Today’s Shared Links for September 24, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 23, 2011

Welcome to the San Francisco Bulls (and good luck)

Some unexpected news this week in the sports world hit our email when the ECHL announced that they were adding a team starting next year in San Francisco, to be known as the San Francisco Bulls. They’ll be playing in the Cow Palace, which is actually in Daly City. Jon Swenson at Sharkspage has the background on all of this.

This seems to be the new home of the long-hibernating Reno team last seen as the Renegades of the WCHL, a league that has since merged into the ECHL. This will be the first return of hockey to the Cow Palace since the San Francisco Spiders played there in their one season of existence in 1995-1996.

To Laurie and myself, trying to move hockey back into the Cow Palace seems a curious choice. We are probably the two people who’ve watched more hockey in the Cow Palace than anyone alive, having not only been original Sharks season ticket holders for both of the seasons the Sharks played there, but on staff with the Spiders as their Webmasters, and as most of the Spiders home games that year. Laurie, in fact, likely has the largest file of Spiders photos in existence, not that anyone cares or wants them, since she was doing a lot of the photography for the web site.

This is a tough venue in a tough market. Our motto back when we were working with the Spiders was “It’s a pit, but it’s OUR pit”, which kinda sums up the Cow Palace. The sight lines are tough, the building is — it has character — the location is tough with bad transit options and parking is expensive in comparison to the expected ticket prices, and the food will suck (I guarantee it). On warm days, the building tends to have an — ambience — to it because of its agricultural heritage.

We remember the place fondly, but I don’t think we’d be in a hurry to put a team in there. Thinking about it, though, there aren’t many options available.

The ECHL has wanted to go back to Reno for a while, but it seems the Renegades bankruptcy has made getting a venue there tough. Other than the Cow Palace, the only options are Oakland (sharing with the Warriors) or Sacramento (sharing with the Kings), both venues being too big and expensive for ECHL, assuming either is interested in having a second tenant. And the Arco Arena also sucks for hockey.

Fresno has two arenas, the old Selland arena downtown, and the newer Savemart arena. The latter’s not a bad place for hockey and has nice sight lines. The ECHL was there previously with the Falcons, but the Falcons left Savemart and moved back to Selland, then failed. Selland is in a bad part of town and not a good facility; it’s unclear if Savemart got tired of the team or too expensive (I’m guessing the latter), but it just looks like Fresno can’t support an ECHL team in this economy.

One other arena option is in Long Beach, where the IHL and later the ECHL had the Ice Dogs. It’s actually a rather nice facility, but hockey never drew well there. We had some minor involvement with the old IHL Ice Dogs as well, hosting their web site for a friend who ran it, and Laurie did some photography down there when we took in games in that facility.

So maybe San Francisco is the best of a set of bad options for minor league hockey here on the west coast. I do wish them luck.

But…

Minor league sports is a tough sell here in the Bay Area. The San Jose Giants have made it work, but the team is going to find it difficult to get media coverage; with two MLB teams, two NFL teams, an NHL team and two NBA teams in the greater bay area, plus Stanford and Cal as Div I college and the Earthquakes in soccer, there isn’t going to be much interest in covering a minor hockey team here. The Spiders fought hard for any coverage at all, and things haven’t exactly gotten better in the print media world in the last 15 years. Broadcast media is even worse, and it took the Spiders half a season to even get a radio outlet for games, and that outlet was one step above broadcasting using a walkie-talkie out of someone’s basement.

For this to work, the team is going to have to work hard at marketing and be willing to spend to get noticed, because there isn’t going to be a lot of cooperation in the media with free publicity. With the Spiders, we found if we could get people to a game or two, they tended to come back; getting them to that first game without massive ticket giveaways was tough, and if you give away too many tickets, you set the expectation that you don’t need to buy seats, you just wait for the next free giveaway. it’s a tough dance; the Spiders ownership ended up not having the commitment to invest in the team to make it work; when attendance didn’t thrive early, instead of investing more into marketing, they started cutting losses, and that put the team into a death spiral. The new owners are going to have to be willing to lose money to start, work hard to attract their audience, and expect it to take 2-3 years to build that audience to make it profitable.

It’s a down economy, but in the last 15 years since the Spiders the Sharks have done a nice job of building a grass roots hockey community; there are lots of people playing hockey in the Bay Area, and if the Bulls market and create a family atmosphere, they can draw off of that. Tying into the youth and amateur leagues gives them a hook into a market the Spiders didn’t have. That’s certainly one thing I’d focus on if I were involved here.

Even then, I’m not convinced this market can support a minor hockey team. The Sharks were never happy with the Spiders showing up, and I can’t see that they’ll be thrilled with the Bulls, so I tend to think it’ll be tough for them to get any kind of player affiliation with an NHL team, and they can’t expect any marketing cross-promotion or help from the Sharks (if I were the Sharks, though, I’d want to see this as an opportunity, a place to stick kids in the system where they’re easy to watch and coach, and a way to help foster the fan base by creating a new price point for fans priced out of the NHL in a way that’ll generate interest over the long term).

I hope the Bulls succeed. You can bet we’ll show up for a game or two (at least), just to see how it looks. Maybe we’ll be able to get our original seats back again for the third team at the old “Palais du Boeff”. In any event, this is an interesting experiment, one we’re going to watch and see what happens.

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for September 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 18, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 17, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 15, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 12, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 11, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 10, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 9, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 7, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 6, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 5, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 2, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for September 1, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 31, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 30, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 28, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 27, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 26, 2011

In Defense of Gil Amelio..

Steve Jobs and the quality of leadership | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

 

Amelio is a smart and impressive man, and he’s known for leading the team that developed the first commercial CCD sensors while working for Fairchild Semiconductor. He later became CEO of another chip manufacturer, National Semiconductor, where he was instrumental in restructuring the company and helping it to regain profitability. Amelio was there to give us confidence after Apple had been pretty bruised under John Sculley and Michael Spindler.

 

It wasn’t an encouraging visit.

I remember Amelio going on and on about the past problems at Apple, and how he was going to fix them. Click here for an Apple video of ‘the speech.’ He had a long list of fixes, but what was lacking was a coherent, compelling vision. He was going to do ‘something’ about the clones, finally replace System 7, and settle down all the politics and warfare between Apple divisions.

I had some specific questions, but he dodged them. It wasn’t convincing, and I wondered if Apple was going to pull itself out of what seemed a certain death spiral. After killing Copland and failing to make a deal for the BeOS, Amelio invested in NeXT and brought Steve Jobs back to Apple. At the end, Amelio got Apple back to making a small profit, after years of losing millions. It was a tiny victory, but certainly not a turn-around.

Amelio was finally ousted from Apple in July 1997 via a boardroom coup engineered by Jobs. The rest is history.

 

As someone who was there, I don’t think Amelio has gotten credit for what he did, only blame for what he couldn’t. So a few quick words in defense of Amelio might be in order.

Michael Spindler left behind an exceptionally broken company that was bleeding from all pores. Product quality sucked. Morale sucked. Inter-division fights and politics had many company operations almost at a standstill. The company proceeded to lose over a billion dollars in a quarter, which even today is a lot of money.

He fixed a lot of things. He staunched most of the flowing red ink. He restructured QA. He re-arranged the product lines away from Spindler’s ongoing disasters.

He stabilized the patient. He kept it alive until they cold transport the patient to a medical team that could patch it up properly. Without Amelio, Apple would not have lasted long enough to allow Steve to figure out how to turn it around.

One of the things he did was NOT buy Gassee’s company, Be. The general consensus on the inside of Apple at the time was Gassee felt Apple had no other options and got greedy on the pricing. True? I wasn’t there. But the expectation among all of us was that Be and Gassee was coming, and then all of a sudden it was off, and then all of a sudden, it was Steve. And the rest was history. It went against the common thinking of the time, and it can’t have been an easy decision to bring back a company founder and someone who clearly could make a play for control of the company (and ultimately did). It took some serious guts to make that call, and Amelio did it.

Now, there were things Amelio couldn’t do. He was a numbers guy. He tried to connect to the geeks and couldn’t. they never seemed to warm to him, and so he struggled to motivate and work on morale. He wasn’t really a product innovator; the national semiconductor background is as a jellybean semiconductor company where product generations are tied to fairly discrete improvements. The product like didn’t catch on fire as much as it used to, but it still didn’t inspire. He fought organizational intransigence but didn’t seem willing to put heads on stakes; he wanted to convince people to follow him instead of realizing that sometimes, you have to not give them the option of saying no, and killing them if they don’t obey.

That wasn’t a problem for Steve. And it was necessary; a few public beheadings in front of IL1, where division heads who played the “I outlasted the last two CEOs, I can ignore you until you’re gone” game suddenly went away, and all of the other people who were putting their own priorities ahead of Apple either straightened up or ran for the exits.

Steve was the reconstructive surgeon in Tokyo who did the reconstructive surgery and made the patient healthy and pretty again, but Amelio was the guy in the Mash tent near enemy lines who kept them alive long enough to get there. (and if I want to stretch this analogy into silliness, that would make Mike Spindler north korea, not Microsoft. IMHO. but I won’t go there).

So while Steve did a transformation on the company that I still marvel at (even as I watched it happening from the inside), that was possible because of the foundation that was laid before he returned, and that foundation was laid by Gil Amelio. And generally, he doesn’t get much credit for that. Mostly because he’s not Steve, and Steve is a hard act to follow (or precede).

And then there’s that great unanswerable question: what if they had bought Be instead of NeXT and brought in Gassee instead of Jobs? What would Apple be today? Or would it just be a memory of what once was?

If you really want to understand the impact of Steve Jobs on society, try to conceive of what our society would look like today if he had never been returned to Apple and never took it back over. Imagine a world without Apple, not just the products it ships, but the products it’s forced everyone else to innovate to keep up….

This world would be a much different place, and it’s hard to see many scenarios where it would be better off without him.

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 25, 2011

Thanks, Steve.

110824 174259 chuq flickr
I  happened to be having coffee today with an old friend today, someone who’d worked with me back at Apple. I got the news on Steve as I left the parking lot just after we’d broken up the party.

I’ve been pondering Steve and his impact on my life since. My direct interactions with him were quite limited; I almost ran over him once outside of Infinite Loop 1 as I was coming in for a meeting and he popped into the street without really looking, Jon Rubenstein and Eddy Cue in tow. He almost returned the favor once as he drove in to work as I was in the same crosswalk headed to yet another meeting on the loop. I spent a number of afternoons in his board room on the fourth floor in customer and vendor meetings, especially when open source companies like Zend were part of the discussion, because early on, I was one of the noisy ones about those technologies. He was never at those meetings, but his presence was.

I remember standing in IL1 one day when Fred Forsyth popped out of the stairwell and hurried out onto the street, and I realized he was using the stairs to avoid ending up in an elevator with Steve. He wasn’t alone. Steve could be — was — tried to be at times — a very intimidating person. His saving grace was that he held himself to the same standards he expected of others. Too few leaders do that.

Mostly, I’ve been sitting back and realizing just want an impact the man has had on my life. not JUST my years at Apple, but all across my life. The Apple II was the first computer I used instead of peeked. I bought an early Mac — a 512K — and later put a massive ten gig hard drive on it via the floppy port, and upgrading it to a huge 2 megabytes of RAM. I never thought I’d fill that drive up.

