Departure from WI / Shows

I've scheduled this post to publish while I'm between Madison and Chicago. It's been over 3.5 years since I drove up into town, and I'll be headed out in the same way - one very full subcompact, but with professional experience and some money saved to show for my time here. I had a few goals in coming to WI, and I think I accomplished most of them, though I probably could have had similar gains in less time - I was just lucky enough to enjoy my job and stick around longer than I had planned.

I'm really excited about what's coming up - which I will announce in this space once I'm cleared for my next gig, but right now I wanted to catalogue something of my time in WI: the shows I saw, and events I attended. I don't think I'm going to save the programs/tickets for a scrapbook, but I think listing them out is a cool record of how else I filled my time here, and around the country. This is definitely a partial list - I only saved tickets or programs some of the time.

• Taize gatherings in Chicago, Pine Ridge, and Austin (still need to write a thank-you-note for Austin)
• Darlingside had a show in WI this past winter; I took some dear friends with me and we enjoyed the great sound (using just one mic!)
• Bookless: the madison central library held an event with live music acts, art everywhere, and a few "Special features" as we said goodbye to the library before a big renovation. The definite highlight was lots of free paint and brushes to get creative on several walls.
• Madison Remembers: I sang in this 9/11 memorial concern pictured to the right.
• Monster Trucks! On a whim, I joined M, M, and A at Madison's smallish arena to see a pretty good show
• Madison State Fair - weather was bad, eh.
• The Magic Castle - an amazing club in LA that I got to visit thanks to a work trip and got in thanks to a work connection.Very privilaged.
• Verona Area Theater - Singing in the Rain and The Producers
• Middle Theater - Les Miserables. It was an AMAZING show.
• Stoughton Players - Company.
• John Oliver Stand-up in Madison.
• Bobby McFerrin in Chicago, and endless calls from the CSO afterward for a membership.
• Catch Me if you Can - the national tour, with a friend's friend in the cast
• Almost, Maine in Rhode Island with a friend in the cast
• Once on Broadway
  
  
  
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Monemvasia, Greece

Source

Medina

The umbrellas are all retractable.

On the American State

This article is interesting:

The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Government by John J. Dilulio Jr. | The Washington Monthly: 



The federal civil service is overloaded, not bloated. The failed
Federal Emergency Management Agency response to Hurricane Katrina in
2005 hit when FEMA had only about 2,100 employees and had recently lost
many senior managers. The badly bollixed launch of Obamacare health
exchanges in 2013 involved scores of contractors and was overseen by the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal center with fewer
than 5,000 employees. The Internal Revenue Service fails to collect
more than $300 billion a year in taxes it knows are owed, in part
because it lacks the necessary personnel.



Fukuyama is correct that America has never had a fully “centralized,
bureaucratic, and autonomous state”; but he is wrong to imply that
America needs one. What America does need is a federal public
administration workforce that relies less on proxies and more on
full-time bureaucrats who are well selected, well trained, well
motivated, well rewarded financially, and well respected by one and all. American government is decaying mainly because it has too few federal
bureaucrats chasing after too many federal proxies, monitoring too many
federal grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars.



The way
forward is to de-leverage the federal government by defunding its
nonessential proxies and relying more on full-time federal civil
servants to directly administer federal policies, programs, and
regulations. Over time, hiring more federal bureaucrats while pruning
proxies would result in a federal government less beset by grant-seeking
and contract-mongering special interests, more “faithfully executed” by
the executive branch, and less bollixed by the Congress and its dozens
of massively dysfunctional administrative oversight committees and
subcommittees.

I don't have personal experience with the questions here, but it's true that in a college education where I focused on politics and policy, the only discussions of bureaucracy came about when discussing obvious corruption - the design of strong gov't systems is a different matter, and one I didn't hear about much in college. Perhaps a good topic for an MPA....

On MLK in 2015

Growing up in Georgia, the idea of Martin Luther King Jr. was a powerful force. He was a unifying figure, canonized in literature and lesson, and a source of pride for the greater Atlanta area. I don't recall ever hearing about him from my grandparents (or really anyone that was a contemporary of his; he would be around 83 this year), but I do remember the shock when Cedric The Entertainer's character made a disparaging comment about MLK in the movie Barbershop.

