Head Tale

Friday Fun Link – Cat Shaming At Its Best

There are lots of possibilities but if I did a photo like this for our cat, one of the first captions to spring to mind would be: “Whipping around the house should only be done at 3am with my owner’s bed as the best place to practice my hairpin turns.” 😉

¶ Posted 24 May 2013 § FridayFunLink § Humour ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute

The Business Case for Happiness in the Workplace

I’ve long been a believer that a happy workplace is a productive, engaged workplace.

Now, it looks like Canadian business schools are starting to agree.

From the Globe & Mail (with my own bolding of parts I found particularly relevant)…

The business case for happiness in the workplace

DELLA BRADSHAW

Published Wednesday, May. 22, 2013 07:00PM EDT

Last updated Tuesday, May. 21, 2013 04:40PM EDT

Forget spreadsheets, swot analysis and risk management; the latest topic on the business school agenda is happiness.

Those academics who research the topic prefer to classify it a bit differently, however.

“Meaning” is the term used by Lee Newman, dean of innovation and behaviour at IE Business School in Spain. At the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Jane Dutton, professor of business administration and psychology, says it is about “human flourishing.” Christie Scollon at Singapore Management University describes it as “subjective well-being.”

But however they describe it, they all agree that happiness makes good business sense. Moreover, employers and policy makers need to consider the happiness factor if they are to promote strong economies and profitable companies.

Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University in the U.K., points out: “When people become happier, they somehow find more energy. We don’t know how they do it.”

According to Prof. Scollon, a psychologist: “Research shows that happy people earn more money, are healthier (spend fewer days out of the office sick) [and] are more creative at problem solving.” This means promoting happiness in the company makes commercial sense “even if you’re a total Scrooge and only care about making money,” she adds.

Like many apparently sudden trends in management thinking, business academics’ interest in happiness has been decades in its gestation and originated in the development of “positive psychology” – a focus on well-being rather than mental illness – in the 1980s. Prof. Oswald says Warwick has been studying the subject since the 1990s. “It’s moved from being another strange thing to being relatively mainstream. It’s just unstoppable.”

Advances in neuropsychology have added rigour and clarity to the picture, while the integration of non-business academics, especially psychologists, into traditional business schools has led to a broadening of interest among economists, says Christopher Hsee, professor of behavioural science and marketing at Chicago Booth, and a psychologist by training.

“About 30 years ago, psychologists and economists rarely talked to each other but now more and more people in economics realize psychologists have a lot to contribute in solving economic problems,” he said.

The combined interest of professors and students has helped to drive enthusiasm, says Michael Norton, associate professor at Harvard Business School. “Teaching is dependent on what faculty are interested in and what students want to learn. I think there’s just a confluence now.”

But business has also been key in advancing the agenda. “Elite workers are extremely expensive to replace, so taking job satisfaction measures is not a soft-minded thing to do, it is a hard-minded thing to do,” according to Prof. Oswald.

Indeed, Prof. Newman believes it is companies that are the driving force. “We like to think that business schools are ahead of companies. But in this domain companies are ahead of schools.”

Organizations such as Google and Southwest Airlines are cited as examples of companies that adopted positive practices in their organizations. “They’re constantly introspective about themselves,” Prof. Dutton says. “Their strategic success depends on it.” Governments are also addressing the happiness agenda in France, the U.K. and the United States.

The financial crisis and the subsequent recession have emphasized the need for this teaching, and layoffs and salary freezes have exacerbated the problems of unhappy workers. “Debt is very closely related with depression and mental illness,” Prof. Oswald says. “Fear of unemployment is a very real fear. Everything to do with fear seems to be debilitating.”

While the study of happiness has been instrumental in addressing problems of organizational culture, there is a second wave of research – equally important – about the relationship between organizations and their customers. “Increasingly the marketers are thinking about the psychological triggers [for customers],” says Prof. Norton. Price-cutting is an obvious trigger for happiness but others, such as those relating to environmental sustainability or social responsibility, are less well-defined.

Triggers for individual employees, too, are about more than just financial gain, he says. Indeed there is real evidence that doing things for other people makes you happier. Prof. Norton cites his research in Europe with a company bonus scheme. A sample group from the company were told to spend their €15 ($20) bonus on other employees rather than themselves. Those who did so were much happier than the control group, he says.

What is clear is that the rigour of work done in the intersection between business, society and individual well-being is increasing.

