While summer may have unofficially ended on Labor Day, the first technical day of fall was September 22nd at 5:18 PM EDT this year. However, today is definitely the first day of fall here in New England. The leaves have been subtly changing color and this morning it is brisk and cool, a high of 63 degrees here in Boston today. There's a strong breeze and it's starting to knock the yellow and red leaves off of the trees, laying them bare for the impending approach of winter.
And this is one of the many things I love about living in New England. While it's still over a 100 degrees in many places out west (unfortunately I have to go to Arizona next week for work where it will be 106!), the seasons are changing here in the North East and it's a beautiful time.
When I get back home from my work trip I plan on making my annual early-October drive through Western Massachusetts, up into Vermont, and having some delicious barbecue at one of these paradoxical outdoor southern-style pork rib barbecue places that I've seen here in New England. It looks like something from the deep south, with the order window built into the side of an old school bus and 50 gallon drums cut in half to serve as grills. A little later in October I'll drive up to Maine and get a pumpkin for Halloween.
This is one of the most beautiful times of year in New England and makes me happy to be here.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
New Forms of Electronic Communication
I don't know if it's just me or if other people are feeling this too; email is starting to feel really antiquated. It's kind of like in the late 1990s when someone you knew still had a rotary phone in their home, in some spare bedroom or other seldom-frequented place and you used it - this same thing that you used countless times just 10 years earlier - and it feels so very old.
Email today is often used as a sort of slow-motion chat without any public persistence. People will send brief notes back and forth to each other and then after the problem is solved, the solution reached, the email is either deleted or filed away and only the two people involved in that conversation know the answer. Sometimes that's good but in collaborative environments this is often valuable information for other people, too. Copying these other people into email conversations just to keep them informed results in too much noise and overflowing inboxes. Chat tools, on the other hand, are too temporal and are also very disruptive.
I think the answer to this lies in the type of communication seen on Twitter and now being adopted by Facebook and other social media sites. This is the use of the broadcasted "status", or "tweet". For anyone who's not aware of what this means, a user types a short blurb about what they are doing, a question they may have, an idea they want feedback on, etc and it is broadcasted to their followers. The result is a "timeline" for each user of their tweets that can be subscribed to by people who are interested in what this person has to say. All of this information is stored in a publicly-accessible location (on the web) and it can be searched. Specific tweets can be directed at certain people (using the @USER convention) and subjects can be applied using hash tags (#TOPIC).
I think a system like this could be adopted very effectively for collaborative or corporate use with the addition of "context". So a user would identify the audience for their tweet, like "my team", "project X team", "department", "enterprise", etc. Users could apply filters to feeds to see what is immediately relevant to them, search for historical information, or read departmental notices when they have time. Of course, this would not replace email entirely; email is still important for formalized communication between two people or for sending information outside of an enterprise although much of that could eventually be done away with and replaced with a good content management system with publishing and workflow features.
It will be interesting to see where the future takes electronic communication. I know that Google is working something called "Wave". More information can be found here: http://wave.google.com/ It seems to work in a similar way as what I am describing although it's hard to know for sure since it's not released yet. Twitter and Facebook have all but replaced email for interpersonal communication for many people. Let's see if the corporate world follows.
Email today is often used as a sort of slow-motion chat without any public persistence. People will send brief notes back and forth to each other and then after the problem is solved, the solution reached, the email is either deleted or filed away and only the two people involved in that conversation know the answer. Sometimes that's good but in collaborative environments this is often valuable information for other people, too. Copying these other people into email conversations just to keep them informed results in too much noise and overflowing inboxes. Chat tools, on the other hand, are too temporal and are also very disruptive.
I think the answer to this lies in the type of communication seen on Twitter and now being adopted by Facebook and other social media sites. This is the use of the broadcasted "status", or "tweet". For anyone who's not aware of what this means, a user types a short blurb about what they are doing, a question they may have, an idea they want feedback on, etc and it is broadcasted to their followers. The result is a "timeline" for each user of their tweets that can be subscribed to by people who are interested in what this person has to say. All of this information is stored in a publicly-accessible location (on the web) and it can be searched. Specific tweets can be directed at certain people (using the @USER convention) and subjects can be applied using hash tags (#TOPIC).
