james mirtle: The Nonis files – A hockey journalist’s blog

james mirtle: The Nonis files – A hockey journalist’s blog:

Of course Nonis goes a little overboard in his rant, but the thing I don’t understand is the relentless pile-on that’s come in the wake of his comments. It’s almost as if everyone in the hockey work, universally, agrees that an unrestricted free agency age of 25 for the game’s top prospects is nothing but a good thing. (oh, if you are trying to figure out what the fuss is, what he said is well covered here).

I have to admit my reaction to Nonis’ statements was a little different than the ones I’ve read online (like here, here and Tom Benjamin being his usual contrary self here)

First, let me say right up front: he’s right about the schedule. It sucks, and if I thought we could fix it MID-SEASON, I’d tell the league to just shut down for a week and fix it, right now, tonight. The existing unbalanced schedule just absolutely reeks. Period. Exclamation point. I’m stunned they left it in for a second year. Did I mention I don’t like it? And I don’t like it BOTH because you don’t see the other conference often enough AND I think it’s TOO unbalanced in favor of the division, when — in fact — playoff decisions are made on a conference level, not a divisional one. So it’s got fairness problems even WITHIN a conference I don’t like.

So, please, Mr. Bettman: balance the schedule some. cut divisional games back to 6, at least. Or four. Give us the eastern conference back. You can do a home and home with every team, every year, without screwing the schedule up too badly. Or less badly than it is now. And if the eastern teams start whining about travel schedules again, I have a serious suggestion: realign the divisions again, and put Vancouver in the Atlantic and New Jersey in the Pacific. One season like that, and the eastern teams will never complain about travel again — as long as you go back to the old way where only western teams get screwed by the travel…..

But on Nonis’ other point, that free agency is “a joke” and screws things up for teams — I don’t have much sympathy for him, nor do the members of the NHLPA. The NHL still has the most restrictive free agency of the major sports in the US and the oldest date for unrestricted for the players. It was legitimately agreed to in bargaining between the league and players, and I honestly don’t CARE if Nonis likes it or not. His job is to work with it and make it work for his team.

Yes, the new CBA and the changes in free agency change things for teams. Smart teams adapt and adopt. Smart GMs look for advantages. Yes, you own your players for a shorter period of time — so do all of the other teams Nonis and the Canucks are competing against. That gives you the ability to look at their players as much as it gives other teams a chance to look at yours.

Sharks GM Doug Wilson saw this coming and planned for it, and look at the results. Nonis doesn’t seem to have — and it shows. And Bobby Clarke actively ignored the possibility of change, and look what happened in Philly.

From the ESPN article: Nonis said increased free agency has helped to reduce the standard rebuilding time from a five-year span to a two or three-year span.

“The Detroit Red Wings could have a five-year run if they did a good job of recruiting, trading, drafting and developing,” Nonis said. “You could keep those players together.

What Nonis forgets to mention is that the Red Wings also had a very rich owner with very deep pockets who was very willing to spend on the team — things that certainly aren’t true in Vancouver OR San Jose, so even in Vancouver, under the old system I doubt that the “red wing experience’ would ever have been possible. At least here in the new CBA, Vancouver can be competitive.

Honestly? if I were in vancouver, this wouldn’t give me warm fuzzies about the quality of my GM.

~stevenf: How to Live

~stevenf: How to Live:

There’s a bit of popular wisdom that suggests you should “live each day as if it were your last.”

Seems like a bit much.

I mean, it can’t possibly be healthy for my body or mind to spend each day sobbing uncontrollably and trying to eat as many Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburgers as I can before nightfall.

I propose a modest revision: you should live each day as if you’ve got roughly a month left. This instills a sense of urgency, but there’s still room for a day or two of guilt-free television watching, or Warcraft. Granted, it doesn’t have the same ring, but I think in the long run it’ll be a lot less stressful for everyone.

Fraser Speirs – Live each day as if you were dying 30 days later….:

Of course, in the Christian sphere, we have the additional eschatological spice of being invited to imagine that every day is everyone’s last day on the planet.

I’ll apologize up front if this comes across as a bit ogre-ish, but there’s a bit “not getting the point” going on here. I’m guessing Steven’s younger — I remember having that kind of attitude about life back when I was in my 20′s, too. It’s easy to take death lightly, because you tend to feel somewhat immortal.

But what they’re trying to get across here is a serious point, and it’s not about cheeseburgers.

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine went into the hospital with back pain. It was bone cancer, it was in the spine. they wired her into a morphine drip to keep her comfortable, and she was gone six weeks later. She was never lucid enough to recognize visitors again, and so we never got to see her before she died.

In the last few months, I’ve had the wife of a good friend die of breast cancer that spread to the brain and took her after a multi-year fight. I’ve got another friend who went from “I think I feel a lump” to Stage IV in the lungs in six weeks, only to beat the bastard when they found the spots on the lung weren’t really cancelr — only to fracture a leg bone a few weeks ago, and the biopsy came back positive. She’s since fractured the other leg, so the victory dance was a bir premature, and she’s back into chemo and radiation, and we’re all back into prayers. And the father of my about-to-be boss had a heart attack and almost died, but he’s fine now.

In the last five years, my mom’s had two serious health crises — both of which could well have taken her away, and which she fought off mostly through sheer stubborness. Today, she happily bitches about having to carry around oxygen because of the damaged lungs, and simply refuses to let it get in the way (she and dad even went on another cruise, mostly to prove they could…)

and last sunday, I got The Phone Call — a friend of mine started feeling ill, ended up calling 911 and being hauled into the hospital. I spent much of sunday in the waiting room while they were in surgery waiting to hear more details (I’m the person of record as being the in-town emergency contact for them, since they’re an import from out of state with no local family). While I was there, there was another family waiting to hear about another emergency, and I watched as the room continued to fill up, with sisters and brothers and daughters and grand kids and nephews — must have been 30 people in there finally, and from the phone calls, the extended family was starting to fly in. Finally their surgeon came in to talk to them — not from surgery, but from ICU, and used the “we’re doing all we can” line, which is medical speak for “start praying”.

So finally, my friend’s surgeon comes out to let me know that everything went well, and they’re doing fine and recovering. I’ve been spending a few hours a day the last week at the hospital, both playing moral support (and straight line for the nurses), and fending off out of town family that seemed to think it was more important that they be updated about the status than that the poor person actually let the person sleep and get better. I happened to be there when the complications kicked in, too, and we had about 36 hours where nobody was quite sure what was going on, only that it wasn’t good; and a second surgery to fix it once they figured it out, but that’s a couple of days I’ll never forget.

