Opposite of helpful....
After awhile of believing in freedom you begin to expect it more and more. However, it’s a belief that must always be defended, because there’s always someone looking to take it away from you. Whether it’s a government, a company, or a significant other, we should always be alert to each encroachment, like for example this recent decision in California. This is a bad precedent, information devices are fundamentally different because they are connected to a network, and therefore should be subject to protections the network establishes. From ars technica:
“Last week, California’s Supreme Court reached a controversial 5-2 decision in People v. Diaz (PDF), holding that police officers may lawfully search mobile phones found on arrested individuals’ persons without first obtaining a search warrant. The court reasoned that mobile phones, like cigarette packs and wallets, fall under the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Even though I take massive dosages of Xanax to get to sleep every night, sometimes I’ll just wake up at like 4:00 a.m. I don’t know why, because most days I feel a little “hung-over” from the Xanax. Yes, I didn’t know it, but some medicine can cause you to suffer through a hang-over. While it’s not the uncomfortable alcohol triple whammy of nausea, vomiting, and dehydration, there are some medicines that will cause an adverse after affect.
Well today was one of those days. I popped awake at 4:30, and from experience, there’s little reason to try to get back to sleep. So I got up made a cup of excellent Puerto Rican coffee and I was off. First, I wasn’t liking how my twitter background image looked on smaller screens so I gave it a couple of tweaks. Since it points to this blog, I decided to carry over the skull motif, which required playing around a bit with the custom template. Now everyone know that skulls make any design cooler, so I was off to a killer start.
While I was at it, with the help of the WordPress documentation and this support post I setup automated posting using e-mail. While I never really needed this before, I’ve gotten used to using my Sharp Sidekick for updates to Twitter, Facebook, and my Blogger blogs, it’s nice to be able to update my blog when I only have cell phone at hand.
Finally, I got comments working again. I have been slammed in the past by comment spam pretty heavily so I had’em shut down. So I got those back online, just hope I don’t make it back onto some spambots list. Next up, I’ve got to get a life stream feed going for all of my me related social media accounts.
For anyone considering a jump into starting their own company, forming or joining a startup, the next few posts will offer a few quick words of advice. As I share them, I’ll also give a brief description of my work efforts.
1. It is said that planning for any project is indispensable, while the plan you create for that project is disposable.
If you’re going to make the jump, make sure you take a parachute along with you. A parachute in this sense is a fall back position that can carry you through the extended “project initiation” phase. It is going to take way more time than you ever believe to get rolling. Whether that means landing the first contract or making the first sale. You’re going to need some insurance. Your insurance could be an existing client. Like quitting your job and being able to contract yourself back to them and continue to provide services.
This is proof that no matter how smart someone might seem, or claim to be, reality is quite often more brutal. I know this rule, but yet I wasn’t actually able accomplish creating a fall back position. While I have a proposal pending with my ex-client, I’m still waiting for feedback. Therefore, I didn’t plan ahead successfully. Many excuses what I didn’t incorporate sooner, build the web site sooner, create a capabilities statement early, for I need them now; and they’re not ready.
Although I did pick up a great sideline gig by becoming the new Editor in Chief of TUX Magazine, it’s not directly on my path to create a startup or software and services company. I’m working on my third issue and it is a lot of fun. It is very helpful in bringing closer to reality my life long dream of authoring a technical book. And in a weird sort of Moebius strip, infinite loop, sort of a way it takes me back some 25 years to when I started Journalism school at Ball State University.
Creating passionate users as I launch my software and services company
In this article Gartner Presents 10 Year Scenario for Information Technology, Business and Society | Tekrati Research News there is a quote which I believe is the clearest description of what is wrong with nearly all businesses:
“The challenge to established companies comes not from other established players, but from start-up entrepreneurs who will use technology to upset the status quo.”
Think about it…
In an interview for Open Business Esther Dyson included this in an answer about whether Yahoo or Goolge are open businesses: “In many ways, Yahoo! believes in smart, “intelligent design” and careful strategies, while Google follows blind evolution and operates a Darwinian fitness landscape within its development organization.”
P.S. I’m back and there’s going to be hell to pay….
While scanning through my feeds, I occassionally come across something that seems important. It seems important but I’m not sure why and what category to place this new information. Here are few such items:
The report also states that, “IDC finds that not only are cost-savings benefits and rapid implementation times fueling overall SaaS adoption, but also intangible benefits such as increased employee productivity and efficiencies are being recognized.”
Tonight I had one of those moments on the Web that fills me with excitement and motivation. So here goes a wild unplanned stream of observations:
As a long time Tom Peters fan, I was ecstatic when I heard “Gil the Jenius” had found words of hope from something new from Tom Peters. So on Gil’s suggestion I rushed over to Change This and read the new material. The Tomato Manifesto was a good reminder of why I think Tom Peters is so great. However, having read his book Re-imagine, this manifesto doesn’t cover much new ground.
Still it is great to read Tom’s stuff. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel drunk with a promise. A promise that other people see the systems we work within and perpetuate as they are, are just plain wrong. Inside, where it counts, I find myself screaming “Hell yes!” and “That’s what I’m talking about”! As my super-ego driven, politically correct, worker/diplomat inhibitions recede, I get more woozy greedily drinking in Tom’s positive vibes. As long as I keep reading, all is right with the world – I have hope, I see new opportunity, I believe that the impossible seems suddenly possible.
