1. What is a baseline?
2. What built-in tools does Server 2003 provide to monitor server performance?
3. What are the five main tabs of the Task Manager application?
4. Once a task is selected in Task Manager what options become available when it is right-clicked?
5. What information is provided in the Task Manager Processes tab?
6. What information is provided in the Event Viewer Performance tab?
7. What are the three log files that Event Viewer writes to?
8. What information is contained in each tab?
9. Are there any limitations on what rights are needed to view Event Viewer logs?
10. What information is viewable from the the System and Application logs in Event Viewer?
11. What information is kept in the details pane of an event in Event Viewer?
12. What tasks can be monitored using the System Monitor tool?
13. What are the three views the System Monitor provides to view captured data?
14. What is a performance counter?
15. What are the most common performance counters?
16. What tasks can be performed through Performance Logs and Alerts
17. What are the options available under Performance Logs and Alerts
18. What actions can be taken when alert is triggered?
19. What configuration tabs are available in the Services MMC?

Happiness is a feeling and state of well-being from within that acts as a positive feedback mechanism to let us know that we are doing the right things and living the right way.  It is this intuition that has allowed us to survive for thousands of years.

The term “happiness” encompasses several different meanings and shades of feelings.  A simple way to classify happiness would be to separate it into two main categories, which I have coined “relative happiness” and “baseline happiness.”

Your baseline happiness is your average level of happiness, whereas relative happiness is represented by the fluctuations in your mood.  If happiness is shown on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most depressed mood possible and 10 being the most elevated possible, an average person might have a baseline happiness of 6 with fluctuations during the week ranging from 5 to 8.  The relative happiness, or the fluctuations, is caused by external events and physical conditions such as buying a new dress, getting into a car accident, receiving a complement from your boss, or not getting enough sleep.  Eventually, once everything settles down again, you will go back to your baseline level of happiness.

In other words, all of your reactions to external factors, or things that you cannot control, affect your relative happiness and not your baseline happiness.  The only thing that can change your baseline happiness is a change in your perception.  This can be achieved by actively working on your attitude and outlook as well as by experiencing realizations through random life events.  For example, if you have just realized that you had been hurting someone’s feelings this whole time, then that might bring your baseline happiness down.  However, if you correct the bad habit that was causing the pain and make amends with that person, then your baseline would actually increase from the original level.  A realization can increase or decrease your baseline depending on what you do with it.

Now that we understand these two concepts of happiness, let’s relate them to true happiness.  It would be ideal if your happiness was at a constant high level instead of feeling like a rollercoaster ride, right?  This translates to maximizing your baseline happiness and minimizing your relative happiness.  This combined goal is “true happiness.”  So in other words, true happiness is achieved when one has a healthy attitude and outlook as well as possesses full control over his reactions to the outside world.

Unfortunately, many of us have been reprogrammed by mainstream media to work against true happiness.  We are bombarded with television ads that try to convince us we need to have their material objects or need to look a certain way.  Shows and movies also constantly model unhealthy behaviors and values.  These negative influences condition us to chase after relative happiness and neglect our baseline happiness.  They are similar to drug dealers, aiming to get us addicted to their products.  If we do not consciously defend ourselves against these negative messages, we shall fall victim to the never-ending cycle of false happiness.

So, how does one increase his/her own true happiness?  How do we learn to control our emotions and want only that which we already have?  That, my friend, will be the focus of the rest of this book.  It is a lifelong process, requiring dedication and concentration, but the rewards will be incredibly worthwhile.  As a quick overview, first, we will review basic laws that govern this world.  Then we will put these laws into action through full body-mind-emotional integration.  Finally, we will touch on advanced laws and principles that will help us improve exponentially.

—————————————————————————

This essay is one of several written by Alexander V. Nguyen for his series on individual development entitled, “Freedom for the 21^st Century.”

A friend of mine is just starting an agile project and is having discussions with her organisation’s top PM about how he believes he needs to begin to address the project’s needs, particularly in relation to staffing.

The approach he was dictating will be rather familiar to a lot of you:

1. A PM will lead and manage the project
2. A BA is needed to undertake analysis and design of the solution, perhaps coupled with an enterprise architect or a solutions architect.
3. A Developer (or three) is needed to produce the software solution. He’ll also work out how long the project will take based during the initiation phase on assessment of the number of use-cases in the requirements documentation
4. A Test Manager is required to do the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and ensure the solution doesn’t break when introduced to the big wide world.
5. You might need an IA or user-experience engineer to help with UAT at the end of the project, or if you’re really advanced in your thinking, they might be involved up front to help clarify the project solution and identify the sets of users’ needs from information classification to navigation paradigms.
6. … add 4 weeks for requirements and 2 weeks up-front for project initiation, 4 weeks for testing (UAT) at the end, and voila! you’ve got your project plan, n’est pas? (… hmmm … maybe not?)

Given her project is expected to last about 12 months, as soon as you put a PM and a BA on the books, even if its only the equivalent of 1 FTE, you’re already looking at $0.25 million or so before you actually deliver something. So, I put the question to her as to whether you start with roles or whether aspects of what users say they require need to be assessed, prioritised, and then look at the skills needed with people who have those skills to then follow.

Some people think it’s a chicken and egg thing. How do you know where to start if a PM doesn’t sit down and plan out the schedule and a BA assess what’s required? Do you need to do this before you establish that you need a PM to manage the project and a BA to do the analysis?

In essence, preparing for an agile project is just a different way of thinking. Gone are the days where I personally just automatically assign a PM and a BA because I just can’t afford the overhead of having someone to intermittently gauge project risks, update gantt charts (note: I now use Kanban instead) and dictate to the team the tasks they should be doing just because the schedule says to do so.

Here’s my top 10 on how I now begin my agile projects:

1. I write-up a basic project requirement — after all, you’ve got to start with a list of basic user needs and what that might mean in relation to a solution. I know some organisations who will spend about $10K and two weeks doing initial requirements gathering, interviewing users and/or conducting workshops, and producing something simple to communicate what the project needs.

   Me? I like to start with a collection of user stories, a few personas, create storyboards for them in a workshop environment with post-its and pens, and discuss what those user stories might mean in relation to features and sets of features. This typically takes me (and some SMEs like an enterprise architect and an experienced senior BA) a few days.

