Is Anything Obvious

May 6, 2012 Leave a comment

Jupiter Rising on FlickrI took this picture while on the beach in Florida, after dinner at one of our company events. Some of the people nearby were watching me try to setup my camera on a mini-tripod, and I heard several comments like “I love the reflection on the waves” and “look how the moon is backlighting the clouds”, but nobody guessed what I was actually trying to capture. If you look below and to the right of the moon, there’s a white dot that looks like a bad pixel – that’s Jupiter! While all the focus was on our planet, our moon, our ocean and our atmosphere, most people simply ignored the biggest planet in our solar system.

Truth be told, I’m no expert on obvious. My daughter was old enough to realize this for herself, when I pointed out to her that Kanga and Roo (in the Disney Channel’s Winnie the Pooh), were kangaroos – the connection had only then occurred to me. Sad as that fact may be, I think I do understand certain obvious things that many of the people I read about, hear about and periodically encounter seem to miss. For instance, I think it’s obvious that we should continue to explore the universe beyond our atmosphere. Despite the benefits that the space program delivered to the rest of our economy, the recent news from NASA is all about how they are depositing the fleet of Space Shuttles at three famous museums and how it may be a decade until we return to space in a NASA-build vehicle. Sorry, that’s just wrong. I was still in single-digits when President Kennedy spurred this nation to the challenge of putting a man on the moon, and he simultaneously spurred an interest in math and science in me. Today, we lament the lack of students and graduates in this country in those fields, but we ignore the connection between what we want and what we do.

As I look back on the various things that have been in flux and transition during my lifetime, I feel like I may be on the event horizon of a black hole. When I was a child, everything and everybody seemed to be looking forward and outward. Today, we seem to be retreating to smaller and smaller interests, more narrowly defined goals and a view of the world as if the scientific facts we’ve uncorked during the previous 50 years are still a mystery. We have communication technology that actually lets us share and discuss ideas with people around the world on a continuous basis, but we have governments from cities all the way up to countries considering how to block those communication channels. Political candidates seem woefully unconcerned about even the smallest of larger issues, and unbelievably compulsive about the most trivial things. The people who occupy leadership roles in this country follow the narrow interests of their financial supporters as if to step off that path would be to wander into a minefield. We look backward to try to find ways to fight the battles we have already lost, and we seem willing to ignore the future battles I think we are uniquely capable of winning. My pet example is manufacturing. So many people talk about why we are losing jobs, how we need to stop losing jobs, and how horrible losing these jobs has been for our economy and our future. If we remain a capitalistic economy, there is simply no way we are going to bring most of today’s manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, there’s no way China can stop those jobs from moving to places with even cheaper labor forces. The simple truth is nobody wants to pay more money for the stuff they buy; but what about the next generation of manufacturing jobs?

Why aren’t our politicians challenging and supporting businesses in this country to leapfrog today’s manufacturing process and create the next generation of good paying jobs in this country. Why aren’t we setting unattainable goals and then supporting the people who will achieve them in their efforts. Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” why do we continue to ignore this aspect of his legacy. We have an educational system that remains largely unchanged since I was a student, and the best our government seems to be able to do is make us spend more time testing children and then arguing over whose funds should be cut (schools or teachers) when children fail those tests. We have created an environment where stepping outside the box would be financial suicide and where success from trying a new technique will go unnoticed or perhaps punished.

Over 10 years ago, I donated three used computers to a middle school teacher in our town who taught special needs students. He had complained that these kids were uncomfortable working in the crowded environment of the Media Center and they were missing out on a valuable resource. The teacher spent his own money on a printer and a network switch, and on a Saturday morning, we configured a network in his classroom. The results, according to the teacher were amazing. Three months later, an administrator stuck a Board of Education inventory tag on each device and moved them all into the Media Center.

Einstein also said, perhaps when he was frustrated that people didn’t understand the first quote, that: “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

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Our Lame Imaginations

April 7, 2012 2 Comments

clip_image002The night before I started writing this, I Sound Hounded “Kind and Generous” as it was playing in my favorite bar. I didn’t need the information, I am a Natalie Merchant fan, but I wanted to see how much things had really changed in 18 years. Back in the mid-90’s, I asked my administrative assistant who was singing the song that was playing on her radio. My assistant was young, hadn’t worked very long for me, and apparently felt that I have given her a direct order. She called the radio station in a mild panic, telling them “my boss needs to know who was singing in that last song…” The answer was Natalie Merchant, and the song, “These Are Days” from MTV Unplugged is still one of my favorites. Who knew that in less than 20 years, I would be able to point my phone toward the speakers and get all that information delivered wirelessly?

