10 top stories – tooting my own horn

22 August, 2014 / Jason Hall / No comments

Award-Winning

Over the last five years, I’ve written so many stories, blogs, and articles that it’s easy to lose track of what they are and what made them work.

To come up with a short list, I’ve chosen ten top stories and assigned “award categories”:

Best headline – This concert review might have gone unnoticed had I not tied one of the pieces performed with issues critical to The Vancouver Observer’s news coverage. The result: Erato Music got much more attention from readers who might not otherwise have taken an interest in chamber music.

“Oilblood” re-imagines Harper with Baroque vengeance

Best use of images (supplied) – I worked with Bicycle Opera and their photographer to find really compelling photos to help tell this interesting and quirky story. In the end, I also pirated several photos from their Facebook page

Bicycle Opera wheels into rural Ontario

Best use of images (I took) – This was a really interesting article to write. It was part music story, research project, and travel story and perhaps owing to the fact that I was a participant to these workshops in California, my photography skills came through.

The Balkan Music and Dance Workshops: re-thinking dissonance

Best niche story – There’s no niche for this story really, because it’s so weird an quirky. Still, there’s a real person who made his own drum kit that could be transported by bicycle.

Musical instrument makers on bikes

Best interview –  Also, on the theme of musical instrument makers, this story describes in great detail two Vancouver-based musical instrument makers. I visited their workshops and photographed them at work.

Discovering Vancouver’s hidden music makers

Most detailed historical travel story – I like this story because it shows one of the most saturated travel destinations, Paris, from the perspective of a lone cyclist not afraid to go anywhere to dig up some good history.

Unforgettable bicycle trips around Paris: Notre Dame, Château de Vincennes, Arc de Triomphe

From my three-and-a-half years at Webtech Wireless, a few outstanding stories emerged:

Best corporate technology story –  I attended a trucking trade show in Orlando and attended a talk about data – yawn. But wait, then I wove it into a colourful story drawing a thread of continuing from Sumo wrestlers, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and Québec performance artist, Jean Francois–all who had something to say about perspective.

Drawing Intelligence from Data

Best corporate human story – I interviewed Webtech Wireless firmware engineer, Alireza Nematollahi, and wrote about his success as a national kayak champion and drew a connection to his testing work at Webtech. When I criticize formulaic blog writing, I see this as an example of what corporate blogs could be. 

Testing the Limits

Best corporate hay-making story – Here, I found a connection between the temperature monitors Webtech Wireless makes for food transportation and world hunger. The statistics for food wastage in transport are huge, so it wasn’t an unreasonable stretch–certainly one I was happy to make.

Cargo Temperature Monitoring Helps Reduce Hunger

Best corporate culture/technology tie-in story – I decided to write our weekly blog as a travel story and sing the praises of Ottawa’s winter celebrations (and its fabled Rideau Canal skating rink), while slipping in the expected corporate blog about how the City of Ottawa uses Webtech Wireless technology to ensures its roads are kept ice free.

Winter Fleets—Let’s Celebrate!

 

Testimonial – Incredibly thoughtful and detail-oriented

7 April, 2014 / Jason Hall / No comments

Jason is an incredibly thoughtful and detail-oriented writer and communicator. I’ve worked with him for a few years and have found that not only is his work impressive but he’s a great person to have on a team. His strengths are not just in writing but in public speaking as well. At a recent editorial meeting, he gave a really inspiring speech about writing and putting soul into a story. It was very powerful and moving.

—Jenny Uechi, Managing Editor, The Vancouver Observer

Trucking software user guide

13 December, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments 
Type: User Guide
Objective: Show how to use in-cab software
Purpose: Reduce calls to Tech Support
Audience: Trucking drivers and managers

Webtech Driver Center User Guide

Audience profiling is an important part of training and documentation. For this next sample, we already knew that our audience (truck drivers and dispatchers) was highly visual and independent. I recommended building a guide that was down-to-earth, and I tied each procedure to a task in the order that the user might encounter it during a typical work day. It might seem obvious, but this approach replaced a rather stuffy technical writer style of documenting every feature whether or not the user was likely to use it (we stuck to documenting 80% and left the remaining 20% to Technical Support to address should the user need arise).

