Seattle Mind Camp 5: Sustainable Work/Life Patterns

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2008/11/21

Kendall Guillemette and I are gonna get a discussion session together at Seattle Mind Camp tomorrow on sustainable work/life patterns. We’re calling it “Seattle Mind Camp 5: Sustainable Work/Life Patterns (…is Calacanis a Saint? Something Else?)”.

See flier below. Some seeds for the discussion –

  • How do you structure your work?
  • Is banking on a buyout like saying, “I’m gonna play in the NBA?”
  • What’re your successes?
  • Your epic fails?

Also cool — we plan to use an iPhone audio meter to insta-poll the crowd on what we should talk about (if it’s a decent size).

Special shout out to all those who need a refresher on “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”.

Seattle Mind Camp 5: Sustainable Work/Life Patterns



CANCELLED: GTD Meetup for March 26

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/26

Tonight’s GTD Meetup where I was going to lead a discussion has been cancelled due to venue double booking.

We’ll be rescheduling and will keep you posted.

If anyone knows of a good alternate venue with wifi, please ping me so I can pass word along to Mike Wilkerson, the organizer.



Leading Discussion at Seattle GTD Meetup on Monday

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/24

I’ll be leading an informal discussion of some of the online project / task collaboration tools I’ve used at the Seattle GTD Meetup at 7 PM this Monday, March 26th at Hale’s Ales in Ballard.

Drop by and say hello — I plan on giving an overview of Basecamp, activeCollab, and my new favorite Vitalist.



Mind Camp 3.0 Video

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/11/14

I’m in the process of uploading video I shot at Mind Camp 3.0 here in Seattle last weekend. So far I’ve uploaded two video files from the ‘Discovery Slam‘ that Scott Berkun and I hosted.

From that session, Ben Livingston’s amazing ‘Blade of Grass Beatbox’ is at –

http://www.blip.tv/file/101016


Click To Play

The full discovery slam is here –

http://www.blip.tv/file/101030

Stay tuned for other sessions I’ll be uploading my raw video for — they are –

  • Alex Barnett’s Singularity discussion
  • Randy Stewart’s Fun Web Session
  • The PhraseTrain session (forgot to get the session leaders name on that one — if anyone has it, please shoot it to me).
  • Intros — these will be up sometime next week — had to shoot those to tape and they will require a bit more turnaround time.

Will let you all know when these are ready.

Some caveats — full sessions are raw footage, so you may have to forward a minute or so at the beginning — also was playing around with shooting straight to disk in a web ready format for super quick turnaround on these sessions, so the video is a little bit too compressed for my taste — will be switching codecs/formats a little next time around.

Also — catching discussion audio is hard because nobody likes to use a mic — but things seem audible for the most part in the discussion sessions I shot — please let me know what you think once they are posted.



Installing WordPress via Dreamhost (Screencast)

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/10/09

Here’s the flash video version of my screencast on installing WordPress via Dreamhost. Enjoy!



Cerner 2006: Blogs & Screencasts in the Quest for Training Attention

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/10/09

I am in Orlando today presenting a session called “Blogs & Screencasts in the Quest for Training Attention” at the 2006 Cerner Health Conference. From the session description:

In the quest for user attention, blogs and screencasts are more that buzzwords. Join us as we examine how these technologies help organizations capture valuable elements of “watercooler conversations” and leverage them toward system and process training. Session will include: An introduction to blogs, screencasts, and RSS; An examination of why content produced and distributed with these methodologies is naturally interesting to users; A short tour of WordPress and Camtasia — two popular blog and screencasting tools.

Here’s the links to the files from the session –

  • PDF of Keynote Slides (PDF - 7 MB)
  • Installing WordPress via DreamHost320×240 (YouTube Flash Video)
  • Installing WordPress via DreamHost1024×768 (Quicktime - 370 MB)
  • Installing WordPress via DreamHost320×240 (Quicktime - 73 MB)
  • Intro to RSS Readers via Newgator1024×768 (Quicktime - 268 MB)
  • Intro to Camtasia1024×768 (Quicktime - 63 MB)


Seattle Podcasting Meetup Links

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/09/05

I’m leading a discussion at the Seattle Podcasting Meetup tonight about podcasting inside the firewall. Will be remoting in via SightSpeed.

