Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

As I've said before, I'm not handy, but I'm trying. I want to also point out that I know exactly ZERO about gardening. All that said, here's what I did this year.

April 10th

This April my wife said it was time for us to have a garden:

One day, last week, it was sunny in Oregon. I looked at the strange yellow ball in the sky and grunted and then I went and bought lumber. I figured this is what people do when it's nice out. I've talked about a garden in the yard for years. This time, I made one.

I got NINE 2x12's, and THREE 4x4's. The first thing I learned was that 4x4s are in fact not four inches square. Turns out the whole inches thing is just a big lie in the wood world. This was news, but now I feel informed. :)

I ordered the dirt/compost, almost broke myself unloading two yards (not sure why it's called yards, but it was a trailer-load and a lot) and last night we planted our vegetables.

I cut the 4x4s into four small two foot posts. I made 1 cut each on 3 eight-foot 2x12s. At this point I had:

• 3 - eight-foot 2x12s
• 6 - four-foot 2x12s

I used wood screws and put them together like this. Make sure you use untreated lumber or "agriculturally treated" lumber. The idea being that you don't want any chemical leaching into the dirt from the wood. We also got weed cloth and covered the ground before I put dirt in the raised beds. This keeps the weeds from coming up from underneath and eating all veggies.

Then I dug 18" holes underneath each of the corners with posts, then flipped the frames over:

I ordered one yard of dirt with compost from a local dirt-person (did I mention I wasn't a farmer? He may have been a Jawa, can't be sure...) and spread it out with a rake.

Next, and this is important, in my opinion, I took some strong yellow nylon string and some nails and separated each bed into 36 one-foot square squares. We planted some seeds but we also found some "organic starters" that were basically little seedlings that had survived the hard part of childhood.

April 25th

Here's two weeks later...it was a little cold at night, sometimes hitting under 36F, so we used weed cloth to actually cover all the beds at night for a about four nights, just to keep them warm. We took the covers off in the morning.

June 25th

Here's two months later. Things are coming along nicely. We were watering for 5 minutes each morning at around 4am, but I was told that was a little too much so we lowered it to 10 minutes three days a week. We didn't use any chemicals.

August 15th

Here's just a few weeks later...things are starting to go crazy. At this point I've realized I've made a few mistakes. The most significant mistake I've made was that I didn't give my tomatoes anything to hold on to. If I did it again, I'd setup little tomato scaffolding and put the tomatoes all against one side of the bed. Interestingly enough, the "All New Square Food Gardening" book warned me of this.

Sept 21th

Here's just a few hours ago at lunch. I've thinned out some of the Zucchini. Here's another thing I learned during this process was this: Only plant stuff you want to eat. I have a metric-ton of Zucchini and one can only eat so much Zucchini bread.

Here's last night's haul. We just went through the garden and picked stuff that looked ready to go.

My conclusion is, gardening is subtle but it's not hard. The amount of effort put in vs. the amount of food you get is minimal. You should try it if you've got even four feet square you can get a non-trivial amount of food.

Related Links

• Paint Fence, Cut Wood, Pull Weed, Plant Tree - Finding Geek Balance Outside My Comfort Zone
• Sharpen the Saw for Developers
• Building your own Arcade Cabinet for Geeks - Part 7 - Success and Conclusion

An email went out to our organization (Server & Tools Online) by one of our GMs that had a bullet (it was bullet #2 I believe) that said:

As community engagement and quality of resources are key goals for STO we are broadening the responsibility of the community PMs who today report to Simon Muzio by creating the STO Community Team led by Scott Hanselman. Tim Heuer, Joe Stagner, Jesse Liberty and Rob Conery will report to Scott, and in addition to their strategic roles of spreading the good word about the latest developer division products and platforms with our customers and the community at large, they will help STO understand how to interact with the community, drive buzz, interest, and excitement around Microsoft technologies. The team will also broaden its mission by taking on accountability around Developer Compete technologies. We need to engage the community in an effective real conversation at the competitive level and decide which competing technologies and communities to engage with.  The team will also pilot a set of globally scalable approaches for community content contribution. This is about transitioning from Microsoft being the major content contributor on our sites to a community content contributor model. 