Selected chapters from the guide (I designed this document in InDesign using some of its responsive design technology to allow readers easy reader whether on a desktop or mobile device):

Testimonial – Writing so much fun to promote!

15 October, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

I personally enjoyed today’s blog post, Jason. Makes it so much fun to promote! Well done. And I loved learning about the background of a Webtech Wireless employee. You just never know what people do when they aren’t at work! 🙂 I appreciate the personal touches you’ve been using on the blog recently.

—Carrie G. Koens, Weaving Influence Social Marketing (third-party provider to Webtech Wireless)

On the First Day: The Importance of Planning

10 October, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

God knew nothing

It’s been revealed that large enterprise systems have a terrible track record for success—about 75 per cent fail or go way over budget. I put this dire statistic together with the postulation that the universe itself is really just a vast enterprise system. But that idea always infers that it’s a successful system. What if God knew nothing of project management? What if He just jumped in and started making the cosmos with no clear plan of where he was going?

Here’s one scenario:

God Goofs OffOn the first day, God rested. He figured He had a whole week to create the cosmos so “hey, like what’s the rush?”

On the second day, God got up, made a cup of coffee, and checked His email. He had over 7 million messages.

Most were spam.

On the third day, God logged into Facebook and updated His status—28,000 times.

Then He tweeted about it.

On the fourth day, God realized that He had better start to seriously do something about creating the cosmos, so after lunch He created the night and the day. But then He realized that it might be too dark at night (even with the moon, which he hadn’t created yet), and people would get lost or fall down in the dark and would probably curse His name, so He revised His decision about creating the day and the night deciding that it might be a bit rash without considering all the repercussions of this cosmos building stuff before jumping in.

He resolved to sleep on it and start fresh the next day.

On the fifth day, God got an idea. He decided that He’d create the waters and the firmament. “Oh my God”, said God, “That would be so cool”.

But then He thought, “What’s the point of water and firmament (does anybody even know what the heck “firmament” is anyway?) with nothing to swim in it or fly through it? Instead, He thought it would be super fantastic to create all the birds, bats, insects and other flying things as well as all the fishes that swim in the sea.

He stayed up really late creating all that cool stuff.

The sixth day wasn’t a good day for God. On the sixth day, God woke to find that, without the water and the firmament, all the birds of the air and fishes of the sea had died horrible deaths. It was pretty depressing (and it smelt bad too).

God wasted most of the sixth day cleaning up from the fifth.

On the seventh day, God woke up in a cold sweat well before His alarm clock rang. It was dark and cold and He realized He’d done nothing useful to create the cosmos. He told Himself that He’d certainly tried—”but life can be so unfair, you know”—and now He didn’t have a prayer of getting the cosmos ready in time. What He needed was a miracle.

And just as he was about to curse His fate for the third time, God noticed a handbill from Wal-Mart and it was offering a ready-made cosmos for sale. At these double discounted prices, God knew this would cover His Ass perfectly. Sure it was cheap and made mostly of plastic and particleboard (probably in some country with dubious labour practices and no environmental regulations), but with all the plug n’ play features, it would do just fine as a last-minute solution.

God thought, “Hell, why not?”

wal-mart-smileyOn the eighth day as God checked out of Wal-Mart, He then noticed that, where His original idea for the cosmos stressed cooperation, this pre-fab version was built on the Darwin model of competition­–survival of the fittest. “Oh well”, thought God, “It didn’t matter really.” He was out of time and short on good excuses.

“Besides”, God said to Himself as He left the parking lot,
“No one would even know the difference.”

Testing the Limits

10 October, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments 
Type: Blog post 
Objective: Highlight employee successes 
Purpose: Build trust in company offerings
Audience: Subscribers to GPS/telematics newsletter

 

Testing the Limits

Testing-the-Limits

When you master a skill, it can appear simple, almost effortless—but that’s just an illusion. Mastery takes hard work and dedication. This week, Webtech Wireless salutes our very own firmware engineer, Alireza Nematollahi (Ali), who’s been pulling in the gold as national kayaking champion while working to ensure Webtech Wireless hardware products are put through tests of their own.

