Category Archives: Musings

I don’t know who said this, but I agree with it 100%:

A veteran — whether active duty, retired, or national guard or reserve — is someone who, at one point in his, or her, life, wrote a blank check made payable to “The United States of America,” for an amount of “up to and including my life.”
That is honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.

We try really hard to limit the amount of advertising that our kids see. We do this via several measures: limiting how much TV they watch, encouraging them to watch non-commercial programs, and using a TiVo to skip ads. However, in the last week, Matt and Tom have both surprised me.
First, on the way to school, Tom asked who our car insurance was with. “State Farm,” I said. “Do they give you a new car if your old one is totaled like Allstate does?” he asked.
I explained that, no, State Farm wouldn’t give us a brand-new car; they’d pay the market value (a concept he already grasps from allocating his allowance.) “You should use Allstate,” he opined, “because they’ll just give you a new car. That’s what their commercial says, anyway.”
That afternoon, Matt was eating a Nerds rope, which he likes to break into sections. He stacked up two sections of unequal length to make a bar graph, pointed at the shorter one, and firmly said “Dad, you could save money on car insurance like this if you used Allstate.”
I don’t know what Allstate is paying Dennis Haysbert, but apparently it’s money well spent.

Good news and bad news from my favorite local newspaper.

Good news: five Blade columnists have started blogs at the paper’s web site. (Thankfully, none of them are opinion columnists.)

Bad news: you can’t get RSS feeds for them. Oh sure, each page sports a little orange RSS logo, but when you click it you get this summary page. It offers some feeds, but none for the columnists. (Bonus bad news: the only comment mechanism is to e-mail the blog author.)

So, I give them a B- for their effort so far. All of the columnists had content posted before the official launch this morning, and it’s all decent intro material. The grade would be higher if I could actually subscribe to their feeds. I called Kevin Cesarz, who’s listed on the masthead as the online editor, to ask him about it, but he wasn’t in.

Update: the feed page now lists the individual columnist feeds. Yay, Blade!

Doggone it, this just isn’t fair. I was going to go to Lotusphere, but decided not to because I’m already going to Orlando twice this year for other trips.. and who’s their keynote speaker? Only the first man to walk on the moon.

The list of past speakers from Lotusphere is pretty impressive: John Cleese; Rudy Giulani, Walter Cronkite… meanwhile, at the flagship MS event, we get… Microsoft executives. Don’t get me wrong; I expect to see executives touting their products, and I appreciate Microsoft’s efforts to bring in sidekicks like Samantha Bee or Mary Lynn Rajskub to liven things up a bit. However, why couldn’t we have an interesting topical speaker? It couldn’t be that hard. Warren Buffett would probably be glad to help his friend Bill out. How about Sean Payton? Scott Adams? The possibilities are limitless.

Interesting thread over at Ed’s blog: he had a Tumi bag that died, Tumi wouldn’t replace it, and so Ed posted about his search for a replacement. Two things happened: Tumi saw his post and replaced his bag with a new one, and Briggs & Riley, the brand he was considering as a replacement, contacted him and offered to let him try one of their bags. I love to see this happen, and not because companies send me lots of stuff (I didn’t even get one of those crappy phones that Sprint was slinging around with such abandon a few months ago.)

Clearly both Tumi and Briggs & Riley “get it”; they saw a good opportunity to score some positive marketing for their products at relatively low cost. This is a smart strategy, and one which I expect to become a differentiator between savvy companies that understand how to enter into conversations with the broad community and the old school (which normally just shouts at them à la traditional advertising).

(and apologies to all my readers who saw the word “angels” and were expecting a more spiritual contribution!)

I get some of the best stuff in my press release feeds! Today’s winner is a release from the Visa Bureau, an independent visa agency that makes its living from helping people emigrate. Anyway, the release points out that Australia has added network security, Siebel, SAP, J2EE, C#, and Java skills to the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL) (along with boilermakers, panel beaters, pastry cooks, and welders).

Continue reading →

IBM struck first, with their announcement of Sametime 7.5. The new version offers support for BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices, as well as Office and Outlook integration. It’ll be interesting to see how good a job IBM did of these features, given that Microsoft has set an awfully high bar with the Office 2003+Communicator+LCS 2005 stack. (one disquieting note: IBM’s SIP gateway apparently requires WebSphere. I hate it when that happens!)

Microsoft’s announcement is scheduled for a little later today. I’ll have more details on today’s announcements once the embargo’s lifted; check back here. Update: here are my notes on the MS announcement.

In the meantime, there’s an article in the New York Times by John Markoff that goes to great lengths to pooh-pooh what Microsoft’s doing (quoting Ken Bisconti and Julie Farris, along with Huntsville homeboy Mark Spencer of Digium) and talking about the complexity of a feature set that, based on the rest of the article, Markoff doesn’t quite understand yet. The article freely muddles the already-announced unified messaging support in Exchange with the stuff set to be announced today, but it does such a poor job of describing both that I felt dumber after reading it.

Terrific post by Barry Eisler on time management:

I’ve done 15 signings in the last two weeks, and a lot of people have asked for advice on how to write a novel. I tell them, “Don’t watch television.”

There’s a common misconception that novels get written in a mad rush over a month or two in an isolated cabin or on a mountain top. They don’t. They get written an hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years (eight years, in the case of my first novel, Rain Fall).

“An hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years”… well, that’s exactly how people watch television, isn’t it?

There are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in our lives. If you use those daily hours doing one thing, you can’t use them for something else. It’s that simple.

Now, of course, I could self-righteously puff out my chest and crow about how little television I watch… but that’s not the point. If I were to take the amount of time I spend reading other peoples’ novels, I’d certainly have time to write one (or more, given how much I read). Of course, that says nothing about the amount of time I spend doing other entertaining but ultimately non-productive things.

Interestingly, my first several computer books were all written in exactly that way: an hour or two at a time, every night after the kids were in bed. As we added more children, and as they grew, our lives changed, and so did my job; I was able to write full time, every day. Now I’m back to writing columns, articles, and so on in bits and pieces, whenever I can find time. For example, this morning I got up at 0500 and spent about two hours working on a paper. Tonight after the kids are in bed, I’ll probably work on a different paper. I guess I should start thinking seriously about whether I want to try writing long fiction (I think I do), and whether I have any interesting stories to tell (well, the jury’s out on that one.)