Growing up is optional

I’ve got the Yahoo! API powering the search on my work’s website. The programming was easy. Using it is easy. The change process is hard.

I’m using PHP to convert the XML into a multidimentional array, and then looping through the results. To limit the results I was appending site:http://mysite to the search string.

The one difficulty I had was with handling big search strings with lots of OR operators. It seemed to drop the end of the query with the site: parameter and our site would then serve results from anywhere. To get around this I prepend it to the query. Also I added an extra check to confirm that the results are actually from our site.

Results are very good. Thanks Yahoo!

Google has been inproving the depth of its non-US and non-UK maps. You an now see down to about 10km across for New Zealand and other parts of the world. Its’ far from a cartographers dream, but you can see major roads near my house, the airport etc. Zooming out a bit you can see Kapiti Island off the coast. heading north up the coast you can follow the Whanganui river inland to Mount Ruapehu. Going further north you come to one of my favourite spots; Mount Maunganui, one of the best surf beaches around.

At last we are on the uphill stretch to Summer! All of the darkness is starting to get me down. It’s not as bad as a Scandanavian winter, and I don’t mind the cold too much but I hate arriving at work in the dark and getting home in the dark. What little time I get outside during the day is in the shadow of high-rises, which create dark windy corridors. The wind is good for one thing; it makes the waves. There hasn’t been enough surf lately. Thanks goodness for winter storms!

When I felt the urge I had to do something before sanity set in again and momentum was lost. I’ve enrolled in a Master of Management at Massey University. My student ID card arrived with a photo that looks like it was taken a lifetime ago. It’s the same photo from when I first enrolled there 6 years ago.

The work begins soon. I’ll be tied to the books for another 2-4 years. I’m starting with Strategic Governance, which I think will probably be the hardest paper other than the research report.

A while back I wrote about the up side of being a generalist. In fact I went as far as saying that I was a ‘Specialist Generalist’; specialising in knowing a bit about everything. Unfortunately I am falling into the generalist trap like Richard said: …because I’m a jack of all trades Generalist, too much of my time gets taken up doing menial Web things for business people – just because I can.

The end result of this is that I get bored. Which in turn creates its own problem: I become unmotivated.

The hard part is deciding what to do about it. There is no point blaming anyone other than myself for this; my situation is the result of my decisions. Nor is there any point in waiting for someone to get me out of it; the only person that can get me out of it is me.

The natural next step is to answer the following questions:

1. Where do I want to be x years from now?
2. What do I have to do to get there?
3. What am I going to do about it?

These may sound like trivial questions, but they’re not. The first two are particularly difficult. The answer to the third should become obvious once that first two are answered. However, answering it and doing something about it are two different things.

So I’ll start with a basic question: What do I like to do? More random thoughts may follow…

<rant>I hate wearing a tie, so I don’t unless I have to go to a meeting that requires one. Today I showed up at work in tidy jeans and a tidy shirt with a collar. I was told several times that this was ‘a bit casual’ by several female staff, to which I responded I’m no more casual than you.

Relative to other males in my workplace, I am dressed casually. But if you put what I was wearing, cut to shape of course, on a female it would not be considered ‘a bit casual’. In fact, they would all go around commenting on how much they liked so and so’s new shirt and that they would like one for themselves.

Maybe I need to find a job where I’m not so outnumbered by women.</rant>