Yesterday, we launched www.sharezen.com and I have moved my blogging efforts over to the ShareZen blog. I hope you’ll join me over there.

Here are my first few blog posts that you will find on the ShareZen blog:

1. Some Things Are Just Better Owned Together

2. A Few Good Resources for Shared Plane Owners

3. The Role of Email in the ShareZen System

4. Communication and The Art of Plane Partnerships

Now, we have all experienced campaigns that have turned out far more successful than we anticipated and sometimes joke that it’s a good problem to have. But having your site go down when traffic is high is no joke at all! If we consider what it costs for an organization or company to acquire a new member or prospective customer, having a site go down during a spike can cost thousands of dollars and/or result in missed opportunity to capture many people who would add to an organizations power base in a very short order.

As I was talking with Dave it dawned on me that someone should invest a little time thinking about the most common causes of accidents in our work and on our site and how they can be avoided. It seems to me that campaign managers and site administrators should have a sort of campaigners flight bag with checklist that campaign managers can use as they pilot their efforts.

In pilot training, pilots learn a lot about accident chains. The basic fact of the matter is, the VAST majority of airplane accidents are caused by a chain of events. When you look at NTSB reports, or read about accidents in the paper, you hear things like “controlled flight into terrain” and “loss of control due to icing”. These sorts of things are almost always the culmination of a chain of events. We pilots spend an inordinate amount of time reading about accidents to learn about what when wrong and how those things can be avoided.

In flying there are many tools, rules and customs that are designed to help pilots remain aware of the chain of events taking place, identify when/where things are not right, and take action to break the chain before it is too late.

Anyone who has ever flown in the right or left seat of a plane knows that Pilots use checklists for just about everything. The reason we use checklists, is because they help ensure we don’t miss the little stuff. They are a tool for helping us break accident chains before they happen.

In my flight bag, I have about 40 checklists that cover ever phase of flight and possible emergency. The first checklist is a “Day Before” planning checklist and the last one has everything I need to remember to do after engine is shut down and I am about the put the plane away.

I firmly believe we need this same sort of thing for the people who are piloting campaigns. Over the next few weeks, I am going to start creating some of the checklist that I believe should be in an online campaigners flight bag. We’ll see what I can come up with. I would love your input on what this campaigner’s flight bag should include.

Here are the major categories that come to my mind emediately:

Campaigners Flight Bag

• Campaign Planning Checklist
• Before the Campaign Launch
• Launching the Campaign
• First day of campaign
• Campaign Monitoring and Kaizen
• Emergency Checklists

As I hit the send button in Quicken, I couldn’t help but compare my confidence in the two entities. The truth of the matter is, if I had to pick which of the two entities had the higher likelihood of making the greatest positive impact on the world, I would have to choose the for-profit startup. Now, it’s important to keep in mind the statistical likelihood of success of these kinds of start-ups to fully grasp the gravity of that feeling.

As a person who works every day for some of the greatest non-profit orgs on the planet, this feeling sparked a bit of a crisis of confidence. I have been thinking a good bit about that click lately and about what made me feel so conflicted that day.

1. I realized that day that I had dug harder into the fundamentals of the start-up than the non-profit. I know more about the management team, their market, their financials, their advisers, and their strategy than I do about the non-profit entity’s. I am pretty sure that the nonprofit that got my check has never received the kind of scrutiny that the startup has undergone of the past months.

2. The nonprofit who got my money has been doing the same work for over 20 years and yet does not appear to have the successes, the customer/member base or the power that would be expected of a company that has been around for that long. Sure, there have been some wins, but really, 20 years!

3. I know that at some point down the road, I will know whether or not my investment in the start-up has been successful. I don’t believe I will ever know if the non-profit will provide a positive return on my investment.

I went ahead and hit the button that day and made both investments because I said I would. But I realized that day that I need to change the way I approach my investments in non-profit ventures. The truth of the matter is, for people like me, the line between for-profit and non-profit can appear so blurred today that it is nearly impossible to distinguish the difference in many cases. There are things that need doing which for-profit entities can not do and there are things that non-profit entities will never do.