“There is good science that grapples with the real issues,” Prof. Oswald reports. “I imagine 10 years from now it will inform how to treat employees and how to define work systems. Most of these systems [today] just come from guesses.”

But there are still negative perceptions to overcome, Prof. Scollon says. “The stereotypes of happy people are that they are dumb. We have sayings like ‘ignorance is bliss.’”

Whereas happy people, it seems, may be the most effective in the workplace.

¶ Posted 23 May 2013 § Jobs § Library § LibrarySchool § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: economics, orgdevl, philosophy, unitedstates

Refer Madness

Over the years, I’ve occasionally posted about some of the search terms that were bringing people to my blog. I did this once a few months after starting my blog in 2006 and again during the 2009 NDP Leadership Race and probably a few other times as well.

I thought it might be interesting to re-visit the idea to see what search terms show up in my referral logs when I’m just doing my thing, posting randomly about technology, libraries and cute baby news (although search engines can and do link to my posts going back to 2006 if it fits their algorithm. For example, for the longest time, the most referred post on my blog was one where I referenced Darth Vader and Eminem!)

Here’s what people have been searching for in the last 30 days (the numbers are best guesses as people will and do use all kinds of variations of search terms and I haven’t scanned through the entire search log to count all of them)…

“Eulogy for Uncle” (and variations eg. “Eulogy Examples Uncle”)- 40+ times
“Head Tale” – 30+ times in the last month (my pet peeve is people who Google web sites instead of typing their URL’s directly into the browser. Someone I know who does this says it helps prevent typos but I don’t buy it!) 😉
“Fred Eaglesmith Tabs” (and variations) – 25+ times (I’ve now put a link to the Wayback Machine’s archive of my page so that will hopefully do in case I never get around to rebuilding this popular page I used to have)
“Life Milestones List” – 20+ times – of all the search terms that bring people to my blog, this is probably going to lead them to an entry closest to what I suspect people are actually looking for
“How Do You Make A Rye & Coke Press” – 15+ times another consistently popular post going back to the first year of my blog (which has also contains some discussion of referral logs
“Similarities between sports and religion” – 10+ times
“Yellow Belly Wedding” – 5 times (apparently there’s a huge market for weddings in brewpubs!)
“RplWatch” – 5+ times (you’ll need to look over there)

Some other interesting one-offs (my top hits are fairly consistent so the one-offs are my favourites as they can be ANYTHING!)…

“porno, ftrw”
“hockey playoffs running out of beer”
“hit the rhubarb”
“looking for sex in Williston, ND”
“i want to help you lift enormous things”
“sask ndp slogans”
“worst professor ever”
“knock knock rape”
“running back to saskatoon racist”
“php function to censor cursing on all wordpress pages”
coedtoplesspulpfiction
“we can and do spend too much time worring whether librarianship is a craft or and art, a job or a profession”
“and possibly litigious”
“canada sensorship is bullshit”
<lots of vanity searches/stalker searches of people who’s names I’ve mentioned on this blog>
<lots of searches relating to different aspects of the recent NDP Leadership race – not just Ryan Meili but lots of people looking for the dirt on Cam Broten too apparently!> 😉

¶ Posted 22 May 2013 § Blog § Humour § Internet § Politics § Saskatchewan ‡ Comments (0) °

Flickr Redesign Now Gives You ONE TERABYTE of Space (and Some Other Thoughts on Cloud-Computing)

Flickr, a photography storage & sharing site which was one of the original Web 2.0 services (the missing vowel gives it away!), has lived in a state of benign neglect for the past few years after being acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

Under the leadership of new CEO (and former Google #3) Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! has refocused its energies in a variety of ways including a major deal to acquire Tumblr (again, missing vowel alert!) and a massive redesign of Flickr.

Probably the biggest news in that redesign is that Flickr now offers 1 Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage (room for ~250,000 photos) which is a quantum leap from what most other free storage sites are offering (including Mayer’s former employer, Google, who offer 5GB of free storage for their Google Drive product.)

(There’s another Google echo in this announcement – Google made a huge wave and got a lot of people to switch from competitors such as Hotmail and ironically, Yahoo! Mail when they launched Gmail in 2004, offering a then-unprecedented 1 Gigabyte of storage when other companies were offering a fraction of that – 2MB or 4MB.)

So anyhow, it remains to be seen if this is a game changer in the crowded online photography services landscape but, as with everything, time will tell.

