Category: Uncategorized

“Oh no, not yet.”

Background music here. (Along with the coolest CGI 1993 had to offer, and a depressingly-sad song set to colossal synth orchastra hits that prevent you from noticing first few listens…. I like that kind of thing.)

But back to the message. Everybody makes mistakes. We’re human. If Lovie Smith is the coach he’s purported to be, he’s telling himself that today, after last night. The key is learning to recognize when what you’re doing isn’t working, and to change things up.

Sticking to the football references, this is somewhere where Al Davis didn’t “get it.” Maybe speed, and throwing downfieldd all the time worked in 1983; it doesn’t work anymore. The coaching staff who got you to your last Super Bowl was boring “West Coast Offense,” and Rich Gannon. You didn’t win fast enough, and you got JaMarcus Russell.

So much of what I see being done in my career field is looking for JaMarcus. Hey, this worked in 2003, it should work in 2014. Cluestick — it doesn’t. In fact, trying to recreate it is foolish in light of what’s happened technologically.

So, what I’m trying to do is do honest analysis, and choose the best solution(s) for the current situation. Maybe they’re not textbook. Maybe they don’t lend themselves to an expensive multiple-choice test. Still, I am confident that ultimately, I can help someone make the correct decision based on the situation.

I’m writing this just before I attend Start Norfolk, so that’s affecting my thought patterns quite a bit. My current work position is also a bit akin to being a Tackle in an Art Shell Air Coryell offense. *sigh*

Wow, has it really been almost a month since I’ve written anything? Considering what I’ve been doing lately, and me getting out of practice since the site where I’d been writing for more than twelve years died, I’ve been bad about keeping up here. (But it is a blog, and my blog, like every other one, sucks…) Initially, I was going to call this, “Choking on CoC,” but that’d be a bit more crass than I normally am.

Saturday, 23 August, I attended a seminar put on by the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce about starting your own business.

While I did get a couple of helpful tips, on balance, spending the morning there was largely a waste of time.

Important take-aways:

• If you run a seasonal business, you have to prepare for the thin months
• People spent a lot of money researching how to do things in a totally suburban environment
• S-Corp ueber Alles (And trying to figure out the HTML code for the u-umlaut is proving too much of a pain for me to deal with when there’s football on TV.)
• Many who own sole-proprieterships choose not to pay themselves as employees, and rely on income derived from profits earned from operations

Other Intersting Factoids (some, admittedly depressing):

• The top business for Hampton Roads is hair and nail salons
• Creating “customer value” is the most important thing these days
• Location, location, location!!1!

I did get some ideas, but absolutely zero contacts out of the session. With what I’m trying to do, and what I think Hatch Norfolk is trying to do with its 1000-Four effort, socialization with other business owners is very important. Not only did the speaker not engage his audience, there weren’t really any opportunities for interaction with other owners. I suspect none of them is doing what i’m trying to do with ITS757; why wasn’t I given the opportunity to collaborate with any of them?

I understand that one of the goals of these sessions is to recruit new CoC members, but recitation of stale ideas isn’t the way to do that. If I was planning on opening a T-Shirt stand at the Oceanfront, a hair salon, or a landscaping company, my take might be different.

(Maybe the recitation of stale ideas goes along with the soliloquy on the struggles of franchise owners. Of course, the focus was on things like chain fast food restaurants. This all taking place at a business within staggering distance for me of at least four chain sandwich shops… I think this sheds light on a fundamental misunderstanding of what business models are going to be successful in the future….)

At this point, I feel like I wasted my time and money. I think I’d feel that even more strongly if I dropped the Benjamins to join the CoC

Oh well. What else should I have been doing on a Saturday Morning?

Sleep isn’t something that comes easily to me lately. This morning’s nocturnal reflection involved the art of the upsell. Part of what I’m trying to help people avoid is getting ripped off by unscrupulous commercial providers.

• Know what you need
• Analyze who provides what you need
• Make the buy

I’m reminded of a fast food chain who took two $0.99 menu items, cut a third off the portion size of each, and put them both into a cup for $2.

Great deal!!1!

Of course, there was a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign driving that message home.

In my professional life, I’ve never been okay with those sorts of tactics.

And that makes me a bad person.

If only there were some letters I could buy after my name to add weight to my opinion.

I’ve been kind of away from writing lately, mainly because I’m still trying to get something to bite work-wise. Eventually, I’ll get into a comfortable routine again. Maybe if I could find some prompts, like what I did for National Journal Writers’ Month the past three years, I’d be more prolific unprompted.

I have been trying to get together with the Hatch Norfolk folks. I see the things they’ve spawned, and am enthused. Some of the discussions I’ve had have made me think more of Bob Zubrin, and his proposed approaches to a Mars trip.

One of the things he really emphasized in The Case for Mars was that going big was a recipe for disaster. He used examples from polar exploration to drive that point home. In IT these days, unfortunately, “go big” seems to be the answer to everything.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

Use native facilities wherever possible. Actually develop through your requirements, and make architectural decisions based on those requirements, not on custom, or sales’ whim. Approaching a problem in that way will eventually get you where you set out to go. It may not be the way you originally whiteboarded it.

That’s okay!

Unfortunately, as I’ve been trying to get my business going, I’ve had to reflect back, and see when I’m about to make the same sorts of unwise decisions I’m trying to help people avoid. Figure out what you need to do, then choose the tool that will meet that need the most efficiently. I was reminded of this pretty quickly trying to figure out Postfix SMTP authentication for the first time in years. Yes, I could have figured it out, eventually. Yes, dovecot provides a mechanism to make it work. Yes, it’s still a royal pain trying to get it to work. Yes, I’d still need to buy certificates so my MUAs wouldn’t bitch.