This isn’t one of those “back in my day” kind of posts. This is more a lament about the lack of, and suppression of imagination. I chose the example above to lead into this post, because I wonder if I would have that option on my phone if it hadn’t been for Steve Jobs. I wonder how long it would have taken for the plodding stream of product development in other companies to bring us to this point, if Apple hadn’t raised the bar by an order of magnitude. Businesses like the modern day Microsoft seem to look at product lines like a bus route. Maybe they have an idea where all the stops are, but they aren’t in any hurry to get to them. Artists and scientists tend to think more in terms of the bus jumping a 50’ gap in the freeway like the one driven/piloted by Sandra Bullock in the movie Speed.

John Mancini, President of AIIM, wrote a really good piece on The Future of Work, in which he ponders a number of very valid questions about the disconnect between business and anything close to the leading edge of technology. I worry more about the question raised in one of the comments, the fact that we are witnessing a dramatic shortage of software developers to take advantage of this technology. I think that part of the problem is the lack of imagination among parents and the suppression of imagination in children. If you’re looking for the data behind that claim, you can stop reading, the best I have is anecdotal evidence collected, well, by me. I have plenty of stories, but I’ll offer just one:

When my daughter was very young, we let her join a play-group after church service. It was a nice group, run by sweet well-intentioned women, but Faith didn’t like it. It seems when they were allowed to take a toy, Faith took the “stacking cups” and began to play with them as she did at home, where they were among her favorite toys. The woman in charge admonished her for “doing it wrong” – the cups were meant to be stacked or nested, nothing else. Faith knew how they worked, but would often stack those cups in inelegant ways, hide things under them or use them for support structures with blocks and other “building” toys. Years later, she dug them out of a toy box to use as trestle supports for her Lego Train.

We didn’t object to Faith breaking the rules because the rules seemed stupid. My parents had never been strict enforcers of the rules of play, whether I was using Army Men on a chess board, randomly assembling Erector Set components or using Chick Peas as ammo in my slingshot. My father seemed to enjoy it when we would think beyond the obvious, except when it came to tools; he was rather anal about the proper use of tools. I remember though that he encouraged us to read, frequently reminding us that “if you can read, you can do anything.” I remember when I asked him if I could take a computer programming course in summer school between 8th and 9th grade. It wasn’t going to be an easy thing to coordinate, but he said “it looks like computers will be important in your lifetime” and he made the arrangements. That was 1967, and I have worked with computers ever since. I was amazed that I could dial-into a computer at the University of Pittsburgh from our Junior High School. I couldn’t imagine then that one day I would be sitting in my family room with a more powerful computer on my lap, but I actually think my father could imagine that. He was a mailman, and he would tell people who would ask me if I wanted to be a mailman, that he didn’t think that people would still be walking/driving around delivering mail in the future.

As technology becomes more advanced and as science unlocks more mysteries, it becomes more important for parents to help keep their children’s minds open to endless possibilities. Parents need to demand more challenging activities in public schools, not just for the high school kids on the FIRST team, but for every child, as early as kindergarten. Stop checking off the boxes on the bucket list of today’s college application. Let your kids explore, experiment and play and prepare for the tomorrow that you can’t imagine is coming.

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Beyond the Chasm

March 30, 2012 1 Comment

clip_image002Laurence Hart recently warned on his excellent Word-of-Pie blog that we should not count the PC out too soon. He pointed out in the title that “Mobile Devices Sell Faster and Die Sooner”, a sentiment I agree with, but I would tack on “for now.” I would also add that a lot of those devices don’t die, they are handed down to other people, the way we used to handle laptops.

I had just returned from my trip to the AIIM Conference in San Francisco, which I extended by four days with a family visit in beautiful Iowa when I read @Pieword’s post. It struck me that during those 9 days of travel, I had used my laptop less than 6 hours, while I lost track of how often I was using my iPad. I think that is worth noting because I am an IT guy who never travels without a laptop.

I carry my laptop with me, always, because the responsibilities of my job include maintenance and support for the in-house applications that I developed, maintenance of our company website and the possible need to use some desktop applications that only run under Windows. However, since none of those things occurred, my laptop mainly stayed in the bag. I did use it to place 2 Lync calls to a coworker, and I used it to practice my PowerPoint presentation. AIIM supplied the hardware for the presentations during the conference, so my laptop never had to leave the hotel room. I could have placed those Lync calls on my iPhone, and I could have easily practiced my presentation from my iPad, I chose the laptop because, for the moment, it’s familiar.