I think a system like this could be adopted very effectively for collaborative or corporate use with the addition of "context". So a user would identify the audience for their tweet, like "my team", "project X team", "department", "enterprise", etc. Users could apply filters to feeds to see what is immediately relevant to them, search for historical information, or read departmental notices when they have time. Of course, this would not replace email entirely; email is still important for formalized communication between two people or for sending information outside of an enterprise although much of that could eventually be done away with and replaced with a good content management system with publishing and workflow features.
It will be interesting to see where the future takes electronic communication. I know that Google is working something called "Wave". More information can be found here: http://wave.google.com/ It seems to work in a similar way as what I am describing although it's hard to know for sure since it's not released yet. Twitter and Facebook have all but replaced email for interpersonal communication for many people. Let's see if the corporate world follows.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Classic Chris Craft Boats
I'm moving into my new apartment in the beginning of July. It's a brand new building (opens July 1st - it's just a parking lot in the map, below) and is very close to the Mystic and Medford Rivers here in Massachusetts. I was just looking at a Google maps satellite image of the location and noticed some boat slips about a block from my apartment. You can see the image here:
View Larger Map
So as it turns out those slips are part of the Mystic Wellington Yacht Club. Apparently they have public launch spaces but I am going to do a little research and find out what's involved in joining and renting a slip space. I've always wanted to own a boat. In particular, ever since seeing "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" I've wanted one of those old wooden boats. There are probably a few different kinds but one particularly popular kind is Chris Craft. Chris Craft still makes new boats, out of fiberglass, but I'm looking for a classic 1950s or earlier wooden model. Something like this:
I really have no clue what all is involved in restoring, maintaining or using a boat like this but I do intend to find out. Once I get into the new place I'll go down to the marina to start to learn a bit more. I'll have to find out if there are any local restoration clubs as well. I don't know if a boat like this would have the cruising range to get to the cape but I think it would be awesome to be able to boat out to Provincetown. More to come on this....
View Larger Map
So as it turns out those slips are part of the Mystic Wellington Yacht Club. Apparently they have public launch spaces but I am going to do a little research and find out what's involved in joining and renting a slip space. I've always wanted to own a boat. In particular, ever since seeing "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" I've wanted one of those old wooden boats. There are probably a few different kinds but one particularly popular kind is Chris Craft. Chris Craft still makes new boats, out of fiberglass, but I'm looking for a classic 1950s or earlier wooden model. Something like this:
I really have no clue what all is involved in restoring, maintaining or using a boat like this but I do intend to find out. Once I get into the new place I'll go down to the marina to start to learn a bit more. I'll have to find out if there are any local restoration clubs as well. I don't know if a boat like this would have the cruising range to get to the cape but I think it would be awesome to be able to boat out to Provincetown. More to come on this....
Friday, May 29, 2009
The Inversion Principle - Random Musings
Many of us work in large corporate environments. Much like everything else in life that humans are involved in, human nature shows through in every aspect, both the good and the bad, the way that things grow and develop and sometimes fall apart. I won't bother going into great detail about this, many people more educated than I have spent their entire lives documenting just small attributes of human nature and there are several sciences dedicated to this topic including anthropology and psychology. Religion attempts to concern itself with this topic as well, but in a different way. What I want to focus on is not human nature though, but "corporate nature", or the way an entity created by people behaves and when it is appropriate - or even necessary - for that entity to stop behaving like the people who created it.
I'll start on one small aspect of this and attempt to put all my thoughts down over time. I was speaking to a colleague the other day about how companies form. In the entrepreneurial sense there is an idea, then people, then more people, then a product, more people, etc. The developer of the idea becomes the purveyor of the product and along the way requires more and more manpower to meet the growing demand of the market (hopefully!). It seems to be a sign of success of the founders of small, start-up companies to talk about the number of people they employ and, especially in recent times, we've seen the government bend over backwards to protect the companies that do employ the most people. However, in any employment pool there is a ratio of "Employees" to "Dead Weight". Or, to change that a bit and put that same concept in a more positive light, "Number of Employees" to "Number of Effective Employees". The relationship of these numbers tends to be that as the number of employees climbs, the number of effective employees does not. A one man show run by an entrepreneur may represent a 1:1 relationship. If he hires a really kick-ass accountant and an amazing front-end developer, perhaps the relationship stays 1:1. But as the company grows and grows and grows and eventually has their own service desk, system administrators, a flotilla of software engineers, etc, that relationship changes drastically. It's been my observation that generally most departments have one really bright superstar that tends to pull the majority of the weight. Sometimes slight more but the relationship is never even close to 1:1 in a large enterprise.