I began using Flickr in 2006 while in library school which is also when we got our first digital camera (thanks Ebay!) and Shea joined soon after. For a long time, I mostly used my account for serving images to my blog since my blog host had limited space at the time. Shea’s account was more about archiving our lives, she even had the $24.95 Pro account which allowed you to view more than 200 most recent photos but let it lapse. So another unintended benefit of this move is people who no longer had Pro accounts are seeing important photos that were locked by Flickr (on the flip side, photos that appeared to be hidden for the most part – to the user anyhow, even if they were still discoverable by search – are now re-appearing)

The timing of this is slightly unfortunate as I was recently researching a place to move all of my photos online for cloud-based storage and access. I looked at Facebook. Flickr, Google Picasa, Dropbox, iCloud, SmugMug and numerous other competitors but none had the feature set I was looking for – ability to upload photos and videos in their original resolution, an iPhoto uploader, ability to identify duplicate photos, decent tagging/grouping options, good control of privacy settings including default of “Private”, gut level of trust of the company, etc.

In the end, just a week ago, I ended up signing up for ThisLife.com which is a relative new entry in the online photo storage/sharing space but which seemed to be the closest fit for what I was looking for. (Here’s a Public “Story” I created – basically, what they use to refer to what most sites would call an Album.)

That does bring up the question of how I balance what is ultimately a divide between the convenience of online cloud storage (access anywhere! no need to do backups! Integrate easily with other services!) versus the control of keeping things local on your own hard drive (Control! Privacy! Prevent Google/Facebook/Microsoft from knowing even more about you!) and this is how it shakes down right now for the major areas of my life

I did a similar post about a year ago so it’s also interesting to see how things have shifted in 12 short months…

E-mail – still using Thunderbird as my main e-mail client rather than a web-based service like Gmail, mostly because I’m old-school and think of e-mail as somehow being particularly private, even compared to putting your photos or documents online
Web surfing – was using both Firefox and Chrome a year ago but have now all but fully switched to Chrome
Digital Photos/Videos – as I said, in process of trying ThisLife.com for photos but will likely continue to use iPhoto as a local repository. Now that leads to question of how to prevent duplication of effort so if I create an album or tag photos or whatever in one, it gets reflected in both (note to self: check if ThisLife syncs photos that get updated in iPhoto?)
Music – Rdio has become the source of probably 80% of my listening with iTunes making up the 10% of bands that aren’t on Rdio – as I said before, ranging from artists that are big (Beatles) to small (indies like Sam Baker, and speaking of, you should support his Kickstarter for his next album!)
Documents – moving or starting the vast majority of my documents onto Google Drive – whether a checklist for Pace’s recent birthday to a To Do list for work

More discussion from MetaFilter, my favourite spot for thoughtful consideration of any news-worthy topic of the day (perhaps partly because they try to *not* being about the current buzzy topics?)

¶ Posted 21 May 2013 § Blog § Internet § MemoryLane § Photo § Technology ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: cool, economics

Music Monday – “There are things that make me dad/You seem to be all of them.”

Pace turned six this weekend and I know it’s cliche but man, time has really flown.

I haven’t had a chance to update this montage of photos we’ve taken with Pace and a stuffed Oscar the Grouch doll every three months of his first year and then annually since then so it only goes up to when I first made it when he was three.

But I’ve put a photo below so you can see how he’s grown.

Happy birthday buddy!

Pace and His Friend Oscar Though The Years from Jason Hammond on Vimeo.

¶ Posted 20 May 2013 § Family § MusicMonday § Pace § Sasha § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: music

A Few Random Thoughts on Pace’s First “Real” Birthday Party

So now that Pace is in kindergarten and turning six, we decided to have his first “real” birthday party with a bunch of friends rather than just family members and/or a friend from daycare like in previous years.

Here’s some random thoughts about what we did for Pace’s party this year and why…

– in Regina, a lot of parents choose to spend $150 – $250 to book a birthday party package at one of the kid-friendly venues around town – anywhere from Laser Quest to “It’s a Blast”‘s giant climbing structure to the Science Centre to Dino Bouncers to bowling and so on. We’d thought seriously about doing this too since, especially having just had our second baby a month ago, it can definitely make things easier and more streamlined. But in the end, we decided we’d have a party at home and that would be less expensive and not much more complicated to arrange, especially since we weren’t even going to really have a theme (other than perhaps “Generic Old-Fashioned Kid’s Birthday Party”) and we’d have lots of helping hands from the family who were here including my aunt who’s visiting from BC and one extra unexpected helper (see below.)

