The Wayward Celt

Some call it vanity, but  a little self promotion can’t hurt, right?

Today, I was honoured to have been the first in what will become a regular series of interviews with various people involved with my employer, IBM Rational Client Support. You can read the full text of my interview here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/nfrsblog/entry/meet_jason_o_donnell4?lang=en

On a purely selfish note, I would love to hear your feedback about this interview:

• Did you like the questions asked? The answers?
• Is there something you thought may have been missing?
• Do you see any value in learning more about people within a company which you may be a client of?
• Does this help de-mystify the company and bring in a more personal feel to the face of an organization?
• Are there ways you think this could have been done better?

I’ll explain further why answer to these questions are important to me….

In the interest of full disclosure and transparency: I am a content contributor as well as directly involved with the just-launched interviews initiative on the Notes from Rational Support Blog. Additionally, I will likely be taking over driving these interviews and posting to the blog, hence my interest in your feedback about the structure, etc. My interview being the first to run was kind of a bit of a cheat since Kelly Smith (@kellypuffs) and I are collaborating on the initiative. In my defense, I tried to get someone else first, but work cycles just weren’t available to do so, as such Kelly fell back on me as an easy standby so we could start the weekly cadence of interviews sooner rather than later. That said, I am still proud to have been spotlighted!

What REALLY gets me excited about this series though? Not the fact that I was spotlighted, but rather the anticipation of how all the future respondents will answer the interview questions (we have about twice as many questions than what I answered, none being ‘required’). I am absolutely looking forward to the variety of insights into both the organization as well as the individuals presented. Being so new to the organization myself, I find amazing value in the stories presented by the old-hats as well as the new ones. Seeing the organization and experiences from so many different points of view has always helped me shape my own understanding of the business and learn from both past mistakes and successes. I see this series as another way to learn even more personally, while also helping our clients see the more personal side to what can often be a faceless organization.

Of course, being one who likes instant gratification, this is going to be a hard one for me to keep to only a weekly cadence, and I am hoping the demand from the readership tells me the same thing. But that is the key to good blogging: keep a steady cadence with content your readership wants, and will keep coming back looking for more!

Yes, I know it has been a while since my last post. Real life happened. I am now, however, finally getting to a point where I am not so emotionally exhausted that I can’t string together more than 140 characters at a time.

Speaking of which, I made an odd discovery about myself yesterday: apparently I obtain a small sense of validation from being re-tweeted. And it actually makes perfect sense to me. After all, a re-tweet is essentially someone else saying: “see what this person posted, yes I agree with it and think it is valuable enough to pass on”. And that makes me feel like my ideas, or even just my words, carry some minor value in the social media spaces in which I have begun playing. It is nice to get that sense that I am doing something right.

Positive feedback is a wonderful motivator.

As many of you know, my dad has been painting watercolours for a number of years now as his passion. He’d been drawing professionally all his life, but only in retirement did he seriously tackle watercolours as his focal media. After showing quite well in a few juried competitions and art shows, and being asked numerous times if he was in a gallery or on the web, he came to me to discuss building a website. So, a few years back, I built out a site and surprised him for his birthday; since then, I’ve rebuilt and maintained his site as a birthday present since it isn’t a necessity for him, and being retired I figured it is an expense he didn’t need to shell out.

While I know the value of a website, it seems dad just figured out exactly what it can do for him. About two months ago he was contacted by a gentleman who had found dad on his website and indicated he was interested in purchasing one of his paintings. They communicated a few times, and finally met up yesterday for a private viewing of a few of dad’s paintings. Dad walked away from that viewing having sold three of his largest paintings for a few thousand dollars each. He called to tell me the news within minutes of arriving home. Rarely have I heard dad so giddy, but I guess a bit of a financial windfall like that will perk anyone’s spirits, especially right before the holiday.

You want to make a retired painter happy? I think I finally found the formula… it involves patience, talent, and a whole lot of luck.  Merry Christmas, dad.

Lastly, for those of you who haven’t seen his work before, go ahead and click on over to www.ODonnellMarineArt.com
I think you’ll enjoy what you see there… though I am indeed biased of course; not only because he raised me, but because I also own four of his originals. And no, mine aren’t for sale 

At my day job, I am a knowledge manager for IBM Rational Support. In this position I am helping to drive a concept known as “KCS”, or Knowledge Centered Support.  I like KCS, because it allows me to do what I have been doing all my life when it comes to information: reuse.

I’ve always found my patience tried when pushed to repeat myself, so I would fall back into a pattern of reusing information I previously provided. Oddly enough, however, it took me YEARS before I began actually reusing content for one of the questions I am most commonly asked: “What whiskies do you recommend?”

