I received an interesting email this morning from my wife with a link to an article In the Smithsonian’s online publication.

Her email’s subject was very sweet and pointed:“Nice article about Lafayette… not such a bad place. ” I opened the link.

There was the article. Sticking Around Lafayette Indiana, written by one of our local Purdue academics, who has become a published author of note, Patricia Henley. Ms. Henley is a professor of creative writing at Purdue University. She is also a native Hoosier. More importantly, she’s a reluctant native who has come to grips with her reluctance. She’s also found that living with it is quite survivable.

I, like Ms. Henley, am a native born Hoosier. Unlike her, my roots to Lafayette are of a closer proximity. Some 35 miles to the west, I grew up – up and down – the banks of one of the states premiere free-flowing streams. I dearly loved that stream and the wooded hills that were my childhood home in my formative years.

But, when I graduated from our consolidated High School, as a freshly minted ‘Indian’, my feet could not move fast enough to make tracks out of the Hoosierland.

I landed on the left coast, as many of my generation, but I went there to further my formal education, not necessarily by carnal imaginings. The residuals of a motorcycle accident at the tail-end of my high school Junior year, rescheduled my plans for an early departure. This peradventure provided my first glancing blow with Purdue.

Following a seven year wandering amid the hills and hollers of the homeground of so many Hoosiers – I returned home. Once again I returned to my roots, this time with a wife and young child in tow.

This homeground reunion was not on pleasant terms.

My father had been killed in an accident and offspring duties beckoned. The ‘plan’ was to remain for not more than 5 years and either return to ‘briar country’ or likely answer the call of the beckoning pillars of the Rocky Mountains.

That was 31 years ago.

A far nobler scribe once penned, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”‘. So, too, have the wonders of lust for this wee warren mouse. Though I’ve worked feverishly to rewrite the words of the famous countrypolitan’s song, ‘Texas In My Rear View Mirror’, to navigate my way out of Hoosierville, on a fast-track, it has not happened.

I reckon, I too, am a victim of ‘terminal escape velocity’.

Ms.Henley spoke of the effort locally, “…underway to clean up … the Wabash River”.  Interestingly, it was the genesis of this effort, for which I played a largely invisible, but pivotal,  part that was also my own, Hoosier perspective, turning point.

In 1990 I returned to Purdue to acquire a degree. My ‘go card’ – which I had consciously avoided for 15 years – beckoned. Fisheries was my mission. But a combination of a arithmophobia and the realization of 12 year vision took over all else. I was introduced to the budding shoots of what became the Internet, in the first semester of my Freshman year and everything else was reordered.

Between a 1994 empty-folder-walk across the Memorial Hall stage; 2.5 years of wallowing -sans life jacket – in the Bloodpools of Technology; 8 years struggling with the forces of academic bêtise; 5 years finding footing amid the slippery-slopes of natural resource advocacy and the first 2 years of a life with MCS, I got that degree.

Something else came along about the same time.  Purpose for being a Hoosier and a reason to stay.

In the late fall of 1994 I began a regular habit of kayaking the Wabash for training and stress relief, that quickly gave way to pleasure. Amid the hundreds of hours on the water, I met several people. People who were canoeing, kayaking, walking, fishing, watching. People with whom I shared one very strong commonality: we all enjoyed the river.

It occurred to me that when people are personally involved with anything, that the ‘anything’ becomes important to them. Important enough for them to get personally – physically! – involved. This realization lead to a tagline I have used since then.

“People will see the need, when they feel the need.”

With this in hand I worked with others to introduce people to paddling the river. We didn’t get throngs to the water.  But we never had a failure either. Each person, no matter how reluctant they were in the beginning – within minutes of entering the water surface continuum that is so much a part of canoeing or kayaking the waterways – became a lasting convert the first time out.

Once people touch ‘it’ they are hooked.They could not -won’t! – let go of ‘it’. They loft ‘it’ into high value status. Over time they begin to realize, just what ‘it’ is.  They begin to realize the ‘it’ is not the river.  ‘IT’… is life.

This is what the Wabash River gave to me. Something I already knew, but was unwilling to admit. That a good ‘life’, a fun ‘life’, an interesting ‘life’… yes, even a ‘life’ with fulfillment and enjoyment, is readily available anywhere. All you need is purpose.

Amazingly I found velocity for change to be anti-terminal and a great escape. Even in Lay-Flat Indiana.