– in terms of who to invite, Pace has one really good friend from his old daycare who’s already been to his birthdays in the past so he was a sure thing. He has one cousin around his age in Weyburn who normally comes to his parties but we had a smaller pre-birthday in Weyburn last weekend since that cousin and also Pace’s grandparents couldn’t make it for the birthday in the city.

– Other than his friend from daycare, Pace has eight boys in his class and since invite cards at the Dollar Store come in packs of eight, we decided it was easiest to invite everyone from his class (just kidding – I’m sure we would’ve sprung for a second pack of invites if they came in four or six packs so we could still invite all his classmates. Well, not all – we couldn’t convince Pace to invite any girls from his class and at his age, didn’t think it was worth forcing the issue.)

– a co-worker told me her strategy was to allow her kids to invite a number of kids equal to their age. Pace invited slightly more than this (nine) but knowing not everyone would make it – especially with Pace’s birthday falling on a long weekend – it would probably work out to close to six (we actually ended up with exactly six guests when an older neighbour kid across the street was a last minute addition. His birthday is the same weekend as Pace’s and a small miscommunication made us think his and Pace’s birthdays were at the same time. But turned out that the neighbour’s birthday was in the morning and Pace’s was in the afternoon so Pace missed the morning birthday but was able to call him over to join our afternoon party. Oh, the neighbour’s venue of choice? Laser Quest.)

– I doubt we’ll continue inviting everyone in his class in future years (boys or girls) but we thought it was a good approach for the first year and this led to a couple unexpected “teachable” moments. For example, Pace said he didn’t want to invite one boy because he was a “bad” kid. I explained that perhaps, if this boy was bad, maybe it was partly because he didn’t get invited to birthday parties so we should invite him anyhow to be nice. (The kid ended up being unable to attend anyhow so I didn’t get a chance to see if he was really a bad kid or just misunderstood.) 😉

– the mother of another classmate who RSVP’ed said she wanted to stay during the party because of her child’s “issues”. I had no idea what this meant and didn’t ask – I figured it could be autism, could be allergies, could simply be a really overprotective mother. Turns out that her son had a major operation as an infant and still has related health concerns meaning he can’t overdo it, has to take medication, etc. I guess that wasn’t so much a teachable moment but it was nice to hear the mother say that this was her son’s first birthday party invite ever (his health issues mean he didn’t go to daycare and he’s probably not as active or involved as the other kids at school – he frequently stays indoors at recess for example – so hasn’t gotten invited to other parties that have happened already this year.) His mom said he was very excited to come and it was also gratifying to hear that her son talked very highly of Pace and how they played together at school. (Oh, and I mentioned one unexpected helper and this mom pitched right in – helping the kids wash their hands before hot dogs and holding Sasha while Shea was busy!)

– there’s also a HUGE amount of peer pressure to give out goody bags full of cheap crap from the Dollar Store that’s quickly broken or forgotten by the recipients. After some searching online for alternative goody bag ideas (I’m not so brave as to do away with giving out something to guests! As sad as it is, I don’t want Pace to get a reputation as “nah, I don’t want to go to his party – he doesn’t give goody bags.”) In the end, I decided to spend a little more but bought a bunch of $5 gift cards from Chapters and gave each kid one along with a note, written from/on behalf of Pace explaining that he wanted to give his friends a list of his favourite books and a gift card so they could get one too. (The irony, which I realised after, is that this may increase peer pressure on other parents to spend more than a couple bucks on their goody bags. But maybe not everyone’s as self-conscious as me?) 😉

– Probably a lot more than for many parents when I was growing up, I’m also conscious of all the possible special needs – do the kids have nut allergies? Religious beliefs that mean they can’t eat hot dogs? Gluten-free diets? Are they vegetarians? Do their parents not let them have sugar? Watch/play violent games? On and on and on…

– With that last point made, I tried not to worry about these things *too* much or ask parents to fill out a disclaimer form or anything – the kids happily played guns on a climbing structure in our backyard, we did give candy to each kid after a pinata got broken, they did come in and play on the XBox after it started to rain the middle of the party. In fact, one of my favourite pictures from the party is one of our living room with a quintessential “boy” look to it – two boys playing the Lego Batman 2 video game, one hitting a stand-up punching bag, one on a hobby horse, one shooting a Nerf gun with foam balls in it.