2. I then group the requirements into logical feature sets and prioritise them based on an initial assessment of value to the end-user. Card sorting with users is a good way to involve users in ascertaining priority.
3. I then draw a line in the sand that describes the most simple, skinny solution — one that essentially has to be delivered in about 8 weeks.
4. I ascertain what documentation might be required or activities that need to be undertaken
   
5. I assess what skills are required to complete the activities. If in doubt, check what you needed last time to produce a certain widget, document, or feature set. Document and baseline it often enough and this task becomes a breeze. Record how long it took and suddenly you’ll be able to have a better guess as to how long you’ll need to complete the task.
6. I then source the people with the right skills and note during the iteration of what feature set when they are required. I don’t care if they call themselves a PM, a BA, or an IA. If they have the right skills for the right job then I want them.
7. To mitigate against loss of knowledge because different people are involved at different times I use virtual teams to baseline and benchmark specific project elements, like the UI, interaction design, systems architecture, etc. In practice, this means gathering together, for example, all the analysts to have their own stand-up meetings about twice a week and have the most experienced among them take a Sensei role. These Sensei’s have their own stand-up meetings with the Roshi to communicate issues with the baseline.
8. If I’ve got multiple feature sets to produce in the skinny solution I group the feature sets into logical bundles and assign each bundle to a team. Of course this can cause fragmentation of the solution, particularly with respect to the UI and interaction design. Leveraging the Sensei in the virtual teams however mitigates the likelihood of this occurring.
9. Each team then needs someone to champion user needs and mentor people to make them more capable to deliver what the project needs (now and in the future) — the team’s Sensei. I simply choose the person that has the most experience and willingness to mentor. Some agile practitioners call this the Product Owner, Product Owner Proxy, the Product Manager or even just the Team Lead (I’m quite partial to Japanese terms and titles though, particularly given they don’t carry a lot of role ‘baggage’ with them).
10. I then choose the most experienced Sensei amongst all the groups to be the Roshi — the person who will champion the project, teach and mentor the team members, be involved in producing aspects of the project, hold morning standups and communicate issues and risks to the Steering Committee. Some call this the Scrum Master, the Project Lead, the Project Director, or the Project Manager. I don’t care about the title overall, I just want them to:
    1. lead
    2. communicate
    3. champion the project,
    4. not be an ‘extra’ or an ‘overhead’. I want them to be part of the solution and intimately familiar with it.

    When I suggested this to a group of PMs in a government department recently someone asked me whether this essentially meant that PMs needed to go out and learn new skills. I simply responded by saying that this was an opportunity for PMs to adapt and learn in order to add greater value to a project.

Working this way to sort out how to begin your agile project isn’t hard. Importantly, it emphasises that from the outset of the project that adding value to users is important and your roles are subservient to that cause.

M

The first instalment of a series of posts that will look at each goal in a bit more detail and give you the opportunity to share your thoughts.

Social Equity: A Markham where all people can thrive

The Green Print Community Sustainability Plan is addressing social, cultural, environmental, and economic sustainability.  As we make decisions about our future, we need to make sure that a high quality of life continues to be a priority.  Part of this involves making sure that Markham is a community where all residents can thrive.

The goal of Social Equity will address a number of challenges and barriers within our community related to age, race, gender, physical ability and income.  

A recent trend to consider is the increase in child poverty in Markham.  The Children’s Aid Society found that Markham had the steepest climb in the rate of child poverty in GTA from 8% in 1990 to 20% in 2005.  And this study doesn’t account for the current economic difficulties.  Growing up in poverty limits children’s abilities reach their full potential.

Other trends we found or heard during the Sustainability Fair include:

• the challenges for newcomers to reach the same income level as non-immigrants
• an aging population which will require new community and health services, housing and programs
• not enough affordable housing options within the town
• facilities and services not being equally distributed throughout the community
• lack of services and publications that are multi-lingual

Are there other trends in Markham that should be included?

What should Markham be aiming for in the long term?  An age-friendly community?  Affordable childcare?  A narrowing of the income gap between rich and poor?  Greater youth involvement?  Equal access to all that Markham offers?  More opportunities to participate in your local government?

Let us know through our online feedback form.

Another Big On Road production, check it out and leave comments this boy MA is going hard with the studio time. His now working on his album so keep your eyes open for the snipets and the tunes… downlaod links will be availbe and you can also download for THIS site all you do is click the download tab.

Another Big On Road production, check it out and leave comments this boy MA is going hard with the studio time. His now working on his album so keep your eyes open for the snipets and the tunes… downlaod links will be availbe and you can also download for THIS site all you do is click the download tab.

Another Big On Road production, check it out and leave comments this boy MA is going hard with the studio time.

Big Tune check it out and comment this also features on his mixtape which is out now keep watching out for that link just incase you have not got it yet.

Listen up and comment

Don’t get me wrong, I love Jacob Nielsen. And his discovery of Agile sends an important message to both software developers and user-experience designers that both an agile approach and integration of a unified user-experience should be an important part of a project. His overall recommendations, based on his research, are:

• Separate design and development: Have the user interface team progress one step ahead of the implementation team. That way, when it comes time to build something, it’s already been designed and tested. He goes further to recommend that you do both in a week or two by using paper prototypes and discount user testing.
• Maintain a coherent vision of the user interface architecture: Create the initial vision during a “sprint zero” period — before any implementation has started — and maintain it through annual (or semi-annual) design vision sprints. You can’t just design individual features; they have to fit together into a coherent whole — a whole that must be designed as well. Bottom-up user interface design equals a confused total user experience the Linux syndrome.

… but is Neilsen right?

Many refer to this method of doing design and then doing development as the washing machine approach, made famous byDesiree Sy.

The distinction, though, between this approach and waterfall is not that large. You’re still stuck with the separation of design and development but just working on smaller chunks of work. Furthermore, it ignores that business analysis needs to occur in order to understand the business rules and architectural context typically documented through context diagrams that will form part of  use-cases and physical data models. You can’t design without understanding the technical constraints nor the business or strategic ones, so beginning with a visioning exercise as part of a sprint-zero will just begin to set unrealistic expectations amongst users.

Ultimately, the washing machine approach is the sort thinking that I hear a lot when doing agile coaching, where people see iterative design and iterative development and immediately think they’re doing agile. This is what I raised at my keynote at Oz-IA this year on the evolution of the Agile IA and something that Matt Balara suggested was ‘faux agile‘.

Nielsen is right about one thing in his article, that it is important to maintain a coherent information architecture and use-experience design throughout the project. With people potentially working on separate, small parts of the project, the vision can lead toward fragmentation. So what, then is the smartest solution for integration of IA and UXD into an agile project, particularly taking into consideration that both software development and project management disciplines have their own versions of agile development cycles?

Within ZenAgile, the IA is the Sensei’s best friend. Within Scrum he works side-by-side with the Product Owner and in XP he pairs with the developer to interpret users’ needs. An IA’s tools and techniques can ascertain the features that of highest value to users and help to prioritise the project’s feature stack. ZenAgile also reinforces the need to mentor others to helps pass on vital user-centred design techniques. Having a multi-disciplinary approach is an important facet of agile projects that Nielsen overlooks — the right tools, the right people, and the right skills to produce the right outcome — and an IA is just as important to consider as whether you need the skills of business analysis, change management or politically astute communications abilities.