Oh, yeah. My friend went home today, doing much better. A fair recovery ahead, and we’ll all be pitching in to make it easier for them, but they’re home. 70 years ago, what happened would have killed them. 50 years ago, it would have been touch and go.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s why this isn’t about hamburgers. It’s about the people in your life, and your relations with them. It’s about not assuming you’ll have a tomorrow to do something, because you may not. If your mom dies tonight because someone drops an anvil on your head, are you going to be satisfied that she knew what you thought and how you feel, or are there things you’re going to regret having not taken the time to say or do, because you waited until tomorrow?

There are so many things that can get in the way of tomorrow; it doesn’t have to be cancer, or a heart attack. It can be a drunk driver — or it can be bad sushi.

“Living every day like it’s your last” isn’t about that final burger, but understanding that ther’s no guarantee of a tomorrow, for you, or for someone you know. And it’s attempting to help you understand to keep an eye on your priorities, and making sure you keep a eye on what you consider important, and on the people and relationships in your life that are meaningful for you. It’s about spending time with people you care about, and keeping communication open with them. It’s about never being too busy to call and say hi, or “I love you”, because you don’t ever want to wake up some morning to find out that it’s no longer possible, and that now you can’t. Or not waking up.

It’s ALSO not about living life paranoid, or refusing to live, or calling hourly just in case. It’s about making sure that the things that AREN’T as important in life (but which can be noisy or annoying or whiny or grating or….) don’t push away those other things you hold dear, merely because the squeaky wheel likes to win.

It’s the difference between “he’s gone” and “he’s gone, and I was meaning to call and say hi, but I didn’t get around to it”.

And trust me, that’s a lot more painful than eating a burger. well, except maybe that Carl’s Pastrami monstrosity… (grin).

If you died tonight, would you have any regrets for things not said or done? Are there people that if THEY died, you’d never forgive yourself for not saying or doing something while you could? That’s what this is about. And If the answer to either of those is “yes”, then now’s a great time to do something about it — while you can.

(and ya know, fraser, I think there’s a sermon in there somewhere…..)

okay, back to serious stuff, like whether Apple should blog… enough of this fluffy Hello Kitty crap….

Apple blogger calls “bullshit” on me « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger

Apple blogger calls “bullshit” on me « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger:

To be perfectly honest, I think the reason more people at Apple don’t blog is that they’re way too busy working to blog. Plenty of my former co-workers have personal blogs. But, you can see periods where they don’t post for days. It’s because they have a project that is all-consuming. Blogs without postings don’t get regular readership.

There are also plenty of other communications vehicles, as pointed out, where Apple talks, or has customer forums. Apple eNews, Apple Hot News, Discussion forums, iTunes reviews, Apple Store reviews, mailing lists. Also, the feedback links on product pages do get read by the appropriate people. And responded to. But if the appropriate person responded publicly to every single message, the appropriate person wouldn’t be able to actually fix anything, they’d be communicating all day. That’s not really meaning to be an excuse, just reality of how much attention there is.

well… that was fun…

Well, that was fun. I’m going to try, over the next couple of days, to close out my series of Apple Post Mortems. Right now, I think I have four pieces left:

Part 5: Problems I think Apple should fix and challenges Apple faces

Part 6: Should Apple blog? (Is S4e right?)

Part 7: The Marketshare “problem”, (aka, damn you, Mike spindler, or why Apple’s Marketshare only matters to analysts you shouldn’t listen to anyway)

Part 8: Where Apple fits into the big picture.

I’m also open to suggestions… feel free to send me email, or leave me comments here.

FWIW, when Scoble pointed to my site, I started getting about 1 week’s traffic per day. Not bad. But today, Daring Fireball linked in, and traffic from them is about 4X Scoble and Winer combined. Going back to friday, the most popular linking sites are:

daringfireball.net

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com

http://www.macsurfer.com

http://www.scripting.com

http://www.tuaw.com

About 20% of the incoming readers slipped off and looked at the front page of the blog, and about 15% actually viewed a page other than the linked page. Everyone else viewed the linked page and moved on.

The one big winner in all this is the Masked Blogger, where 17% of you clicked through onto his site, so if you folks didn’t know about him before, you do now. I think he owes me a beer or two for doing his publicity work for him…

Me? if a few of you stick around and join the conversation here, that’ll be awesome. I found the conversation to be interesting, and surprisingly few trolls needing to be ignored in either camp. I’ve pointed to some of the more interesting blogs that I discovered in all of this already, and will continue to do so, but I think this has pretty much been taken as far as it deserves to go… so onward into other stuff…

It’ll be interesting to see how the old baseline readership numbers and the new ones differ, once things settle down. (and the stats above are because I find them interesting, and because they probably say something; what they say, I don’t know, although I do find it interesting hat Daring Fireball isn’t on Technorati’s top 100, but generated such a wave of traffic (it is #52 on most favorited). Scoble’s blog is high up on both lists, but John Gruber’s blog drove the serious traffic. tend to thinik that this backs my thought that the way “popular” is being judged is wrong, given it’s an epoch-based number and not a rolling one. Or maybe not.

Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack

Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack:

Email lists and forums are for existing clients with technical problems. You’re forgetting people who have not yet exchanged money in their pockets with products on your shelves.

What about the people who want to enlist? What about the people who want to get on the bus? What about the people who want to stop and have a coffee? What about the people who want to join a community? What about the people who want to stop for a minute at the water cooler?

Attitudes like this …

And THAT is why Apple has no blogging policy. Because, frankly, it’d just get in the way of what is already going on: working with and communicating with Apple’s customers.

… are insular. Inward-focused. Limited and limiting.

Some interesting comments here critical of what I said. Go read them — very interesting.

But, I think it misses one point.

If you look at Apple’s current strategy, IT’S WORKING. Very well, from units shipped, market share growth, revenue. The lack of blogs don’t seem to be hurting Apple.

And in actuality, John DOES get it, without realizing it. He opened his comments with:

If you want to tell somebody something, you have to speak their language. And it helps to be in the same room.

And that’s exactly what Apple IS doing. While Mac OS X and Macs are increasingly being adopted by the geek community, Apple’s primary audience isn’t geekland — it’s the consumer product market. And that is why Apple is doing TV ads and billboards and mass marketing and not blogs. Because that’s where its customers ARE.

People within the tech community tend to start thinking that the entire universe is and thinks like them. It’s not.

And the reality is, Apple IS in the same room with its customers. That the hard core geek community isn’t the primary focus of that attention bothers some of the hard-core geeks, but it doesn’t make what they’re doing wrong. Just look at the numbers.

Apple blogger calls “bullshit” on me « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger

Apple blogger calls “bullshit” on me « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger:

Apple blogger calls “bullshit” on me

Chuqui, who is an Apple employee, has a point. Apple employees ARE allowed to blog. They just aren’t allowed to be spokespeople, as Chuqui admits.

Hey, Robert — where’ve you been? I left Apple. Just read the blog, it’s not exactly hard to tell.

C’mon, guy. you can’t even get THAT basic a fact right?

How can you expect people to give you any credibility when you get facts like these so wrong?

