Monthly Archives: December 2017

T’was the night before Christmas, and all throughout Workplace

Every participant was posting at a furious pace.

Daily Blog Posts was booming, each submission full of wit,

Sharing wisdom and tips, hoping for a massive traffic hit.

Today I Learned, blowing up just as much

With people sharing about bitcoin and diet and such.

All Participants and Alumni, the lobby if you will

Holds photo of Praxis Swag & Christmas traditions. This group is never still.

Then from my Slack window, there was the notification knocking

(When you work remotely, this is our form of talking)

Over to Slack I turned my attention

To see what message had my name mentioned.

The #random thread had messages streaming in

Typical team shenanigans, maybe influenced by holiday gin.

I watched as the story continued to unfold

A new take on Santa and his reindeer, breaking the mold.

For Santa, the clear choice was our fearless leader.

The competition Isaac faced for claiming the spot was meager.

The team were the reindeer, making this company fly

First up is TK, what a swell guy.

He listens to Christmas music all through the year

Only having people to share it with when the holiday draws near.

Then there’s Cameron, our resident grump.

Don’t let him fool you, he’s usually only acting down in the dump.

You can find Derek writing content at the speed of light,

And if you want to defend Bitcoin, he’s down for the fight.

Chuck is our resident expert on almost anything you can think:

Websites, books, cocktails, or how to make a sausage link.

Ryan is from Canada, which is apparently still a country.

He’s a World Wanderer, going on adventures, at times including bungee.

Laurie is a customer service and Instagram pro.

She also writes killer blog posts that make you say “Woah!”

Brian is our Joseph, an interpreter of dreams.

The amount of paper needed to write his life story would be reams upon reams.

Hannah is a creative: writing and photographing her life.

Her works saves participants and staff countless strife.

I am happiest when playing with data.

Even though Salesforce and Excel have many a hater.

That is our team, the best the land,

And I challenge you to find a group anywhere that is as grand.

Add in our participants and alumni, and the competition becomes sparse.

And to think the program was initially thought to be a farce!

I am thankful for this group, during the season of all things merry and bright.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

 

I’ve noticed that this 12-day blogging challenge is far easier than the 30-day challenge I did in April and not just because of the length. I can remember running out of ideas 5 or 6 days in during that challenge, and so far for this one (knock on wood), I can typically think of an idea quickly and am getting out the posts in far less time.

I’m following the mantras:

To be creating, you must be consuming.

To be interesting, you must be interested.

Both of these are paraphrased from various Praxis materials or just conversations we end up having in Slack. So, to have a full stocked inventory of blog post material, I need to be learning something every day.

Today I learned about languages. I listened to the 2 episodes of the Freakonomics podcast about language and the follow up episode about Esperanto, a constructed language designed to be simple enough for anyone to learn and possibly be a universal language. It’s such a great analogy for business/products where someone could create something “everyone needs” and then hardly anyone buys/uses it.

What would a universal language look like? Will the UN form a super government, take over the world, and force an existing language on everyone? Will Esperanto or another newly constructed language gain traction (like International Fleet Common in the Ender’s Game series)? It’s certainly an interesting question.

The podcast also brought up that many languages come with the baggage of their past. English has British Imperialism (not to mention the US’s involvement in everybody’s business), German from its part in both World Wars, and Sinhala caused an entire civil war in Sri Lanka!

I’m not sure I see a future with a universal language. Given the spontaneity of how they change and the size of the world and the population, I lean more toward a technological solution like live translation.

If I’m wrong, I can always try to learn Esperanto – now available on Duolingo!

A friend told me about the Up and Vanished podcast recently, so I binged it this weekend. Between errands, gift wrapping, and cleaning, I had plenty of time to listen to all 24 episodes, many of which are only half an hour. Now that the podcast is over, I’m left feeling very unsettled and lacking closure.

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for Up and Vanished.

In case you aren’t familiar, Up and Vanished (UAV) chronicles the disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a 30-year-old teacher from south Georgia who went missing in October 2005. Her body was never recovered, and when the podcast started in 2016, no one had ever been arrested, either. It’s debatable whether the podcast helped “shake the trees,” but two suspects were arrested in 2017 for her murder and for helping to conceal her body, respectively. Knowing all of this ahead of time, I thought for sure there would be resolution to this case, unlike when I listened to Serial so many years ago.

Second-mover advantage meant that I got to zip straight through the podcast and not have to wait 2 weeks in between each episode. I got more and more excited as information about the first arrest came into play and later the second arrest as well. But as the episodes started dwindling down, I noticed we were running out of time to hear about the trial, the verdict, and most important to me – the whole truth.

Well, the podcast is over, and there isn’t even a trial date yet. While there is some slight resolution to the case (it’s a murder, not a missing person case), the podcast left me with a ton of unanswered questions, which I hate.

