Wednesday, 06 May 2009 20:25
MRN
It is our policy (our only, single, sole policy) that associates and partners use their best judgment depending upon any given situation. Decisions are to be taken seriously and with as much information as can be reasonably gained in a timely manner. Mistakes will be made, and used as an opportunity to learn and demonstrate to others via entries in the available resources about the circumstances, the decision and the outcome. Blanket policies that are static can never account for every situation in an environment as fluid as an ongoing business with constant interaction between staff, vendors, customers and the public. Stagnation is death - policies only codify the conditions of demise.
Thursday, 30 October 2008 22:41
MRN
What I was referring to in the last post about focus and change is nothing less than an existential ennui that I seem to suffer from almost continuously. I get a half-dozen or so projects on my plate in addition to the day-to-day operations issues and I start almost immediately to become dissatisfied and bored. An effect of this is that I get half-way done with a project and can see the end result and what must be done to get there...and then I lose interest. I've already 'seen' the end, and therefore it no longer holds my interest enough to make it fun to work on. So finishing these projects is always a slog. A long, tedious, painful slog toward what is in my mind, inevitable. I need resources. I need a team (better yet, multiple teams, or a stable of pros to be assigned to teams as needed) that will take the projects designed and planned and move them competently and efficiently to completion. To get there, I need more financial resources. To get there, I need to focus on one, lucrative project that can put these financial resources in my hands. Currently, the most promising long-term project is the proof of concept for Neighborhood Computer Support. To move that into a position that will generate steady cash flow and constant growth, I need a system. It is a web-based system and in my mind it is nearly complete. However, it doesn't yet exist. I need the initial team to build it with me. The System is for the regular management of Neighborhood Computer Support shops based on what we've learned in the nearly four years operating Bryn Mawr Computer Support. It is based on customers, inventory, services and accounting. Here's the link to the project: Neighborhood Computer Support System. It will develop over the next several days as I download as much as possible from my head into the project document to be published here.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 30 October 2008 23:05 )
Wednesday, 29 October 2008 22:43
MRN
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am tired. I am most certainly tired and annoyed with the current election cycle, and I cannot fathom a more inane conversation than the one currently taking place on the surface by proponents of either party. The real issues are (as expected) being ignored and the spin, pandering and outright criminal activity going on in the name of democracy is enough to make me physically ill. If you believe in the Constitution of the United States as it currently exists, your individual liberties and the opportunity for everyone to make something of themselves through hard work, clear thought and perseverance that is the promise of America, then there is only one real choice. The other candidate has spoken – directly – against each of those. Likewise, near constant discussion (again, at the oblique periphery of any substantive facts) of the credit mess specifically and the economy as a whole is mind-numbing. The underlying numbers, the facts of employment and actual economic activity belie the doom and gloom constantly spoken from the television studios to the local coffee shops in this country. The real economy, the one wherein every day the people you see on the street and do business with trade goods and services in exchange for currency, credit or in kind value, is alive and well and will not stop – or even slow down – regardless of the factors reigning in the recent insanity in the housing and credit markets. The only real problem is that the stupid and criminal will probably go unpunished for their part in that mess. You and I will continue to live our lives just fine. It is supremely annoying that so many people make so much noise about so little when the facts and the reality of their day-to-day lives are right in front of them. I’d like to smack the population of America up-side the head, if I may. I need to focus, but I have been unable to do so. That is entirely my own fault, but before I make the effort necessary to rectify the situation, I would like to share with you my current thinking on several things. But that will have to be for another installment. It’s time for bed now. Focus. Truth. Freedom.
Saturday, 28 June 2008 08:48
MRN
Crowdsourcing is definitely an interesting concept, and there have been a few successes and a few failures over the past couple of years. One of the most interesting was Cambrian House, a platform for crowdsourcing business ideas. Conceptually, it was very cool. And although it has not survived in its initial incarnation, it was an experiment that had to happen. I'm grateful to have been one of the participants in the community, because it has opened up several possibilities that I would never have been aware of otherwise. However, it is time to make way for something better. VenCorps (currently in Alpha) is up and coming. "VenCorps brings together the power of collaborative innovation and venture capital VenCorps taps into the global community to discover, fund and grow cost-efficient startups with world-changing ideas. VenCorps connects founders, funders and facilitators together in a community of shared interest: startup success. VenCorps is a program of Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. Winners of the VenCorps Startup Showdowns will receive funds anchored by Spencer Trask along with founders, funders and facilitators."