In his book “Crossing the Chasm” author Geoffrey Moore talks about the technology adoption lifecycle and the work by Everett Rogers and others. It is from this work that we have the expression “early adopters”. Moore explores what he describes as a chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. I don’t know how Messer’s Moore and Rogers would describe tablet and smartphone adoption, but I think we are beyond the chasm on both. Oh sure, I’m surrounded by people clinging to their laptops, but a lot of them would rather use their iPad, and I will help them get to that point. The people most loyal to the complete PC model are the ones whose work day involves processing transactions or reporting on the transactions processed in our organization. These folks are using those applications that we developed, and those applications are not iPad ready – nor will they be anytime soon. Ironically, these were the first people in our organization to get computers of any sort, but the last people to get laptops. Other users, the ones who travel often and need the ability to stay connected to the mother ship, create content and give presentations, have been carrying laptops since before they were an affordable solution. I can remember a day when people preferred desktop computers because you could swap hard drives, add memory and install add-on cards with ease compared to a laptop. Desktops were more powerful and more versatile which meant that only travelers chose laptops, and they did it for the convenience.

Laptops grew to equal the power of business desktops several years ago, or they simply got beyond the point where it mattered; I can’t remember the last time, I ran out of disk space before retiring my computer. Frankly, I see the same trend today; tablets are becoming as good as laptops, or they are getting good enough to the point of it not mattering. For example, I use the App Photogene on my iPhone and iPad to edit digital pictures; I use Adobe Creative Suite on my laptop. For most of my photo editing work, Photogene does the job. The other way to look at that is to point out that I use very little of Photoshop’s rich feature set. The same can be said of my use of Microsoft Office, and I honestly think I use more features of Creative Suite and Office than most people I know. While my iPad will continue to encroach on my laptop’s capability, my laptop is stuck in a bigger-is-better model. I use Photogene instead of PhotoShop, because I can take the photo, edit the photo, email the photo and post the photo to Facebook from the same device. In fact, I can do ALL those things from within Photogene! My laptop tries to lure me in with the promise of better software, but increasingly, I find that I don’t need what it has to offer. Contrast the meager benefits with the fact that I have to carry a power brick, find a place to rest the laptop and wait forever for the thing to boot up, and it’s game-set-match iPad.

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Since Nobody Asked

March 19, 2012 2 Comments

imageLooking down the road to what appears to be a one-Windows-fits-all offering from Microsoft; I can say without hesitation, I dread the day it arrives. If you want to embarrass me, I’ll save you the trouble – I also said I didn’t want an iPad. Ironically, when I wrote that I didn’t want an iPad, I said that I was looking for the features Microsoft seems to be building into Windows 8 for tablets. What I failed to consider at that time is that I am a geek. I wanted those features, and I wanted the ability to build on that complex platform to give my users what I think they expect from me. It turns out, that most of my users don’t want that at all.

Since 1981, when first IBM PC came out, I have been giving my users something that was way more complicated, way more powerful and that demands way more knowledge than they wanted. In fact, most of the users that I support (work, friends, family) really don’t understand the PCs I provide to them or help them use. They learn specific applications and they use Windows the way a passenger uses a bus. The fact that Windows can do so much more than run Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer is lost on most users. In fact, most of the features of Word and Outlook go unused, and most users aren’t fully comfortable with Windows Explorer! If you want to test that, ask someone to change the default application for opening a file type – go ahead, I’ll wait.

For the first time, I am giving people something they want, like and understand – an iPad. Oh, I have some who complain that they can’t find their files, but they are in a minority that, amazingly no longer includes me. I don’t care where the files are. My apps always know where the files are, I can always open, delete and share those files, so why should I care where they actually reside? I was driving with a friend last week and I asked him if he felt the absence of a file system on his iPad was a drawback. He immediately replied: “it’s a blessing!”

Microsoft seems to be banking on the fact that users want more from a tablet; I doubt it. I think they want tablets to be, as Einstein said, "as simple as they can be, but no simpler" and for my money, and the money my boss trusts me to spend, I think Apple has nailed that with the iPad. The app that I developed for our iPhone and iPad users is dirt-simple to use, and I can honestly say that I’ve gotten more positive feedback on that app than any other piece of software I’ve ever written.