I did, of course, and many drives since. I’ve spent some time tonight trying to think about how many Macs I’ve owned over the years, and in all honesty, I can’t. My time at Apple spanned the Mac II to the Mac Pro, an just stop for a second to think about how much these computers changed and how much power they gained in that time — and despite that and all of the enhancements added to the system over that time, someone familiar with a Mac Pro would find a Mac II usable, and vice versa. they’re both recognizably Macs.

One of the things that drove me in the last years at Apple was that I was in a situation where I could create things that allowed a company that was reshaping society the ability to do so; how often do you have the opportunity to “move the needle” in a meaningful way?

Steve moved that needle almost routinely. His “one more thing” became a cliche; underneath  that cliche those one more things have transformed the world we live in.

I am who I am today in large part because of Steve. Not directly, but through the companies he founded and the products he built and the technologies he fostered; even more importantly, because of the people he brought in and mentored who turned into people that mentored me. Because of the thinking and attitudes he promoted and inoculated that became part of what I’ve become.

What makes me melancholy today is that this is clearly the end of an era. Pundits will now start proclaiming this the end of apple, of course, because that’s what pundits do. Eventually they’ll be right, too, because nothing lasts forever. But while there is nobody at Apple who can be Steve, the most important thing he did at Apple was build a team of people who each understand what is needed so that collectively they can carry on what Steve did. None of them alone is Steve; collectively, they have been taught to understand the how and why of Steve, and so I think Apple is going to be fine.

What makes me happy today is something even more important — that Steve chose to walk away on his terms, with his shield and not on it. He’s smart enough to pull back before life does it for him.

Here’s hoping he continue to enjoy his life on his terms without the pressures of trying to run a company like Apple, and be a person like Steve in that goldfish bowl he’s lived in. Now is his opportunity to just be Steve, be with his family and friends, and enjoy life on his terms. I do hope we as a society gives him that opportunity and doesn’t try to peek and peer more than he wishes us to.

So thanks, Steve. I’m the person I am because of you, what you did, the opportunities you created, and the attitudes and expectations you baked into those around you.

When I left Apple, I had a stack of pictures of mine printed, and I wrote up thank you notes to a bunch of people who’d been influences in my time there. the first one I did and delivered was to Steve. No idea if he got it or kept it; doesn’t matter, either. But it was important to me at the time to say thanks to a bunch of folks, and he was at the front of that line.

Tonight, I say thanks again, because you can never say it too many times.

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 24, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 23, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 18, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 17, 2011

Arrivals and Departures

I was going to make part of this blog entry my Wednesday in review, but then I got some other info, and things changed a bit…

But here’s a nice arrival: Matt Levine has started a blog. That name is probably not familiar even to most Sharks fans, but he has a long history in the San Jose sports market, he was employee #2 with the Sharks and their first Vice President of Business Operations. He was involved in almost every early key decision and hired many of the early staffers for the Sharks that built that operation and made it one of the great businesses in hockey (and in pro sports, for that matter). You can also, I believe, thank him — or blame him — for the color Teal.

There’s an amazing amount of knowledge and history of how pro sports here in the Bay Area became what it is today locked up in Matt’s brain (and much of it because Matt helped make it happen), and now he’s going to talk about it. If you’re at all interested in sports in the Bay Area, you should check it out.

Matt was one of the early contacts we had at the Sharks back when we were running the mailing lists; he always made time for us; he helped us with access and information when we needed it; we did occasional favors for him and the Sharks in return, and he and the team were very supportive of our efforts to try to foster an online fan enclave at a time when those things were new and nobody quite knew what that meant (and at one point, our research indicated that about 1 season ticket in 11 was controlled by a mailing list member, so it was to everyone’s benefit to work together to help share information).

One of the first people Matt hired in was Ken Arnold, who was the PR department and managed things like the program books and other marketing, PR and communications duties. He was another person we worked with a lot early on over at the Sharks. It’s sad to note that there was a restructuring on the business side of the organization today, and one of those laid off was Ken.  Laurie and I both remember the day we wandered over to the Sharks offices to show Ken this fascinating new thing — something called a browser — and to talk about these strange things called web pages and how a team like the Sharks could interact with the fans on this internet thing with them. That was in (I think) 1994 or so, just after the Sharks moved into their offices in the bowels of the San Jose Arena, and the Sharks were the first team in the NHL with a  web site — only fitting for a team lodged deeply in Silicon Valley. Ken has been a driving force of the Sharks online presence in recent years and really gets the whole “new media” thing.

It’s sad to see one of the really early builders of the organization move on; that’s life in pro sports and the valley, unfortunately. I don’t know what Ken’s plans are (if any), but I wish him godspeed and thank him for everything he’s done for us over the years. (and there are very few PR or MarComm groups that wouldn’t be a hell of a lot better with Ken in them here in the Valley; if you can survive and not burn out doing that in pro sports, high tech is going to be slow and boring in comparison; if you’re looking for that kind of person, I can probably make connections (or you can likely do so through the Sharks).

Most of the cutbacks the Sharks (okay, technically Silicon Valley Sports and Entertainment, which runs the non-hockey parts of the business) come from them shutting down a small side operation that did fulfillment of custom logos on various artifacts from T-shirts and hats to glassware; I think that business grew from the time when the Sharks were fostering light dates via secondary sports like Roller Hockey (remember the Rhinos?) and Indoor Soccer. Since they needed that ability for those teams, it got expanded as a general business and handled creation and manufacturing of these items for organizations and events around the valley (I MAY be wrong, but I believe some of the San Francisco Spiders merchandise was source through them).  According to Dave Pollak of the Mercury News, nobody on the hockey side was downsized, but with the ones that were (Kent Russell, VP of sales and marketing being the only other name mentioned and another long time, early Sharks staffer that we maybe met once or twice) some long time Sharks history is now gone. Maybe not names most sharks fans would recognize, but names and people who made being a Sharks fan something enjoyable.

The other interesting note in Pollak’s column today is that the Sharks ownership have more or less decided not to replace Greg Jamison, who retired last year. Instead of bringing on a new CEO, the organizations are being run by the ownership group, with Doug Wilson on the hockey side and Malcolm Bordelon on the SVSE/business side reporting directly into the owners. Since I felt from day one that Bordelon was heir presumptive to replace Jamison, this doesn’t surprise me and I think it’s a reasonable (non-)decision; don’t forget that Wilson was heavily involved in the business aspects of the NHL Players Association after retiring and before coming on board with the Sharks, and an exceptionally savvy guy. In practice, I think this is a good move, and seems to give Wilson a little more (deserved) autonomy, and removes a layer or management from the organization, which I like. Most important, the right people (Wilson and Bordelon) are in the positions of authority, and that I fully agree with and support, however the structure is laid out.

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 15, 2011

Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!

Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier! | Monday Note:

 

The idea came up during a “what if” conversation with my wife Brigitte, while walking along University Avenue in Palo Alto. What should Apple do with its almost beyond comprehension $76B in cash? The COO of the Gassée family is creative and practical, an abstract painter turned “lumber VAR”–she builds or rebuilds houses in Palo Alto. She’s not enthralled by technology and takes a utilitarian view of computers, phones, navigation systems, tablets…an attitude that provides a useful counterpoint to my sometimes overly-enthusiastic embrace of anything that computes. She immediately nixes a big acquisition that could dilute Apple’s culture, an aspect of the company that’s integrally important to Steve. She has no interest in financial engineering and concludes that Apple will continue to make small acquisitions that pose few cultural challenges–but small buyouts won’t solve the cash “problem”. What to do with all that money? As we chat, we walk by the wireless carrier stores: T-Mobile, a couple AT&T retailers (one is shutting down), Verizon and, next to the Apple Store, Sprint, a big store with a bored sales staff that easily outnumbers the customers. “Why doesn’t Jobs buy a carrier?” she asks, “He’d easily do a better job than these people….”

I was amused to see that Jean-Louis has also thought of the “Apple buys a carrier” idea. Good to see I’m not the only one seeing this as a fun speculation.

Still, I don’t see this as likely to happen. Although I must admit I find this recently issued patent intriguing in this context. Gassee has some interesting perspective on all of this, though; worth a read.

(hat tip: Technologizer)

Today’s Shared Links for August 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 12, 2011

more than you possibly want to know about RSS feeds…

Okay, I think I have the RSS feeds figured out. Maybe.

Here is what I’ve found out about why (some) folks are magically seeing partial RSS feeds from my blog all of a sudden, when I’ve told it to distribute full ones.

It turns out an RSS feed has two data components embedded, a <description> and and <content:encoded>. If you enable full RSS feeds, the full data goes into <content:encoded> but the description continues to be the wordpress excerpt, which if you don’t flag an explicit excerpt, is 50 words.

It also turns out some feed setups (firefox, evidently) use the <description>. Others use <content:encoded>. Google Reader seems to use <description> when you’re viewing a feed for subscribing, but the <content:encoded> for reading, so it does both, confusing the hell out of things until you figure this all out. It took some serious geeing into the raw feed data and some inspired googling to understand this (sigh).

So, it is perfectly possible to be pushing a full RSS feed and having people seeing a partial feed depending on their reader type. and yes, googling this shows I am not the first person to trip over this.

Lots of poking and prodding of the feed make it clear the full feed IS in there. As well as a truncated <description>. This is a feature, not a bug.

My solution: there is a wordpress plugin called “Excerpt Length”  which lets you set the excerpt length (duh). I installed that, and set it to 3000. If I get THAT wordy in one post, you will thank me for truncating it. So now the <description> has the full text in it, unless I specifically choose to write an excerpt, which I rarely do. So this should work for everyone, at the cost of a larger RSS feed file.

Why did this suddenly start showing up on upgrading to the new look and feel? I don’t know. but my best guess is that the RSS files are being distributed with a different mime-type than the old one; probably actually following the standards, where the old one probably didn’t.

I could be wrong. Since this seems to fix things, I’m not really motivated to dig into the gory details. My testing shows it seems to be fine now. you?

chuq (more geeky fun for a friday than I’d planned for!)

 

 

 

Back in the house!

Canon 100 400mmIS

I’m happy to say that my lens is back from summer camp with the nice people at Canon’s repair depot. I haven’t had a chance to shoot with it yet, but I’m going to do so this weekend to test it out.

For those that have never had to have a lens repaired, the process is simple. It starts here, where you can create a repair request and log it into the system. You then ship the lens to them with the paperwork. When they receive it, they’ll inspect it and send you and estimate. You approve it and give them a credit card, they fix it and ship it back Fedex 2nd day.

One thing I’ve come to terms with is that to get the shots I want to get, I can’t always baby my camera gear. That doesn’t mean I toss it around or abuse it for no reason, but there is going to be some wear and tear over time. Plus, I’m a klutz, and I have been known to drop things once in a while. Or drop myself and use the camera as a cushion to soften the fall.

