Author: Nadreck

Surfacing

I’m still here.

Fair warning: I’m going to ramble here for a little bit. I used to write my blog as a personal journal, and that slowly shifted into its current state as a semi-neglected platform for interesting quotes, random essays and commentary, and the occasional video. That’s likely what it’s going to continue to be, but sometimes you just need to get back to your roots and have a proper life-update braindump. Continue reading “Surfacing”

Link: LinkedIn For People Who Hate LinkedIn

Jon Jones has a really excellent write-up of how to set up a solid LinkedIn profile, and why you should. While the opening context is game industry related, 100% of the information he covers is relevant regardless of what career path you’re following. Well worth the read — also, check out the rest of his blog and tweets, there’s a ton of really solid information about resumes, portfolios, and getting into creative industries.

Link: Open for Business

Laura Kalbag nails transparency in business and social media in her post Open for Business over at A List Apart.

In particular, I’d like to note this:

Being open as an individual isn’t just saying everything you think without caring—that’s called being a sociopath! If you want to be transparent, you still need some kind of filter. It’s like how we might not swear in front of our grandmothers; it’s not good manners. Or how we don’t use Twitter to broadcast every meal we eat, because we’d bore our followers. Diplomacy is necessary too. Very few of us want to be honest to the point that we hurt other people.

I sometimes talk about choosing transparency in our lives, and I feel like her explanation here really describes two key points of what I’m trying to say: tact and diplomacy are not antithetical to transparency; transparency does not mean opening a firehose — you can still strive for a good signal-to-noise ratio.

WordCamp Portland 2013

Welcome to WordCamp Portland 2013! It’s being run a little different this year in that there are only two sets of unconference slots, the rest is actual speakers. There is also a theme to the event this year (a first, at least for the Portland WordCamp), discussing permanence.

A few event announcements:

  • A lot of us are introverts here, or shy. Please try to be welcoming and encourage talking to new people. Just join in the conversation if you hear something interesting.
  • Code of Conduct is up on the website! Please follow it.
  • If you’re just on your computer/tablet/smartdevice for non-participatory reasons, try putting it away — if you’re taking notes, sure, fine, but still, be present if you can.

Continue reading “WordCamp Portland 2013”

Online Psychotherapy May Be More Effective

Psychotherapy Via Internet as Good as If Not Better Than Face-To-Face Consultations: I think this is fascinating, and look forward to seeing more research into this going forward. (I’d like to see the experiment replicated as well as a more thorough tear down of the paper, but I appreciate the research nonetheless.)

“In the medium term, online psychotherapy even yields better results. Our study is evidence that psychotherapeutic services on the internet are an effective supplement to therapeutic care.”

I’m both pleased and unsurprised by the findings, when you take into consideration some prior research that’s been done (thinking about some of the comments in the IRC Francais paper published back in 2002: I think it allowed us to get to know each other better. […] You learn about [the others] as people. We would talk about relationships and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t talk about in class.). It helps validate my feeling that online interaction and community serve very real, very valid roles, in ways that can be just as effective (or more) as in-person interaction. That’s not to say there aren’t issues that also need to be taken into account, but there IS value there.