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Dressing For Success January 11, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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Obviously inspired by my recent posting on tying your tie, the Wall Street Journal has a good article on dressing correctly for job interviews and for work in general. Among the advice that they share, and with which I agree:

  • Iron your shirts. Better yet, have then dry-cleaned and starched.
  • Press your pants.
  • Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.

And my personal favorite:

  • Wear good shoes.

Amen. For men, especially, who only need six or so pairs of dress shoes, invest in very good shoes (I like Johnston & Murphy) and maintain them. That means getting them shined regularly, and having them resoled as needed.

I like to get my shoes shined whenever I have a layover in an airport. Airport shine stands give better, longer-lasting shines than almost anywhere else. Plus, it is fun to sit in the big chair, high above the streaming masses, and watch the people go by. The best shine stand in the US is in the St Louis airport. Second best was a guy who was giving free shines at the Microsoft CIO Summit last May. Never miss an opportunity to shine your shoes, and tip well. You’ll look better and feel better.

Update: more than a year later, the Journal is still reporting on shoes, this time focusing on how the recession is helping cobblers.  Buy good shoes and keep them shined!

“…I’ll never go hungry again” January 6, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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The other day, in a planning meeting, I was suddenly moved to channel Scarlett O’Hara and shared her core sentiment: “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” followed by “Tomorrow is another day.” I was met by blank stares. (This happens a lot to me in meetings but can be disconcerting nonetheless).

I probed for some cultural connection, someone in the room who knew what I was talking about. No takers. Is Gone With The Wind that far removed from current culture? Is there anyone under 47 who knows this movie? Is it important any more?

I like to think that there are certain cultural elements that are consistent across wide swaths of our society, but I am beginning to think that fewer and fewer of them exist. Conversely, it may be that there are just as many of these touchpoints, but I am not getting the memos to keep me in the loop.

I worry that a culture that lacks these binding elements is actually no culture at all. We are shifting from a world where 50,000,000 people see one movie and remember it collectively, to one where 50,000,000 see 50,000 blogs and videos and break into 1,000 subcultures.

I’m thinking that this internet thing may have some unforeseen side effects.

Welcome! December 28, 2007

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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Well, this should be interesting…

(Or not…)

I find myself in the position of being among the very first to the party that is the web, and perhaps the last person on earth who isn’t writing some sort of blog.

I was fortunate enough to be in R&D back in the early 80s, when this whole internet idea seemed to be getting some traction.  Of course, back then it was ARPAnet, and the number of hosts on earth numbered in the hundreds.  There was no DNS, just a file of host names and IP addresses that we FTPed among ourselves.  Email was a confusing collection of @ and % and !, with special tools that figured out the uucp routing to reach a site, and messages sometimes took days to arrive, since some hosts only dialed out at night, when long distance rates were cheaper.  I worked at Harris Corporation, in Melbourne, Florida, and we were really lucky to have a dedicated 9600 baud leased line to MIT, which gave us a premium connection to the world.  The whole web community was maybe a few thousand people, and we kept up with each other using newsfeeds and FTP.

Now there are more sites than you can count, we’re pushing gigabit connectivity, billions of people are on the web, and there are people who have never paid for long distance by the minute.  I am astounded by the change and amazed at the penetration.

So, now a blog.  I don’t know that I have too much to say that would interest large swaths of readers, but I do have a compulsion to say something, every now and then.  We’ll see how this goes, and if the interest and effort seem to balance out.