It’s one of those things that I wish I had time to learn, it just looks…interesting. At the same time, there’s something to be said for the elegant simplicity of ‘most votes wins’.

It’s a fairly modern hotel, when you enter the room to get the lights to come on you have to put your door card in a reader inside the room, then when you leave you remove it and a few minutes later the lights go off automatically. Flat screen tv, easy to reach power ports, all good stuff.

But the shower was the best part of the trip. Not just any shower, one with electronic controls! I took the two photos to show you, the second one after I realized I forgot to get a picture of it in progress and since I had already removed the door card, the lights went out before I could get the second pic in normal light.

Press power, click OK, watch the temperature start at 75 or so degrees and sit for a few seconds, then it starts to climb up to the default on this of 103 degrees. Twist the dial on the right to change the temp. It’s got six pre-sets, and each of them will store not just temperature buy settings for multiple shower heads if you have them (sadly, only one here).

Most hotels have those very green and not very fun water saving shower heads. Not here. This was a ceiling mounted high volume shower, far better than I have at home. Not quite a fire hose, but definitely moving a lot of water. Combined with the pure geek fun of the shower controls was just excellent. The only strange part is that the controls are outside the shower, you have to step out and around the door to change the temperature. I think a sacrifice worth making for this combo!

Thinking this is something to put on the list for when we get around to the next home renovation (along with multiple shower heads so that don’t have to do the turn in a circle shower dance). Looked it up online and I think it’s the Kohler K-683. Not clear if is only the controls, controls plus valves, and whether it’s also a tank-less heater or not, but you can get it online for….$800 or so. Holy cow, $800?

Would I spend that much? Going to have to think on that one. It’s nice, but not sure that nice. A bathroom renovation not cheap, would it make sense to spend an extra $700 or so over what the usual controls cost? Will a lightening strike fry it? At $200 would do it in a minute. At $800? Hmmm. Don’t know!

Here’s the outline:

Learn to network and make professional connections that will pay off for years to come from best-selling author, communications trainer and “small talk” expert, Don Gabor. Using demonstrations, exercises, role plays, and coaching that focus on networking at breakfast, lunch, between sessions and at the evening reception Don will guide you step-by-step through the networking process. By practicing confidence-boosting skills, tips and strategies you’ll see that connecting with your colleagues is easy, fun and profitable! Take-aways include:

Using body language to build instant rapport

Introducing yourself and remembering names

Breaking the ice & keeping the conversation going

Transitioning from topic to topic

Ending conversations and working the room

Following up and building business relationships

Each workshop attendee will receive an autographed copy of Don’s best-selling book, Turn Small Talk into Big Deals.

Do you need business contacts? Of course you do! Just because you’re not a consultant or selling a product doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from business contacts. One of the fun parts of networking is that you just never know who you’ll meet or how it may help you (or how you may help them).

I’m going to this one, and I’m writing the $75 check to attend. I want to be in room with a bunch of other people that want to network, what better place to both meet people and practice new skills?

Now to be fair I’m biased. I met Don after reading his book about how to start conversations, hired him to coach me, and we’ve become friends. I don’t want you to attend so that Don can make $75, I want you to attend because I think he’s just about the best in the world at what he does. I watched him greet people coming into a room last year, hand shake and hello, and 10 minutes later name at least 50 of the 75 attendees. Remembering names is hard, and he makes it look easy. That’s just a part of his game!

Whether the boss pays or not (he should), I hope you’ll attend, we’ll have fun and learn a lot too.

I think as much as I might wish for super powers, I also know that the ‘great responsibility’ thing would be hard, maybe too hard. Being fast or strong won’t let you solve the hardest problems, the ones that are about people and their dreams and perceptions.

As we talked Don always reviews his work methodically, then has someone else do it, and then it goes to a real editor for review and further work. I asked how he manages his own reviews, since for me there is nothing harder than proof reading my own work. The answer was speech to text, he said he often caught things by listening that he didn’t think he would have found reading. Not just spelling or grammar, but the overall flow of the writing as well.

Interesting. I’ve ignored the voice features of Windows for, well, forever. As much as I’d love to be able to say in my best Picard voice “computer: playback current draft using voice of James Earl Jones”, it’s never been worth – to me – the pain of dealing with it. Time to revisit.

Don uses Final Draft ($249), a product that seems to focus on screen writing but serves his needs. I didn’t give it a try, figured I’d focus on things I already owned.

I started by searching the Windows help and that took me to Narrator (Programs | Accessories | Ease of Access) and running it (see next two images). Clunky. Voice is not great but understandable, had a hard time getting it to read text in an Office 2010 doc, worked a lot better when I pasted to Notepad. There are other voices in something called a SAPI5 format, here’s a link if you want to try some http://www.bytecool.com/voices.htm. I suspect a different voice doesn’t fix the clunky reading.

Next I looked in Office 2010 for a speech to text option, and finally found how step by step instructions. The short story is that you have to add the command to the toolbar (or ribbon) first, then you just click but speech button to start/stop play. Same voice, same API I’m guessing, worked smoother (but maybe that was just me).

