September Blogging & Backlog

It's been a couple months since I wrote about my stats on blogging. Here's a check-in on the month just finished, September 2024. I wrote 57 entries in the month, for an average of 1.9 per day.

As I often do with goal setting I set a range of three goals, low, medium, and high. The low, or baseline goal is the minimum I want to meet. The medium goal is my target. And the high is my aggressive goal or stretch goal.

• My baseline goal has been to write to my blog at least once a day. Years ago I softened that from "post every day" to "average at least one a day". I wish to reassert the original meaning now as I've managed to post every day for nearly 6 months. My last skip day was April 2. I like the discipline and commitment of writing every day. I haven't always felt like it this month.Several days I asked myself, "Does it really matter if I don't post something tonight?" I decided yes, it matters. It matters to me.


• With my average of 1.9 posts/day in September I ably surpassed my target of 1.5. That's more than each of the past two months. What really boosted me in September was the week long trip Hawk and I took early in the month to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Travel, originally for business but in recent years mostly for pleasure, has always been the main driver of my blog.


• I fell just short of my stretch goal of 2/day. I fell short in August and July, too, though came closest in September. Could I have reached 2/day? Absolutely. I have a mental backlog of at least 10 posts I could have written in September... if I'd had the time and the will to do so. Like I noted above, there were days it took effort just to post once.

What's in this mental backlog I mentioned? I'll jot down a few of the items here so they're at least no longer exclusively in my head:

• There are a few more blogs I've been meaning to write from the hiking & 4x4 trip we took two weekends ago. Yes, that trip is 10 days past now. And there are at least 2 entries, maybe 3, more I aim to write about it.


• I'm behind on blogging about the two TV streaming series I've watched this year. There are be easily 5+ blogs in that category. Though the farther I get from having actually watched the shows the less likely I am to write, or to write in detail. So depending on how long it takes to get to it, they probably won't be 5 entries anymore.


• Politics. As I've remarked before on the topic of politics, though I seldom post about it in this blog it's not because I don't follow politics but because I've chosen to prioritize it lowly as a topic for blogging about. I have wanted to blog about political current events at least a dozen times this month. And of course, that backlog only ever grows. I don't know how many political entries I'll get around to writing in the near future. As I said, while thinking about it is very much top-of-mind, writing about it is low on my priority list.

Cancel my 7am Meeting after it Starts... Again

A few weeks ago I blogged "Sure, Cancel my 7am Meeting... at 7:05am" about, well, the title. It happened again today.

We had a 7am meeting, a customer presentation, which I was asked to attend as of yesterday afternoon because, apparently, it's super important. So again, today, I woke up early to get camera-ready to present at an early meeting.

A few minutes after 7 the first customer joined. He was calling in, while traveling—so he was unable to see any of the presentation and demo. And then he informed us that the whole rest of his team was called away to fix an urgent problem on their side. He urged us to give the demo anyway, using the meeting as a recording the rest of his team could watch later.

Thankfully my teammate who's taking the technical lead on this project put his foot down on that request. It would be stupid to create a recording of a customized demo for people to watch, whenever, maybe, if they remember, if they feel like it. Instead the demo should include the right stakeholders, interactively, so we can ensure their concerns are addressed and validate their feedback.

While my colleague was negotiating with the customer at 7:10am about when/how to reschedule the call I was already blowing up my boss's Slack with messages about how this is getting ridiculous. This is now the second time this has happened— with the same customer. And not only that, but our regional sales VP for some reason decided this meeting was so important that we had 4 people from my functional team (sales engineers) attending... plus a VP engineering from our product org. From a staffing perspective this was a super expensive meeting for my company. A super expensive meeting with zero value because the customer is not committed. We're throwing the whole varsity team at them to win the sales, while I believe they're just tire kickers.