BTR

Les Booth, Lafayette, Indiana, midwest, fast, leave, behind, Wabash River, Lay-Flat, Hoosier,

Tags: better, Hoosierville, Indiana, Lafayette, life, serious, tracks, Wabash River, worthwhile

From the perspective of history, comes this article, found in the stacks of Inc. magazine, comes a bit of a timely, useful and much needed shot of information.  Dare I say it even contains a healthy dose of wisdom?  Yes on both counts; I do and there is.

With the vantage of 2 years of hindsight, might we not learn from our recent history, that the following article has some real merit?  It’s workting for those who practice; it doesn’t for those who don’t.   Can we not draw a clear conclusion?  If not, what – other than ego – stands in the way of clarity..?  I submit whatever it is should be removed before permanent damage results.

I  _really_ suggest this be a slow and deliberate read.  Re-read it – whether you think it’s necessary or not.  It is!

In Praise of Selflessness
Why the best leaders are servants

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/managing-leadership.html

#btrcom

Posted via email from Beyond The Ripples

Tags: "Beyond the Ripples", BTR, Inc, leader, Les Booth, May 2007, praise, selflessness, servant, success

I noticed that one of my Facebook friends – a young lady whom I’ve known for a number of years – asked for some help on the growing profession of Medical Coding the other night.  I knew a little about the profession – mostly that I wish the AMA would extend their codes to cover Alternative Medical assistance; but that is another post.

So I began Googling the topic. It became an interesting and informative search.  This is what I came up with.

Facebook Medical Coding Groups and Pages

• Medical Coders Group
• Intelicode Medical Coders & Auditors Group
• Medical Coders Unite!

eHOW.com

• Job Description of a Medical Coder

DocuCoders.com

• Outsource Medical Record Coding

AHIMA

• About Medical Coding & Medical Records

What are the current job prospects for Medical Coders?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics …  Very GOOD; with growth expectations greater than usual.

Tags: "Beyond the Ripples", "medical coders", jobs, medicine, prospects, records, technology

A question asked many times by equally many pondering minds. Value. Honor. Family. Origin. Future. Regret. These and many more make up the sum of the names we carry; assigned or assumed. Writers, in many cases write under ‘assumed names’ – referred to as

PEN NAMES or in the French tongue, Nom de plume. A bit of a travel among the stacks of Wikipedia provided this tidbit on the art of writing under an assumed name.

In today’s venue of communication offerings, eMAIL has grown to unimaginable levels in just the past 10 years. How we send these tiny digital bits of yak ‘n frak, is as varied as the options offered in a Google on the subject. But another matter entirely arises when we decide the archival and recall of our online correspondence is important.

There are a number of offerings and I personally use more than one. Mostly because I am constantly kicking the .exe files to see what’s new. And partly because I just haven’t found that ‘perfect’ email reader/storage/recall tool.

Maybe we have gotten a bit closer with the offering from a group called POSTBOX-INC.COM.

PostBox-Inc.com is not a free tool, but neither is it cost prohibitive. At $30, if it works as well as it is promoted to, then it will be well worth it and well on its way to providing a more ‘total solution’ package. It’s free to download.

I have and will be testing it soon.

I don’t plan to give up my Gmail accounts! Nope. I like and enjoy the versatility and access freedom far too much to look elsewhere… yet.

With exceptionally sweet segue,  we’ll jump into the next item. As I just mentioned, I use Gmail .. a LOT (> 45 accounts, presently! … and I use them all day, by-the-minute!).

With all those accounts and all that email: I also rarely delete any email deemed worthy of keeping: I obviously don’t want to ‘loose’ my email. So, like all good computer technology practices DATA BACKUP is a ‘good thing’. A REAL GOOD THING!!

I began looking for ways to gather groups of email within my various Gmail accounts and send them in .zip compressed files to people wanting such information. I have yet to find a solution.  Hint, hint! Please let me know if you KNOW of such a tool or technique!

I did, however, find a neat tool for backing up my Gmail email accounts.

The tool is called Gmail BACKUP – odd eh? – and is a 3rd party product produced by a couple of enterprising Czechs.

Unfortunately, I can’t give a ‘thumbs up or down’ on this as I’ve not tried it yet. But it sure looks easy enough to execute. I will test and provide my findings in an ‘update’ – on this page – when I do.

“UPDATE”:

While I’m on NEW STUFF … Adobe^® has come out with a cool tool called the BrowserLab. It’s essentially a browser testing tool – for your web designs – all under one FLASH roof.  Actually this is a very welcome tool.

I only took it for a quick turn around the block, but it sure did the trick on finding the kinks and offering solutions in a quick design. Not sure what ALL it will do, but knowing Adobe as well as I do! – they will have it tricked out and downright indispensable within couple of versions; if not sooner.

