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Archive for the ‘Bruce Byfield’ Category

Weird T-shirts

Posted in anarchism, Bruce Byfield, free culture, George Orwell, H.P. Lovecraft, Linux Journal, Personal, popular culture, Proudhon, T-shirts, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 8, 2008| 1 Comment »

I won’t wear a T-shirt that advertises a product or a company. The way I figure, if I’m going to be a walking billboard, you’re going to have to pay me – assuming you can coax me into doing it at all. The closest I come are T-shirts advertising a cause I support, such as the Free Software Foundation, or a small band or art exhibit I happen to like. But, in reaction to the trend towards the billboard T-shirt, my preference is for T-shirt art that is a joke to me, but is obscure to most other people.

During the 1990s, one of my prize possessions was a Miskatonic University T-shirt. Readers of H. P. Lovecraft will recognize the name of the university whose faculty often explored the supernatural, and whose library contained a private collection full of deadly occult lore, such as the Necronomicon. The shirt showed some pseudo-classical buildings with tentacles coming out of the building, and students fleeing from it. Since I was a sessional instructor at the time, I wore that T-shirt around the English Department a lot (which, come to think of it may have something to do with the fact that I parted from academia; undoubtedly, the rather humorless chair thought I was making a statement – and, looking back, I suppose I was).

A few years ago, my favorite obscure T-shirt was from the Linux Journal. On the back, it read, “In a world without fences, who needs gates?” Members of the free software community will recognize that as part of a longer comment that used to be common in many people’s email signature: “In a world without walls, who needs windows? In a world without fences, who needs gates?” No doubt Microsoft’s legal counsels would like to eradicate the comment, but the lack of capital letters leaves the reference open to interpretation. Whenever I wear this T-shirt, someone is sure to come up to me on the street and congratulate me on it, but most people walk past it blankly.

Another favorite of mine reads simply, “++ungood” (read “double plus ungood”).The slogan is Newspeak from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As you may recall, part of the motivation behind Newspeak was to regularize and simplify English so as to remove certain tendencies of thought. Specifically, rather than use a list of comparatives like good, better, best, Orwell’s language for totalitarians reduced them all to variations of good. Similarly, rather than having “bad” as a separate word, Newspeak reduced it to the opposite of good. So, “++ungood” means “bad” or, more accurately “wicked,” and carries a political overtone of “politically undesirable” as well.

But my latest acquisition is the most obscure of all. It comes courteous of Ben Mako Hill, an executive of the Free Software Foundation and a strong advocate of free culture, who kindly put the artwork online for anyone to use free. Meant to resemble the exercise gear issued by universities that students once stole but can now buy as souvenirs in most campus book stores, it reads “Property of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.” Proudhon, as every scholar of anarchist philosophy (and nobody else) knows, is the political writer who coined the phrase “Property is theft.”

What I like about these obscure T-shirts (besides the polite but puzzled look down at the T-shirt shop where I get them made up) is that, although most people don’t get them, they are often excuses for people to start talking to you. And when someone does understand them, you know that you have at least some small thing in common with them. So, I foresee my obscure T-shirt collection growing.

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The roots of my font-fetish

Posted in Bruce Byfield, design, elementary school, graphic design, layout, Personal, typography, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Every once in a while, blogging delivers an unlooked-for personal insight. I had an example of this occurence earlier this week, when I mentioned that, despite being left-handed, I had won handwriting awards in the first few grades at school. Suddenly, I realized that this experience helped to explain my interest in typography.

The connection was news to me. I thought I had developed an interest in typography when I was working as a technical-writer, and wanting to branch out into design. Partly, my motivation was to make myself more versatile and therefore more employable, and to add a extra bit of creativity to what was sometimes monotonous work.

However, I soon became fascinated with typography for its own sake. Not many people – including graphic designers – are well-versed in typography, but the selection of typefaces and their arrangement on the page is a minature art-form, full of arcane jargon and fascinating lore.

It’s hard to imagine now, for instance, that the rise of asymmetrical design was as controversial as Impressionism or Modernism in the arts – or that one leader of the so-called New Typography, Jan Tschichold, was considered so subversive in Nazi Germany that he was given the option of exile or imprisonment (he chose exile, first to Switzerland and after the war to England, where he designed the standard templates for Penguin books of the period – little gems of design that you can still find today, sometimes, in second hand book shops).

And, like any art form, once you’re comfortable with the language of ascenders and descenders and kernings and letterspace, typography changes your perception. Just walking down a street of shops became a whole new experience for me as I examined all the signs in a new light. Similarly, opening a book, my pleasure is substantially increased by a fine layout, or lessened by a poor one.

These are all reasons enough for the large collection of fonts I accumulated. However, I suspect now that my font-fetish is also a revival of attitudes formed in the first years of my education.
You see, I was left-handed, and no one expected me to write with any elegance to my letters. The very fact that we read left to right makes writing awkward for lefties, and letters in cursive script especially are easier to form when your pen hand isn’t in the way.

But, having conquered a speech defect in Grade One, by the time I was introduced to handwriting in Grade Two, I was determined to defy expectations again. By an effort of will that, looking back, I now find hard to credit in a seven-year-old, I focused on the forms of the cursive letters, drawing them repeatedly over and over at home in my own time until I could draw them perfectly.

