Rob Hyodo

Nearing the end of my second week of unemployment, I have not accomplished much in the way of finding employment. I received a few more calls from former teammates and partners and have tracked some opportunities in a spreadsheet, but have not made any calls.

Instead, I have been able to extend my stays with family and friends and avoided any need to rush.

• I took a trip to Sacramento with friends who took a couple days off work to see a few bands play.
• Drove down to SoCal and celebrated my daughter’s Shichi-Go-San ceremony and had photos of her taken in traditional kimono, hairstyle and makeup. Absolutely beautiful!
• I spent time with friends in my scene at Bats Day at Disneyland, which was an absolute blast.
• Did a lot of photo editing!
• Installed Propellerheads Reason on my laptop so I can take my music editing on the go.
• I’m starting to help people with web projects, setting up WordPress blogs for them.

My unemployment still has not come through after nearly two weeks since I applied. I’ll need to call them tomorrow and get that squared away.

My time to myself so far has been quite refreshing. I haven’t yet become lazy to where I’m sleeping in until noon. As a matter of fact, I’ve only “slept in” (full eight hours of sleep) twice since my lay off. I’m staying productive and plan to travel a bit to places I’ve been meaning to go photograph, but couldn’t, given my schedule.

“Obama to be first African-American president Obama to be first African-American president”

This seems to be the headline for the past few hours. As an Obama supporter, I celebrated at my friends’ Election Night Gathering where we watched video streams as the announcement was made.

Shortly after the announcement that Barack Obama would be our next President, Senator John McCain gave a speech in Arizona which I thought was delivered with utmost respect to both Obama and the American people. This was the greatest speech I’ve heard from McCain and I have great respect for someone who’s fought as long and hard as he did, not only for this election, but for his service to the country. He addressed Arizona and the nation with magnificent grace!

President-elect, Barack Obama, then gave his speech. He is an inspirational speaker. There were moments where I actually felt a bit of pride in being an American again. I’ve not felt much American pride in a long time. It was a very forward-thinking speech that would speak of changes into the next hundred years.

“What’s better than watching history unfold? Being a part of it.”

I’d like to think that I was a part of making history today. I’m not working at the moment… what else could I do? this afternoon, I went to the San Jose Obama Campaign Office and for the first time ever, I volunteered to try to make a difference in this presidential campaign, using my personal phone to call people in swing states like Missouri and Colorado.

There were about 50 people there making calls and over 30,000 calls were made that day to likely Obama supporters  reminding them to vote. It seemed like shamelss telemarketing, but it was great when people said they voted for Obama and were excited about that themselves. But I had enough negative responses to know I’d never want to be a telemarketer.

To close the evening, we watched various video clips, monitored results and had drinks and snacks. Then we got into watching videos on YouTube, digressing into watching videos such as:

Twisted Sister - Oh Come All Ye Faithful

and

The Temple of Drum and Bass

on a large, Sony Bravia…

I’m voting for…

First off, I had a great weekend with my daughter sharing Halloween candy, watching movies, reading and writing (no arithmetic). It was eerily calm and relaxing and the rain was a nice touch. This morning, I drove her to school for the first time ever since moving to the Bay Area, which was great.

Here are a few things I accomplished today:

• Tied up some loose ends by emailing my former boss a list of things I was working on, the status of each item and where to find certain resources to keep them going.
• Spoke with a couple former colleagues who continue to offer support and help me start the search for job opportunities amongst people they know, even if just for the benefit of networking. (I took a lot of notes.)
• Researched details on some propositions for tomorrow’s election so I can make cast a more educated vote.
• Edit photos and post them on a site for a local group I belong to. This had been looming over my head for a week now.
• Set up a WordPress blog for my Dad’s business.

These are just a few things I felt worth noting.

Something I didn’t get to that I really needed to do… exercise! I’m going to hit the gym hard tomorrow! Tuesday night’s are usually reserved for capoeira, but a friend is having a BYOB Election Night Gathering where we’ll monitor the election results as they unfold.

The event is described as: “We’d like to watch the numbers roll in with a small gathering of friends, eat snacks, and drink (drink is essential!)”

As mentioned in my previous post, I was laid off yesterday from Technicolor Digital Content Delivery.

Hmmm,… I seem to have lost…

my job…

Taking it all in at the moment. More later…

I got myself a career coach today. I’ve always thought this would be beneficial. I’m new to my role, I’m georgraphically isolated from my division and I tend to do better when I know that what I’m doing is the right thing. Otherwise, I tend to be hesitant and self-doubt can take over, making my efforts seem half-hearted, even to myself.

I was on a call with a peer on the East Coast and he suggested it. “That’s just what I need,” I thought to myself. Someone VP-level or higher and someone in a different business unit. Those were a couple of suggestions of who that mentor could be. I knew exactly who and phoned him. He gladly accepted.

