Moon Sammy

Tuesday morning:

And I wondered with great admiration...

"Moon Sammy", Soul Coughing

I got up this morning to find that the weather was absolutely gorgeous; blue sky, sun, and a wonderful look to the part of Baltimore that I could see: church spires, ship's masts, brick towers. I took a short walk around the harbour and found a wooden clipper ship tied up close by. I was hoping I could get to the Constitution, but I think it was further off than I thought.

Back to the conference and to Tom Limoncelli's morning class on time management. I've already devoured his book (seriously, if you don't have it you need to; the link throws Tom a few shekels) and I was looking forward to his course. It was a new approach to time management, based on the idea of looking ahead at your day and treating it accordingly. A day filled with meetings would be focused on making those meetings productive; a day without meeting would be focused on focus itself, making the most of those (blessed, blessed) long stretches of time and handling interrupts.

Some of the material was straight out of TMMSA; after all, the basics are in there. Also, the course was only a half day and that limited the amount of material that could be presented, new or not. And much of the material was aimed, I think, at much larger departments than my own (which == 1), which did limit some of the applicability to my situation.

But. Tom is a wonderful speaker and presenter, and it's well worth going to his course if you haven't before. The course was packed, as was his afternoon course, and I saw at least one guy who was attending Tom's course for the second time. And there was some new material in there that I noted for immediate use.

Some quotes:

• On the inapplicability of other time management systems to our profession: "System administration is not like real life."

• On the problem of mentoring: "If your boss is technical, she can't give you advice; she's just as screwed up as you."

• On using the term "meeting" in his training to mean any large, immovable block of time: "A change window is sort of like a meeting with a router."

• "The benefit of a paper planner is it can't play games. I check my calendar with my iPhone, and...let's play Tetris! The paper planner does have a Tic-Tac-Toe implementation, but it's single-user...it gets boring, so I quit. It'd be worse if I lost."

• On limiting distractions at your workstation: "I don't know what IM client you're using, but I bet it has a quit feature."

LISA does this every year where you have to go around getting signatures from people; it's a good ice-breaker. In 2006 the organizers had their pictures on the card; this year, it was a scavenger hunt. You had to find someone who had, say, a LISA t-shirt on, or was part of the program board, or supported more than 1000 users. Ten signatures got you a spin of the prize wheel at the registration desk.

At the beginning of his class, Tom asked people from the audience for help filling out his card. ("The trick to doing the card well is to have a PA system. But we'll be talking about abusing power later on.") As it turns out, I was his tenth, since I have a Hallowe'en costume (the OMG PONIES shirt; I'm going to be Slashdot from April Fool's Day 2006). He got to sign my card (he's a vendor, since he's with the Google presence here), and he was my tenth. Card buddies 4ever!

At the break I went to spin the wheel; there was a woman in front of me who actually won a free prize to next year's LISA, which is damned cool. I got the "Jump To Conclusions" mat....no, but it is a little keychain where you press a button and one of three lights comes on: ACK, NAK and EQN. (Gotta verify what EQN means; enquiry?) It's cute.

And during lunch I actually went and napped. I've been up late and up early every morning this week -- there are just so many people to meet here! -- and I'm starting to feel it.