Ali Tests the Limits

Ali works on hardware engineering projects at Webtech Wireless, either involved with new deployments or redesigning existing products and processes for increased efficiency. “Currently, I’m redesigning the automated testing hardware to improve how we test our locators”, he says and then explains that locators were tested manually, but “due to complexity of the locators, they are not human testable in a timely manner. By automating the testing, it will be possible to test up to 24 locators simultaneously.”

My impression of a slow hands-on testing process replaced by a faceless machine is dashed by Ali’s description of the rigorous test procedures in automated testing. Automation is more than just hurrying up (although that certainly is one aim). Automated testing improves how Quality Assurance analyzes the test data through improved reporting, and by analyzing the reports, they can continuously improve testing.

“I Will Be Fast!”

Ali has won a dozen or so medals over the years competing as a flatwater kayaker, and he credits his success in part to having “the best coach ever”.  Six days a week, you can find Ali training, either on his own in the gym or on the water with Kamini Jain, a two-time Olympian. Her motto, “I will be fast!”, must be what inspires Ali to say things such as, “You can do whatever you want”, and “I can be successful at my job and I can be successful at my sport”.

Overcoming Adversity

Although he’s not a professional, Ali has competed and won against the best in the field. He won the men’s gold medal at the national finals in Regina and won gold in Seattle’s Ted Houk Regatta K4, but is still content to have placed seventh this year in Montreal. “Does it seem like a failure to only place seventh after winning gold”, I asked, but Ali’s answer is a case in point of what a winning attitude is all about. “It’s not a failure. Seventh is very good, and failure is what motivates me to do better”.

On adversity he says, “I don’t let myself get caught up in comparison with others or my earlier successes. Comparison will tear me apart from the inside. I’m always thinking about the next regatta and the next year.” Then he adds, “Failure motivates you to do better.”

It’s pretty clear from talking to Ali that his training has prepared him for all the tests that life can offer, both at work and on the water. Congratulations for being an inspiration.

My Life After Civilization

1 October, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

CIV5

One month ago today inspired by my friend Todd’s commitment to quit smoking, I decided to take on a little addiction challenge of my own—could I survive one month without my precious computer game, Civilization?

It had all started out innocently enough about 15 years ago, when I first started playing Civilization II (we’re up to version V now). A lover of history and culture, this game promised me mastery over the minions, bestowed me with kingly powers to lead the charge to a better world, and enchanted me with hours of timeless imagination about other times and places.

The beauty of this game is you can play it as a warlord, a diplomat, a merchant, or a key religious figure—and still win (if you’re good at what you do). You can also pick your civilization as well as your opponent civilizations. Typically, you’d start at the beginning of recorded history and progress through Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and so forth until you reach modern times (the game even went a little into the future (2025), to let you conclude your business if needed). Also, you could acquire Great Wonders to advance your civilization, such as the Great Pyramids, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, or the Eiffel Tower.

NapoleonI tended to play as one of the European civilizations, but would occasionally indulge in other exotic cultures to play out my quasi racist fantasies. I liked to start in the Middle Ages (an option) and would often play the French (so characters like Dagobert, Charlemagne, and Henri IV were popular). Some versions of the game were easier to mod than others, so there was a period where I’d set up unimaginable “Civilizations” such as the provinces of Canada all pitted against each other (imagine the Great Wonders available in this mod – the skidoo, Green Gables, poutine, the potlatch…).

I’m painting this picture, first to show how addictive it is and second to set up the craziness and unreality that comes from such things. Because, when it comes down to it, I’m not cycling, or learning new skills, or playing music, or meeting interesting people, or travelling or a thousand other things I could be doing with this all-too-short life I have. Instead, I’m dweebing away in my apartment pushing little pixels around a screen. What made matters worse was these games aren’t short—they can go on for hours and hours, so like any classic addiction, one minute was too long and an entire night, not long enough. And like an addiction, the next day I’d be staggering back to the real world half asleep and wondering why I wasn’t as productive (or happy) as I’d intended to be.