I will continue on with my every-day activities, but be more mindful and take note of things I question. I should have a couple of pages of random thoughts by mid-October! this should be a good starting point for kicking off my career coaching. My mentor and I are having lunch next time I’m at headquarters in Burbank.

We’ve all made mistakes while working too fast, often when trying to meet a deadline. I can attest to the old saying, “Haste makes waste.”

I sprinted through a task which I should have walked through to ensure I met all objectives. At one point, it seems I did complete the task as intended as I checked my work… on a staging site. I then moved my work to the production site, but the update failed to complete. I did not check the contents of the staging site.

I did the work on a Sunday evening and was eager to meet some friends. I also wanted to get the work done, but was watching the clock. You could say my priorities were mixed as I tried to accomplish two tasks and both were important to me.

Yet I failed at both. I erred on my delivery of my task and I was late for my evening engagement. To ensure success in at least one task, I could have either A) let my buddies know I could be late, or may not come at all and ensure the work was done properly or B) put work by the wayside (it was the weekend).

A) would be my choice. I value my friends’ trust in my to be there when I say I would, but I also need to value the trust my colleagues have in me.

To slow down, breath, check and double check my work would have ensured success and preserved trust amongst my work peers. Then a simple call my friends to say, “I’m on my way,… had to take care of business,”… they would have understood AND I could be a much safer driver! (Rushing to get “over the hill” from San Jose to Santa Cruz is not safe!)

Lesson learned to preserve trust and turn out quality.

In February this year, I had a work objective to integrate and maintain a blog into our company website. After receiving feedback that a senior in the organization would not approve, I took it upon myself to register a domain (ecdguy.com) and blog on my own.

I got nowhere fast. It was something I had to do with my own money and time after hours.

Furthermore, I felt my domain name was goofy. I think anything-guy.com sounds silly. I then decided to use my existing robhyodo.com domain after obsessing over the “right” domain name.

I continued attempting to post, but industry news proliferates quickly and people have their favorite places for the news I would merely abbreviate.

Thus, upon reflecting on many things as I recover from illness this Labor Day weekend, I’ve decided to take back my own domain and let it evolve into something more personal (what a blog should be). I want to keep this blog related to my work experiences and rather than continuing to blog about online video, I will write about my experiences and learnings while working at any job (past, present and thoughts of future endeavors).

I do manage another blog (illumik.com) where my posts are closer to the heart. There, I write more freely about my thoughts, reflections and passions, keeping things more in-the-moment. (Oh, and I have a private LiveJournal for my closest friends where I share more intimate details…)

Maintaining my two blogs can be an indication that I haven’t quite figured out my life career goals and that’s ok. Most people still have 1) work and 2) passions, which are kept separate. My goal (and the goal of many) is to merge the two in some way. We’ve heard it all before: Make money doing what you enjoy doing.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy what I’m doing, but I have passions that, if I could earn a living from it, wouldn’t seem like work at all. And my work would be so much a part of my life that my “work day” would never end. I would simply do what I enjoy and earn a living from that. Doesn’t that sound nice??

Did you catch any of the Olympics over the weekend? If you did, chances are many of you were among the millions that watched it on NBCOlympics.com.

NBC secured exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympic games in the U.S. That’s satellite, cable and online. NBC paid the International Olympic Committee nearly $900 million for this exculsivity. Staggering? Yes. But not a bad deal once you consider the numbers and the advertising dollars to be made from this.

NBC reports 4.8 million unique users were on the site Saturday, generating 62.7 million page views for that day alone. My 7-year old daughter quickly became annoyed with the ads, however, without even knowing what they were.

We searched for the “Live” games and ads preceded the stream of the games. My daughter exclaimed, “I thought we were gonna watch swimming!” “We are,” I replied, to which she asked, “Then why is it,… this?”

I explained to her that these were “commercials.” And we saw plenty of them from G.E. Once she knew they were commercials, any time we switched to another live stream and saw an ad, she would say, “Ugh! Why do they keep showing this? It’s the same thing!” lol

Annoyance to a 7-year old aside, I enjoyed the experience. If you can get through a pre-roll the video itself is not bad. The value is the option to watch any live event you want. Too bad we’re a little behind on broadband speeds here in the U.S. Full-screen HD of this kind of video would have been sweet!

Something else I want to point out is the fact that they used Silverlight! Given the ubiquity of Flash, I thought this was a brave move on NBC’s part. There have been a few complaints (i.e. older Macs that aren’t Intel-based), but it seems as a whole, the Silverlight integration has been successful. I see this as a huge win for Microsoft/Silverlight.

I’d love to see the statistics of this online venture when this is all done. So far, it seems largely successful for NBC, Microsoft and Limelight who’s providing the streaming.

Update: I do have to point out a metadata flaw my daugher noticed. She wanted to watch archived video of  “Athens 2004: Russia Group - 5 Ribbons” but cliking on it played the video that preceded it in the UI (”Athens 2004 - Russia Group - 3 hoops, 2 balls”). The thumbnail image was corretly displayed; just not the text.