Dateline: in the Shire, Indy, 19 January 2006

Had a fun night last night with World Affairs Council of Indianapolis, which hosted me for brief at Butler University in northern Indianapolis. Brought daughter Emily along for cocktail hour, then dinner, then my brief with Q&A, then signing some books. After all that we go to local bar where we participate in meeting of Geopol, a local virtual think tank of young professionals, scholars and students who get together and discuss geopolitics. There we got an excellent presentation on possible military strike options against Iran and debated the utility and feasibility of such approaches. Really quite cool.

My performance was pretty good. It was an older audience, so I went at a reasonable speed, explaining a lot of stuff I wouldn't with a professional military audience. As such, I only got through the A-to-Z rule set on processing politically-bankrupt states.

Still, overall a very nice night. I did this talk for free to sort of announce myself in the area (many seemed stunned I moved to Indy). Not sure how many more will follow over time, but doing it the night after my first remote (Kudlow and Company), it made the week feel like my coming-out party.

Today was lost to hospital time with son who faces some unusual surgery this summer, so lots of F2F with docs. Nothing too tense, just one of those things you end up enduring (this process will unfold over years) as a parent.

Now for the changes ...

My former partner in the New Rule Sets Project, Steffany Hedenkamp, gave a go at being my combined personal assistant and webmaster, doing a great job throughout her first six weeks (especially in navigating my site to a new host provider), but we decided to mutually end the relationship because of the workload involved for her, given all her competing interests. I'm very grateful to Steff for helping through the last couple of months and I'm sorry it didn't work out, but the experience taught me a lot, helping me move toward a bunch of decisions that hopefully will create a better work environment for me as I continue to get more deeply involved at Enterra Solutions while maintaining the blog, writing for Esquire, supporting the books and someday writing another, and continuing in my role as a public speaker with my agency.

To that end, a few changes are in store.

The big change is that I've given up on the notion of trying to find one person to be both personal assistant and webmaster. In reality, I've got plenty of admin support from Enterra, so it's really only my speaking engagements where I need the help, primarily in setting up travel and then following through with vouchers. To that end, I've finally taken up the very kind offer of my speaking agent, Jennifer Posda, to make those services part of the Leigh Bureau's service to my as my booking agency. This works for me because it comes under their percentage fee, and it works for Jenn because it frankly simplifies her planning and support to me by giving her complete control over the process from A to Z. Jenn had been offering this kind of help for a while, and I guess it just took some time and enough circumstances for me to realize what a great offer it was. Jennifer has been a huge boon to my work life in general in recent months (she took over for me during 2004 after I lost the original manager I had at LB and have been temped for a while by another senior manager). When Jenn and I were finally paired, it took a while for us to get to know each other well enough to be more forthcoming in advice and sharing of information with one another. But now I consider her such a big part of my worklife, I'm really thrilled to have this function handled by her, making me that much more grateful to be with Leigh Bureau.

So that problem (the personal assistant) is basically solved, leaving me with the issue of webmaster, which I intend to solve ASAP.

Two other changes of note: First, I intend to end production of the newsletters, which, by my way of reasoning, are simply too much work to have piled on top of the weblog. The journal-cum-newsletter concept grew out of my original partnership with Steff, Critt and Bob Jacobson in the New Rule Sets Project. It was envisioned as a vehicle for promoting dialogue in which my partners could participate and through which we could promote the vision, the firm, my books, the whole enchilada. But with NRSP dead and gone, and now those three partners all moved on to other ventures, it just seems like drudgery to me. Don't get me wrong, the essays were great (from others, I mean), and I enjoyed having the AskTom letters being shared with a wider audience, but again, it was just too much work for the gain, and I'd rather have this site and my creative endeavors center around the blog exclusively. It's why I started the site, and it's what keeps me (and virtually everybody else, judging by our stats) coming to the site. So it's a matter of sticking with what you love and trimming as necessary to protect that kernel.

One of the main reasons I considered keeping the newsletter was to allow for the reprinting of the AskTom emails and my responses, which grew out of the decision, way back when, to stop the comments function on the blog. I made that decision way back then because I used to read the comments obsessively and try to comment back on all of them, which tired me out and made me tense. But I feel like that's not going to be an issue for me at this point, because I now barely have enough time to write the blog, much less review it or scan the comments. I think what I'll do this time around is have my new webmaster moderate the comments (yanking the jerks/spam/sellers) and edit them at will, using his best judgment. And if that doesn't work, I'll simply kill the function again (with the shame being on me this second time).

That's the sum of it: Steff departs, a new webmaster comes in, the newsletter dies, and the comments come back. I'll keep the AskTom function for now, because some prefer that route (actually, a large number of my readers do, for various reasons), but I also want to create--within reason--a space for people to discuss the posts.

I'll try to post something later tonight. Got my new Mac (went for iMac this time, in 12 inches, hoping the white plastic Mac turns out to be tougher than the aluminum G4 that I beat the crap out of in just one short year of travel--okay, I travel a lot, but really, that thing dented like no laptop I ever used before), and I'm hoping to break it in a little bit tonight.