Here are some links I’ve jotted down for the session —

1) An introduction to informal learning by Marcia L. Conner

  • Informal learning accounts for over 75% of the learning taking place in organizations today.
  • In 1996, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that people learn 70% of what they know about their jobs informally.

2) Jay Cross’s Informal Learning Blog —

From The business environment of informal learning —

J.P. Rangaswami, former global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort in London, (says, …) as I’ve been pointing out, “The graduates of tomorrow are more used to the tools I was looking at than the enterprise was. So training cost, which used to be a huge barrier to entry for the people who were weaned on the mother’s milk of Microsoft, just wasn’t there.”

Harvard B-School prof Andrew McAfee chimes in, “The opposite of an imposed structure is not chaos. With these tools, the opposite of an imposed structure is an emergent structure, one that forms over time based on the interactions of a lot of people.”

– – – – –

From LMS, we hardly knew ye

LMS create a walled garden in an era when walls are falling down. Why not use the real internet and real internet technology rather than some hokey oversimplification? Furthermore, how can you manage serendipitous learning that is inherently unmanageable?

3) Elliot Masie webinar on ‘Is Instructional Design Relevant to RSS, Mobile Learning, Blogs, PodCasts, Wikis and New Tech?’

  • Masie says podcasts under 10 minutes offer a more optimized learning experience
  • IIRC this references and example of McDonald’s documentation in Turkey done via a wiki.

4) Reflections on the difference of creators vs consumers Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks. An excerpt from From the anniversary edition, pages 7-8 —

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctiveness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

5) Screencasting Tools —



Article: ‘e-learning 2.0 - How Web technologies are shaping education’

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/08/09

Great article this AM from the folks over at Read/Write Web on emerging Web 2.0 (yeah, I know, but we gotta call it something) trends in eLearning.

Article is titled ‘e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education’. Here’s an excerpt –– 

The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner.

In contrast, e-learning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a ’small pieces, loosely joined’ approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services - such as blogs, wikis, and other social software - to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities.

This is the heart of what I will be going into detail on in ‘Blogs and Screencasts in the Quest for Training Attention’ for my Cerner Health Conference 2006 presentation in Orlando this October.



Interviewed on blogs and podcasting in the corporate environment

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2006/06/14

Caught up with Stuart Maxwell of the Seattle Podcasting Network (SPN) a few weeks ago at the Seattle TechCrunch party.

We talked about the challenges of using blogs, podcasting and new media tools in the corporate environment — great chat.

I cover some of the ins and outs of spreading the vision for these types of projects in healthcare (and other non-tech-industry) organizations (like the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford where I currently work).

Stuart recorded our conversation and has posted it to the as ‘SPN Podcast - TechCrunch Party Interviews: Part Two’.

Part 1 is also available from the SPN site.



Seattle Mind Camp 1.0 highlights

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2005/11/07

Went to Seattle Mind Camp this Weekend and it was a blast. Cannot recall a time where I’ve had 24 hours of such great discussions.

Got to talk with so many interesting people who provoked me with cool ideas — Even now I’m having a hard time slowing my brain down (woke up at 3 this AM with my usual insomnia — only this time I had at least three viable business / project ideas the minute I opened my eyes — is that a good thing?)

Here’s some of my big highlights in chron order –

Highlight 1: The Saturday morning session by Julie Leung called “Making Masks: Blogging as Social Tool and Family Lifestyle” was stunning.

She read an essay set to pictures on how blogging has changed and challenged her as a woman, wife, mother, sister.

It was exciting to be at a stereotypically geek event and be provoked by such a thoughtful intelligent display of femininity — I thanked her afterward for a session that my blogging wife would have thoroughly enjoyed (somehow I imagine that my wife’s newfound affinity for Maryam Scoble is just the beginning of us discovering some very cool feminine blog voices).

Julie’s presentation gave me so much hope to see that geek slumber parties like this really do have the potential to be more balanced and diverse instead of stereotypical (and yes John — I’m with Liz and Tara — the quote could have been contextualized much better).

Highlight 2: Got to talk for 30 minutes with Scoble and Bill McCoy (Adobe’s director of Product Management) about the state of web development, Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Google, and husband vs wife debates on wood stoves vs. plasma TV’s — quite a bit of fun — tried hard not too come off as too much of a fanboy.

