A lot of people have been talking about this Business Week article, “Blogging With the Boss’ Blessing“; it discusses the idea that businesses gain mindshare by revealing more details of their internal operations, or becoming more “transparent”. As Doc Searls points out, Mark Cuban is setting the bar for business transparency with his blog. It’s no surprise that folks like Scoble are noticing and commenting on the fact that Cuban is completely transparent, but there’s one interesting aspect of Cuban’s blog that I haven’t seen widely mentioned: where are his posts about HDNet? HD programming is a nascent market segment, and HDNet is doing some big deals (including rebroadcasting NBC’s Summer Olympics coverage). Could it be that his good business sense prevents him from airing his dirty laundry in an area that’s still highly competitive? Maybe he’s more interested in the Mavs (always a possibility!), or maybe he thinks no one’s interested in HDNet except for a few geeks. I don’t know, so I asked him.
Update: Wow, that was fast: an almost-instant response from Mark. Short and to the point: “Not much new or interesting to say about HDNet… we get the best programming we can, we play it…” Fair enough. Thanks, Mark.
Transparency revisited: Mark Cuban’s blog
Comments Off on Transparency revisited: Mark Cuban’s blog
Filed under HDTV and Home Theater, Musings
Gmail invites available
I have two Gmail invitations available. Who wants ’em?
Filed under General Tech Stuff
ConceptDraw and Visio
I’ve got to draw a bunch of diagrams for a document I’m working on. Normally, I’d use Visio, but the machine I normally use for Windows Office stuff is down, and RDP’ing to my laptop is deathly slow for some reason. I thought I’d try ConceptDraw on the Mac, since it claims to be able to import and export Visio drawings. My experience so far has been mixed: the one diagram I drew with ConceptDraw looks fine when I export it to a PNG, but it’s in grayscale when I use their converter to turn it into a Visio file. That won’t do; as an extra penalty, the objects are slightly different sizes. I’ve observed the same problem when converting Visio drawings to ConceptDraw, so I guess this may not be as seamless a solution as I’d hoped.
Update: another problem: ConceptDraw won’t export a graphics file to an SMB volume, meaning I can’t put the PNG-format file I need for Word into the share where all the rest of my files are. That’s also not good.
Comments Off on ConceptDraw and Visio
Filed under General Tech Stuff, Reviews
Fantastic SpaceShipOne photos
Richard Seaman has some astonishingly good pictures of SpaceShipOne on his photoblog.
Comments Off on Fantastic SpaceShipOne photos
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Houston Airport Rangers
You’ve heard of the Texas Rangers– now there are the Houston Airport Rangers, volunteers who patrol the 11,000 acres of Bush International on horseback.
Airport Rangers are mounted security patrol made up of volunteers, including off-duty law enforcement officers that ride their horses along the perimeter of the 11,000 acre Bush Intercontinental Airport. In return for keeping an eye out for suspicious activity in the area, equestrians have a pristine location, including wooded trails to ride and the airport has extra eyes and ears in areas that most security patrols can not easily access.
Comments Off on Houston Airport Rangers
Filed under Travel
Reporter’s guide to finding people
Duff Wilson of the Seattle Times has a nifty guide on how to find information on people: “Who is John Doe, and where to get the paper on him“. It’s missing a lot of commercial services, but it’s still interesting.
MSDN Product Feedback Center
This is really cool: a new web-based engine for tracking product bugs and feedback for Microsoft products. It will eventually replace BetaPlace (and not a moment too soon IMHO). You and I can now report bugs, not to mention being able to find existing bugs and “vote” for them to raise their priority/visibility. This doesn’t have any direct impact on Exchange, yet, but it’s safe to bet that when Exchange Edge Services hits beta that this will be the feedback mechanism for it.
Comments Off on MSDN Product Feedback Center
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
An open letter from a Marine
From Blackfive, an open letter from a Marine to the sadists who kidnapped Marine Cpl Wassef Hassoun:
When you raise that sword over your head I want you to remember one thing. Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun is not alone as he kneels before you. Every Marine who has ever worn the uniform is there with him, and when you strike him you are striking all of us. If you think the Marines were tough on you when they were cleaning out Fallujah a few weeks ago you haven’t seen anything yet. If you want to know what it feels like to have the Wrath of God called down upon you then go ahead and do it. We are not Turkish truck drivers, or Pakistani laborers, or independent contractors hoping to find work in your country. We are the United States Marines, and we will be coming for you.
His family is asking for prayers. I think the terrorists who kidnapped Cpl Hassoun should be praying, too.
Comments Off on An open letter from a Marine
Filed under Musings
Apple’s posters at the WWDC
This week is Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference, and they’re pulling out all the stops to introduce Mac OS X “Tiger”. Here’s a snapshot that arrived in my mailbox earlier today.
