Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I'm late to the party for saying this, but the Democratic Party has really gotten its mojo back the past few weeks. Put this in the category of "better late than never". While none of it may be news to you, if nothing else it's a message in a bottle to my future self.

When Joe Biden folded his reelection campaign just over a month ago the Dems were in the pit of despair. Biden had been lagging in the polls for months, and his uninspiring performance at a debate with Donald Trump June 27 caused a few big-money donors to start expressing doubts about him. The craven mainstream media glommed onto the story and ran articles about it twice a day for weeks, as if his opponent Donald Trump weren't still saying outrageous and dangerous things the whole time, not to mention speaking in increasingly unintelligible fashion— but no, Biden was the one having his mental acuity questioned daily. The Democrats' already sagging campaign dropped into a tailspin.

There was a brief moment following Biden's choice to drop out where the same chattering class of political pundits who talked his campaign into the ground expressed uncertainty about whether his endorsement of Kamala Harris, his former running mate, would improve the party's lot. Much to everyone's surprise, Kamala Harris stepping forward as the presumptive Democratic nominee didn't just improve things, it electrified the base. Democratic voters who'd previously worn hangdog looks suddenly snapped and crackled with new energy.

Was Biden all that bad? Was Harris that much better? The answer is yes-and-no to both. Biden and Harris are close on policy matters, so there's little change there. And Biden's challenges with mental acuity were nowhere near as bad as the dishonest GOP or craven mainstream media might've led the average person to believe. But where Biden failed, and the whole generation of Democratic leaders around him failed, was that they failed to control the message.

Media Matters

The area where Republicans have been absolutely killing the Dems the past 8+ years is messaging. And within the realm of messaging it's not the quality— the GOP routinely claim things that are transparently false and/or contradict things they claimed even moments beforehand— but the quantity.

Republicans have been getting their message out morning, noon, and night, leveraging not just their friendly TV/radio/print media outlets but also social media. Meanwhile Democrats seemed completely out to lunch on the modern media landscape, exhibiting no apparent understanding of the power of social media, let alone even the the "24 hour news cycle" of cable TV— which has been around since the 1990s.

The "old age" problem the Dems have isn't old age per se but that so many of the party leaders— who happen to be old in age— campaign like it's still the 1980s. They've been unable or unwilling to adapt to the times. While GOPs have been pounding their talking points 4 times a day, Dems have remained aloof and refused to engage the issues. They seemed to expect the media to (1) come to them and (2) dig deep to sort fact from fiction for its readers/viewers. Hahaha, that's not how most of the media works anymore.

"Weird"

So, is Kamala Harris really that much better— at media? That's also a yes-and-no situation. Yes, she is more active in providing grist for the media mill than her predecessor, though that's a low bar to cross. But also "no" because it's not just Harris who's different. The party leaders have really woken up around her. With her choice of Tim Walz she picked someone who gets it.

Walz, for example, fired back at Trump's rhetorical technique of branding his opponents with insulting nicknames. It's low-brow but generally has been successful for Trump. Walz didn't even pick a particularly trenchant nickname. He simply called Trump and Vance weird. But that was enough. Just firing back with anything was enough. Weird stuck. It gave supporters something to repeat, and once people were repeating it the guileless media started repeating it, too. It's a simple example of a rallying cry that helps inspire the base and capture the attention of swing voters.

This week I'm involved in another technical training workshop. Yes, I attended a training workshop two weeks ago. This is another one. This time it's not about a new product of ours but a course to help my team bolster its skill on an important industry technology, Kubernetes. It's also being conducted remotely, so there's no travel involved— for good and bad. Good because it means no travel cost or time; bad because there's so much value in reaching consensus on sensitive topics and unscripted face-to-face conversations that simply can't happen on a big Zoom meet.

The meta-lesson in this training, though, isn't about the value of f2f vs. remote work. It's about how to plan how much time the training takes. Or, conversely, how little content it takes to fill a fixed time-box. Because this training, as valuable as it is, is running way behind schedule— which is, BTW, a very common problem with training.