We all have limited resources and when I consider the impact that my resources (time and money) are having on my great grandchildren’s planet, I can’t help but want to see the largest return on my investment possible.

I am not sure yet where this whole train of thought will take me, but I can say with confidence that the way I deploy my resources will look different next year that it did this year.

1. Routers: These pages are designed to quickly move a visitor along to content they are looking for and that we want them to find.

2. Engagers: Designed to get visitors to something, anything, on the website. Page the provides a compelling experience that moves people down an engagement path. (awareness, perception change, participation)

3. Educators and Explainers: Designed to educate or explain a particular issue, project, program, or other effort.

4. Convincers: Designed change the perception of target audience. (perception change phase)

5. Closer: Designed to get visitors to enter into an engagement process. Focuses on “selling” the visitor on a particular course of action or call to action.

6. Converters and Checkouts: Pages that are part of whatever is necessary to gather information/agreements and get a finished lead or transaction via the site.

7. Re-Assurers: Pages designed to reassure a visitor about some potentially problematic issue or concern (legal, privacy policy, etc)

9. Tools: Pages designed to collected or provide information as part of a non-sales or closure process.

10. Completers: Thank you pages, etc.

11. Sponsors: Pages or series of pages which themselves provide value to your organization, but whose content is mostly provided by a third party or partner.

This is 15 minutes well worth spending!

Do not litter on my ground.
Care for me.

Take care of my animals and plants.
Compost, it is cool to see the worms.

I want to live so you can live too.

I am a big part of you
So take care of me.
I do a lot of things for you.

Water me.
So my plants can grow.
Help me grow.

I want to give you food and water.

And I want to be gentle to you
So be gentle to me.

Recycle as much as you can.

Always remember to care for me.
And be nice to me.

And I grow lots of things for you
Take care of my oceans and sea creatures.
Even though you cannot see them,
They’re still part of the world.

By Haley Bernard

The reason I am doing this is that over the past couple months, I have spent a decent about of time reading articles and person accounts about LASIK and was surprise that none of them quite fit my profile as a person who’s eye correction was nearly entirely astigmatism.

My Eyes Before:

1.    I wore glasses for about 20 years. I first started wearing glasses in junior high after I began suffering severe headaches from eye strain.

2.    My prescription was almost entirely astigmatic; in other words, I had nearly no other nearsighted or farsightedness to correct for.

Other options:

As I said above, my whole vision problem was caused by astigmatism. I won’t get into the details of astigmatism, but suffice to say that in my experience glasses have been about the only solution available for correcting astigmatism.

Quick side note on contacts: Contacts suck for astigmatism. The problem is, in order for contacts to correct astigmatism, they must be weighted in order to stay oriented on the eye in precisely the same way ALL of the time. Think about that… In order for contacts to work well for astigmatism, a thin, soft, rounded piece of plastic must stay EXACTLY in the same place over the eye at all time. No matter that the little thing is floating on a slippery wet ball that is moving around constantly, and has eyelids flapping up and down over it many times per minute… Long story short, this is an area where technology can only go so far.

Why Now

Over the past 10 years, I have asked several eye doctors about laser eye surgery. Time and again, I was basically told, “not yet.” The reason being, the surgery was not quite perfected for astigmatism. I was also seeing that the odds of ending up with “halos” were higher than I was comfortable accepting. The combination of these things kept me in a holding pattern. I figured eventually the technology would reach the point where the decision would tip for me.

Then, about three months ago, I read an article in a flying magazine that pointed out that NASA has approved Custom All-Laser LASIK for use on astronauts. The article talked about the latest technology, called WaveFront. To make a long story short, after doing a bit of goggling for more information, I decided to set up an appointment at the Casey Eye Institute to see what I could learn about my own eyes.

