Mike O’Connor

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).

Here's my daily dose of rants and puzzlements. Today's revolves around the recently-announced wireless project in Philadelphia. Like lots of folks, I'm hoping they'll make it go. Like lots of folks, I can't quite figure out how they're going to make the numbers work. Here's why.

Get an envelope out, we gonna do some figuring on the back of it. Let's see here, the Philly folks say they're going to light up the whole town for free Internet access. Ok, great. Presume all the geek problems away and let's say they get it lit. Now, if they really finally run with "free" they've basically replaced all the ISPs in town. Well, maybe that's ok. After all maybe this is an amenity that cities should do, like roads and sewers and stuff. Here's where the numbers get hard...

If residential Internet access is free, then most everybody will switch to it. Some significant percentage of 1,000,000 households. First "numbers" problem -- how much is upstream access for all those folks going to cost??

Get your envelope out. Let's say we give everybody up to 3 mBits (kinda like cable). And let's assume that people aren't all going to use it at the same time. That's called "oversubscription" and everybody does it - ISPs, phone companies, you name it. What oversubscription ratio? For the sake of the envelope, say 30-times. So for every megabit of upstream access, we can sell 30 mBits of "downstream" or customer access. Or 10 customers (remember? 3 mBits/customer). So for every 10 customers, we need another megabit of upstream access for those peak times (after supper).

If most of our 1,000,000 households switch to our free service, we gonna need a *lot* of upstream access. Let's say 20% of the households sign up. 200,000 customers means we have to buy 20,000 MBits of upstream access. 20 GigaBits! Wow! A T1 line is 1.5 MBits, so that would be 13,000 T1's. That a lot. Ok, Internet access is overbuilt and getting really cheap, so maybe they've got a really good deal. Maybe $10/month per MBit (that's cheaper than anything I've heard of, but hey, benefit of the doubt that's my motto...). $200,000/month for upstream. $2,400,000 a year of taxpayer money...

Once the customers have signed up for Internet, any time anything goes wrong with their computer that they can't understand, who they gonna call? The ISP, that's who. So now Philly's got to provide help-desk support for 200,000 customers. Let's say each customer calls once a year with a hard question that takes an hour to answer. 200,000 hours a year. People work 2000 hours a year, so that's 100 people answering help-desk calls at, say $50,000/year. Hmm, $5,000,000/year...

See where this is heading? I could run through all the rest of the stuff that an ISP does -- network maintenance, upgrades, fixing people's connections, paying the bills, etc. Roll all that up in a ball and it looks to me like you've got at least $10-15 million/year to keep it running.

On the one hand, that's a lot of money. On the other hand, compared to losing money on ballparks and stadiums and roads and sewers and economic incentives for people to move in, maybe it's not. I'd love to see the numbers for that project.

I missed this rumpus when it first happened. Nick Carr wrote an article in Harvard Business Review in 2002 called "IT Doesn't Matter" which triggered a heck of a debate.

I ran into the debate yesterday when CNET published this summary and rebuttal on their site.

I like the premise -- that IT is becoming a commodity and needs to be managed that way. Lots of interesting parallels to other industries -- electricity, railroads and (a new one for me) machine tools. There's been a very healthy debate over the article, which Nick has collected on this page for your reading enjoyment.

This is another angle on my earlier rant about why tech startups are a dead end.

Gotta scoot off to dinner with friends, but here's a darn good article about software pricing if you're an ISV.

I had a huge debate with JJ Allaire back in the early days of Cold Fusion about his pricing. I was lobbying for a price which turned out would have been way too low. Fortunately, he didn't listen to me.

Marshall Goldsmith's got a good one in Fast Company this week... Here's the link to his article in which he says (correctly) that we should "stop obsessing about goals and focus on mission."

I thought the whole piece was good, but the part that spoke the most for me was the personal side of the story. Here's a good sample Quote:

I've always felt that it's important to know how much is "enough money." Keeping that "enough is enough" notion in mind has kept me out of a lot of trouble over the years, and left me a lot more time to mess around with my family, friends and quirky sideline interests.

Everybody's hyperventilating about how SP2 "breaks stuff" today -- here's a typical article that ran last night. I wish they'd describe this in less dramatic terms. 'Turns out they're talking about the impact of having the firewall turned on by default, instead of turned off (which is the default up until now). So a better version of the headline would be "XP SP2 needs to be reconfigured if you use certain apps" or some such...

Which got me thinking -- why doesn't Microsoft bundle anti virus and anti adware software in too? Sure, it'll annoy the companies that have made a business out of fixing MS flaws, but so what? 'Sure would make life easier...

Assuming this will never happen, here are the (free - well, donations-accepted) packages I currently use.

AVG Anti-Virus software

Spybot Search and Destroy - anti adware/spyware software.

I was pleased to see that Consumer Reports just gave Spybot the nod as a "good thing" in their latest issue.

Here's a great optial illusion -- via Joho the Blog

Put this up as the greeting slide on your next presentation and have people begging to get started. Click on the thumbnail below to go to the full-page version. 'Makes my eyes water, it does.

I don't know where that quote in the title comes from -- but I use it all the time. I was reminded of it when Boing Boing pointed me at this fabulous piece in the Guardian in defense of idleness.

So why is this in the "managing" section? 'Cause I think acknowledging this notion is an important part of managing, that's why.

So there...

It's been kindof a slow week for the blog -- I dunno, just nothing much catching my eye. But this piece is a great list of ways to lie -- both words and pictures -- as well as countermeasures.

Here's the sample (via Boing Boing) that caught my eye

(8) The argument that we should not make efforts against X which is admittedly evil because there is a worse evil Y against which our efforts should be directed (pp 50-52)

Dealt with by pointing out that this is a reason for making efforts to abolish Y, but no reason for not also making efforts to get rid of X.

(9) The recommendation of a position because it is a mean between two extremes (pp 52-54)

Dealt with by denying the usefulness of the principle as a method of discovering the truth. In practice, this can most easily be done by showing that our own view also can be represented as a mean between two extremes.

I woke up wondering what would change if legislators (at any level, local through international) could vote over the Internet. What's the implication of that (inevitable, although maybe not in my lifetime) change in the way that representative government takes place?

Here are some initial thoughts before heading off to the farm this morning.

Legislators;

- would spend more time in their home district

- would be more influenced by the voices of the people they represent

- would be harder for lobbyists to reach

- wouldn't need to be paid as much (since they would only need one residence)

- would spend less time on travel

I think there are some great quality, performance and cost enhancements possible here. I'll keep editing this for a few days...