Working side-by-side and using a standards-based approach like ISO13407: Human-centred design processes for interactive systems into the iteration cycle ensures integration of users needs, information architecture and user-experience design, into the core of the project’s feature design implementation. But what out, though, this still doesn’t solve the issue of fragmentation.

Baselining work is an important aspect of any project, whether policy, process of software design. IA must be baselined after each iteration cycle to ensure an holistic user experience design as well as an holistic systems architectural approach. This is the approach I took with my very first agile project and continue to use it today, even when coaching BAs or PMs.

My words of wisdom, for what they’re worth:

• Don’t separate design and development: Pair IAs with developers. Pair IAs with BAs in order to elicit requirements. Use IAs to uncover features and help users to prioritise them so they can go into the stack. The result will be an integration of IA and user needs into the system rather than it being left as a separate process.
• Integrate IA into the baseline: Even make the IA responsible for maintaining the documentation of the baseline! But ensure, ultimately, that the user-experience is an important part of it so that their experience is seamless and uniform throughout the whole application (just like it is with the iPhone for example!)

M

check it out and comment this boy is spending some time with the studio

Big Big tune, one of the best tune this young grinder has done yet listen up and comment

Big Beat, listen and comment

Listen up and comment

Baseline x 2
Row 500 meters
40 Squats
30 Sit ups
20 Push Ups
10 Pull Ups
11:29 min

Notes: fuck. first 500 1:42.5 (pr) first baseline 4:31 min, just an off day all around. Didn’t feel warm after warm up, pull ups were fucked up, legs were smoked on squats, and hips hurt at the bottom of the squat, had no hip drive to power out of the bottom. Must still be feeling the effects of last weekend and being sick

Yesterday morning I testified to a Joint Economic Committee of Congress hearing (update: that link may be fragile; here’s the JEC general page).  The session discussed the latest GDP numbers, the impact of the fiscal stimulus earlier this year, and whether we need further fiscal expansion of any kind.

I argued that a global recovery is underway and in the rest of the world will likely be stronger than the current official or private consensus forecast, but growth remains fragile in the United States because of problems in our financial sector.  While our situation today is quite different in key regards from that of Japan in the 1990s, the Japanese experience strongly suggests that fiscal stimulus is not an effective substitute for confronting financial sector problems head on (e.g., lack of capital, distorted incentives, skewed power structure). 

We are well into the adjustment process needed to bring us back to living within our means. Although such a process always involves an initial fall in real incomes, growth can resume quickly as the real exchange depreciates.  The idea that we necessarily are in a “new  normal” scenario with lower productivity growth seems far fetched, but continuing failure to deal effectively with the “too big to fail” banking syndrome delays and distorts our adjustment process – it also makes us horribly vulnerable to further collapses.

The fiscal stimulus enacted in early 2009 had a major positive impact, particularly as it was coordinated with other industrial countries – this prevented the global recession from being even deeper (disclosure: I testified to the need for a major fiscal stimulus in October 2008).  But a further broad stimulus at this time is not warranted and the first-time homebuyers tax credit should be phased out.  We should extend unemployment insurance and focus our future efforts on improving the skills of people with less education, e.g., through strengthening community colleges. 

Like all industrialized countries, we also need to look ahead to “fiscal consolidation” in order to stabilize our debt-GDP levels (and pay for the rising cost of Medicare).  The large contingent government liabilities implied by the existence – and potential collapse – of big banks are a major risk to medium-term outcomes.

My written testimony (with some small updates indicated) is below (pdf version).  This is now our revised Baseline Scenario.

Main Points

1. The world economy is experiencing a modest recovery after near financial collapse this spring.  The strength of the recovery varies sharply around the world: 

a. In Asia, real GDP growth is returning quickly to pre-crisis levels, and while there may be some permanent GDP loss, the real economy appears to be clearly back on track.  For next year consensus forecasts have China growing at 9.1% and India growing at 8.0%; the latest data from China suggest that these forecasts may soon be revised upwards.

b. Latin America is also recovering strongly.  Brazil should grow by 4.5% in 2010, roughly matching its pre-crisis trend.  We can expect other countries in Latin America to recover quickly also. 

c. The global laggards are Europe and the United States.  The latest consensus forecasts are for Europe to grow by 1.1% and Japan by 1.0% in 2010, while the United Sates is expected to grow by 2.4% (and the latest revisions to forecasts continue to be in an upward direction).  Unemployment in the US is expected to stay high, around 10%, into 2011.  [Update: the latest quarterly GDP data do not make us want to revise this view]

2. The current IMF global growth forecast of around 3 percent is probably on the low side, with considerably more upside possible in emerging markets (accounting nearly half of world GDP). The consensus forecasts for the US are also probably somewhat on the low side.

3. As the world recovers, asset markets are also turning buoyant.  Recently, residential real estate in elite neighborhoods of Hong Kong has sold at $8,000 US per square foot.  A 2,500 square foot apartment now costs $20 million.  Real estate markets are also showing signs of bubbly behavior in Singapore, China, Brazil, and India. 

4. There is increasing discussion of a “carry trade” from cheap funding in the United States towards higher return risky assets in emerging markets.  This financial dynamic is likely to underpin continued US dollar weakness.

5. One wild card is the Chinese exchange rate, which remains effectively pegged to the US dollar.  As the dollar depreciates, China is becoming more competitive on the trade side and it is also attracting further capital inflows.  Despite the fact that the Chinese current account surplus is now down to around 6 percent, China seems likely to accumulate around $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves by mid-2010.

6. Commodity markets have also done well.  Crude oil prices are now twice their March lows (despite continued spare capacity, according to all estimates), copper is up 129%, and nickel is up 103%.  There is no doubt that the return to global growth, at least outside North America and Europe, is already proving to have a profound impact on commodity markets.

7. Core inflation, as measured by the Federal Reserve, is unlikely to reach (or be near to) 2% in the near future.  However, headline inflation may rise due to the increase in commodity prices and fall in the value of the dollar; this reduces consumers’ purchasing power. 

8. This nascent recovery is partly a bounce back from the near total financial collapse which we experienced in the Winter/Spring of 2008-09.  The key components of this success are three policies. 