Or I could just throw a few bucks towards a competent provider, get more reliability than I could ever hope to match, update the MX records, and move onto something else. (Resisting the urge to snark about doing it $whoever way.)

Other stuff from my interactions recently:

1. I guess Woz is coming to speak, locally. I watched some of his stuff when colleagues were borrowing some of my stuff for the 5th HOPE conference where he was a featured speaker. If tickets aren’t outrageously expensive or hard to get, I’d go. The stuff he did with the Apple ][ was legendary. He didn’t really work on the original Macintosh; if you Google around a bit, you can find numerous quotes from the 80s and 90s where he hated on teh Mac. With the Classic OSes (System * and OS 8/9), I can understand where he was coming from. Apple’s NeXT buy seemed really unwise in 1997, but I think it played out pretty nicely.
2. For a long time, I was very much against the use of databases. I’ve come around on that, though. For data that is infrequently written, but frequently read, it’s tough to beat a database. Whether that’s MySQLariaDB, or MongoDB, or Oracle, or SQL Server, or whatever, the data is stored, access is provided to it via a predictable API, and it’s not bound up in some proprietary data blob. There’s a reason Microsoft deprecated Access/JET.

So, more, more often, but I have an appointment now.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been doing a research study with a Fitbit One. It was offered to MS patients as part of some study.

I connected it up, and wore it most of the time, as instructed.

Thoughts?

I dunno. Since I’m not terribly active to begin with, I’m not sure how much my data will help. Did it help me track things like caloric intake? Yep. Did I forget it once in my few public outings? Yep.

Sadly, the one day I did forget it going out, was one of the most active days I had in the period. Naturally, the next few days were full of gluttony, courtesy HR Geeks, and Cogan’s Pizza.

Final verdict? Free, fun gadget to play with. It was something for me to do while I was busy getting ITS757 a big better organized. Finishing weight: Plus 0.5lbs. Max weight gain: Plus 0.5lbs. Minimum weight: -2.5lbs.

I’ll hand it over to my wife to play with for awhile, and may use it again if/when I find myself out in public more often.

As for ITS757, barring one of the Federal jobs I’ve applied for hitting, this is happening. The feedback I’ve gotten from most of the people I’ve pitched it to has been positive. As I’ve thought through things a bit more, I’ve been able to address some of the weaknesses.

Now to get the customers.

Saw Joe Trippi posted this on Twitter..

I find a few things incredible about it.

1. While calling for innovation, his preferred politicians do their best to stymie any sort of innovation when it affects contributors, and;
2. The politicians they do elect, who enacted new regulations, and selectively enforced others, actively work to reinforce teh bad practice(s)  the innovators are working to replace.

 

Invented a new way for people to get from place to place without using the overpriced taxi services? Sweet! Please vote for us! Nevermind that we’ll just go shut it down after the election, saying that you’re not complying with some regulation we chose not to enforce before.

Found a new way to do business? Yeah, about that. Because you didn’t pay proper protection, I mean, get the proper paper certifications, you can’t work.

Oh, and by the way, you know those laws that say people have a right to work? Our friend Marvin is going to run a secret poll of your workers to see if they want union representation.

It’s disgusting.

Not long ago, I tweeted this:

 

Taking my own damn advice.

— 757sean (@757sean) June 10, 2014

What was it in reference to? What I’m trying to do with ITS757. There’s two principles I have yet to see a compelling rebuttal:

• You can do most things cheaper in-house, and;
• You can hope to compete with the big guys’ reliability and security

Who’s this bad news for? Those who’ve invested a lot of time playing Minesweeper getting vendor and security certifications.

For my stuff, I chose to go with the totes-not-evil big G. Maybe there was someone else I could have chosen, but I have experience, a discomfort level with their stuff.

Could I have made pretty graphs about it? Sure. Could I have done weeks’-long analysis? Absolutely. Would I recommend a customer have me do that? You bet.

I’ve been thinking the past couple of days about this concept of “creating customer value.” It’s a big thing in the study prep for many of the minesweeper contestes.

Still, the definition seems arbitrary, without quantification. This is even more true when “experts” spend scant time determining utility.

The solution creates customer value simple because it is awesome, and I, being awesome, created it.

I promised I’d write something about NBC’s interview with Eddie The Ops Guy.

The flippant answer is channeling Dennis Green, and that this is just a sweeps bit. (Guess Andy Fox chasing after cars ain’t workin’ anymore….) I’ve written about Eddie The Ops Guy a couple of times.

I found three decent reaction pieces on the interview.

• The first, from Howard Kurtz (Someone I used in college, and his coverage of the Clinton Impeachment. You know, college, that place the high school dropout Eddie has never even considered.)
• The Baltimore Sun
• And the best one from the New York Times.

The interview didn’t really answer much, but it did reconfirm my initial suspicions about the guy.

He’s a self-important douchenozzle.

I kept waiting for him to invoke the name of his lord and savior, RON PAUL, but he never did.

If you, fundamentally, have a problem with what the people you work for are doing, you quit. GTFO. If it’s so egregious, then you go to the authorities. You don’t steal things, then run off to places hostile for security.

If you really think you were defending American values, why are you so scared of allowing its systems of justice and redress to work?