The pause that refreshes

Where am I this week? In training -- on the receiving end for a week.

 This morning we spent half the day on communication styles. I apparently have an action oriented, emotive style -- they call it expressive.  Though on the survey I score somewhere between action oriented, and querying. That's actually a matter of training rather than proclivity. This morning's session was a review for me. I had similar training back in 1994, and I recall at the end of that, we each tacked at 2-blocker with a dot in one corner showing our "quadrant" up in each cube, as a reminder to other team members as to what their style was.

It was quite a fun session, and I might even have to turn my colleagues onto it. I'd forgotten about half of what I learned the first go-round.  After that team finished it's project, we were sent off to other projects, and the skills just didn't stick without the reinforcements we had set up for ourselves.  I'll need to try that again differently.

Yesterday was almost a whole day on communicating to leadership, with half the day spent on one communication tool, and the other half split over several others. I gave myself an extra homework assignment and applied several of those tools to my CDA R3 = HTML5 + Microdata idea. I've got to redo some things on my next presentation sets for them.   I realized that A) my first approach followed the pattern very well, but B) there were some gaps with respect to obstacles, and so now C) I simply need to readdress the gaps, reapplying what I just learned, rather than re-communicate the whole idea over again.

Today our class got to see how steam turbine generators are made.  It was like being live on the set of How It's Made, only for really BIG stuff.  Very cool.

In other news, I prepared a paper for a W3C workshop that Compares CDA Release 2.0 with HTML5 and Microdata (NOTE: If you are thinking about attending, sorry, the price of attendance was submitting a paper, and that deadline already passed). My paper was not only selected (which means I get to attend), but was also chosen for presentation. So now I get to tell some W3C geeks about what CDA has that HTML5 and Microdata are missing.  I've definitely missed my early XML days with some of those folks, even though I was much more on the periphery of XML standards than I am in Healthcare standards today.  After the workshop, I'll share more details.   Thanks, BTW to Gerald Buechelt at MITRE who alerted me to the workshop in the first place.  It was truly timely.

One example for missing pieces in HTML5+Microdata is a schema spec. I've been perusing JSON Schema lately, and I think that it simply needs to be reversed engineered back into HTML5 + Microdata as a format for Microdata schemas. That's just so sickly recursive I want to kick myself.

So, I've been off twitter mostly, and barely writing here.  The last two posts were "pre-recorded" on Sunday when I arrived.  The rest of the time I've just been a sponge.  It's been interesting thus far.  One person I sat next too yesterday was legally able to fly by himself before he could drive, and now designs and (flight) tests jet engines.  That's the kind of crowd I'm sitting with this week.  It really isn't all that more intense than the usual gang of people that I hang out with, because they are all super-smart and capable, too.  But very few of these folk do anything at all with Healthcare.  For a week, that can be really refreshing.