• First, global coordinated monetary stimulus, in which the Federal Reserve has shown leadership by keeping interest rates near all time lows.  Of central banks in industrialized countries, only Australia has begun to tighten. [Update: and Norway, obviously affected by rising oil prices]
• Second, global coordinated fiscal policy, including a budget deficit in the US that is projected to be 10% of GDP or above both this year and next year.  In this context, the Recovery Act played an important role both in supported spending in the US economy and in encouraging other countries to loosen fiscal policy (as was affirmed at the G20 summit in London, on April 2^nd, 2009).
• Third, after some U-turns, by early 2009 there was largely unconditional support for major financial institutions, particularly as demonstrated by the implementation and interpretation of the bank “stress tests” earlier this year.

9. However, the same policies that have helped the economy avoid a major depression also create serious risks – in the sense of generating even larger financial crises in the future.

10.  A great deal has been made of the potential comparison with Japan in the early 1990s, with some people arguing that Japan’s experience suggests we should pursue further fiscal stimulus at this time.  This reasoning is flawed.

11.  We should keep in mind that repeated fiscal stimulus and a decade of easy monetary policy did not lead Japan back to its previous growth rates.  Japanese outcomes should caution against unlimited increases in our public debt.

12.  Perhaps the best analysis regarding the impact of fiscal policy on recessions was done by the IMF.  In their retrospective study of financial crises across countries, they found that nations with “aggressive fiscal stimulus” policies tended to get out of recessions 2 quarters earlier than those without aggressive policies.  This is a striking conclusion – should we (or anyone) really increase our deficit further and build up more debt (domestic and foreign) in order to avoid 2 extra quarters of contraction?

13.  A further large fiscal stimulus, with a view to generally boosting the economy, is therefore not currently appropriate.  However, it makes sense to further extend support for unemployment insurance and for healthcare coverage for those who were laid off – people are unemployed not because they don’t want to work, but because there are far more job applicants than vacancies.  Compared with other industrial countries, our social safety net is weak and not well suited to deal with the consequences of a major recession.

14.  The first-time home buyer tax credit should be phased out.

15.  GMAC should not receive a further infusion of government money.  It should be turned down for any kind of additional bailout; as with CIT Group earlier in the summer, this would force a negotiation with creditors and some losses for bondholders (most likely through a pre-packaged bankruptcy process).  This would not cause a general financial panic; probably it would actually strengthen the overall process of economic recovery, as it would move incentives in the right direction.

16.  The lack of skills among people who did not complete high school or who did not attend college is a critical longer term problem in the United States.  The impact of the recession will exacerbate the problems in this regard.  We should respond by further strengthening community colleges, allowing them to offer more vocational skills classes and to provide a viable way for more people to work their way into four-year colleges.

17.  America is well-placed to maintain its global political and economic leadership, despite the rise of Asia.  But this will only be possible if our policy stance towards the financial sector is substantially revised: the largest banks need to be broken up, “excess risk taking” that is large relative to the system should be taxed explicitly, and measures implemented to reduce the degree of nontransparent interconnectedness between financial institutions of all kinds.

The remainder of this testimony reviews current U.S. macroeconomic issues in broad terms, assesses the lessons of Japan’s experience in the 1990s, and make proposals for further essential reform (both fiscal and financial).

Current U.S. Issues

To be a strong global leader in the future, America needs to generate an environment where entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and immigration ensure that the nonfinancial private sector can continue to propel the US economy. 

It is premature to argue that the US economy has stumbled into a “new normal” paradigm that involves slower growth.  The factors that drove our growth over the last 150 years, particularly entrepreneurial startups and the commercialization of invention, remain despite the crisis.  Indeed, these drivers of growth may become even stronger in the future, if we can reduce the wasteful financial sector activities that grew since the 1980s (and really flourished over the past decade) and allocate resources to more productive activities in the future.  

America needs a new framework to harness that growth.   That framework needs to address the following problems with our current economic structure.

Problem 1:  With the recent financial sector bailouts, we have sent a simple message to Americans: The safest place to put your savings is in a bank, even if that bank is so poorly managed, and has such large balance sheet risks, that just six months ago it almost went bankrupt.

Despite being near to bankruptcy six months ago, Bank of America credit default swaps now cost only 103 basis points per year to protect against default, and the equivalent rate for Goldman Sachs is a mere 89 basis points.  Goldman Sachs is able to borrow for five years at just 170 basis points above treasuries.  This is not a sign of health; rather it indicates the sizable misallocation of capital promoted by current policies.  American’s leading nonfinancial innovators would never be able to build the leverage (debt-asset ratio) on their balance sheet that Goldman Sachs has, and then borrow at less than 2% above US treasuries.  The implicit government guarantee is seriously distorting incentives.

Problem 2:  We have not changed the incentive structures for managers and traders within our largest banks.  Arguably these incentives are more distorted than they were before the crisis. So the problems of excessive risk taking and a new financial collapse will eventually return.  Financial system incentives are a first-order macroeconomic issue, as we have learned over the past 12 months.

Today bank management is strongly incentivized to take large risks in order to raise profits, increase bank capital, and pay large bonuses to “compete for talent”.  Since they have access to a pool of funds effectively guaranteed by the state through being “too big to fail”, there is the potential to make large profits by employing funds in risky trades with high upside.  Such activities do not need to be socially valuable, i.e. it could be that the expected return on the investments is negative, but as the downside has limited liability, the banks can go ahead.

Problem 3:  We have not changed the financial regulatory framework in a substantive way so as to limit excessive risk taking.  The proposals currently proceeding through Congress are unlikely to make a significant difference.

Problem 4:  The policy response to this crisis, with very low interest rates and a large fiscal stimulus, is merely a larger version of the response to previous similar crises.  While this was essential to stop a near financial collapse, it reinforces the message that the system is here to stay.  

Problem 5:  The public costs of this bailout are much larger than we are accounting for, and people who did not cause this crisis are ultimately paying for it.   Taxpayers and savers are the big losers each time we have these crises.  We are failing to defend the public purse.  

Our financial leaders have emphasized that our banks are well capitalized, and no new public funds are likely to be needed to support them.  This is misleading.  The current monetary stance is designed to ensure that deposit rates are low, and the spread between deposit rates and loan rates is high.   This is a massive transfer of public funds to the private sector, and no one accounts for that properly. 

It is striking that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve himself, in a recent speech, stated that no more public funds were needed to bail out banks.  His institution continues to provide massive transfers to the banking system through loose credit and low interest rate policy.  That credit could instead go to others; the Federal Reserve has chosen to transfer those funds to banks.  This policy was used in the past to recapitalize banks (e.g., after 1982), but we have now a very different financial sector – with much more capacity to take high risks and a greater tendency to divert profits into large cash bonuses.

Today, depositors in banks earn little more than the Federal Funds rate and are effectively financing our financial system.  We are giving them very low returns on their savings because the losses in the financial system were so large in the past.  This is essentially public money – it is the pensioners, elderly people with savings, and other people who have no involvement in the financial system, that are being required to suffer low returns to support the banks. 

