Why are the “high maintenance” and “low maintenance” tags always thrown at women and never at men?

See, honestly, I’m high maintenance. I won’t lie to you. [Well, I would lie to you if you'd let me ... yes, I'd be the worst kind: high maintenance, but pretends he's low maintenance.] I seek approval and affirmation. I can be manipulative. I’m self-aggrandizing and all those really horrible character traits that we associate with being high maintenance. It is not enough for me to know that I’m smart—I have to show you, and I need you to tell me!

Societally, though, we don’t lob the “high maintenance” pejorative at the male of the species. I wonder why…

Dear Internet Message Board Denizen:

If you’re frustrated with everyone’s inability to realize when you’ve switched from serious to sarcastic to not giving a damn, here’s a hint: your communication skills, they suck.

While this might not be a big deal to you, it is to some of us. It’s not that we’re sensitive [because we are], it’s just because we care.

:sigh:

Love,
Geof

P.S.: Responding with anger? Yeah, that doesn’t help things at all.

I’m always amused as to how often those who clamor for respect do not show it in kind to those from whom they demand it. I have ways of dealing with it, though. Because it amuses me, a selection of quotes on respect:

There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect.”

– Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 23

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.

– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Carmichael and Wiliam Short, 30 June 1793

Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables: le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer, et créer.

– Charles Baudelaire, Mon Coeur Mis à Nu [1887], XV

… I’d call Rick’s right now to wish him a Happy Birthday.

I mean, Jess is usually awake at this hour, but Rick? He’s been asleep for two hours.

I think I’ll refrain, though. He could beat me up. [I remember when he was so skinny that this wasn't an issue.]

Happy birthday, buddy. See you at dinner tonight.

I’m a big believer in the following axiom: “If you have to tell someone about one of your qualities as a person, the chances are that you’re lying.”

I believe in that axiom both from observational and personal experience. Case in point: when I went off to school at MSMS, I took the horribly audacious step of posting my ACT score on the wall above my desk in my dorm room. I wanted everyone to see what a smart person I was!!!

Looking back, I can examine my motives: I was entering a highly competitive academic environment, and while I never had any presumption that I’d be the smartest person there, I wanted to be up at the top. That posting was a warning shot across everyone’s bow.

It was also, in two words, incredibly stupid.

I think we see cases of this all the time: people claiming to be lovable when they’re really pretty prickly; people who state their hotness, when their mama had to hang a steak around their neck just to have the neighborhood dogs play with them; one who proclaims himself a great coder when he’s really just a two-bit hacker, et cetera. I mean, it’s pretty clear that the modifier “self-proclaimed” isn’t a positive thing, no?

Self-proclamations are, of late, right up there with rampant abuse of superlatives on the list of things that absolutely, utterly drive me up the wall. In fact, you might say that I consider myself to be the world’s greatest hater of self-proclaimers.

It would be interesting for the WP Links Manager to, upon entry of an URL, go and spider that URL real fast to grab relevant data—info from the <title>, autodiscovering a syndication feed URI, check for links back to the originating site for XFN data…—and dump that into the form for the user’s perusal.

Like, if I put in http://photomatt.net/, it’d spit back:

• Title: Photo Matt » Unlucky In Cards
• Feed URI: http://xml.photomatt.net/feed/
• XFN: acquaintance

All of that data is spot-on, and it would probably keep the user from making a mistake and entering bad data.

Now, you might say, “What’s the bother? It’s not like this data takes long to enter!” But user-entered data always has the propensity for failure, no?

Also, what about the concept of a way to put Image URIs in <head>? Say I provide a banner image for the Indiana Jones School of Management—such a spider could take that URI and grab either the URI or the image itself [stored in a local folder for such a purpose, probably somewhere in wp-content]—and then the whole process of grab, FTP, and data entry is all automated.

My left-leaning friends look at judges who bar kids from having abortions and claim, “This country is getting more and more conservative.”

My right-leaning friends look at judges who want to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Alleigance and claim, “This country is getting more and more conservative liberal.” [Thanks to Chris Hubbs for pointing out my gaffe.]