Now if you’ve ever celebrated too much, you know that eventually the good times come to an end. You may feel pretty good just before you go to sleep, but when you wake up your perspective changes 180 degrees. Your new outlook after waking can be pretty painful, or at least so I’m told. The reason I bring in this analogy is because it is the way I feel after reading Tom Peters. While I’m reading I feel pumped, but when I have to go back to work or read the newspaper or watch the news, I’m flooded with this feeling of disappointment. I feel as if I’ve been fooled. Perhaps this is a harsh reaction, but the contrasts that the manifesto illustrates is exactly what I’m talking about. While reading Tom’s rants there is feeling that someone understands that there is a better way, but when I try to reconcile or connect Tom’s positions to reality, I become immediately aware of the chasm between the two opposites.
I’m often shocked that most companies remain viable and, dare I say, profitable. Most business are full of unproductive, uncooperative, and damaging people, policies, and processes. The only way these companies remain alive is through the personal sacrifice, passion and diligence of a few “freaks” (as Tom refers to them). In software development there is a model that attempts to grade a software development process. Within this model there are five different levels (grades). The first level is called chaos and the freaks I mentioned are called champions. Almost all software development processes are at level one.
If we assume that conducting business is essentially no different than creating software development. They are both collections of people attempting to complete a task (or collection of tasks) to attain a specific result. What I would suggest is that if there were a comparable grading system for companies, most companies would be graded as being at level one, chaos. If you agree, then the big question becomes: “How do we get our companies to receive a better grade?”
Staying with our drinking metaphor, companies are like alcoholics. Often most companies live in denial. Typically there are people close to the company, front-line employees for example, that attempt to tell the leadership of the company that they have a problem. But what does the company usually do when people tell them about the problem? They deny that there is a problem. So counselors then advise family that the only thing left to do when an alcoholic lives in denial is to wait until they hit bottom and be ready to catch them. Only with companies, when they hit bottom they fire (I mean lay off) everyone that would be able to catch the company.
It all sounds pretty hopeless then, right? Well one more analogy and I’ll bring this to a close. Gil is right, there is only one thing we can do. This is like religion: we need to have faith and believe. Within our churches, mosques, synagogues, and cathedrals we hear and learn that there are higher ideals, let’s use loving your neighbor as yourself as an example. In a world full of terror, greed, and fools it can be extremely challenging to love your neighbor. The approach I take is to keep it simple. Do what you can, attempt to live the ideal as much as humanly possible, don’t sweat the rest, and hope that others take notice and see that it is possible to live the ideal (at least some of the time).
Tom Peters actually has his own similar approach. It is called “Brand You”. We may not be able to convince our friends, our peers, or our bosses that this Tom Peter’s guy is onto something, but as individuals we can choose to do what we can do to live up to the ideals. We can change the way we approach our work. We can embrace the Internet, we can embrace globalization, we can hire quirky, creative, and multi-cultural, we can hire people smarter than ourselves and then hang on for the ride, we can pursue great design, and we can accept that safe is risky (That one is from Seth Godin). We can only do, what we can do. When we are in a position to embrace change and influence others, then we should. We need to look for ways to try new things. Just because something has always worked for us, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better way!
In an effort to get back “in shape” for OSCon, I really got to pump this out. If I head into Portland with my current habits, it will be tough to keep up. So here it goes.
Well, my participation in my first ever scientific (or should I say academic) convference was a mixed bag of experiences. As mentioned in the brief posts I made while I was there, not having consistent and reliable Internet access was a shock. I think it was such a shock that I never really recovered my balance and established a rhythm. I mention this because I believe that it is very important while attending a conference to have a smooth rhythm. It’s all about habit and accustom. In different environments some people refer to this as being in the flow or in the zone. When behavior is second-nature we are more productive. So without the Internet I lost my rhythm and never really recovered.
Additional factors also kept me off balance. My expectation was that because the conference was about Information Technology, that most of the participants would be software related. This assumption was wrong, because most of the speakers were engineers. I’m totally believe that mixing different areas of specialties together it creates a more powerful team, however in this situation I felt like the odd man out. This feeling was amplified by the fact that I am from private industry and everyone else was from academia. I know, duh, it was an academic conference.
One of the things that further disoriented me was the disorganization of the conference. The president of the Domincan Republic opened the conference and that screwed the schedule for the whole first day. Unfortunately this trend continued on the second day, even though there were no major disruptions. Finally some minor irritations added fuel to the fire: the food sucked, the conference facilities were divided, the Internet at the conference went out for almost 24 hours, and a bunch of speakers never showed up at the conference which caused the organizers to move speeches
I’ll stop my whining now and share my take aways. Despite everything I still managed to meet some fantastic people. I came away inspired by the great passion most of the educators there had for their students and areas of research. A couple of themes kept appearing in speech after speech. First, globalization is also influencing the academic arena. This most definitely dove tails with my research and observations. Something to consider when my daughters get ready to begin their higher education is the recommendation by some speakers to internationalize their education. The basic premise is that it will be easier to understand globalization if you witness it first hand. A second trend was the emphasis on collaboration. Again, I say right on brother. Collaboration, competitive cooperation, sharing, and partnering I believe will become “steroids” (As Thomas Friedman calls certain world flatteners). They will make small and medium sized business bigger and better able to compete with multinationals. It will also make the lone researcher or entrepreneur reap the very same benefits. The final trend was the coincidence of multiple projects reaching the same conclusions, but from different perspectives, environments, and objectives A curiosity indeed, but also proof, for me, that research and investigation is an endeavor this connects us all. Regardless of the differences we insist we have, we are all basically the same and we are all moving in the same basic direction.
In the end, attending the 6th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training was extremely rewarding. I met someone from the Domincan Republic that would like some Linux training and others that represent future collaborators from around the world. Preparing the SNAP Development Center’s paper “Using Open Source to Enhance Learning” was a great experience. In addition, it ensures that the legacy of the project will always be available from the IEEE archives.
