Mike O’Connor

I just posted a story over at the St Paul Broadband Committee site about my belief that a lot of the municipal WiFi networks don’t seem to be grounded in financial reality.

Here’s a link to the article and here’s a link to the muni-WiFi financial model I built to go with it.

Here’s the deal — let’s get these models out of the hands of the VooDoo consulting expert type people and into the hands of the people. “Open source financial modeling” if you will. Let’s beat on this model — or write a new one if this one is hopeless — and get to the point where we ALL understand the economics that underpin these projects.

That way, we can either rejoice in bridging the digital divide, solving the problems of the world and putting a chicken in every pot (as advocates claim) or we can avoid the mess that comes with yet another technology project that over-promises and under-delivers.

What say you? Let’s have at it.

Sure, they’ve been around forever. Sure, most of you probably already know about this site. But just in case you don’t, here’s a pointer to GetHuman.com — a great site if you’re trying to get to a human-being customer-service type person.

Marcie was trying to find the path through Northwest Airline’s patented “Voice Prompts From Hell” system to book a seat for me on an existing reservation. She finally gave up. I remembered reading about GetHuman somewhere, Googled it, looked up NWA and tried it out. Tarnation! Worked perfectly.

I’m sold. It’s even got the incredibly-secret path to Amazon customer-service reps!

Sheesh, this one is a slap yourself in the forehead idea.

If you, like me, have a cable connection to the internet and you, like me, haven’t thought about your cable modem since the day you bought it and you, like me, bought the durn thing more than a couple years ago — go buy a new one that’s compliant with DOCSIS 2.0. It’ll be way faster.

Ralph pointed this out at lunch on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon I had me a brand new Motorola SurfBoard (which, with all the rebates from CompUSA, turned out to be free).

I’m talking way faster… Ralph’s getting over a megaBYTE per second sometimes. I haven’t formally tested mine. But it’s…

WAY FASTER!

… just Google on “I have Gmail invitations” or some such.

doh! why did it take me so long to figure THAT out?

Here's a shorthcut to the place where I got my invitation, if that's too hard.

Here's the link to the article, which ran in the St Paul paper this Sunday - click here for the story.

A great lesson in community organizing and Margaret Mead's famous quote Quote:

Marcie and I were a part of that committed group of parents that changed the direction of the school. But it was Richard who stole the show. At both of the big public meetings, he got up and made the comment that people all remembered.

Pretty cool guy, that Rich.

I have an admission to make. I was inspired to get the haven.com domain (which I use for all my personal stuff on the 'net) after reading some cyber-punk novel or other. Might have been Neuromancer by Bill Gibson or maybe Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Whatever. Anyway I was entranced with the idea of “data havens” that was floating around in the fiction of that time, and that's what was on my mind when it came time to get my very first ever domain name. I was tickled to death to find out that haven.com was available (for free back in those days).

Some years later, Ryan Lackley contacted me to see if I would be interested in selling him the domain for a new venture he was involved with, which at that time was called HavenCo. Their premise was to set up a secure data haven in this odd little place called Sealand (that’s their official “national” site — also check out the Wikipedia entry about Sealand, which includes the latest developments like the fire in 2006). Sealand is an old WWII gun platform about 10 miles off the coast of England that is owned by a pretty odd character who dubbed himself “Prince Roy”, declared himself a sovereign nation and embarked on all kinds of schemes ranging from ship registry to fishing tours.

I passed — we'd just sold gofast.net, and I'd sold Television.com and Company.com and was feeling like I needed a breather.

HavenCo launched about a year later (July 2000), amidst much fanfare and a fabulous piece in Wired Magazine.

Well, almost five years have passed as I write this and as I was updating my web site with a little group of links called “All the Havens this isn't…” I decided to see how HavenCo was doing. Unfortunately, as with lots of schemes that were hatched in 1999, HavenCo isn't doing so well these days.

Here's a link to the official HavenCo web site. Doesn't look too bad does it? The site's still up, and it appears that they're still open for business. Well, not so fast.

Here's an article that ran in 2002 that starts giving you a clue that maybe things are starting to unravel. Check out the pictures of the Sealand platform. Hmm. I'm not sure I'd want to put much of a raised-floor computer/network operations center out there. And I sure wouldn't want to live out there for a couple years the way Ryan eventually did.

Here's Ryan's writeup of where things are at — which is the usual disarray of failed contracts combined with a dash of international sovereignty foolishness. I found this paper that Ryan presented at DefCon to be especially poignant.

So to sum up — it looks like (as of this writing) HavenCo is limping along, milking it's remaining customers for whatever it can. The founders are all gone. Lawsuits abound. Dreams are shattered. Geeks are pissed.

Sigh. So many stories like this… Remember all that baloney in Wired Magazine about The Long Boom that started coming out in 1997 or so? Oh well…

Way to go Gizmondo — an amazing post here to delight your senses. As long as you're willing to spend a little time outside the box, that is.

Head on through to the assembler.org site and try the two screens out — I like the animated one the best. Even better with the suggested MP3 tracks playing at the same time. Took me back to my “new music” days in the late '60's these did. Very excellent.

Malcome Gladwell (the guy that wrote The Tipping Point) has a new book out called “Blink.” The NYTimes just ran the first chapter of the book in their cunningly-named First Chapter section. Fersure hit this link to Blink on Gladwell's site where he outlines the broader themes of the book.

