This guys is crazy with his pumpkin carving skills. Read the whole story at WSJ.

Note: This video will not play if you have had blocking software. I don't have ads on my site so you can disable for my domain safely and no animals will be harmed.

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After the Burial!

Metal Graphic by Matt Giordono

As you read this, I'm in the air on my way to Orlando. But I cannot let another Friday go by without some serious metal brain melting. So I loaded an iPod up with the list you can see below. It's all new music, mostly from eMusic. @fred_beecher, it's up to you to pick one for yourself.

I will be gone a week, but don't fear, I will give you meaningless updates about my vacation via The Twitter and The Facebook. I might even do some Google+ shit. Too bad I can't scrobble from the plane.

Metal Graphic by Matt Giordano

It's coming up nothing but new music today. Nothing but I tell ya. My eMusic subscription renewed and I burned through it like an arsonist with a Zippo. I'm especially excited about the new Blood Stained Child, a great and creative band. After the jump is this week's playlist.

Image via Wikipedia

I've been thinking about failure a lot. My career has some doozies in its wake. I've heard people speak about failures at conferences. The current trend is to tell people failures are okay because they learn from them. I've seen some suggest extremes like encouraging failure. Back in the late 80s, "failure was not an option" and other similar platitudes ruled the business rags. People wanted to be Gordon Geko so bad. I think the discourse is starting to swing back toward allowing no failures. Certainly political discourse is.

Why must everything be either or? This black and white view of the world is killing us all. Failure is relative. Mistakes are not synonymous with failure. So stop equating the two. The "fail" internet meme is really a series of photos and videos pointing out mistakes. Failure is not achieving a set goal. Failure is not falling down in public; that's just embarrassment.

I'm one of those guys who is really hard on myself, more than anybody else will ever be, and I know it. I look back on many past failures and wince at the outcome. Most of my failures were of my own design. That's the hard part to swallow. I believe failure evolves from a series of mistakes. Mistakes are warnings that tell us we are on the path to failure. What we learn from failure is to pay attention to mistakes and learn from them as we go along.

I've failed at start-ups, I've failed with friendships, and I've failed with family. The most important lesson I've learned is that failure is sometimes a choice you make at the time. You may choose to walk away from a situation and cut your losses. For instance, I walked away from a start-up because it was killing me. I over committed and couldn't support my family. I burned bridges and have regret, but I also learned important lessons about what is important to me and my family. I'm not cut out to be self-employed. This was pressure I put on myself because I came from a family who ran a small business. I'm much happier in life now that I've let that go.

Failure is what you make it. You can wallow in it and not get past it. You can leave bad situations and use them to learn and grow. You can give up on a project when you hit diminishing returns to save time, money, and resources. All of these scenarios are forgivable and understandable. Allowing failure in your life can alleviate all sorts of pressure and help you move on to more important things. You just have to give yourself permission to fail here and there.

Another way at looking at it is to reframe what you consider failing to be. For example, if you are in a bad, unhealthy relationship and you break it off, is that a failure or is it you protecting yourself? If you pick the latter, you're growing as a person.

Remember, mistakes are not failure. Failure is relative. And "fail" is a verb. For the love of all that's holy, if you want to mock a mistake, put "oops" on the photo.

Related articles

• Of Failure and Learning… (anounceofeternity.wordpress.com)
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Today's list is dedicated to this horrid winter. I made a randomized list of all of my Iced Earth and Celtic Frost. If that doesn't break the ice, I don't know what will.

Can you be all things to all people all of the time?

Lis Hubert (@lishubert) wrote this week about UX needing to grow up. It got me thinking (an unfortunate thing for those nearby). She wrote how UX designers want to be Jacks of all trades and how, unless they want to go into management, this is career limiting (see UX… It’s Time to Grow Up). Among many cogent points, she wrote:

…by us being jacks of all trades it can stump our own individual growth. How many of you out there know what your career path is? Ok you can do wireframes, interviews, task analysis, etc… but what next? UX management? But you don’t want to be a manager. What else besides management is next for a UXer? We can’t answer that question, because there are not career paths that have been established in our field.

Then I thought about Don Norman's (@jnd1er) essay on design education (see Why Design Education Must Change). This excellent post should be a launching pad for real change in the world of design education. Here is an example of what he had to say:

Today's designers are poorly trained to meet the today's demands: We need a new form of design education, one with more rigor, more science, and more attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to modern technology, and to business. But we cannot copy the existing courses from those disciplines: we need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique requirements of the applied requirements of design.

While Don wrote about education and industrial design and Lis was focused on UX (read: software/web design), it appears their philosophies collide. Can you be all things to all people all of the time while having a practical career? Is it possible to specialize without pigeon-holing yourself out of the market?

Self Awareness

Personally, I come from a technical writing background. My specialty is content. You can say I'm an IA if you want, but many of my day-to-day activities also fall under business analyst, project management, requirements management, and conceptual design. I cannot choose what I prefer to work on as business necessity overrides my preferences daily.