After that, I realized that MLK wasn't a real person for us. He was a hero, a saint, a martyr....but not a person. And his accomplishment is much more complex than we heard about in school. See this excerpt from an interview he did that I read about here:

KING: But I do not think violence and hatred can solve this problem.
WARREN: Yes.
KING: I think they will end up creating many more social problems than they solve, and I'm thinking of a very strong love. I'm not, I'm thinking, I'm thinking of love in action and not something where you say, "Love your enemies," and just leave it at that, but you love your enemies to the point that you're willing to sit-in at a lunch counter in order to help them find themselves. You're willing to go to jail.
WARREN: Yes.
KING: And I don't think anybody could consider this cowardice or even a weak approach. So I think --
WARREN: -- yes --
KING: -- that many of these arguments come from, from those who have gotten so caught up in bitterness that they cannot see the deep moral issues involved.

MLK's choice of non-violence was not because it was the best method of achieving integration, but instead because it was the best method of ending segregation. We haven't completed the former work yet, and the latter work continues to be a struggle. Below the jump is a map of Atlanta using 2010 census data; you can see the fault line between the green of blacks and the blue of non-Hispanic whites, with stark sections of people who identify as Hispanic or Asian.

Assorted Music

Art

As the Leelah TG story goes around the world, here's a link to her cry for help

every time i want to kill myself it’s always inconvenient to everyone around me. i want to fade away without ruining everyone else’s plans : depression

On the crimes in North Korea and how we are distracted from them

metsuken comments on Sony & "The Interview" -- what's your take?:

But Kim Jong Un is not Emperor Palpatine. The Workers' Party are not
Sith lords. They are completely sane, flesh-and-blood men and women no
different from me or you who torture and imprison regular people.

Real people. People who are fathers, daughters, uncles, friends.
Imagine if your family lived in a country where one misstep you make
could land you and your children in the gulag. If you have daughters,
you can expect them to be raped by guards who don't bother to use
condoms and their fetuses forcefully aborted. If you have a relative
that has special needs, expect them to be executed for polluting the
gene pool.





When you step back and start deprogramming yourself from the media
conditioning that North Korea has been feeding you, it's not so easy to
be so flippant about North Korea, is it? Suddenly it becomes as
disturbing as joking about the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, or
creating memes out of the two NYPD officers who were murdered in cold
bold simply for being in uniform. Picture that on a scale magnified by
millions and perpetuated every single day.





So the fact that the world is congratulating itself for being so
witty and edgy for mocking North Korea is what made me angry this week.
Once again, the North Korean government proved that comfort kills
empathy. It's natural human psychology. I've seen more outrage against
North Korea for bullying Sony into pulling this movie than I have when
the UN released its report on North Korean concentration camps.





If the world was able to see North Korea soberly as the most brutal dictatorship in the world,
it wouldn't be such a pain in the ass convincing people to get
involved. That's harder to do now that everyone is lapping up the DPRK's
Kool Aid without realizing.

Caroling at Work

Post by Dave Frattinger.

I move my hands an awful lot. :|

The Roots

Things I Think About: Task Tracking Trials and Trust

There are a myriad of options out there for managing tasks and time management at the individual/personal level. David Allen's "GTD" system is one used by my company, but there are dozens of websites with ideas. One of my favorite talks on the subject is by the "Last Lecture" YouTube star, Randy Pausch. It's an interesting area, and one where I continue to iterate.

The struggle I've had is in finding the appropriate balance between detail and efficiency when managing tasks owned by others. Let's be clear here: we may not have the monkey with any of these tasks, but we do own the overall success of the project, and we are accountable when the task owner  misses a task or gets offtrack with a project. This is task management, executive-style.

Let's define some possible cases are the far end of each spectrum. On the one hand, we can manage the tasks of others as we manage our own tasks - for me, this means tracking individual tasks using lists with checkboxes, divided and sorted by subject matter. It's also extremely time intensive and wasteful whenever a task happens on track: there's a cost of my time in monitoring the task, my time in sending a "ping" of some form about it, their time in replying, and my time in checking the box off. This isn't sustainable across the board.

On the other hand, we can check in at occasional (perhaps weekly) checkpoints on status and if work efforts are on track - relying more on the other person's task tracking. This doesn't take a lot of time, but it tends to stay at the project level (unless it's a 1-2-1 planning meeting), and it's not great at mitigating risk. Let's dig into why:

• Wastes time for the larger group if you get too detailed
• Doesn't allow easy opportunities to check-back on late tasks
• Allows updates like "I didn't get to this, will get to it today/tomorrow.
• Doesn't account for issues or tasks that the person might have forgotten.

In my work as a project manager, I've found that we need a system that allows for a middle ground of the two approaches above, and can be dialed up or down depending on the urgency of the project and the past performance of the task owner. I'm still working on ideas about how to dial up and down seamlessly.