Or so I thought. I wonder now if I won handwriting certificates as much because I did better than lefties were supposed to do, rather than because my handwriting was objectively among the best in my classes. Unfortunately, I don’t have a sample of early handwriting to confirm or deny my suspicions.

No matter. What is important isn’t whether I really deserved the certificates, but that I became interested in the shape of letters for their own sake. I remember doing class presentations on the Greek, Phoenecian, and Norse alphabets. And, well into my teens, copying out the final version of my essay (this was before personal computers) became a ritual all its own. I remember labouring over the letter forms, not much concerned with what I said, but determined to produce a beautiful page. In Grade Ten, I even did a calligraphed creative writing project that I did and redid many times, and only completed because of the deadline – and I laboured at least as much over the page borders as I did the story contents.

Those interests went unexpressed as I went through university and became an instructor then a technical writer. Even when I was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I never did much of anything with calligraphy. Yet, like a root buried deep underground, the interest remained, waiting for the right conditions to send up tendrils and be reborn.
Odd, that I never saw the connection from now. The continuity and persistence confounds me – yet, in seeing them, I now know a little bit more about myself.

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Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the challenges of managing large projects

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, management, management theory, Napoleon, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 4, 2008| 3 Comments »

(This article was originally published on the IT Managers Journal site. Now that the site is no longer active, many of the articles are no longer available, so I’m reprinting some of the ones I wrote to give them a more permanent home)

Everyone knows that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia failed because of the winter, right? But the truth is, saying that is as incomplete as saying that the cause of every death is heart failure. The winter may have been the final blow to Napoleon’s grand design, but it need not have been.

The more you look at Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the more you realize that it ran into trouble long before the first snowfall. The campaign actually failed because of difficulties in scaling, combined with poor management by Napoleon himself. His example provides a case study of the pitfalls when planning any project, especially large ones, making it an object lesson for the modern corporate world.


A bigger team isn’t always a better one

To invade Russia, in 1812, Napoleon assembled an army of 700,000 — probably the largest army up until that time. It contained some elite forces, but it was never an efficient fighting force. For one thing, its members spoke too many different languages to communicate well. Many parts of the army were traditional enemies of other parts, or had been fighting them recently. As a result, the army never cohered into a whole.

Also, its size meant that provisioning it was difficult. It could not even live off the land, as other French armies under Napoleon had done, because no area contained enough food for so many people. Instead, it had to keep moving, so quickly that its members were always well ahead of any supply wagons and frequently starving.


Ask yourself if you have the right resources and preparation

Contrary to a popular misconception, Napoleon did not go into Russian completely blind. He had maps, and he made considerable effort to stockpile food, resources, and horses. His instincts were sound, but he had no firsthand knowledge of what he was about to face.

On a map, it looked perfectly sensible to plan to use particular roads. But what Napoleon couldn’t see was that many of the roads in Russia were too narrow for the quick movement of large numbers of troops, and too muddy for artillery and supplies to pass. Nor could he see how foraging in a country as poor as Russia would be next to impossible.

Similarly, the far-sightedness of gathering supplies meant nothing if they weren’t the right ones. Napoleon gathered countless pieces of small-bore artillery, but these were a nuisance to haul, and useless in sieges like the one at Smolensk or artillery duels like the one at Borodino. Nor did he consider stockpiling pointed horseshoes suitable for travel in snow or winter clothing.

Still, even if he had gathered the right resources, the effort would have been largely useless, because among the things he neglected was any plan for delivering supplies to where they were needed. The one efficient piece of transport he arranged was his personal mail service, which could deliver a letter from Paris to Moscow in 14 days — and that luxury was unimportant in the campaign.


Decide on a goal and focus

Despite all his preparation and the size of his army, for once in his life Napoleon was uncertain what he wanted to do when he invaded Russia. Did he mean to occupy Moscow and Saint Petersburg? Carve up Russia between Sweden, Turkey, and a revived Poland? Force Tsar Alexander into a truce and go on to take India from the British? In the early months of the campaign, Napoleon considered all these goals. Unable to make up his mind, he could not act with his usual decisiveness, and failed to followup on his initial victories until after he had lost the initiative.

This oscillation continued throughout the entire campaign. Days, if not hours, before he retreated, he remained uncertain whether he would leave Moscow or winter there. Even when he abandoned Moscow, he first moved south as if planning to face the main Russian arm — then abruptly veered west to begin the long trek home. Not knowing what he wanted to do, he was, not unexpectedly, unable to do much of anything, or to do what he did do effectively.


Keep in touch with your team

Part of Napoleon’s leadership ability was his rapport with his troops. By moving among them, Napoleon could always get a first-hand feel for their morale and combat-readiness, and sense when punishment or a gesture of concern could improve the mood of his troops. Often, his appearance alone could inspire troops.

However, during the Russian campaign, this hands-on approach was rarely possible. At times, Napoleon was too ill. Yet, even when he was healthy, the size of the army and its dispersal meant that he could only use his personal touch on a minority of his troops. Too often, the only troops he saw were the Imperial Guard, those with the most loyalty and highest morale who, because of their proximity to him, were also the best-fed and supplied. Judging the rest of the army by the Guard, he assumed all was well as the rest of his army steadily sickened and dwindled away.