In fairness to Microsoft, maybe they do get it, maybe they know where this all has to go, but they also realize that there are a gazillion PCs out there running Windows and they can’t just throw the switch and change things. Microsoft is fighting momentum (conservation of energy) Einstein had something to say about that too. In fact, Einstein changed the law from conservation of energy to conservation of "mass-energy", recognizing that mass is converted to energy by E=mc2. One of the sad realities revealed by that simple equation is the amount of energy required to counteract momentum. So maybe the iPad is just a disruptive technology and Microsoft is fighting back the best way it can, or maybe Microsoft is trying to wring every last dollar out of its customer base at every turn and they are afraid to actually make life simpler for those who want it. A Windows world where some users have desktops and some laptops and some tablets, might be a nice place to live, if each user had what they want, and an operating system that fully exploited the box it was running on. Giving a desktop or laptop user a touch-based OS is like turning the on the sound on a TV in a sports bar – it’s a distraction that provides no benefit.

For almost 10 years, I used a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC. I loved those laptops; they worked as fully functional laptops and flipped around to create awesome slates. Unfortunately, the last model (M800) featured a full touch screen, even though Windows 7 was ill-equipped to take advantage of it. It caused me constant grief as people would point to stuff on my screen and cause actions to occur. When I tried to use the stylus for input, my palm was always doing something I wasn’t trying to do. After I got my first iPad, I ditched the Portege in favor of a lighter, no-touch ThinkPad.

Windows is like a railroad that never unloads its trains. The trains run for a while and then they stop and add a few more cars. The routes get more complex, serving more and more customers. The trains have gotten longer, carrying a wider and wider variety of loads. Microsoft seems to think we want an N-gauge version of the whole Windows train. I think most people want a mix of unit trains (like the one shown above), light-rail, subways, buses, cars and bicycles, and I think we are right to want those things.

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How Did We Get Here?

March 10, 2012 6 Comments

imageWhen I was a young boy, my father woke me up one Saturday to assist him on an errand. He was a mailman, and a woman on his mail route needed to have her rural style mailbox replaced after it was damaged by a snow plow. At first, I thought this was part of a mailman’s job, but my father explained that we were simply “doing the right thing.” The woman was a friend; she lived alone, and didn’t have anyone around who could do this task for her. My father reasoned that since we knew how to do it, had the time to spare and owned the necessary tools, it was something we should do. He dragged me along to help, to learn about digging post-holes removing broken posts, and more importantly, about helping others. I have had many opportunities as an adult, to use all of those lessons.

Partly because of that lesson, and the way it and others like it shaped my outlook on life, I found myself in a most unbelievable situation a few months ago. Several businesses in our building were suffering from an Internet outage due to the failure of a fiber switch that we all share. In addition to this group, a technician from the carrier was on site as well as a representative of the building owner. I am being purposefully vague, for reasons which will reveal themselves as we proceed. The switch was bouncing between a powered-on state and a powered-off state. The carrier technician explained the problem as likely being related to the building electrical circuit, despite the fact that other devices plugged into the same outlet, were not affected. Nobody accepted that conclusion, but he would not budge. He said “I would have to see the switch fail while connected to an UPS, before I could recommend swapping out the unit.”

That seemed to everyone present to be the best way to proceed. If there was an intermittent power supply issue, the UPS would probably be able to keep the switch alive during the failures until an electrician could be called. If the switch failed while connected to the UPS, the carrier would swap it out. Great, all in favor of installing an UPS raise your hands – no hands raised. One by one, the people involved invoked the barrier du jour these days “I need to check with legal.” In similar fashion, legal(s) concluded not to proceed. The rationale was simple: “at this point, the problem belongs to the carrier, whether they plan to act on it or not. As soon as we unplug the unit and plug it into our UPS, the problem(s) extend to us.” Scenarios possible and bizarre were offered: “what if the UPS fails?” “What if the UPS damages the switch?” “What if the switch fails to power back on when we plug it into the UPS?” No, we weren’t heading down that road, unless everyone agreed to indemnify everyone else.

I’m not sure if this is the case for you, but for most employees, indemnification is the third rail of business contracts. Indemnification takes otherwise logical arguments away, and substitutes an indefensible hit to your company’s bottom line. I am not even allowed to sign a contract that includes an indemnification clause.

