The Einstein Effect

Sometimes when I play with GIMP late at night I end up having interesting dreams. In this case, I had a vision. Albert Einstein in a Starfleet uniform, a book cover. Maybe this will be the third book in my Mission: Dawn series (I already got other ideas for book two).

Do not leave popcorn unattended in microwave

A few weeks ago I was playing around in GIMP, the open source graphic image manipulator. I read some tutorials on how to make starfields and nebulas. Tonight I read a tutorial on how to make a planet.

I felt like munching on a snack and I'd already had some ice cream so I found a bag of popcorn and put it in the microwave oven. I don't trust the Popcorn setting and I recall from past experience that 2:30 is about the amount of time that it takes. So I punched in 2:30, hit Start, and went back to my laptop to build my first planet.

Two and a half minutes the microwave beeped. I went back to the kitchen and opened the microwave door. Smoky smoky smoky! There was a nice big burn mark on the paper bag. So 2:30 is too long for this brand of popcorn. But it is enough time to make a decent looking planet.

A Grand team meeting

If any team meeting had the potential to be a totally screwed up meeting it was tonight's meeting (see A Grand new journey). I was burned out all last week and didn't tackle planning the meeting until Sunday night - the night before. Kind of late for delegating major parts of the meeting to other men. So I would need to prepare to lead most of it myself. Add to that half the team being busy and not coming, add to that we met at a location where we had never met before, add to that me being late because I didn't leave the house early enough to get to the site on time, add to that there was only one man there when I arrived...

Despite all that, it was a great meeting for the men who did come. In total we were five men - four members plus one first-time guest. I remained focused on my context, purpose, and results, and on delivering value. My purpose was "having great communication in all relationships", and a couple of results I had were "all men including guests are encouraged to participate" and "men are encouraged to be open with each other". With that in mind, I managed to direct a non-purposeful chit-chat session into a spontaneously developed exercise in which men shared things about themselves and then expressed what they learned about the other men.

What I learned - we don't need to have a large number of men present to have a Grand meeting. Also that I am good at being flexible, adapting my agenda on the fly, generally by listening to and trusting my intuition. It does speak to me when I need it. Although this is a strength that is good to have for producing value under dubious circumstances, I have to be careful not to become too cocky, not to use it as a substitute for planning and preparation.

Oh, by the way, I finally had a chance to say "Make it so" tonight.