On Tuesday, the first of three half-days of workshops, we got through less than 75% of the material planned for Tuesday. It took us until more than halfway through Day 2 to finish the Day 1 syllabus. Basically there's at least 1.5x as much stuff in this course as there is time allotted for it. In particular, the hands-on exercises are routinely running 3x as long as the instructors planned them to.

Part of the reason I make a point of this is that I've been on "the other side of the table" for training a lot. I've done technical sales enablement. It was as semi-official part of my job at a previous employer and an official part of my job for the first few years at this company.

Now, I'm not a "pro" at training. I don't have a college degree in it. I don't have formal training in it. It's a) an aptitude that b) I've spent time & effort getting better at.

I remember the first time I worked with a "pro" trainer several years ago at this company. We'd just hired him on, and I was meeting him over dinner the night before we delivered a day of sales training together in Boston. I'd reviewed his material on the flight out there.

"Tim, I'm concerned there's too content little here," I said. "We're booked for a full day tomorrow, but I think we could be done with this by lunchtime."

Tim just smiled. "It'll be a full day," he said. "You'll see."

I pushed back gently on that, asking him to elaborate. He did. Tim explained that he was allowing time for IT troubles to have to be resolved, extra time for break-out exercises, long breaks for sales people to catch up on their emails, and the ability to say, "Great! Everyone can go home an hour early," at the end of the day instead of asking everyone stay an hour late (as too often happens with training).

The next day happened exactly like Tim predicted. Everything he allowed for happened. People drifted in 15 minutes late. IT troubles caused us to start 1 hour after schedule. Allowing 2x to 3x the time for break-out exercises made them more meaningful for everyone. Allowing generous breaks for sales people to catch up on emails and keep in touch with their customers kept everyone focused in class— because if we didn't schedule generous breaks, sales people would just drop in and out on us, and we'd lose cohesion. And we finished comfortably before 5pm, allowing everyone to feel great about going home a bit early— or voluntarily stay a bit later to enjoy those unscripted f2f conversations I mentioned above.

So, what's the lesson here for trainers? Estimate how long the class should take, then add 50%. And either book a part day or be sure to include generous breaks— because the attendees all have "day job" responsibilities they need to address.

On Friday I walked out of a meeting at work.

The situation was a sales colleague, Mike— I'll call him Mike because that's his name— and I were "discussing" the next steps we'd take in working with a prospective customer. I quote discussing because a proper discussion requires mutual respect. This interaction did not have that. Mike was instead hectoring me, assuming poor intentions on my part, focusing on trying to manage my time (when he's not my boss!), and not really listening to my position on the issues at hand but instead demanding repeatedly that I take a specific action he was ordering me (again, not my boss) to take.

My boss was in the conversation, too. He'd offered to broker the meeting when I showed him a string of demeaning things Mike wrote to me in Slack. I told him I found them unprofessional as was preparing to tell Mike that in simple, blunt terms. He suggested we call Mike together to "straighten this out".

My boss and I were both at the same training summit Friday. It was winding down by noon Friday, so we found a quiet spot out in the hotel hallway and called Mike on speakerphone. That's where Mike continued his hectoring, this time aloud, along with improper focus on criticizing how I am prioritizing my time at work. His criticism was not only inappropriate, BTW— inappropriate because, again, he's not my boss— but also factually wrong. I am actually already spending time on the category of things he told me should be my main job responsibility. I'm just not doing the thing he instructed me to do because I disagree that (a) it's the appropriate next step and (b) that's it's my responsibility... it's actually his as the account manager.

During the call I stated a few times, "Mike, you're not listening to me." When he continued criticizing my time management— falsely— and went back to hectoring language, I stated outright and simply, "Mike, you're being disrespectful, and I don't like that."

His response? "You're disrespectful!"

Really. His response was straight off an elementary school playground.

At that point I told Mike and my boss— remember, boss was standing next to me— "I'm done with this for today. f you can't be respectful toward me, find someone else to work on this project." And with that I picked up my bag and walked away.