We Are Not Japan

After the bursting of its real estate bubble, at the end of the 1980s, Japan faced a serious problem in its financial sector.  This fact has inspired many people to look for parallels with the current US situation, and – in some cases – to draw the implication that we should pursue further large-scale fiscal stimulus today.

There is a cautionary tale to be learned from the Japanese experience – on the need to promote, rather than to prevent, appropriate macroeconomic adjustment.  But this does not encourage a further expansion in the budget deficit at this time.

The property bubble and general credit bubble in Japan were actually much larger than what we recently experienced in the U.S.  The implied price of the land in the Emperor’s Palace, in central Tokyo, was worth more than all of California (or Canada) at its peak.  Land prices collapses and never recovered.  US house and land prices never got so far out of line with the earning capacity of homeowners.

The Japanese stock market rose to price-earnings ratio of around 80 (depending on the exact measure), also as a direct result of the credit bubble.  The US did not experience anything similar in the last few years.

Japan was – and largely remains – a bank-based finance system.  And their nonfinancial corporate sector was generally much more indebted (often using borrowed money to buy land, but also over-expanding their manufacturing capacity) than was the case in the US.  Total Japanese corporate debt was 200 percent of GDP in 1992 – more than double its value in 1984. The implication was a long period of disinvestment and saving by the corporate sector – in fact, this change from the 1980s to 1990s explains most of Japan’s increased current account surplus after the crisis.  Since Japanese corporates had accumulated too much capital, they exhibited low returns in the post-crisis period.  The US has strong bond and equity markets, and our corporate sector is not heavily indebted – so the cash flow of the nonfinancial sector should bounce back strongly.

In contrast to Japan, the US consumer has much more debt and saves less – in fact, on average over the past decade, the our household sector has saved roughly nothing (partly due to the effects of rising wealth, from higher house prices).  This sector will be weak in the US.  In contrast, in Japan during the 1990s there was no significant increase in household saving (and thus no contribution from this sector to their current account surplus.)

The obvious solution for any country in the situation faced by the US is to let the economy adjust, which implies and requires that the real exchange rate depreciates – so our exports go up, our imports (and consumption) go down.  This is a level adjustment downward in our GDP and standard of living, but then growth will resume on this new basis.

In contrast, Japan did not grow largely due to their over-investment cycle (in real estate, but also plant and equipment).  This created a much more difficult adjustment process, which worked for manufacturing primarily through depreciation of installed capacity and a gradual movement of production off-shore (e.g., to China and other Asian countries).

In addition, another major cause of Japan’s poor performance was its demographics, and the relatively lackluster growth of its trading partners in Asia due to the Asian crisis.  With its working population peaking in 1995, Japan lost a major driver of growth.  The country still has strong enterprises and decent productivity growth in the manufacturing sector, which allows them to grow.  But the pace is naturally slower than when they were “catching up” through the 1980s.  During the last ten years Japan’s has grown around the same pace as some of the continental European nations with better but also poor demographics, such as Italy and Germany (the comparison is from Q1 1998 to Q1 2008).

The Japanese policy reaction was to run budget deficits and maintain very loose monetary policy for over a decade, in an attempt to stimulate the economy and obviate the need for painful adjustment (including job losses, recognizing losses at major banks, and properly recapitalizing those banks).  Today Japanese gross debt to GDP is at 217%, and it is still rising (net debt, even on the most favorable definition, is over 110% of GDP).  The working population of Japan is now declining quickly, and so those people that are required to pay back the debt face ever rising burdens.  There is a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default, or need a large inflation, to erode the burden of this debt since their current path is clearly unsustainable. 

Japan’s policy approach from the 1990s – repeated fiscal stimulus and very easy money – is not an appealing model for the U.S. today.  All dynamic economies have a natural adjustment process – this involves allowing failing industries to decline, and letting new businesses develop where there are new opportunities. 

In fact, while Japan hesitated for over a decade to let this process work (particularly protecting the insiders at their major banks), it has finally moved in this direction.  Unit labor costs in Japan have declined sharply over the last ten years, helping making the country a more competitive exporter.  The forced recapitalization of some major banks, at the end of the 1990s, was also a move in the right direction.

The process of deflation – spoken of with terror by some leading central banks around the world today – actually makes industry more competitive, and while there are negative aspects to it (particularly if the household sector is heavily indebted, as in the US), the modest price declines seen in Japan are not a disaster.  In fact, real GDP per worker in Japan – annualized over the past 20 years – has increased by 1.3 percent per annum; while the comparable number in the US is 1.6 percent.  Over the past 10 years, real GDP per worker (annualized) increased by 1.3 percent in both Japan and the US – and now it turns out that much of the GDP gains in the US financial sector may have been illusory.

The Japan-US comparison is not generally compelling, particularly as Japan ran a current account surplus even during its destabilizing capital inflows of the 1980s.  The current US experience more closely matches the experience in some emerging markets, which have in the past run current account deficits, financed by capital inflows – with the illusion that this was sustainable indefinitely.

The long and hard experience of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with such countries that have “lived beyond their means” – or over-expanded in any fashion – is that it is a mistake to try to prevent this process of competitive adjustment, i.e., bringing spending back into line with income, which implies a smaller current account deficit or even a surplus.  The adjustment can be cushioned by fiscal policy – and here the IMF has changed its line over the past few years, now offering sensible support for this approach.  But attempting to postpone adjustment with repeated fiscal stimulus is almost always a mistake.

Japan did not want to force its corporate sector to adjust (i.e., in the sense of going  bankrupt and renegotiate its debts), so it offered repeated stimulus.  As a result, it has become stuck with a “permanent” fiscal deficit program which is now threatening their survival as a global economic power, and will – regardless of the exact outcome – burden future generations for decades. 

Some analysts further claim that Japan’s early withdrawal of stimulus is a major factor explaining why they have not returned to robust growth rates.  It is true that Japan introduced a new VAT tax in April 1997 not long before the Asian Financial Crisis began, and the Bank of Japan raised interest rates by 25 basis points in August 2000.  Subsequent to these changes the economy slowed down. 

However, each of these measures were relatively small.  The Bank of Japan reversed course on interest rates quickly, and a negative turn in the economy was surely already in the cards – this occurred at the same time as the global economy slowed down, and a great stretch to argue that a 25 basis point move could explain the poor performance of Japan’s economy for years or decades subsequent.

As long as there are not major adverse shocks from the rest of the world, the US will experience higher savings, a fall in consumption, a recovery in investment, and an improvement in the its net exports (so the current account deficit will become smaller, or stay at its current level even as the economy recovers).  Growth will resume, driven by demographics, technical progress, and entrepreneurship.  The high level of unemployment also implies that rapid growth will be fuelled by willing workers, subject to the right skills being available.