Don’t force subordinates to misrepresent or lie

Early in the campaign, Napoleon told his generals and field marshals that he wanted accurate reports about their troops. The trouble is, when they told him about the lack of supplies and the problems with desertions, Napoleon was prone to abuse them, sometimes publicly. At times, these tirades were followed by demotions or reassignment to difficult duties.

Faced with such consequences, Napoleon’s management soon realized that, for their own sakes, the last thing they should do is tell him the truth. Early in the campaign, they began exaggerating the strength and readiness of the forces they commanded. These exaggerations prevented proper planning and caused Napoleon to under-estimate the extent of the campaign’s difficulties until they were far advanced.


Choose substance over PR or positive thinking

All his life, Napoleon believed in his destiny, trusting it to carry him through times of trouble and upwards to future greatness. For much of life, this belief served him well, possibly because the bravado that it produced constantly took his opponents by surprise.

But in Russia, where geography, weather, and distances were as much a problem as the opposing armies, there was too much reality for a positive attitude to conquer. Napoleon did his best to assert his will and frequently issued proclamations that pretended all was well or about to be so, but this stance became harder and harder to maintain — especially since Napoleon was intelligent and observant enough to be unable to deny the increasingly obvious truth. Still, for a long time, he persisted in believing that will would triumph over circumstance. Unfortunately, by the time he admitted what was happening, his army was crumbling and in an exposed position cut off from supplies. At that point, he had nothing to do except retreat.


Listen to experts and subordinates

Napoleon’s entourage included people whose knowledge could have countered many of the difficulties listed above. For instance, Caulaincourt, the former ambassador to the Tsar, warned him about the conditions of the roads, the poverty that eliminated the possibility of foraging, and the political situation that made it likely that the Russians would continue to fight, despite constant retreats and uninspired field leaders. But these were not opinions that Napoleon wanted to hear, so he ignored them until it was too late. It was only on the retreat, when Caulaincourt advised Napoleon to return home ahead of the army that he listened to him — and then, the main reason was probably that Caulaincourt was saying what Napoleon wanted to hear.


Have a fallback plan

For several weeks beforehand, Napoleon knew that a retreat was a strong possibility. The alternative was to winter in hostile, barren territory. Yet, perhaps because of his reluctance to admit failure, Napoleon made no plans to prepare for the retreat. New conscripts arriving from the rest of Europe were still hurried up the line to Moscow, the farthest point of the French advance, rather than being assigned to secure possible routes. Similarly, no supplies were stored along the way. Nor were any scouts sent along the possible routes. When Napoleon made his sudden decision to retreat, he had made no preparations for it, which undoubtedly worsened the disaster of the march.


Sometimes, resources have to be abandoned before they become a liability

As the French army advanced into Russia, it carried a variety of unsuitable equipment, including hundreds of light field guns and carts that were unsuitable for the roads. Instead of destroying this equipment or abandoning it, Napoleon insisted on dragging it along. This stubbornness served only to slow his advance.

Even worse, on the retreat, the army was carrying as much of the loot from Moscow as possible. Not only did the loot encumber soldiers by filling their pockets and weighing down their belts with the objects hanging from them, but it also encumbered the army’s various vehicles, making them harder to move. The path of the retreat was soon littered with abandoned riches, but the determination to hang on to their spoils killed thousands of soldiers as they tried unsuccessfully to dodge marauding Cossacks or to hurry on to the next outpost where they might hope finally to get a meal.


You can lose by winning

Napoleon never lost a battle in Russia, although many, like Borodino, were indecisive. By traditional standards, he should have won, since he occupied Moscow, the old capital and still the largest and most important city, and his troops started home with fabulous riches. Yet he found his soldiers, horses and supplies steadily whittled away by disease, desertion, starvation, and exposure. After despoiling Moscow, he had to retreat, constantly harried by an enemy he no longer had the cavalry to close with. Unable to grasp fully the kind of war he was in or to adjust his tactics, he abandoned his army to rush home to France. In the end, only 22,000 — a little over three percent of his original force — survived to do the same.


Conclusion

Napoleon was a brilliant leader, one of the most outstanding ones of all time. But the fact that even someone of his caliber could make such mistakes only emphasizes that anyone can falter. Lack of preparation and focus, a belief in his own infallibility, a refusal to assess the situation objectively, a failure to follow the leadership techniques that had served him so well in the past — all these things led to the greatest catastrophe of his career.

Napoleon took another three years and one exile and a return before he was finished for good. But his Russian invasion had drained the fighting strength of France and destroyed his reputation for invulnerability. After his Russian campaign, his rule was a constant struggle for survival against continually increasing odds. Finally, at Waterloo in Belgium, he met the Duke of Wellington — a man famous for his clear headed planning and lack of nonsense — and lost his position once and for all. But the beginning of the end was his lack of proper planning when he invaded Russia.

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Breaking news

Posted in braking news, Bruce Byfield, journalism, news stories, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on July 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »

On Canada Day, I had planned to be at a picnic at the Barnet Marine Park. However, when I came in from my morning run, a message from a publicist was on my business line. Would I be interested in a story?

