Daneomatic

In January 2004 I started my job as a phone support jockey for a small web software company. Five days a week, eight-or-more hours a day, I went to a regular job and got a regular paycheck. I didn’t want to give up all my privileges at the mountain, however, including good friends, a season pass and bragging rights, so I continued to work as a snowboard instructor on the weekend.

Every Saturday and Sunday I would wake up early, catch the employee bus, and spend my weekend teaching kids how to snowboard. This went on for two months, where I would literally work for thirty days in a row before I happened to get a day off. On a fateful day in March it turned out we had too many instructors scheduled for the afternoon, so I finally got to clock out and go riding.

I was ecstatic. When you’re an instructor you’re on the mountain every day, but you’re always limping around the bunny hill and softly cursing under your breath. The opportunities to ride for fun are few and far between, so my friend and I quickly snatched up this rare gift and went straight for the terrain park. I was blowin’ huge and hitting everything, kickers, rails and the like, and I was lining up to throw down some serious air on the spine.

A spine in a terrain park is a very steep jump, perhaps twelve feet in height, that is sharp at the top like a shark’s fin. The intent is that your forward speed gets converted into upward motion. You ride up the launch side, pop nearly straight up in the air, and ride down the landing side. It’s almost like a half pipe, only you don’t need to spin around for your landing.

I was going hard at the spine, giving myself plenty of speed so I could really get up there this time. I hit the launch, but instead of going up I got shot straight out over the flats. Here I am, fifteen feet in the air over completely flat snow, with no transition for my landing. Shit. I waved my arms to reorient my body, “rolling the windows down” as we call it, shifted my weight onto my back leg so I could land the tail of my snowboard first, and hopefully cushion my impact.

The tail hit hard. I felt a snap in my back leg, and my body hit the snow in a sickening heap. I knew immediately that I had broken something, so I crawled to the edge of the run to avoid getting hit by any other errant, irresponsible riders. My friend rode up, and I told her to go call ski patrol.

I sat and waited for fifteen minutes, feeling like an idiot. The patroller showed up, and he packaged me in a yellow tarp on an orange sled, and dragged my sorry ass off the mountain. At the mountain clinic they x-rayed my leg, and sure enough I had broken my fibula, right at the top of my snowboard boot. The boot acted as a fulcrum, and my leg became a doomed see-saw.

It wasn’t a bad break, but it was enough to put me on crutches for eight weeks. I was done for the season, done at the mountain, and done with anything outdoor-related. The management at the mountain was understanding, and no doubt stoked that I broke myself off the clock so they weren’t financially responsible. They offered to reassign me as a yurt attendant, serving dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets to four-year-olds. I turned them down, as I already had a job and didn’t need the extra work. I wanted my knuckle-dragging friends. I wanted the free season pass. I wanted the social scene. Without snowboarding, though, all I wanted was to be left alone.

In a matter of moments I had gone from being incredibly busy and active in the outdoors, to being a bored shut-in. My roommate affectionately called me “Gimp”. At least I think it was affectionate. Just a few weeks prior I had bought a new car with a manual transmission. With my cast I sure as hell couldn’t operate a clutch, so every day I limped to work on my crutches. My co-workers bought me a bag of frozen corn. Forcing myself to remain inactive was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, and I knew I needed to find a new activity to stay occupied and keep my mind busy.

I decided to learn web design. All of it. I redesigned my personal website, and then I redesigned it again. And again. This was back during the CSS renaissance, when Doug Bowman, Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea were all actively inventing the techniques that we still use today. It was a very exciting, but also very frustrating, time to be a web designer. We still had to support Internet Explorer 5, and there were a few times, especially in regards to whitespace parsing errors, where I nearly jumped out a window as a result of that damn browser. Nevertheless, before long I was rarely answering telephone calls at my job, and instead carving up Photoshop comps into beautiful tableless XHTML/CSS.

I was so irrationally stubborn about working at the mountain that it took something as extreme as bodily injury to make me withdraw from that gambit, and to understand that working myself to the literal breaking point wasn’t a healthy way to live. I realized that if I depended not on my brain, but on this frail little body for my livelihood, that it could all be stolen from me in an instant. I knew I needed to do some intellectual investment in myself, and I used this new free time to refocus my priorities and crawl out of the trenches of phone support.