I look at Congress and my state Legislature and see gridlock over openness in government, accountability and ethics charges, and judicial appointments. I say, “The root of our problem is neither that this country is becoming more conservative nor more liberal; the problem is that it gets more polarized, and that’s because legislators—the ones who’re supposed to foment compromise—are forever punting on their legislative duties to bring forth those compromises, and, being scared, leave case law to the judges. Who are judges? Lawyers who like technicalities.”

When the one moderating force in government—legislative compromise—is forever shit-canned, people run to opposite sides and want to play political Red Rover: caucusing on each side, watching for trial balloons to shoot down and tackle.

Ay me.

If you feel the need to post your dinner options on a message board and have your fellow posters help you make a decision, you need more help than they can provide you.

[Lest anyone think I'm writing about a specific person, I've always thought this. I mean, come on ... it's dinner. Ask me what you should have if we're going to dinner together, but otherwise, figure it out on your own. Yeeeeeesh.]

Dive into the long tail: See, exactly. Everybody and their brother knows about Slashdot. Recommend me someone obscure, y’know? If syndication feed recommendation engines are going to give me help, they need to let me see the full spectrum.

See, how I came to know about Hem was through Audioscrobbler [specifically a couple of the communities, Paste Music and Over The Rhine], where I saw people listening to them. I said, “I’ve never heard of this ‘Hem’; what can I find out?” I did some reading, and I said, “I’ll give that a try.”

And I’m now bad, bad, bad hooked.

But if I’d followed what was popular, I’d never have found a gem.

More long tail, please!

Bits and pieces from a conversation with Josh. We were talking about sports journalists, but then got off on broadcast media in general:

[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: Being on air is a narcotic, man.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] G: I’ve done it myself.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:09] J: No doubt — and you don’t get on air with balanced opinions!
[25-January-2005 @ 16:10] G: And nuance? As Kerry learned, nuance is lost in the soundbite.
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] J: Exactly
[25-January-2005 @ 16:11] G: You can get your point out, but you have to do it over the right medium. Most of us want to be fed the soundbite because we 1) have shit to do and 2) are lazy.

I think that, these days, you have to craft the message to the medium. Wonder why I segregate my Weblogs? Pretty simple—I see them as different exchange media. [Not that any of them are really good, but they make me happy, so yeah.]

I think that understanding this is important for both content producers and consumers. You’ve got to remember that, when you’re giving or receiving the soundbite, it is what it is—a soundbite! If you forget the context, you can really go off on a tangent.

Not that I’ve ever gone off on a tangent in my life.

The other day, two items flew across my aggregator at the same time, and since they’re on a subject near and dear to my heart, I thought I’d point to them and challenge them a bit: Taming your Email and Shooting E-mail Like Bullets.

Let me start by saying that I really feel Jeremy on his concerns about the crappiness that abounds in today’s professional email communication. I think that your business communication says a heck of a lot about you as an employee, and that’s why I’m pretty anal-retentive about it. [Yes, I'm a-r in general, but this is a specific application with a specific purpose.] Some folks take the approach of “Be formal when emailing someone outside the company, and informal when in the company,” because formality is supposed to equate to more time spent. I dispute the efficacy of this approach for three reasons:

1. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve emailed my boss, and he’s taken that email and forwarded it to a customer or, worse, a NASA representative. If I’ve been informal, my boss catches that and has to spend time re-writing what I had to say into his email, making him take more time. My boss doesn’t have lots of time in his day, and for another thing, email [or, for that matter, computers in general] is just not his bailiwick. Anything that I can do to make him take less time is good.
2. In the same vein as the previous note, there’s nothing more embarrassing to have a “Yo, check this out!” email get forwarded to someone with whom you wouldn’t be so informal. Ya see, not everyone is so careful and accomodating as my boss. [Or me. I usually re-write emails if the previous emails I've gotten from folks aren't up to snuff.]
3. Lastly, I want to bitch about the “formality = more time”. If you spend your time being formal in your communication habits, it really doesn’t take any more time than being informal does. This is why I refuse to stoop, generally, to cool online clichés [lack of capitalization, abbreviated or poor grammar, R for are, U for you, etc.]. If you stay formal all the time, it becomes second-hand.

