Work Motivation, or Lack Thereof

So if you search for what employers can do to increase employee motivation, you'll get a list that includes:

• money
• opportunity for growth
• leadership opportunities
• responsibility
• recognition of performance

Why do so few of the search results for work motivation talk about what I feel is a key motivational factor? Namely, giving a shit about the thing you're working on.

Feeling like the product you're working on is subpar and not likely to improve is a real drain on motivation. :(

I don't want to talk with people about what I work on. If they're not familiar with it, I have no reasons to recommend that they learn about it or try it. If they are familiar with it, I have to agree with all their complaints about it and then some.

I need to work on a different product...

Overnight Camping at Ohanapecosh

See all this trip's photos on Flickr.

I had written this post right after the camping trip, but I only just now (20 days later) realized that I had never clicked the "Publish Post" button. Oops!

Last Saturday around noon, Forrest proposed that we go camping. We stopped by Fred Meyer to pick up a Coleman lantern and some food, hit some traffic on the way to the library (for reading material that we ended up not actually reading), and drove the two hours out to Ohanapecosh campground in Mount Rainier National Park. It was raining on the drive up through Enumclaw, but then it cleared up and turned sunny. The weather's like that in Seattle — never assume that bad weather now means bad weather in 5 minutes.

We were a little concerned about the campground being full, since we were heading out somewhat late Saturday rather than on Friday afternoon. But as we started up the road to Cayuse Pass, we passed several private campground that looked populated but not crowded. We figured that, worse case scenario, we could stay at one of these if Ohanapecosh were full.

Just past some rental cabins, Forrest said he thought he'd seen a patch of snow. "No way!" I dismissed what must have been his eyes going crazy. But then around another turn, suddenly there was snow all over the place. That'll teach me. Soon everywhere was snow-covered, and the mountains across the river looked like they'd come straight out of winter.

Down below the pass again, the snow let up but didn't disappear. When we rolled into the Ohanapecosh campground late in the afternoon, we saw plenty of scattered snow patches hanging around. We had been hoping for one of the walk-in sites, but several sections of the campground were closed and we weren't able to find them. Instead, we settled on the most "isolated" (not really) drive-up site. At least the campground was only about 50% capacity.

We bought a bundle of firewood from an enterprising man selling them out of the back of his truck, then set up camp with the last of the daylight. A few weeks ago, we had purchased a fancy-dancy six-pound backpacking tent from REI, the Marmot Aeros 3P. The "purpose" of this camping overnighter, apart from camping for camping's sake, was to give the tent a trial run before the annual Davie backpack trip this summer. I'm happy to report that the tent went up very easily, was just as roomy as it appeared to be in the store, and was otherwise a very respectable tent.

The trip itself was fairly uneventful, being just one night out car-camping. But it was fun nonetheless. (This is also the result of not having finished this blog post immediately after the trip, so further details of interest escape me...) On the drive back the next afternoon, we drove through some especially thick low-lying clouds.

Siniestro Mu y Las Vacas Lobotómicas

So Forrest and I were going through boxes, putting away things, when Forrest found a scrap of paper with some Spanish written on it. He told me to search YouTube for it, at which point we stopped cleaning to watch La Tortuga Manuelita. Many clicks of "related" videos later, we came across El Baile de las Vacas:

After recovering from the hypnotic effects of the video, we watched one more on YouTube (Siniestro Mu, El Jingle) before just googling broadly for all the info we could find. (We're not warped or demented, no sir...)

The only two sites with actual animated content that I could find were:

SiniestroMu.com

The official site for El Show de Siniestro Mu y Las Vacas Lobotómicas. It has 3 episodes and 3 comics. ¡Quiero más episodios!

YouTube user siniestromu

This user has uploaded 7 short clips to YouTube. This is all his fault that you're being exposed to it now.

Various newspaper articles (in Spanish) say it's a Saturday morning cartoon from Panama. Where can I get it?? My Google-fu does not seem to be strong enough for this one. :(

This is more or less how I got into Veggietales. Does not bode well. ;)

"Go Home" Outlook Reminder

The Problem

Now that Forrest has moved up here, I have to change my work schedule a bit. When I had no one to go home to after work, I didn't really worry about how long I stayed in the office. Even after I put in my 8 hours, I'd be inclined to stay, reading the Intarwebs. I mean, if I was just going to be internetting when I got home anyway, what difference did it make whether I did it at home or at work?