The good folks over at photo store’n'share giant, Flickr have come up with a very cool tool, currently in (Beta), called Flickroom [note the shared 'r' in the spelling!].

The idea here is to have a Lightroom-like viewing window in which to view all of your Flickr goodies … and those of your Flickr associations; established or serendipitous!

Flickroom is powered by the Adobe^® Air technology. Quite slick, but a bit slow on older machines [read: impossible!! FLASH 10 is NOT usable on OS X below 10.4 or Vista].

And now it’s time for a bit of spawned btr editorial comment.

Two (2) topics today…

[1] I am a web designer – have been for 15 years – and I really, no longer, design for legacy technology. I did this in my early years. Beat myself to death trying to make my web designs work for every platform. I stopped. It was not worth the effort.

If you choose to design with cutting-shelf technology, then do so without looking over your shoulder. But, if you must design looking back, then drop the box of goodies you just found in the latest-n-greatest what’s-new-in-online-technology-bundle and stick to the basics of HTML and forget about ‘cool’ looking. Just the facts is all ‘Joe Friday HTML’ is looking for.

This might grate in the craw of those who try to say we ‘must’ design for legacy data and those who are still ‘behind’ in their run-toward-technology. My response is still the same. I’ve not seen the data to support the so-called, lagging-element.

What I do see is a lot of people who choose NOT to update – for whatever reason [most of it being 'fear-based' .. ie, primarily: fear of change]. But I don’t see people still using WIN 98, NT or 2000 complaining their machines can’t do ____ (fill-in-the-blank). The same goes for legacy users of Mac 9.0 or lower.

By far, the majority of these users are not interested in updating. Thus, they either are unaware of new offerings or just don’t care. For them, their computer is an ‘IBM selectric upgrade’, nothing more.

Fine. Let’s understand this and move forward, NOT trying to drag the disinterested along and everyone else – including technology advancement – down.

[2] Flickroom DOES ask to have FULL, unfettered access, to your Flickr account; both public and private material.

So, if you are not willing to have the items marked PRIVATE in your Flickr account, Go Public! – then I would say, ‘steer clear of this tool opportunity’. I have nothing to hide in my data, but I do have a few Flickr sites for certain art and marketing projects that I use for ‘private storage’ and/or communication between a small group of specific colleagues.

This material is NOT for general (aka: Public!) consumption. That’s why Flickr has the PRIVATE settings! However, if you activate this 3rd party extension, you will be negating the ‘Private’ portion of ANY Flickr account you give discovery access to this software. Flickroom is still a very cool tool, but  Flickeroom is something to be aware of.

OK. Peachbox Platform is OFF.

I love technology as much as the next nerd, but there is no replacement for running and romping outdoors, no matter what age you are. Kids need to get outside and play.

I grew up on a small creek, surrounded by riparian buffers of old growth Hoosierland hardwoods. My playtime was spent amid trees, fish, tadpoles, mud and all the fun and mess that goes along with it. I would not trade that for anything.

So the next item is near and dear to me and it was a wonderful serendipitous find.

The folks over at GlobalFisher.com have teamed up with a design firm called RED DIRT and a very impressive gathering of outdoor artists (my friend Bob White of WhiteFishStudio.com is one!), to produce a great site for kids called Fishy Kid.

FishyKid is right down my aisle. It’s about teaching kids the values of fishing, knowledge of the natural world, respect for environment and the lifelong values each of these areas bring to life. Do check it out and get your kids involved in the FishyKid Coloring Contest.

The influence of natural beauty upon the life of a single person, who participates in such endeavors, can  influence many. Visit the site of Yoshikazu Fujioka. His site is called, Trouts and Seasons of a Mountain Village.

Yoshi is an amazing artist and a wonderfully gentle man. I have no doubt anyone visiting this site will do as I did back in 1997 when I first stumbled upon it – just after Yoshi had first released his new web site – marvel at its simplicity of natural beauty.

Like then, I find myself every now-and-then re-entering this Japanese Brigadoon.

Each time I visit, I’m once again, being swept up in it’s magical mystery and then leaving it only to return by serendipitous encounter again a few years later.

This is why I love the act of serendipitous encounter.

It’s also why I love to write … Beyond The Ripples.

Until later …

BTR

Tags: Adobe, Adobe Air, backup, Bob White, Browserlab, email, family, Fishy Kid, Flash, Flickr, Fujioka, GlobalFisher, gmail, Lightroom, mountain, name, origin, pen name, RedDirt, Seasons, Studio, Trouts, village, Whitefish