The fact is, the 100-400 has seen a lot of service; it’s over six years old, and in that time I’ve upgraded through four camera bodies (my original Rebel, the Rebel XT, my 30D, and now my 7D; I still carry the 7D and 30D as my second body). it’s been pretty flawless over that time, and I use it for as much as 90% of my photography, depending on what I’m doing. I figured it was it was due for a tuneup about this time last year but didn’t get around to it, but after I kinda dropped it on the Yosemite trip, I knew it needed to be looked at.

I was right; the repair cost me more than I’d hoped, but less than I feared — about $350 total, for a $1500ish lens after six years I can’t complain. Beyond general cleaning and refocusing, there was damage to the zoom mechanism and some parts in that assembly needed to be replaced, and that had knocked the len elements a bit out of alignment, which is why I saw some softness in it at some magnifications on the last shoot I did.

I’ve tested the zoom mechanism and it’s operating flawlessly now. I’ll take it out this weekend and do some test shots with it, then bring it home and pixel peep those, and then run it through the LensAlign and see if I need to adjust the micro focus (digression: for those interested in learning about the LensAlign or want a good practical guide to using it, check out the discussion of it on Arthur Morris’ blog; I’ll probably talk more about it after I run my lenses through).

Overall I’d rate the Canon repair process about a B+; the weak spot is that once you get past the estimate and approve the repair, you don’t get any estimated time for repair or status updates — the Canon web site says they try to return a lens in about seven days (but put a bunch of disclaimers on that); in my case, the time from approving the estimate to getting the notification the repair was finished was about 2 and a half weeks, and I was getting nervous enough I was about to start pinging them for a status update when they shipped it back. I’d really love to see them give some better visibility and set expectations based on how busy their techs are — even if they were to report the average hold time for the lenses currently being shipped back to others it’d be a nice step forward.

But other than that? The lens came back packed well enough to survive being dropped from a plane, which impressed me. It is definitely a lot cleaner than it was when it left, so they clearly took some time on it. Proof is in the pudding on how sharp the shots are when I hook it up to the 7D, but the process and the systems around the repair all seem very professional and straightforward. The biggest worry was putting the lens in a box and shipping it off to an unknown facility that first time, tracking numbers or no.

But now that I’ve done that once, I won’t worry about that as much. Not that I plan on making this a habit, mind you. But in reality, some preventive maintenance on the hardware probably isn’t a bad idea once in a while…

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 11, 2011

The coming pro sports economic crash

Unsold Premium Seating is Becoming a Structural Problem | The Business of Sports:

Unsold premium seating inventory is a rising problem in the sports industry. It is becoming more and more common to turn on the television for a game, only to see dark suites and swaths of empty club seats in the background. Most teams have approached this issue as a sales problem… making more sales calls, offering more creative discounts, etc. In my opinion however, this is not a sales problem, this is a structural problem. During the sports facility building boom that lasted from the early 1990’s to the mid 2000’s, most professional sports teams drastically ramped up their inventories of luxury suites and club seats. Prior to the building boom, the vast majority of seating revenues for sports teams were generated from general admission tickets, but now seating products focused on corporations and high-income individuals can account for as much as 25% of a franchise’s locally-generated income.

This is an interesting look at a growing problem. it’s hard to tune into a broadcast with some teams without noticing the wide swath of empty seats masquerading as fans — seats that were actually sold to corporations, but which they didn’t bother using. And now, as the economy turns, it looks like those seats are starting to turn into unsold (and expensive) inventory.

Not a surprise to me. I wrote about this back in 2007 after the Wall Street Journal did a piece on it. These kind of structural rejiggerings within stadiums and arenas were happening four years ago. Even then, if you looked, you could tell that some teams were getting increasingly desperate (or greedy) about pushing revenues by pushing high margin (um, luxury or service-enhanced) seating options.

Arena design and sports financing are kind of hobbies for Laurie and myself, going back to the days when Laurie’s masters thesis involved helping the San Jose Giants get their stadium upgrades financed. We visited the Portland Rose Garden shortly after it was built, and found the design and ambience really sad and disappointing (and to be honest, that building has been a disappointment from a revenue standpoint); we did the same the year after Key Arena was rehabilitated for the Sonics, and look how well that worked out — it’s basically an empty building with a lot of unpaid bonds and a team that now lives in another state.

And I can’t say I’m surprised. The redesign up there was — arrogant. It was one of the early buildings to build in a cloistered mezzanine floor for luxury seats, taking secondary seats and hitting them with magic fairy dust to get premier pricing out of them. The Rose Garden does the same thing, and we sat in them one night and ended up sneaking out (easier said than done given all of the locked doors “protecting” us from the common fans) and finding empty seats down on the main level.

There’s been a massive growth in revenue in pro sports over the last 30 years; the change in economics has been stunning. Much of this has been driven by television, but teams have gotten very scientific about understanding demand for seats and have spent a lot of time and energy trying to drive pricing to the maximum possible price, and for a number of years, this has worked.

For all the cries by the fan with “normal” paychecks that tickets have gotten to expensive, the reality is that these tickets were still being sold. If it’s sold, it’s not too expensive (whether you’re canibalizing your future sales is another question; whether you’re allowing future generations access to become fans is a good question — given owners tend to turn teams over to new owners before they have to worry about that, do they care? they should, but do they?). of course, only an idiot would believe this kind of pricing growth would continue indefinitely, and it’s pretty clear, especially with the recession and the economic downturn, that the glory days are done and that revenue is going to at best stagnated.

This is especially true given the massive changes going on in the TV industry; I believe TV revenues have peaked, or are close to it, and it’s unclear that the alternate video distribution methods that are starting to spring up will equal the numbers leagues are getting out of CBS, NBC and ABC; the networks are trying to figure this out (see NBC’s big move into regionals and repackaging of Versus, for instance), but I sure wouldn’t want to build an economic model for a team or league that assumes continued growth. Sorry, athletes who presume 10% raises every year coming out of college.

Buildings that aren’t flexible about reconfiguration are in trouble (I’m looking at you, Portland and Anaheim). Compare that to places like San Jose, where they were smart enough not to overbuild (keeping the building smaller and more intimate — they could have built a 20,000 seater, and didn’t — but more importantly, not overbuilding luxury boxes or building inflexible premium seating. Vancouver’s building is very similar, so if demand drops, they can change their pricing structure without massive pain.

To me, San Jose’s building is a model of how the future looks; in the last few years, they moved by adding the party pavilions; they’re premium seating is not driven by in-arena cloistering but by using a club area where access is manageable; that allows them to grow of shrink the luxury seating areas if they absolutely need to. Beyond that, they never got overly greedy on pricing, and have worked hard at keeping areas in the arena affordable and available day of game so that parents still can take kids to a game without a mortgage. They clearly left some potential revenue on the table — but they also hedged their bets and aren’t as exposed to the economic downturn, and haven’t gutted their future fan base at the expense of maximizing revenue today. That kind of long-term future thinking is unfortunately fairly rare in many areas of pro sports (but NHL hockey seems, because it never got so addicted to the needs of network TV revenues, not as greedy as other sports and more forward thinking).

The next five years are going to be fascinating. Painful for some teams and leagues, but fascinating. Here in the bay area, if you’re a building and finance geek, ti’s an absolute circus — we have the 49ers who absolutely botched the Hunters Point project and now are trying their damnedest to screw up the Santa Clara stadium. You have Al Davis and the city of Oakland. You have Lew Wolff, who was handed a deal in Fremont and botched it, because deep down inside he always wanted the team in San Jose. Oakland has some weird new plan to revitalize the coliseum area and magically turn it into Downtown Disney, but I’m paying no attention to that because it has zero chance of happening. Ditto any time San Francisco pops up to say they’re still in the game for, well, pretty much anything. The Oakland arena refurbish for the Warriors wasn’t as disastrous as the Key arena rehab was for Seattle, but it was far from a success (the only building with that footprint where it seems to have gone okay was Phoenix; all of those cookie cutters just need to be torn down, they do nothing well).

So while the Giants succeeded massively with their park despite everything san francisco could do to screw them up, and San Jose’s Sharks are solid if not printing money, the A’s need a park desperately, the Raiders need a park desperately, the Warriors need — god knows, but what they have hasn’t worked. the Kings up in Sacramento are in a building that’s not even AAA worthy any more, and, oh, who cares? answer: nobody.

So we have four teams in a six team market that have arena/stadium problems. The 49ers will figure out a way to not screw up the Santa Clara deal, but I expect continuing amusement watching them try. I also think that at some point the NFL will broker a deal for that stadium to be shared with the Raiders the way the New York stadium is, because there simply isn’t money available to build two NFL caliber stadiums in this region any more. So that’s two of the teams. (IMHO, the gating item on getting the Raiders do join into the 9er stadium deal is Al Davis. and the 49ers dislike of the idea of dealing with him; if Al Davis weren’t in the way, this would likely be a no-brainer).

The warriors have a relatively new building with a  mediocre redo, but new owners. Hopefully, they’ll help. the old ones never impressed me. By all that’s sane, the Kings should move to Anaheim already, except I think the NBA really wants the Clippers there and are waiting for an owner that’s sane. So I nominate the Kings as the first Las Vegas team, although I’m not sure they can outdraw the Rebels. (more likely, Kansas City).

And the A’s? Rule 1: ignore anything Oakland says, they are incapable of making it happen. Lew Wolff I just can’t figure. Smart real estate guy who had what I thought was a no-brainer project in Fremont and gave up on it way too easily. I still don’t understand why, and I followed it fairly closely. My best guess is deep down inside he always wanted the team in San jose (but wanted the land in Fremont to develop, and needed the Fremont project to get those permits). And the San Jose stuff?

Dear everyone who thinks the A’s are coming to San Jose (especially you, Mr. Purdy): ain’t gonna happen. Not the way this is being done.

The A’s have been waiting for Selig for what, two years now? On this territorial issue, silence speaks volume: a lack of answer is an answer. if Selig had any intention of letting this happen, it would have happened.

And here’s what the unspoken elephant in this sitting room really is: Wolff wants to get territorial rights to San Jose without paying the Giants what the Giants want for it (I’m guessing at least $50 million, probably $80. if I’m the Giants, my asking price is $100m and then we negotiate). The Giants have no intention of giving it up for free. Wolff has played the San Jose folks and public pressure to try to convince Selig to give him the territory for free, or to set a lower price for it.

Seligs silence, I think, is really saying he’ll approve the deal, at a price both teams agree to. If he were to publicly say no, it’d kill any move to San Jose and then he has a REAL issue with the A’s and a lousy stadium and no options. But he won’t cut Wolff a sweetheart deal here. So he sits back and says nothing and waits for Wolff to go to the Giants and bargain. And Wolff doesn’t want to pay market price. And so we sit.

So I declare the san jose deal dead, unless someone has a spare $80 million to give Wolff to pay for the territory he’s unwilling to buy. If I were selig? I’d do exactly what seems to be happening, which is leaving these two teams to work out a market value and not mucking around with the territory rules. I can’t decide if the city of san jose really is naive? or if playing naive is part of the plan. I don’t think it matters, enough time has gone on to realize if it was a plan, it didn’t work. So, sir Wolff, either open the pocket book, or go back and figure out how to unscrew up the fremont deal. Or sell the team and cut your losses — because honestly, I think Wolff was more interested in the real estate than the team from the start, and in this current economic climate, I can’t see that he can make the real estate work any time soon, either.