This means I now have a team of 4 people and, as an aside, I've got reqs (requisitions or "headcount") for possibly two more. There's no extra pile of money for me but they do tack on "Lead" at the end of my name, I think. Or "Group" at the front. I'm still not sure which, but one of them.

I have called myself, both internally and externally, and only half-joking, "The People's Programmer." I have said "Developer Liaison" and "Community Concierge." They're all fun titles, but they are all true.

Our team's job is to make sure that you're having a good time developing with Microsoft tools. I want you to feel empowered to make cool stuff. If you're not, we'll try to make it better through articles, tutorials, walkthroughs, videos, presentations, books, and more. We're worldwide multimedia professors, but we're learning from you as much as we're teaching.

Now that we've got some autonomy, we're also going to try to figure out how to reconcile all the different kinds of community people there are at Microsoft (there's lots) and how we can best work together.

We also feel that there's a lot of great content out there that's been written by you, Dear Reader, that Microsoft doesn't promote or make easily available. I want to get your content on MSDN, on ASP.NET, on Silverlight.NET. If you've got good content, we're trying to understand what roadblocks at Microsoft are making it a hard for you to contribute.

I hope you've figured out by now that I'm open to feedback. A lot of you have commented here or emailed me and I hope you've seen how we try to advocate for you. ALWAYS feel free to talk to me or *ahem* my team (that'll take a while to get used to) if you have feedback on anything we do.

<cheesy>
Thanks for being here for me Dear Reader, I really love being a part of this community.
</cheesy>

-- ScottHa

I just got an email from a GM (General Manager) at Microsoft who is giving a presentation soon about "How to be an effective IC (Individual Contributor)" and he's collecting best practices. He wanted a brain dump from me and others on tips.

Here's my exact email.

NOTE: Dear Reader, you may have heard some of these from earlier blog posts.

Hm, not sure I have enough context from your email to help, but I’ll try, assuming I understand the question. Let me know if I can help in/during your presentation.

• Consciously manage your personal brand.
  • You work here to help the company, but also yourself. No one will manage your “personal brand” except you. How are you perceived? Do you know? Take negative feedback gracefully, and implement change. Rinse, repeat.
• Push the Limits
  • Chris Sells told me once, If you’re not getting in trouble with your boss at least twice a year, you’re likely not pushing the envelope hard enough. Two slaps a year might be the cost for 10 successes. If you’re not moving forward, well, you’re not moving forward.
• Conserve your keystrokes.
  • When you’re emailing a single person or a reasonably sized cc: list, ask yourself, are you wasting your time? Is this a message that 10 people need to see, or 10,000? Is email where you should be spending your time. Actively be aware of the number of people you communicate with , and the relative level of influence. Is a blog post seen by 50,000 more or less valuable than a single email to your skip-level? Only you can answer, but only if you’re consciously trying to conserve your keystrokes. Your fingers DO have an expiration date; there’s a finite number of keystrokes left, use them wisely.
• Don’t give bile a permalink.
  • While you’re on the clock, think about what you tweet and FB. It only takes one bad link to undo a year’s work. Same goes for tweeting product launches before they’ve launched.
• Write down what you’re trying to accomplish and hang it on the wall.
  • Make T-Shirts. Tell your spouse and kids. If you’re working towards a goal, tell people. It’ll keep you honest and it’ll motivate you. Saying things out loud help make them reality.
• Manage Up
  • Are your commitments aligned with your boss and your bosses boss? Do you have visibility into their commitments? If not, ask for them. Make sure your accomplishments are making yourself, and your boss, look good.
• Have a System to Manage Information Flow
  • If you’ve got 1000 emails in your Inbox, it’s not an Inbox. It’s a pile of crap. Have a system, any system, to triage your work. Any item in your inbox should be processed: Do it, drop it, defer it, delegate it. There are no other actions to take. Are you effectively managing your information flow? Try scheduling time for email on your calendar.