But now, it's sad if I don't get home until 9 or 10 in the evening, tired enough to want to go straight to sleep, and I haven't seen Forrest all day. So I need to save my time-wasting (such as blog posts, hrm...) for when I'm at home, where at least we can waste time together. :)

The Geeky Semi-Solution

I will lose track of time, though, if left to my own devices. So I wrote myself a little custom "Go Home" button in Outlook, which creates an alarm 8 hours from when I get to work, that pops up and tells me to go home.

Partly to document it, and partly to help out anyone else who might like to program something similar, here's how I did it. In the Visual Basic Editor (Alt-F11 from within Outlook), I created a new function:

Sub CreateGoHomeEvent()
    Dim message, title, defaultValue As String
    Dim arrivedAtWork As String
    Dim appt As Outlook.AppointmentItem
    
    message = "When did you get to work today?"
    title = "Start Time"
    defaultValue = DateTime.Now
    
    arrivedAtWork = InputBox(message, title, defaultValue)
    If arrivedAtWork = "" Then
        ' If the returned value is blank, the user hit cancel.
        Debug.Print "Cancelling; did not create an appointment."
        Exit Sub
    End If

    Set appt = Application.CreateItem(olAppointmentItem)
    With appt
        .Categories = "Important!,Processed"
        .Subject = "Go home, it's been 8 hours!"
        .Start = DateAdd("h", 8, arrivedAtWork)
        .End = .Start
        .BusyStatus = olFree
        .ClearRecurrencePattern
        .ReminderMinutesBeforeStart = 15
        .ReminderSet = True
        .Save
    End With
    
    Debug.Print "Created a 'Go Home' reminder for " & appt.Start & "."
End Sub

Then I customized the Outlook toolbar to include a button that calls this new macro. It prompts me for the time I got to work, defaulting to the current time. If I click the OK button, it creates a new reminder task with an alarm that goes off 8 hours from that time. It's simple, but useful. Here's a screenshot of it in action, with the "Go Home" button on the far right of the toolbar, and a red rectangle in the "To-Do Bar" being the task sitting there, waiting to trigger its pop-up window alarm:

Update, Wednesday 11:35 AM: Added in the missing code to actually trigger the reminder itself. Setting ReminderMinutesBeforeStart = 15 is not enough; you also need to set ReminderSet = True for the reminder to trigger.

Graupel is Weird

Footprints in the Graupel

Strange April weather! It's like pellets of snow, which Wikipedia says may be graupel. Weird stuff.

They Call Me Dandelion Bane

They Call Me Dandelion Bane

I got up this morning intent on being constructive. Being DEstructive isn't so far off. :)

Eggly Eyes

Eggly Eyes

Forrest is a good cook, and sometimes a silly one. :)

Orange Microsoft Crates

Orange Microsoft Crates

These are the intra-office moving crates Microsoft uses. They're not really all that intrinsically interesting; mostly I just wanted to test moblogging from my new phone. :)

House!

Westlake House

Forrest is up here visiting, looking for rental houses with me in anticipation of his moving up here in mid April. We looked at several houses, but there was only one that we were really happy with. So today we put in our applications and the deposit (oof). They haven't approved it yet, so it's still possible we won't get it, but we very probably will. Exciting! :)

You can wander over to Forrest's Flickr set of photos of the house to check out the house. It's in the Westlake neighborhood of Seattle — not as nice (or pricey) as Queen Anne up the hill, but still okay.

Update, Monday 11:10 AM: Omg, we got the house! That was some fast turnaround time on the landlord's part, and she's not even physically in the state at the moment. (Her daughter has been doing the legwork of actually showing us the house.) The move-in date is April 1st, ie tomorrow, so it sounds like as soon as we sign the lease we can start moving in. Wootles!

Skills of an Artist, er, Linguist

My manager stopped by just a minute ago. "I need help of a linguist," my manager says to me.

"Oh?" My manager speaks English as a second language; Russian is his native language. I figured it was related to that somehow.

He hands me a sticky note with "Gene" written on it. "Is English name?" he asks. "How do you pronounce it?"

I laugh and tell him it's /ʤiːn/, just like DNA-type genes.

He thanks me, commenting that if he's going to be calling this big-shot consultant, he'd better get his name right. I was glad to be service. :)

Gold star and a happy face to those who recognize what this post's title is referencing. :)