I've already started to get involved, and can't wait to see what comes out of it. Already I'm seeing this as a distillation of the ideas that were tried with Cambrian House into a much more powerful system.
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Friday, 16 May 2008 22:19
MRN
Cringley is asking a very lucid question that more people in the upper-echelons of business today should be asking: "What Does Gartner Really Do?" Leaving aside the fact that I agree completely with the author's derision of these research firms' "real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year", A couple of points got me thinking. First there's this: "How often do these consultants tell their customers that everything is fine and no action is required? Almost never. In fact I'm tempted to say "absolutely never" simply because I haven't heard of such an instance, but I'm playing it safe here."
The consultants he is referring to are the research firm analysts. There are a lot of good I.T. Consultants out there doing good work and providing a valuable service by, at times, preventing their cilents from spending money they shouldn't on the latest and greatest buzz-word technology. I can say absolutely that I have indeed told clients NOT to spend money on things they don't need and won't or can't use. (I'm a flawed consultant, driven by the ideal of helping clients rather than increasing my own sales. That's probably why I don't work for any consulting firm but my own.) But the bigger issue is one of professionalism. Cringely is right that many I.T. workers are clueless about the technology they're working with. There is no professional standard (no, A+ certification doesn't count here) and no independent, credible organization conferring a professional accreditation to I.T. pros. Unless you have a masters degree or better in Computer Science and/or engineering, there's no way to measure your skill set against any other. Most business leaders would be amazed to learn how many people with the title CIO or CTO can't keep their VCR clock from blinking 12:00 continuously. (Be even more frightened that in 2008 CIO's and CTO's still even HAVE VCR's in their homes!) Which brings up the question of just what measurable qualifications could and should be included to provide an I.T. professional with quantifiable recognition such as medical doctors and Certified Public Accountants. If we came up with that list, updated on an annual basis to stay current with the latest technology, rest assured that the only people qualifying would not be the types who look good for the photos included in the glossy annual report.
Sunday, 11 May 2008 20:54
MRN
This Twitter thing is getting out of hand. I've been in technology for a long time, and while I've never been a 1st tier early adapter, I am and have been on the front lines and usually in the second or third wave of the early adopter set on the Internet. I still don't completely get Twitter, and I probably won't any time soon because I'm not immersed on a minute-by-minute basis in the minute expansions and contractions of the bubble as people inside the echo chambers of the Web2.0 startup/VC/media crowd are. Read: I don't have enough friends and/or colleagues on the bleeding edge to make this limited service useful to me. A brilliant intern last summer showed me the tumblog he and a friend had built in RoR, and I was impressed with the functionality, but the only way I could imagine the usefullness of such a thing would be with widespread adoption. Twitter has apparently reached the first-stage critical mass that it's a phemonenon inside the echo chamber, but remains unknown and relatively useless to the world at large - including the vast majority of the population with broadband access. But being in the industry (if not in the beating heart of it), I pay attention. Recently I've been seeing more and more conversations decrying the state of Twitter and whether it will survive, what should be done to make sure it survives and whether it should survive at all in its current incarnation. Articles such as this one at TechCrunch with it's obvious allusion to drug addiction are increasingly disturbing. If you thought information addiction was a problem before, the instantaneous gratification provided by Twitter is as crack is to the cocaine of an always on broadband connection and good feed reader. Some people need to take a step back and get some perspective. Having said that, I can see how this is potentially game changing. The way that Microsoft's Live Mesh is moving things to the next level of connectivity is going to be useful for a vast majority of people. I have already used Live Mesh in my first 3 days of being signed up to ease the transfer of data and information for both work and personal needs. Twitter, on the other hand, requires either an established community requiring such real-time connection and/or a perceived need to be able to follow and be part of specific conversations surrounding specific topics. It's not for the masses...yet. The problems that Steve Gilmour references in his article are specific to the current user base, but they do not address what I believe will be necessary to make it useful to the population at large. I'll try to refrain from further social commentary here, but thinking out loud on the topic produces a few ideas on how to make it so. To make the 'platform' useful to the general population (considering the technical limitations that Twitter has experienced) it will indeed need to be decentralized. Gilmour speaks of namespace issues and he is correct in doing so, but with the increasing adoption of OpenID, I believe his fears may be unfounded. It comes back to control of an online identity (or several), and that is precisely the problem that OpenID is intended to solve. Critical mass of the size required to take it mainstream might easily be found by tapping the existing userbase of IM networks. What if...one were to create an OpenID based login that could simultaneously publish to multiple IM networks with a simple tick box to include a comment into the Twitter network. OpenID providers could be convinced to offer Twitter message hosting as a feature/incentive, thus obviating the need for a central network and thus avoid the outages recently experienced. Include a multiple network client such as Pidgin and you have a ready-made solution based on existing technology. With the level of adoption this expansion could foster, we might very well introduce the benefits of this kind of communication across the Internet as a whole and bring whole new sets of users into the conversation. Then, I could see the appeal - as would millions of others.