What would YOU send him? What are you Best Practices for Individual Contribution? I'll pass them on if they're awesome.

Whatever you do, don't tell my Boss because I'm just sick about this. Like physically ill. I have a confession to make.

I got nothing done on Monday. I need to call a "do-over" for the entire day.

The whole day was a comedy of errors and meetings. I had meetings (phone calls, virtual camera things) from 9 to 11, and I'd blocked 11am until 5pm to work on something specific and important. (Hence the blocking off of time.)

For whatever reason, I was totally unable to log into my laptop. It's never happened before, and I'm pretty technical. ;) I ended up having to drive an hour to the local Microsoft Portland office to try logging in while plugged into a real network.

This got me part-way there, and at this point we're pushing past noon. I then spent the rest of the day messing with my laptop that apparently has a bad video card (it's a hybrid laptop with two cards, one from Intel and one from ATI/AMD) because I was getting video corruption, lockups and general evil. This is what I get for running Beta ATI drivers, of course.

I literally fought with this until 4pm. I could have used VMs, my backup laptop, etc to get my work done, but this was my main machine we were talking about. I couldn't let it go and put it out of my mind.

By 6:30pm I'd missed dinner with the family, fixed my laptop and got nothing done.

I just feel SO bad when I burn a day like this. It seems like it happens about twice a year.

I wanted to get this off my chest and declare this post an "open thread."

Dear Reader, please, regale me with stories of how YOU have burned entire days so that I might some how justify my own toasted day.

* Fire Photo from FreeFoto.com

There's a lot of information, both useless and useful, on Twitter. When you get started on Twitter the shear amount of crap can be totally overwhelming.

Twitter's a lot like Tivo (Digital Video Recorders). It'll record everything and everyone you're interested in, and while this seems like a great idea, just like your Video Recorder, what was once a joy quickly becomes a chore. I've got dozens of shows on my recorder...I thought TV was supposed to be fun, now it's become a To-Do List. The same thing happens with Twitter. If you expect Twitter to be high signal and low noise, it's not the medium for you.

If you make Twitter into another list of crap to read, you will be sad. The sooner you realize that Twitter is just a list of crap, the happier you'll be.

Just let it flow over you like water on a duck's back. When you follow someone on Twitter, you're following the whole person. You might find out where @levarburton went to lunch that day. You might see pictures of me taking my kids to see Thomas the Tank Engine. You may see @BillyMays (RIP) last tweet as he gets off a plane. You can get news and opinions, pictures of planes in the Hudson, and find out where famous folks use the toilet. Truly thrilling.

Twitter is a lifestream and just as you'll miss stuff in life, you need to accept you'll miss stuff on Twitter.

Sometimes people will "unfollow" you (or me) and they'll tweet why. I have had a lot of people unfollow me because there's "not enough .NET content" in my tweets.

However, as @unclebobmartin says:

Twitter is not a single topic medium. If you follow someone you follow the whole person.

This statement might seem obvious, but it's not obvious to everyone. Uncle Bob and I don't agree on politics. That doesn't mean I'm going to unfollow him. I'm also not following him because I think I'll miss some deep insight on Software Architecture. I follow Uncle Bob because I like Uncle Bob. He is a full and complete person and he's interesting. When he stops being interesting, well...let's just hope for his sake, he stays interesting. ;)

I use a few tricks with Twitter to stay on to of things without them becoming stressful. That's the key. If Twitter stops being fun, consider Quitting Twitter rather than following everyone.

Twitter Rule #1 - Follow Liberally

Twitter without People isn't Fun. I'll use me as an example, because I'm on Twitter, but note that I'm not the point, just an example.