What happened next: I regrouped and came back to give my boss a verbal warning!

It's been years since I've posted on the topic of Stupid Interview Tricks. From interviews I've done in the past few weeks— interviewing candidates for jobs at my company— I've got a few new ones. Two are related and one is not.

First, the unrelated one: Not including teammates in interviews. This is a stupid trick on the part of the hiring company, not the candidate. One reason I haven't posted about stupid interview tricks in several years is that I've rarely been included in the interview process the past several years. At my company interviews have routinely done by managers: the hiring manager, the hiring manager's manager, the division exec, plus a few managers of adjacent teams. What's missing here is the person the candidate will work directly with on a daily basis. How can management think this interview is so important as to be skipped routinely? I'm glad to see this appears to be changing.

Now two stupid tricks from the candidate side of the interview:

Disrespecting the Question. One candidate began his response to literally every substantive question I asked with the intro, "Well, look. The thing is...." That intro implies the question was misstated, off base, or making the subject more complicated than it really is. Done once I would have ignored it. Done twice I would have noted it as a minor thing. Done every time it was disrespectful.

As I began to write a negative evaluation after that interview I paused to ask myself whether maybe I was being too sensitive to a small (but consistent) verbal tic. Then I considered how sales training techniques such as the Sandler method teach the importance of how to respond to questions. Sandler emphasizes to begin your response with a positive phrase, something like, "That's a great question,' or, "I'm glad you asked." That shows you're listening and are aligning with your counterpart's needs. It also gently rewards them for asking a question, encouraging them to be more engaged in the discussion. The opposite of this is implying to your counterpart that the question is off base and suggesting they should feel slightly foolish for asking such things.

Giving Too-Brief Answers. The same candidate as above also made the mistake of giving brief answers to every question. Sure, sometimes a brief answer is what's wanted, and going long can be a negative. But when I, as the interviewer, ask for details you need to provide them.


I hope you can see in this brief dialogue that the candidate's answers were brief to the point of being insulting. But beyond even his answers raised concern that he was misrepresenting his record. When you're asked to describe a thing you did and you dodge providing any details, giving instead platitudes and circular answers, you create legitimate doubt that you understood what you were doing or that you even did it at all. Maybe someone else did the hard work and you were just along for the ride.

By the way, a great answer to this question looks like this:


That is how you nail this type of interview question.

This past Sunday, almost a week ago now, we hiked to Carson Falls near Mt. Tamalpais. It was the second hike of an epic, three-hike day. The trek to Carson Falls was the longest trek of the day. Though our morning hike along Cataract Falls was so jam-packed with waterfalls. we covered probably little more than a mile and about 400' of ascent on that trail. Here we'd cover nearly 4 miles roundtrip and over 1,000 feet of gain. And the trek started with unexpectedly good views along Pine Ridge.

This trail is the Carson Falls trail, though, not the Pine Ridge trail. It would still be nice without the falls, but the falls are what make it special.



The first tier of Carson Falls plunges over the side of a narrow canyon in a drop of 20 ~ 25 feet. There's a small rocky ledge opposite the falls that's nice to sit on and enjoy the view.

As we were headed to the rocks to pick a perch, a nature volunteer approached us and asked us if we'd come to see the frogs.

"We're here to see the falls," I said, gesturing to... well, everything visible around us.

"Oh, but do you know about the yellow-legged, shitsicle-licking frog that came in last place in the leaping frog of Calaveras County competition?" the guide asked. ...Okay, he didn't really use all those descriptors for the frog, but that's how annoying he was already coming across with his boisterous insistence on questioning us about frogs.

"We saw the display near the trailhead at the fake taco truck," I responded.

"Oh, the Tam Van!" he corrected me.

"Yeah, the fake taco truck," I insisted. "I was really hoping for a hotdog and an ice cream."

Hawk wandered off somewhere else, apparently not wanting to be part of the "Who can be the biggest jerk?" competition I had engaged the old coot in. The difference between us was that I was doing it on purpose, trolling. The old guy was apparently completely self-unaware how annoying he was.

