Mike Schubert

Those of you working for smaller, private companies may not have been exposed to the vernacular I am about to rant about. The same may hold true for government employees. But for whatever reason, when you get into a company with 10,000+ employees with shareholders, etc. you end up speaking a different language. A new website, Unsuck-It has come to the rescue to help you decipher these words and phrases so that you will understand what the person is REALLY trying to say. Here are a few examples:

Drink the Kool-Aid - Meaning to follow blindly. I assume the origin from this was the Hale-Bopp comet people that all drank poisoned Kool-Aid thinking they were going to join aliens on the tail of the comet. If nothing else, they left quite the legacy on corporate America.  Update: Drew corrects me via comments that "but the origin is from the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jim Jones convinced his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid."

Disambiguate - doesn't clarify sound so much better? I actually used this word in a meeting yesterday to poke at someone else's overuse of flowery language.

Operationalize - make it work. Could you imagine if management actually said you need to make something work? That would sound like they had a product that didn't work. Hmm....

Social Media Strategy - Hahahaha. Defined as "Typing into text areas." So true. I'm reminded of our social media guidelines at work, and the minor uproar they caused.

And my favorite: Ping Me - I recently said this to someone and haven't heard from her since. Coincidence? Further proof that you should avoid corporate speak in all of your conversations with non-co-workers. Check out Unsuck-It and see what words and phrases you should be avoiding.

Laying out my Transition Bags and Gear
Originally uploaded by Iron Mike Schubert

Lack of change is certainly not my problem these days. Every day is almost as different as it is the same. I'm walking around with open eyes, an open heart, and asking myself "Self, what do YOU want to do today?"

Last Tuesday, I brought my new bike home. It's the Scott Plasma I talked about a couple of weeks ago. It's a dream to ride. For its maiden voyage I rode with a new friend, who also had recently acquired a new road bike, out at Stone Mountain Park. Something just seemed right about this particular ride around the rock I grew up so close to.

Tonight, I'm headed to a "Grind" class. I've been told it's unlike any "spin" class I have ever taken. I'm looking to hire a coach and these Tuesday / Thursday classes might just put this group over the edge. The classes are periodized and executed on your own bike. That means I get to use my power meter during a spin class! They also have an indoor "Current" pool that is like swimming in the ocean. They have "Grind Bricks" which allow you to do a swim before class or a run immediately after. I'm really pumped about the possibilities this change will bring.

So I have my bags laid out before me, ready to be packed for the adventure. My gear is clean and lubricated (where necessary). My mind and body are clear and primed.

I am ready for a change.

Over time I have come to accept that age is just a number. It can be used as potential gauge of a lot of things, but it's really just a milepost. I've roamed this planet for 37 years and have experienced quite a bit. The pleasures, the pains and every emotion in between. At this point, my age is simply an indicator of the events that I've lived through. Hostages in Iran, the fall of the iron curtain, the opening of China to the world, and the onset of the digital age are among the key events that have shaped the world in the time that I've breathed it's air.

How old do I feel? 25. Some days 19, but it's not awkward to order a drink since I'm legal, so 19 is fleeting. 

What's my metabolic age? 16. According to my Tanita scale, anyway. Let's hope the hormones of the 16 year old don't come with that.

So I can measure myself in many different ways, but at the end of the day it is just a snapshot in time. Looking back is interesting but it obfuscates the present. Looking forward is interesting as well, but worrying about it may prevent enjoying the here and now. 

If what I did yesterday still seems big and audacious, then I must not have tried hard enough today.

Rock on.

This post is somewhat of a departure for me. I normally don't post truly personal stuff, nor do I typically name names. This site is usually about racing or technology so if you're here for one of those reasons, you might want to just skip this post. If you want a glimpse of the softer side of "Iron Mike" then read on.

Normally I would've posted my Peachtree Road Race report for 2010 by now, but I have been dealing with the loss of a dear friend. Johnny O'Brien whom I'd been friends with for over 15 years passed away not long after I crossed the finish line on Sunday. He'd been battling cancer, and appropriately and unknowingly I wore yellow on 7/4.

Johnny isn't suffering any more, and tonight his friends gathered together to say goodbye and share laughter and tears. Johnny and I didn't see eye to eye on everything and tonight he proved me wrong on one very big account. To Rachel - You have no idea how happy I am that you and your daughter were part of Johnny's life. I was wrong.

Life is too short and precious to live it with regrets. I have to continue to be the best friend I can be to all whose lives I am in. We are all different people with different definitions of happy and as such we won't always see things eye to eye. And that's OK.

I miss you Johnny, and I'll forever think of you when I pound the pavement or watch fireworks on the 4th of July.

One of my missions in developing web applications for a Fortune 15 company is to emulate the dominant design of well known internet applications when designing new functionality for inside the company. I occasionally am beat up for not doing this. One recent example was an RSS reader portlet. The goal was to provide people with a customizable portlet on the McKNet homepage that would allow them to subscribe to various feeds within the company and see the 3-5 most recent updates for those feeds. When my management team saw the proposed product, they questioned why it didn't look and work like Google Reader. I tried not to laugh - you might imagine that it comes down to money. This was one function point out of 8 proposed in a quarterly maintenance release that was being worked on full time by a single programmer. I don't know for sure, but I'd say that Google Reader took someone more than a week to develop.

One of the things I've been involved with lately is establishing "maintenance" pages for each of our applications. These maintenance pages are just meant to say "sorry - we've got some planned maintenance going on, here are some links to other content that you may be looking for that is not currently impacted by our maintenance." Finding examples of dominant design for this are a little more difficult, since you have to find either a reputable site that is under maintenance or read a blog post about it. Today, I tried to go to My Cigna based on some mail I received yesterday and found they were under maintenance. Perfect! Here's a screenshot of what I saw:

This gives me a good idea, but also points out the pitfall. The idea? Let them know when the maintenance window is planned to end. In this case, it says "The site will return at approximately 12:00pm on Sunday, March 28th.". The down side is that you have to keep up with the page and make sure that it reflects an accurate date and time. You'll see I included the status bar from Windows to show that today is April 18th - 3 weeks after the above referenced date.  So now that I think about it, this isn't the greatest of examples. Guess I'll have to keep fishing for a dominant design of under maintenance pages.