When I realized I was a UX'er, it was a pretty interesting moment for me. I had been a user advocate my entire career. Technical writing morphed into web development which morphed into software design. Along the way I picked up on usability, typography, print, and a few other handy things. My collective experience, especially after consulting for a while, have really helped my career.

The key to being a good UX designer is self-awareness. Without coming across like a self-help guru (ew), I think the better you know yourself, the better you can find your place in the UX world. Real self-awareness is a personal journey. You must be deliberate and realistic with your self-evaluation. Even then, you need input from peers who know you well. You should also be willing to hear the good with the bad. However, the better you know yourself, the more you can find what works for you and plan your career accordingly.

Lose The Ego

Ego is the biggest obstacle I've witnessed during a project. Regardless of the various skills involved or the business goals, ego appears like a demon waiting to pounce on the vulnerable. People behave in ways to ensure they have made their mark, whether the motivation is knowledge, experience, financial rewards, recognition, pride, politics, or any combination of those. Ego has project teams working as a collection of individuals rather than as a collaborative collective.

Real design solves problems for the user. It's not there to pave your career's path. It's not there to ensure a spot in management. As soon as anyone loses sight of solving user problems (within the constraint of the business goals), that designer is setting the project up to fail. Losing the ego is an extension of self-awareness. In the UX world, only teams can pull off large projects from start to finish. Losing the ego is about knowing your fellow team members, respecting their skills, and solving problems for the benefit of the user.

Specialize But Don't Limit Yourself

Finally, you cannot not specialize. It's human nature to gravitate toward things we like. Why fight it? However, that shouldn't stop you from reading and learning how the UX Machina works. I'm no typographer, but I've developed a healthy respect for typography and its nuances. On small projects, I can do in a pinch. On large projects with national exposure, I know to bring in an expert.

Modern business culture dictates we all contribute however we can to get the project done. The last thing you want to do is draw a fence around yourself and tell your team you only use Robohelp (for example, but based on a true story). The technical communication community have done this to themselves and while they are scrambling to figure out who they are without big, thick printed manuals and operating-system-based compiled help files, the rest of the software world has moved on to use other resources for content. STC is a struggling organization because of how it defined itself for so long.

However, we all have our wheel-houses. Mine is content. Give me your poor and untidy content and I will give you something fantastic. I know I can do that. However, I am loyal to no specific software tool. I use what I like when I can, but I'm competent enough in just about every content creation tool. In addition, I can whip up a mean CSS, but I'm really just a PHP script-kiddie. I'm also a big-picture thinker and can solve system problems. I'm proud of those skills and they are what ground me in the reality of a project. But I try to learn as much as I can and I will stay up all night to do things I don't normally do (even if it's not stellar) when the situation calls for it.

While Lis and Don are coming from such different angles, they really hit on a topic that forces us to think deeply about ourselves, business culture, and a new frontier of design. It's really all about solving user-related problems and the most effective ways we can do that. I firmly believe UX is a big tent with plenty of room for designers of all flavors. We just need to look around a bit and find the best place to set up shop.

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I grew up in central Arkansas and for those of you from other places, growing up there is like growing up twenty years in the past. The place never seems to be culturally caught up to the rest of the country. Fashion trends hit there last. Back in high school, I had a friend who was a full-on punk with Doc Martins, trench coat, and a mo-hawk. He was from out of state and people always asked me about my "gay" friend. The was the best they could do with punk since he was the only one they'd ever seen.

Race, however, was a part of every day life. I could not get through a day without hearing the N word. I remember first noticing this when I was in third grade and we played Star Trek on the playground. Demetris was one of my school friends and we let him play Captain Kirk because he was the only kid who had an authentic gold Star Trek shirt. This was the only criterion to play the coveted role of Kirk we seemed to respect. On days Demetris didn't wear the shirt, he was Scotty because he wanted to try his best at that outrageous Scottish accent. Demetris was one of my first black friends. He was a nice kid and I wanted him to come over and play. I didn't have many friends back then because my home life was a nightmare. And you probably guessed by now when I wanted to invite him over, he wasn't allowed, even if he wore the gold Star Trek shirt.

Right around that time in my my life, my mom was on her second marriage and this guy was quite the dick. His name was David and he did things like hit my mom and beat me with a boat paddle. He kept loaded guns in the house and I was nearly killed by my step-sister. David was as stereo-typical white trash as you can image. After duck hunting, he plucked the dead fowl in the front yard causing a fog of feathers that spread out in a radius of two adjacent homes.

Around the time I was seven, I found out a black family moved into our neighborhood. I can't remember exactly where they moved in relation to our house, but they should have known better by looking at the mushroom cloud of feathers, dead fish guts on the carport, garbage-strewing Labradors, and the overt public yelling and beatings all within the constrains of our lot alone. Alas, they moved in. David was furious. This was personal for him. So personal, he did something I've never told publicly before. David bought black house paint and sneaked down to this new family's house and defaced their house with the black paint. He finished off his work with a burning cross. I know this happened because my mom told me about the paint and the whole neighborhood buzzed about the paint and cross. I suspect David had accomplices. I also suspect he was privately cheered in that neighborhood. However, being seven and continually hiding from an abusive step-brother kept me away from most adult conversations.