(you’d think the words “apple post-mortem” in the title of the message he responded to would give him a clue something was up. This is my OTHER problem with his writing; he is so busy responding to things, he doesn’t bother to check the facts or think through his position. He’s too busy being the expert….

This is exactly the problem I have with the “blogging uber alles” crowd. They talk about conversations — and spend all of their time lecturing. you think Scoble actually spent any time figuring out what was going on? No, he took a sound byte he could play with and started babbling. That’s conversation?

Not in my world. If that’s what it means to be an A-list blogger — be my guest. I’ll stay off in the weeds, actually trying to communicate.

Why Apple doesn’t have a blogging policy (it ain’t what you think….) (Apple Post-mortem, part 4 of some number…..)

Previous episodes:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here’s my view of why Apple never implemented a blog policy. It’s not what you think, either….

But first, a digression through Sun:

ongoing · Oh My Goodness Gracious:

In a recent piece on the new Project Blackbox, I used some coarse language, in an idiomatic way, not giving it much thought. The consequences were surprising.

NearWalden » Tim’s Bomb:

Last night I got back from Pop!Tech and found that I had 110 new emails. While I always get a lot of email, this was a surprise since I’d just checked it 4 hours earlier. The trigger for this email was a posting by Tim Bray on his Ongoing blog where he dropped the F-Bomb, and which had been picked up and written about by the Inquirer citing Tim as a Sun employee.

Since Sun one of the most open companies from a blogging point of view, these discussions are critical. We’re in new territory, and the best way to sort through these issues is through open dialogue, which was taking place on the bloggers email list inside the company.

Instead of being the 198th email, I thought I’d just post my thoughts here. First a disclosure: I’m a Sun VP and a private blogger, so I’m writing this from both of those perspectives. It’s also important to understand that Tim has on blog which he uses for everything. Given the overlap in his personal and professional interests, there’s some sensibility to this. Others of us at Sun keep personal and Sun blogging separate in two blogs

This, in essence, is why Apple has no blog policy. Sort of.

People who knew me at Apple knew I had a couple of catch phrases I used a lot. One was “it’s all my fault”, which was how I and my team described the project we worked on the last few years. That actually tied back to a project review early on where I did a presentation to upper management where I introduced all of the team members in a dilbertesque org chart (Michelle was She Who Must be Obeyed, Jason was Boy Wonder, and my director — who fortunately has a sense of humor — was the pointy-haired boss and the person in charge of saying “no”.). Me — I described my role as “it’s all my fault”, which, like the project code name (“Chatterbox”), took on a life of its own.

The second catch phrase was a bit less positive; it was “if they’re not trying to fire my butt at least once a year, I’m not working hard enough”. That, like “It’s all my fault” also had some basis in truth, and only partially because I insisted on blogging without hiding my employment identity. Doing so would have been rather difficult, given that I’d been blogging, or doing equivalent public discourse, since before I actually worked at Apple, and in a number of situations (like my work for lists.apple.com) was the public face of the project and primary contact. It was generally realized that this genie wasn’t going back in that bottle, and I didn’t particularly want it to. And, of course, every so often I’d say something that would piss someone off and create a fire drill, although I never really got more than a good talking to about watching my butt. (the other reason I tended to almost get fired is that I had this tendency to every so often call bullshit on something — usually correctly, but not necessarily in a politically safe way, and usually to someone rather high up on the food chain. usually when I was on deadline and exhausted and not being quite careful enough. Fortunately, I’ve never been afraid to loudly apologize for being a twit, either, and we always found a way to turn these into learning experiences — and usually got the damn project fixed to boot.

(digression: a basic reality of being willing to speak your mind: you are going to put your foot in your mouth. that’s a given. It’s how you extract it that matters — and one thing that many bloggers do poorly, or pretend is unnecessary. People have long memories, and I believe we should strive that those memories be pleasant ones. A well-placed and EARNEST apology does wonders to undo a nasty situation, especially when you realize that they’re right and you were a jerk. We all are at times, folks. Smart people admit it and do something about it. Trust me, flowers help — a lot. So does walking office to office to talk to folks; email apologies suck, unless you have no other choice due to distance. Try the phone….)

Anyway, back to now. There have been various discussions about Apple, blogging, and policies (and lack of). There have been any number of discussions about Apple and its blogging policy (or lack of one), both external and internal. I spent a fair amount of time at one point talking to people and trying to see what was possible, what made sense, and the question finally was taken to Apple Legal informally for their thought. And they thought about it for a while, and came back with “we already have one that governs employee communication — why should we need a special one for blogging?”

And that’s true, of most companies, not just Apple. In Apple’s case, it governs email, IM, blogging, public speaking, pretty much anything. There’s no corporate “no blogging” policy. there IS a corporate “don’t act as a spokesman” policy, but it applies equally to all communications, not just blogging. And in my discussions with the people involved, the only argument that could be made (or, at least, that I could figure out to make) in favor of a formal blogging policy, other than it’d be good PR, is that it would override some manager’s decisions to put their own policies in place for their group (especially out in the retail stores area). To be honest? I frankly DON’T have much problem with giving a manager discretion here to manage this kind of policy a bit, but a few managers around the company overdid it (IMHO), but it was rare enough that I don’t think anyone felt it was worth putting the time and energy into formalizing a policy when existing policies covered it. It wasn’t broke, we all had better things to do. end of story.

So, now we have the Masked Blogger. I have some ideas who it might be, actually. And I honestly think there’s a fair chance it’s sanctioned and designed to generate feedback on topics in a way that a non-anonymous blog from Apple couldn’t. that’s the joy of non-transparency, you don’t know who’s pimping who.

And, of course, Scoble chimes in with the same old, same old.

Anonymous Apple blogger starts up « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger:

I don’t like anonymous blogs, but Apple deserves a raft of them. Apple’s PR department has employees freaked out about having conversations with customers in public.

Robert, that’s bullshit. And you should know it.

The reality is, Apple employees can blog, and do. I know a few dozen. Most of them simply don’t telegraph their affiliation. Not because they can’t, not because they’re afraid to, but because they’ve seen what happens to people who DO (like me). They don’t WANT to be Apple bloggers. In my discussions with various ones over the years, if Apple DID in fact “legalize” blogging, I’d say 90% of them would continue to fly under the radar and do things the way they are today. Very few of them WANT to come out of this particular closet.

Why should they? putting an apple on their breast simply makes them a target to every anti-mac pc-bigot or customer with a problem looking for someone to solve it for them. These folks don’t WANT that sort of fun.

Here’s the fun part: while Scoble talks about blogging as if there is no way to communicate without it being on a blog, he completely misses the bigger picture.

IT AIN’T ABOUT BLOGGING. It’s about communication. it’s about sharing information. It’s about solving problems. And while Scoble loves to babble about blogs (because he is, ultimately, a blogger, not a communicator), Apple employees have been out there working with the customer base.