Maybe a better product than Windows/Office would make it more interesting. I found Natural Reader with a quick search and they let you do a playback test of text you provide right on the web site. They have a free version, one for $49, one for $99. The $99 version lets you export to MP3, so I could see it might be interesting to drop it on a portable player or phone and do the review while commuting (though then you need a way to make notes about problems).

I’m not a convert yet, at least not for blog posts!

I’ve had people suggest RSS feeds, and in fact I do subscribe to quite a few (few hundred that is), and it works well for stuff that isn’t time sensitive, but email works well for things that need attention and when they end up needing to be tracked/converted to tasks.

I get a relatively small amount of email to my personal/home account, the one I use for bill reminders, family correspondence, etc, and while I need to read it, I rarely need to read it immediately, so I have it going to my phone only. The next step was to pay more attention for a week and if I wasn’t reading a newsletter, unsubscribe and consider adding it as a feed so I can still follow along. Netted a few more.

I found I get a lot of email because I’m on the forwarding list for the SQLSaturday main account and we’re at a point where HQ is handling that stuff, so I’ve asked to be taken off the list. That’s a hard cut for me, it’s good to have my finger on the pulse of things and hear about the occasional problem, but it’s a time sink. Instead I’ll rely on HQ and/or event leaders to raise things up to me that need my time.

One I haven’t fixed yet is bounced emails when we mail to the oPASS list. You know how email addresses are, good today and bad tomorrow, so right now we probably get 50 bounces per send. Cleaning those up is tedious, so mostly I delete them, but I can’t skip email to the main oPASS account, and I don’t think that we have the option to specify a different email for bounces (but I need to check again).

I try hard to be diligent about email, if at all possible I get a reply out in 24 hours. Every email I get takes a few seconds to read, then decide on action then or later in the day, or move to a task and try to come back to. It’s hard to tell if I’m saving a significant amount of time – my guess would be only a few minutes – but it feels like less work, less things to do, and that in turns feels like just a little bit less stress.

You might note that I’m not big on filing newsletters for another day. I’ve tried it a few times and while mechanically it works, it seems I rarely get back to it. If it was important it wouldn’t get filed, and if it got filed it wasn’t important! Strangely having a backlog of feeds is fine with me, it’s nice to have a bunch of stuff queued to read (for those that don’t just publish abstracts that is) when I’m waiting on something.

It’s a tradeoff. I like reading, like following a lot of things, but I only have x hours in the day and some of that has to go to doing real work.

How much can you expect from a volunteer? It depends is the best answer, and it’s the same as when you look at someone on your team at work – how much can I give them? Will they grab it and go, will they need coaching, is there a 50% chance they’ll leave it to the last minute or worse? Volunteers need managing, but the style is different because they don’t get paid. You can’t yell at them, you can – sort of – fire them, but for me it’s hard to get upset at someone willing to work for free as long as they communicate. Even if they don’t, I own a portion of the responsibility and can’t blame them entirely if they go dark and don’t get something done.

Hopefully most will agree with that, though in practice it can be frustrating, and the temptation is to reduce risk by just doing it all yourself. Not smart, but tempting!

What should volunteers expect in return for their effort? What should we do for them in return? Should we give them gift cards? A chance to get a discounted or free entry to an event? Books? Let them earn points to redeem on various things?

For me, volunteering equals no pay. When I volunteer I do it because I want to, because I think it will be fun, because I will meet people that might be good to know, and to learn or use skills that I wouldn’t get to use otherwise. I expect whatever support is needed to go along with the task, and a thank you at the end. A follow up email or a card in the mail makes my day, or a nice certificate that maybe I’ll hang up at work. A small inexpensive gift is nice. Providing lunch or covering travel expenses is nice (even important) but that’s about as far as you need to go.

Note that there is a difference when you spend money on gifts that are also marketing or other messaging. Speaker shirts at SQLSaturday are one example. It’s a way to recognize their efforts, it’s also a way to help others find them in the crowd, but it’s also marketing. Nothing wrong with having multiple reasons for doing it, it’s still a nice gift.

Volunteers can get a lot of out their experience if they or you work at it. Make sure they meet some people, make sure they try new things (and get feedback), try to make it fun, let them solve it their way if you can. Say thank you publicly and privately and know that you’ve held up your end of the relationship fairly.

Don’t turn volunteerism into working for $6 an hour. Don’t turn volunteering into ‘what’s in it for me’. Don’t feel bad about asking them to volunteer their time, because they do get something out of it, it’s just not cash or the equivalent. Ask people to contribute their time to something you think is worthwhile and if you make a good case, they’ll say yes.

So when I saw this video about a 89 square foot house, I was intrigued. I don’t yearn to downsize quite that far (or even at all right now), but there is something simple, maybe even romantic in a ‘go west young man’ kind of way about having a just big enough house that is nice. All the more startling when you really think about it, my home office is 140 square feet.

Its turned into a business and I wish him well. It won’t be for everyone, but for some, it will be exactly what they needed. Lot easier to be green and self sustaining in a house that size.