Kanban means “billboard” or “sign” in Japanese. Originally developed as a way for Toyota to optimize their assembly line flow it has since been used for numerous other industries and even in your personal life as a form of organization.

Getting started is pretty easy.

First assemble the following items:

Whiteboard
Sticky Notes (all same color is fine)
Pen
Dry Erase Markers

First Steps
Start by visualizing your workflow. This is one of the essential keys of Kanban.

Think about how you do a project, clean the house, or get tasks done. Then split your whiteboard into those sections with your markers based on that flow. Someone on twitter said “I’ve never done the same Kanban twice”. This is because it’s not rigid but extremely malleable. You grow with Kanban, not into it.

My Kanban at work consists of 4 columns (Ready, Doing Today, Doing, Done), but yours can be anything you want and named anything you want. There is no “wrong way”. For the sake of this post let start off with the simplest form – Ready, Doing, Done.

Basic Portable Kanban

Mentally Unloading
Now it’s time to pull all that psychic weight out of your head. Take your pen and put each task you want to get done on separate sticky notes. No need to go into detail, you can always revisit these and break them into more notes. So you might write down “take the car to the mechanic”, “call the landlord”, “finish the report”, or “push changes to source control”. Write out everything you can think of to accomplish your long-term or daily goal.

The Backlog
Once you’ve unloaded it’s time to put them on the board. The way I do this is to actually stick them off the board first in my “Backlog”. This is the area that I keep when I have new things to add. I also am constantly re-prioritizing this and the “Ready” area with new and existing tasks.

Items In The Backlog

Limiting Your “WIP”
WIP stands for Work in Progress. This is the other essential key of Kanban. Limit your work in progress.
To do this you will set limits of how many items (or notes) can be in your Doing or To Do columns at one time. Think of a juggler. A good juggler can handle juggling two items, or maybe three. Only really good jugglers can handle 4 or 5.

The key to Kanban success is to find your limits. Start off small and then work up. Think about what your limit is and why. It may surprise you that your limits can change based on the project or even mid-project. It’s ok, adjust these limits as you see fit. Mine in the photo below have a limit of 1 item WIP.

Limiting WIP. Items flowing through.

Pulling Items
Visualize a supermarket and how they stock their shelves. The customers at the end of the chain “pulling” these items. The process by which the store keeps shelves stocked is only by what gives the best profit/success and, ultimately, what is being “pulled” downstream.

Prioritize in you Backlog, move the tasks into Ready, to Doing, then Done. Watch how your WIP changes and how items flow. Tweak it where it fits your process and work flow best. This is your Kaizen or “improvement”.

Pulling To Done

Visualize your flow. Limit Your WIP. You are now ready to Kanban.

Recommended Reading: Personal Kanban by Jim Benson http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Kanban-Mapping-Work-Navigating/dp/1453802266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329978749&sr=8-1

@greeleygeek

First off I’m not going to necessarily re-hash all the do’s and don’t about Twitter. Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) already has a great reference out with some great stuff about that in his Simple Twitter Book.

This is a self-serving post admittedly. I just thought it was time to create something where people could find out a bit more if they’re thinking about following me on Twitter.

I don’t always tweet about “X technology”. Although a big part of my life is computers, programming, SQL server, and other technology I don’t always tweet about it. I try to keep a good mix and at any given time I tweet about life, family, or just something I find absolutely hilarious (I hope you do too).

I go to conferences and tweet about them. I am a fairly active member of the SQL Server community as well as the .NET community. With that I regularly attend conferences and events and tweet about them. I know for some this may get old really quick on a Saturday afternoon. All I can say is they usually only last a few hours

My intention is never to offend. I usually try to keep twitter light and outside of the political or religious arena. However, there is no denying that I am Buddhist at heart and in mind. With that I strive to put more positive out in the world than negative, even if this means keeping my beliefs mostly to myself. I am the first to admit I am not always successful in this, but it’s a work in progress.

My opinions are not my employer’s. ‘Nuff said

Why I don’t follow you. Occasionally I will go through my follower list and see what others are talking about. If I see you tweeting about something that interests me I will most likely follow back. Please don’t be offended if I don’t follow right away or never follow. It could be that the timing is just wrong.

Other reasons I might not follow you:

• You seem like a spammer. Please put up a picture, stop re-tweeting news links all the time, make yourself as “real” as possible. I want to hear from you, not the latest Apple news that’s already been re-tweeted 1,000 times.
• You’re constantly negative. The world is negative. I even get negative sometimes. It happens. However, if you’re constantly a jerk and down on others I just don’t find any value in that.
• You rarely tweet. Tweet regularly and I will remain your faithful follower.

Why I do follow you

• You have some great things to say. Again, what are YOU thinking. I don’t want to hear what others think.
• You’re funny. If you make me laugh. Well. Then I thank you for that.
• We’ve met in real life. Usually an instant follow.
• We’ve shared a great discussion. Of course I will follow you.

However, unless the internal problem is fixed, the only way out is to stand up another server somewhere. Of course this is problematic because of the speed of domain name propagation. Over the years it’s has gotten much faster, clocking in globally in as little as 4 hours for a change. But wouldn’t it be great if we could simply point our domain somewhere else on the fly?

With Amazon’s new Route 53 you can do just that.

Now I don’t represent or work at all for Amazon, and I’m by no means a “cloud expert”, but recently I was tasked with finding a solution to be able to display a webpage with a downtime message while our datacenter has a complete shutdown for a new UPS install (over 4 hours).

The first thing that sprang to mind was “hey, I can put it up on that cloud thingy”. What I found was a myriad of solutions but we just needed something cheap and fast to display a simple one page message.

