Category: Personal Updates

My life

A list of one thing I learned each day of June 2016

I wanted to get a sense of the kind of things I learn on any given day. So I spent the month of June writing down one specific thing I learned each day.

My goal was for them to be actionable and easily transferable, hoping to identify just how regularly I am learning such things. It was fun. Let me share, from reading, watching, talking and traveling — like to the Great Lakes last month, as depicted above.

I love the idea of learning meaningfully all the time. Here’s my latest check on myself.

Continue reading A list of one thing I learned each day of June 2016

Listen to this small business podcast interview with me

PR shop 2820 Press founder Joe Taylor Jr. hosts a podcast with small business owners called the Build.He invited me on.

I talked about the beginning of Technically Media and about my perspective on journalism and its role in our work. It’s an hour-long conversation you can find here.

Below are some highlights I shared:

Continue reading Listen to this small business podcast interview with me

I am a white Airbnb host. I reviewed 102 guest requests to assess my own racial bias

Peer-to-peer, short-term housing platform Airbnb is probably my favorite consumer web company. A traveling member since 2011, my wife SACM and I have been hosting travelers too for most of the last year. I’m a proud and happy user.

Yet I know that some of the loudest news about Airbnb in its last couple years of mainstream expansion has been controversial: first, about the company navigating municipal hotel taxes and, most recently, its central role in a conversation about racial bias in the sharing economy.

You know, #AirbnbWhileBlack.

So now that my wife and I have been hosting for nearly a year and have received more than 100 requests, I wanted review for our own selection bias.

Continue reading I am a white Airbnb host. I reviewed 102 guest requests to assess my own racial bias

How I described what I do for a living to a classroom of first graders

If you can’t describe what you do to a child, you don’t actually know what you do.

Sure, in an era of disruption and distraction, we are changing and evolving roles and organizations and missions rapidly enough that to kids and even other adults outside our industries, the details can get fuzzy. But the idea here is that your core purpose has almost surely been seen before.

So can you describe what you do at its simplest form?

I got this challenge when I agreed to do a Career Day this month at Adaire, a public K-8 school in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia in which I live. (The school has a fun history dating to the 1890s, including the above-depicted first building and a more conventional one used today)

Continue reading How I described what I do for a living to a classroom of first graders

Cybersecurity is about to get a whole lot bigger

The cybersecurity community will need to widen its focus, both for talent attraction, collaborative defense and inclusion.

That was the basic premise of my keynote this morning at the inaugural Cybersecurity in Action, Research and Education conference. Since I am not a cybersecurity executive or academic, my goal was to simply share some interesting examples of the cyber conversations that our team at Technical.ly is dutifully reporting on.

Find my slides and links below.

Continue reading Cybersecurity is about to get a whole lot bigger

National Novel Writers Month #NaNoWriMo advice

Writing and editing are two separate acts. The old joke goes that you ought to write drunk and edit sober for a reason. One is about discovery and the other is an exercise in concision.

One reason I like the idea of National Novel Writers Month, which takes place each November, is that it is a clear call for writers to write now, and edit later. Since 1999, thousands of writers have written 50,000 words of a novel draft — about 1,600 words daily. With a simple novel concept, I participated back in November.

Since then, I’ve had a few discussions with friends about the process. I thought I’d share those simple thoughts here.

Continue reading National Novel Writers Month #NaNoWriMo advice

A few things I learned at a ‘Personal Finance Day’

The act of learning something I can use has maybe always been one of my favorite acts (that’s why I used to collect extra printouts from school printers). And the mysteries and vagaries of finance have perhaps intimidated me more than most — particularly as a business reporter.

It’s a system that benefits from its complication, making it easier to separate us from money. So I try to take as many opportunities as I can to learn and share to pick up and trade tips on personal finance. As a middle class kid, I had the privilege of being introduced to basic banking from an early age but the more complex instruments were ones I discovered as I pursued greater understanding through high school and college.

I’ve continued that learning and want to share some recent lessons here.

Continue reading A few things I learned at a ‘Personal Finance Day’

I had 3 terrible customer service experiences in the last six months. Here’s why they were different

In the last six months, I had three painful customer service experiences. I struggled with the whys of all three — afterward, I remain a customer of two and won’t ever buy from the third. Each taught me something.

Find overviews of the three experiences, how I attempted to solve them and the result (spoiler, all tried something to help but only two worked).

Continue reading I had 3 terrible customer service experiences in the last six months. Here’s why they were different