I like it. I've spent my whole career being accused of jumping to conclusions (so I've gotten better, although not great, at keeping my mouth shut until a little supporting data rolls in). I think a lot of us have run into the same problem. You know what the situation is, but if you blurt it out, you're likely to get beat up by people who need lots of supporting facts.

Maybe you've just got a really rich set of experiences that your subconscious is taking advantage of. Perhaps you're just good at “blink.” I like this book's premise because it reminds me to value those 2-second blinks, and gives me a way to rationalize those leaps of cognition to other people.

This is the latest geek project — reclaiming Robert’s old PC and transmogrifying it into a personal video recorder (PVR for short) with a Hauppauge PVR 350 and SageTV software.

Sure, I could have gone out and bought a Tivo or ReplayTV for about the same (or maybe a little less) money. But I see several advantages to doing it myself;

[read more…]

I hang with a short-attention-span crowd — so we're always changing our job/direction/passion.

I like this “How To Be Creative” manifesto a lot. It encapsulates many of the ideas that I share with folks when they are in that creative, unfrozen, floating period between gigs. This is kinda like Powdermilk Biscuits — gets you up and doing the things you need to do.

I also like the whole Change This site — comprised mostly of “manifestos” by irascible opinionated curmudgeons like me.

I came across a web-development manifesto - “One Minute Site” - which spoke loudly enough to get me up off my rusty dusty and plug some changes into my sister's web site. One Minute Site is a great rant against the overly-complex, overly graphical/technical sites that “web developers” foist off on their clients. I've been making the same rant for ages, as have many of my good web-dev friends, but One Minute Site does a great job of presenting the argument.

I'm happily pecking my way through the rest of the site — I bet a few more manifestos make their way into this blog.

I've always liked to hang out with people who are REALLY into what they do, often to the point of being irascible and grouchy because there's nobody for them to talk to as a peer.

One such fellow is Steve Emly, the founder/proprietor of Emcom. Steve is into network monitoring at a level that defies description and I love learning from him.

Son Richard and I are embarking on the (probably ludicrous) project of converting my vinyl record collection to digital and I came across another fellow who's at the “guru level” during the process of looking for “de-click, de-pop” software to clean up my beat up old vinyl.

I don't know what his name is, but I **know** that he's another person who's functioning at that supremo-geek level — I would love to meet him some day. BTW, I know it's a “him” because he's got to be the curmudgeon narrating the video on his web site. Bet the house.

If you ever want to learn about digital audio recording or digital sound enhancement, head out to Enhanced Audio or the associated TracerTek (which seems to be down today, but is the bigger/better site). Download copies of his free demo software and the tutorial that goes with it. Spend an enjoyable half day narking around with his DC Six software and you will be a whole lot smarter than when you started.

He's into cleaning up old records, but he's also really into forensic audio. You know, where the cops have bugged your office, you've used loud music to cover up your conversation about the big drug deal? He's got some killer software that will remove the music and leave the conversation behind. Very much reminded me of the old movie Blowup. Some of the demos are to die for. Definitely a great geek holiday that you can take from the comfort of your workstation.

Ah. Every once in a while I come across a fantastic lecturer who illuminates a huge topic. Carl Sagan did that for me when i was at Cornell — I used to play hooky from classes and go sit in on his Astronomy 101 lectures (as did several hundred other folks).

A less known example is Hubert Alyea who was a brilliant Princeton chemistry educator upon whom The Absent Minded Professor was modeled. He was a colleague of my Dad and I grew up listening to Professor Alyea's amazing chemistry lectures (from which the notion of Flubber emerged).

Professor Felton (also at Princeton) is in this league in this lecture “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue”. The stream's likely to be one of the best hours you can spend if you're interested in the digital media rights issue.

Here are a few topics;

- How Sandra Day O'Connor saved the fast forward button

- A great explanation of how to digitize media

- Technology convergence

- The most important concept in Computer Science

- The Celestial Jukebox and the Napster case

- The Remix culture – Negativeland, the Grey album, Woody Guthrie

- DVDJohn

- The Fritz (Hollings) Chip

And more. The whole stream is about an hour and a half, but I gave up at the Q&A session — the questions were long and badly recorded so I got tired of waiting. Same goes for the introductions — I skipped those as well. The lecture itself is an hour. Well worth every minute.

I'm a big Strongbad fan (thanks to my kids who turned me on to the whole Homestar Runner gang a year or so ago).

This week's Strongbad Email is especially appropriate for us folks who fiddle around with security. Here's the link.

Here's a link to a 2mb MPG file that shows how to fold a t-shirt. It is about the neatest thing you will ever see.

Serves as a reminder that elegance can be found in many places. Would that all our efforts were this beautiful.

I'm heading into a big project, and as part of preparing for it I revisited the site I maintained while participating in the Y2k preparations for my home town of St Paul, MN.

Just about every single Y2k link on that site is busted now, although one is selling some strange kind of medical nostrum that's not likely to live up to it's claims of Improving My Life In Every Way.

But one of the links led me to the new site run by Peter de Jager. For those of you who don't remember, Peter was considered by many to be the person who first voiced the Y2k problem in terms that were compelling enough to get people off the dime. Opinions vary — some think Peter was a nutcase, sounding the alarm for a non-problem — and I agree, Peter got a little shrill at times. But I also think he's a very good thinker and did us all a great service by sticking to his guns.

I'm glad to see that Peter is still thinking, writing and active. I recommend his publications pages if you are interested in large-scale change management projects (like I am).