So my current view of the A’s is “screwed, basically”, and I bet if major league baseball went to Wolff privately and whispered the word “contraction”, he’d sign the paperwork so fast you’d hear the sonic boom. And I don’t think I’d blame him.

Because really, the A’s can’t stay in their current stadium, they can’t fix it up until they get rid of the Raiders (and 99% of oakland city government and most of the populace); there really isn’t a place they can move to, there’s no convenient empty stadium they can threaten to head to to get a deal for a building. The best option might be BC place, and given the CFL schedule, that really sucks, too. So there really isn’t a good solution here.

(actually, my favorite solution was always a stadium out in the pleasanton area, on the bart line, given how strongly the A’s core attendance demographic ties to the BART line. the big weakness of the fremont proposal was that it didn’t deal with that aspect).

Or maybe this will all magically work out. In this economic crisis? I doubt it. But it’s going to be fun to watch, as long as you aren’t financially tied to it. If you are? my sympathies.

Because the only thing I know is true is that the golden days of pro sports are ending, and anyone who expects the next ten years of economics to look like the last 15 is going to be seriously disappointed. (and that’s not a bad thing, in the greater scheme of things…)

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 10, 2011

Wednesday’s in Review: City of Ruins by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

City of Ruins is Kris Rusch’s sequel to Diving Into the Wreck, which I reviewed back in June. It carries forward the story of from Diving into the Wreck, with the Boss now running an organization committed to acquiring as much of the stealth technology as it can to keep it out of the hands of the Empire and maintain the balance of power. There’s are reports that seem to indicate there might be stealth technology on a planet instead of in deep space, and while the Boss is skeptical, she pulls a team together to go and investigate.

To say “it’s complicated” is an understatement. The planetary government has secrets it would rather not be discovered. The Boss and her team make discoveries that include stealth technology, but definitely not the kind of find they were expecting. Rusch weaves in a completely independent plot line, except it’s really not, and I don’t want to say more than that because it’d be a spoiler. There’s a major earthquake, a first contact sequence, one heck of a chase scene with a “nick of time” escape, and what you end up with is a really fun, high energy romp.

The reader (and the Boss) also take big leaps forward in the understanding of the stealth technology and the ancient history that these derelict ships came from, and the history of how things got to this point in time becomes much clearer.

She also does something I love, and which happens all too rarely in series books — she brings this book to a perfectly satisfactory ending while at the same time clearly setting up the structure for future books and showing hints of where this series is going to go in the future. Too often authors fall too much in love with the overarching story arc and forget to tell the series as a set of solid independent stories, but Rusch avoids that trap. Both City of Ruins and Diving into the Wreck are in depending stories within a larger story, rather than extended chapters.

Oh, and Rusch leaves a subtle but clear sign that uber-loner Boss is going to find her reality complicated even more than expected in future books by a personal relationship. How Rusch handles that should be fascinating….

These books are fun, high energy action adventure science fiction. You don’t need to think too hard, but they don’t fall apart if you poke at them and consider what’s going on underneath the chase scenes. Solid entertainment and well worth your time to grab a copy and spend an evening with them. For best results, read them in sequence, but both books do stand alone if you choose not to.

Highly recommended.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 9, 2011

about that logo….

New logo

 

So, one of my loyal readers had this comment on the new logo:

Please forgive me for saying it, but I’m not a big fan of the logo. :-(

Consider yourself forgiven.  I mean, seriously. I spent literally minutes on the logo (seriously). It continues my tradition of silly logos that aren’t intended to be more than something that looks like I put it together on the fly (which I did).

The logo on the previous generation of the site (which I will allow to fade into eternity, where it belongs) was intended to invoke the early days of the web when photoshop was new and bevels were state of the art. it was intended to be somewhere between kitschy and annoying, and when I got email from a friend 30 minutes after launching that said “Dude! did you ship with the placeholder instead of your real logo?” I knew I’d succeeded.

This one’s moved a little further along the evolutionary path where things are now rounded instead of edge beveled. I use three fonts here (bickham script pro, Book Antiqua, and our dear old friend, zapf dingbats), because I wanted the script but bounded by something a little stronger and with some character. The dingbat is actually one i used typographically in my printed copies of OtherRealms back in the 80′s, and so actually has a quiet historical significance only I care about. and besides, without it, the logo seemed unbalanced and needed — something. so why not?

And that pretty much defines the design between the logo? “Why not?” — it’s harmless, and to some degree, it’s designed to revel in my not being a serious graphic designer. Which is what I like.

So if you don’t like it, I guess I succeeded again. Which is fine. about all I can guarantee is that next time I redesign the site, I’ll change the logo again, and if I ever get serious, I’ll have it designed by a real designer. But I’m not in any hurry about that….

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for August 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 7, 2011

Introducing the updated Chuqui.com

I’m happy to announce the updated chuqui.com. the new blog look and feel is now live. Please wander on by and let me know what you think.

Last year for my birthday I completely revamped the blog with a new look and feel after years of benign neglect. At that time, I had some idea of what I wanted but was still thinking through a lot of things, and WordPress (the software that lies underneath) had released version 3, but a lot of the support tools and themes were still figuring out how to take advantage of and support the 3.0 capabilities.

I’ve been experimenting with things over the last year, trying to decide what my focus should be and what tweaks work and which ones don’t. One big push when I updated the blog last year was looking for ways to encourage people to explore the site and see what other content was here, trying to break the bounce-glance-bounce behavior you see among many people. The new site both improved how long people stayed on the site and how many pages they viewed per visit, so I feel that was a success.

I came to think the blog still looked somewhat disorganized and cluttered, though, so in June, I decided to do it again and take what I’ve learned in the last year and see if I could make it better.

My focus this time was on cleaning up the navigation and really tightening a lot of the secondary material, simplifying the sidebars and making everything a lot easier to find. I also wanted to improve the typography and make the blog more readable. I also wanted to improve how the photography looked on the page.

Once again I did the redesign using a commercial them (in this case, Dandelion) I bought through Themeforest. I would love to build a theme absolutely from scratch exactly the way I want — but I really don’t want to invest 200 hours or so doing so, not when I can pay $35 for the first 90% of the job and spend 15 hours customizing and designing around that base. It took me about two weeks to decide on Dandelion as the new theme, and I’m quite happy with the result. It’s very solid, the markup looks good (better than my previous theme) and it worked as advertised and I ended up not needing to go into the guts of the theme at all to fix things. I really like the jquery integration which gives me some nice options I plan on experimenting with.

I think I’ve succeeded at improving the site, but time (and you) will tell. What really matters is what you think? Wander by, look around, and let me know what you like and what you don’t like….

Today’s Shared Links for August 5, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 3, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 2, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for August 1, 2011

Laurie talking goalies

I’m happy to note that Laurie’s back and writing about hockey again (finally!), and her first column over at Kukla’s Corner is now live. She’s going to be talking goalies, which if you remember the old Sharks list was one of her specialties. I’ve been encouraging her to get back in the pundit game for a while, and I’m damn glad to see she’s doing this, and those of you who know her ought to wander by Kukla’s and say hi.

chuq (this must mean hockey season is approaching…)

$80 billion dollars is a lot of money….

Apple’s $76.2 billion cash hoard: Six frivolous ways to spend it | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog:

One thing that staggers the mind is the amount of money Apple has on hand. During last Tuesday’s 3Q earnings call, it was announced that the company has US$76.2 billion cash on hand — actually a combination of cash, short-term investments, and other items that would take an accountant to sort out. While Apple CEO Steve Jobs has publicly stated that “we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future” as the reason to have all that money on hand, I thought it would be more fun to think about ways to spend $76.2 billion on frivolous things.

 

 

 

Fun article, but Apple doesn’t buy things frivilously. I’ve felt for a while Apple’s cash position had a larger purpose, that larger purpose being that Apple has plans to buy something really, really big — when the time is right.

What thing?

Think a bit about how Apple has succeeded. It’s succeeded by taking an industry and finding a way to disrupt it; to change the rules such that the industry leaders are weakened and Apple’s position is strong. It did this in computers by taking an industry that was rife with beige boxes and marketing messages around gigahertz and megabytes and convincing consumers it really was about style and looks and getting things done; a computer to use, not a computer to geek, and one that won’t clash in the living room.

Ditto music; it’s hard to remember now, but iTunes and the whole online music thing was a big experiment and risk. But  Apple is now the dominant player in music sales not because they took on Tower and Wal-Mart directly, but because they disrupted the industry and shifted consumer demand into areas Apple could sell to where the existing players couldn’t tread. By the time the industry reacted, Apple had taken the business away.

If Apple learned nothing else from the Mike Spindler era, it was that standing up to a 800 pound gorilla and expecting to beat it going head to head is a stupid idea. the real profit is in changing the game, disrupting an industry such that the current leaders can’t compete soon enough to keep Apple from taking a chunk of it away.

So if you want to see where Apple is looking to future growth and new endeavours, look both at what it’s strong at (consumer electronics, large back-end infrastructures, style and finish and design, and strong customer support) and then consider what industries might be vulnerable to Apple deciding to come in and take off a hunk in an Apple way.

What industry has a strong consumer component, significant technology needs, huge back end infrastructures and low customer service rankings? Our friends, the wireless carriers (and secondarily our other friends, our ISPs that feed broadband into our houses).

The problem with taking on carriers is they have all sorts of built in chokepoints: it’s a brutally expensive industry to get into, and even if you have the cash, you have the problem of acquiring frequency spectrums (licensed by the US goverment) and cell tower permits (licensed by local governments full of NIMBY no-sayers), and it would take years to build out a network — all the while, the other carriers would ahve time to see you coming and get ready for the fight. You also need a massive back end infrastructure to manage provisioning, billing, customer service and things like email and the like.  And you need to build up the technology to replace existing carriers SIM cards and the inherent lock-in of devices they cause.

But what if you’re Apple? And you have iCloud, a back end infrastructure already designed to support millions of iPhones and iPads? And you have iPhones and iPads, meaning you don’t need to worry about a handset manufacturer leaking your plans to the other carriers. And you have, oh, $80 billion dollars IN CASH hanging around getting bored?

The SIM lockout issue is a problem, unless you’ve developed your own (which rumors have surfaced that Apple is working on). The other entrance chokepoints — spectrum and cell tower placement?

Apple has $80 billion in cash. Sprint’s market cap is about $16 billion (roughly). Clearwire’s is under a billion. Apple could buy a carrier tomorrow — basically out of petty cash — at a good market bump over the stock value so that Wall Street smiles on the deal. Given Apple isn’t currently in that market, anti-trust issues should be minimal. Given financing is more or less “we’ll write you a check”, they won’t need to spend months building up the financing package — they could decide to do this and get the deal closed in 180 days. maybe 90. So fast no other carrier could even issue a press release complaining about it much less try to shift its business to compete against it.

But if Apple were to just walk into this business and act like another carrier? It won’t bother. It doesn’t just want to be “Sprint as Apple”, it’d be “Sprint as leverage to take over the industry” because that’s what Apple does best. So it won’t just buy a carrier to act like a carrier, will it?

