Mike O’Connor

Ah, the joys of moving. Old things rediscovered after years of sitting lonely and forlorn in the Center Hall Closet. One item that’s made it back out into the glory of the light of day is the wedding-gift Porto Baradio that we got from our bestest Madison friends. It was a centerpiece in the place-before-last, got demoted to the closet when we bought Mom and Dad’s mid-century modern house and returns to its proper place now that I’ve got room to see all the radios again.

Is this a cool thing or what? A bar… A radio… All portable… Take that, you iPod weenies.

Yep, we got sooo much snow that I had to punt off taking the ham-radio license exam yesterday. We wound up getting about 15 inches of snow, and there’s a little more on the way. So that made it a good day to try out Vista on the trusty Thinkpad and see how it worked.

I’ve got a Thinkpad G41, which is a weird beast — it’s a desktop replacement machine, so it’s got a Pentium 4, running around 3 ghz and lotsa memory. But it’s also pretty cheap, which means not much oomph on the video card. Which turned out to be trouble down the line. More about that in a minute.

Anyway, I set out at 9am with a copied image of my hard drive (thanks Nate, that turned out to be a great idea) and fired up the Vista Business install.

The only hard part about the installation was the dreaded “Sonic Studio DLA” problem — Vista scurried around the hard drive before launching the upgrade and said it wouldn’t proceed until I removed that program. Only trouble was, there wasn’t a program by that name to uninstall. Some rummaging in the registry and I realized that IBM had renamed the program “IBM DLA.” They’d also done that with another Sonic product called “RecordNow!” — I pulled both of those programs off the machine and Vista cheered right up.

The rest of the upgrade was easy — it just took a long time. I didn’t time it, but my guess is around 4 hours. The nice thing is that the upgrade is completely unattended so I didn’t have to babysit the machine. At the end Vista popped up, asked me for my password and I was good to go.

I drove around for the rest of the day and just before dinner rolled back to XP Pro by dropping the old drive back into the machine.

There are several reasons why I decided I like XP better on the laptop (which, to be fair, is not listed as a Vista-ready machine on the Lenovo site). The video card is the main hardware reason I rolled back. Vista’s graphics made the video card work so hard that the laptop’s fans were on pretty much all the time (unlike XP where the fan comes on only when the machine is working really hard).

But the real reason I went back to XP is because there really isn’t anything new in Vista. Oh yeah, lots of eye candy, cute new interfaces and navigation. But as one web site says, it really seems like XP with Mac-wannabe clothing on. I’m willing to put up with a lot of pain if software lets me do something cool that I can’t do any other way. But I couldn’t find that cool thing while running Vista.

Meanwhile, of course a lotta stuff broke — I’d have to upgrade a bunch of software that I use a lot (like QuickBooks), peripheral drivers were ok but whining about stuff, the usual bother of an OS upgrade. As I said, I’d do it if it were worth it. But it wasn’t. Sure am glad it was just a drive-swap to return to XP…

Updates…

Hm… Others share my view. Julio’s blog turned me on to this grouchy piece in Forbes. The recommendation? Don’t even think about upgrading an XP box to Vista.

This link is running all over the place in blogs that I follow. I’m sticking it in here so I don’t lose track of it.

Periodic table of visualization techniques

Completely nifty set of different ways to visualize information. I got lost in it for about an hour this morning. I sure wish they would put the graphics out in a list so I didn’t have to hover the mouse over them, but that’s just a nit. A great source of new ideas.

I have a gaggle of premium domain names I got a really long time ago. I keep coming up with ideas for them that are either late/lame or too hard for me to do. I’ve decided that the time is right to sell one and, being a structured RFP type guy, I decided to build an RFP to select the broker.

Here’s a list of the domains — I only want to sell one of them, but I’m going to let the brokers choose which one they want to sell so they can sell it into their strongest market segment.

bar.com — social networking, beverage industry, legal services

pub.com — social networking, beverage industry, publishing

grill.com – social networking, consumer products, humor

cafes.com — social networking, food and dining

place.com — travel industry, entertainment, social networking, Internet-destination

shelter.com — social services, social networking, consumer products, industrial products

I’ve prepared a couple of documents. Here’s an introductory letter (in Word format) that describes the process and timing in detail. If you’re thinking about bidding, you fersure want to read that.

There’s also a detailed vendor response document that I will cheerfully email to anybody who’s interested. The reason I’m not posting the response document to the web is to keep track of who’s inquiring so’s to make sure that vendors gets invited to the various events along the way. But if you’re just interested in a copy for any reason, feel free to ping me (everybody: put “RFP response” in the subject to get through the spam filter)

Here’s a timeline (see? I am into structure);

1/8/2007 Issue and publicize RFP
1/22/2007 Vendor conference call (at noon, CST)
2/12/2007 Deadline for proposal submission
2/19/2007 Interviews with finalists completed
2/26/2007 Negotiations with finalists completed
3/5/2007 Announce selection

Update:

Well dang. Looks like I threw a party and nobody came. Lots to reflect on in that, but the bottom line is that no brokers proposed. This isn’t the first time this has happened to one of my goofy ideas. It usually means I’m a little ahead of the market. So I’ll go figure out some other approach to this problem… I’ve got some good friends in a related field who bring a lot of marketing and sales savvy to the table — maybe it’s time to roll my own.