Does a parrot love millet stalks? Suddenly, my plans for the day changed.

There’s something about a breaking news story that I can’t resist.

I wasn’t always that way. Several years, when I first started working as a journalist, I much preferred feature stories, although I didn’t know what they were called. With a non-timely story (as I called them to myself), I could take the time to get the facts right, and choose the details to use carefully – maybe even set each one aside a day or two before submitting it so I could reconsider the wording and structure in the cold, rational light of second thoughts.

By contrast, news stories terrified me. Writing for a largely North American audience, I am at a natural disadvantage compared to writers on the east coast, who are awake and working three hours before I am. The idea of rushing to finish a story in a few hours, especially with my time zone handicap, seemed rash. Undoubtedly, I would make a mistake.

But that was before I had tried writing a breaking story, and before I had made at least my share of mistakes. Now, the challenge exhilarates me.

In fact, a large part of the appeal lies in the challenges. In the space of a few hours, I have to decide who to interview, talk to them and transcribe the results, then produce some sort of coherent story. I’ve learned a lot of tricks of the trade in learning how to cram all these tasks into as little time as possible.

I’ve also learned to work through my fears, ignoring the little inner voice that is constantly yammering that I’m not going to finish in time – and that, too, is a form of challenge. Douglas Adams can joke all he want about the sound of deadlines whooshing over his head as they zoom by, but meeting a deadline – especially an impossibly close one – can be a measure of skill and a source of accomplishment, so long as you don’t have to manage the miracle four or five times a day.
Moreover, the flip side of urgency is a feeling of accomplishment when you’re done. And if you’ve beaten the other three or four writers on your beat and posted your story before they have posted theirs, then the accomplishment feels even greater. You’ve proven your ability to come through in a crisis.

Never mind that the portal sites will link to other stories on the subject as readily as to yours, or that the wisps of glory are ephemeral, blown away and forgotten within three or four days. For a few hours after your story appears, you can enjoy the delusion that you know something about writing after all.

These are all reasons why, despite all my efforts to be hard-headed, I can’t resist a news story. Let me sniff one, and I’ll foam at the mouth in my eagerness to enjoy the sense of purpose it brings.

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11 common mistakes in networking

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, employment, jobs, networking, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2008| 4 Comments »

(This article was originally published on the IT Managers Journal site in January 2008. Now that the site is no longer active, many of the articles are no longer available, so I’m reprinting some of the ones I wrote to give them a more permanent home)

Everyone knows that networking is an essential part of business. Done well, it can build partnerships for you, and tell you about jobs before they’re advertised. If you are a consultant, you can easily find — as I have — that networking is responsible for 75-100% of your income. Done poorly, though, it can handicap or even seriously set back your career.

The dangers of poor networking are especially high for IT workers. Many of those working with computers have poor social skills, and may be tempted either to indifference because of shyness or brashness because of efforts to over-compensate. Also, IT workers tend to be among the major users of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and other social networking sites, where the ease of use and casual atmospheres can encourage the wrong tone for business interaction, especially if you’re a novice at it.

However, over my 12 years as a consultant, I’ve seen problems in every sort of business. To help you avoid them, no matter what field you work in, here are what I’ve observed to be ten of the most common mistakes in networking:

Badmouthing other companies and individuals

Meeting people in the industry whom you don’t see everyday, you can be tempted to express feelings that you normally suppress about bosses, past and present, or about other companies. However, it’s rarely a good idea to make those feelings public — especially in a job interview. If you show too much enthusiasm for criticizing others, those with whom you are networking are going to wonder what you say about them when they’re not around. You can also create the impression of a negative, downbeat person.

If you meet the fellow survivor of a company or boss, you might not have to worry about such things. Yet, even if others start the badmouthing first, you should be cautious about joining in. After all, what are you networking for: To find an outlet for your frustrations, or to make useful contacts?

Name-dropping without permission or with exaggerations

Being able to claim a connection is part of what networking is all about. However, before you claim someone as an acquaintance, much less as a reference, check that you have permission to do so.

For one thing, it’s only polite to give your contacts a chance to think what they’ll say about you if contacted. Possibly, too, they would prefer not to be a reference for you, for reasons like office politics that are only peripherally to do with you.

For another, IT or any other field is a relatively small place, and your claims of friendship or support are easily checked. If they’re false, people will react as though you have lied to them — and, in a sense, you have.

Exaggerating connections

Exaggerating your connection with someone can have the same results as mentioning a connection without permission. True, implying that you are a personal friend of Linus Torvalds or Andrew Morton may get you the job interview you’ve been angling for. But if your interaction is limited to a single email you sent two years ago, you’ll look either duplicitous or foolish when the truth comes out.

Begging for a job

If you are networking to find your next position, one of the unspoken rules is that you never ask directly for work. At first that tradition may seem like hypocrisy, but, if you think for a moment, it makes sense. Networking is an informal, personal way of compensating for the formal, impersonal habits of business. By asking for employment directly, you are mixing categories and creating a confusion that can only make you look crass.