When did this happen? When did we become so afraid of the litigious spirit of our neighbors that we simply stopped cooperating? In CT, we have a Good Samaritan Law (CGS § 52-557b), that protects “certain” individuals while providing “some types” of emergency medical aid. A quick read of the 2,500 odd words making up the law and its caveats didn’t turn up any references to Uninterruptable Power Supplies or Internet connections. Do we really need to create a Good Samaritan law for problem solving? Do I have to worry about jump-starting a stranger’s car at the grocery store? What about the advice I gave local high school students at Career Day, is that going to haunt me when they don’t get into the college of their choice or they don’t get the job they want? What if my neighbor needed his mailbox replaced?

I wonder if all the businesses that send their managers and wanna-be managers to problem solving seminars tell them “…but always check with legal before actually solving any problems.” I guess they don’t have to; five people, from five different companies, representing a broad cross-section of skills and responsibilities; all knew not to solve the electrical problem described above. Even though we all agreed that the solution involved a device that one of us had and even though the device in question was made by a company (APC) who is arguably the best in the business. We were afraid (or made to feel afraid) of the potential cost of doing the wrong thing. Ironically, nobody – none of us and none of the lawyers – was interested in considering the very real cost of doing nothing.

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Commodity Pricing

February 8, 2012 Leave a comment

clip_image002Working in the world of technology (I know, this is supposed to be my non-technical blog) I hear a lot about the fact that computers and servers and related services have become commodities. I think this began when IBM decided to stop making ThinkPads, you know the laptop everybody wanted to own, but the commodity mentality has gained momentum in recent years as the economy has added pressure to budget decisions. I have to make these decisions for two very important groups of people, the company I work for and my family. With respect to the company I work for, I have a fiduciary responsibility to make the best choice when spending their money. When it comes to my money, I have a personal but entirely similar responsibility. In both cases, I am not driven by price when buying so-called commodity items. If you tend to consider price first, ask yourself these three questions:

Are you buying a commodity or a product? – Keep in mind that from some vantage point, everything is a commodity; are you buying a gallon of paint or 40,000 tons of pigment? If you are buying a product, your first consideration should be “what do I want?” Of course that question is followed closely by “what can I afford?”, but it still should be the first thing you consider. If there is a misalignment between the answers to those two questions, your next choice is to change what you want or save your money until you can afford what you want. I know, “save my money until…” has fallen out of favor, but it remains a valid approach. Before you start considering substituting something equivalent to what you want, consider whether you are talking about equivalent or similar. I can find cheaper hand planes that look like the Stanley Low-angle block plane pictured here, but planes that are equivalent cost just about the same. Before you start considering “finding what I want at a lower cost”, read the next two questions.

Is there a difference in what you are buying due to the vendor you have selected buying commodities vs. products? – This might be a hard question to answer, since you usually can’t tell what is inside the box and technically, it may just be a much more fine-tuned version of the equivalent vs. similar question. I don’t mean to pick on Home Depot, but the discussion thread linked here illustrates the thinking on this question. I have two personal examples that speak to that distinction: 1) I purchased a faucet from a big-box store and found that the mixing valve was nylon, not brass as in the “same” model faucet at a local hardware store. As the discussion shows, it was a slightly different model number. 2) Well, it’s hard to pick a specific example, but suffice it to say, I buy building material from a local lumber yard. They beat the big boxes on quality and, unless I’m buying one 2×4, on price. I do have an example from a purchase for my company that is on point with the question. Many years ago, when memory prices were extremely high, I bought a large quantity of modules from a low-price vendor. This guy was simply shuffling chips from a container to a small bag, and when I discovered several bad modules, I also discovered the answer to my question. This vendor was not buying for quality, he wasn’t standing behind his product, no, he was simply extending a wholesale purchase opportunity to me at a slight markup.

Is there a difference in the service you receive after buying a product from a vendor who is selling a commodity? – If you expect the answer to this question to be “no”, you live in a dream world. Before you start commenting about great service from a big-box store, re-read the question. I have heard many stories about the high quality of Home Depot service, and I believe those stories because Home Depot buys commodities but sells products. The guy I bought my memory from was buying and selling commodities. I know that I can get a less expensive Internet provider for our company, but it would be through a company that is selling bandwidth, not Internet service. I know that I can find a less expensive source for servers, switches and other network infrastructure, but again, I would be getting a bunch of equipment and not much more. I can register a domainclip_image004 name for as little as $2 or as much as $7.49 (with the mix of vendors I’m familiar with) and even on that simple product, there can be a difference in the service you receive. Every board in the lumber order we bought to complete an addition on our house was straight and all but two were defect-free. The two that were cracked were replaced in the next order, without my ever having to return them.

The perfect mix is finding a good vendor who is selling the exact product you want, at a fair price. Changing any one of those terms without affecting one or both of the other terms is asking the impossible.

