1. You could just chalk it up to numbers/random chance, and walk away without making any significant changes.
2. You could also double down, and try to get back in good graces with these potential customers, on the theory that your qualification efforts were good, and you just missed something at the end.

Both 1 and 2 have problems. The problem is that these are both responses to (supposed) external problems, rather than internal. When you get down to it, the problem is most likely with your product/service rather than your sales cycle. Drill down and ask yourself the tough questions. What do you have to offer? Why would anyone want it? How could you reposition or recraft your product or service to make it more appealing? Engage in the tough conversations with just-missed customers and ask them the “why not?” questions. Ask them what would have turned the sale. Analyze. Adjust your product or service. Try it out with different customers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Having said that, my search for an appropriate writing competition is stalled. There are _so many_ competitions, ranging from the obviously amateur to the probably professional, and everything in between. The internet bulges with horror stories of writers who cough up money to enter writing competitions, only to see their submissions ignored, their money stolen, etc. etc. etc.

So the trick is to find a reputable competition. That may take some time. In the meantime, I continue to write.

A friend asked me if writing was “cathartic”. I suppose that it is, after a fashion, but the only true catharsis is reality. For example, if I had cancer (which I don’t!), I could write all day about a life in which I didn’t have cancer, or in which a cure for cancer was found by some selfless latter-day Dr. Howard Roark, but at the end of the day I would still have cancer. So it goes with other topics that might be candidates for catharsis. Until the actual problem or issue is resolved, writing can – at best – provide a temporary injunction. For some things, only time and space can highlight a way beyond. But in the interim, writing (or journaling, if you prefer) is a healthy way to let out some creative energy, and provides unequalled mental stimulation. The act of creation is beneficial in many ways, even if that same act doesn’t negate or do away with other, painful realities.

To that second point, I suppose that authors everywhere, when confronted with a touchy subject, would sharpen pencils and come up with a roman-a-clef in which your hero Anthony Stevens is transparently recast as Andrew Strosser, Darcy Devereaux becomes Denise Derbyshire, Charles Cross becomes Chase Clover, and so on. It would be a lurid, storm-tossed tale of high drama and low dudgeon, win me a spot on the bestseller lists, and fuel recrimination and counter-recrimination among the literati for the next ten years. Actually, that sounds sort of fun. Should I attempt it? I remember reading recently something to the effect that fiction has to be truer than real life, because it has to be believable. Sometimes real life is so unbelievable, it nears insanity. Or at least inanity.

So here’s the plan: I’ll browse around for a compelling short-story contest. Your hero, as well as you, dear reader, will provide grist for the mill, and I’ll come out a couple weeks later with a winner, a piece about life, death, love, hate, hope, and despair, so deftly written that it merits notice by editors at the New Yorker.

Stay tuned!

The official docs tell you to click on the “Show updates” checkbox in the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet, but that didn’t work for me. “Windows PowerShell 1.0″ (or any variation thereof) didn’t show up.

A google search led me to look for installed service packs in the %WINDOWS%\$NtUninstallKB* directories that has the “PSCustomUtil.exe” file in them. Then go to the child /spuninst/ directory and uninstall the KB that way. I got a ton of warnings saying I would nuke my system back to the Stone Age should I attempt the treasonous act of actually uninstalling a KB patch, but I – being the renegade that I am – went ahead and did it anyway.

My search picked up two KB packs: KB926139-v2 (Windows PowerShell 1.0), and KB926141 (Windows PowerShell MUI).

Once I uninstalled both, I was able to successfully install the PowerShell v2 CTP3.

Hope this helps you too.

I started things off by giving a talk in the 11:30 session on GTD – Getting Things Done. I’ve been on and off the GTD wagon for several years now, and used to give training sessions at a previous company, so I know the theory pretty much backward and forward. There were about 40 people at the session, and I felt a little nervous before I got into the swing of things. However, A few people came up afterward and complimented me on the talk, which made me feel a lot better – thank you, you know who you are!

A few other highlights from Day 1:

– The raucous laughter coming out of the Lightning Rant session. It sounded like they had a *great* time, and I can’t wait to hear more details tomorrow.
– I met Daniel Escapa, who works on my favorite software product of all time, OneNote. His name didn’t register with me at first, but I’ve read Daniel’s blog on and off for a long time. Great guy!
– I met Arianna O’Dell, who is the founder of FlyBy, an online music site. They have an interesting business model – free music with the occasional visual advertisement on your iPod.
– Had a chance to catch up briefly with Sarah Schacht, who runs Knowledge as Power, and is a strong advocate for government transparency. It sounds like things are going pretty well for KAP right now.
– Talked to two startup CTOs who both declined to talk about their products or companies. Funny, because I thought stealth mode was so 2007.
– Finally met @missrogue herself, Tara Hunt, who was attending and who also is in the middle of launching her new book, The Whuffie Factor. It’s a book about social capital and how companies and individuals should participate in the new world of online communities. Looks like a good read!

I look forward to going back tomorrow for Day 2. I’ll report back more after the end of the day tomorrow.

A few years ago, we went through a similar episode with Mad Cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and tens of thousands of cows were put down, beef imports were curtailed or eliminated, and the world’s agricultural industry held its breath.