It also makes you look as though you are only interested in networking for what you can get. While this attitude may seem efficient to you, it also signals to people that you are uninterested in them personally. You probably wouldn’t respond well to someone whose interest in you is selfish, so don’t be surprised if others feel the same way.

Spamming requests

Networking is the opposite of the usual marketing techniques; it’s about the quality of contacts, not the quantity. Sending out general broadcasts for help negates that emphasis. Instead of being a one-on-one connection, you make networking an anonymous one when you contact everyone you know with a request — and few people enjoy feeling that you only see them as one of the crowd.

Moreover, any experienced PR flack can tell you that, although targeted requests take longer to put together, they bring better results than spam broadcasts. So, by honoring the intent of networking, you also tend to help yourself.

Participating passively on online sites

As the middle-aged discover social networking, sites like FaceBook are increasingly being used to maintain business contacts. Others, of course, like Ryze.com were designed for business networking for the start.

On all these sites, you’ll find hundreds of registered users who signed up a year ago, and have only a handful of contacts. And, although registration for such sites is hardly time-consuming, these users have essentially wasted their time. One such user regularly complains to me that these sites are useless, but what else can he expect when he doesn’t actually use them?

For any type of networking to be effective, you need to put some effort into it. It’s only when you have developed a large network that you’ll find that others will start coming to you with friend requests. You don’t have to let networking sites take over your life, but, at the same time, if you do the minimum, you’ll only get minimal results.

Networking Indiscriminately online

When you are registered for a social networking site, you may get requests to connect with people you don’t know, or to give recommendations to people you’ve never worked with. The temptation is always there to build your network by accepting these requests, but there’s little point beyond an unconvincing illusion of a broad network.

Whenever someone actually tries to use that network, its inadequacies will quickly become apparent. If you don’t know a person, then how do you know that you can be useful to each other — or that they’re the sort you want to be associated with? Nor can you recommend strangers without making them appear to exaggerate the acquaintance (see above).

Failing to keep up relationships

Contrary to what many people seem to believe, establishing a connection is only the first part of networking. The longer a network connection exists and the more exchanges of help that are made — in short, the more trust that is established — the more useful the connection becomes for both parties. For this reason, stopping at initial contacts is only slightly more useful than sitting back and waiting for contacts to come to you. If you want networking to work, you have to become involved with it.

Being unrespectful of other people’s time

When you network, you can treat as a given that everyone is busy with other things beside the connection. Try to avoid pestering others for favors, especially if you are hoping to use the connection to find work, and avoid asking a favor that is disproportionate to the connection. Asking a new acquaintance to send you details about an upcoming conference is appropriate; asking them to give you a private crash course in Ruby isn’t.

Similarly, just over a year ago, a colleague asked if I could help her fill a position at her company. I found several possible candidates, and introduced one to her company. A few days later, she told me that her company had decided to fill the position through a recruiting agency. The decision meant that I — to say nothing of the candidate — had each spent a couple of hours for nothing. Both the candidate and I agreed that we would think carefully before dealing with my colleague again. We both felt we had been treated with a lack of respect.

Hounding a connection

Last summer, I promised to let an acquaintance know when a position at another company was being filled. After a week, he began sending me daily emails, and phoning me every other day. Since I had no control over the job and was simply relaying information, I could do nothing about the delay and told him so. Once, I made inquiries on his behalf, but eventually I had to ask him to stop contacting me so often. He got angry, and I haven’t heard from him since. From another mutual acquaintance, I understand that he feels that I let him down.

Really, though, he let himself down. By hounding me, he lost his connection to me, although it was obviously useful to him.

Rather than producing the same results yourself, minimize your followups when you’ve requested help. Unless there’s a definite deadline, once a week is often enough to ask. And if the request goes unanswered for more than a couple of weeks, you can probably assume that it’s not happening.

Treating networking as one-sided

Effective networking is about an exchange of help. That means that, if you want people to help you, you have to be willing to help them. If you ignore requests for advice or references, or — like one of my acquaintances — always find excuses for not reciprocating, eventually people will start refusing to help you. The same can be true if you are constantly asking for large favors while only offering an equal number of small ones.

The exchange of favors implicit in networking doesn’t have to be spelled out. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Instead, networkers simply assume that, if they help you out, at some unspecified point, they’re entitled to request a favor of comparable value from you. Ensuring that you honor that assumption is the main point of networking.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best way to avoid these mistakes is to keep in mind the image you would prefer to project around colleagues. For most people, this image would be professional, polite, and active. Ask yourself how your words and actions might appear to your colleagues, and you’ll not only be likelier to avoid these mistakes, but also to start networking effectively.

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Being a lefty

Posted in Bruce Byfield, lefthandedness, Personal, tagged , , , on June 30, 2008| 4 Comments »

I can’t claim that I have ever seriously suffered because I’m left-handed. When I happened along, the days were long gone when teachers forced lefties to write with their right hands, at least in public schools. Nor have I ever worked at a job where this accident of birth endangered me, the way that I’ve heard some loggers on the green chain have, because the safety guards were all positioned for right-handers. Still, being left-handed set me apart at an early age. It also made me believe I was clumsy while I was growing up, a feeling that later evolved in a belief in flexibility and a patient approach to problem-solving.