Imagine this scenario. Apple announces a deal to buy Sprint (and for the hell of it, Clearwire). It announces that you will be able to buy iPhones with an Apple custom SIM in them, either on contract/subsidized, or off contract and unlocked. If you want to just buy a sim and put it in some other phone, Apple will sell you service, happily, month to month, pre-paid. whatever works. They add provisioning and account management for this to iCloud. Going to Europe? log in, buy a block of minutes in the countries you’ll be visiting, and Apple acts as the wholesaler for it. (goodbye, evil overseas roaming rates). Make buying minutes as easy as buying the new Coldplay album. if you want subsidized phones and bundles, cool. If you want to pay by the minute or pre-pay. cool. Lots of data? really cool.

Sprint would give them the spectrum to prevent carriers from freezing them out by refusing to let them buy minutes off of the other networks, making them a player in the business. There’s no need for Apple to use that spectrum the way sprint did, they can reshape the business away from the “locked in phone long contract” model endemic in the US in favor the european model. They don’t even care if it’s an iPhone or another model – just plug in the SIM and they’ll sell you network (of course, if you buy an iPhone, they make even more money).

Apple could walk in, buy sprint, disrupt the entire wireless industry and if they do it right, grab a huge chunk before any other carrier could react to the changes. And do it for $30 billion or so, leaving them another $50billion in the bank for investment in the infrastructure or to buy other toys.

If this is such a good idea, why hasn’t Apple done it already? First, they’ve needed to build out the iCloud infrastructure, and that’s still ongoing. That North Carolina datacenter has plenty of cycles, but they need to get the software in place and get it ready for the provisioning. Lion/IO5/iCloud are the first pieces that  make this possible. They’d have to get all of the infrastructure pieces ready, though.

Second reason they haven’t? It makes no sense to make a move into being a carrier now, at the tail end of the “3G era”. The real 4G (not the faux-G being marketed right now) is just rolling out. My guess would be Apple would do this when it could make a national 4G presence and not worry about a 3G legacy customer base, and put all of its investment in building out and upgrading the 4G network. Even though the first true 4G phones are hitting the market, 4G networking is still not quite ready for prime time in enough cities; but in six months? 9 months? it’s coming. If I were Apple, I’d wait until 4G was reasonably well rolled out and then make a move like this. Not before. but definitely, 2012 is a sweet spot for being rolled out without allowing the other carriers to get entrenched in 4G.

If Apple were to do this right, there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt another industry and make a huge amount of money out of the disruption. Even if Apple maintains most of the existing carrier model — simply having a company with working web sites and billing that’s not byzantine and networks that work would be a huge competitive advantage (and Apple, if nothing else, would not tolerate mediocre networks with its name on it).

But there’s one other opportunity for disruption this would create. Remember I keep mentioning Clearwire? they’re a big piece of Sprint’s 4G buildout strategy, but this is also a “last mile” wireless broadband network strategy as well. Think about one of Apple’s big risks in it’s shift to the cloud — it’s ISPs and the growing shift towards data caps and “managing” network traffic.

So what if Apple not only went into the carrier business, but leveraged that to go into the wireless ISP business? Offered you 4 megabits down for half the price of Comcast, using 4G wireless and with no data caps? You think that might put a dent or two in the copper ISP plans to go to tiered (and increasingly expensive) usage based pricing plans?

Hmm.

do I think this is likely? Absolutely not. This isn’t rumor, this is just raw speculation, based on a few nights talking with friends over some really nice bottles of wine, and a few random intersting rumorlets about Mama Fruit. And, frankly, a wish for a wireless carrier that didn’t make me feel like an enemy, or at best a number. If you look at the wireless carrier industry, it’s ripe for a disruption — but doing so would be exceptionally difficult and expensive. Not many companies could do it, because not many companies have both the technology background, consumer experience, and capital available to make the investments to walk in and deal with the roadblocks in the way.

Apple, and it’s $80 billion dollar war chest, iCloud infrastructure and consumer savvy, seems to be the one company that could do it. If it chose to. And even if it took a $50 billion dollar total investment (more than twice what sprint is currently worth) — it still have a huge cash hoard to do things with.

So, no, I don’t think this is likely. But it’d be fun to watch the screaming if they try it, and I wouldn’t bet against them succeeding. And if nothing else, it’s a fun speculation to try to work out the details and see if it still makes sense when there isn’t a Barolo involved.

(have fun, don’t think too hard…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 31, 2011

status update on my birthday present.

Photo1

Quick status update on my birthday present. It’s not done yet, mostly because I had to hold off last weekend when a knee got a bit grumpy, but put some good work into it this weekend, and it’s close. Because gravel and bricks are HEAVY (wow. who knew?) I can only carry so much in the subaru in one trip, which also limits how quickly I’m turning this around,. and mostly only working on it on the weekends. I’d estimated 16 bricks and about 20 bags of gravel (half a cubic foot, about 50 pounds, per bag), in reality, Im’ going with 7 steps (14 bricks) and it’s going to take about 30 bags of gravel to finish this off, so I have about 3 more trips for supplies to finish. If work cooperates, I’ll try to do that this week so it’s finished next weekend. That way next weekend I can start bringing in the wood chips to spruce the area up… Looks like the final cost of materials will be around $250.

There are four low-flow sprinkler lines underneath this now, and that’s the next project…. That, and general cleanup. For all I’ve been cleaning out the yards into the green waste bin this year, there’s still a hunk o’ stuff to clean up and get moving out of here to the city compost pile…

All in all, pretty happy at how it’s turning out. And it’s been a good workout hauling that stuff around.

Today’s Shared Links for July 30, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 29, 2011

Why I decided not to turn pro….

Charlie Borland wrote an interesting piece recently titled Are You Sure You Want to be a Professional Nature Photographer? that I recommend to anyone who’s pondered that thought. I struck a few chords with me when I read it.

This kinda of struck home with me this recently when I realized it was five years since leaving Apple and which ties into that in some ways. Back in 2005, after my nervous breakdown but before I actually decided to leave mama fruit, I started getting serious about my photography. I was doing a lot of thinking and trying to plan forward as well, because at that point, I was seriously trying to figure out if I still wanted to be in high tech (or if I still had what it took to be in high tech), and if so how long.

One of the things I mapped out in some detail was what it would take for me to make the shift from geeking for a living to turning myself into a photographer and writer. The first thing on that list was not (surprisingly) “build a web site offering your prints for sale”, but “you need to get a crapload better as a photographer”.

QT Luong has a fascinating post on his trip down this path. It’s pretty much the path I figured I should take, and I think it’s the path any photographer looking to make this leap should be planning for and working towards.

Every six or nine months I’d sit down and do a formal critique of my work; I’d find comparable imagery from the pros and serious amateurs that I follow and judge myself against and I’d sit and look at my images and ask myself why anyone would buy my image instead of the other one? For a long time, my answer to myself was “I woudn’t” and then I’d set myself goals for the next round and go back to work.

It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve come to feel that my work is “up to snuff”, that I could not only take a quality image, I understood the techniques and mechanics well enough to guarantee quality images and do so reliably; this has been one of the reasons I’ve done the road trips, to put me out of my comfort zones and comfortable areas, and to create a plan for taking images and then following or adapting the plan, rather than going and praying for interesting stuff to happen. I think that’s worked out well overall; even my recent yosemite trip where I ended up seriously dehydrated (grump. oops) I ended up with some decent shots — and a lesson in being more careful for next time.

So I finally decided I was at that point where I could consider beginning that path that QT Luong talks about. So I sat down and mapped out what that meant and how I would start the process — and I decided that I really liked being an amateur.

Here’s the thing; “turning pro” doesn’t mean you stop working for a living and pick up a camera (and magically, your rent gets paid and stuff). In fact, turning pro implies spending a lot of time and energy on sales and marketing, and in a lot of cases, doing even less photography to make room for it. It’s not like I was going to give up my “day job” and hope I’d be making enough money to cover before the savings ran out. So how do you squeeze in building a photography business?

Most likely, by sucking time out of your photography.

I decided I just didn’t need to do that. In the meantime, I’ve fallen back in love with working in high tech and doing what I do, so that initial motivation is muted. And honestly, I can live without the added complexity of trying to stuff something like that into my life right now.

It can wait. Photographs don’t rot in the field, and nothing bad will happen because i choose to NOT try to turn a hobby into a business. I can always change my mind and try it later (or not). If opportunities to sell an image arise, I can do it. but I don’t have to put the time into running a business to take advantage of occasional sales (or get nervous if they don’t happen).

So here’s my advice to others thinking about this; photography, especially nature photography, is a very tough, competitive business. Doing it professionally is a lot of work — work running a business, not holding a camera. It’s not something you’ll succeed at taking images once in a while and putting a website out with a big “buy my prints” sign on it. So ask yourself — take a long, slow walk somewhere and think about this long and hard — whether you really want to walk that path. the reality of being a professional photographer is a lot different than the fantasy I hear from most people who dream of giving up the day job to take pictures. You don’t give up the day job to take pictures — you give up the day job to SELL pictures; you need to have pictures to sell, but you don’t make the money taking them. To some degree, that’s something you squeeze in around the selling.

In my case? It doesn’t make sense. I’m happy taking pictures and sharing them and pissing off photographers who think my sharing images under creative commons is wrong because it might cost them a sale (my answer is: if your images are good enough, they’ll sell. And what have you done for me to warrant me doing you favors?).

This is a personal decision for each of us. I’m happy to have put in the time to improve myself to be ready to go pro; I needed the focus and the goal as I worked through the things going on the last few years (my camera and my wife were the only things that kept me sane in 2008 when I was dealing with dad). But just because I did that, I feel no guilt at choosing to not take that “next logical step” and neither should you.

For me, what matters is the camera, not the sale. I’m fortunate that I don’t have to depend on income from my camera, and I’m happy to have decided to leave it that way and not complicate my life by trying to go pro. And before you take that step down the path, I encourage you to think about it, and think about whether that’s really the right path for you, right now….

Or maybe you should pick up the camera and to shoot something…

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 28, 2011

Notes from the Commish: The curious case of Chris Osgood and the Hall of Fame.

barfy.jpg

Welcome to the latest ruling in “Notes from the Commish” where I as the Commish of the NHL (in my universe) and my Vice President of Disclipine Barfy will pontificate upon the state of the game and what I think needs to be changed. The fact is, NHL hockey is in pretty damn good shape overall, not that you’d believe that reading some of the pundits out there.  But the reality is, a business the size of the NHL can never be perfect, and there are always things that can be improved, and there will always be things that need to be fixed. And I’m the guy to fix it.  (or replace this with something witty and snarky)

The Accidental Hall of Famer | American McCarver. Your Sports Blog.:

But jot down a list of the best goalies in hockey from when Osgood entered the league in 1993 to when he retired this past Tuesday, and I bet it will take you some time before you remember to put Chris Osgood’s name on the list.

Chris Osgood has finally retired, after 400 wins, 2 Stanley Cup rings, and 17 seasons.

This, of course, opens season on the whole “should Chris Osgood be in the Hall of Fame?” argument. For the record, I don’t think Osgood will be inducted. I do think he deserves to be.

What I think is, of course, irrelevant.