It brought me back to my first and only experience on jury duty. It was an armed robbery case where the defendant had already confessed to the crime in a police interview. I thought it would be a slam dunk, easy case. Surely everyone tells the truth on the stand, right?

Maybe, but I doubt it. We were met with conflicting stories, extraneous details, and a defendant who said he falsely confessed for fear of his life. While I am still confident this man was guilty, which was what our unanimous vote was, it still bothered me that all of the puzzle pieces didn’t fit together.

The Tara Grinstead case is worse in that these two seemingly random young men who she possibly hadn’t had any contact with since they graduated 3 years prior were the ones responsible for her disappearance. The lack of motive leaves me confused and irritated, and the harsh reality is that even a guilty verdict in a trial doesn’t guarantee a motive or the answers to many other questions will be revealed. And that sucks.

 

All of the best movies come out in November and December. I went to see Lady Bird today and had pretty high expectations due to its 100% (but now 99%) rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Very tiny number of spoilers below! If you don’t want to know anything about the movie, stop reading!

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“There are different kinds of sad! It doesn’t all have to be war.”

I loved this quote the moment she said it. It’s after a disappointing sexual experience, and the guy tries to minimize her feelings by talking about how many people have died in Iraq since the invasion (movie is set in 2002).

While it is important to keep perspective on how large your problems are in the grand scheme of the world, it’s not an excuse to invalidate someone’s feelings.

 

I’m a planner and a saver, so planning my wedding a few years ago was the typical mix of exhilarating and stressful when you consider the wedding premium placed on everyday party objects.

The wedding premium is when the price automatically increases just by being classified for a wedding. For instance:

House warming, birthday party, graduation invitations: $0.50 – $1.00 per card

Wedding invitations: $6.00 per card

You get the idea. So here are some tips on how to avoid the wedding premium:

Find a dress you like and order it in white.

This tip came from a friend who posted about it on Facebook, inspiring today’s blog post!

Arrange your own flowers.

I do not possess the talent know as flower arranging, but I have some friends who do, and their wedding flower bouquets and arrangements have been gorgeous! If you have that skill or a close friend with that skill, hit up the local grocery store or Costco to get season flowers a few days before your ceremony and save yourself a ton of money.

Outer envelopes are not necessary.

Have you ever received a wedding invitation and opened it to find another envelope containing the invitation, response card, and response card envelope? Why the double envelope? I actually Googled this when I was engaged, and it allegedly dates back to the Pony Express days (might be an exaggeration) when mail tended to get dirty during transport. To preserve the cleanliness of the invitation, people would use an outer envelope like a rain jacket. Now that we get our mail delivered in climate controlled vehicles to little rainproof boxes, outer envelopes are just extra paper.

If people are going to throw it away, avoid it or look for inexpensive options.

Similar to outer envelopes, I didn’t want to spend a significant money on anything people were going to throw away. The two biggest things that came to mind were invitations and programs. While I might keep them and frame them, my guests won’t, so I didn’t want the paper products to break the bank.

I used Vistaprint for both. They always have coupon codes, and their prices are often below other printing services as well. I used a wedding invitation template and designed my programs myself. It was a lot of trial and error with Microsoft word, but I pulled it off! The programs were my favorite because I used the “rack card” product for programs. This was my greatest hack in terms of spending way less money than was expected since the template for wedding programs were significantly more expensive.

Other options: you can also use emailed invitations which are free and there’s nothing for guests to throw away. If you want to have physical invitations that go in the mail and want them to look nice, consider enlisting the help of a friend with graphic design skills or hiring one on Upwork or another peer to peer network.

Keep an eye on stamp prices.

If you go the route of mailing invitations and include pre-stamped return envelopes, the cost can add up quickly! Luckily the government announces forever stamp price increases well in advance of them taking place, so you can save 2-3 cents per invitation if you buy stamps before the price increase. As the name suggests, they are good forever, and depending on the size of your wedding, you could save over $100.

Decide what you care about.

This is obviously a catch-all, but it can be overwhelming to create an event that lives up to the expectations of all of your guests. Luckily, you don’t have to! You (and the person you’re marrying) and the only one(s) who need to be satisfied with the day.

I struggled with the decision between real dishes and plastic (but the nice-looking plastic that almost convinces you it’s real). The price differential was extreme, not to mention the fact that actual dishes have an additional cleaning fee, run the risk of being broken, etc. I finally decided to go with plastic because if someone was going to judge me negatively as a person based on my cutlery, they weren’t the type of person I would invite/want at my wedding anyway.

There will be things you care about, though, and that’s ok! It’s just important to remember that the only things you actually need to get married are an officiant and someone who also wants to marry you.