– I didn’t force it too much but I was hoping I could convince the boys to play some old fashioned party games – Marco Polo, Charades, etc. – which I suspect many of them might never have ever heard of. But again, I was always mindful that it was Pace’s party, not mine and so I’d let him lead (with guidance) on what to do and when. If the boys are happy playing pirates in the backyard, I’m not going to say “okay, now who wants to play a rousing game of “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button”?” (Pace did ask me today – “how come we never played any of those games you talked about?” and I told him that they were having fun doing other things so I didn’t bother.)

– Fascinating to see the different personalities of the kids, even at this age – who’s extroverted, who’s a joker, who’s domineering, who’s more of a loner or who’s more interested in playing with our cat than the other kids! 😉

We didn’t choose not to go to an existing venue just to save money but if I dare total up what we spent on the party compared to the $200+ we would’ve spent at a typical birthday venue, we definitely came out ahead…

$30 – food – hot dogs, buns, juice boxes, chips, nachoes, etc.

$30 – cake from Sobey’s

$30 – 6x$5 Chapters gift cards for “booky bags” instead of “goody bags” (we bought 10 in case we had unexpected guests but only gave out six in the end so someone else in the family will likely end up using the extras)

Free – it took some work but we convinced Pace that using a chili pepper from our Mexican-themed wedding ten years ago was just as good as a new $20 Batman pinata from the Bulk Barn

$10 – candy from Bulk Barn for Pinata

$20 – assorted other stuff from Dollar Store – plastic utensils, paper plates, sparklers, a few birthday decorations, balloons
—–
$120

What else? I guess that’s about it – although it had its minor stresses (and real or imagined) peer pressures, I think Pace’s first “real” birthday party was a hit and I can’t wait until next year when his mom, less burdened with a new baby, can be the lead in planning it instead of me? 😉

¶ Posted 19 May 2013 § Family § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute, holiday

Saturday Snap – Happy Sixth Birthday, Pace!

Shea and her first baby on his sixth birthday…

(Well, the actual day is tomorrow but the party’s today which is causing a bit of stress for Pace – “But if my birth day’s tomorrow, how can we have the party today???”)

¶ Posted 18 May 2013 § Baby § Family § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § SaturdaySnap § Shea ‡ Comments (0) °

Friday Fun Link – Our English As She Is Spoke (A Column Only Canadians Will Understand)

A fun column by Dave Bidini as we head into the May Long Weekend aka “The Official Start of Summer in Canada” (at least in theory, if not practice.)

¶ Posted 17 May 2013 § Canada § FridayFunLink § Humour § Randomness § Travel ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute, language, travel

Sriracha Hot Sauce Catches Fire

A Business Week profile of the Sriracha Hot Sauce company including its founder, its history and some reasons why its been so successful.

My own introduction to the fabled hot sauce was fairly typical – when I started working at the Sask Publishers Group, my boss took me for Vietnamese food (is it possible I never had Vietnamese food all through college? Maybe – I was pretty sheltered! Or, if I did, I’d never bothered with the sauces.) Anyhow, I followed the lead of the other people at the table – I ordered rice vermicelli with meat, I poured the fish sauce on it. But instead of squeezing a small dollop of the red sauce in the ketchup squeeze bottle on the side of my dish like they did, I squirted a huge amount all over my food. And of course, I nearly died from the heat and could barely finish my meal, tears running down my face, constantly blowing my running nose.

I’m not so sheltered anymore and the irony is that today, I practically eat the stuff like, well, like it’s ketchup! 😉

¶ Posted 16 May 2013 § MemoryLane § PopCulture § Randomness ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: economics, unitedstates

A Partial and Incomplete List of Reasons the NDP Lost The BC Election #skpoli #bcpoli #ndp

I went to a noon hour presentation at the Johnson-Shoyama School of Public Policy on “The BC Election and What It Means For Saskatchewan“. One presenter got a good laugh off the bat joking about how he had to tear up his speaking notes in light of the stunning come-from-behind victory of the Liberals after all pollsters (including internal polls for both Liberals and NDP) were predicting an NDP victory.

Here is a partial and incomplete list of reasons why the NDP (may have) lost, not all of which may have been covered in the presentation:

So, in summary, nobody – including pollsters, pundits or politicians – knows what the hell happened in BC yesterday or why! 😉

By way of comparison, the Maple Leafs also lost a heartbreaking battle to a last-minute, come-from-behind surge that nobody saw coming earlier this week.

Here is the full and complete list of reasons the Leafs became the first team in history to lose after having a three goal lead in the third period of a Stanley Cup playoff Game Seven: