Labor Day 2008 | About Randy Pausch

For over a month now I’ve been trying to figure out how to post about Randy Pausch’s death last month from pancreatic cancer. What his final lecture meant to a lot of people, what it meant to me wasn’t about cancer, it was about how you live.

My dad passed away last year from complications from a pancreatic tumor. According to wikipedia, Randy underwent the same drastic surgery as my father. That’s a 13 hour surgery. No walk in the park. Both Randy and my father, however, lived well past the estimates of medical science. They had their own positive mental attitude (PMA) which burned within them.

That similarity wasn’t why Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture was so profound for me. Positive Mental Attitude: Randy had it in spades. His lecture was so profound six million views and counting were seen on YouTube.

My Lesson: Sacrifice and Responsibility

You learn a lot about yourself being the person responsible for someone. Whether as a parent or in caretaking a parent, it changes us when we are forced to accept or reject life and death responsibility for another human being.

I learned a lot about myself in the past four years and my opinion is that most people don’t know what’s important in their lives until they are confronted with life and death decisions. It’s not something that can be adequately described. It’s a large part of why I posted my essays on Martin Luther King Day and Memorial Day on this blog.

Communication, Education and Teamwork Balanced

It’s amazing what priorities we will set, what sacrifice is defined by when everything else becomes placed into proper perspective. My personal experiences in the past four years make me realize several things.

Lifelong learning is important. Passing those skills along through education is important. Communication with others and the tone and impact of my voice is equally as important. Both for my family and for my community as a whole. Passing a desire to learn rather than simply driving content – that is a finesse that is reserved for the best of teachers.

Whether in a workplace or in a family, teamwork, communication, and education will make or break the team. Randy had it nailed, and I’m still working on it with mixed but mostly good results. 

Randy’s Lecture Defines What’s Important

In a showcase for how to change video into eLearning, Gabe’s Word of Mouth Blog features Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture in Presenter format. The lecture, a YouTube top favorite, has a learning centered focus and is now viewable in smaller chunks and retention is increased due to the formatting and sidenotes.

If you want to learn from Randy Pausch the first time around and in the best eLearning format possible watch this rather than just the YouTube video. You will love both the content and the container it comes in.

See it today.

As if there wasn’t enough to worry about for parents with last year’s crisis of Chinese lead painted toys, now the ^7 recycling icon is considered a toxic symbol. 

If this isn’t a massive issue of Corporate Authenticity, I don’t know what is. All polycarbonate bottles and other containers are suspect to some degree because of something called bisphenol-A (BPA).

From The Health Dangers Of Reusing Plastic Bottles And Bags by the Environmental Working Group:

…researchers concerned with the evils of a common chemical known as bisphenol-A (BPA) suggest you should toss out these baby bottles along with any toys suspected of containing lead or dangerous magnets.

How toxic is BPA? Nobody really knows for sure.

In fact, it’s still debated as a scientific issue, however WalMart has pulled BPA baby bottles from the shelves.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that…

“[T]he possibility that bisphenol A may alter human development cannot be dismissed,” says this new draft report from the U.S. department of Health and Human Services.

Though the evidence isn’t entirely clear, it’s possible that exposure to the chemical during infancy could cause changes in prostate and mammary tissue that raise the risk of cancer later in life, the report suggests. The latest analysis goes beyond two others from last year, both of which concluded the chemical was safe in low doses.

I’m still researching this matter after a year and it’s almost inconclusive, yet safer to err on the side of caution.

BPA: A Call For Corporate Authenticity

I tend to side with this frustrated parent’s opinion:

What we want is actually quite simple. We want companies that produce products which come into contact with infants’ and toddlers’ mouths, and which are exposed to high heat due to washing and sterilization, to disclose the types of plastic they use in their products.

We want companies to inform consumers so that people like us don’t have to do their job for them. Labeling like this will only influence the choices of people who care. If people care, they should have a choice. If enough people care about materials that you’re afraid to label your products with the information, you’re using the wrong materials.

Listen up, chemical companies. We’re having a conversation. We’re trading information, we’re becoming organized.

And if what you’re doing is threatening our children’s safety, we’re coming to GET YOU.

Legally of course.

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I recently was drawn to this video from a small Microsoft IM advertisement because – well, everyone wants to save time. Folding my own laundry is something that I (and most people do to save money and look neat.

Audience: Everyone

Folding a t-shirt faster simply helps everyone. This instructional video is being chosen by savvy web marketers as a way to draw people into their space, whether it’s for ordering t-shirts or printing on t-shirts, or… well you get the point. VideoJug uses this how-to instructional clip as a portal for driving people to their site. Microsoft promoted it and I tried it out.

Finding your audience is something that every Marketing person desires to do. Explaining a process so that an audience gets the point is what every Technical Communicator desires to do. With Microsoft’s Live platform they’ve integrated both of these within their Instant Messaging client.