In my research I found the solution in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their S3 storage.

AWS S3 provides a means to upload static files with which you can reference by URL. Sounded perfect but then I ran into the age old problem of DNS propagation again. I didn’t want to have to move the domain to point to the S3 storage days before, then try and move it back after. This would, in effect, take our site down for days while DNS propagated worldwide.

At that point I really thought I had run into a brick wall. But then Amazon released Route 53. Route 53 is defined as a “scale-able domain name system”.

For my purposes what this offers is the ability to point a domain name from my registrar to 4 global Amazon nameservers. Once this propagates I then have the ability via the AWS control panel to re-point the domain anywhere within a matter of seconds, not days.

There is only one catch with all this and that’s www urls and non-www urls.
If I register domain.com with Route 53 I gain all the ability to point that domain name via CNAME record to S3 storage (something like www.domain.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.) but only with the www.domain.com version.

The problem is with the non-www record, as you can only use an A record to an IP for this and you can’t register a CNAME on what they call the “apex domain”. So while www.domain.com works to S3 storage, domain.com will not out of the box.

So what’s left? Well, there’s this little thing called EC2 micro instances. These are micro Linux instances you can bring up on-demand.

To solve the “www problem” I brought up an EC2 micro instance, installed Nginx (you could use Apache), then I added a redirect back www.domain.com for any requests of domain.com in the Nginx config. The final piece to this was to assign an Elastic IP which gave me a static IP for this micro instance.

All I had to do then is plug this IP into my A record for domain.com and I was in business.

All requests for www.domain.com go through AWS Route 53′s CNAME to my S3 storage, and all requests for domain.com get redirected back to www.domain.com via EC2/Nginx.

Now what I have is a viable and quickly updateable solution for about $2.00.

Thank you Amazon!

That being said I recently decided that I’d had enough and something needed to be done about my weight. It wasn’t that I was extremely obese, 5’8″ 171lbs, but it was the fact that over the last few physicals at the doctor I was proceeding into “borderline territory” as she called it. Looking at the charts I definitely was in the “overweight” category for my size. I tried to get on an exercise program, but was feeling tired all the time.

My boss at work and my wife had done this diet, lost, and has kept those pounds off (and lost more after). I figured I’d give it a shot.

The diet in question is called the HCG diet. The premise consists of two gorge days (eating as much as you can), then 21 days of 500 calories (per day) plus the HCG drops 3 times a day (not the Wal-Mart kind).

Meals consist of 100 grams of Fish, Chicken, or Beef, a vegetable (like a tomato), and two small Melba rounds. You can drink as much water, tea, or coffee as you want (yay coffee).

No-no’s are sugar, dairy, juices, etc.

I currently have 4 more days of Phase 2 and have lost 17lbs. I am now almost to the middle of the “healthy weight” end of the scale.

Eating 500 calories a day has been interesting. I definitely cannot exert myself too much as I get light headed.

Although I am eating meager portions somehow I’m not hungry, but the craving is there (if that makes sense).

My energy level has spiked which is the weirdest part of the whole thing. Mentally I am sharper and more focused. This diet really is a mental game.

The next phase is the maintenance phase where you attempt to lock in your weight. This part has me fearful that all of this has been for naught. In this phase you go back to your normal calorie intake minus starches and sugars. Once this phase is complete I will be done and start my planned exercise regimen.

Again, this diet isn’t for everyone. I don’t know if the HCG drops really work as an appetite suppressant or fat targeter.

All I know is I’ve lost 17lbs since Jan 3rd, was not as hungry as I thought I would be, had more energy than I thought I’d have, and I feel great.

I find the comparison interesting for the fact that “users” need I.T. professionals in a similar way (sans the addiction part). It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about grandma needing help setting up her e-mail, or the CEO needing a network connection. More and more everyone needs an I.T. person in their life.

The thing I find strange with many I.T. people I’ve met (or work with) is the amount of judgment that can go on behind the scenes. I myself have even fallen into the trap of the “that guy’s an idiot” mentality.

And let’s be honest, some people ARE idiots. But, I think the number is far less than we would like to attribute.

If Alma Alwaysforgetsherpassword knew as much about computers as you do you really think you’d have a job?

This is really the crux. Without “dumb” users we’d be out of work. If users could fix their own problems or <shudder> manage their own servers we’d be out on the street.

Really most users are simply trying to just go about their day plugging away at that big pile of work. They don’t have a clue how what “cardinality” is or why their computer has 10 toolbars sitting in their browser and quite honestly they shouldn’t have to. That is our job. It’s what they pay us for.

Our jobs are very much like parenting. Babysitting, hand-holding, teaching, and having to constantly be aware so users don’t hurt themselves.

Maybe this is where the superiority complex comes in to play?

So why this post? What’s the point?
Well, it’s really more for me than any of you out there frankly (sorry). Dealing better with the users is something I need to get back to.
Of late all the rhetoric going around the office has hit me like a virus. I’ve kind of inched into the fringes of the user-basher crowd.

Not a good mindset to have and it’s needless stress. I should really care less whether Umberto Useshiscdlikeacupholder can’t figure out how open a PDF.

I should just help.

So I’ve come up with some guidelines and mental notes I will be using to get myself back on track:

1. 90% of the time users aren’t idiots. Help, smile, and nod for the other 10%.
2. If users could do your job then you would be out of one.
3. Don’t bash users, bash problems.
4. Protect the users from themselves.
5. Educate.
6. Make it simple.
7. Follow up.

There may be more to add to this list, but I think it’s a good start.