He was also completely unaware that I was trolling him to shut him down. He kept talking. IDK, maybe everyone lambastes him about the fake taco truck. I suspect more likely he was lonely and my trolling was the longest conversation he'd had with anyone all day.

By the way, there are at least two of these endangered, never-praised-by-Mark-Twain-for-their-jumping-ability frogs in the picture above. I could only spot one with the binoculars the guide lent me. At maybe 4 inches across It's too small to see in the photo as presented here.

After a while I handed the guide back his binoculars and made my way down to the next perch.



The second tier of falls is even more impressive than the first. It's partly because these falls are even taller and partly becuse the viewpoint is better. Here there's a rocky perch near the bottom.

You might notice both these pictures (and the next one, too) are slow exposures because of the motion-blurred water. I did slow exposures of the falls in Cataract Canyon, too. But here I had to employ two tricks with my camera to pull it off that I didn't have to there.

First, here, because there's strong daylight I had to use a darkening filter to slow my camera down to 1/4 second exposures. In the deep shade on the previous hike I could do that without a filter. Here I used my ND6 filters— which block out about 98.5% of the light.

Second, I didn't have my tripod on this hike. A tripod is important when making pictures with slow exposures like 1/4 second because it stabilizes the camera. I left it back in the car on this trek because it's a longer trek and I didn't want to lug it so far. So I was shooting hand-held. For these pictures I braced the camera against my knee or a rock to hold it steady. The technique worked fairly well. Especially at this spot, where there was a big rock in exactly the right place.



An even more awesome thing about this spot than having a big rock in the right place is that it's a two-fer of waterfalls. You can see the second and third tiers of Carson Falls here! You need a really wide lens to capture both in one frame, though. And fortunately I have a really wide lens. And a really big ND6 to screw onto it.

Oh, but wait, there's more. This spot is actually a three-fer. If you have a lens that covers, like, 180° you can see three tiers of falls. My lens isn't that wide. And the pano mode in my iPhone got really confused because it expects panorama pictures to be captured on a level, not a diagonal.

And there are other falls, too. Carson Falls actually has at least 4 main drops, maybe 5. We hiked down to the lower tiers, and I took pictures there, but the views weren't that great. The lower falls are overgrown with trees right now. They showed better when we visited 8 years ago. Of course, that was the trip when it sleeted on us on the hike home!



After visiting all the falls we started our way back up to Pine Ridge for the trek back to the car. It's a few hundred feet up from the lowest falls just to the spot where Hawk is standing at a trail junction in the photo above. From there it's at least another 500 vertical feet to the top of the ridge. Whew, uphill both ways! But the trip was absolutely worth it. In beauty I walk.

President Joe Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address on Tuesday evening. I'm not sure I've ever watched a SOTU live before. Usually I figure I'll just read the highlights the next morning. This time I decided to stream it on my laptop computer while I was cooking and eating dinner.

Overall the president's message was upbeat. He hit three themes repeatedly: 1) We're actually doing reasonably well, all things considered. 2) But there are still clear problems we need to fix— so "Let's finish the job." And 3) For all the gnashing of teeth about a politically divided country we actually can get things done, and have gotten things done, bilaterally.

There were a few times the president slipped on his words. That's unfortunate because the right will pounce on them as indicative of some secret agenda accidentally revealed. The truth is far simpler: Joe Biden has suffered a stuttering problem since childhood. Him tripping on words occasionally is not a sign that he's stupid, uninformed, or lying. It's a condition he was born with, one that's shared by an estimated 3 million Americans.

The highlight of the speech was when Biden went "off script" to respond to hecklers. He accused Republicans of proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Many shouted "Liar!" and other things arguing that wasn't true. Biden insisted he has the receipts. I agree; I saw the proposals from a few GOP members in Congress in the news a few weeks ago, too. But rather than just leave the interruption at "No we didn't/Yes you did" Biden engaged in a bit of real-time deal making. "So we're agreeing that Social Security is off the books?" he prompted. (This was a minor word slip; the proper colloquial phrase was off the table.)