Proposals For Change

The main threats to the recovery scenario come from the financial system, which has developed serious and macro-level pathologies over the past two decades.

We have weak bank regulation and supervision.  Politically we can’t let banks fail: they bend or lobby to change the rules in order to grow big, and then we bail them out. 

New theories of deflation and zero interest rate floors attempt to explain why we need unprecedented large bailouts – with the experience of Japan and the Great Depression of the 1930s offered as partial justification.  More likely, we are on an unsustainable fiscal path with the potential for new financial bubbles.

The following changes should be priorities.

1. Reduce the impact of financial sector lobbying on bank regulation and supervision.  Today the US Treasury is filled with former finance sector workers in key positions responsible for financial sector reform and bailouts.  This is too large a conflict of interest.  We need to close the revolving door between government and the financial sector.

2. Put far greater regulation and closer supervision on the large remaining banks that are clearly too big to fail.  These should be broken up into much smaller pieces, so we have a more competitive system. 

• When major financial institutions request additional help from the government, such as GMAC, they should be turned down.  This would force their bondholders to take a loss and lead to better incentives for the future.  It is highly unlikely that it would cause a major financial panic.  The financial system is experiencing a sharp bounce back more broadly and GMAC can likely arrange a pre-packaged bankruptcy that would actually allow its debt to rise in value.
• Banks can syndicate if they need to do large transactions. This is actually what they do for most capital raising transactions. 
• Banks should draw up “living wills” and raise additional capital as they become larger relative to the system.

3. We should also toughen our monetary policy to send a clear message that we will not maintain a pro-cyclical monetary policy which bails out banks at the end of each crisis.  The cross-liabilities on banks’ balance sheets should be reduced as far as possible to lower the risks involved with letting one fail. By doing this, we would free the hands of those running our monetary policy to take tougher actions to stop the next bubble. 

4. We need to address the inequality driven by our bailouts as a gesture to show that we will defend the public purse beyond the simple accounting in the budget. 

• Increasingly, there is discussion of taxing “excess risk taking” (reflected in high profits and bonuses) in the financial sector, particularly if that is large relative to the system.  The terms in this debate have not yet been clearly defined and this initiative could go in the wrong direction.  But we should recognize that mismanagement at major banks has created huge negative externalities both for the financial system and for the economy as a whole.  Taxing activities that generate such externalities is entirely appropriate in other sectors, and the same reasoning is likely to be applied for banking also.
• In addition, we should also require that Goldman Sachs, GMAC, and other non-banks (i.e., those operating without deposit insurance) with access to the Federal Reserve’s window pay a substantial long term annual fee to compensate taxpayers for that access.  This is a valuable insurance policy which they have – at this point – been given for free.

5. We should withdraw the fiscal stimulus over 5 years and aim for fiscal consolidation, including Medicare costs, at that time.  We should use extra spending to target specific issues that will help people improve their skills, but wind down the temporary public works programs that build jobs in the public sector. 

6. All industrialized countries need to make a substantial fiscal adjustment over the medium-run, in order to stabilize public debt levels.  The size of this adjustment depends on assumptions (and policies) regarding longer-run medical costs as the population ages and medical technology becomes more expensive.  The US and almost all other members of the OECD most likely require a fiscal adjustment in the range of 4-8 percentage points of GDP.  In that context, further unfunded or nontransparent contingent public liabilities vis-à-vis the financial sector are untenable; the Japanese experience should be taken as a warning sign in this regard.

7. For the longer-run, we should focus on measures that improve skills for people with fewer years of formal education.  Supporting the expansion of community colleges and other practical skills training is the best way forward, although this will take some time to scale up.

By Simon Johnson, Peter Boone, and James Kwak

Baseline

3 rounds

500 m row

40 squats

30 sit ups

20 push ups

10 pull ups

Round 1 – 7:11, Round 2 – 8:13, Round 3 – 8:32

rough work out…row really killed me and made the first set of squats rough, kept decent pace on the rest of it

I have to start stretching daily.  Robin had me stretch on the foam roller and I’ve lost a lot of flexibility.  Stretches hurt, but felt good.  Really have to work to make this happen daily.

Controle Integrado de Mudanças - Mantenha seu plano atualizado e sob controle.

Uma das característica dos projetos é ser progressivamente elaborado, ou seja, quanto mais avançamos nos projeto, mais sabemos detalhes sobre ele. Essa característica já foi responsável por vários artigos aqui, mas hoje vamos tratá-la de forma diferente.

Sempre falamos sobre o planejamento, de forma a minimizar os impactos que a elaboração progressiva causa, hoje, gostaria de falar sobre o controle. Para ser mais preciso, sobre o Sistema de controle integrado de mudanças. Como pessoas tem aversão a controle e a mudanças, nunca é fácil o “start-up” , mas o controle uma vez acertado e trabalhado adequadamente pode ser muito eficiente.

O controle integrado de mudanças (CIM), tem o objetivo de estabelecer uma forma de solicitação de mudanças, recebê-las, filtrá-las, analisar os impactos e implantá-las ou não, de acordo com o resultado do processo, e manter registro atualizado delas.

Cada um achará uma forma mais adequada para seu tipo de projeto, mas a estrutura básica de uma CIM deverá ter:

1) Deixe claro o que são mudanças, e o que pode gerá-las. Por exemplo: a identificação de especificações erradas que possam vir a gerar problemas no projeto, algo foi esquecido durante o planejamento, ou até mesmo a declaração de escopo foi mal escrita, enfim, diga qual o critério de mudanças à serem solicitadas. Crie as regras.

2)Crie o método de solicitação. Normalmente isso é feito através de um formulário padrão de requisição de mudanças, varie de acordo com sua necessidade e conveniência, coloque apenas informações relevantes para quem fará a avaliação e documente a solicitação.

3) Submeta a avaliação do gerente de projetos, ele verá quais as áreas afetadas, e fará uma análise de prazo, custo e qualidade. O G.P. deverá posicionar-se se a mudança criará algum impacto no sucesso do projeto. Na fase de avaliação de impacto, em algumas estruturas, o papel do G.P. poderá ser substituído por um comitê, ou até mesmo por PMO. (normalmente o G.P. tem uma autonomia limitada sobre decisões de alto risco e impacto).

4) Após a análise, haverá a decisão de aprovação ou não mudança. Sendo a resposta positiva ou negativa, a decisão deverá ter sua justificativa registrada, tanto para o caso de lições aprendidas, como para o caso de problema futuro na execução do projeto. ( Acredite, você será cobrado pela realização da mudança até mesmo por quem não aprovou, portanto registre!) Se não aprovada, arquive. Se aprovada, inclua no plano de projeto e execute-a.