Indeed. The leg would heal, and it would be a beautiful summer.

End Part III. Review Part I or Part II.

Five years ago, right around this time of year, I was convinced I made the biggest mistake of my life. I had spent the summer working as a gear technician for a windsurfing shop in Hood River, Oregon, which meant I spent ten hours a day out in the blazing sun and nuking wind, building and dismantling rigs for our windsurfing school. It was the perfect dirt bag gig, and exactly what I wanted to do after completing my undergraduate education.

However, as the summer wore on, the shop realized I had other talents besides my bronze tan and rippling muscles. They had a website, yes, and it needed desperate help. By the end of the summer I was working as their full-time webmaster, maintaining their online product catalog and rebuilding their design in XHTML/CSS.

It was a good gig, but come September the town of Hood River really starts to empty out and there isn’t a whole lot to do. Fortunately I had become close friends with the shipping manager of our windsurfing shop, and we kept ourselves entertained throughout the fall by hiking around on Mount Hood and climbing Mount Adams.

Life was good, my job was fine, but I was bored and restless. I didn’t want to spend my winter working in an empty summer tourist town, sitting on my ass in front of a computer. I wanted to work as a rental technician at a ski resort, and despite Hood River’s close proximity to Mount Hood Meadows I didn’t want to work there. I was suffering from wanderlust, and I needed to go somewhere else. I wanted the open road. There was still so much to learn, and Hood River was only the beginning. I didn’t want convenience, I wanted experience.

Thus, in October I drove down to Bend, Oregon for the Mount Bachelor job fair, a one-day event where they hire most of their seasonal employees. I wanted in, and I woke up at five that morning to make sure I would arrive at the mountain early. I reached the town of Bend without issue, but promptly got lost in the Deschutes Wilderness while trying to find the road to Mount Bachelor. I figured it would be well-marked, with big signs and everything, but I was sorely mistaken.

I was lost. So lost. I stopped to talk to some homeless dudes who had been camping out in the woods. They were kind enough to tell me which direction the town was, and I gave them a ride back into civilization. They paid me for my services with ditch weed, which I stuffed in a Leatherman case and threw away.

Eventually I reached Mount Bachelor, but two hours later than I had intended. The job fair was in full swing, and after waiting around for three hours it was finally my turn to interview. By this time all the positions had already been filled, including rental technicians and lift operators, even food court slackers. I was out of luck.

The woman who was interviewing must have seen some potential in me, and she was able to swing me an interview with the managers of the ski and snowboard school. I figured my chances were slim, as I had only been snowboarding for two years. I must have dazzled them with my brilliant tales of working with kids at a summer camp, however, because they offered me a position as a snowboard instructor.

I was stoked. I spent the rest of the day checking bulletin boards in grocery stores and coffee shops, rifling through the Bend Bulletin classifieds, trying to find a place to live. I found a few that would have been absolutely horrible, and one two-bedroom duplex that I thought would be most excellent.

I threw down for the excellent one. Yes. I would be living with a viking.

I had a few weeks between the job fair and actually relocating to Bend, during which I wrapped up all my responsibilities in Hood River and started loading up my car.

I moved to Bend in a snowstorm. The road was so slippery at times that my Mercury Tracer wagon couldn’t even make it up the rolling high desert hills. I was convinced I was going to die.

I didn’t die. I reached Bend, I started my training, and I became close friends with a number of fellow snowboard instructors. We even celebrated Thanksgiving together. Things were good, I was working, I was getting paid, I was paying rent.

And then. Nothing.

We finished our training around the end of November, and suddenly our schedules were open. Damningly open. We were working two, maybe three days a week, for about six hours a day at minimum wage (plus all the hot cocoa you can drink). The mountain made it clear that when the winter holidays finally rolled around we would have plenty of work, but until then we would have to tighten our belts.

My belt was already plenty tight, so I began hunting for a part-time job somewhere in town. I applied at a number of places, including a few temp agencies. Eventually I got a phone call telling me to dress warm and show up early in this, this here residential neighborhood, because I had been hired to do some landscaping at a reasonable, non-minimum wage rate.