What amuses me is listening to the fans rationalize their decision. “Yeah, he won 400 games, but HE PLAYED FOR THE RED WINGS!” “Yeah, he has two rings, but HE PLAYED FOR THE RED WINGS!”

The reality is, fans (and when I use the word fans, I am including all professional hockey writers that speculate on, but odn’t vote for, the Hall of Fame. Just to piss them off a bit. But the reality is, I swear most fans put more thought into their Hall of Fame blog posts than most sportswriters do. But I digress.) wait, where was I? damn digressions…..

Oh, yeah. fans (and hockey writers) make up their minds first, and then go off looking for facts that justify their opinion, and wrap those facts around their opinion like a february snow fort. And they look for reasons to denigrate any fact that disproves their opinion that they can’t ignore (like Stanley Cup rings. Ever see one? stands out in a dark room; can’t miss it).

The reality is that “hall of fame member” isn’t an objective decision, it’s a gut call. Most people seem to have decided that Osgood isn’t a Hall of Famer. The way that rationalize away his career numbers is that HE PLAYED FOR THE RED WINGS, and that the Wings were so good, they would have won those Cups with anyone in goal, so he really shouldn’t get more than partial credit for his career. Even though, well, he was their goalie. I boggle at someone using this rationalizing to say that maybe Yzerman isn’t as good as people say he is because he played on such a good team anyone could have played center…

It’s a silly justification, but with some core of truth. I dare you to look me straight in the face and say “The Wings would have won both of those cups with Bob Essensa in goal” and not start laughing. Or Andre Racicot. Or Jamie Storr. or Dan Ryder. I can keep moving down the list until we find a goalie we agree would have blown it for them, if you want, but I think you get the point.

Or go the other direction. Do you think the Wings would have won more Cups if they had Martin Brodeur in goal those years? Well, honestly, yes, I do. So let’s ignore that. No, let’s not. The league has seen a few hundred goalies come and go in the time Brodeur has been playing in the NHL, and it’s safe to say that it’s hard to think of a dozen qualified to carry his bags on a roadtrip. In my book, Martin Brodeur wouldn’t have to retire to be inducted, so it’s no real shame to not be that good. It’s not like we can only pick one goalie….

Osgood to me stands right on the line that defines ‘yes” or “no” to induction. I remember being in the stands for the playoffs here the Sharks surprised everyone (including themselves) by eliminating the Wings. A very young Chris Osgood was in goal, and at the time, both Laurie and I felt that Bowman mishandled the kid and we felt he was broken.

(another digression: sorry, chris, I never get tired of this goal. But I’m sure you are

)

But he pulled his game together. He didn’t break (hello, Jim Carey) he got tough. He reshaped his game, he found ways to win. As the game changed he reinvented his game. He adopted. He looked at the new generation of blockers and realized he wouldn’t stick in the game unless he changed his style, so he went off and learned how to block goals like J.S Guigere instead of stopping goals. He found ways to win, he found ways to stay in the game.

He stayed in the game for 17 seasons, and that’s why he’s a Hall of Famer in my hall. Lots of people put him down or discredit his accomplishments because he did this for the Wings, but haven’t really watched him play (they don’t need to. they already know how to decide!). I’ve followed his career since the Sharks beat him, and watched a lot of his games. Watched him kick the Sharks butt on a number of occasions, too.

The fact is, he’s not a Brodeur-class goalie, but when you’re talkinga bout someone who’s one of the ten best that ever played the position, few are — and few in the Hall of Fame stand up to Brodeur, for that matter. But Osgood is a very good goalie who played for a very good team; he was a big part of why they were very good.

But the reason he’s in the Hall of Fame for me isn’t because he has 2 rings, or 400 wins, or 17 seasons. it’s because the core of his success is that he knew how to find a way to win — and that ability to find a way is why he ended up with 400 wins and 2 rings and 17 seasons — and you can talk all you want about other goalies that the Wings could have won cups in front of, but none of those goalies would have lasted 17 seasons or come close to 400 wins, Wings or no Wings.

He’s a winner. He’s a survivor. He’s a player with the ability to maximize his talent and opportunity. In that way, he’s a lot like Chris Chelios, also not the most exceptionally talented defenseman in the universe, but one that committed to finding a way.

Unfortunately, that argument won’t sway those who vote for induction. Maybe he’ll follow the path of Dino Cicarelli and get in later. My gut tells me not. Which is too bad. He’s a better goalie than people who haven’t watched him much give him credit for — and while the stats don’t tell the whole story, they tell a story that ultimately is hard to ignore.

Even though I expect the Hall will.

(As an aside: American McCarver is a new sports blog that’s recently arrived on the scene.  It includes a bunch of interesting writers including John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Jason Snell of MacWorld. It is not afraid to cop a bit of attitude (I mean, seriously: Gruber is writing for it) and it is worth your time.)

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 27, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 26, 2011

Google+ — lots of win, not perfect

I have been experimenting with (and when I say that, I mean “avoiding work with”) Google+ the last couple of weeks, and I have to admit, I did not expect to be impressed, but I am.

The engagement factor is very high, and the friction issue is minimal. It’s very easy to put content into it and point it at your social group — or a subset of that social group — via circles, which are sort of like Facebook lists, but not broken. That’s because facebook lists were grafted onto facebook and fairly awkward to use, while circles were the core element Google+ was designed around, and so everything uses them almost seamlessly and circles make organically slicing and dicing your social graph easy and (almost) painless.

As a result, I’ve found I’m spending a lot more of the time I budget for wading into the social data streams on Google+; this means that I’m spending less time on other services, and the big loser so far is Facebook, where between closing off my time on Zynga games and Google+ means I’ve cut my time on facebook by about 85%. My primary use of facebook today seems to be interacting with and talking to people who are on facebook but not on Google+. Pretty much any situation where someone is on Google+ I’ve shifted my interaction with them there.

The system is pretty good for a 1.0, but not perfect. If find the lack of any way to share items from Google Reader ont Google+ curious (but trust me, I know how in a company the size of Google this happens, and I expect it’s in the plans).

More troublesome is the kerfluffle going on over pseudonyms. it’s hard to spend any time on the system without running into one of the many threads going on about this. For those just getting started, check out this thread for some background; it also shows one of the strengths of Google+’s messaging in its ability for a thread to both get into a meaty, intense discussion without spiraling out of control, and be able to survive ratholes and side points successful. Those are both things many services fail at miserably, and it’s clear some thought has gone into figuring this problem out.

I think Google is well-intentioned but didn’t properly think this one through. Given that it seems some pseudonyms are okay (look at, for instance, 50 cent), google has set up a system I feel can’t be properly policed and is open to use as a spite attack vehicle (spite attack: I piss you off, you report me and try to get my account shut down), and given celebrities seem to be able to use their ‘stage names’ okay, have created a perception of a double standard where you are being required to use your real name, unless you have money and fame.

I made the following comment in the thread above, and it sums up my views on why this policing is a bad idea:

Okay, pop quiz. pick the real and fake names in this list:

1) Barnabus Arnasungaaq
2) Kanimozhi Karunanidhi
3) James Tiptree, Jr.
4) Parasayip Ole Koyati

5) Dean Wesley Smith
6) Chuq Von Rospach
You can look all of these up in google, if you want (I did). Stop and think about it for a second.

1) inuit soapstone sculptor
2) indian politician involved in a sex tape scandal
3) famous pseudonym of a science fiction author (or choose John LeCarre Jr, if you prefer)
4) Person of the Masai tribe in Africa
5) real name of an author who publishes under many pseudonyms
6) are you sure?

My point? first, let’s get past thinking everyone here is an American, using an American name, and that we really have any practical ability to look at a name and determine real or not. When you start looking at a global culture of the scale of the internet and G+, it’s all over.

So policing this on a scale the size of G+ is practically impossible except on the “report/challenge” system. And that means the most likely result of a policy like this is that it’ll become a tool of the griefers. There’s no way Google or anyone can police naming on the scale of a service like this, period, except on a case by case situation involving abuse. So they shouldn’t try.

And my other point is that this is policing the wrong thing. Police bad behavior, not names. Some subset of naming is an aspect of bad or abusive behavior and should be dealt with, but deal with it as behavior. Trying to put naming restrictions in place is well-intentioned but won’t scale and will open the system to abuse by those with axes to grind. Focus on what matters, which isn’t the name, but how whatever is behind that name acts.

By the way, there are still real people in the universe named Adolf Hitler. If one of them joins G+, how would you police that? Because pretty much everyone in the universe will presume it to be a fake name, right? What if this person wants to avoid the issues involved with that name so chooses to use a pseudonym? you going to force them into a situation that opens them to abuse?

And a second big issue: where does “nickname” end, and “pseudonym” start? And how would you write a set of objective rules you could police as administrators?

What is my name, anyway? Is it my real name? Is it my nickname? Or is it a pseudonym? and why?

From reading the various threads on this, it seems clear Google is grappling with this and trying to figure it out; I expect they will. I think this is a case of naivete towards the complexity and implications of the policy, not anything “evil”, and as this has come to light as Google+ rolled out, they seem to be trying to figure out what the right balance is and how to implement it. I’ll cut them some slack while they try.

An even bigger problem for me, though, is harder to ignore: users have found when they get shut down on Google+ that it impacts their entire Google universe. For some folks, that’s devastating. The tight integration of “everything google” is nice, until it bites you; when it bites, it can bite hard. I’m frankly very uncomfortable with the idea of having my gmail account locked or deleted because someone picks a fight with me on Google+; enough so I considered setting up a second gmail account JUST for Google+ usage. Instead, I’m considering shifing my public email presence back to my me.com email address, so that if something bad happens, I’m not completely screwed over here. That’s a challenge as all of these systems integrate more tightly, and something we all need to be aware of. I’ve been careful about not having too many things depend too heavily on Google (no domain registry, no running my business via google docs or google apps, etc) just to minimize the damage this might cause, but now Google+ and Gmail linked is a bit too close for comfort.

This is more serious because Google can (and has; I hear of a few cases of this a year) shut everything down on you without warning, and their appeal process is, well, weak. you can’t pick up a phone and fix things, and they don’t make it easy to get things fixed; not something you are happy about if you’re on the wrong end of it and key business or personal things are locked away from you.

My recommendations for Google to improve all of this are:

  • Commit to service specific lockouts. If someone gets blocked out of google+, then lock them out of Google+, not everything. Ditto if their email gets hacked and someone uses their gmail account to send spam, it shouldn’t cause them to lose their google docs or any of their other services. Free or not, people are building businesses and lives around these products, and depend on them, and it’s good customer support to treat them fairly and give them a way  to reconnect, appeal and pull their content out of their accounts even if those accounts are closed down.
  • Improve your account lockout/closure appeal process. nothing should ever be shut down without warnings; google needs to improve and make more visible the ways to connect in and explain/appeal these decisions. (note for the record, google’s  no worse than most online social sites out there, everything sucks at the mediation/appeal process; it ain’t just Google, but Google can take a leadership role here in defining best practices for social sites if it chooses – and make it a competitive advantage of its services).
  • Resolve the naming issue; as I note above, I think the naming issue is a red herring. Police abuse, not names; if nobody has a problem with the actions and content — don’t worry about it. I think any other path will lead to continuing conflict with the user base, and that’s not good for the service or its users.
  • and please, hurry up and implement nested circles and “mute this person”.
  • oh, and posting links/notes from google reader onto my public stream.

but overall, I think it’s a great launch. If things continue, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I dump my facebook account down the road. And I’m already posting fewer things onto twitter, and posting them onto google+ instead.