Comments Off on Apple’s posters at the WWDC
Filed under General Tech Stuff
Toledo local satellite channels
Finally, we’re getting locals! Dish turned on their Toledo locals last week sometime, and DirecTV has announced that they’ll deliver them as soon as they get FCC approval to move the DIRECTV5 satellite to 72.5°. Of course, this might take a while, especially since DirecTV is already in trouble with the FCC for moving DIRECTV3 without permission. Still, I’m hopeful that this will happen before the fall TV season starts, since most of the shows I want to TiVo are local broadcasts.
Comments Off on Toledo local satellite channels
Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Random notes from my recent trip
I just got back from a long trip: TOL-ATL-MLU, followed by a short stay and family visit at Lake D’Arbonne State Park, followed by MLU-DFW-SEA, a few days of work, and a return to the park, thence home. A few notes in no particular order:
- Whoever set up the state park at Lake D’Arbonne should get a raise. It’s beautiful: secluded, quiet, with clean, well-maintained, well-equipped cabins. Bonus points for not putting TVs in the cabins.
- It was wonderful to see my sister and my grandparents, neither of whom I get to see that often. The food and company were both great.
- Seattle consistently has the rudest TSA staff of any airport I’ve ever been in. Ruder than Detroit, ruder than Newark.
- In this month’s issue of Delta Sky, there are profiles of several Delta employees, including Phil Bartholomew. He’s the best DL flight attendant I’ve ever seen: super courteous and very much on the ball. In the same magazine, there’s a big ad from Sykes congratulating Delta on their 75 years of success. I noticed that the one reservation/ticket agent included in the profiles works for a city ticket office in Rio; I wonder how the current (and former!) US-based reservations employees feel about Sykes’ ad.
- I’ve taken probably 200 or 250 trips with a laptop since I graduated from college. I’ve left my laptop behind twice. This was one of those trips. Fortunately, I left it at the park cabin, where Mom was able to toss it in her car for her return trip to Ohio. Rookie mistake!
- Delta gets bonus points for putting a Crown Room Club in their satellite terminal at DFW, but they lose them again for having it close at 9:30pm when the last bank of flights leaves after that. C’mon, guys: if there are departing flights scheduled to leave, have the club open. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Comments Off on Random notes from my recent trip
Filed under Travel
Ken Jennings keeps rolling
Wow. 16 consecutive wins, $512,959. Awesome! Ken’s success is having a trickle-down effect, too: since Sunday, I’ve been getting about three times as many readers as usual. Since I (temporarily) have lots more readers, a quick plug: Spirit of America and SmileTrain are worthy charities if you’re in a giving mood.
Update: w00t! Ken now has 18 wins and $601,760 in the bank. I’m finally home, so I’ll be watching tonight.
Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Alexandria gets Mormon-ized
On the way to camp, I spotted the building for what I assume is the Farmerville branch. Once we got there, my grandmother brought a cool newspaper article to Camp Bloch: the Alexandria Town Talk did a full-page piece on the LDS missionaries assigned to the Alexandria ward. Pretty neat. Right now, our whole family is waiting to hear where our friend Jacob will go on his mission– it’s been 4 1/2 weeks since his papers went in, and we’re all eager to hear the news. It probably, alas, won’t be Alexandria.
Comments Off on Alexandria gets Mormon-ized
Filed under Spiritual Nourishment
Ken Jennings: Mormon superstar
Courtesy of this article in the Salt Lake Trib, I now know that Ken Jennings, who has run his streak of Jeopardy wins to 12 (total winnings: $410K, so far!) as of last night, is a BYU graduate, a returned missionary, and a software engineer. Note to self: avoid going on Jeopardy to avoid unfavorable comparisons…
Update: I missed Tuesday’s show, but as of Monday Ken was still going strong. I’ll definitely be watching tonight.
Update: Ken is rocking on! He scored win #17 tonight.
Update: Ken is still winning big (although last night he almost didn’t make it to Final Jeopardy). The New York Post reports that Jeopardy’s ratings are up 12+% since Ken’s run began, but why trust them?
Filed under Musings
IMF archive reviewing
Over at the real Exchange blog, Neil posted a note about a cool web-based tool for reviewing messages archived by the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. Written by Daryl Maunder, the tool is simple to install (create a new IIS virtual directory on your Exchange server, copy the tool files to it, and voila!) and works well. In the comments to that post, the tireless KC Lemson noted another filter, this one a C# tool written by James Webster of the Exchange team. Both work well; I currently prefer Webster’s tool because it shows both the message and the contents of the P2 recipient data, using a sort of preview pane arrangement; I also like the fact that it’s open-source. Maunder’s web-based tool is cool too because you can access it from other machines on your LAN (or via VPN). Either tool is an improvement over the minimal functionality the IMF itself provides for reviewing archived messages– try them both and see which you prefer. (Note to both authors: please, please implement a way to select multiple messages for action– that would be a big help.)
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Paul's Down-Home Page 