So, two years ago, I answered that question in the form of a blog post on my whiskies tasting group site: www.3DrunkenCelts.com

Since it was around the Christmas holiday, I framed the original post in the context of gifting whiskies to someone else, but the concepts and recommendations are still solid if you are just buying for yourself.

This year, I am going to fall back on the best practices I’ve learned over the years and simply reuse my old content, as it still holds up today:

• 3DC: Need help buying a whisky lover a Christmas gift?

So, jump on over to my tasting group’s site at the link above and read through my post on buying whiskies as gifts… and maybe even take a look at Raz’ recommendations for non-whiskey whiskey gifts too. Who knows, you may just find that perfect something for the perfect someone, or just for yourself

A sad day hit the household this weekend; our drip coffee maker developed a leak.

While this was not entirely catastrophic, it did give us the excuse to finally replace our little Mr. Coffee with a proper drip machine that would bring our Stumptown roasts to full flavour. After some solid refreshers on my previous research (I spent a full year researching my purchase of the Rancilio Sivlia and Rocky combination for my espresso setup), I had narrowed our choices down to 2 within hours: a Capresso MT-500 or a Technivorm Moccamaster .

Further discussion and a final trip to a local kitchen store, Kitchen Kaboodle, resulted in us coming home with a Technivorm Moccamaster Thermal carafe drip machine:

Such a beautifully simple drip machine. It has only one switch with two settings: on and off. No timer, no clock, no bells and whistles. The brilliance of the machine is the power it wields, as it is one of the only machines on the market which will actually heat the water to the perfect extraction temperature of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. It is also one of the very few machines (possibly still the only home drip machine) which can boast an SCAA certification/approval for meeting its standards.

Now, with the old coffee maker in the garage, I have disassembled it in preparations and attempts to see if I can rebuild/mod it into a steampunk style Mr. Coffee at the suggestion of a good friend. If I am successful, you can expect a full process write up on this blog.

Of course, while we were at Kitchen Kaboodle, we also ended up replacing our 13 year old Hamilton Beech 7-cup food processor with a new, larger Cuisinart Custom 14 cup food processor:

I think that should pretty much settle any future kitchen appliance purchases for another 10+ years. If we had kids, these two appliances would be handed down to them when we pass; they are built that well!

With that, I’ll go have another cup of Stumptown, perfectly brewed at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Ah coffee, how I love you!

Ok, so this is how my ‘vacation’ went:

Right off the bat, let me say that the time spent at war with friends was well worth the effort…. I had not been looking forward to this war as I had others. No sense of excitement for the tasting was washing over me, nor was I looking towards the 1700+mile roundtrip to get there and back. It wasn’t until the Sunday before when I figured I was committed to it, since that was when I had packed my bike in preparation. And it wasn’t until Tuesday before that I was 100% sure I was going…

Click the link below for the full story… Be warned, this post is as long as the 1700 miles I rode to make it.

The Gospels According to Seamus: The Exiled years

(Whiskies of the World, 2009)

(To follow along the timeline of events, use Twitter search to locate all our Tweets posted with the #3DC tag: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%233dc )

A panoply of emotion washed over me before my departure for this year’s event. My excitement was still present, yet not as palpable as in years past; I was muted by an underlying exhaustion from a looming deadline, one which I was determined to ignore once I locked the door to my house….. click the link below for more!

2.5 days of whisky fueled mayhem… with tasting notes!

As promised, pics of the new cut, behind the cut, like a good little emo kid:

… in that I’ve always wanted one, and realized I can have one now. So I did.

Since I work from home, and rarely leave the house, I figured a haircut really didn’t matter. So, I let it go far too long for my own taste and didn’t see a barber for over 3.5 months. I got a bit shaggy. And then I realized, when I get it cut, I can do anything I want.

I’ve been a bit antsy anyways, and looking for a good change to shake things up a bit. So yesterday Jean and I headed out for a day downtown. We ended up at Bishops barber shop at around 3pm and I sat for about half an hour while Danica clipped away at my head.

End result: mohawk.

Later, Jean and I ended up at Alteration Nation to pickup some hair dye. After all, what is a mohawk without proper colour? We walked out of there with a t-shirt, vintage velvet coat, and some violet wildflower Special Effects dye to give a dark purple/blue hue to my head.

Sadly, the dye didn’t take well last night, so we’ll be bleaching and redying tonight, after which I expect to fan it up and get some decent pictures for you all (since I know you are on the edge of your seat with antici-… wait for it… -pation).

Good times. And yes, I AM straining to keep a hold of my rebellious youth, thankyouverymuch. \m/

Gasp! Yup, that is me coming up for air…. So what HAS Jason been doing all these months you ask? Let me tell you, from a very highlevel, generic perspective (so as not to totally bore you, I even included pictures!):

Cut for dull explanatory work stuff.