Sometimes someone will tweet that I've (personally) "filled their twitter timeline." Then I'll take a look at their Twitter account and notice that they are following maybe 7 people. Usually something like 6 friends, the me. This would be like going to a cocktail party with, well, 6 of your friends, and me. That would be obnoxious, or rather, _I_ would be obnoxious. No one would want to go to that party, it would be lame.

To have a real cocktail party, you need a lot more people. Forgive me as I quote myself (ya, I know):

It's a river of uselessfulness and truthiness. It's a permanent cocktail party where you know some folks, and don't know others. Some are famous, some are your friends. There's a the constant background of overheard conversations, except on Twitter, it's socially acceptable, nay, encouraged, to jump in. No need to say, "oh, I couldn't help but overhear, excuse me but..."

To really get something out of Twitter you need to follow at LEAST a hundred people of various backgrounds. Really mix it up. If you're really into just .NET and only want to see .NET tweets, I'll talk about how you can filter in a second.

Still, take a moment and drink this in. Follow liberally. You're following people, not topic experts. They'll tweet jokes and stupid stuff as often as they'll tweet code and useful tips. You'll need to follow a large swatch of people in order to get a wide and diverse experience on Twitter.

Some folks say that they can't find anyone interesting to follow. This is nonsense. Here's a tip. Find ONE interesting person, and see who THEY follow. Rinse, repeat. I've found 1000 interesting people this year. Turns out the world is full of them, and 0.1% of them are on Twitter.

Twitter Rule #2 - Use Search Effectively

Search is integrated into Twitter's website now, when it wasn't before, so that's useful, but I'm still surprised how few people notice that little search box. Make sure when you select a Twitter client that you select on that supports Search Columns. This is how you find info on topics when you're not necessarily interested in particular people.

For example, if you don't want to follow me, but you want to listen to conversations on ASP.NET MVC, make a search column with "ASP.NET MVC" in it.

I recommend these Twitter clients that effectively support search:

• TweetDeck - The original "deck" full screen client. The first thing you need to do after you install is go to the settings and turn off the "All Friends" notification as it'll drive you insane. The second thing is to setup some columns for topics you're interested in.
• bDule - A very nice client for Windows with a lot of of flexibility in how you can layout the columns. It also supports Facebook comments and likes.
• DestroyTwitter - The new kid on the block, it's very minimalist in style but supports many themes. It can be small and thin or be like TweetDeck and have columns.

I have columns in TweetDeck for Friends, Replies, Direct Messages, a search for "hanselman OR hansleman", a search for "Win7", a search for "asp.net", a search for "mvc," and a search for "diabetes." I also add searches for topics that I may find interesting that day or week, but then I'll delete them later. I had a Michael Jackson search for a few days, as an example.

Point is, make sure your Twitter Client supports search. Otherwise it's useless.

Twitter Rule/Tip #2a - Groups

Another way you can segment things is to use Groups. TweetDeck lets you put, for example, all your .NET people in one group and all your diabetics in another. This forces you to break up your party and assign labels to folks, but it's your party. That's another good thing to remember.

Twitter Rule #3 - Favorites as "Read Later"

When things are moving fast you often need a "read stuff later" button. While there is a service called Instapaper that is starting to get integration inside of some Twitter clients, it hardly has the broad support of a TwitPic or other 3rd party tool.

To solve this, I use "favorites" as my "read later." That means if I'm on my phone or my desktop and someone tweets something interesting or a link I don't have time to follow, I favorite it, then I came back later to read it. This simple technique has made things a little calmer for me when there's tweets coming in faster than I can read them. I just hit the little "star" icon in my twitter client that every client supports and I'll get to it later.

Conclusion

So, if you want to follow the Whole Person, follow me on Twitter. If not, just hang out on the blog, there's no hard feelings. :)

Also, consider reading my post on How To Twitter - First Steps and a Twitter Glossary

*Twitter Duck Image courtesy of Paul Söderholm