The Initial Visit:

My initial visit was about 3 weeks ago, when I went in for a preliminary exam. This is about a 3 hour full exam. This includes having some pictures taken of your eye using the WaveFront radar thingamajig.  This alone is worth the cost of the visits if you ask me. I was able to get the technician to show me how it worked. Essentially, the cool thing about WaveFront is that it provides detailed pictures of what are known as “higher-level aberrations” and “lower-level aberrations.”  These are essentially imperfections in your eyes. As I recall, I had about 13% higher-level aberrations.

A quick side note: Turns out that my sister had gone to high-school with my doctor (Dr. Rick Fraunfelder) , which made for some fun conversations but I’ll skip those here

In the days before WaveFront, LASIK essentially applied whatever your glasses correction was to your eye. Today, this is still the case, but the laser also corrects the aberrations; making your eyes better not only to the degree that glasses can, but also in ways that correct for the aberrations.

This is all good and fine for those of us who like the idea of having laser perfect eyes, but the real benefit is that WaveFront LASIC also reduces the likelihood of negative side affects such as halos.

Anyway, on that initial day, the technician and doctor took a bunch of pictures of my eyes, poke at them, prodded them, put drops in them and otherwise checked to see that my eyes were well suited for the procedure. They also honed my prescriptions.

An interesting little tidbit is that they look to see how thick you cornea is. As I recall, they like see corneas that are thicker than 125ish (can’t recall the exact number). The procedure typically takes of 12 to 20 microns (again, these are my very loose numbers)…. In my case, I was starting with 200+ microns of corneal material.

Decision:

The decision was a no-brainer for me. I have had several friends who have had LASIK and was not overly concerned about the risks having done my research… I set up the appointment for the procedure two weeks after the initial exam. Cost would be ~$4000…

Day of the Procedure:

I am not much for formalities or drama, so I had my lovely wife, Sara, drop me off at OHSU at 8:30 last Wednesday morning. The doctor has tried to give me a prescription for Valium to calm my nerves the day of the procedure and Vicodin (sp?) to take for the rest of the day to sleep off the worst of the recovery time that day. I declined both. In hindsight, I might have taken the Vicadin, but I am not sure.

8:30am – The technician takes 5 more pictures of each eye to make sure they have a prefect picture to work from.

8:40am – The technician put some numbing stuff into my eyes for the first time; they would continue doing this until the procedure was over.

8:45am –The technician drew some dots on my eyes that the laser would use to orient my eye. You see, the laser tracks your eyeball, it your eye moves, the laser adjusts.

9:00am – The doctor gets started. The first part of the procedure is when the doctor tapes open your eye, puts a little suction cup thing on your eye ball, and then put you under a simple looking machine that cuts the flap in the eye ball survey layer. This doesn’t really hurt, but it’s not something you would want to do on a regular basis. Think of it as being a bit like getting a filling: Actually, it not quite as bad a getting a filling.  Total time per eye: 15 seconds. The good news is that even if I did need to have an adjustment to my eyes after the procedure, I would NOT have to do this again. Apparently, the doctor can use the same flap again in the future. It sounded like this is the case for ever, but I may be wrong about that.

9:05am – I walked over to the LASIK table and lay down. Things were a little blurry, but not bad. I give the doctor a hard time about getting it right the first time.

9:10am – The laser is fully calibrated and lined up… Doctor flips back my eye flap (using a tool called a Flap Flipper, by the way) and tells me to look at the light. I do… Right eye first… time in the machine 57 seconds.

9:12 – Onto the left eye. Same routine. Except on this eye, I was trying to breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell of burning eye (it sounds FAR worse than it is) but non-the-less, I thought I would be smart and just breath through my mouth… But, half way through the procedure the machine stops and beeps. Not a lovely feeling… The doc tells me to lift my chin and the laser gets back to work… Total time: 59 seconds (plus 1 for my little chin incident).

9:15 – The technician puts on a pair of goggles that I am supposed to wear until the next morning when I come back for a checkup.

9:17 – The world looks fine and my eyes don’t hurt yet. I stand up and walk out the door. Call Sara who is already on her way.