I think that all lefties must develop a sense of being different at a very early age. You can’t help but feel separate from the world around you when it’s not quite designed for you. You have to figure your own way of doing things, sometimes with equipment that leaves little space for a left-handed approach. You can’t count, for instance, on having space inside a piece of machinery to turn a screw left-handed, which forces you either to use your right-hand or some ingenious workaround instead.

As for watching a demonstration, forget it. Not only do you have to reverse all the motions made by the person doing the demonstration, the way that other members of the audience do, but you have to transpose them again to see how they apply to you. This is a tremendous effort for a child, who is likely to have an imperfect sense of abstraction, and explains why I learned simple tasks like tying my shoes at a relatively late age. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have well-meaning teachers and family members; it was that none of them were left-handed, so they couldn’t help me much in learning how to absorb the information they demonstrated.

Unsurprisingly, this difficulty in navigating my immediate world left me feeling incredibly stupid and clumsy. Other kids didn’t have trouble I had, so the trouble must be in me. This feeling lasted well into my teens, even my early adulthood until I discovered the secret of relaxing and concentrating so I entered a special mental stage in which I could transpose what I saw and translate it into my own actions. But I didn’t fully get over this self-perception until I realized that the fault was not just in me, but also in the poor instructions I received.

Just as importantly, I learned the need for patience with problem-solving. Now, when I’m trying to solve a computer problem, or plan the most efficient route for a series of errands, I know that the best way to accomplilsh my goal is to deliberately slow myself down and think throughly and methodically until I hav a course of action planned.

With this background, I don’t think my stints as a university instructor or a technical writer were the least accidental; I still believe that the ability to explain properly is one of the most important talents that you can have.

Because of such circumstances I must have been all of four when I first realized that, no matter how I parsed my situation, I didn’t fit in very well. Either I was a slow-learner and clumsy as well, or, by necessity, I was more versatile than the right-handers around me, becoming close to ambidextrous simply because I had no choice. I suspect this feeling of difference explains why the left-handed are represented disproportionately in the arts; in our society, being an outsider is a given for an artist, so creative activities seem a natural refuge for many of us.

Some lefties are probably destroyed by their alienation, but for some reason I took a different work. Increasingly, as I matured, I took a perverse pride in my difference, increasingly describing a strange idea as “coming out of right field” and using “sinister” as a term of approval, reversing the diction that decried left-handedness as a form of joking self-assertion. When I played baseball, I would confound others by continually switching the side of the plate I stood on; similarly, once I could score consistently under par at the local pitch and putt course while golfing right-handed, I achieved similar scores golfing left-handed in less than a couple of weeks.

These days, I don’t notice which hand I favor all that much, except when I realize that an actor looks natural to me because he or she is left-handed. If anything, my view is that the ability of lefties to adapt and flourish is one of the many proves of just how flexible the human brain can be. But, when I stop to think, I have no doubt that I would be very different if I had been born right-handed.

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“The Best Place on Earth,” whatever that means

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, slogans, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 29, 2008| 3 Comments »

“Pardon him … he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
– George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

In preparation for its 150th anniversary and the 2010 Winter Olympics, my home province of British Columbia has adopted the slogan, “The Best Place on Earth.” The slogan appears on the special Olympic license plates that you see occasionally, and, with increasing frequency, on government ads and documents. But, wherever I see those five words, their crude jingoism never fails to set my teeth on edge.

My dislike of the slogan has nothing to do with any deficiency in me. I have a strong sense of place, so much so that it partly explains my appreciation for art rooted in the region, such as the work of Emily Carr or Northwest Coast artists such as Robert Davidson. Born with the coast mountains around me, I am infected with a peripheral nervousness in flat regions. When I return home from a trip, the first thing I noticed when I leave the airport is that the atmosphere is properly moist.

I am also well aware that the Vancouver area is far more cosmopolitan than any city of its size has any right to be, thanks to the accident of being the major Canadian port on the Pacific. And, like many people around the Vancouver area, I am convinced that I live in one of the few decent climates in Canada, and not-so-secretly pity those who live elsewhere in the country (although I smugly think it would be rude to insist on the advantages of my home region too strongly – rather like posting about health care to American friends).

However, as rooted as I am, I know that other people feel just as strongly about the places where they live as I do. I remember once when I was visiting San Francisco, and my comment about the barrenness of desert provoked a prose poem on the beauties of the flowers that bloom briefly in Arizona after rain, and an exclamation that was close to disgust about how excessive the rain forest could be. From such experiences, I long ago figured that, had I been born elsewhere, I would probably have had just as strong attachment to the sights and smells of that region.

Ever since then, when I travel, I have tried to get a sense of a new place by walking around areas not frequented by tourists, trying to get a feel for the place by imagining what my life might be like if I lived there. I have even found a few places, such as Berkeley ,where I imagine – rightly or wrongly – that I could fit in without much difficulty (although I have also found some places, such as New York, where more than a weeks’ stay would drive me mad for the lack of greenery and wilderness).

I make no claim to be well-traveled. Still, to me, “the best place on earth” sounds narrowly chauvinistic – the crass boasting of someone without enough experience of any other place to realize how vainglorious and ultimately empty the slogan is.