This was a great bit of extemporaneous speaking. The president took an interruption, meant by his opponents to subtract from his speech, and turned the tables to make it an added win in his column. It's doubly nice because Biden's opponents like to paint him as old, doddering, and incapable. Here Biden displayed a benefit of his age and experience.

Decades ago politicians engaged in actual debate when speaking. There's still debate today, but it's more commonly an exchange of one-sided salvos, buttressed by teleprompters and made-for-TV sets. Biden's been in politics for decades. He drew on his old-school experience to engage critics in meaningful repartee.

As a technical matter, technical in the sense of public speaking skills, Biden demonstrated a critical point about preparing for a speech. You don't memorize your speech, you internalize your speech. The difference is when you memorize it, if something interrupts you you may lose your place and stumble. You go off script and it's bad. When you internalize your speech, interruptions don't faze you so bad. You can extemporize. And if you're really good, you can flip the tables on people interrupting you and trying to play "Gotcha!"

Update: More extra-curricular activities from the SOTU: Mitt Romney rebukes George Santos for his lying ways.

It has been disappointing watching the Democrats' lead in national polls erode over the past few weeks. They went from having a good chance of taking over the Senate while being close to even in the House, to being a bit behind in the race to control the Senate and most likely to lose the House. I blame inept messaging for their loss of ground.

Democrats have a number of good issues on their side. Abortion rights are supported by a majority of the voters nationwide. Republicans are trying to restrict voting rights based on falsehoods about the "stolen" 2020 election. And their policy platform is based on cruelty and hatred. To be sure, there's a segment electorate for whom these positives, but they're a minority.

So what have Republicans done right to turn the issues in their favor? They've gotten voters focused on inflation and crime. These "kitchen table" type issues are more immediately powerful than wonkier issues like whether ballot drop-boxes are open for 1 day or 7 days, or whether abortion is banned after 6 weeks, 14, or 20.

What have Democrats done? Frankly, they've screwed the pooch. They have done almost nothing to try to control the messaging, or even respond to it.

I blame Democrat leadership for this. Four years ago there was scuttlebutt about whether Nancy Pelosi was the right leader for the party. I was, and still am, on the side that Ms. Pelosi is the wrong leader. It's not because of her position on issues, BTW. I agree with her positions. It's because her understanding of campaigning is horribly outdated. She's leading the party's campaigning like it's still 1992. And she's not the only one. There are a lot of senior Democrats who need to go— not because they're old, per se, but because they've let their skills and leadership fall horribly behind.

What do I mean by "Like it's still 1992"? Three big things. ...Not all of which are specifically 1992, though the first is.

First, 1992 with Bill Clinton's election was when the power of "the 24 hours news cycle" was proven. Clinton's messaging team worked hard to stay ahead of news stories and thus control the messaging. People made jokes at their expense about how an unfavorable story on CNN wasn't really a national emergency that required multiple senior advisors staying up half the night in the White House's Situation Room. But it worked. Clinton and his team stayed ahead of new stories, exerting ability to shape them by fast response. They ran circles around Republicans who were accustomed to waiting for news media to come to them, or appear on Sunday talk shows. Today Republicans have learned that lesson while Democrats have forgotten it.

Second, Democrat leadership has remained in denial about the reality that Fox News, and other smaller players in its ecosystem, are basically propaganda machines for conservative politics. Fox and allies don't report news, they make it up. And they repeat their points, with distorted or false stories, morning, day, and night. In a context like this, Democrats can't simply wait for reporters to come to them and help get their message out— especially when traditional news media have been hollowed out. Even the traditional media today tend to "report the controversy" rather than dig to report the facts, because reporting "He said/she said" is easier and cheaper.

Third, Democrat leadership has completely missed the importance of social media. To me, this is what complaints that people like Nancy Pelosi (and Chuck Schumer, etc.) are "too old" means. It's not that, say, 68 is okay and 82 is not okay; it's that failing to understand the single most important shift in communication of the past 15 years is not okay. Republican leadership is killing it on social media. Younger Democrats are active on social media, but the party's leaders have totally missed the boat.