Then, this AM, I opened up Todd Bishop’s Seattle PI post on “Notes from Mind Camp” and found this photo of the conversation (picture 7 in the photo gallery that accompanies the post — I’m the geek in the yellow shirt). All I could think yesterday was — it would’ve been cool to have some shots of the impromptu moments that happened, then, blam, there one emerges.

Talking with Scoble and Adobe's Bill McCoy at Mind Camp 1.0

Coolest takeaway here, aside from the geek discussion, was that Scoble really is as approachable and good willed as rumor has it — glad he is influencing the industry (and culture at large) in that direction on so many fronts.

Highlight 3: About 15 or so folks (including 1 woman — which I count a diversity victory) hung out for the discussion I led on “Neo vs. Samwise in a fight? And what does this have to do with the attention economy?”

Conversation was really great and hit me with things I hadn’t thought of before.

My friend Mike Wilkerson took notes on a tablet PC that we projected live as we talked. I will do more of a write up on this later and post a PDF and HTML file of the notes. Hope to one day write a book with this as a chapter (Tim O’Reilly — get in touch with me if you are interested in new kinds of offerings — seriously).

My session from Mind Camp is the 4th one down under the 5-6 PM timeslot

Picture of the session description from the Mind Camp schedule was also in the Todd Bishop’s Seattle PI photo gallery. In photo 3, my session is the 4th one down under the 5-6 PM timeslot.

Highlight 4: Got to meet Buzz Bruggeman of Activewords.

Wilkerson and I pulled him into our orbit during Saturday night’s dinner to get the direct buzz on his product — we ended up talking for about an hour about everything from that to how a lot of people want Jesus to save them from his followers.

(Wilkerson has the blue crayola diagram of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that Buzz drew — it was one of the coolest conversations I’ve had in a long time — and Mind Camp was one of those extremely rare eclectic mashups where it somehow did not seem out of the ordinary)

Highlight 5: Shelly Farnham presented on the use of a peer to peer filesharing technology called Groove during the response to hurricane Katrina.

Very interesting conversation. Nancy White had lot of other experiences she shared from an international perspective on use of technology in relief work.

This one went late (1:15 AM according to Nancy) and at midnight I had to excuse myself to get some sleep.

Highlight 6: I got up at 5 AM and loaded a bunch of the sound equipment that had been donated for use on Saturday. We didn’t publicize it too much, but all of the PA gear used at Mind Camp was donated by two Seattle churches — Mars Hill in downtown Ballard (where Wilkerson is a pastor) and Harambee in downtown Renton (where I am a volunteer marketplace pastor).

That’s very cool to me.

I really identify with that “Jesus save us from your followers” sentiment most of the time. When I heard that Mind Camp needed a PA system, it was a blast to jump in and “bless the geeks” — no matter their race, creed, culture, politics, sexual orientation.

It’s quite a kick to see what everyone at the event is doing and to bless it with no strings attached — it’s a bit of a cultural disruption, if you ask me — a sort of culture hack — I like it — I like it a lot.

Highlight 7: After returning the sound gear, I continued a conversation thread with Justin Martenstein (whose wife is an RN) that had started the night before about our shared passion of using technology to solve real world problems.

We talked a lot about Berkun’s people centric pragmatic approach to tech projects in “The Art of Project Management” and I gave him a copy of “Why software sucks (and what to do about it)” that I happened to have with me.

I love spreading Scott’s work around — he and I had a chance to catch up a few times on Saturday but I missed his sessions (because I was talking with the folks from Highlight 2 above — oh that there were more hours in the day). Hoping to hear about his takeaways from the event soon.

Highlight 8: As Justin and I rambled on to other topics, I mentioned a story from a book a friend of mine named Don Miller wrote called Blue Like Jazz (man I wish I hadn’t been too busy to do the cover design on that book!).

Ted Leung (husband of Julie from Highlight 1 above and XML programming afficonado) was nearby and it turned out he had read the book and was intrigued by what we were talking about.

Was a great discussion that again had me thinking of those Inkling conversations that Tolkien, Lewis, etc. had so many years ago. Looking forward to more of that sometime soon.

Highlight 9: As Wilkerson and I left, we thanked Andru Edwards who spearheaded the event with the help of family and friends. Noted to him our sincere thanks for putting the whole thing together and that we are both ready to help with Mind Camp 2.0 in any way we can.



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