Wander through any of the lists.apple.com mailing lists, one of Apple’s core communication tools with their developers. On EVERY list, you’ll come to realize there are Apple engineers on them, answering questions, helping people, doing things. Same with the online forums (Apple’s and others). There are people out there, doing ad-hoc tech support on a regular basis. Some of them actually have it as part of their job description, some of them do it because they feel they should. I’d guess there are 100 Apple employees active on lists.apple.com alone, and likely that many on the Apple support boards.

They just don’t advertise who they are, or use apple.com addresses. But if you follow the conversations going on, you’ll start recognizing names that keep popping up. And this tradition of Apple employees getting involved in communities predates blogging, predates Scoble — it ties back to Apple’s early attachment to USENET and MUGs and mailing lists and forums going back into the Apple II days, and it continues today. Dozens of Apple employees committing hundreds of man hours a week.

The difference between them and someone like Scoble? Apple people do it to solve problems. Scoble seems to believe the purpose is to get credit for doing it. Scoble believes that the future is in blogging. Apple long ago figured out that the REAL need is communication, and blogging is ONE tool that can be used for some aspects of communicating with customers. Scoble only has a hammer in his toolbox, so all of us look like nails.

And THAT is why Apple has no blogging policy. Because, frankly, it’d just get in the way of what is already going on: working with and communicating with Apple’s customers. Apple and its employees long ago figured out it was better to get the job done and not worry so much about taking credit for it.

One need only look at what happens on lists.apple.com to see how well that model works. To say that it has to be blogging, or it isn’t real or isn’t useful, is really to admit that you don’t understand the internet, or what this is all about online.

it’s not about blogging. It’s about communication, and it’s about solving problems. And Apple doesn’t NEED employee blogs to do that. It’s been doing that all along.

(to me, the difference is like giving to charities: do you do it to solve problems? Or because you want to be known as a humanitarian? It’s obvious which answer Scoble’s bought into….)

InfoQ: Spam Prevention without CAPTCHA Images

InfoQ: Spam Prevention without CAPTCHA Images:

The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (formally known as AJAX) offers a control that reduces spam on web logs and forums without requiring users to enter a CAPTCHA.

The NoBot control uses three techniques to detect bots.

* First, it offers a framework for a challenge/response in the form of a client-side JavaScript calculation. This will filter out bots that don’t support JavaScript.

* Second is a minimum delay. The idea behind this is if you know that users cannot possible fill out a form in less than 2 seconds, you can assume they are bots.

* Finally it can limit the number of submissions from a given IP address in a time period. For example, a human isn’t likely to make 5 posts in a single minute.

Interesting setup, but….

It works only because it encourages spammers to go to the less-protected sites. Of the three techniques, the 2nd and third are both trivial for a bot to circumvent — should the spammer care to. They’re little more than security by obscurity, and I don’t think worthy of even bothering with. Faking IP addresses and adding sleeps are trivial for a spammer to do.

As to the first — given spammer’s willingness to improve their technology as the anti-spammer technology does, it’s probably only a matter of time.

I was hopeful, but to me, this mostly seems capable of instilling a false sense of security, I don’t think it really can replace the CAPTCHA (and I hate them…. I’d love to find an alternative).

Flickr interestingness revisited

A while back I posted some thoughts on Flickr Interestingness. While playing around with MyBlogLog today, I noticed a new link to that posting. It’s been a fairly popular piece on my sight, showing continued interest in Flickr Out There.

That link points to — patents involving Interestingness, as well as other discussions about Interestingness posted by others. Very much a message worth chewing on a bit.

To borrow from it a bit:

Interestingness rank is based in part on:

* The quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object,

* The number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object,

* An access pattern related to the media object,

* A lapse of time related to the media object, and/or;

* On the relevance of metadata to the media object.

* Whether the media contains undesirable content such as obscene imagery or promotions of a competitor’s product.

One of the questions I had about all of this was how much control the content owner had over interestingness; Does it matter if the caption is short or long? Do titles matter? tags? sets? groups? Some users throw dozens and hundreds of tags on photos; others (like me) tend to be sparser. Does one have an advantage over another?

Or more correctly, ignoring whether the owner’s metadata decisions make a photos more or less likely to be found in a search, does that metadata affect interestingness itself (by, perhaps, indicating interest by the author?)

I’ve been working on — slowly — some thoughts on tags (and how technorati uses them) and how tag usage can be encouraged and improved through automated selection and feedback mechanisms. I’ve written before that tagging of text data needs to be improved, and I think I know of a way to do it — and it probably would improve flickr tag quality as well. In reality, the two problems are basically the same, except that with text, search engines can go build a context meta-data structure that helps “auto-tag” messages, where in photos, if the author doesn’t do it, you’re basically hosed. That’s why I think flickr tags are much more advanced and useful than technorati tags are — and we can learn from them…

As I catch up on the nine million projects I’ve got going…. it’ll appear.

Coffee may reduce diabetes risk – That’s Fit

Coffee may reduce diabetes risk – That’s Fit:

In a new study published recently coffee drinkers came out on top. Drinking caffeinated coffee was shown to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by as much as 60%. This is not the first study to come up with similar results, but this one was unique because it targeted people who were specifically at high risk for developing the disease.

Nice! if you’ll excuse me, I need another cup….

Sharks go to Nashville, and get beaten (again)

The Sharks hosted Minnesota and got bored to death. the Sharks went to Detroit, and and stunk up the ice. The Sharks went into Nashville, and stunk up the ice, but made it look closer than it really was.

The thing I was worried about has come true: the team got enough easy wins early they decided it was going to be easy — and fell into bad work habits. To quote coach Ron Wilson: the forwards look like they’re auditioning for Ice Capades. Goals on the power play have been so easy, they’ve stopped competing 5 on 5. Detroit took full advantage of that by being really careful to not take penalties. oops. That’s three games out of four that come close to no-hitters, lots of ice dancing, little fighting for position, much less initiation of contact.

Now, the team is 7-3, so in some ways, it’s hard to argue with results. But it’s easy to frown at the trend line. Sharks have a day off in Tampa tomorrow. I suggest Ron Wilson cancel the free day, find a sheet of ice, and put away the pucks…. They need to break this habit early, before this becomes a serious trend.

Pack Your Camera’s Battery Charger – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog

Pack Your Camera’s Battery Charger – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog:

While I was packing for my recent trip to Ireland, I mentioned to Derrick Story that I had three fully charged (proprietary) batteries ready for my Canon point-and-shoot. When he asked if I’d packed my charger, I said I thought that three batteries should be enough, but he insisted I take it. (His words, I believe were, “Wrongo.”) I’m writing this post in an act of public contrition for ever thinking otherwise.

Let’s face it, chargers don’t take up much room; mine has the collapsable plug that renders it about the size of a deck of cards.

