What is optimism?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by rickcolosimo

Someone asked me recently about being a dad, and here was my response.

I think my main goal is to help them really internalize the trick of finding the upside instead of the downside, with a healthy dose of old-fashioned American “if it’s broke, fix it.” I don’t think being an optimist means you just accept whatever life dishes out — optimist is not another word for victim.

Am I injecting a bit? Yes, I’m very sensitive to this issue of fundamental optimism vs. fundamental pessimism, crossed with active/passive approaches. Seems like time for an Indexed-like four quadrant map. Maybe I’ll draw one today.

My next thoughts on this optimism/pessimism dimension were a combination of ideas:

It’s in that realm where I think Buddhism doesn’t map onto American psychology as neatly as it does in other countries’ cultures. (Of course, I saw a documentary film on Burma/Myanmar recently that made the argument that the deep Buddhist culture of the people made them more (too!) accepting of such crappy conditions in their country. My friend, native-born but from NorCal, called BS on that.)

The movie “They Call It Myanmar” didn’t make this point explicitly, but it certainly focused on, by juxtaposition, “deep” Buddhism, guilt, acceptance, and apparent passivity.

Posted in Soapbox | Tagged | Leave a comment

Shockingly hot for technically merely suggestive

Posted on May 10, 2013 by rickcolosimo

http://champagnefacials.tumblr.com/

I can’t even describe how hot this is. Fire.

I shouldn’t even post this, it’s so damn salacious.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

General under investigation in Afghanistan

Posted on April 30, 2013 by rickcolosimo

I know Bill Caldwell. Worked for him. He convinced me, unintentionally I’m sure, to leave the Army. I know nothing about what he did, didn’t, should, or shouldn’t have done with all this stuff in the paper. But my personal opinion, FWIW, is that he’s not above suspicion and should not get the benefit of the doubt.

Shit, Rick, I do illegal searches all the time.

I debated on posting this, but there are people I know who are solidly upstanding, courageous men, full of character and good hearts. They have been in actual harm’s way for longer than I was even in the peacetime Army. Those men deserve our support and gratitude every day.

At the 3-star general level, maybe it’s no longer about moral courage, character, and choosing the hard right over the easy wrong; maybe it’s about politics just like it is when a congressman posts on Craigslist: you screw up and get caught, you’re out.

I hope you didn’t step over the line, sir.

Posted in Soapbox | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Where the bad moods went

Posted on April 24, 2013 by rickcolosimo

Someone once told me that she hadn’t seen me in a bad mood. (It was after only four weeks of knowing me, so maybe there’s a sample size problem.)

 

I said that something had annoyed me the week before. Things still bother me, but not for long and not as much. Remembering things I used to know about how I think about, approach, and deal with the world.

 

In fact, as I write this…

 

I realize it’s not even that things bother me — it only bothers me when I’m not sure about my solution or course of action. Everything that is, just is. No being bothered by all of that: it’s not helpful.

I can feel the changes in me when something else is stressing me — that’s what leads to my less, um, constructive reactions to otherwise meaningless things. So, I focus my efforts on dissociating the two: divide and conquer. In fact, I think that recognizing and naming the stress makes it easier 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Flipping freemium on its head

Posted on April 14, 2013 by rickcolosimo

I recently read a post that pushed “freemium” companies to start charging right away — to put the paid offering on the table to see who will buy how much at what price. It’s good advice, of course, but really in many ways just an okay read; nothing you haven’t already read somewhere else.

But I had a different thought for the launch of CEOguides.com: why not start at the paid end of the market (where we’re at: professional services), and go down, rather than start at the bottom and climb up. You might call it mass customization (very loosely), or even a Targetization (bringing design to the mass market).

We have always been in the couture, bespoke, handcrafted, artisanal knowledge & advice business. (Nobody pays 3 figures/hour for cookie cutter advice!) Our strategy for these new service-related businesses should mirror that.

Premifree? Pree? Not so catchy; perhaps I’ll keep working on a label that fits.

What examples do you have of startup companies taking this reverse approach rather than the freemium model?

Posted in Mentor | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

World Autism Awareness Day 2013

Posted on April 2, 2013 by rickcolosimo
Today is World Autism Awareness day. My Facebook profile picture is my 8yo son Dylan, showing you, and me, what he thinks of autism. I imagine it’s something along the lines of “I just want to do what I want and have fun like every other boy. Sometimes it’s just hard.” Other times I imagine that’s it’s a hearty “fuck autism,” like when he’s scrambling up the rock climbing wall better than any 8yo in the place.

But he probably doesn’t think about it. He just moves through life, doing what he can and frustrated when his reach exceeds his grasp — just like the rest of us.

So, be aware, be supportive, and perhaps this year you’ll take some action, however small.

Awareness only gets you so far. I’d venture that Dylan is unaware that he has autism. He just acts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 2 Comments

Don’t bother us with questions: just buy

Posted on February 28, 2013 by rickcolosimo

Everything you do as a business speaks to your customers.

I got an email from Quicken the other day saying that they were shutting off certain services, including downloading info from banks. (How and why that should affect my desktop software, which I thought connected directly, is another version of the message in this post while being entirely different.) There’s a link to upgrade and save $20 for the privilege. What swell folks.

Occasionally, I read the fine print at the bottom of emails. (It’s an occupational hazard.) This choice language appears:

If you have any questions or comments about this e-mail, please DO NOT REPLY to this e-mail, because it is not a monitored mailbox.

Now, that happens to be pretty common in corporate emails for lots of reasons that stem from using third-party services/software to send email to huge numbers of customers and track the results. But what struck me here is that there’s nothing ELSE. No suggestion of what to do with your question or comment: no email link, no web form. You might assume that what they’d tell you to do with your question or comment isn’t very nice.

