I’ve barely been on-line the last few days, because we’ve been finishing up our move to Seattle and we also had our first house guests at the new place. (Patti and Charlie drove over from Spokane for the weekend.)
More later … internet connectivity is crude right now at the house, but we’ll be in a wireless wonderland within a couple of days.
I’ve changed the look of the blog, by installing and activating a different WordPress theme. It’s a pretty simple process: you just find a theme on one of the web sites that list WordPress themes, download it, de-compress it (with WinZip or PkZip), then upload the files to a new folder under wp-content/themes on your WordPress blog site. After that, the theme will show up in the site admin options and you can select it by just clicking on its name.
This theme, named Connections, was created by Patricia Muller. I replaced her photo with one I took myself, and other than that it’s exactly as she created it. I’ll probably replace the photo periodically … you know how I am.
And Verio is still down, so all the other photos on this site are temporarily missing. Sigh.
If you tried to get to mahugh.com on Monday, you probably noticed it was down.
I never gave much thought to where my site was physically located — it’s just hosted by Verio, that’s all I knew — but it turns out that it was hosted in a facility in Boca Raton, Florida. And when there was a power outage yesterday due to Hurricane Wilma, Verio’s backup power supplies “which had been tested four days earlier and found to be operational” failed to kick in. The whole saga is documented at www.verio.com/wilma.
Here’s a great look at how the Bush administration promotes its agenda. When you read the “editorial” piece in your local paper, you probably think that you’re reading somebody’s independent thoughts, right? I mean, even if you disagree, you’re at least assuming that you’re reading the actual opinion of somebody who is actually affiliated with the paper you’re reading, right?
Fool! (Me, too — I always assumed those things.)
Check out this story, which I found on Memeorandum.com, which I was checking out because Robert Scoble mentioned it in an interview with ActiveWin this week.
It appears that various newspapers around the country have run a piece prepared by the Bush administration that explains why it’s important to cut wages for hurricane reconstruction workers. And they’ve run it as an op-ed piece, with no named writer; some of the papers have even labeled it as “our view.”
How many times has this happened before? I’m reminded of the one-year anniversary of 9/11, when I was sitting in the Rex Hotel in Saigon (I refuse to call it Ho Chi Minh City, sorry) with my Mom and we were listening to Walter Cronkite decry the restrictions that the U.S. press had accepted in the name of fighting the war on terror and he said something like “I have a hard time picturing the journalists I used to work with accepting these kinds of limitations on free speech.” It’s getting worse, Walter: journalism and sales have merged, and it ain’t pretty.
The above-mentioned propaganda piece starts with “One of the smartest things President Bush did …”, so I’m thinking right there most people should smell a rat. As my brother Greg told me in 2000, “you don’t have to be smart to do that job (U.S. President).” (We’re an all-American family: four brothers, two love Bush, two hate him.)
Anyway, I’m so impressed with Memeorandum’s approach to organizing blog data that I’ve added a real-time summary of their latest articles to the home page of Mahugh.com.
Seward Park is on the southwest shore of Lake Washington, a couple miles from our home. It’s basically a wooded hill on a peninsula, with a 2.4-mile paved trail running along the shoreline around the base of the hill. The trail is very popular with runner, cyclists, and walkers; I ran there last night, and again early this morning.
There were lots of stars visible in the darkness this morning, so I knew it would be clear enough to get a good sunrise photo of Mount Rainier. I went home and picked up my camera gear, then came back and hung out with the ducks on the south side of the park until there was enough light to take a picture of the mountain. The telephoto lens makes it look like it’s right behind Renton, but it’s actually about 50 miles away. (Click here for a closer look.)
There are also some good views from the north side of the park, looking across Lake Washington to the I-90 floating bridge and the downtown Seattle skyline. Next time …
I’ve been thinking I need to get more organized around here, in anticipation of all the wonderful content that will accumulate on this blog soon. (Speaking of which — am I the only person who feels a little weird throwing content out onto a blog and not having it in my backup rotation? Is it me?)
Anyway … I’ve started tagging these posts by category, so that you can just look at a specific category if you want. No reason for my tree-hugging liberal friends to suffer through rants about technology, or for my asocial geek friends to read anything that might expand their minds. Just pick a category and get focused. I love that word.
Hmm, I just tried it and it doesn’t work. Oh yeah, I hacked up the “Sharepoint-Like” theme that I’ve been using on my WordPress blog. I liked the look of it, but it was written in Bulgarian, so I had to translate and edit a bunch of stuff in the PHP file that contains formatting information for the main page. So it looks like I might have overlooked a comment in Bulgarian that said something like “delete this and you’ll screw everything up!”
Oh, well, time to install a different theme. I’ll be away from a secure FTP connection the next two days, but by Monday I’ll get it fixed. More later …
I’ve always enjoyed John Dvorak’s column, ever since I started reading him in InfoWorld in the early 80’s. For the last 20 years, he has been a columnist for PC Magazine and also a very popular speaker and writer for many other publications.
This week, John’s column is about the pervasive but rarely acknowledged Mac bias in the business press. I knew that there were a lot of Mac bigots in the newspaper world, but I had no idea that writers for publications like Forbes and Fortune are overwhelmingly Mac-based. Given that the majority of their readers are Windows users, one has to wonder how this disconnect affects the quality of the advice and information that gets published on technology topics. Doesn’t one?
Check out the article on Reuters about American soldiers in Afghanistan burning Muslim men’s bodies and using the act as a propaganda piece. The funniest/saddest part is when Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says “It is the policy of the United States, as well as the Defense Department, to treat all remains consistent with the Geneva Convention and with the utmost respect.”