What Colleen said, in spades. In fact, I bought a second charger for my Canon as well as spare batteries, so there’s a charger in my bag AND a charger in my office, and I’m never tempted to forget it in the wrong place — and yes, I bought the second charger while I was travelling, because I had, in fact, left it at home; I lost half a day in Vancouver finding a GOOD camera store that had one in stock.

Also, spare batteries don’t help much if you don’t have them in your pocket. Not that I would ever do this, but I had this friend who hiked the most part of a mile out into a marsh chasing birds only to find out the battery was fading and needed replacing; by the fully charged battery sitting warm and snug in the bag in the trunk of the car. (ditto that “spare” flash card, too!)

It’s easy to pack this stuff. it’s also easy to forget it. Making sure you have these things is a habit you need to create. The one time you say “hey, I’ll be okay” is when the martians decide to land, only to have your battery go dead 3 shots in…..

Rethinking how I do things — making decisions (Part 2 of …..)

Chuqui 3.0: Web/Tech:

So that’s really the basis for what I’m doing now — looking to see what else is part of my “electronic life” and seeing what makes sense to update, change, come up with a new or better workflow, or whether it makes sense to do at all. The things I’m looking at are fairly standard ones: our mailing lists; my RSS reading and news feeds and web browsing, my email, my calendar and address book.

I also have a few not-as-traditional/simple issues: do I keep .Mac or not? How do I want to handle backups down the road? Safari or Firefox? When I was at Apple, given that I’m a firm believer in “eat your own dogfood”, I tried to make sure I used Apple’s tools for things — and live with their strengths and weaknesses. Now that I’m no longer there, I feel I can take an honest look at Mail.app and safari and .Mac, and whether those are the best solutions for me. Complicating .mac is that I also use it as a place to stick my mom and dad’s online email and other things, and I need to decide what to do there, too.

Some of the issues become surprisingly complex; email, for instance: local (to your desktop) availability and the power and filtering capability of an application? Or the generic accessibility of a server-based webmail? And how does it all relate to email on my phone, and text alerts and SMS, and all of that? Or does it?

In and among the other things going on, I’ve been trying to figure out what my new personal space should look like.

Some things are really easy. We currently run two mailing lists on our hosted domain, using mailman. At this point, especially since most of the mailing lists affiliated with the two we run already live on yahoogroups, we see no reason not to move these, also. I’ll get to it — eventually. Once we do, then yahoo will manage the archives going forward (but backups of those archives are currently undefined), and what I do with the existing archives are undefined. The easy answer is to move them all off to a secondary backup system in a public space, but I’m going to defer that since I need to do more investigation, especially over filtering of email addresses. stay tuned.

Another easy decision, mostly — Safari? or FireFox? While I was at Apple, I used and tied to help improve Apple’s tools. today? As the saying goes, “not my job”, and while I don’t dislike Safari, I’d heard enough about Firefox to consider migrating worth trying. The big loss to me was .Mac syncing of bookmarks (but .Mac comes later). Funny thing is — I moved over, and first thing I did was hit a web site that Firefox couldn’t handle, but Safari could. so much for compatibility claims. I also found Firefox slow and the UI kludgy, to the point where I was seriously considering moving back, when I realized I was using the production firefox (1.x), and there was a 2.0RC candidate out. downloaded 2.0RC2 and, well, game over. Very nice. Much faster. A few UI quirks to get used to, but they’re definitely interpretations, not bugs. Time to re-learn some habits.

A third aspect I’ve looked at — news reading and RSS feeds. Application (i.e. NetnewsWire)? the new Google Reader? Or my.yahoo.com?

Well, my.yahoo.com isn’t remotely capable, so I tossed it out long ago. In fact, I’ve pretty much stopped using it. The new Google Reader pulled my OPML feed fine and set it up, and I spent some time using it, but while I can’t really complain about it, it wasn’t what I was looking for. Just “not me”, as opposed to “not good”. I could probably live with it the way it is fine, I just didn’t think it was an upgrade off of what I have; so it’s NetNewsWire for me for now, even though I’m not convinced it being sold off to NewsGator was a Good Thing for the app yet (good thing for the developer? definitely, so I’ll continue seeing how this plays out). This is the first time the “move to the web” failed. Now in theory, there’s always Bloglines. But I stopped using it when it had its stability problems, and it’s founder left, and frankly, since being bought by Ask, ti’s unclear what the plans are for it or what future features might show up, or when. It went from being a leading edge thing that could have really taken over the market to, well, something that seems to be in idle, and losing whatever momentum or edge it had. Too bad — and yes, I know a lot of you are using it successfully, I see you in my blog referer log. More power to you, Ask’s uncertain committment to the beast has me unsure why i should commit to it in return.

One of the questions I’d had was why my.yahoo.com seemed so — outdated. A big answer came up when I started investigating the next part of my virtual life: email, calendar, address book, etc. Inside the new yahoo mail beta is, among other things, a feed reader, so it’s clear their intent is to turn that into your “life dashboard”. Even better — if you play with it a bit, you’ll find a dialog that tells you that a way to import your OPML file is coming — which to me explains why my.yahoo hasn’t been upgraded to compete with Google Reader. Yahoo’s going in different directions, and so far, I like them. But more on that later.

Right now, I’m trying to finalize my setup for the core of the “personal space”, which is email, address book, calendar. I’ve basically decided on Yahoo’s setup, but I still haven’t got it up and running, so that may change, and there are still significant issues to resolve. But first, I found out (the hard way) while working on this that syncing between my mac and my treo is broken (again) for unkonwn and obscure reasons (again), so I’ve said the hell with Palm Desktop and just downloaded Missing Sync, which I should have done months ago, I think. So I’ll go back on the email stuff once that’s done and my phone and computer are talking again. gah. how can such a nice phone as the treo have such crap support software?

Oh, and two other quick cage matches before I go: in search, I spent some time testing Google and Yahoo, and decided I preferred Google’s results. However, where I was using Google Maps a lot, when I did some time comparing the two, I much preferred Yahoo. So I’ve moved my map work over to Yahoo Maps.

So far, in the “apps” vs. “google” vs “yahoo” vs “everything else”, Yahoo seems to be winning…

That and a couple of bucks will get you a coffee….

Update: Missing Sync really rocks. nice, reliable. Installed cleanly, works well. finally. If you use a Mac and a Treo, and you’re fighting Palm Desktop, dump it and spend a few bucks. your blood pressure will thank you.

Update: ran into this while surfing today, seemed like an interesting addition to my comments on RSS readers above…

if he’s right, and I don’t see that he’s not — what does that mean for Bloglines?

Pluck RSS Reader Shuts Down: Consumer RSS Readers a Dead Market Now:

I’m afraid to say that consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless – the real business is white label and enterprise solutions. So Newsgator for example is well positioned. And Bloglines and Rojo both got out while the going was still good, via acquisitions. Although it must be said that niche RSS Readers will still have their place – for example FeedDemon (owned by Newsgator) will continue to get an adequate number of subscriptions.