Rose City Middle School (formerly Elementary; Credit Google Maps)

During this time, one of my places of refuge was my grandmother's house. She drove into "nigger town" twice a week to pick up one of two ladies to do her house cleaning. On Mondays she would get Lucille and Thursdays it was Rose. Both of these ladies were nice to me and busted their asses to clean my grandmother's house. Now, my grandmother was busy all of the time running the family construction business and wanted cheap housekeeping. So my grandmother took time to drive over to one of the poorest place in North Little Rock, Rose City, to bring these ladies to our house. I clearly remember one trip playing in the back of my grandmother's 1976 Ford Country Squire station wagon with my mother riding in the passenger seat. I remember my mom saying "nigger babies are really the cutest of them all."

Yeah, I grew up around racism. I know what it feels, sounds, and tastes like. From the subtleness of my grandmother ignoring my repeated questions as to why I couldn't use the same bathroom as Lucille to the ugly behavior of David trying to drive a black family from our street. I've seen a lot of it. Growing up white in this environment was like some sort of club. Other white kids felt comfortable saying the most vile and hate-filled comments because I was somehow in on the joke. I grew to hate people in general.

There is something about me even my family never understood. I'm way different than they are. I always have been. My grandfather was all about construction and mechanics and working the earth. I wrote stories, drew comic books, and lived in my head. I had few real friends and was generally considered a weird kid. I never liked the racist talk at the dinner table and remembered being embarrassed when they said things in public. It wasn't until I became self-aware that I could pin-point my disgust at that behavior. I hated it just as I hated working construction, as much as I hated David.

Eventually I left Arkansas and the biggest reason was its seemingly irreparable broken culture. I grew to loathe the way everything was racial. Martin Luther King Day always stirs up this complex torrent of memories, feelings, and images. I am reminded white resentment that Dr. King received a day of honor and how racist Southerners unofficially embrace it as Robert E. Lee day. I am reminded of Central High School and the forty-year struggle and financial nightmare that central Arkansas schools became. I am reminded of taking a black girl on a date to the Arkansas State Fair and being publicly ridiculed by whites while she was publicly harassed by blacks. I am reminded that there are many types of trauma a person can suffer, and one of them is growing up around so much hate.

Surely I'm not the only out there who grew up this way and who has similar feelings. If there are people like me, they recoil at any racism and try to avoid any appearance of it. It has nothing to do with white liberal guilt or making up for their own sins of the past. They are who they are because deep inside they know right from wrong in spite of how they grew up.  I'm not trying to present myself as special. The truth is I'm just an average guy who can barely take care of his own family. I hate politics and I especially hold disdain for racial politics. I avoid openly talking race but I enjoy reading publications like The Root because I know there are different and reasonable sides to every story (and it's a damn good read too).

I do credit Martin Luther King, Jr. as a role model. I know reading about him in the fifth grade made a life-changing impression. I clearly remember his picture in my history text book. I believe it's the same photo I included in this article. I'm still in awe of his driving desire to make a difference in a world where most of us have a sphere of influence only within our own households. Honestly, if I had been Dr. King, I'd have given up long before getting the national spotlight. As long as I live I will never fully understand his optimism, faith, and drive. Such things seem to evade me even to this day. However, Dr. King made a difference in my life. At a time when I began to question who I was, I read about a great man who confirmed I did know the difference between right and wrong even though it had not fully articulated as such in my mind.

Ironically, fifth grade was also the year I was bussed to a school outside my neighborhood to, of all places, Rose City Elementary. My teacher, Mr. Allen, an extraordinarily tall, thin black man, loved being a teacher so much I remember him working with me as I struggled with math and athletics. It was this man who so passionately taught us about Dr. King. I've never forgotten Mr. Allen or his kindness, or the fact he was so incredibly tall. Sadly, my mom pulled me out of public school because I got the snot beat out of me daily by a gang of five white kids from my class. They beat me up on the way to school and on the way back. So began my all white private school education for the next three and a half years. But that's another story for another time.

Martin Luther King Day is special to me. Like all holidays, it's personal and evokes memories, some of which are painful and some are painfully wonderful. However, every year I go through these memories trying to figure out what to do with them. This year, I decided to share. I hope somebody somewhere can identify with the pain of growing up around this kind of hatred and turn it into something positive. None of us have to be like our parents, on any level. I'm proof of that.

Previous Related Posts:

• Little Rock Central High School Museum
• Central Arkansas Schools, Desegregation, and 50 Years of Government Micromanagent

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• What needs to be said on MLK Day (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2011: Nation Ponders King In Wake Of Arizona Shootings (huffingtonpost.com)
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