Lembre-se que todos os planos e subplanos do projeto afetados pela mudança deverão ser atualizados. A integração entre eles é importantíssima para o funcionamento do CIM.

Mantenha seu CIM o mais prático e descomplicado possível, quanto mais burocracia, maior a chance das pessoas utilizarem “o jeitinho” para fazer suas alterações no projeto. Afinal, as palavras controle e mudanças já assustam as pessoas, se entrar burocracia então…

Crédito da imagem: http://www.efetivapromocoes.com.br/

Date – 19/10/09

Time – 8:00pm

Weight – 81.7 kg

Chest – 105 cm

Waist – 83 cm

Hips – 97 cm

Upper Arms – 35.5 cm

Forearms – 27 cm

Thighs – 56 cm

Calves – 37 cm

In the last week, we have added three new clients to our practice, and we have begun the task of starting our assessments with them. Whenever I start out new clients in our practice, I always describe the assessments we will use to get a “picture” of where the learner is, if he is a beginner, intermediate, or advanced learner. Our baseline is our starting point, and gives us our “map” of where we are going with our treatment program.  It is always a given that many parents ask what the difference is between the two assessments that we use. Many times, this is the first time that either the ABLLS or VB MAPP has ever been conducted on these learners!

The Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills (ABLLS) was written by Dr. James Partington and Dr. Mark Sundberg in 1998. The ABLLS is a criterion referenced tool with 25 reperoire areas. The way I think of criterion referenced is that it is task analyzed according to repertoire area, and the child “competes” against himself to master out the objectives in each repertoire area, and “close the gap” between typical language development and his own. We have been using the ABLLS here since about 2002, using it as our primary assessment tool, and curriculum that links directly to the assessment itself. What I mean by this, is that given the results of the baseline assessment, we take objectives that the child does not have in his repertoire, and introduce them within the program binder. The bonus is that at the end of the quarter or after about 6 months, we know which objectives have been mastered out, so it makes re-assessment easy! One downfall is that the ABLLS is not developmentally sequenced, and many times, I have had to look up the age levels at which typically developing children acquire certain behaviors to make sure I should even be teaching it!
The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP) was more recently written by Dr. Mark Sundberg and published by AVB Press (http://www.avbpress.com/) in 2008. For me, the VB MAPP makes more sense. It has many advantages that outweigh using the ABLLS.  See http://www.marksundberg.com/vb-mapp.htm It is a developmentally based criterion referenced assessment tool, that was field tested with typically developing children and children with ASD.  I have had the honor of being able to participate in the field testing of it, utilizing my typically developing daughter’s profile to help Dr. Sundberg. This was great practice for me, in starting this assessment with my daughter when she was not yet 1 year old, and updating it every 3-4 months! She will have a nice record of her language development when she grows up!

The VB MAPP assesses individual skills within each repertoire area, such as the echoic, mand, tact, intraverbal, etc. It also assesses the child’s barriers to learning, and has a nice echoic assessment written by Barbara Esch, PhD., an  SLP and BCBA.  The MAPP also contains a transition assessment which is to aide teachers and providers in making placement decisions about the level of inclusion or group instruction that may be appropriate for that learner. These added features really make the VB MAPP the paramount tool! The VB MAPP has three specific developmental levels (0-18mo, 18-30mo, 30-48mo) so you can compare the skills of a child with autism with skillset of  typically developing children in each range.  Once the VB-MAPP is completed, the totals within each level can be added up to obtain a fraction or score which can be valuable when comparing scores over time.  This is what I like! The graphs act as reinforcement for us practitioners, and parents,  and reinforces our good teaching behavior!

Overall, I feel that the VB MAPP is more comprehensive and easier to administer tool! It is just a much needed improvement on the technology. It was difficult for us as a group to switch over entirely from the ABLLS to the VB MAPP in aligning it to our curriculum, but that has been getting easier over time, and soon I think we will be able to say that we are solely using the VB MAPP. Both the VB-MAPP and ABLLS can be used as assessments, curriculum, as well as skills tracking guides. They both also provide a nice visual display of the data in color.

The ABLLS, ABLLS-R (A revised ABLLS published by Dr. Partington in 2006) and the VB MAPP assessment tools are all available at http://www.difflearn.com/ and information regarding BCBA’s can be found at http://www.bacb.com/.

After you complete your baseline assessments of either the VB MAPP or ABLLS,  some wonderful programming advice can be found in Mary Barbera’s book: The Verbal Behavior Approach: How to Teach Children with Autism and Related Disorders (http://www.verbalbehaviorapproach.com/). (Thanks Mary! – We use your book to give out to all of the parents of our clients, as well as to all of our employees!!~ We love that it is easy to read, and not overwhelming to parents or providers new to the vocabulary and acronyms!!).  Mary also posts a blog with great information related to verbal behavior  on her website above. Also, Mark Sundberg has some wonderful information including downloads, on his site www.MarkSundberg.com. There is also a link to the AVB press site where you can purchase this valuable tool.

When I first bought the ABLLS, I think it sat with dust on it for several months, until I began to try to get through it with 1 client.  I recall how overwhelming it was to think that I had to assess all 25 repertoire areas, and really had no one to hold my hand in doing so.  Autism Training Solutions (ATS) training videos on the VB MAPP and ABLLS will be released soon to give some more specific guidance to those who would like a more step by step approach in utilizing these assessment tools. We hope to give you a hand to hold when learning to implement these valuable tools.  When making the decision which tool to use for your child , it is recommended that you consult with a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) who is familiar with using Skinner’s Analysis of Verbal Behavior in language programming.

Best of luck! Just remember that  learning to adminster these assessments, and linking up a curriculum  based on your assessments doesn’t happen overnight! It takes many years of trial and error in programming to make it the most efficient it can be! Don’t be afraid to ask for support! Stay tuned for ATS training videos on the VB MAPP and ABLLS, and also handouts and tracking sheets to make your journey into these assessments more errorless!

For more information on the ABLLS see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assessment_of_Basic_Language_and_Learning_Skills

For more information on the VB MAPP see:

http://www.marksundberg.com/vb-mapp.htm

Você consegue prever precisamente um futuro distante?

Segundo estudo do PMI realizado em 2008, o principal problema em projetos é o não cumprimento de prazos. Novidade? Não, nenhuma, tenho certeza que todo profissional da área de projetos sabe disso.

Gostaria apenas de fazer algumas considerações sobre isso. Não há método infalível para fazer um cronograma perfeito! As razões são muito simples:

1) O cronograma é um documento criado ainda na fase de planejamento. Grande parte dos “gerenciadores” (não gerentes) de projetos, assim como clientes, nunca mais o revisa, realmente acredita que o cronograma é algo “congelado”, foi planejado, concluído e pronto.