But as a standalone company, it’s no longer possible. Consumer RSS Readers are a dead market now.

Jobs I wish I could have taken at Apple (Apple Post-mortem, part 2 of some number….)

(more discussion about Apple now that I’m no longer an employee and no longer having to worry about what I say quite as much…. see part 1 of this ongoing series here)

If things have worked out, I would have stayed at Apple. I felt there were any number of ways I could have helped the company, and (of course) I had various ideas of places where Apple could be improved and I might be a person who could make that happen.

Of course, as it turns out, it didn’t happen, but that’s okay. I felt, however, that it might be interesting (or at least fun) to talk about some of the jobs I wish I could have accepted at Apple, had they existed…

1) Apple Games Evangelist: I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t want this job? But one of the things I noticed over the years is that whoever took the job lasted about a year, then went and did something else. Personally, though, I now think the future of gaming is really the platforms (I just bought my Xbox 360) — but I sure am hoping that once Neverwinter Nights 2 ships on the PC, they’ll announce a port to the Mac (because dammit, I’d hate to run windows on my intel mac just to run a game…. but I might).

2) Community architect for iTunes. This is one I actually had some discussions about. Maybe you’re familiar with Pandora or last.fm? One of the questions I’ve had since the start of iTunes (and the Clear-Channel-ification of broadcast radio) was how people found out about new and interesting music. It’s sure not on broadcast radio any more, especially here in Silicon Valley. Pandora and last.fm are heading in that area — but what if you could turn the iTunes community into a real recommendation service? And how would you do it? there are some very simplistic tools in iTunes today that are “very Amazon” and not “very community” — and they’re nice, as far as they go. I felt that there was a lot of opportunity to build something really sharp and best of show. There was definitely interest among some folks inside iTunes, too. It may well happen — it just won’t be something I did. ohwell. Here’s hoping, though. There’s such opportunity here.

3) Community architect for .Mac. Although honestly, .Mac needs a lot more than community building. Allow me to defer detailed discussion of .Mac for later (remind me if I forget….), but while I think it’s good for many things, there are lots of things Apple really ought to do with .Mac (they should have bought Flickr, dammit, to name just one), and Mac Groups are barely adequate for organizing a church picnic. But there are some decent bones here to build from, if they’d just commit to doing so. Unfortunately, I just never got the feeling they would.

4) Customer Ombudsman (aka Chief Privacy Office, aka the Royal Avatar of the Customer). This is actually another job I talked to a number of folks about. Some understood what I was trying to do and agreed it was a necesssary thing, nobody could ever quite figure out who it should report to or how to bell this particular cat. Is this in Marketing? Legal? Applecare? Engineering? Probably Applecare, but I always suggested Legal, because Applecare is the primary support provider for Apple, and reporting into that structure creates a potential conflict of interest for a true Ombudsman. Now, let me make it clear — I feel Apple does a very good job at managing customer privacy and also a very good job at support and customer relations in general. But it’s not perfect (no company larger than about 1 person is, if ever), and so I felt having a person that was outside the system and could deal with situations where the systems failed or didn’t apply, or simply help people understand how to get into the system and take advantage of it (because from my view of Apple from the inside but not directly in the loop, most “Apple failures” were people who didn’t know the right way to use the system or people with unrealistic expectations, not true Apple screwups. But Apple screwups did occur, too, and when they did, people had a real tough time finding someone who can help them unscrew things…. Another aspect of the job, I felt, was being involved in system design and anything customer facing to speak for the customer, and to ask difficult questions like “how does this benefit the customer instead of just Apple?” a lot.

Many parts of Apple are very aware of the need for keeping the customer in mind, but having someone who’s job it is to “think like the customer” would be a very good thing, especially if they were part of a design/approval process that worked cross-functionally, so that people couldn’t, well, forget to ask those questions. It would also help coordinate and standardize these systems to make it easier for the customer… at least, in theory.

5) Town Crier, or official distributor of information. An even better job than Games Evangelist; but a lot less likely. If there’s a single key “problem” within Apple (and I use the term “problem” carefully, given how well things are going on at Apple…), it’s that there’s very little exchange of information among groups. that leads to some duplication of effort, but more importantly (to me), there’s a lack of consistency and standardization that could be tightened up, and the cross-fertilization that goes on when someone sees something and says “hey, what if you did…..” or “you know, we did something similar, let me show you….”. That just doesn’t happen enough. A lot of that is because (a) Apple is very careful about distributing information because of the history of leaks and the problems they cause, and (b) nobody really feels like figuring out what is and isn’t safe to talk about, even internally — so stuff just doesn’t get passed around enough. The Town Crier’s job is simple (and EVERY company ought to have one): their job is to talk to everyone in the company and find out what they’re doing, and then if they think it has more general interest within the company, to go to management and get approval to allow it to be talked about and distributed; he is the Baron of brown bags as well as the Deacon of Engineering docs. By making it one person’s job to help foster the cross-fertilization, you build a body of knowledge about what can and can’t be discussed, taking that off the shoulders of engineers and their managers who already have too much to do. And if it’s done right, the key information that needs to be kept sensitive is kept sensitive and private, but the stuff that can be leveraged around the company gets visibility and discussion. The idea here is to encourage people to learn from each other, while still having someone involved who’s sensitive to the need of “need to know” — and authorized to help determine which is which. Since no line engineer or manager has that knowledge, or the time to figure it out, it just doesn’t happen. By careful investing in a headcount of two, I think there’s an opportunity for huge synergies within Apple. Or, for that matter, any decent sized engineering organization. I just never had the chance to try to find the right person to convince of this before I left…. ohwell.

My new job..

Apologies for not posting this sooner (as I’d said I would), had some things come up this weekend that needed my attention: a bit of a firedrill, now under control.

So, I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a position with StrongMail, as their new Professional Services Architect. I’ll be working both pre- and post-sales on helping design solutions connecting customer data systems and processes to take advantage of StrongMail technologies, and also working with customers on how to improve and update their email communications strategies and systems. It really is a rare opportunity, I think, for me to help companies understand that e-mail is an important part of a customer relationship, and not just a tool for blasting marketing messages at eyeballs. I’m going to be reporting into the VP of Customer Services there, and working throughout the company on things as needed.

Strongmail is a company that’s working on Email backend systems. You very likely receive email sent via StrongMail on a regular basis — their customer list includes Netflix, Fox Sports, Ticketmaster, WebEx, Univision and Williams Sonoma. Strongmail’s primary funder is Sequoia Capital, along with Evercore and Globespan Capital.

I had a couple of other job offers pending, which I hated to turn down, but when given an option of “London? Or Madrid for dinner?” you can’t be in both places. For me, what finally made the decision was the chance to work with external customers and help solve problems across a range of companies, as well as a chance to really help influence how this all moves forward in the e-mail space.