But since this is an “e”-mail, maybe this address at the bottom makes sense as an easy way to communicate with customers:

Intuit Inc., Customer Communications, 2800 E. Commerce Center Place, Tucson, AZ 85706

What’s the message of this email from Intuit?

Don’t ask questions; kindly just give us money — we don’t care what you think. It makes me wonder why to even include the “we’re not going to respond to your email” disclaimer if they’re not going to be receptive to any communication in the first place.

Intuit has (had?) a huge market share. But I can’t get a decent version for my mac after switching nearly two years ago. Is it any wonder that other companies have been making inroads. (Sure, they *bought* Mint in 2009; they didn’t come up with it.)

 

Posted in Soapbox | Tagged | Leave a comment

Why DNA privacy should not be on your radar today

Posted on January 22, 2013 by rickcolosimo

The NYT headline, ”Web Hunt for DNA Sequences Leaves Privacy Compromised,” blows this out of proportion. 

 Wired’s article “Scientists Discover How to Identify People From ‘Anonymous’ Genomes” is only slightly more helpful. The key issue here is not that the DNA sequence of the participants itself was itself a magic fingerprint, but that when that information was combined with other genetic information of other people (in some cases, probably including the study participant) disclosed elsewhere on other terms, then it was possible to find people.

Indeed, there’s nothing magical here that hasn’t been done far more invasively by traditional marketers collecting personal consumer data from different sources and aggregating it.  

So what’s the point of knowing who I am if you have my DNA sequence? There’s a mention in Wired of a teen finding the identity of his sperm donor father. In that case, the teen had his own DNA and the father had put his DNA on a genealogy-related website. Well, there you go. That’s like putting your picture on LinkedIn and being surprised when someone matches your high school yearbook photo to it.

Unfortunately*, neither of these articles explains, or even hypothesizes in any way why this is a horrible thing. The NYT suggests that “severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects.” Usually we identify harms before proposing penalties.

People who disclose information know, or should know, that others will use that information and almost certainly in combination. People who buy drug-related products with credit cards and surf drug-related websites should not be surprised when an employer decides they might be smoking pot. Target, as an example only — we should all be SURE that every business that sells to consumers does this, recently got some unexpected attention when its data mining practices revealed that Target knew a teenaged girl was pregnant before her father did. 

 

By the way, in response to this study, the PGP reminded participants that this is obviously not an issue for us and of the rationale for not trying to protect sequence data.

 

Disclaimer: my position on the value of deliberately destroying any privacy of my DNA sequences is on the record: I’ve volunteered for the Personal Genome Project and will volunteer the DNA of my two boys and as many family members as they will take. Research requires data.

Ignorance is submission. Knowledge is power. Action is dignity. 

—–

* Wordle tells me unfortunately is a word I use an awful lot. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I note it  here for the record and won’t edit that one out of this post. I expect it won’t appear as often in future posts.

Posted in Soapbox | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Saving comment state improves usability

Posted on January 15, 2013 by rickcolosimo

If you want people to comment, say on a lifehacker post about going paperless, and you require sign-ins for commenting, don’t trash their comments when they forget a password.

 

Among the least interesting passwords I remember is my lifehacker account for commenting. I don’t use it every day and it’s of zero value to a hacker (hence, a mediocre password such as “password”) to masquerade as me on lifehacker.

Today I wrote a brief comment on the post regarding scanning/ocr/storage workflow, contributing to the community in some small way. Lifehacker wants me to sign in. Of course, I forgot my password (since it’s for some reason forbidden for Firefox to remember it for me). In the course of doing the reset, the site not-so-conveniently trashed my comment. Gone. Zero. 

I don’t care enough to write it twice if you can’t care enough to remember it once. If I write it again, it’ll go on my blog as part of my workflow series.

Posted in Soapbox | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

For Nathan — Dad’s First Grade

Posted on January 11, 2013 by rickcolosimo

 

Dear Nathan,
 
When I was in first grade, I was 6 at the beginning of school in September and turned 7 in the middle of the year. That was in 1974. I lived in a town called Spencerport, NY, with Grandpa Tom and Grandma Katie. (Uncle Jim was not born yet!). We had a black cat named Figaro — that is the same name as the cat in the movie “Pinocchio.” Grandma Katie picked his name.
 
Because my town was so big, I had to ride a bus to school. I would walk down the end of our driveway and then down about four or five more houses to get on the bus at one spot with all the other kids on my street.
 
My school was in a big building that had all the kids from the whole town in one building, even big kids in high school. But my classroom was not just for first grade. Because there were not a lot of kids in Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade, all three classes were in one big, big classroom, about three times as big as your class. So there were kids in my classroom who were younger and older than me. My picture of my whole class had everyone in it. I think it was about 25 kids all together.
 
I remember my teacher, Mrs. Hartman. She was the same teacher that I had the year before when I was in Kindergarten. Her hair was long, brown, and straight. She was very nice. When I was learning to read, I read books about Dick and Jane, just like the ones we have at home. They were in a big yellow workbook, but only the pages on the right-hand side of the book were for reading (the other side was upside-down). Then, when I got to the end of the worksheets, I flipped the book around and all the other sheets were now right-side up so I could do those worksheets. Reading was my favorite part of school.
 
When I was in first grade, I wore glasses too. One day, I was doing monkey bars in gym class. I fell down, and my glasses broke. A little piece of the glass cut me where my eyebrow is. I went to the hospital, and Grandma Katie came to check on me. I was okay, but I had to have stitches to make the cut small so it would heal. If you look super-carefully under my eyebrow, you might be able to see the scar from those stitches. I forgot about it until just now!
 
 
Love,
 
Daddy
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment