Blood, Sweat, and Gears

Health and wellness. Bicycling. Fresh California air. Gorgeous spring weather. The Northern California foothills.
Put them together for an event: the Tour de Cure, cycling to raise awareness for the American Diabetes Association.
The ADA schedules Tour de Cure rides all across the US, and this May, I ride with my “Blood, Sweat, and Gears” teammates.

This year, we set a goal of 20 riders, $5,000. With the ride just around the corner on May 4, we thank you in advance for helping us reach that goal.
Please follow our team’s progress, join our team, or sponsor a rider.

The Burning House

“If your house was burning, what would you take with you?” Thus was born one of the most inspiring web sites I’ve started following, TheBurningHouse.com. by Foster Huntington.

The site has inspired me and countless others to take stock of what’s important in life.

Assuming all people and pets are out safely, what would you take from your burning house?

Socialcast to the rescue

Social networking exploded at my workplace with the recent soft launch of Socialcast.
As an internal-use-only social networking tool, Socialcast opens up a conversation space that knocks down territorial walls, expedites knowledge sharing, and builds community.

For example
Just this month, our mobile clinic team began sharing their experiences on the road as they serve various communities, the underserved, the uninsured, and victims of natural disasters. Before, attempts to communicate back to us at corporate consisted of emails with attached photos that bogged down servers, created duplicate copies, and often missed entire departments of interested audiences not served by the email sender.

Now, they post a quick update on Socialcast, add a photo (linked to, not copied a gabillion times), and subscribers immediately see the update.

Resistance is futile
Yes, we do have resistance to this tool. I’ve heard “geez, not another site to go to. I already read email and our intranet.” Or, “I don’t get Twitter and I hate Facebook.” And I understand those fears.

Caine’s Arcade – a boy and a dream go viral

Imagination. Innovation. Incredible power of social media.

A 9-year-old boy in Los Angeles with a big dream and tons of creativity spends his summer building an arcade out of leftover cardboard, hoping customers to his dad’s auto parts shop will stop and play.

But in this day of online shopping, his dad’s customers shop by mouse click, not by foot.

No one stops to play.

Until one day, a customer shopping for a car door handle stops to play, buys the fun pass, and becomes enamored with the boy’s imagination, innovation, and incredible execution.

That customer, Nirvan Mullick, dreams another big dream, and the rest of the story is how videos go viral.

Watch.

Postscript: More than $100,000 has been donated to a trust fund for Caine’s college education. Imagine the technological wizardry to come from this boy’s imagination.

Perfectionism is killing me

I’m a closet perfectionist. It’s in my DNA.

The danger of perfectionism is that nothing gets completed. Sure, I get work done, but that often leads to me tweaking and refining and perfecting and revising and reworking and never reaching the point where I am satisfied.

Because I’m shooting for the perfect, when I should be shooting for the good.

Funny thing is I just read about it in this post by ProBlogger Darren Rowse, “Perfectionism: the ultimate time drain?”

You should have seen how much angst I put myself through just getting this post started, written, and finished.

There.

Be the ball

be the ball

Coaches often tell a player to “be the ball.” I heard that phrase as a beginning bowler from my bowling mentor. He said to “be the ball” in order to understand how I’d roll down the lane if given certain types of spin.

In this latest album of photos, I was asked to shoot images of golfers. Having seen numerous golf shots of the same, boring image of foursomes lined up shoulder to shoulder (like fence posts), I decided to photograph the golfers from an entirely different angle and perspective. I decided to be the ball.

What do you think?

Amgen Tour of California – geewhiz photos

Convergence (n) – the point at which objects meet.

On May 15, 2011, my hometown of Sacramento became the convergence point, and I could only be at one place at one time.
So, I shot photos at the Amgen Tour of California as it blew into my hometown.
Wrapping itself around the state capitol for its final leg of this “opening” stage, the race finished just blocks away from where I also wanted to be, the Sacramento Community Center.

For it was at that precise time and place that my other true passion was converging.
The technical communicators’ annual conference!

My best photos. http://on.fb.me/mdbjvl