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

—Desiderius Erasmus

But this month since I quit playing, I’ve started doing really interesting things, like reading books, and going for long cycles around the city, and taking courses to upgrade my skills, and playing more music, and, oh yes, and getting a full night’s sleep. How amazing is that?

End of Civ

So let this be a warning to you. Yes, YOU! Time flies on fleet wings. Don’t waste your time doing things that ultimately don’t matter. Turn off the computer and go outside.

What’s Your Calling?

16 September, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

Addiction

My friend, Todd, made a commitment to quit smoking this month. To support him, several of his friends ante-d up with some form of commitment of their own. I don’t smoke, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have some addictive behaviour—everybody does. For me, it’s a nasty little computer game called Civilization, in which an hour of relaxing time can (and does) easily spin out of control into seven-hour marathons that leave me sleepy, unproductive, and somewhat guilty about not achieving the goals I’ve set for myself.

The only way I can think it’s possible to thwart addiction is to overcome it with something more attractive. That would be, something non addictive, that’s more attractive. Without the usual outlet to steal myself away, I’ve discovered something much more attractive than a computer game—people.

Since I’ve declared war on my addiction, not only am I going to more events (last week three concerts, the Tweed Ride, a francophone barbeque, a birthday banquet, and a new course I just signed up for at BCIT), but I’m also using these events to branch out more connections. That is, I’m meeting more and more interesting people.

Todd is back to smoking sadly, but I ensured my commitment was not contingent in any way on him keeping his (that wouldn’t do our friendship any good). I’m beginning to see what even a smallish addiction is costing me in terms of, well, life. Who knows, it might be my term to inspire him the way he initially inspired me.

 

Your calling is where your deep gladness
and the world’s deep hunger meet.

—Frederick Buechner

Testimonial – Impeccable timing

9 September, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

The timing was impeccable for this well-written article. I used it at  my meeting—and it generated a lot of questions. Great Work Jason.

—Mary Cecilia MacPhee, Senior Inside Account Manager,
Webtech Wireless

Tracking a Movable Feast: How National Food Does It

5 September, 2013 / Jason Hall / No comments

National-Food_Home
Photo courtesy National Food Corporation

Based in Everett, Washington, National Food is an egg and egg products production and distribution company. To economize its egg delivery service, its transportation department also offers for hire truckload and LTL (less than load) transportation services of refrigerated and dry freight to other food companies throughout the Pacific Northwest.  “In doing this, often if not always, we transport a variety of products that are being delivered alongside our products”, said David Harbour, Transportation Projects Manager at National Food.

Because of this diversity of product that National Food transports, the temperature monitoring solution David’s team picked isn’t used as advertised. At Webtech Wireless, we promote temperature monitoring as a solution that enables fleet managers to know through real-time alerts if temperature thresholds in trucks and trailers are being reached. While this is valuable information for National Food, they’ve opted out of the real-time alerts and focused instead on the benefits of reporting.

How National Food does it

For National Food, it’s all about reporting. “We have less need to know what’s going on in real-time than to have the reporting capabilities after the fact”, said David. And after-the-fact reporting is how National Food saves thousands of dollars in otherwise lost revenue. A shipment can run around $40,000 to $50,000, and I can think of at least three instances where temperature reporting saved us a lot of money. If a client claims that a shipment was spoiled, we can produce reports that show it didn’t happen on our watch”, said David adding, “It saved our bacon.”

Looking Forward to the New WT2250

WT2250 by Webtech Wireless“We already have three WT2250 Locators installed and plan to upgrade 28 trucks with the WT2250s as well”, said David. He mentioned some of the new features he’s looking forward to having with the new WT2250 Locators. “The WT2250 Locator sends a temperature report with every record, so in addition to the GPS location information, I know what temperatures my reefer trucks are recording”, said David. He goes on to mention the rugged build of the new WT2250s, “The antenna is built in, so there’s no separate accessory and one less fail point”.

With configurable timed reporting intervals and detailed reports show temperature history and readings exceeding thresholds, David and National Food have much to look forward to as they continue to deliver eggs and other food products to their customers—efficiently and cost effectively.

National-Food_eggs

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