The Power of Negative Blogging

Here’s a story of failure turning into success. From Wikipedia:

Silly Putty was invented by James Wright of General Electric when he dropped boric acid into silicone oil. He was looking for a substitute for rubber. GE supplied the newly discovered dilatant compound to researchers around the world. None found a use for it, but they all loved playing with it.

In 1943, Dr. Earl Warrick left the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to join the newly formed Dow Corning Corporation. His research was refocused: help the war effort by developing a synthetic rubber substitute. Although he failed to produce a suitable rubber before the end of the war, one result of his experiments was a silicone bouncing putty. (”Forty Years of Firsts: The Recollections of a Dow Corning Pioneer,” by Dr. Earl L. Warrick, McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, 1990, pp. 27-28.)

The product was then commercialized by Peter Hodgson in 1949 after the marketing expert attended an informal “nutty putty” party where chemists were playing with the substance after hours. Renamed “Silly Putty” because of its main ingredient, silicone, the product was a smash hit.

Failure can be devastating if you let it. More so if you don’t expect it. Other times is can be down right silly.

 PS - Here’s another article on second opinions. Five diagnoses that call for a second opinion
PPS- Here’s a great article on how trying to be happy can make you miserable. Happy to be unhappy

Change is something we face every day. It’s unavoidable. You can do your best to resist change, but guess what? It still happens, whether you like it or not. Take Microsoft Office 2007, for example. It has completely changed. I mean, it looks and feels like a completely different program. Good-bye .doc files, hello .docx files. When I first opened Office 2007, it was like looking into an alien starship. Gizmos from another planet I’ve never seen before, tabs and colors. It took me awhile to find the “paste special” option on the menu. I thought I was fairly good to go with old Office 2000, but apparently I am an idiot with 2007. So how can we apply negative thinking to change? Follow me…

1. Before you change something, ask around. See what reactions will be to the change. Everyone will complain, because we fear change, but listen to the complaints. Separate the actual problems from the unwarranted anxieties. Usually you can find an easier way to implement the change. The complaints may highlight major issues you didn’t think about. Now Microsoft being who they are, they could care less if you don’t like the changes. They’re going to make the changes, shove down the market’s throat and let God sort out the rest. But for us mere mortals, we need to take some, not every, idea into consideration.

2. If you’re ready to make the change, find the “mouth”. The “mouth” is the person in your office that has the ear of the masses. Somehow, through sheer personality and guile, this person has some sway over the rest of the group. Find this person. Win this person over, first. Let the “mouth” work for you to spread the word about how fabulous the new change will be. Otherwise, the only change you will make will be changing your mind about the change. (Can I use the word change a few more times in THAT sentence? Sheesh.”)

3. Understand that change takes time. Don’t expect the change to be instantaneous, or accepted immediately. Sudden change can shake the confidence of the people it affects. No one likes to know it all one day, and be the “newbie” the next. Allow for the growing pains of change. Make sure people know that you expect them to change, but not change overnight.

But you know what? I’ll figure Office 2007 out sooner or later. Like change, it’s inevitable.

Let’s face it, IT is an industry built on negativity. Have you ever met an IT person? Negativity is their life blood. There entire job is either fixing problems or preventing problems. Just think about the things you may have installed on your personal computer.

Do you have antivirus software? You better. It stops 17-year-old college students who don’t have anything better to do to create a program that will destroy your computer.

Firewalls? They prevent hackers from getting into your files and learning about all the porn sites you visit that you thought no one would ever find out about. Uh…forget I said that. I mean, it prevents them from getting vital information from your computer like credit card info, social security numbers and passwords so they can steal your identity. And you thought no one would ever want to be you…ha!

Surge protectors prevent equipment from frying. Mass storage to prevent all those digital pictures you take from going *poof*. Cooling systems in server rooms. Simple things like “auto save” for Word so you don’t lose information if you forget to save your documents.

We are so dependent on computers and electronics that if some catastrophic event happened like an EMP, only the nutcases living in bunkers would be left to populate the Earth!

So please be nice to your IT professional. Treat them with kindness and understanding. They hold the fate of the world in their hands.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for awhile, but since this is America and people are innocent until proven guilty (or this case admit guilt) I’ve waited until the plea was given and the deal brokered.Michael Vick would have been saved by some serious negative thinking.

An honest assessment of his “friends” would have enlightened him to the fact that he needed to drop them like hot potatoes. “Friends” who, in public mind you, acted like idiots. If I had friends that acted like this I’d disown them. I’ve had some goofball friends in my time. Being a former stand-up comedian, you’re surrounded by them. But I wouldn’t tolerate them ruining my reputation and Michael shouldn’t have tolerated them ruining his.

At some point thinking to himself: “If CNN was here, would I be okay with what I am doing?” This is how I judge if this is something I’d do or not. I call it the YOUTUBE TEST. I simply think, “If this was put on YouTube…what would I do?” If hide in shame forever or commit suicide pops into my head, I don’t do it. There’s a lot of things I’ve done that I’d be embarrassed by, but I don’t think I’ve done anything that would make me feel ashamed. So Michael. Would killing dogs on national TV be something you’d want people to know you do? I don’t thinks so.

And even if you didn’t care if people knew you did this, why lie when you got caught? Did you think they wouldn’t do anything about it? Talk about a perverse positive attitude. To go to the Commissioner of the NFL, your teams owner and lie about this as the feds are turning up more evidence than a CSI marathon…you, sir, are a 1st round idiot of the highest order.

Sorry for the delayed post today. Hectic office day, not much I can do to prevent it. Anyway, as a public service, I always present the problems the media causes by disseminating destructive negativity. For example:The weather reports. Here is Houston, they always make the weather more negative than it needs to be. It’s not the Weather Center; it’s the Severe Weather Center.

And its not Sunshine Central, its Storm Central.

They also like to scare us and make it sound worse than it is. When hurricane Rita came they were on 24hrs a day for 3 days in advance. They created animations showing how the potential flood surge would wipe out the entire east side of Houston as well as Galveston. You can see how excited the weatherman is talking about it. And as the hurricane slowly turned away, you could see the disappointment in their faces.

“It’s…it’s not coming. In fact, it’s heading to the Sabine River area, one of the…least…populated areas. So it looks like this is the (gulp) best case scenario.”

I spoke to a meteorologist after Rita and he said, “You have to forgive us. Hurricanes are like our Super Bowl.” I’ve seen the Super Bowl. At the end of the game they don’t kill all the spectators and blow up the stadium.

All the channels created a panic that caused a lot of trouble on the freeways. And they do it for days in advance. Remember in the old days, if a storm got close to Cuba they would tell us about it. Now, if a pygmy burps off the coast of Africa, we’re watching clouds for three weeks.

One time, I was an Astros game and the weather alert came scrawling across the bottom. “Hurricane Ernesto….1900 miles from Galveston.” 1900 miles!! My parents live in Concord, NH. It’s roughly 1600 miles from Houston. At the moment, they were more a direct threat to me than the hurricane.

And if the weather isn’t bad enough, they make it worse. They invent heat indexs and wind chills.

“It’ll be 98 degrees today, but the heat index will be 104!”
“Today’s low is 13 degrees but the wind chill will be -30!”

Like 13 degrees isn’t bad enough!

I understand the importance of knowing the weather and being prepared. But do they need to scare us into watching, when they would do a greater service by telling us the information. As the panicked evacuation showed us here in Houston during Rita, scaring us into action sometime is less effective than simply telling us.

But, I leave you with my favorite weather report of all time:

http://utterlyboring.com/archives/videos/DogWeather1.wmv