Something Jeremy pointed out speaks to a huge criticism that I have of Michael’s “only process emails a few times a day” approach in his second point:

Expectations about when I’ll read a message. Honestly, if it’s that important, why are you using e-mail? The first letter in “IM” stands for “Instant.” Try that instead. And, like seemingly everyone else in the workplace, I wear a damned cell phone. When it rings, I generally answer it. The only real exceptions are when I’m in the restroom, when the caller has blocked caller ID, or when I’m in the middle of a meeting that is highly likely to be more important than your call. The more often I’m responding to your e-mail, the less work I’m probably getting done.

Now, I don’t work in a workplace where IM is used, because I don’t work in a white collar situation. I also know that Michael’s “process at specific times” approach is a great one where you’re in a normally-tasked environment, but I work in a rapid response environment. [This is by nature inefficient. I'm aware of this, and after many years, I've come to accept it. Hell, it's allowing me to spend time thinking about this entry while I'm downloading and editing engineering drawings in the background.] I can’t afford not to respond to email because of the way my customers, colleagues, and vendors work.

That’s the problem with theory meeting application—the theories have practical boundaries that their staters rarely make. Oh, if I could only respond to emails first thing in the morning, after lunch, and at the end of my day … it would be so glorious!

Eric Meyer writes about guiding a large [5,000+ member] mailing list community and how css-discuss is very much civil.

I also participate in the community as best I can, setting an example for how questions should be answered and list members should act. Of late, I’ve been too swamped to offer more than token participation on the list, which is why I just yesterday selected four list members to be moderators. They’ll be helping with administrivia, but more importantly, will be helping to keep things on-topic and civil, although I honestly don’t expect them to have to work very hard at that last part.

The founder’s influence is key. Back when the Rumor Forum was far more nascent, Bryan’s influence is what made it what it is. The heavily-involved users in 2002 are, in large part, still around, and they’re the ones that continue to guide the community as it gets far larger. As the RF is a variegated Web discussion board centered around a few themes, the topicality that Meyer speaks is out the window, and so we have, as a result, a pretty high volume for a far smaller group [~850 at present] of users. There’s no way that the RF—and the community at large—would never run as well as it does without our wonderful group of moderators/community leaders, which we call Bartenders, following the meme that our little forum is a lot like your corner pub.

In short, Eric is totally right: good leaders will make for a good community.

From Why Web Publishers Fear a Little Sharing:

“We use registration only where it makes sense to do so from a reader’s perspective,” explains Adrian Holovaty, lead developer of World Online, the Web division of The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kan. “The classic example is on message boards and comment forms, where readers want to register so they can own the rights to their usernames — and, thus, their online reputations.”

Like I said: reputation matters.

[See also: I do not let things go.]

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball has been undergoing a change of sort as John pushes towards being a full-time Weblogger on his areas of expertise [mainly Mac stuff, but other things as well] by seeking to incorporate members-only content into his offerings. One thing he’s now doing: a
linked list.

Everyone is free to browse the Linked List web archives; however, the only daily index is the RSS feed, and there’s a one-day delay before new links are posted to the web archives. In other words, the RSS feed is the only way to get the links fresh, and the only way to subscribe to the feed is to become a member.

This exact model is one that we considered with TOTK.com Sports way back in the day: publishing content via email on one day, then putting it on the Web the next. The way John’s doing it with member-specific syndication feeds and members-only content is a better way to go than what we were doing, but that’s because the technology far better supports online self-publishing today than it did back in 1998.

It’s almost enough to make me want to get back into that, but I know that doing so would be a temptation not worthy of submittal.

I can’t really explain why it’s been five days between posts. I don’t think it’s for lack of anything to write about, really–perhaps I just wasn’t mused late last week.

It’s not even as if work was all that terrible–really, it wasn’t that bad. Sure, I had to re-write people’s work from craptacular form to workable form—come on, people, when you have a requirements document, writing an acceptance test procedure is not difficult; I did it when I was a snot-nosed, can’t-legally-buy-alcohol co-op!—but that’s not all that bad.

Thankfully so, since I get to do it again today. Why are we paying this vendor, again? It’s so much fun in this line of business to pay someone to do the job and then have to have someone sit in their facility to tell them how to do it. It’s a situation of, “We’d do the work ourselves if we had the volume of work to merit doing it, but this is outside our core competency.” Yes, I just used the phrase “core competency” in a sentence; I typed it with a straight face, too.

I mean, crap, I’ve even used the phrase “added value” of late without laughing.

I don’t know what’s becoming of me.

[What was I posting about again?]