Those are the two services i think are at biggest risk at losing people’s time and interest from Google+, plus all of the smaller specialty sites (like Quora) can’t be happy with a new elephant in the room drawing attention. The biggest risk for Google+ is the naming issue; if they don’t resolve it in a reasonable manner fairly soon, I think there’s a risk it’ll turn into one of those running firefights you see on some services, with the controversy being continually replayed well out of proportion to it’s real impact, but having a high public visibility and impacting the reputation of the services overall.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, and Google+ grows into its potential. It looks to me like it can be a game changer. I didn’t expect Google could do that.

 

 

 

 

 

In any event, if you use Google+, you can find me here. Feel free to wander by and say hi.

Today’s Shared Links for July 25, 2011

Five years ago today…

Apologies in advance. this is long, this is personal, and this is probably going to annoy some of you. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t like long and personal on someone’s personal blog, go and read the lolcats site for a while, Thanks.

When it Changed…..

Five years ago today I sent out the email to my team announcing I was leaving Apple after 17 and a half years. I posted a copy of it here. I left slowly, working with my bosses to make the transition smooth, so it was two months before I actually handed in my badge and became a free agent.

It was an interesting time in my life. At that time, I said this:

So I’ve made the tough decision that it’s time to make a clean break of it, take a little time off, and then find a new position where I can make a fresh start in a situation where the stress levels are easier for me to cope with.

I’m not really happy with this decision; the word I’d use for my feeling is that I’m comfortable that it’s the right one. I’m not leaving for a new position; I’ve just started exploring what I might want to do, and what might make sense.

With the passing of time and the sharp focus of hindsight, I have to say it was definitely the right decision; in all honesty, I was tired of Apple, and Apple was tired of me, and we both needed to make the break. You can see from Apple’s stock price since then just how badly they missed me.

Aapl5year

Two events precipitated this decision, although it was honestly a long time coming. The first one was when a really neat lady I liked and respected asked me an unfortunate question when I was having a bad day, and I went off on her. It was mean — it was abusive — she didn’t deserve any of it, and 30 seconds after I did it, i was mortally embarrassed at what I’d done. It was also something that you can’t undo with apologies, although i definitely tried. It was at that moment that I realized if I was that stressed out that I was losing it that badly, I had to make changes before I did something seriously dangerous or the stress killed me. (to her great credit, she eventually stopped being freaked at the thought of being in a room with me, but it is one of those moments in my life I will never forgive myself for).

Then a few weeks later, I was in a planning meetings when the alarms went off because the system was down. It turned out the database machine threw a drive, the primary data drive. On the primary master server, which was two weeks from being made a fully redundant, multi-machine server with automatic failover. We were that close from avoiding this disaster — and that drive was basically the one piece of the system that wasn’t redundant or easily replaced on failure; of course, it was the piece that fried. We knew about the risk, we were working to resolve it, and we missed it by THAT much.

It took us 13 hours to bring the system back live, swapping in one of the redundant slaves in the mysql pod and turning it into a master. There was no data loss (thank god), but still, that was one of the most stress-filled, panic-inducing times I’ve had in my life. At the end, I wandered into my director’s office, slumped to the floor, looked at him, and told him I couldn’t do that again. I was done. He sent me home, told me we’d talk later, and I went home and slept for 15 hours.

We agreed on two months as an offramp, plenty of time to bring up the new team and train them. That gave me, I thought, time to find a new project and home at Apple; in reality, I had no clue what I wanted to do — only that it was time to stop doing what I was doing — and didn’t try very hard. So I handed in my badge, got in the car, and drove off the face of the earth for a couple of weeks, my first “no phone no modem” vacation in years.

That project started out as a skunkworks with myself and one other programmer to see if it made sense to bring Apple’s marketing email inhouse. It turned into a behemoth that when I left was conservatively driving $50m a year in revenue and we were showing at least $10m a year in cost reductions within the company with a team of about seven. It was recognized as having the best ROI of any project in Apple IT — ever. We extended it for use globally, localized to something like 20 languages. It was the first Apple IT project to make significant use of open source technologies and be hosted 100% on xserves, so we blazed a few trails I’m rather proud of. it was (and still is) one hell of a hack; the team that took it over has done an awesome job and done some nice things to it I wish I’d thought of. If there’s one thing I’m really proud of, it’s that the transition went off about as smoothly as you could hope for, which is what I wanted. The whole open source thing was a fascinating experiment in itself (by design), and both a blessing and a curse, and deserves some discussion on its own; maybe later I will get to it.

What I didn’t know then, wouldn’t know for another six months, was that 95% of the problem I was having was sleep apnea. I’ve talked about that before, so I won’t go into detail, but in the 18 months before I left Apple I gained 90 pounds; in the 5 years since I’ve gained 15, ten of that in the last 9 months while we’ve been driving to get the TouchPad launched (and now I’m working to change that and pull that back). What I do know is when I got the apnea treated, my blood pressure dropped more than 25 points and a whole lot of problems in my life went away.

The last five years have been an interesting journey, in both the literal and chinese way. The executive summary of the last five years:

  • Sleep Apnea — once I was diagnosed and treated, my blood pressure dropped over 20 points. It’d progressed enough I was falling asleep in meetings. But the first night I put on the CPAP, my life changed radically, and I’ve never looked back. But I was very close to falling asleep at the wheel, or snoring myself into a stroke.
  • When I left Strongmail, it was with the intent of launching a site called Dare2Thrive, and try to break out onto my own. A secondary deal I thought I had with a friend blew up in my face, costing me a chunk of change, and then it became clear Dare2Thrive was dead on arrival (I really need to talk about that some day), so I took it out behind the barn and shot it. This, needless to say, did wonders both to my self-image and my pocketbook, but not as badly as if I’d launched the thing. I did, however, self-destruct in interviews for weeks, costing me a couple of really good jobs and probably guaranteeing I’d never work for Yahoo without a name change (not that, as it’s worked out, that this is a bad thing).
  • I got my exercise program up to about 1 1/2 miles three times a week, which was making nice progress on my weight, and then stepped in a gopher hole, tearing the meniscus in my right (good) knee. Which didn’t heal, which is how we discovered the arthritis in both knees. Neither of which is operable, until we decide it’s time for replacements. Fortunately, 500mg of Relafin twice a day keeps them mostly functional and it hasn’t seemed to progress much. But that indirectly caused a serious case of tendonits in one ankle, which took nine months to get rid of. That made life interesting (and exercise impossible) for most of 2008.
  • But 2008 was the year my dad got sick and died; it was a year of tests and hospitals and funerals and laywers, as I spent a big chunk of time in SoCal (or in transit: 12,000 miles on the subaru, just driving up and down the state) and helping mom get settled and things under control with the estate and her life. When I surfaced, it was October, and honestly, I remember almost none of it.
  • Somewhere along the way — my best guess is around March — I went diabetic, but we didn’t diagnose it until 2009 when the simptoms got significant enough (significant enough: blood sugar > 400, tryglicerides > 600, blood pressure way up…). Fortunately, it all responded well to treatment and is well controlled and stable without a lot of fuss.
  • And once I got that under control, I went and fired up the exercise program again — and fell down and went boom, going back on the shelf for about two months before I could even think of doing any significant exercise again (not that I wanted to; given recent history, it’s suprisingly hard to get up much enthusiasm to try again, although I’ve been starting slow and trying to build carefully…)

I mention all this not to whine or elicit sympathy, but to bring forward the thought. Sometimes life is good, sometimes it throws you challenges. It was Nietzsche who said that which does not kill us makes us stronger. It was in a hotel room on the road, with dad in the hospital and it increasingly seeming like he’d never get out, my ankle wrapped in ice so I’d have a chance of walking the next day (because i had no choice), Laurie hundreds of miles away, feeling very much alone and tired of it all.

And I had a moment that can only be described as howling at the moon. I found myself yelling at nobody in particular that if life would just leave me alone for a while, I could get this all under control and be happy again. That was the moment I realized that life didn’t owe me easy, that it was up to me to make it easy. And that I didn’t like who I was, and until I fixed that, nothing was going to change.  I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I knew it was important to find out. And that’s been the journey since.

Five years ago I was in dream gig with a great team, awesome bosses for a company that was changing the world — and I was absolutely miserable (and really had no idea why).

Today? Much different gig — but a great group of people I enjoy being around even more than my team at Apple, which is something I never thought I’d find. Great challenges, lots of fun, lots of work to do. It’s hard to believe five years have passed. I feel like I’m a much different person than I was.

And I’m happy. With what I do, with who I am.

And isn’t that what really matters?

Whenever I end up talking about Apple with folks, there is one question that always pops up, so I figure since I brought it up myself, I might as well answer it. That question  is “Would you go back?”

The answer is yes, with some qualifications. Apple is doing many good and interesting things, and in many ways, is changing the world (mostly for the better); there are lots of challenges there to take on in the right situation. but the implied question within that question is whether I miss Apple or feel some need to go back, and that answer is definitely no. I left at a time when it was the right thing to do, had a great run there, regret almost nothing, and enjoy what I’m doing now. I’ll admit that I’ve looked into a couple of positions there over time, but in each case, it was a position targeted at an internal candidate.

If the right situation came up, I’d do it. A lot of where my interest today is around photography imaging and how technology and people (i.e. this “social” stuff) come together. Apple still seems to me too afraid of losing control of its message to embrace social — just look at Ping (sorry, really qualified and talented folks who built that). That’s a social media for companies who are afraid to be social, and that’s just not that interesting to me, and not close to what I was encouraging people to consider even before I left.

But if you’re smart, you never say never.

I’m not sure what the five years have in store. Good times for sure, challenges just as surely. All I know is that I’m looking forward to seeing what they are…

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 24, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 23, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 18, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 17, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 15, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 12, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 11, 2011

What I gave myself for my birthday…

Since my birthday just passed (and I was around to celebrate it!), I thought I’d show what I gave myself for my birthday this year

110710 155142 chuq flickr

It is a hole in the ground. Or more correctly, a trench, I guess. about 6″ deep, about 4″ wide.

It will soon be a gravel and paver path between the main patio and the hot tub.

It’s a project I’ve wanted to do since about 2006; where circumstances and opportunity kept kicking me in the knees (sometimes literally) and it simply never happened. Coming into this spring, I decided it was time to start getting things done around here again, and three days of digging, 12 wheelbarrows of dirt relocated and some wonderfully sore and neglected muscles later, it’s ready for some weed cloth and some gravel.

The real gift here, other than being tired of having this project laughing behind my back at me, is that it was a few days of some serious, no compromise, physical activity, and other than confirming just what lousy shape I’m in, all of the body parts I’ve been fighting with the last couple of years handled it just fine; no knee pain at all, which is awesome. With the TouchPad launched, I should be able to shift some time back to a more regular fitness routine, which is good, because for the last six months or so, every attempt to cut calories to get some weight off has been stymied by my metabolism ramping down to match; it’s time to unchain from the desk and get moving again.

