fan of something called “informational interviewing” for many years now. Basically, it’s just a fancy name for contacting someone at a company you’re interested in and taking them out for lunch, coffee or a beer. One of my big discoveries is that there are all kinds of jobs in all kinds of interesting companies out there, but you’d never read about them in the want ads. Some of these jobs have strange titles, or none at all. Some of the jobs don’t even exist yet.

Something great happens when two people meet on an equal footing in a non-threatening space. Even better if some intoxicants are involved (but not too many!). These are NOT job interviews; they’re more like job dates. You’re not even required to meet with the person actually capable of hiring. Just someone who can be honest about where they work, about what they and their company do, and about what it feels like to be there for eight (or more) hours a day.

It figures that I received a package from Amazon UK today with a whole bunch of Region 2 DVDs that I bought on sale. You see, I’m in the thick of HotDocs, reviewing a bunch of films over at my film blog Toronto Screen Shots. Nevertheless, I can’t wait to check these out over the next few weeks:

• A box set with Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-sac, along with 8 shorts (Anchor Bay)
• Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Artificial Eye)
• Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Artificial Eye)
• Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (Artificial Eye)
• Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (Artificial Eye)
• Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (FilmFour)
• Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (Masters of Cinema)
• Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (Optimum)

If that weren’t enough, a screener for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly arrived this week, too, which I’ve been eager to see. Brooke is reading the book right now and raving about it.

I think the sale might be on for a while yet, especially on the Artificial Eye releases. If you have a region-free DVD player, these are some great deals.

Kevin Kelly is at it again. And all I can do is link.

Borrowing some ideas from Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, Kevin postulates that to make a decent living, an independent creator (musician, artist, writer, whatever) need only amass a thousand “true fans,” defined as people who will buy whatever the maker creates. The challenge, says Kelly, is that the artist has to maintain direct contact with all of these people or they will stop feeling “connected” to you. The good news is that the web has many tools (blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts) that allow creators to maintain direct connections with their fans.

It’s a compelling argument, and the discussion unfolding in the comments is enlightening, with people jumping in with examples of successes and failures. Go over and have a look. Then come back, if you’re a True Fan of mine!

I’ve always been a big supporter of the BarCamp concept (a free self-organizing “unconference” where everyone is expected to contribute or participate), although the original BarCamps are way too technical for me to understand, never mind contribute. So I was happy to find out that CaseCamp Toronto is happening again on April 29th. CaseCamp is a marketing version of BarCamp, with people presenting case studies, and because there’s a big crossover with my favoured tribe of web nerds, there’s usually a heavy dose of social media wonkery. For some reason, these only appear to happen in Canada. My only disappointment is that it’s happening at the exact same time as two other potentially interesting events: StartupCamp 2 and Raindance’s free “99 Minute Screenwriting School.” If anyone makes it to either of those two, would you mind reporting back? And if you’re interested in CaseCamp, sign up soon. There are almost 100 people coming already!