I wish there were a penalty box I was allowed to put customers in for blowing off meetings. Like, if you demand a meeting that's outside my normal work hours, and I agree to accommodate because I'm working with you in good faith, and then you leave me standing there alone only to cancel 5-10 minutes after it started, you don't get to do that again. You can have your next meeting at a time that's convenient for me. And if you abuse my good will twice, you definitely don't deserve further good will from me.

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way in most places in sales. Most managers in sales are completely spineless in front of customers. Customers abuse us and then whine we're dragging our feet to serve them? Management amplifies their concerns because, gasp, they might pay us money in the future. Except tire-kickers are not likely to do that.

It's sad that so many sales managers are spineless because having a spine in this situation is literally one of their important jobs. Sales managers are supposed to ensure their team is putting effort in the right places to maximize revenue subject to the real-world constraint that there isn't time to do everything for everybody. A sales manager who thinks that staff time just grows on trees is counterproductive to sales.

Bonus meeting dipshittery: at 11:23am today a customer messaged us, "Is this meeting still going on?"... for a meeting that started at 11am. Several of us from my company were on the call. We gave up at 11:15 after all customer invitees no-showed. It's like, dude, we're not going to sit around for 23 minutes in a 30 minute call just in case you mosey in at the end.

The New Normal: Hurricanes Deadliest 100s of Miles Inland

Hurricane Helene struck the United States last week, causing widespread damage across multiple states in the Southeast. Recent reports have the death toll at 162 with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. Helene is now the second deadliest hurricane to hit the US in the past 50 years.

When we think of deaths and property damage caused by hurricanes we traditionally picture images of gale-force winds pounding homes on the coast in Florida, where hurricanes most frequently make landfall, or approach nearest to it, in the continental US. Once a hurricane crosses over land its winds lose strength. Typically this is thought of as the end of the worst; that the danger has passed. But what Helene has showed us, along with the path of devastation wrought by other hurricanes in the past few years, is that some of the worst damage is now caused by huge amounts of rain, and the impact of this can extend 100s of miles in from the coast.

Consider the breakdown by state of the figure of 162 storm-related deaths given by this CBS News article updated a few hours ago (1 Oct 2024, 8:42pm EDT): 77 in North Carolina, 36 in South Carolina, 25 in Georgia, 14 in Florida, 8 in Tennessee, and 2 in Virginia. The deadliest place was North Carolina. And BTW those deaths are not in coastal North Carolina, where hurricanes sometimes do make landfall, but in far western NC, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in towns like Asheville and Boone. These towns are not only hundreds of miles from the coast but also at elevations from 2,000' to 3,500'.

Part of this is the changing profile of hurricanes driven by climate change. As average temperatures warm, especially as average sea water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea warm, hurricanes forming in the region absorb more water into the air. This means when they lash rains out across the land, there's heavier rainfall. Western North Carolina, for example, got more than 12 inches of rain in one day. Rain at that level far from the coast is disastrous, and the infrastructure and the land itself cannot handle it. Rivers flood, overtopping their banks flooding entire towns. Bridges and roads are destroyed. Lakes flood and destroy nearby homes. Reservoirs become dangerously overfull and dam breaks become a real risk.

It's not just parts of the country hundreds of miles from the coast facing new risks from torrential hurricane-fueled rains. Houston in the last several years has experienced multiple hurricanes that caused widespread flooding. From 2017 record-breaking Hurricane Harvey to Hurricane Beryl just a week ago, the biggest source of damage has not been gale force winds; in fact, these hurricanes have been relatively mild in the wind department. What's caused so much devastation has been how much rain they've dropped. Harvey dropped 50 inches of rain on Houston over the course of several days.

This is the new face of hurricane damage nowadays. It's no longer the classic image of a ramshackle cottage next to the coast being blown down by strong winds but a city, possibly hundreds of miles inland, seeing its streets and neighborhoods flood from rain waters, highways and bridges collapsed from underneath, and public services such as electricity and phone lines cut off. All due to simply to overwhelming amounts of rain.