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Something Will End in 2012

January 15, 2012 4 Comments

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I’m not a great believer in the value of the Mayan calendar, so I am preparing to celebrate another Christmas. On the other hand, I do believe that some things will come to an end in 2012, and these I can predict with relative certainty.

Social Networks – Simply put, as I enter 2012, I feel like something has to go. I am tired of updating multiple networks with the same stuff, and I am tired of reading the same updates by others. As I look around, I think Facebook is the most likely network to suffer, albeit not much, by my departure; in effect, I have already departed. Facebook feels to me like AOL after most people discovered that they could just access the Internet. I rarely update Facebook, and I think my anemic number of contacts on Google+ has exceeded those on FB. I guess I would maintain a presence on FB, if that was the only way to stay connected with some people, but I don’t see much activity from me. Klout, however, is actually likely to see me cancel my account. I’m not sure what benefit I receive from Klout, I don’t care about my score and I don’t care about anybody else’s score. I connected and I have remained for as long as I have because I was curious. Now I feel like I’ve peeked inside the box several times, and it’s still empty. I will likely stay a member of LinkedIn, but I see less and less value in that membership. If Facebook is the new AOL, LinkedIn is surely the new CompuServe.

Fewer News Sources – This prediction has already come true; I receive news from fewer sources today than I did on December 31, 2011. I began by scratching several eNewsletters off the list, and I am expanding that to free print magazine subscriptions. Any service that requires me to register for each whitepaper I download will disappear from my inbox in 2012. Any newsletter that consistently serves me old news, rehashed by alleged experts, is also marked for removal. Simply put, if you can’t put “news” in your newsletter, you’re gone. Also on this list is the New York Times. Seriously, I might agree to pay for an electronic NYT, but not the price they expect. Lately, I use the electronic edition as a search tool – I read their headlines and then search for stories elsewhere. Also, I am flummoxed by their pricing plans. While we are beginning to see technical parity emerge across platforms, they want to set pricing by platform, charging more for smart device access than Internet access. If you want to charge for your content, that’s fine, but why does it matter how I get there?

(Would be) Vendors – I have been losing patience with vendor marketing efforts for a few years, but I think this is the year I turn up the heat, get rude, and start sending more people to voice mail. If you’re a vendor and you’re reading this, here are a few tips:

· 15 minutes way more than I want to waste listening to a cold call.

· I am not interested in changing anything for you. Your product might be great, but if I’m happy using a competitor’s product or service, why would I change? If you can’t answer that question with a breakthrough answer, say thanks and hang up. If you can, answer that question, make sure you’re not lying – I am not going to save 73% by using your VIOP service, unless I am replacing a network of rotary dial phones.

· Please don’t insult my intelligence by telling me that you “will have a representative in my area next week” – if you thought there was a sale, your rep would take me to lunch today.

· Don’t pretend to know me, especially when you don’t and even more especially if you could. I.E. Stop asking me for my title even after I registered your product. Stop telling me that you wanted to speak to me after seeing our website when you clearly haven’t read our website.

· You can keep sending me surveys, but stop reminding me that you sent one. If I didn’t fill it out, I have no intention of filling it out.

· Stop calling with a few questions that “are not in an effort to sell anything”, seriously, stop it!

· Understand that your actions matter too. I read about you. I pay attention to how you treat your employees, what your customers say about you. How the people in your branded vehicles drive, and how you support the community in which you thrive.

This just in: if I took your cold call and expressed little or no interest in your product, following up with an email tagged “Important” and asking for a read receipt is a sure fire way of ending up in my “Never Do Business With” folder. (This has happened, see picture above).

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My New Calendar

December 29, 2011 Leave a comment

clip_image002One of the gifts we always exchange at Christmas is calendars. Two staples in our house are an Irish Setter calendar and a Tuxedo Cat calendar. In addition to that are page-a-day calendars featuring Dilbert, Pearls Before Swine and, of course, the Pittsburgh Steelers. If we are to take the advice of researchers at Johns Hopkins, we could stop buying calendars forever – my, what a dumb idea!

What really amazes me about this idea is the pure juxtaposition of technology and time. Over 400 years, ago, people figured out how to adapt the calendar to match the passage of time as the Earth orbits the Sun. Today, armed with devices that are actually capable of doing date-math, we are advocating reducing accuracy in favor of something that, allegedly, is “far more convenient.”

“Everybody has to redo their calendars,” … “For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It’s completely unnecessary.”