Damn if I wasn’t going to be doing some landscaping. Because damn. I wasn’t. Every day I would show up at that location. Every day a pickup truck would pull up, the driver would lean out of his window, and tell me that the ground was frozen and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. “Maybe tomorrow it will be warm enough,” he would say. And tomorrow the same thing. Until soon the pickup stopped showing up, and I would simply get a phone call. “Maybe tomorrow.”

It wasn’t all bad. They compensated me for an hours’ work every day, simply for showing up. Really, it was the only time in my life where I got paid for waking up in the morning.

That said, a man cannot live on $12 a day. I wasn’t getting work at the mountain, my leads in town were going nowhere, and rent was due. I had nothing to do, no means to support myself. I clearly remember driving around the Old Mill District in the dark, listening to “Keep it Together” by Guster, thinking I had made the biggest mistake in my life.

I began obsessing over the question of why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill? Why didn’t I stay in Hood River, stay at the windsurf shop, enjoy a safe and slow winter of hammering on a website, perhaps get a season pass at Meadows so I could snowboard at my leisure? I thought I had seriously fucked up, and I didn’t know what to do with my useless self. I was bored and listless. Rudderless. Ironically I started sending off emails to my undergraduate professors, inquiring about graduate school. That didn’t happen. At least not yet.

It sucked. It sucked hard, but I didn’t give up and I decided to stick it out in Bend for a few more weeks. Like Marty said in class yesterday, sometimes your darkest hour can turn out to be your brightest moment. True greatness can come from tremendous psychological struggle. Indeed, salvation did eventually come, and it turned out to be more than I could have possibly imagined.

Salvation came in the form of a spam house.

Then it came again, in the form of a broken leg.

And these all turned out to be good things.

End Part I. Read Part II.

To those who are wondering, no. I am not growing a beard. I am raising a beard. There is a distinct difference between the two actions, in that one suggests passivity, while the other implies a much more active and deliberate process. Remember, design is deliberate.

Raising a beard is not just the absence of shaving, it is the presence of not shaving. Kind of like typography. It’s not really the letters that make up the words, but the space within (and even between) the letters that does. Whitespace. Negative and positive space. Like music. It is the space between the notes that matters. Unless you’re Charlie Parker and there is no space between your notes, and you couldn’t even slide a piece of paper between them because they are so tightly packed together.

But you are not Charlie Parker. You are not one of the most influential jazz musicians ever to live. You could be, though, you could get to that point, and that is why we are here.

Why are we here?

We are here to destroy and subsequently rebuild ourselves. Indeed, as part of this process I have found solace in the beard. Yes, these are the things to which we aspire, to achieve once again this incredible degree of bad-assery.

It took hard work to get there. A lot of hard work. I’m not even sure it can be accomplished in this environment, what without sun and elevation and hauling 70-pound backpacks through the grizzly-ridden wilds of Yellowstone. This is a different environment, with a different definition of bad-ass, but what happens when these worlds collide? Let’s find out. Perhaps we will crash and burn, but by then at least we will know. Zen Dog himself tells us it is not the destination, but the ride, that is important.

Zen Dog also tells us that he is a pirate. If you did not know this then you are not paying attention. You should wake up. As it was once so eloquently put:

“Me and my friends have been too busy sunbathing off the southern coast of St. Bart’s with spider monkeys for the past two weeks, tripping on acid. Changed our whole perspective on shit.” SOURCE (a good HCI academic always cites his sources).

Indeed, I have discovered that this beard, being a physical manifestation of the current broke-ass state of my brain, acts as a feedback loop. I feel gnarly inside, all twisted and confused and somewhat jittery after my twelfth cup of coffee. All this coffee does something to me, physiologically, such that I occasionally must attend to a room with mirrors in which I participate in socially unmentionable activities. This room has mirrors, yes, and I look at myself in these mirrors and there’s this scraggly beard looking back at me. The beard opens its mouth, speaks, says, “I know how you feel.”

Suddenly it doesn’t bother me so much anymore, that my brain has become unhinged and fractured. The beard knows. The beard understands. It is a reflection of my inner state, an admission that yes, it is okay to feel this way. It is okay to be grizzled. This process, this process of becoming, it isn’t a clean process, it is messy and chaotic and frustrating and punctuated with stray bits of food and milk that hang around longer than would be considered proper.

