2-3-12 Will Gadd and Linkedin.com

Posted on February 5, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

My dream last night was very much a process oriented dream. I had a lot of these throughout engineering school. Basically my brain would take something that I had been studying, and analyze the crap out of it in my dream. In this particular dream it was about Linkedin.com because I’ve been eating, sleeping, and breathing it (apparently now dreaming it too) at work. A buddy of mine and I were able to convince our company to support Linkedin as a professional networking tool. Sounds like a no-brainer but it was more difficult than we thought. Anyway, suffice it to say that my brain has been in Linkedin mode for a while now.

Then, last night I went to a talk at Tufts University given by the best ice/mixed climber in the world, Will Gadd. He’s been referred to as, “The Ice Wizard”, “The Ice Ninja”, “Professional Badass”, and the list goes on. Check out this video of him crushing it at the Ouray Ice Festival.

I was lucky enough to have dinner with him before the talk and then the chance to have beers with him after the talk, he really is an amazing guy. So my dream combined these two topics in my head, Linkedin.com and Will Gadd. For what felt like the entire night I dreaming of professional networking maps of myself and Will Gadd to see where we overlapped and what connections were primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. I had flashes of me adding him to my professional network and then introducing him to my climbing friends and vice versa.

After watching his talk I was hoping that I’d have dream about some epic ascent, navigating dead vertical ice and rock. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case, I had a typical engineering dream, or a process dream as I refer to them where my mind is going 1000mph on a specific topic, working through it, and ultimately not getting anywhere, waking up realizing how useless all of it sounded.

2-2-12: Free Ice Climbing/Gear Demo

Posted on February 4, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Dream: I was at LaHout’s Summit Shop in NH on a business trip with work (hint, my work has nothing to do with outdor gear, unfortunate). The difference was that the people working at LaHout’s were not the people that work there in real life, they were two guys from a client of ours out in Newton, MA. In real life, we are making a visit there in a few weeks to do some business so these guys must have been on my brain last night. We were talking about an upcoming event which was likely VICE Fest, but I can’t be sure because we didn’t talk about it specifically. They offered to pick us up and take us out to demo gear and then to take us out to lunch. We then decided that we needed to stop back at home first (referring to Tufts Loj in the dream) in order to get a few things of our own. They were going to outfit us with all this new and awesome gear but there were still a few things of our own that we wanted. This is where the dream ended because my alarm went off at 6:30am to get ready for work.

A full 8 hours of sleep, awesome, that’s the first time in a longgg time.

Day 20 – Bottle of Wine: Random Act of Kindness or Peace Offering?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

After work I headed north in a Honda Fit, loaded to the teeth with four other stoked 20-somethings and a trunk-full of ice climbing gear. We had planned to drive two hours north to spend the night but our plans fell through as we got into the car. We decided to drive north anyway and see what happens. If all else failed, we could sleep in the car.

Fairly quickly we decided that sleeping in the car was a bad idea so we diverted plans to head to Manchester, MA to our driver’s parent’s house to have a few beers, cruise the hot tub, watch a movie and crash, driving north the following morning. That plan seemed much better than sleeping in a cramped compact car stuffed to capacity. The past few times I’ve been to this friend’s parent’s house we’ve had a great time but we’ve managed to create a rather large ruckus in the process. I’m sure on one hand his parents were glad he was home, but on the other hand I’m sure they wanted us to settle down and go to bed sometime before 2am. So this time around I decided to bring a peace offering, or as today I’m calling it, a random act of kindness.

We stopped to get a few barley-based beverages and I asked my friend what his parents might like. He suggested a Cabernet Sauvignon. Without breaking the bank I picked one up. When we got to his parent’s house (interrupting their movie) we all said hello and I gave them the bottle of wine, partly out of kindness and partly to make up for all the nights we’ve kept them awake with our shenanigans. They were very surprised and graciously accepted, saying thank you many times with me responding, no no, thank you thank you.

They definitely would have no problem allowing their son and his friends to stay the night but I thought it was a nice gesture that I normally wouldn’t have done. They certainly weren’t expecting it so I’d say it was a decent random act of kindness for the day.