I’ll start 11/6, and I gotta say, I’m truly jazzed.

News – Sharks Elect To Retain Defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic – San Jose Sharks

News – Sharks Elect To Retain Defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic – San Jose Sharks:

San Jose Sharks Executive Vice President and General Manager Doug Wilson announced today that defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic will remain in San Jose this season.

Vlasic has played in all eight of the Sharks games this season, averaging just under twenty minutes per game (19:59), bettered on the team only by Scott Hannan (21:27) and Kyle McLaren (20:53). He made his NHL debut on Oct. 5 vs. St. Louis and has not yet posted his first NHL point.

This, of course, comes as a suprise to almost nobody except Vlasic himself, who even before the Wild game on Saturday, was still telling people he fully expected to be sent back. Not sure where San Jose would get his 20 minutes a game if he did go back, or what he’d accomplish if he was returned to juniors, frankly.

So, he finally heard the words every young player wants to hear: “Hey, Pickles! Get a room!”

Sharks 1, Wild 4 — fans 0…..

How bad was it?

I left early. Now, Laurie and I never leave a game early. It doesn’t matter, we try to stay to the very (painful) end. Me, I left when it was 4-0.

But that’s not the worst of it. I was the last person in my row to leave. A good chunk of my section was empty. The ushers were apologizing for the play.

And it was Rally Towel Night. oops.

The best way I can sum it up: it was the kind of game that makes you want to find a pay phone, and call in a bomb scare.

oops. too late.

The Sharks looked a bit tired, just a touch slow. It was enough. The Wild got an early, ugly goal that came in from behind the net and somehow got past Nabokov; I don’t blame Nabby for it (or #2, or #3… #4? let’s talk, but by then, the rest of the team had checked out….)

The Wild took great advantage of that, refusing to give the Sharks time or space, clogging passing lanes, refusing to let the sharks generate any speed. the Sharks would grind the puck in, the Wild would doink it back out. Grind-grind-grind-doink.

Let’s all watch paint dry. More fun. at least the fumes would help after a while.

memo to self: track down wild tickets for the rest of the year, and burn them.

What can one say about a team that is willing to take a 1-0 lead five minutes into the game: and defend that lead for the next 55 minutes?

Great discipline — and realize, they played good (if gratingly boring) hockey.

and they must, somehow, violate the Geneva Convention.

The best news? Living in San Jose, we only have to watch games like this a few times a year. Imagine being a Wild season ticket holder….

(shudder)

Off Wing Opinion: The Final Cut On Media Credentials Guidelines

Off Wing Opinion: The Final Cut On Media Credentials Guidelines:

Guidelines for Granting Media Credentials to Bloggers and Other Online Media Representatives

I know I”m really late to the game here, but every time I wanted to get involved with this earlier my personal life got in the way.

I did not want this to pass without noting the work Eric did in pulling this set of guidelines, and I think it’s a great example of thinking how to make these situations work for all sides. I think it’s quite fair and reasonable, and it’s something I know I’ll have no reservations recommending to both bloggers and teams, should any team be silly enough to ask my opinion. More than that, I think it’s a great model bloggers covering other sports can use to help develop guidelines to work with their sport’s organizations as well.

Well done, Eric (and everyone else).

Why I left Apple (Apple Post-mortem, part 1 of some number)

(hold that thought….)

It’s been enough time and life is settling down a bit that I feel ready to start this thread of postings. I plan on, more or less, to take a look at Apple from the outside and comment on some of the aspects of the company that I felt deserved some discussion.

And before you all start drooling, there’s going to be very little dirty laundry, since I was very happy there before I left, and the fact that I left shouldn’t mean I’m now pissed at them. And no, I’m not going to disclose anything or talk about unannounced products or any other secrets, so the rumor sites can go back to sleep. There will be, I repeat, will be no mentions of the iPhone, especially not that third configuration the rumor sites haven’t caught on to yet.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t discussion points. I think the first one, just to clear the air on some stuff, has to be why I left.

When a company announces that an executive has left the firm “to pursue other interests” or “to spend more time with their family”, I know what I think; and I bet most of you assume the same — because the reality is, that’s code for “we took away the key to the executive washroom and wished him a fond farewell, and then pushed him off the roof.”

Similarly, when an employee announces their leaving a company, and no, they don’t have a job, the natural assumption is that things really suck and that the employee cut and run, or that there was some big fight — but basically, people look at the company and wonder what’s up.

I know in my talks with folks, and in many of my interviews, the point came up, and I just want to bring this out in the open and make it clear what really happened here.

There really IS a lot less here than you might think, too.

Take the wayback machine back to last spring, when I got sick. To me, it was a hint I had to start taking a real close look at what I was doing; I couldn’t go on pretending that the hours and stress were manageable. My management and groups we dealt with were for the most part understandable about things had to change. If you look at my flickr photos, you’ll also see a big uptick in my photography, because when I got over this, I started scheduling time out during office hours to make up for the evenings and weekends.

Around the same time, I had the discussion with my doctor about me weight that ended with “we aren’t even going to talk about weight loss until you get the stress under control. It won’t happen.

Nature, of course, abhors a vacuum. There were empty spots in my calendar. People started trying to fill them up, of course, even though they were blocked. Some of the people who told me to make sure I took care of myself and took it easy started coming back to remind me that I was still expected to make the original dates on various projects (or else). One project I was dealing with that was having all sorts of problems, when I refused to commit to dates (because we had no way to evaluate what it’d take to finish the project) simply committed the team to dates without telling me, which my management then started holding me to.

So the message I was getting back was mutating into “do what you need to do, as long as the dates don’t change”. From a business standpoint, I see the reality of this — from my standpoint, all I did was start getting more and more pissed.

And in reality, things weren’t in bad shape. The team stepped up and was making things happen, and then we hit one of those project perfect storms: first, my dev lead’s wife got ill and he had to go on leave for a while, costing us a key player, and then we had a disk failure on the master database machine — that created a bit of a, well, the best way to explain it was that it was not a demo-reel day for anyone, anywhere in IS (starting with me), and our system was down for 13 hours.

So, prior to this little downtime, things weren’t doing badly; I’d actually lost four pounds, I felt things were more or less under control on the projects, I felt like I was balancing life and the stress better. And suddenly, that four pounds I lost was gone, and so were four more, and I shot past 375 and 380 and hit 384, and I could see 400 pounds down the street in the taxi, and headed my way. Over the next few weeks, I talked to my director multiple times about trying to get my situation under control; 12 pounds later, all I was getting back was “work harder, it’ll get better eventually”.

I didn’t like that answer. I really, really didn’t like it (it wasn’t until after the dust settled that I really understood that we were locked in and there really wasn’t any other answer; at the time, I was pissed because as I saw it, I’d put so much into Apple, and when I finally asked Apple to step up for me, it wouldn’t. In reality — it wasn’t that simple. of course).

