The title is the name of Guy Kawasaki’s blog, which roughly translates as “sign(s) without sound”; I’m thinking he’s walking in the shadow of Macbeth. I was initially drawn by his tagline: Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do. Then I got caught by The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog.
This page is relevant to conversations I’ve had with Patricia lately- what’s the purpose of blogging? I’m mostly having fun; for her, it would be more business-oriented.
I landed on Guy’s blog from Kare Anderson’s Say It Better newsletter, a lightweight monthly email with business behavior and interaction tidbits that keep me fluent with business jargon.
Guy’s pages lead to Rajesh Setty’s site http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/, and his eBook on personal branding. It’s also lightweight, maybe a couple dozen pages of real content, but has ideas, references, and his own personal branding story.
My own personal brand, or lack thereof, has completely not worked in San Francisco. It’s been fascinating to watch people’s eyes instantly glaze over when I describe myself as an engineering manager (or Director, or whatever). I sorta think of Barking Cats as a brand, but it’s really more a channel. This year off, in one sense, is a rebranding exercise for me, both coming up with an updated brand and identity, and learning how to present it clearly.
(For the record, this entry took about an hour.)
(courtesy Ron Leppke)
Patricia and I drove both sessions of yesterday’s PCA GGR autocross at Alameda Point. The day was illuminating- 15 minutes of fun runs at the end finally made clear how to get the car around the course faster. My best official clean run of the day came in at 1:03.465, and I could not get below 1:03 (no matter how many cones I ran over…). During the fun runs, I finally tried going slower and driving tighter around the twisty parts, which seemed just… wrong. But it worked, for a final time of 1:01.013.
So: the Boxster goes faster without extremes of either acceleration or braking (remembering that when the official clock is running is a challenge). The feeling of the car being glued to the road when driven correctly is a blast.
Patricia has clicked with driving. She had a best time down in the 1:03s as well, only slightly marred by a DNF. That makes her one of the faster women drivers in the club.
As we were leaving, there was a light crunching sound while driving off the course, also coming from the car behind us. Turns out our scuffed up and sticky tires were picking up little gravel bits and sounding like studded tires as we slowly filed out. Kinda fun to have an end-of-day sound associated with driving.
There’s an initial batch of pix on the net. All images are public at the moment; so far, only Den has made comments on them.
A first post on newly-redesigned Barking Cats. I’d intended to write my own code for the redesign, build some MySQL tables, do some PHP around it, then realized how much of a wheel I’d be reinventing.
So… this round is an exercise in using resources already out there- WordPress for blogging and overall site management, and Flickr for image management (unlimited storage for $25/yr, full tagging support; non-customizable UI, but the default is OK). I doubt there will be much blogging content, but, who knows?