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Thursday, 17 April 2008 21:16
MRN
No, the title of this post is not a typo. Here's an idea (for free) for all the materials nuts out there: Graphene circuits aligned 3-dimenaionally in aerogel. Discuss. No, seriously. They are already working on functional, fashionable wearable computing platforms - this would make it easy. Any temperature issues are already minimized by the properties of the graphene circuits, the insulating properties of aerogels make that whole line of problems a non-issue. Lower power consumption: check. And the density of the circuits available...wow. I could conceivably run a computer that could defeat BlueGene at chess...in my shorts. They're already working on display technologies with graphene, but consider an artificial eye. If we replace nature's aqueous humor with this circuitry infused aerogel, how small could we make the current computing rigs required for the latest artificial vision projects? Just the tip of the iceberg, if you ask me.
Thursday, 14 February 2008 22:59
MRN
I was just reading this post at TechCrunch about the looming battle in the social gaming space. I'm not normally interested, because I'm one of those unhip people who have yet to see the value of spending a lot of time and effort on those sites. But as I was skimming the article (TechCrunch and TechDirt are two of a very few blogs that I actually try to get the gist of EACH post from), I saw this: "It’s most popular game is Texas Hold’Em poker (with 609,000 daily active users in Facebook alone), followed by Blackjack, Attack!, Scramble, and Sea Wars. At least on Facebook, it appears that Zynga has more daily active users."
I have no idea what this company's version of Sea Wars is like. I don't know anything about the game. But all I could think about at the moment was the old (and I mean green-screen old - forget your fancy 8-bit characters) Sea Wolf arcade game. I remember fondly the rest of the family happily enjoying their meal on a Friday night in the dining room of our local pizza joint while I bathed my retinas in the blue glow of line drawn ships in the first arcade game to introduce a stored high-score. I had an idea. We could do this on the Internet. The game could take up about 2 vertical inches of screen real estate, edge to edge. It would consist of the old style view port, a few keys to pan left and right, move forward and back, and a radar screen on which to track enemy ships. Here's the cool part: the other ships are other users. Their location on the playing field (the Earth) indicated by geo-IP. Ok, geo-IP isn't very accurate, but work with me here. There would need to be some concentrations of targets anyway to produce decent game play. The very simple controls would take your Sea Wolf! attack submarine under the surface toward where your radar, and or signals intelligence, indicated there were enemy ships. Attempt to maneuver in undetected to within torpedo range, fire and escape. Of course, most players are going to want to drive a Sea Wolf attack sub. But there should be options for surface vessels as well. Destroyers, Carriers, (the game used P.T. boats as the enemy),etc. Anything that can pose a plausible threat to submarines. Players could form battle groups, steam in convoy for protection, and have to approach safe harbors for repairs or supplies as warranted. Players could sign up to represent their home nations. There would be ongoing point totals, tournaments over time periods of days or weeks, allies, enemies...all the great things that helped the cold war spawn the birth of electronic gaming in the first place!
Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 February 2008 23:08 )
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