I’m not too interested in animal-related pandemics (avian flu would be another), but more interested in the societal phenomenon of hysteria. Not necessarily mass hysteria of the OMG-the-world-is-going-to-end variety, but hysteria brought on by a lack of perspective. In all the recent pandemics, fewer people died than those who slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and hit their head. The level of reaction – or overreaction if you will – was grossly out of proportion to the evidence.

A couple thoughts. First, does modern mass media and/or distributed real-time media fuel or temper societal hysteria? I think you could argue pretty convincingly that mass media fuels it, due to the echo chamber effect, whereas internet-driven realtime media tempers the impulse, due to the sheer number of outlets, interests, and mini-communities of interest. Second, is societal hysteria a byproduct of the individual tendency to hysteria, or is it a phenomenon that is unique to groups? We all have a tendency to overdramatize and lose perspective from time to time, as I wrote yesterday – does this reverberate into our shared societal rhythms?

During the Mad Cow episode, England was the hardest hit of all countries, with some estimates claiming 50% infection rates in cattle herds and financial losses of up to $50 billion. That’s a lot of tangible evidence to support the hysteria, even if the infection vector was not adequately known. This is interesting to me because the English have historically been known as reserved, anti-hysterical types – stiff upper lip, and all that – and so the tension between national norms and actual hysteria-inducing circumstances was interesting to watch.

Individually, we are all Englishmen or otherwise – with a lesser or greater tendency toward hysteria and lack of perspective – and I’m really curious how individual circumstances and upbringing lead one toward one or the other pole. I’m pretty convinced, based on recent personal events, that one could design a study that proved conclusively that certain types of circumstances lead one inexorably toward a dramatic lack of perspective, regardless of individual upbringing. Or perhaps not – that’s the beauty of philosophical arguments; one can never quite be sure that one has the opposing argument in checkmate.

When we lack perspective, things are too TOO. Too important, too close, too critical, too, … whatever. We get hyped up, aroused, overstimulated, overemotional. Time and distance help to realign things, but during those first close moments, everything is topsy-turvy, turbulent, and theatrical. Things become elegant and impractical, like fine china. Time gets distorted; mere seconds seem like hours while they occur, but looking back entire days go by without much getting done.

The key to kickball, if I may be allowed to pontificate for a second, after having attended my first kickball scrimmage since the 1980’s, is perspective. And, pontificating further, one of the keys to living your life in the best way possible is also having perspective. I’m not saying don’t dive off the cliff blindfolded every now and then. I’m saying that keeping perspective allows you to choose the right cliff

Thoughts?

Not many thoughtful posts lately. I’ve felt just sort of cruddy, wiped out, and majorly stressed out, which sort of saps the creative juices. Not even the fattest bottle of Absolut or lengthy row of ice-cold Stella Artois can get the writing going when your mind stubbornly refuses to be present.

I went into work early this morning, but my mid-morning I felt cruddy so I took the rest of the day off and had a four-hour nap, which was delicious, and which did the trick – for today anyway. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. I’m missing tonight’s Seattle Tech Startups meeting in preference for resting and storing up my energy for tomorrow. The first kickball practice for the work team is tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll see if I feel up to going to that. I’d like to suit up and get out there and kick some butt, work off some loose, unproductive energy, and have some fun, but not if I continue to carry around this wiped-out feeling.

Mentally: I suppose “not present” is as good a way to describe it as anything. I’ve been able to focus in bursts, and get my work done, but once the work day is over, I’m off to la-la land. Just a ton going on that takes time to process; by this time next week or next month things will likely be 100% back to normal. In the meantime, I’m distracting myself with programming tasks, and have been having fun learning PowerShell and re-learning F#, both of which take a certain amount of brain power.

I’m looking forward to BarCamp this weekend as a sort of forced exposure to the kinds of people and conversations that I love – motivated techies, optionally with beer – even though I might otherwise bow out based on how I feel right this moment. This wiped-out feeling will pass by the weekend, I’m sure, and I know I’ll have a TON of fun at BarCamp, so there you go. No reason to stay home. I have to remember to bring business cards for all the new people I expect to meet. There’s a fun period of about two weeks right after a conference like this where you make appointments for coffee or lunch with all of the new, interesting people you meet – I’m looking forward to that and expanding my horizons a bit. Lately I’ve felt insular or static in my thoughts and in my daily habits. Exposure to new people will help bust me out of that rut.

I was thinking about giving a talk, but my friend Marina is also thinking of giving a talk on the same subject, and since she does that productivity / effectiveness stuff for a living, I’m going to cede the floor and listen to what she has to say. After all, nobody pays me to tell them how to get productive! Looking around my house right now, I can tell why. Lots of little household tasks have been piling up, and I haven’t much felt like doing them. That’s got to change, and soon, or else I’ll be so far behind I’ll never catch up.

That’s all for now – thanks for listening! Reports from BarCamp will be forthcoming following the weekend.

One of the other big jumpers is FlyBy, whose CEO is attending this weekend’s BarCamp (I think). Another big jumper was Blah-It, up 47 spots. Congrats Ali and Kelsye!

The STS Wiki has details on when and where, if you’re interested in going. Should be a great talk, following up on last month’s great discussion!