I’ve done almost no birding this spring, and basically haven’t touched the camera more than twice since the Yosemite trip (which reminded me the biggest hindrance between the photographer I am right now and the one I want to be is my weight and physical shape limiting what I can do). I’ve been spending time on the weekends whacking away at the neglect in the gardens, and while there’s still a lot to do, it’s finally starting to round into shape and look like someone cares again. 13 recycling bins of yard waste later, I’m at the point where I can start mulching and finishing the hardscaping I want done, and then get to planting… by the end of the summer, I might actually have a garden that won’t make me wince…..

It’s been an interesting few years, with the apnea and diabetes, blowing up the knee and dealing with the arthritis and then the tendonitis, losing dad (and losing 2008 to dealing with all of that), and then last year, having that fall and spending three months back on the bench while stuff healed. It was, in fact, not having the energy to weed the yard that made me realize I needed to get checked, and that’s what led to finding and treating the diabetes. So it’s really nice to be able to work up a really enthusiastic sweat without babying any body part — if only for the confidence it brings that it’s safe to get back on that horse and get out and get going again.

So what’s the best possible present?  A hole in the ground…..

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 10, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 9, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 8, 2011

The Dany Heatley Trade

No, I did not see the Dany Heatley trade coming. I was at dinner with friends (at Tigelleria, in fact, with a nice Italian Barolo and a charcuterie plate) when my phone bleeped, and it was a pair of text messages telling me about the trade.

Am I surprised at the trade? Yes, but no. Setoguchi was clearly my disappointing player, but Heatley was a guy that was generally criticized for his play, and while it came out he was playing hurt — many including myself still seemed to feel there was a piece of him missing from the equation. My gut told me Seto was gone, but it also told me if there was another player likely to move, it would be Heatley. I wasn’t sure the contract was moveable, and I didn’t think Wilson would move BOTH. But Wilson is never shy and shaking it up when he thinks it’s warranted, or being timid at doing so.

Heatley reminds me in a way of Todd Elik from the Sharks past, another player that seemed to move to a number of teams around the league in his career, adn consistently seemed to have strong years with a new team followed by declining numbers and criticism. It just seems some players need the “got to prove them wrong” edge, and as they settle into a team and get comfortable, lose it and fade a bit, even though they don’t recognize that as happening. And for those players, it just looks like changing teams every 2-4 years may be the best thing for their careers and production.

Look at Heatley’s past, and that seems to have happened. Look at his Sharks numbers, and it seems to roughly fit that mold, too. if I can see this trend, one can only assume Doug Wilson does, too. Havlat, coming to the Sharks in return, is the same age and has a self-admitted motivation problem playing for a team that isn’t making the playoffs; that’s what drives him, and so playing on a rebuilding team like the Wild was tough for him.

So this is a place where two teams trade their “problems” for each other, solve issues with the team (the Wild were like 26th in scoring, with setoguchi gone, the sharks top six forwards were pretty slow) and this seems like a trade that honestly benefits both players as well. hard to see a loser here, and I like havlat as a fit with the Sharks.

I was a strong critic of the Heatley deal before it happened. Heatley convinced me otherwise after he got here, and I have zero criticism of him and his time in San Jose. And yet, I’m not surprised he’s moving again, and I don’t think this’ll be his final stop in the NHL. Some players just seem to have a career like that. I wihs him well, except when the Sharks are in town.

Seto and Heatley in Minnesota should definitely improve their scoring. I’m guessing they’re not a playoff team, but they’re definitely better. and Burns and Havlat here? Burns is a nice addition, and Havlat, if not an improvement, at least leaves the forwards at par with what we had before.

So no complaints here.

Today’s Shared Links for July 7, 2011

How to become a better informed, more knowledgable hockey fan in one easy step.

Here’s how to become a more better informed, more knowledgeable hockey fan in one easy step:

Outcry over Spending falling on buffalo’s deaf ears

here’s the step: stop reading Ken Campbell, Bruce Garrioch and Steve Simmons. You stopping the wasting of your valuable time with their writing will stop confusing your brain with their overtly negative “everything about the hockey universe sucks because that drives page views” writing, and you’ll get more thoughtful, more balanced and intelligent hockey writing into your head simply by subtracting theirs from your consciousness.

Try it. You’ll thank me later. These guys are only there to find reasons to rip hockey, the NHL, and especially Bettman, adn that serves no useful or constructive purpose other than them convincing folks to read their stuff. Which is mostly crap and not worth the electrons it takes to stuff it into your monitor’s window.

 

 

 

the ever changing social landscape

I hadn’t planned on this nor intended to make changes, but the social landscape online keeps changing, and so I’ve been thinking through whether to make changes in my personal landscape and if so, what that means.

The big change? Google’s getting serious about the social area of the net, and they’ve started to roll out Google+. It’s bones look a lot like facebook, but it’s not a direct rip-off by any means. It’s tight integration with other Google properties like Gmail means that once you get access (it’s still in limited roll out) the friction point of dealing with it is minimal; that makes it a serious competitor to any service who’s functionality it overlaps.

And that includes not only Facebook, but through Picasa (being rebranded as Google photos) Flickr and the filesharing photo sites like Instagram. It’s going to be interesting to see how this all falls out.

Will it take on (or take out) facebook? I have no clue. It’s still incomplete, it’s still fairly empty with a lot of people outside wanting to get in, and so there’s a lot left to happen before we can decide if it succeeds or not — but it being to ubiquitous within google properties, it has advantages other sites don’t have. And honestly, after using it for a few days and getting a feel for how it operates, I’m moderately impressed, and I didn’t expect to be. It’s pretty well done, unlike Buzz and Google Wave (remember those?).

Still, there are lots of ways it could become the nets Quora, which, as Yogi Berra once said, is so popular nobody goes there any more. I was an early user of Quora and found it interesting, as it got “discovered”, it mostly became forgettable and noisy, and I’ve pretty much stopped using it beyond checking to see if Quora’s figure out how to solve these problems (answer: no).

One of the first reactions to Google+ was from Facebook, which blocked users who tried to grab their address book data out of Facebook to use it at Google. This is nothing new, Facebook has long held that data belongs not to the user, but to Facebook, but it just reinforces the reality that Facebook wants all sites to set up things so they share into Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t see a need to share back — and I find that annoying (as do many other users, like OM). Months back I decided not to create original content on Facebook for just this reason, but now, with Google+ as an alternative, this “roach motel” data model really seems like an increasingly unacceptable concept in this social universe that’s evolving on the net. This “as long as we’re in the center and in charge” is a problem, so I’m taking another step away from Facebook just to distance myself from this — I’ll continue to let my other content sources funnel into Facebook and interacting with the content of other users there, but where there are options (whether it’s Google+ or going back to the original source of data funneled in there by others) I will go to those options and interact there. and I (obviously) encourage others to do the same.

Facebook doesn’t want to play fair with the other sites out there, and now that there are some growing options, I think we should consider using them — as long as those sites DO play fair with their peers, and Google+, so far, seems to be. But it’s a good example of why you don’t want to be too dependent on services you ultimately don’t control. Especially sites that have a reputation for blocking stuff they decide they don’t like, sometimes in what seems to be arbitrary or punitive ways. (google, fwiw, is no saint here, either, and both have poor support systems for appeal and reconsideration. But that seems part for the course for social sites, sad to say — so diversify and control what you can, and don’t depend on these sites as your primary point of contact).

I’ve also, as I said, been experimenting with 500px. I’ve been increasingly — uninterested — in flickr, mostly because Yahoo seems just as uninterested. Taking a look at how Google is handing images within Google+ (using Picasa technology) and how well those images are presented and shared, it really shows how little Yahoo has innovated Flickr over the years; then when photo module of Google+ out-flickr’s Flickr, Yahoo has a real problem. And 500PX blows them all away with their beautiful design and presentation.

So I’m trying to decide if I want to stop contributing to Flickr. Most of the communities I’ve been in are at best stagnant or hibernating. There’s very little there there, unless you want to get in the race to show up on the interestingness pages (which I don’t). It’s even unclear to me if anyone cares if you’re on those pages any more.

I don’t plan on removing any content from flickr, but I may stop contributing, instead using (maybe) G+ for my “casual portfolio”. I’m thinking I might set up 500px to do my Saturday and Sunday photo posts, and Smugmug for me “serious” portfolio. Still thinking it through, but that seems like it’ll be appropriate uses for all of those services, at least once google+ fully rolls out. I don’t see flickr having a role in my social space long term unless something radical changes there soon.

And like I did last year, I’d originally planned on a blog redo for my birthday this eyar, but with everything going on at work, had no cycles. But I’m thinking of doing that when I get a chance. Duncan Davidson recently redid his blog, and I love how he built the design, especially his wonderful presentation of his photos, and I’m thinking seriously of — borrowing — from it heavily. With credit, of course.

There’s still an amazing amount of innovation going on in the online world, especially the social spaces; if you don’t innovate and adapt and adopt, you’re falling behind (as flickr has found, and they’re going to have trouble catching up again, IMHO). And if you don’t learn to share and cooperate — that’s another problem (I’m looking at you, Facebook). I have enough history and content on Flickr I can’t just leave, but I can let it hibernate. I’ve been smart enough not to over-commit on Facebook, so I don’t have a lot of digging out to pull free of that site to get to a degree I’m comfortable with. And while I think we have a lot to see come out of Google+ — unlike Buzz or Wave, I think it’s something worth wathcing, exploring and encouraging. So I will.

 

Wednesdays in Review: Spectacular Yosemite

Spectacular yosemite

So this week was my birthday, I’m now officially a year older than I was a year ago. More importantly, I officially declned to fo find out what exists on the “other side” for one more year, a task I hope to continue for a number of years.

Birthdays tend to be problematic. I get asked what I want, and I have no idea. This year, I simply pointed at my Amazon wish list and said does this help?

It did, and Laurie was nice enough to get me a copy of Spectacular Yosemite, text by Stuart Booth, photos by Quan-Tuan Luong.

It is a large, oversized hardcover with overf 150 images, many taken in medium or large format, and well displayed using full page or double-page layouts. In all honesty, the photography is spectacular. You can get a nice sample here on the PDN site.

I was blown away. My honest first opinion while browsing the book the first time was actually “why do I even bother picking up a camera?”, after a bit, I decided to turn it into a challenge. His work has a very distinct style, especially in his larger format works — but you can still see the influences of some of the other photographers that have worked in Yosemite. His use of dramatic lighting reminds me a lot of William Neill.

A lot of the imagery is done on the valley floor and from easily accessible locations, meaning that as a visitor or visiting photographer, you can find many of the places Luong shoots from and investigate your own visions of the park. He also, however, hauls his here into the backcountry and brings those parts of the park back for your enjoyment as well.

All in all, an an exceptionally well done book both both photographers and lovers of Yosemite. I’ve gone through it twice now, and am planning on going back and studying the images with some care, becasue I feel like there’s a lot I can learn from seeing how Luong is interpreting places I know I’ve photographed as well.

Don’t forget to check out Luong’s web site and blog. And since I mentioned him, you might also check out the work of William Neill.

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