Meanwhile, back at the farm

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using del.icio.us (now http://delicious.com) for over a year to manage my bookmarks for me.  It is essential that I have an online repository for my bookmarks because I often jump to multiple machines and I like to have my bookmarks handy.

I use the official delicious add-on in Firefox to quickly access my delicious bookmarks and to add new bookmarks without even visiting the delicious web site.  I usually only visit the web site when I want to manage (remove/edit) my bookmarks.

delicious advertises social bookmarking, which I never really paid much attention to.  Just having an online repository for my bookmarks was good enough.  But earlier today I was visiting a friends blog and noticed that they also used delicious due to a link on his web site.  After clicking on the link I was taken to the delicious page that showed all of his bookmarks.  As I looked through the list I noticed that there were a lot of things there that looked interesting to me.  I thought, this is sorta like micro-blogging, except with a URL to this person’s favorite sites.  It show’s the things he’s interested in and gives me more insight into the project he’s working on.

It then hit me that delicious offers an RSS feed for the links.  Just like subscribing to a blog, I subscribed to his links in Google Reader.  Now I will automatically get updated with any site he bookmarks.  Beautiful!

If you use delicious, let me know cause I want to follow your links too!  If you want to follow my links, you can click the link on the sidebar of my blog or just jump to this link here: http://delicious.com/mikefarmer

I’ve now been working at BYU-Idaho for just over a month.  This is a fabulous job and exactly what our family needed after the untimely, but not unexpected, termination of my employment from Sento.  I believe that through divine intervention, this job was an answer to prayer and it has worked out on many many levels for us.  For that, I am grateful.

It hasn’t all been sugar and spice however.  I worked at Sento for 8 years and it was really my only real work experience.  I learned a lot there, but one major disadvantage is that I only saw one view of the world – a world constantly struggling to stay alive.  In that environment, anyone that has the wherewithal and the guts to step up and get things done gets recognized and appreciated.  I was really used to that.  When stuff needed to get done, you did all you could to do it.  Although business politics existed, they were easily surmountable if you were reasonable and presented a good case.

As with any company or organization of the size and scale of BYUI, you just aren’t going to have the freedom to grow, develop, and just plain get things done.  The barriers are tall and their roots are deep. Worse yet, the barriers are not always apparent, documented, or well known unless you have been in the company for many many years.  Often, I find myself like the proverbial cow bouncing along an electric fence inadvertently getting shocked when all I was trying to do was get some tastier grass.

Learning the culture and unspoken/unwritten boundries of any new job is difficult.  Lately, I’ve been trying to bump less into the fence and just be content with the pasture I’m in.  I’ve found that I’m less frustrated and generally more happy.  So the lesson to be learned here is to work within that you can control, get over the occasional hand slapping, and keep your head down on the work you’ve been given.  Trying to be a hero constantly is not always the best approach. The key is to keep your eyes open for opportunities to get that tastier grass, and when they come, take them.