2)Pela mesma razão, por ser criado em uma etapa onde ainda temos muitas incertezas sobre o projeto, é impossível prever precisa e detalhadamente o que estará sendo feito num futuro distante. Chamo isso de  ”Síndrome de Nostradamus”, ou você em sã consciência consegue afirmar precisamente qual atividade você estará fazendo em 03/10/2012? Portanto, quando você faz um cronograma, congela sua primeira baseline e a única certeza que você tem é que ela está errada! Você apenas precisa partir de algum lugar!

3)Baseamos nossos cronogramas em estimativas, probabilidades e estatísticas. Por mais científico que seja o método, estimativa  geralmente representa uma experiência passada, estatística é passado, e probabilidade representa chute! Você pode fazer um milhão de simulações de monte-carlo, mas mesmo assim não conseguirá dimensionar perfeitamente seus riscos, e consequentemente um cronograma preciso. O cronograma envolve recursos, tempo, escopo bem definido, e riscos bem identificados, controlados e medidos. O que também é difícil de acertar no início do projeto.

4)Segundo Scott Berkun, em A arte do gerenciamento de projetos, estamos inconscientemente condicionados ao atraso. Experiências rotineiras como esperar por uma mesa em um restaurante, mesmo tendo feito reserva, ou ainda, aguardar para ser atendido em um consultório médico, mesmo tendo hora marcada, faz com que aceitemos que a espera por um período de tempo, seja admissível.  Período de tempo é algo muito subjetivo, nos compromissos diários achamos normal um atraso de 10 minutos, em um projeto de meses, estamos condicionados a achar que um atraso de algumas semanas também. (particularmente concordo com a posição dele)

Depois dessas considerações, pergunto:  O fato de errar ao criar um cronograma, nos faz maus gerentes de projeto?

NÃO!  Como disse antes, não podemos adivinhar precisamente o futuro, mas podemos mudá-lo se estivermos atentos às tendências.

Cito como exemplo, o projeto da UHE de Machadinho- SC (http://www.machadinho.com.br/ ), que se tornou case internacional de sucesso, pois foi concluído com um ano de antecedência, mais de 100 milhões de dólares abaixo do custo e com o escopo completamente atendido.

O segredo? O planejamento seguiu sucessivamente durante 3 dos 4 anos da obra, não se tentou “congelar” desesperadamente o cronograma, mas sim, acompanhá-lo e agir de maneira pró-ativa.

Como bons profissionais de gerenciamento de projetos, temos que monitorar todas as baselines, todos os riscos identificados, e agir, preferencialmente de forma preventiva, ou corretiva quando necessário. Claro, precisamos obedecer as restrições e marcos principais, e em alguns casos não poderemos “jogar” com as datas, mas poderemos rever os recursos, ou estratégia de execução, compressão, ou qualquer outra forma! É para isso que estamos no projeto para tomar decisões baseadas em fatos, para fazer acontecer e não para fazer adivinhações.

Se a intenção é acertar tudo de primeira, é melhor comprar uma bola de cristal.

Perfect timing. Just as I was publishing my previous post (yes, I realize this makes 3 for today), the nurse coordinator called. Game on! My E2 came in at a beautiful 20 which is “a great number” according to good ole’ Judy (filling in for my nurse coordinator, Susan). So, our plan stays as is and I start stims tomorrow! No delay! Yeah me! Woohoo!

Man, I hope every call in this cycle makes me feel this great.

Deadlift
Set new 1RM

brief rest then do “Baseline”
500m Row
40 Squats
30 Abmat Situps
20 Pushups
10 Pullups

New PR’s in the deadlift for Cindy, Jill & Beau!..  Beau’s was huge – 25# – must be the new lifting shoes.  Good job to all.
Beau took about 3 minutes off his baseline time.  Mike took off about 4 minutes with alot better movement and range of motion this time.

Warning: I am going to talk about AF in this post, in detail, so if that makes you squeamish or you simply think it’ s too personal, you can skip this one.

One of the many things I heard about Lupron is that the resulting period is wonderful. Free of cramps (again, not usually a problem for me), very short, very light, and the consistency a bit thicker and darker. On day one of AF, I experienced everything but the free of cramps. Granted, day 1 is pretty much always like that for me these past few years. Sort of acts as a warning of what’s to come. So, this was normal for me EXCEPT I had the cramps from hell starting 2 days before the ho showed up!

Lesson #1: If you usually get cramps, Lupron eliminates them (or so I hear). If you don’t usually get cramps, Lupron will make sure to remind why you’re so lucky…usually.

So, day 2 comes along and everything changes. Normally I go between 5 to 8 days with spotting on day 1, moderate flow for 2 days, heavy spotting/super light flow for the remainder. For some reason unknown to me, I generally stop bleeding at night and resume in the morning.

This period is reminiscent of my 20’s. It’s Niagara Falls my friends. Gushes so significant I can feel them, and I’m changing pads every hour or so. I wore a super duper overnight pad last night, and apparently I need to switch to Serenity disposables for adults because nothing is holding this puppy back. I woke to a huge mess, and then couldn’t sleep anymore (as a side note, due to a tilted uterus, pads are the only option for me). Hopefully this means it will be short, if not sweet.

Lesson #2: Lupron affects everyone differently. Be prepared for the opposite of what you’ve heard.

Part of the reason I bring this up is, I have my baseline tomorrow. That means dildo cam time. I have never had an exam of any kind while on my period, and to be honest, while I have no problem talking about, totally expect PB to get me pads if I need them without being embarrassed, etc., I’m generally uncomfortable with sharing the actual experience of my period with anyone.

PB is not allowed in the bathroom for any purpose when I have to change pads. I hate having sex on my period. I think it’s gross. It feels different, I can smell it, nothing makes me feel unsexier, and I can’t relax and enjoy it. I’m very self-conscious about it for whatever reason. So the idea of having to face Dr. G with the dildo cam tomorrow is beyond unnerving.

Initially, I calmed myself by thinking, I’ll have a Lupron period like everyone else. It will be barely there spotting. He’ll hardly even notice. But no. I have a virtual tsunami happening between my legs right now and I have no reason to believe it will be any different tomorrow. And I’m already mortified.

I know this is his job and he doesn’t care, blah, blah, blah. And going through treatments means putting up with people looking at and probing your nether regions regularly. I’m never excited about that, but I accept it, and I certainly don’t stress about it. But this is really bothering me. I know I just have to do it, and it’s possible that the current could slow or even, miraculously, cease by tomorrow. But right now I just keep thinking, ugh. I can’t think of anything more uncomfortable or more humiliating.