My conflicts were starting to leak out onto the team, people knew I was stressed. I didn’t want my situations to screw things up worse, so I finally realized that I had to make a decision: I could (a) continue fighting for changes to my situation where it seemed that wasn’t in the cards, (b) I could go back down the rabbit hole and do the “work harder for now” thing, or (c) I could leave the project.

So, here I was, staring going back to the Good Old Days in the face, staring at another crazy holiday season in the face, staring at 400 pounds in the face. What only a few folks knew at that time (including my director) was that I had started exploring a few things within Apple, looking towards transitioning to a new opportunity sometime in the next few months. That’s one reason we were locked in here — it really is hard to justify making significant staffing changes when there’s an even bigger one coming to deal with.

I decided that I simply wasn’t going back down the rabbit hole. I didn’t feel I’d succeed, perhaps not survive (seriously). And I didn’t think it was good for the team to try. Neither was trying to restructure things to make it more livable for me; it was beyond that. So that made the decision easy. I went to LA for the weekend to visit my family and think it over, came back, and handed in my resignation. Effectively, I decided it was better to leave NOW than stick around and then leave in a few months anyway, where that time in between was going to be painful for myself and probably for people around me as things played out.

We ended up agreeing on an 8 week term period, which allowed me to work more or less on my terms and focus on training and transition rather than other things, and it made the business happy (well, happier), because I’d be around for one last product announcement where things were going to get crazy — our volume that one final week (the week he announced the iTV) matched our volume for all of December the previous holiday, and December was always the insane month. And I’m happy to say that week was almost painless, once we got there, and things worked out quite well. I also ended up doing almost 60 hours of training, and the week before I left, my dev lead returned from lead and stepped in and started taking over things again, so we got continuity there, so all in all it ended a lot better than it started.

My goal for Apple in leaving was for two things to happen: the project to continue successfully without me, and my team to be able to carry it forward without major problems. I’m happy that, five weeks later, that seems to have happened, and that the fall release of the project was supposed to have gone live this weekend (and seems to have) — with a nifty new ajaxy user interface redesign and some interesting new stuff under the hood. By making the decision to leave, it forced a deadline on all of us to make the training happen, bring on the new teams that needed to get involved on the support side, and get the documentation and other stuff that we needed done finished.

My goal for me in leaving was to simply to get a clean break, make a fresh start, get away and figure out what I wanted to do next, and start focussing on the changes I needed to make for myself; it was a “stay around and be miserable for a while for the project, or get it over with”. After years of the first option and putting Apple’s interests ahead of mine (willingly!), I chose the latter. What that choice cost me, ultimately, was any real chance at staying at Apple, since the timing of my leaving really precluded any ability to go find or work to have a new situation for me created. That was, ultimately, a tradeoff I made willingly.

In the eight weeks I was doing the final transition, I went back down the rabbit hole, at least a bit, and put in some more serious hours, but I also lost four pounds along the way. On the last day, I handed in my badge (a weird feeling), then two days later, laurie and I piled into the car and drove north for two weeks of getting away from it all, my first true vacation in a decade without some kind of pager attached. We had a great time on that trip (more on that later, as I catch up on my blog-writing and photos) — and I lost another six pounds. And I’m happy to note that I’ve continued to lose; five weeks after I left Apple, I’m down right around ten pounds, or about 14 pounds from my high.

With two weeks before I start my next opportunity, I’m hoping to make that 20. Of course, I have a ways to go.

At 384 and age 48, I had 100 pounds to take off to get back to what I weighed at 30. My best guess is that the weight I need to shoot for is between 220 and 250; with my build, that won’t be buff, but it’ll be at least a good first approximation (as a sophomore in high school, I wrestled (badly) at a “make weight” around 145, and I left high school in decent shape around 170-180, and I’ve been putting on weight ever since….). At 48, I’ve been lucky: no sign of diabetes, no sign of heart disease, no sign of high blood pressure (until the last year, when my doctor started “tsk”ing at me) — mostly just the discomfort of hauling a couple of five year old’s around all the time and sore, grumpy knees. I am not stupid, though, and I can read the stats as well as anyone. That I’ve been avoiding problems to date doesn’t make me believe I always will.

Catching pneumonia was, to me, my “two minute warning” — and a rather mild one at that. I’m one of those people who at least once a year sits down and tries to figure out things like “what are my priorities for the next year” and “where do I want to be in 3 years, and 5″ — and so as I was recovering from this, I was doing some serious thought on the whole “what now?” thing.

And I kept coming back to this meme: What do I want to be in five years? 100 pounds lighter, or none of the rest matters. I kept having the discussion that if I didn’t get my ass in gear, five years from now, I’d be diabetic, or in a scooter, or in a hospital, or I’d be dead. There’s not a lot of personal upside to ANY of those options — and there aren’t a lot of options (other than being really damn lucky) that avoids all of them. I just didn’t want to depend on luck any more.

So once I make THAT decision, everything else becomes easy. I tried to make it work at Apple — but Apple needed to go in specific directions, and I couldn’t. The worst I’ll ever say about it was that it was an amicable divorce. And now, of course, I have no excuses — which is fine by me. I know what I need to do, I believe I’ve got a new opportunity that is compatible with that, and it’s with people that understand where I’m coming from there.

So ultimately, it really was about it being time for a change. Do I wish I could have done this AND stay at Apple? Yes.

Do I think Apple should have done more to create a situation that would have let me stay with the company? In all honesty, yes — my existing management did what they could, but I was honestly a little disappointed that when my intention to leave went public internally, there wasn’t much interest (that I ever saw) of the “let’s find a place for you” around the company, especially given my tenure and various contributions over the year to the company and it’s bottom line. however,

Does that bother me? Not at all; I honestly think a completely fresh start is the best possible option for me now, and I’m glad I made the choice; I am also still very much a fan of the company, a user of their products and a believer in what they’re doing.

But it was time to join the real world, and see how it works.

The one big change I’m going to have to make is get an iPod interface installed in the car, since I’m now going to have a bit of a commute. time to get used to listening to audiobooks….

But you know? I can live with that.

O’Reilly Network — Open Tools for MySQL Administrators

O’Reilly Network — Open Tools for MySQL Administrators:

MySQL provides some tools to monitor and troubleshoot a MySQL server, but they don’t always suit a MySQL developer or administrator’s common needs, or may not work in some scenarios, such as remote or over-the-web monitoring. Fortunately, the MySQL community has created a variety of free tools to fill the gaps. On the other hand, many of these are hard to find via web searches. In fact, web searches can be frustrating because they uncover abandoned or special-purpose, not ready-to-use projects. You could spend hours trying to find tools for monitoring and troubleshooting your MySQL servers. What’s a tool-seeker to do?

Click here to find out more!

Relax! I’ve already done the work,