Further Update:

Ah! Frank Michlick wrote a piece about this little RFP over at his great DomainEditorial site. Here’s a link to his article about the RFP. Thanks Frank!

Hung out with a few old friends and made some new ones last night. I’m heading out the door — so not much in the way of captioning or explanation. Maybe I’ll get back to this one later at the farm…

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.

Huh. Full-circle time. I’ve been working on the St Paul Broadband Advisory Committee for the last few months and put up a web page to help us do our work. Click on that link to check it out.

Better yet, register for the site and help us out!

Ok, that title’s a bit harsh but I’m pretty tired after rasslin’ with a PHP upgrade all weekend and this is my chance to vent now that the worst of the damage has been repaired. And perhaps wax a little philosophical about the open source world’s need to get better at figuring out upgrade management.

It all started with an attempt to install [read more…]

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!

I’ve been grouchy about Qwest in the past, sometimes even way beyond grouchy into the “troublemaker” category.

But today it was reported that they are the only RBOC holdout in the NSA’s program to build a database of every dang call made in the USA.

Kudos to Qwest for holding those call records back. Stick to your guns, folks.

The latest project to keep me away from this blog is bringing up the registry for CORP.COM domain names.

This is a project that Edmon Chung and I started back in 2002 when Edmon was the hotrod young entepreneur in charge of Neteka. He did such a great job that they got acquired by Afilias not long after we started our project.

What with Edmon distracted by the acquisition, and me distracted with a series of really interesting InstantCxO engagements, the Corp.com Registry sorta went on the back burner for a few years. But the time seemed right to both of us last year and the project is galloping toward an April launch.

2nd level domains like CORP.COM have been steadily gaining favor over the last few years, which is another reason why it seems like the time might be right to kick things off. Afilias is game, Edmon is game, I’m game, we have our first registrar in NamesBeyond. So off we go.

Les Suzukamo (a buddy of mine) wrote an article about data center outsourcing in last Sunday’s Pioneer Press that you might find interesting.

But he got beat up by a reader for the following sentence — “Tier 1 is considered the Rolls Royce category of data centers. ” The reader pointed out that Tier IV is the best, and that Les had gotten his ranking backwards. When Les asked me this afternoon, I gave him the consultant’s answer — “it depends.” In this case it depends on who you talk to. Us network geeks tend to think in terms of Tier 1 carriers — and thus their data centers are considered Tier 1 data centers (or, telco-class data centers).

But data center infrastructure geeks indeed do have a different hierarchy, and by those lights Les’s reader is right — Tier IV is the best. I pushed this white paper along to Les by way of backup.

Dang, that’s confusing…

I’m working with Affilias to roll out a registry for corp.com domain names (”did you miss acme.com? you might be interested in acme.corp.com”). We’re shooting for early April to have things up and running.

Along those lines, I’m working on a little gizmo to help people look up name-possibilities for free. There are lots of darn good resources, but they’re really hard to find so I thought it would be useful to find as many as I can, and perhaps put some automation in front of them to make the searching easier.

This is a scratchpad for me as I locate the free-lookup sites.

Free trademark searches — US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) — (note; follow the “Search trademarks” link in the middle of the page)

Free national business yellow-pages search — Searchbug

Free state entity name search locations (not complete, I’m still hunting them down on the incredibly variable state pages — you’d think there’d be some kinda convention they’d follow…)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia (DC)
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indianna
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Wisconsin

Safe Haven's not getting much attention these days because I'm still getting my sea legs with the podcasting stuff. Sex and Podcasting is gonna be getting a new post a day, at least for the next week.

But I ran into a cool thought while listening to The Gilmore Gang yesterday (what happened to them by the way — a great series of podcasts that seem to have trickled off to nothing back in February).

Here's the idea — why not use RSS on a manufacturing shop floor to let machines and work-centers tell each other (and us) what they're up to. Machines could “subscribe” to upstream machines, and “publish” for downstream machines and let each other know what's going on — feeds could talk about what came into (and left) the machine/work-center.

I spoze this could be expanded to anything that has stuff moving through stages — paperwork processes, hospitals, etc. All kinds of real-time applications come to mind.

One thing that would be neat is that we'd get away from the huge central database notion and so adding a workcenter, or rearranging them, would be easy. Simply a matter of changing who subscribed to what. Sortof an object-oriented model that us regular people could understand…

It could be really visual too — lots of cool UI possibilities there. Not to mention fitting in better with the notion of lean manufacturing, and visual management.

Now, back to podcasting.

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…