I flew into San Antonio, Texas tonight for the NAESP conference (National Association of Elementary School Principals).
I happen to be staying in the Emily Morgan Hotel, and am fortunate enough to look out right over top of the Alamo. I took a stroll around at about 11ish local time and snapped a couple of night-time pix.
The church building at the Alamo site, seen from the side originally within the fort:
An oak tree I saw illuminated by dim spotlights:
An Alamo memorial. I took this with night-mode and held the camera as steady as I could, leaving the shutter open for about a second and a half:
A scene commemorating the Alamo. Again, night mode with a long shutter.
Davy Crockett’s name on the memorial …
I never read newspapers. Well, almost never.
But right now I’m on a flight to Dallas, Texas, on my way to a convention in San Antonio. And I happened to pick up the complimentary newspaper while boarding the flight.
It’s a great paper, by most measures – the Globe & Mail. One of Canada’s two national newspapers.
But it has a horoscope section, just like any tabloid rag. It’s been years since I’ve seen a horoscope. Today I decided to read it, just for fun. And it is a lot of fun. As long as you treat it for what it is: complete and utter nonsense.
Take the advice for Aries:
You feel confident in your abilities – you honestly believe there is nothing you cannot do. However, other aspects warn you would do well to remember that there is always someone who is bigger and better than you.
In other words, you believe can fly in directions other than straight down. But you need to remember that it’s very, very tricky.
Cancer gets the same ambivalent treatment:
You must get things moving today but you must also be cautious …
Sally Brompton, the genius who puts this particular bit of nonsense together, admits the obvious by continuing with “although that might sound contradictory it is simply a matter of getting the balance right.”
Taurus gets something a little different. Instead of the noncommittal it-might-rain-today-but-then-again-it-might-be-sunny nonsense, Taurus gets an ingenious twist: the self-fulfilling prophecy:
You may be thinking of give up on a plan or project that you once had such high hopes for but something will happen to day that makes you think again.
Something like the horoscope that you’re reading right now, perhaps?
Libra follows another well-worn path: completely uncontroversial and always-applicable advice …
You may be a nice guy by nature but every now and then you go right the other way and say or do something that is uncalled for an today’s cosmic alignment warns against annoying individuals you would do well to stay on good terms with.
You can probably count the number of people who don’t think that they’re pretty good guys on one hand, and the number of people who haven’t gone off half-cocked and said something they later regret on the other.
I really can’t believe people read this stuff. Even more, I can’t believe people write this stuff – and pretend that the planets and stars have anything at all to do with a person’s opportunities and choices in life.
I find it dishonest, manipulative, and disgusting in the extreme.
But extremely entertaining if read with a few buckets of salt.
How can someone this clueless get a job writing for tech magazines?
John Dvorak is talking about the Apple versus Apple lawsuit: the Beatles versus Apple computer. Here’s his solution:
In an effort to save the money, though, I would suggest that the company change its name for good. Offer a million dollars to the public-at-large in a competition to rename the company. That would do the job and get the publicity needed for it to be promotional. Why not?
Last time I checked, Apple’s brand was worth $8 billion and growing. Apple Computer, that is. Apple Corps is, of course, not on the list.
Astute observers of sparkplug9.com will have noticed that Zoomclouds, announced with such frisson merely a week ago, is toast.
Zoomclouds offers a very simple way to add tag clouds to blogs. Since, of course, no self-respecting hip web 2-ish blogger would be caught in a coffee-bar without a tag cloud, I had to have one too. Keeping up with the Joneses, you know.
However, Zoomclouds (among its other lamentable failings) had two fatal flaws:
- it only indexed a tiny fraction of my content
- it thought everything was a tag, including sea gull
Yes, sea gull. Not cool. Not cool at all. Not even slightly hip. Rather Fisherman’s Friend gauche, actually. So Zoomclouds had to go.
Luckily, my fragile sense of blogging panache was bolstered by the concurrent sighting of Zak Greant’s Category Cloud. Instant image restoration!
Category Cloud, unfortunately, is not a final solution. Sadly, it’s a chimera: the tags it displays are not tags at all, but simply – as the name suggests – categories masquerading as tags.
Which means it works great for bloggers like me, who have hundreds of hideously old-fashioned un-tagged posts. A better solution will have to wait until Wordpress supports tagging and tag clouds natively.
Until that day: long live categories! (And category clouds.)