I go zen. I put on my eye patch and ride an innertube down the Namekagon River. Tied to my innertube with a scrap of Finley’s Fine Twine is another innertube, a tiny innertube with a cooler, a cooler filled with ice and water but above all filled with awesome.

This river may or may not obliterate you. Remember, though, that no matter what you do, no matter what happens, hold onto your awesome. Do not, under any circumstances, let that go.

You hear me?

Hold onto your awesome.

As our first week draws to a close I have realized, quite jarringly, that my existing systems for task and information management are dreadfully inadequate for dealing with this kind of volume. I’ve worked as a professional web designer and developer for five years, in small companies at various levels of authority, and even spent a year or so running my own freelance web design business.

As a web director at my last job, I managed a project for completely overhauling, recoding and migrating the website and commerce engine for the largest windsurfing and kiteboarding shop in the United States. The project launched on budget, and three months ahead of schedule. I know how to manage tasks. I know how to get things done.

But I don’t know how to do this.

When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree I had a computer. I didn’t have a laptop. I didn’t have a cell phone. I had a Palm Pilot, which was a great way to waste a lot of time and maintain an awkward mass in my pocket. I would receive only an email or two a day, mostly from my parents. Students took it as a personal affront when professors would send an email to the class. If a professor were to announce an assignment via email, there would have been riots.

There was no OnCourse. There was no online syllabus. Professors had their personal websites, many of them striking a decidedly GeoCities pose, but it was rare for a class itself to have a website. For handling tasks, it was perfectly manageable to keep everything in a weekly planner. All my readings and all my assignments would arrive in the classroom. This single, unidirectional information stream, this was something I could handle.

I didn’t go to college in 1970. I went to college in 2003.

A lot has changed since then, and I’m not so sure it’s all for the better. The wireless networks are more stable, the average walk-up computer is far more powerful, but the biggest problem I’m experiencing is this relentless onslaught of information, coming at me from every side in every possible medium. My calendar alone is freakish in nature.

My organization and task management has improved since graduating from college, which is good considering that managing a commercial commerce rebuild in a personal weekly planner would have been sheer lunacy. I would argue, however, that managing personal tasks is a far different beast than managing a group project.

After this first week I’ve realized that my weekly planner, the means of personal task organization that I associate with school, may not be the answer to my organizational woes. Fortunately, for the last two years of my life I have been using a casual, stripped-down implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. At its most basic, I attempt to collect every single task that is assigned to me, every single thing that may demand my attention, and localize them all in a single inbox.

These task items range from “water the plants” to “renew health insurance” to “pay rent” to “get an internship”. I will collect tasks in my inbox throughout the day, copying stuff from my email inbox, writing down things from conversation, or things that I need to do that suddenly popped into my head. A couple times a day I will “process” my inbox, whereby I go through all my tasks, get a taste for what needs to be accomplished soon, what can be postponed, and what needs to be broken down into further tasks.

That last point is important. A monumental task like “get an internship” is meaningless until you break it down into near-term achievable components. In this case, I will break down “get an internship” into “finish and print rough draft of resume”, “schedule meeting with career center”, and “begin collecting items for portfolio.” Any die-hard GTD fans out there may chide me for not implementing the full-blown system, and perhaps my life is suffering as a result. Indeed, the sudden increase in task volume has already strained my system.

Ironically, for being a tech-savvy person who’s pursuing a degree with “computer” in its title, I am not easily convinced that technology is always the best solution for a problem. Up until a month ago I kept my entire task list on a series of small legal pads. Historically most GTD applications have been awful, as they focus more on categorizing and organizing tasks rather than actually checking them off.

I’ve recently started using Things, which is the only GTD app that I believe gets it right. It retreats to the background and is open enough, while still organized enough, to adapt to your personal strategy. Plus, the new version of Things will sync with the Things application for your iPhone, so you can have your task list wherever you go. If the movers ever arrive and deliver my primary computer, I’ll be able to set this up.

However, over the last week it has become apparent that I will need to develop a task list where I can quickly and efficiently capture ten times the activity than I was encountering before our program started. With all these new avenues for incoming information, from class to email to websites to blogs to forums to OnCourse, I will need to overhaul my system soon, or it will buckle under its own weight.