Skip to main content

Back with the living

Well, I quit posting quite precipitously there for awhile, and now I'm back. I hope you didn't miss me too much. Here's the deal: I came back from a trip to Michigan one fine Monday in May morning and decided to make a change on the work front. I put out a resume the next day and by Friday I had a new job at a highly respectable allied health care association. YAY!

So I ate bonbons for a couple of weeks and started work on Monday, June 19th. (Although I did attend my new gig's conference in San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend, and had a blast.) In between there, I was really actively trying to sort of "fast" from the internet, professional stuff, etc. I did read a lot, but you know, I read things like The Scarlet Letter and gardening books. I also got caught up with some "administrivia" around the house.

I also went to my spousal unit's conference in San Antonio, which was great. Our hotel was right on the River Walk and I spent some time at the pool and I went to the San Antonio Botanical Garden, which was good but you basically run across burning silica from one plant to the next.

I noticed that ASAE has a blog called Acronym and that's great. I also have been moving around on different computers, etc., and so I've been having a hard time keeping up with my RSS feeds so I'm a little out of the loop. I'm starting to get the feeling that I don't have anything else to say blogwise. I'll snap out of it though, but I may have to refocus. Stay tuned.

Oh, I wanted to mention, my brother Paul now has a blog. He programs X-Box games for Electronic Arts in Orlando, Florida.

Oh, and my article in Associations Now came out. Hope you liked it.

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.