Continued in next blog entry....

Several months ago I wondered if I'd forgotten "how to people". The need to socially distance during the Coronavirus pandemic drastically cut the amount of interaction we all had with other people, particularly in person interaction. Being now 2 years on from that it makes sense that we'd have lost some of the skill and habituation to do it. For sure I seek social time with other people less now than I did before the world changed. Lately I've been considering an alternate explanation, though. It's not that I "forgot how to people"; it's that I've lost patience for dealing with people who suck.

The enforced isolation of the pandemic accustomed me to managing with less social interaction. As things opened back up and I could socialize more I found I didn't really care to. And it's not that I lost interest in socializing. It's that I realized a lot of the people I'd been spending time with were because I felt I had to. They were acquaintances but not friends. Or they were old friends who'd ceased having value being friends. Or they were strangers who were dull or, worse, said obnoxious or offensive things. Prior to the pandemic I'd stick with the conversation out of a sense of politeness. But through the pandemic I found I could just walk away.

I walk away from bad conversations now. I hang up on social zoom chats when they're dull or someone starts acting like an asshole and won't stop when asked, once, kindly. I hang up on phone calls. I'm willing to literally walk away from in-person gatherings. I don't care to "take the good with the bad" anymore. I'll try getting the "good" later, without the bad people around. And if the good people are really any good, they'll understand.

Update: I replaced the phrase "having value" in the second paragraph because it's problematic. It implies to many readers that I view friendship transactionally, as in, "We're friends to the extent that you deliver things of value to me." The thing of value I was talking about is time— as in Warren Buffet's famous advice that the most value thing one person gives another in a relationship is their time. Old friends who are unwilling to spend time with me anymore or who put preconditions on it, such as "If you want to talk to me join up on this new social media app and read my pinned posts first, then we'll talk," are no longer behaving as friends. Friends don't require an application for continued friendship.

We had dinner with a friend last week. Once upon a time we used to see him at least once a week, either at a gathering of friends at a restaurant or at one another's house. Since the start of the pandemic 20 months ago we've seen him maybe three times. As the topic of conversation came around to gradually resuming normal (pre-pandemic) life he quipped, "I forgot how to people." Meaning, talking to people in person now is unfamiliar and taps skills and energies that have shrunken from disuse.

Have you forgotten "how to people"? 

For myself I'd say the answer is No. I still "know how to people" even if I've been doing it a lot less for the past nearly 2 years. For me it's like learning how to ride a bike: once you learn you don't forget. But also like riding a bike, if you haven't done it in a while your balance maybe wobbly and you may tire quickly. Or maybe you've just lost interest in bicycling. That's how it feels for me. After so many months of having infrequent and brief f2f conversations I've become accustomed to not talking to people in person. I've stopped seeking it out. I'm actually fine being at home, by myself or with my spouse. I've got to rebuild the proverbial muscles— but more importantly, the desire— to meet people in person again.

My company is ditching Zoom, the popular web conferencing tool that has become virtually synonymous with distance communication since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic. We standardized on Zoom in 2019 after an internal shoot-out between it and Citrix GoToMeeting, which we'd been using for a few years prior. I liked G2M better but I was outvoted. In April last year we unplugged Zoom when major security flaws were exposed. Then we returned to Zoom after the company acted suitably chastened. Now we're leaving Zoom... again.

This time our departure from Zoom is strictly financial. We've been Google Suite customers for many years. Google Meet is part of G-Suite, and we've been using it alongside Zoom for some of our meetings. Meet is not as richly featured as Zoom, though; nor does it scale as well. But apparently it has more features when you license a higher tier of G-Suite. Until now my company had avoided the more expensive tier as the added features didn't seem worth the price, but last month we got a year-end deal that made it attractive. So now we're unplugging Zoom and switching everything over to Meet. I'll see soon how much better than before it really is. And probably, in 11 months, I'll have to switch back to Zoom when our bargain-price subscription ends.