It’s one thing to use a slogan like Alberta’s “Wild Rose Country” which plays on an official emblem, or Quebec’s “Je me souviens,” which reflects the history of the place. Both these slogans are too officially nationalistic for me to be entirely comfortable with them, but at least they evoke a sense of place that doesn’t denigrate other people’s feelings for their homelands. Possibly, the Quebec slogan implies a resistance to Anglophone cultural domination, which is the usual way that it is interpreted – but, given the province’s history, who can blame it for any such implication?

Anyway, an assertion of identity in the face of resistance is very different from uncalled-for boasting. It seems to me that the only response a polite person from outside of British Columbia can make to the slogan “The Best Place on Earth” is “Did I ask?” And no doubt with a few beers, the response will be,”Says who?”

Of course, B.C. has a history of poor slogans. The official motto, which translates from Latin as “Splendour without diminishment” has always seemed the bravado of a resort-extracting capitalist to me. Even worse is “Super, natural,” which was used for years in tourism promotion, as though the goal was to corner the market on travelling neo-pagans.

But with “the best place on earth,” the powers that be have hit a new low. We can only pause to shudder, and, realizing that this is another vague whim of government that we can do little to counter, can hope that this, too, will someday pass.

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A raptor drops in

Posted in birdwatching, Bruce Byfield, crows, eagle, nandays, Parrots, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on June 28, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The other night, I was lying on the futon when I noticed our parrots going absolutely rigid. Unlike their usual habit, when they see a crow or a seagull, they were not calling out. They were making small, disturbed chirps, and their feathers were tight against their bodies – a sure sign of agitation.

Looking outside, I couldn’t see any reason for their disturbance at first. Then I noticed crows and smaller birds streaking low into the trees, and I realized a predator must be in the neighborhood. Sure enough, after a moment, I spotted a bald eagle perched atop tree about a hundred meters from the window.

Most of what I could see with my unaided eyes was a black silhouette, since it was less than twenty minutes before sunset. Still, there was no mistaking what I was seeing. Although I had nothing I could compare the silhouette with to be sure of its size, the general outline was nothing like the crows that usually sit on that perch. It was longer and thinner. It didn’t move like a crow, either. It kept peering this way and that with a jerk of the head that was most uncrow-like, and fanning and unfanning its tail.

Nor could the avian reactions, both outside or in leave me with any doubt that I was seeing a predator. Outside, I could see more silhouettes streaking low across the sky behind the eagle towards shelter. Nearby, the usual sounds as the birds go to roost were completely missing from the night. Inside, our parrots were tense and straining forward to keep an eye on the visitor, ignoring everything else.

What interested me about the parrots’ reaction was that they had no trouble recognizing a predator when they saw one. Of our four parrots, at least one was taken from the wild as a baby, and one was born in our living room, and neither of them could have had any personal experience of raptors, yet both reacted exactly the same as the other two. Of course, nanday conures are a flock species, and alarms and greetings spread quickly, even between parrots who don’t like each other. Yet it seems clear that, at some instinctual level, they knew a predator when they saw one.

At the same time, the two on the futon were not so alarmed that they panicked. On some level, they seemed to know that they were far enough away not to be a main target. Possibly, too, they were aware of the window between them and the eagle; one of the first bits of training we do with all our birds is introduce them to the window, so that they don’t fly into it by accident. Instead of backing slowly away, as I half-expected, they not only stayed where they were, but actually moved forward a bit, craning, to get a better view. In other words, they were on alert, but seemed aware that they were safe. Perhaps what I was seeing was instinct and intelligence fighting for control.

After about five minutes, the eagle stirred abruptly, seeming to fall rather than fly from its perch. I soon found out why: a half dozen crows were charging it. A predator can make short work of a single crow, but a determined flock of crows outhinks and outguns it, and this eagle was obviously experienced enough not to challenge its attackers. Now its turn had come to seek shelter, and the last I saw, it was flapping furiously, trying to outdistance the crows and not having much luck.

The crows, no doubt, had a strong incentive. This past ten days or so, the first of this year’s baby crows have been taking their first flying lessons, leaving many of them stranded permanently or temporarily on the ground, or on remote perches without being quite sure how to get back to the nest. I had been dive-bombed several times myself because of my curiosity, and no doubt the eagle, for whom the crow fledglings provide an easy meal, had raised the ire of the adults.

Given the timing, you can almost imagine the adult crows acting like a fighter squadron, scrambling to get a response into the air as soon as possible to confront the danger. When you consider crows’ intelligence and social organization, that metaphor might even be a reasonably literal description of what happened.

With the eagle gone, our parrots relaxed almost instantly – another sign, I suppose, that they know exactly what a predator is. As for me, I was left with both a gut-level awareness of the eagle as predator and our parrots as prey species that I had never had before. And, for all my fascination with observing the reactions, I found that I was relaxing too, along with the rest of my flock.

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Quoting and the craft of interviewing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, quoting, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on June 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »

“I don’t think I have ever been quoted as well by a reporter before.”

I like to think that I’m immune to compliments but this comment from someone I interviewed earlier this week got through my defenses. I interpret it as saying that I reported what the person said accurately.