That quote found in the article in Scientific American reminds me of the commercials for those oddball devices for washing your feet, or stirring your soup or grating cheese, more than anything that resembles scientific research. Seriously, how hard is it to “redo your calendar?” My Outlook calendar lets me schedule events on the same day, the same weekday, the same frequency between days, every other Tuesday, and any number of odd combinations I can dream up. In fact, I don’t do anything on a regular basis that my calendar hasn’t been able to accommodate. Further, I can’t begin to count the ways that their argument, that it would somehow be better if events always fell on the same day (“Christmas would always be on a Sunday”), is stupid. Even if you ignore the Christian bias in making our holiday always fall on a Sunday, and the impact that would have on every other faith’s calendar driven events, who wants Christmas to always be on a Sunday? I love it when Christmas and New Year’s Day fall on a Thursday or a Tuesday and we get back-to-back 4-day weekends. Also, if Christmas is always on a Sunday, then my birthday will always be on a Monday – that’s just dandy.

The other thing that amazes me about this article is the notion that a calendar that is always the same would somehow be more business friendly. In the article the author talks about having to “update lecture dates and syllabi” every year, a task that seems relatively trivial to me, as being part of the inspiration for this cockamamie notion. Well, that might be useful to college professors, but most businesses don’t seem to be calendar-challenged in that particular way. We have month-end’s, quarter-end’s, year-end’s, but we don’t publish a syllabus. Since 30 and 31, the only number of days in the months in this new calendar, are not evenly divisible by 7, it’s not like month-end would always be on a Monday or a Friday. The truly weird part of this idea, when considering business impact, is proposed way of handling the loss of Leap Day.

“To account for extra time, (the professors) drop leap years and instead create a “leap week” at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed “Xtr”…”

First off, these guys are pretty bad at math. We have a Leap Day every four years, with the added complication of century years being evenly divisible by 400, but I digress. A week’s worth of extra days wouldn’t be necessary for 28 years by my calculation, not every five or six. The big question for business would be “do we have to pay our employees during Xtr week?” If yes, what fiscal year would that fall into, what tax year, what benefit year. If I am about to use up my allotment of 20 Physical Therapy visits, do I have to skip that week or can we start the new counter? Does that week fall into the fourth-quarter numbers? Will shareholders understand the increase/decrease in quarter-to-quarter sales or year-to-year comparisons? Since that week will fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day, are we extending the holiday vacation for school children? That might be a nice idea for a college professor, but what about the millions of people paying for daycare?

I think the thing that truly repulses me about this concept is that, despite being armed with modern day technology, we would advocate convenience over accuracy. Changing from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar required losing 10 days from the calendar and took hundreds of years to be adopted to the degree that it is adopted today – hard work, to say the least. Today, with a gazillion appliances telling us what day it is, and atomic clocks telling us the time with accuracy down to one one-millionth of a second, why we would opt to be out of sync with our orbit by fractions of a week for years at a time? Why don’t we just get a few geeks together in a room and write an App for generating syllabi?

Filed under Humor, Technology Tagged with , , ,

If We Spoke Like CL&P

November 11, 2011 1 Comment

The following are all adaptations of statements in news conferences, articles, text messages and web-based responses to the power outage that followed Storm Alfred by CT’s largest electric utility.

Our goal is to pay 99% of our bills on time. This does not mean that your bill will be paid on time. Your bill may be paid before it is due or it may be paid after the due date. We are doing everything we can to expedite the paying of our bills.

We have asked some of our out-of-state relatives to help us pay our bills this month. They have promised to help by sending us any money that is left over after they help other relatives in other states. We are disappointed in the response by our relatives. Some say it’s because we never repaid them the previous loans they have made, but they should understand that we fully intend to pay them.

Please understand that the electric bill we haven’t paid is much larger than we expected it to be. We knew the bill was coming, and we were here while all the electricity was being used, and my wife said “we sure are using a lot of electricity” but we still never expected that the bill would be this high.

We are currently assessing the status of all the bills we have received, along with that of our bank account.

We have deployed all of the funds that are available to us for paying bills.

We are aware of unpaid bills from your company. At this time, estimates as to when your bill will be paid are not available.

Non-payments are currently affecting 35 vendor(s) that service this household. We are working to pay these bills safely and quickly. Thank you for your patience.

This month’s electric bill is the largest such bill to arrive at this household since the 1600’s. This is unprecedented and we are doing everything we can to deal with this situation.