Yeah, everyone has noticed that the last few years, Bryan. And we’re also reassured to know that
“These allegations will be aggressively investigated and, if proven to be true, the individuals will be held appropriately accountable.” Until I saw those words, I was worried sick that somebody in the chain of command might be held accountable! But just as with Abu Ghraib, it sounds like a few low-level working stiffs in the military will take the heat instead. Go, Rummy, Go!
It’s been interesting to see the reaction of my friends and colleagues to the news that I’m moving to Seattle and going to work at Microsoft. A lot of people have opinions about Microsoft, because so many people have experience with their products. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone I know who has not used a Microsoft product, and most of the people I know use multiple Microsoft products every day. That gives people a sense of Microsoft’s products, but when they make the leap from that to feeling like they know Microsoft’s people or culture, that’s a bit of a stretch.
As a point of comparison, consider Ford and Toyota. Ford is one of the world’s most poorly performing large companies, a bureaucratic dinosaur that has thrashed around wildly in the modern technology-driven world and lost billions of dollars lately. Toyota, on the other hand, is a focused and well-run company that has found ways to thrive and prosper in the modern world.
You can see this difference if you work directly with the people in these companies — I’ve worked with a lot of Ford people, and there’s a consistent emphasis on processes and hierarchies and labels. I’ve never had an experience with a Ford person that left me feeling like they were particularly passionate or creative. Now, I’ve not worked with Toyota, but based on things I’ve read it sounds like they’re quite different from Ford; at the very least, Toyota has a much flatter org chart and a balance sheet that is a lot healthier and more impressive than Ford’s.
But can you see that difference in the products? I’d say not, in general. Ford makes many high-quality products, and so does Toyota. If I look closely at their specific products, I might develop a strong preference for one or the other. But even though I drive a Ford Ranger and am pleased with it, I wouldn’t want to work at a place like Ford! I’ve seen enough to know that for sure, and that has nothing to do with which products I use.
So to my friends who have beefs with specific Microsoft products, I’ve been saying “so do I, but I’m very excited to go work there.” I mean, I’ve been whining about things like the fact Internet Explorer still can’t print a simple table as well as other browsers for a long, long time. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft is a bad place to work. In fact, the more I read about Microsoft’s recent culture, the more I feel like it’s going to be a great place for me specifically. I like intense debate with smart passionate OPEN-MINDED people, and frankly that’s hard to find. I don’t know of any other company that is so committed to maintaining that kind of high-energy challenging culture, and I’m excited about getting a chance to work with so many smart successful people.
As two good examples, consider Robert Scoble’s blog and the Mini-Microsoft site. Can anyone give me an example of that kind of open, honest, intelligent PUBLIC debate going on at any other large profitable company? Even a small or unprofitable one? Seriously, send me a URL and I’ll post it here. But as far as I know, Microsoft stands alone in promoting this kind of thing. Top managers at Microsoft aren’t merely allowed to post their opinions on-line, they’re actively encouraged to do so, regardless of whether those opinions are the Redmond party line or not. Scoble praises Steve Jobs, for example, and Microsoft rewards him for his open honest approach by naming him CBO (Chief Blogging Officer).
Oops … apparently that’s an Urban Legend, the CBO title, which started with Robert’s entry in Wikipedia. Scoble is still in DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism), but it is true that he’s a consistent thorn in the side of Microsoft leadership, with their consent. For example, check out his direct questioning of Balmer’s leadership on the issue of gay rights.
Yes, Microsoft makes a lot of money. Does that make it an evil organization? Would it be a less evil organization if the people running it were less effective managers and therefore had to settle for less success, less market penetration, less influence, less creative freedom, less money at the end of the day? Perhaps some people think so, but not me. I’m not afraid of working with a bunch of people who are a lot smarter than me; in fact, I’m eager to jump into the fray and get started.
I have no illusion that Microsoft is any more “fair” or “balanced” than any other big organization. They have over 60,000 employees — name a personality type, and Microsoft probably has a thousand of them. But the core values of Microsoft, especially at the highest levels of the organization, feel right to me. And that has nothing to do with whether IE is a better browser than Firefox, or whether bundling functionality in Windows is “fair” to Sun and Netscape and Apple.
As a footnote on this rant, here’s my favorite Microsoft quote I’ve seen lately …
“At Microsoft, if you’re not running at 200 miles an hour with your hair on fire, you are not having fun and you are not contributing to the business. This company is a rare combination of deep technical intellect, uncanny business savvy, and strongly self-motivated individuals who perform equally well as individual contributors or as team members.”
- Rajiv Nair, Microsoft President, India
Man, “running at 200 miles an hour with your hair on fire” … if that’s not a perfect fit for me, I don’t know what is. Redmond, here I come.
Take a guess: where’s the biggest wi-fi cloud in the world? It’s not in Redmond OR Palo Alto — it’s in Umatilla County, Oregon. Most of the area covered is rural. Very rural, as in sagebrush-and-jackrabbits rural.
Fred Ziari is the entrepreneur who made this happen. He said that it was easy to do because of the lack of politics and backroom deals: there’s no big business in the area, and therefore none of the bigger players (phone companies, cable companies) had any interest in fighting over the market.
I learned about this in this morning’s Spokesman-Review, but after doing a few searches I found a little more info in a Wired artice. I drive through Umatilla county every year or two on the way to visit my Uncle Irv in Baker City, so I’m looking forward to trying it out firsthand. The thought of sitting in the middle of nowhere checking my email, not far from the old ruts of the Oregon Trail … beautiful.
Ziari’s company, EZwireless, has an interesting business model. They’ve rolled out this wi-fi coverage and provided it for free to individuals, while charging local governments and large businesses for value-added versions of the service. Could this model catch on? Might the boonies become more wireless-friendly than the big cities in some states? Stay tuned …