Or, to be exact, my reworking of what the person said was a close reflection of their thoughts. Because, of course, no journalist quotes an interview subject word for word – unless, that is, they want to portray the subject as a incoherent half-wit. If you have transcribed as many interviews as I have, you’ll know that even the most fluent speaker can be made to look rambling and dull by quoting every little pause, space-filler, and change of direction in thought. To make the story read better, all journalists routinely edit quotations to help the continuity of their stories. If they are also ethical journalists, they do while making sure that they preserve the sense of what the subject said.

At any rate, the comment pleased me, because accurately reflecting what someone has to say is a skill on which I pride myself. When I pitch a story to my editors, I rarely have a fixed opinion on the subject, except when I’m writing a commentary. Instead, I want to write the story because I’m interested in learning more about the subject. My opinion emerges from the as I research the story and talk to different people; on those occasions when I do have an opinion on a subject, I frequently alter it as I develop the story.

This habit does little to soothe the nerves of potential interviewees who ask what my perspective on the subject we’ll discuss happens to be, or ask in advance for the questions I want answered. If I were being completely honest, I’d have to explain that, in most cases, I don’t have the least idea what the perspective will be in the story. Similarly, while I jot down topics I want to cover, I rarely prepare specific questions. When I do, the resulting article is never an example of my best work. Instead, I develop my questions while listening to the interviewee. But these explanations, I suspect, would not be believed by the suspicious. They’d be sure I had a hidden agenda. The more I explained, the more paranoid they would become.

All the same, they’re the truth. While I taught in an English Department when post-colonialism was the prevailing critical theory, I’ve never been a believer in completely subjective truth. At the risk of sounding naive, I believe, if not in objective truth, then in the effort to find it. I’m well aware that my bias creeps in to everything I writer, regardless of my intentions, but I don’t believe that my perspective is endlessly interesting, so I try to vary it with the opinions of those whom I talk to.

That’s not to say that I don’t have a define viewpoint by the time I finish an article – although I do try to subdue the expression of it, because I happen to think that a gently-delivered truth that guides readers to the conclusions I want to give them is more effective than a thundering oration. But if I want to persuade people to accept my outlook, I want to make my development of my points as accurate as possible to make them more logically acceptable.

So, yes, I do try to report the gist of what other people say. It is both part of my code of ethics and part of my style of discussion to do so. No doubt I often fail, both ethically and stylistically, but such are my ideals – and I’m warmed by the thought that someone has noticed.

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The grammar neurosis strikes back

Posted in Bruce Byfield, grammar, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on June 23, 2008| 1 Comment »

After writing professionally on the web for several years, I’m no stranger to careless readers and wonky comments. I learned long ago that not only can you not count on everyone to read your thoughts carefully, but that some subjects, such as Microsoft’s intentions towards free software, cause many people’s critical facilities to go on holiday. But none of the subjects I’ve written about provoke as much blind reaction as the suggestion that grammar should be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

I was reminded of this fact recently when I noticed that my article “Tech-writers, Grammar, and the Prescriptive Attitude” had not survived a redesign of the Techwr-l site where it was originally posted. Because I still get requests for it, I asked Deb and Eric Ray, who maintain the site, to send me a copy of the published version, and posted it on my blog. The request also prompted them to repost the essay on the original site. In the days since, I’ve been fielding a comment or two per day from both sources, most of them sent privately.

Some people approve the sentiments in the article, but perhaps half are outraged. They set out to correct my thinking by pointing out that, without consistency, language ceases to communicate. Their assumption seems to be that only official English has consistency. I answer that all forms of English have their own rules – for instance, a double negative, which is considered wrong in official English, is perfectly understandable with the context of some Afro-American dialects (and, I might add, Old English). So far, none of these conversations have continued beyond this point.

Another conversation about the article begins with someone asking if I’m saying that we (by which the reader usually means sophisticated, literary folk like themselves) should go along with mispronunciations or incorrect uses, usually in sarcastic tones that suggest that, of course, I mean no such thing. I reply that I do mean exactly that, that, when a pronunciation or usage reaches a certain degree of popularity, it becomes standard usage.

To this comment, my correspondent usually replies that it is the duty of the literate to fight against such barbarisms. My response is that you are, of course, free to use any language that you care to, but, if you imagine that your example is going to inspire an outbreak of proper usage, then you think far too much of yourself. The most anyone can do is avoid usages that are vague in the name of clarity and personal style – and, at that point, another conversation peters out.

And these are just the most common ones. I’ve been accused of advocating complete chaos, of insisting on poetic language at the expense of clarity, and all sorts of other stances that have nothing to do with what I wrote, no matter how you construe my words. Often enough, people insist that I believe something that I frankly state that I do not believe. Apparently, many people – particularly those who work with words – have so much invested in their self-image as initiates into the secrets of proper grammar that any suggestion that their knowledge is as useless as heraldry immediately robs them of their ability to read and analyze text.

Personally, I find the idea that we have, not one but dozens of versions of English exciting and challenging. It means that, as a writer, I have more to explore than I can possibly learn in one lifetime. But that, unfortunately, seems to be a minority viewpoint.

A good thing that I thrive on being a contrarian, or I might find the hostile responses disheartening.

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