We are confident that we normally have the right amount of funds on hand to handle our monthly bills. To always have more funds available to pay bills would mean that those funds would often be idle, when they could be doing things like taking us on vacation, buying meals at restaurants and buying new clothes. However, we do need to do a better job of finding people to help us pay our bills when, as in this case, the amount of the bill is totally unexpected.

Please take a look at this video on our YouTube site that illustrates how hard it is for us to pay our monthly bills.

There are no reported unpaid bills for your company at this time. If other customers in our area have paid their bills, but we have not, please send a text with UNPAID and we will do our best to restore payment to your bill.

Filed under Humor Tagged with , , , ,

Blog Therapy

October 12, 2011 1 Comment

clip_image002A few years ago I started my first blog in response to a request from an audience member at a speaking event. I didn’t think anyone would want to read my contributions to an already blog-ridden topic (Microsoft SharePoint), but the audience seemed to disagree. A few weeks later, I found myself quoting my boss in my blog, and I asked him if that bothered him in any way. He approved, and he made a curious observation “I imagine writing this is somewhat therapeutic for you.” I didn’t think too much about that at the time; I was still convinced I was giving something back to the community. Today I realize that he was right; today I treated myself to a bit of blog therapy.

Blog therapy comes in variety of forms, the most common being The Rant. Ranting feels good, and it feels even better to rant in a public forum and it feels absolutely awesome to have people join your rant. It is close to the feeling I had at West Virginia University when we built random bonfires after beating Pitt in football in 1975; the spirit of the crowd was uplifting (and apparently, we set more fires that night than after any other game before or after). Rants are fun, but I limit myself in how often I use this form. I don’t want to be the angry man, and other than providing a feel-good moment, rants aren’t usually productive. My Physical Chemistry professor is famous in my mind for putting the value of the crowd in perspective. While commiserating over low test scores, I commented that “they say there’s safety in numbers.” He quipped “they also say misery loves company!”

Truly therapeutic blogging is more subtle and it is productive. The best bit of blog therapy is when I am able to offer useful suggestions to a large audience when a much smaller and more personal audience has ignored the same suggestions. If I am unable to convince the members or leaders of a group I am involved with that an idea is worth considering, I might take the idea to a broader court. With more people involved, it’s more likely that someone will agree. Someone might even be a true champion of the same idea and offer me a new and better argument. Validation is empowering, even when it comes from relative strangers. The blog I crafted earlier today was this kind of therapy. I recently had to deal with a setback in terms of an objective I have been supporting and I needed a bit of encouragement.

The funny thing about blogging is that the encouragement doesn’t actually need to be direct. I love it when people comment on my blogs (which is rarely). I feel good when people tweet, re-tweet or share links to my thoughts on Facebook or Google+. Ironically though, I start to feel good after pressing the Publish button. More than anything, blogging is a self-established series of goals and accomplishments, a cycle of “do this” and “well done” moments. Well done, because any writer’s toughest critic is him or herself. When I get done assembling and editing this stream of consciousness, I feel good. If I think, or if I am lucky enough to find out that you enjoyed it, I feel better, but I still feel good even if it’s never read.

In addition to the creative blog therapy, I read a lot of blogs too. I read some wonderfully helpful blogs, like that of my friend Marc Anderson. Marc’s blog is my trusted reference library for all things SharePoint. I just began reading WordsFallFromMyEyes a few weeks ago and I am in awe of this woman’s ability to write. In fact, I want to go back a few sentences and substitute a different word for “writer” because I have trouble comparing myself to her. Blogs don’t have to be text-based; I follow my daughter’s Flickr photostream because, in addition to wonderful photography, she tells stories about the people and events she photographs. She recently photographed a wedding at Mystic Aquarium in southeastern Connecticut and it appears to have been a simply magical event. In addition, despite the fact that Technorati says there are over 112 million blogs, there are people I am encouraging to write or write more often. I’d like to see my brother write more. He posted on Training Debate last year, and he has a lot to say and the experience to back it up. I’d also like to see @FaithAntion write more, but I happen to know that she’s pretty busy. I enjoy Consultant Chronicles by Mark Thompson and Bill Kelly; I like the blog, and I love their podcasts. I would also like to see more from @RealTalkBLewis I’ve read his books and I’d like to read his work more often. Locally, I would like to see more from Julie Beman, and internationally, I’m still waiting on the food blog Cheryl McKinnon hinted at a while back (because she tweets about awesome sounding meals and well paired wines), but her technical stuff is pretty good too.

Filed under Uncategorized

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