So... clearly any enterprise wants to keep this relationship as close to 1:1 as possible. But how? As companies grow they need more people, right? And amazing talent isn't always easy to find. This is where the Inversion Principle (a term coined by a friend of mine. Or at least introduced to me by a friend of mine in this particular context; Google turned up nothing) comes into play. The concept is that as a company gets larger and more flush with cash (or greater access to credit) and more mature in its product offering it becomes easier to outsource commodity services (i.e. systems administration, call center tasks, etc) and the enterprise has more money for commercially available business process management software whereby less development is needed for commodity software (i.e. reinventing the proverbial wheel; work flows, routing software, etc). This allows the enterprise to become larger with less. Of course, this is antithetical in some ways to basic aspects of human nature. Additionally, we often have a notion of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" because this is the way companies have run since Adam Smith and the industrial revolution. But look where this has taken the auto industry. And there is no reason to believe that other companies won't go right down that same path. IT is like the auto union workers for the 21st century company. It's helpful but it is also a tremendous liability of not managed appropriately.
I'll be writing more about how companies, departments or even small work groups can begin to take advantage of the inversion principle in daily practice in order to reduce their size and increase their effectiveness. It may seem strange, but less truly is more.
I'll start on one small aspect of this and attempt to put all my thoughts down over time. I was speaking to a colleague the other day about how companies form. In the entrepreneurial sense there is an idea, then people, then more people, then a product, more people, etc. The developer of the idea becomes the purveyor of the product and along the way requires more and more manpower to meet the growing demand of the market (hopefully!). It seems to be a sign of success of the founders of small, start-up companies to talk about the number of people they employ and, especially in recent times, we've seen the government bend over backwards to protect the companies that do employ the most people. However, in any employment pool there is a ratio of "Employees" to "Dead Weight". Or, to change that a bit and put that same concept in a more positive light, "Number of Employees" to "Number of Effective Employees". The relationship of these numbers tends to be that as the number of employees climbs, the number of effective employees does not. A one man show run by an entrepreneur may represent a 1:1 relationship. If he hires a really kick-ass accountant and an amazing front-end developer, perhaps the relationship stays 1:1. But as the company grows and grows and grows and eventually has their own service desk, system administrators, a flotilla of software engineers, etc, that relationship changes drastically. It's been my observation that generally most departments have one really bright superstar that tends to pull the majority of the weight. Sometimes slight more but the relationship is never even close to 1:1 in a large enterprise.
So... clearly any enterprise wants to keep this relationship as close to 1:1 as possible. But how? As companies grow they need more people, right? And amazing talent isn't always easy to find. This is where the Inversion Principle (a term coined by a friend of mine. Or at least introduced to me by a friend of mine in this particular context; Google turned up nothing) comes into play. The concept is that as a company gets larger and more flush with cash (or greater access to credit) and more mature in its product offering it becomes easier to outsource commodity services (i.e. systems administration, call center tasks, etc) and the enterprise has more money for commercially available business process management software whereby less development is needed for commodity software (i.e. reinventing the proverbial wheel; work flows, routing software, etc). This allows the enterprise to become larger with less. Of course, this is antithetical in some ways to basic aspects of human nature. Additionally, we often have a notion of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" because this is the way companies have run since Adam Smith and the industrial revolution. But look where this has taken the auto industry. And there is no reason to believe that other companies won't go right down that same path. IT is like the auto union workers for the 21st century company. It's helpful but it is also a tremendous liability of not managed appropriately.
I'll be writing more about how companies, departments or even small work groups can begin to take advantage of the inversion principle in daily practice in order to reduce their size and increase their effectiveness. It may seem strange, but less truly is more.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
The PS3 Online
So I've been a fan of the Sony PS3 for some time now. I've had one for a while but whenever I've spent much time with it in the past I've been playing multi-player games with a friend in my living room. It's a truly amazing machine. I've set up a media server on an old PC with 80 GB of my music, all my photos and a bunch of movies on it and I love that I can play all of this effortlessly on my living room television/stereo via the PS3. There are some pretty incredible other features that I've played with as well, such as "PlayStation Home", an interactive 3D world and "Life with PlayStation" which allows you to manipulate a globe and see what news is happening and what the weather is like in many major metro areas.
