Friday Top 5

One of the things I love about NACHRI is the organization-wide commitment to wellness.  It manifests itself in many ways, from periodic office yoga classes to a weekly meditation group to a sponsored (and partially funded) Weight Watchers group to allowing me to organize 25+ of my colleagues to participate in a CSA on company time to the current wellness challenge:  walking.

For the past 7+ weeks, the overwhelming majority of staff have been wearing pedometers and dutifully recording our daily steps.  We started with a goal of 2000 per day, increasing by 1000 steps per day each week for 8 weeks (ending with 9000 steps per day for those who are bad at math).  Each individual who gets the requisite number of steps for the duration of the challenge will receive an extra vacation day.  We're also operating in self-selected teams of two.  The team with the most steps will receive a cash prize to spend on the fitness equipment of their choice.

Now, I get way more than 2000 steps on an average day.  Actually on most days, I get more than 9000 steps without doing anything out of the ordinary.  Can you see where this is going?  I just wanted the free day off...until the end of week 5, when our HR department announced the standings, and I discovered that my team was leading.  Oh, it was ON.

In week 6, we swapped the lead with the #2 team, and going into the final week (which started Wednesday), they were still in the lead, but only by about 11,000 steps (less than 1%).  The top two teams are more than 100,000 steps ahead of the #3 team, so it's down to the two of us. So I've been doing a LOT of walking.  A LOT.  Well in excess of 45 miles last week alone.

My Friday Top 5 honors that.  Here's what I'm looking forward to doing when the walking challenge ends on Wednesday:

1. Wearing all the clothes that have been sitting, sad and alone, in my closet for the past 7+ weeks because there's nowhere to attach a pedometer to them.
2. Practicing yoga, which I haven't done the entire time because those types of movements don't record as steps.
3. Driving to wherever I'm going out in the evening and, as a result, getting to wear fabulous shoes, many pairs of which have also been sadly neglected this summer.
4. Taking a day off (which you can do if you're just trying to earn the vacation day - you only have to get your steps 5 out of the 7 days in each week.  But if you want to win, there's no rest for the weary.).
5. Hopefully using my winnings (assuming Team Walkin' After Midnight pulls it off) to buy some new walking shoes, because I REALLY need them at this point!

GIVE Back

For the first time, ASAE is recognizing excellence in volunteer projects from 2009-2010. 

I quote:

Every year, our many volunteer groups create numerous and exciting projects, events, and resources to help us complete our mission “to connect great ideas and great people to inspire leadership and achievement in the association community.”

To celebrate the many accomplishments of our volunteer groups and bring more visibility to their hard work, ASAE & The Center’s Volunteer Relations Department will recognize their outstanding projects with the first ever Great & Innovative Volunteer Experience (GIVE) Awards. Volunteer groups and staff were asked to nominate a project from each group completed during the 2010 fiscal year.

The contenders are listed in the Volunteer Town Square on Member2Member, and YOU get to pick the winner!  So vote now.

ASAE will announce the winners at the volunteer brunch on the pre-con day of this year's Annual Meeting in LA.

What I'm Reading

• Does "free" really work?
• 14 (very good) reasons I won't follow you on Twitter.
• Jamie Notter has a great Big Think-y post on design thinking, organizational design, and how they relate to social media and organizational silos for the SocialFish. 
• Two great case studies:  relaunching your FB presence (via John Haydon) and the MPI "paying for positive coverage" fracas (via Maddie Grant) - oh, and the short version is that they didn't, but they could've been a little more clear/forthcoming about what was going on.
• In honor of this past Sunday's season 4 premiere, Harvard Business Review tackles "What Mad Men Gets Right About Innovation" (and no, it's not the critical importance of daytime cocktails to the creative process, which someone should really write about pronto).
• More on Mad Men - KiKi L'Italien (rock star association tech consultant by day, equally rock star makeup artist by night) posted on The Mad Men Effect, just in time for a Mad Men party I'm attending this weekend.  I'll be going as Joan, natch. 
• Philadelphia Eagles training camp started this week, and we're just over 2 weeks from the first pre-season game (GAH!  must get back into football blogging shape ASAP!), so I'm reading all the camp coverage in preparation for my first-ever visit to training camp in just over a week!
• I don't usually get all political up in here, but recent circumstances have led me to post this incredibly well-written screed against the myth of white oppression by people of color. Can people of any race be racist? Sure. But it's not oppression without power to back it up (thanks to my awesome friend Sarah for the link).
• I finished The 19th Wife - not bad, and I didn't guess the killer before the end (always a good thing in a murder mystery), and I just started The World That Made New Orleans by Ned Sublette.  I'm only two chapters in, and I'm already loving it, which is not surprising, as I tend to devour anything about my favorite place, but this seems to be a well-written and entertaining history of the founding and development of the city.

TEDWomen - Really?

By now, you may have heard that the famous and high-powered TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) organization has decided to launch TEDWomen.

YAY, right?

Not so fast.

I'm actually pretty annoyed that TED is ghettoizing women. I think more women should just be on the regular TED program, rather than this BS "well, the ladies weren't good/smart/innovative enough to make the REAL TED program, so we gave them their own event - which will also ensure that they're only talking to each other and don't bother us BIG IMPORTANT MEN with their silly little ideas."

Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

But I doubt it.

Always the Last to Know: Metasploit

One of the toughest things in IT security is figuring out the difference between a vulnerability and a threat.  Systems have thousands - maybe millions - of vulnerabilities, but not all of them are actual threats, and trying to block every single vulnerability will make you crazy, take up all your time, and potentially render your system unusable. 

But how do you know the difference?

Metasploit - it provides open source penetration testing of systems for end users to help you figure out what vulnerabilities you have that hackers are likely to actually exploit - in other words, distinguish the vulnerabilities from the threats.

Friday Top 5

Exactly 4 weeks from today, I leave for LA for #ASAE10.  The Top 5 things I'm looking forward to:

1. Networking - always my favorite part of the Annual Meeting.
2. The YAP party - no, you don't have to be 25 to participate, so get it on your calendar ASAP
3. The flashmob - you still have plenty of time to learn the steps, so get cracking!
4. The session I'm doing with the fabulous Layla Masri and the equally fabulous Lynn Morton, Plays Well with Others - we're going to be sharing great information and case studies in a really, really clever way.
5. Melissa Etheridge and Cyndi Lauper!

What are your "don't miss!" tips?

Smart People on Health Care Reform

First, Rohit Bhargava gave a terrific Pecha Kucha presentation at last year's e-Patient Connections called The Past, Present and Future of Health 2.0 in 20 Inspired Tweets. It's about 7 minutes of awesome.

Second, Dan Roam has also weighed in on the future of health care with back of the napkin thinking:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more presentations from Dan Roam.