by Phil Houtz on February 27, 2010
in Diary
I started this year with a goal to better focus my writing and blog every day. I did a pretty good job of it until February 15…and then I stopped. Why?
My attention shifted. The things I’m interested in at the moment don’t necessarily fit the theme of this blog…which is loosely defined as “things for the suburban frontiersman.” I’m caught in a dilema. Do I post these things because they are close to my heart? Or do I reframe them to stay on-topic with this conversation? Or do I, like the Protestant Church when faced with a dilema, start another conversation elsewhere?
So I am doing what I typically do when faced with a confusing choice: nothing.
Some blogs manage to pull together very eclectic conversations by having a loose but persistent focus.
- boingboing continues to amaze, delight and surprise me. (Happy Mutant Culture)
- LifeHacker is regularly useful. (Simple tricks to boost productivity)
- KK Lifestream produces “Oh, wow!” moments (“Out there” meets “in here”)
Other blogs make me wish they would get back on track. For instance I wish Geek Hiker would post more of his excellent trail reports (SoCal hiking scene from a guy who is hopelessly single).
I’m toying with the idea of adding a “BrainBucket” category as a place to talk about some of the ideas I’m having. Such as The Permeable Organization – Crowdsourcing Marketing Conversations from Within. Then again, that’s way far afield from “stuff to feed your suburban adventures.” I’d also like to talk about Hunter vs. Farmer – Tips for Hunter Personality Types, Viewing Church Splits as Conversations and Using Music to Reset Executive Function Meltdown, Out of My Head: Tips for Creative Types Who Are Poor at Making Social Connections.
In other words, an explosive hodge-podge of conversations that dont’ fit any particular theme. Do I put them here and blur the focus of “suburban frontiersmanship” that has had moderate success over the past month or two or do I need yet another platform?
Help!!!
Tagged as:
blogging,
Organizing,
Purpose
by Phil Houtz on February 15, 2010
in Diary
Dogs meeting on the trail
A good trail dog needs to be calm, confident, alert to danger but not easily threatened, and most of all…focused on his owner. This does not describe Mr. Moose, the German Shepherd (Greyhound?) mix that I am training to be my trail buddy. He does very well with people he knows, and he’s more plenty willing to take on a challenge outdoors – I took him to the river this weekend and he galloped headlong into a patch of quicksand. This mishap surprised him, but it didn’t freak him out.
The big problem is the way Mr. Moose handles strangers. He is extremely wary, to the point of aggression, with people he doesn’t know or understand. With dogs he is hyper-ballistic.
Learning to Walk All Over Again
I started Mr. Moose on the Martingale collar, a nylon collar with a slip-chain that can’t choke the dog. The good: the collar doesn’t choke and he can’t twist out of it. The bad: When Mr. Moose spies a Schnauzer and lunges to the end of his leash his instinct is to pull harder against the resistance. This turns a peaceful dog-walk into a fight with a barking marlin. The ugly: Strong, firm corrections don’t even register. I’ve had to give a really hard yank to get the dog’s attention.
Next we switched to a prong collar. After satisfying myself that the prong collar is not an instrument of torture, I found it to be a very useful tool for teaching Mr. Moose to heel. I’ll need to cover my training method in another post, because the prong collar alone won’t keep a strong dog like Mr. Moose in line. But it does provide a level of natural consequence that the Martingale collar didn’t. The good: Mr. Moose quickly learned that the most comfortable place to walk is by my side. The bad: It still takes a firm tug at times to give a correction. The collar needs to be used thoughtfully, and takes a certain amount of skill to administer. The ugly: The prong collar did nothing to keep Mr. Moose from lunging at the sight of other dogs. If anything it escalated his aggression, possibly because the collar was hurting him as he yanked and twisted on the end of the leash.
Now I’ve switched to using a Halti head collar. I’ve had disastrous results with head collars on other dogs, tugging, wriggling and generally causing freak-outs. But seeing that Mr. Moose had learned to heel and that his instinct to pull against resistance (cf. sled dogs) was now the major problem, it seemed like a head collar might work. True, he hates having his snoot looped, but it does prevent him from making sustained lunges. Now when he tries to pull against the leash instead of being like fighting a sailfish the effect is more like trying to land a 70 lb. flopping bass. The good: the dog doesn’t continue lunging forward against resistance. The bad: instead, the dog frantically moves backward, twisting, shaking and clawing at the head collar. The ugly: given enough twisting, he can escape the head collar. Fortunately there is a back-up lead that clips to his regular collar.
The important lesson here is that a training collar is simply a tool. The collar alone won’t correct a rotten dog’s behavior. I suppose this all goes back to the old joke:
Q. What’s the first thing you need to know in order to train a dog?
A. More than the dog.
Photo by Ildar Sagdejev
Tagged as:
Dogs,
Hiking
by Phil Houtz on February 7, 2010
in Diary
Some people are farmers, some are hunters. Some people excel at routine tasks, making small incremental improvements, minimizing risks while maximizing returns. Others are better at recognizing patterns, focusing for long periods of time in pursuit of a goal, reacting suddenly and effectively in chaotic situations, taking risks.
The “hunters and farmers” metaphor has been around for a couple of decades but I stumbled across it just the other day in blog a post by Seth Godin. Godin muddies things with a couple of bad examples that confuse consumer behavior with personality type. Marketers have long made a distinction between low-involvement purchases (impulse shopping at Zappos) and high-involvement purchases (expensive large scale technology) and adjusted their pitches accordingly. It’s probably more accurate to say that hunters and farmers treat low-involvement and high-involvement purchases differently. A farmer will make an impulse purchase (breath mints) if it helps him avoid risk (offending his date). A hunter will spend a long time researching a high involvement purchase, yet she will be willing to accept more uncertainty than the farmer if the potential for reward is high.
But let’s not talk about marketing. Let’s talk about survival.
The modern world is optimized for routine work, farming if you will. While Thom Hartmann’s metaphor of hunters and farmers might not be good science it does help construct an alternative narrative for people who are easily bored with the way most of the world works. The question for hunter-types is “how do I engage my natural instincts in a work-a-day world?”
Some hunter types have found a way to engage their inner drives by going into the sales profession. Others seek creative jobs. Still others just suffer.
Despite the fact that Hartmann has invested a good deal of effort in helping hunter-types find success, I’m surprised that there are very few resources targeted to hunters on the web. For instance, Merlin talks an awful lot about dealing distraction – a problem for hunters in a farmer’s world. But he doesn’t seem to have much to offer the hunter who wants to optimize his or her inner drives.
While this video blog from Howard Rheingold gives you more than you wanted to know about the matter, I believe it poses a good first step for frustrated hunter-types. Rheingold flips Merlin’s question “how do you screen out distraction?” and rewords it in a way that is more helpful to hunters – where do you want to focus your attention?
Photo by Charles Fred
Tagged as:
Organizing,
Purpose,
Systems,
Tips,
Wisdom