But tonight I decided to sit down and spend some quality time with a game of mine that I hadn't spent much time with previously, "Little Big Planet". The basic synopsis of the game is that you're in a world of human dreams and you go around playing these interesting, somewhat surreal levels. It's physically challenging (requiring a certain amount of dexterity and reaction) but it's also really beautiful, creative and a little intellectually stimulating. Well, as I played it tonight I decided to try some of the levels "online". This was totally weird. Suddenly I'm playing levels with other people around the world, like me, in their living rooms. I can chat with them, choose levels with them and see their own creations within the game.
I've spent a lot of time on the internet. I started using IRC a decade ago and I'm no stranger to chat and, obviously, blogs, web sites, twitter, etc. What was so alien about this is that it was in my living room... on my television! For some strange reason I felt somewhat exposed and more "connected" to this experience than I've felt during my online computing experiences. I guess it goes to show that there is a lot more to be discovered and experienced in our relationship with these machines. It's so strange how images on a television can evoke a different emotional response based on what you think is driving them. In some ways, this may be the reason the Turing test is such a benchmark. If we believe that we're interacting with a person on the other side of that screen then there is a different response from us.
But tonight I decided to sit down and spend some quality time with a game of mine that I hadn't spent much time with previously, "Little Big Planet". The basic synopsis of the game is that you're in a world of human dreams and you go around playing these interesting, somewhat surreal levels. It's physically challenging (requiring a certain amount of dexterity and reaction) but it's also really beautiful, creative and a little intellectually stimulating. Well, as I played it tonight I decided to try some of the levels "online". This was totally weird. Suddenly I'm playing levels with other people around the world, like me, in their living rooms. I can chat with them, choose levels with them and see their own creations within the game.
I've spent a lot of time on the internet. I started using IRC a decade ago and I'm no stranger to chat and, obviously, blogs, web sites, twitter, etc. What was so alien about this is that it was in my living room... on my television! For some strange reason I felt somewhat exposed and more "connected" to this experience than I've felt during my online computing experiences. I guess it goes to show that there is a lot more to be discovered and experienced in our relationship with these machines. It's so strange how images on a television can evoke a different emotional response based on what you think is driving them. In some ways, this may be the reason the Turing test is such a benchmark. If we believe that we're interacting with a person on the other side of that screen then there is a different response from us.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
UNIMOG
I went to the hobby store today to get some spray paints for my current model I'm working on, a "Spapanzer" 234/4. It's basically an eight wheel drive, eight wheel steering armored car from Germany during WWII, being produced in 1944. It's an interesting model because it has an open fighting compartment, like many other tank hunters or self-propelled artillery pieces from Germany in that era. That means a lot of interior detail.
Anyhow, I was getting some primer red for the interior and some dark yellow for the camo-base exterior and I saw a Revell model kit of a UNIMOG U1300 L. This is a very cool vehicle built by Mercedes for the modern German Federal Army. This particular model is from 1978. I just had to buy it. It looks like this:
It's a neat vehicle and I'd love to have one some day for... um... well, I'm sure it would be useful for something (aside from being fun to drive). There's this company in Germany that turns them into all-terrain motor homes and they are simply amazing! Here's a great example, although it's a U1550, a slightly different, newer model:
Since a custom all-terrain motor home is a bit out of my budget and I basically have no need for one, I think I'm going to scratch build this model into a miniature motor home. I might even take a sort of post-apocalyptic twist on it and go a little nuts. More to come....
Anyhow, I was getting some primer red for the interior and some dark yellow for the camo-base exterior and I saw a Revell model kit of a UNIMOG U1300 L. This is a very cool vehicle built by Mercedes for the modern German Federal Army. This particular model is from 1978. I just had to buy it. It looks like this:
It's a neat vehicle and I'd love to have one some day for... um... well, I'm sure it would be useful for something (aside from being fun to drive). There's this company in Germany that turns them into all-terrain motor homes and they are simply amazing! Here's a great example, although it's a U1550, a slightly different, newer model:
Since a custom all-terrain motor home is a bit out of my budget and I basically have no need for one, I think I'm going to scratch build this model into a miniature motor home. I might even take a sort of post-apocalyptic twist on it and go a little nuts. More to come....
Saturday, May 16, 2009
My New Blog
I've set this blog up to track my professional endeavors as well as some of my hobbies, such as model building. I'm currently working on a German armor model from WWII, a Dragon Models' "Sd. Kfz. 234/4, Panzerspahwagen".
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