Click beneath the fold for the instructional video of how to do the 2 second fold…

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sip,structural insulated panel,construction,energy efficiency,solano county

I was recently asked by a friend how the construction project was going. Another blogreader asked how much I was involved.

A picture is worth a thousand words…

(jump beneath the fold for more)

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parenting,school violence,common sense

I thought this bore repeating. See the original context within Bill’s site waxing techcomm:

First, teach your children how to mind their own business.

Second, teach your children not to spread rumors.

Third, teach your children to listen to authority.

I’ve got to say that this common sense is sorely missing in a lot of kids / young adults that I know. Bill had mentioned this in reference to a ‘gun rumor’ that had affected one of his kids attending a middle school dance.

His summary is simple and bears repeating:

You can’t expect teachers to keep order among the kids when it’s the kids (in bulk) themselves who are causing the disorder. This problem needs to be fixed at home and fortified at school, not vice versa. But by blaming the school for what happened, I know you don’t feel the same, and that itself is a pity since you’re just continuing to contribute to the problem.

Shame on you, parents.

baby friendly travel,airline complaint,XJT,ExpressJet,false advertising,airline advertising,nonstop flight,airline deception,deceptive advertising,handicapped accessibility

Wrapping up the ExpressJet debacle, it seems that my recent topic of corporate authenticity works well in analyzing the ongoing situation with ExpressJet (Nasdaq: XJT), the startup airline company in which I intended to invest heavily into this upcoming year.

Dr. Girlfriend reports that return flight was much worse than the departure, leaving me greatly disappointed in ExpressJet’s ground crew competence and customer service. In fact, after she had arrived at Tulsa she was impressed with the inflight service and had actually decided not to press the issue, but her return flight completely changed all that.

It Can Always Be Worse

While I hope for the best with any aviation venture it bears mentioning that the worst in aviation is always a smoking hole and broken dreams.

Therefore I apply the same critical analysis I would make if I were still flying in the Navy and had to evaluate a crew for mishap potential. Nobody gets a free pass or a gimme when the combined efforts or missteps of the entire team could result in tragedy, or in this case, unsat service. If my post brings light into situations that can be addressed, we are all better for it.

Analysis

Personally, I find the concept of untrained ground crew just downright scary. Pilot error or groundcrew error are two things not even top rated maintenance crews can help fix.

Maybe this jet is small enough for the pilot / flight crew to do all the preflight prep but if the ground crew are poorly trained and touching anything mission critical; that’s spooky and more important, human error is the most frequent cause of an aviation mishap.

You Snooze, You Lose!

Well, she gave them a full business day before I thought it best to post this message and see how many people’s lives it touched. As I mentioned in my Corporate Authenticity post, it’s time that corporations got real about what they represent.

As you may have become familiar with the events Dr. Girlfriend had boarding ExpressJet from my last post, it turns out that Dr. Girlfriend wrote a very detailed letter of her situation to ExpressJet.

Dr. Girlfriend gave me permission to post this after ExpressJet had a reasonable chance to respond to her. Here’s a copy of that letter, minus the identifiers, and plus the spell checking…

Note: Dr. Girlfriend is in the medical field, not technical communication.

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I’m not sure where Viraj got this, but it sure sounded good.He’s got a lot of deep thoughts on his blog I’ll have to source where he gets them. Otherwise he just copies them from another spot – not that it’s a bad thing mind you, I just like to have the raw data.

Quoted from http://viraj21283.wordpress.com/ :

Top 20 Qualities of Smart People

1. Make Decisions Intuitively

Smart people listen to and follow their intuition. They know how intuitions and insights come to them and are tuned-in internally to make wise decisions.

I read a book called ‘Think like a Genius’ which led off on the same track. All the book did for me was simply confirm my suspicions. I am a genius.

Kids and Genius

However, this list of twenty things makes me more aware of being a parent. I want to make sure that I’m able to encourage everything on this list whenever possible with my kids. There’s enough in the world that tells them they can’t do things, and encouraging exploration safely has been my focus on the time I spend with them.

Manners Cards

One of the nicest tech writers at a major client’s business gave me a set of home-designed Manners Cards she had made for my oldest son to use. He loves them.

When he says ‘Please’ or helps his brother, I tell him, “Manners Cards, you earned a Manners Card!” His face then cracks into a huge smile as he repeats it. “Manners Cards, I get Manners Cards!”

If more of us could mentally check off the twenty item list here like I do with his cards, I think we’d be on our way to creating the habit of encouraging and enabling our kids to think like a genius, and feel self rewarded at the same time.

I’ll be saying to myself, “Genius Cards, I get Genius Cards!”

parenting,kids,manners,techniques