An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to have some in-person time with one of my employer's vice presidents. My card-holding manager invited me and one of the colleagues I've worked with the longest, to visit a different office location and to cover some SEO news topics over the course of a half hour. While I was quite content to split this time allocation evenly, I also had a disproportionately large amount of information to cover, although I was quite selective in topic choice (our team has gained momentum and, hopefully, a wider sphere of influence since moving organizationally last year). Since this opportunity arose with very little lead time, I also decided to use pre-existing slides (which I only provided some feedback to create, not as primary author). It could have easily taken an hour to cover just my section in proper detail, but also in trying to meet some "business as usual" deadlines, my attention remained painfully divided even during the hours just prio

It seems to me that it's increasingly becoming a frightening new world that we live in. Back when the internet was merely nascent, I was studying psychology in college: numerous examples hammered home to me the notion that we, collectively, are easily manipulable, emotionally, cognitively, and that our memories are scarily labile, too. Over three years ago, I'd blogged about  Google+ increasing its reach , which has since apparently been adopted by many more people . Sure, a small fraction of its estimated 2.2 billion + account holders are publicly posting content - but Google has access to all the trackable behaviours of everyone who remains authenticated, not to mention numerous third party cookies and ways metrics are being recorded. Last summer, amongst other topics I'd read the coverage on Facebook's 1-week, 700K user experiment on emotional contagion, which is well summarized in the Atlantic . Then, about a week ago, another piece was brought to my attention

Several colleagues of mine recently attended this year's Internet Summit in the US, so not unexpectedly, lots of advice came couched in the form of American-friendly metaphors. I'd lamented some years before about culture-specific expressions, and how they confuse non-native speakers, but given my heritage, the advice cited in the blog title actually "struck home" (baseball pun not intended). Perhaps a soccer metaphor would be more recognizable to those outside of North America, in which case it would likely be to strive for strategic passes and goal assists, and to value the role of Libero (or sweeper) rather than fixate on scoring goals or becoming an ace striker. In any case, this advice pertains to keeping a blog fresh - a topic that I've been mindful of, having started several draft posts since my prior entry in April, which have not seen the light of day. So, here I am wading back into the fray, as it were, by taking said advice. From now on, if I find

Try the quiz linked via the graphic, to answer 20 questions all skewed towards extroverts Most of my socal media profiles openly declare my self-identification as an INTJ (estimated to comprise 1-2% of the population, and popularly depicted in fiction as antagonists or anti-heroes). I've tested as such since I was 11, though during my university years I came close to registering as INTp. Of course, Myers-Briggs has had numerous valid detractors , and one criticism is that the dichotomies of I-E etc. are not quantified by the labeling: that is, one cannot tell just how strongly introverted I believe myself to be. And since it's a self-identifying classification, one could easily delude oneself into believing that inclination is manifesting directly into actions, meaning that others may not classify one as belonging to that type at all. Nevertheless, lately there have been quite a bit of confrontation between the two camps, where one normalizes one's preference and m

Although the engagement completed in 2013, I have the privilege of remaining on the admin list for one of my employer's Facebook page s. In the past day, my colleague was kind enough to note that due to a glitch, scheduled posts via HootSuite attribute me as the person creating them. This is in spite of my never having linked my HootSuite account to that page, although I do have it linked to my personal Facebook account. For full disclosure, while I'd considered personally sharing one or both of the stories below, I hadn't, nor had I used HootSuite to view or share them to my various social media channels (which in this case, would likely have been personal Facebook via Twitter , as well as LinkedIn and my Google Plus page ). Evidence A and B: If one is not an administrator of the Facebook page, however, this additional information is not disclosed - so had I chosen to keep my silence, very few people would be cognizant of the onset of this strange phenomenon.