9:35 – Home I go. I take a couple Advil and lay down in bed knowing that the numbing drops will wear off soon…. They do!!!!

First three hours – My eyes are a bit sore. The run when I open the. The doctor had told me to keep them shut for the first 4 to 6 hours, but I am not very good at listening to directions. I take off the goggles occasionally to dry my eyes, which are tearing quite a bit.

Hour 6 – My left eye still really hurts when I open it. But I try anyway… Bad idea… But now I am starting to wonder; could I have moved the little flap thing? The worse part about the day was just worrying that I could have dislodged the little flap.

6pm – Damn, my left eye is actually worse than it was a couple hours back… I call the on-call doc to ask what he thinks… he tells me to just wait until the morning, there is no risk of doing harm…

8pm – I fall asleep for the night.

Thursday:

1am – I wake up and my eyes don’t hurt… I take of the goggles and the world looks GREAT. Wow… is that it?

6:30 am – My 4 year old son comes into my room and snuggles with me a bit.  We get up for the day. By the point, I can’t put the goggles back on… Sorry doc, I just couldn’t do it.

8:00am – I go back into the doctors office and they check my eyes… 20/15, both eyes. They given me two types of eye drops to take 4-times per day for a week and another set to take for up to a month. Apparently they slow down the healing processes, which is good.

I took the rest of the day off, sort-of. I only did occasional work on the computer, a conference call, and a single in-person meeting.

Friday:

Life was back to normal. I had a 4-hour strategy session with Pacific Rivers Council and cleared out my email, etc.

Now: different people have different post-procedure experiences. I think my Wednesday was actually worse that most. It really did take me about 16 hours to get my eyes to a point where I could open them without pain.

Today:

I have no eye dryness other side affect. All is groovy.

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I’ll have to think about that a bit.

It’s hard to explain the unbelievable value of flying in a simulator to a non-pilot. The best I can do it say that I have now dealt with things in a near-to-real-life situation that I never expect (but always plan) to experience in the air.

Here are some of the things I came away from the weekend with:

1. I have now seen what many emergencies look and feel like and thus will be better able to know them if/when I see them.
2. Having faced a range of critical emergencies first hand, I am more confident than ever in my reactions.
3. I have now tried some things that I should not and will not ever do. The reason for “SHOULD NOT” is more clear than ever.
4. Working with a super qualified flight instructor, I learned a whole range of tips and tricks that I will take into every flight from now on.

The list of emergencies we faced included:

1. Loss of left magnetos during flight. (That’s not a life threatening thing, but there are some very interesting implications)
2. Loss of both magnetos during flight over mountains with no runway in sight… CAPS pulled successfully. Translated, loss of engine, pulled the chute!
3. Sudden and drastic drop in oil pressure followed by engine out. Landed safely back at KPDX, from which I had departed.
4. Sudden onset of night IFR flight (as is only possible in a simulator and horrible winds at the airport I diverted to; which resulting in my going around twice before landing. I was literally sweating by the time I was done with this one.
5. Loss of prop governor in climb: nursed the plane back to the airport for a safe landing.
6. Loss of PFD during IMC. Boy do I love that Auto Pilot in times like that. (Translation – Well now, I am in the clouds and the instrument that tells me which direction is up, just went away… Fortunately, there are solid options for dealing with this and not ending up like the son of a president)
7. Sudden loss of control surface resulting in spin over water. CAPS pulled immediately. In this case, the instructor just removed my wing so that I would non-ceremoniously enter a crazy spin to test my reaction time for identifying the situation and pulling the chute.)
8. Overweight take off at a high-density altitude runway… No fun, not going to happen again.

Other lessons learned.

1. I fly over water from time to time up around the San Juan Islands; I will be buying flotation devices for me and passengers to wear.
2. I learned a number of new tricks with the Garmin that I was unaware of before.
3. Formation flying is TOUGH!!!
4. Countless little pearls of wisdom from a guy with 5000 hours flying. The best part about this was that the guy is my favorite kind of professional… a geek. I love geeks of all stripes, even pilot geeks.