This is the fourth installment of what I hope to be a complete “translation” of Romans. Please note that this is not scripture; it is my understanding of scripture. Any with questions or concerns should check the original.
In Romans chapter 3, Paul introduced a solution to the problem of being right with God: faith. Now in chapter 4, he explains that Abraham – the father of all Jews – was saved by faith. And we can (and must) be saved by faith as well.
Read more »
I’ve been thinking about business blogging lately.
Partly because of a months-old post on Hugh McLeod’s blog about what comes after the Cluetrain, and a post he references on Marketing Hub.
But mostly because of a need in my present business venture to spend more time listening to real people in real jobs in real organizations that we think will buy/use/promote the products and services we’re creating.
Here’s the key piece from the Marketing Hub post:
“The value may not be the immediate impact of their [bloggers'] words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it’s more about creating real engagement – where you are changed too. And the thing about good conversations is that more goes on than just an exchange of information. Something more energising takes place. I think that’s the deeper insight of the whole ‘markets are conversations’ meme.”
In other words, business blogging is not something you do, it’s something you are.
It’s not operational but ontological.
It’s not economical but epistemological.
And in the end, business blogging is not something you are, it’s something you become.
The traditional company is an organization defined by barriers. These people are in; these people are out. Employees know certain things; customers know other things; non-clients know other things: all separate domains of knowledge.
(And sometimes keeping those domains of knowledge separate is facilitated, even encouraged.)
Blogging is just one thing that can turn this beast inside out … making the surface area outside greater than the surface area inside. The more surface, the more touch. The more touch, the more influence.
And the more you touch, the more you are influenced.
Barriers are defined by what they keep out – and what they keep in. Business blogging is one way of turning an impermeable barrier into a permeable barrier – if a barrier at all.
What kind of company would result?
Perhaps one that ‘gets it.’ Perhaps one that is (not just understands) its market. Perhaps even one that doubles its sales.
I just read Peter Merholz’s now-ancient post on getting out of the lab and into the real world when doing usability testing.
One example he cites:
What we did, however, was field research. We went into 12 homes, and saw how people currently managed their stuff. And, believe me, it’s messy and complex. One participant used: a church address book, a week-at-a-glance, a Palm-style PDA, a simple address-storing-PDA, and an Access database to manage this task. Had we brought her in to test our prototype, we could have found out all kinds of stuff about how she used this prototype in isolation and away from her tools. But we would have learned nothing about how this tool could possibly have integrated itself into his complex web.
Wow. This makes me sit up and pay attention.
I’ve done some testing in a usability lab. It was a powerful experience to see people using applications that you’ve built, and breaking them, and breaking them in entirely unexpected ways.
But I can see that leaving people in their natural environment would be far, far better.
(Interestingly, Peter’s talking about using Bolt Peters’ relatively new Ethnio app for doing the in situ testing. I had contacted Bolt Peters for a usability testing job, but we hadn’t been able to make the schedules work together, so I eventually went with a different firm.)
The closer you get to people in their own … errr … habitats, the better you can understand how and why they are doing what they’re doing. And, therefore, the better you can design your product/service to meet those need and actually fit in their lives.
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Incidentally, Peter says he’s in Vancouver right now for a conference and visit, and to email him if any regular readers of his blog want to meet up. I can’t find your email address, Peter, but if you see the trackback I’m sending, consider this an offer to get together for a coffee or something. My email is accessible on my resume.
On our recent trip to San Diego, we toured the USS Midway. It’s the longest-serving aircraft carrier in US naval history.
Gabrielle was (very) pleasantly surprised to find parts of the ship painted – of all colors – pink. I think it’s purple, but who am I to say?
(Gabrielle is wearing headphones that you get, with a little portable audio player, when you board. At various points, you see a number, enter that into your audio player, and it tells you some history about what you’re seeing.)
As I posted quite a while ago, I re-evaluted using Google AdWords on this site when the whole Google China thing came out.
I did eventually take AdWords off, for that reason as well as out of a desire to simplify this blog (see what I had on the site and also what I took off). Google still owes me about $50 that I guess I’ll never collect, because they only send out checks in $100 increments.
Now I’m wondering if I should create a new blog just for AdWords. Some clicks are worth a lot of money!
But what a pain it would be to endlessly write about mesothelioma lawyers ($54/click), refinancing mortgages ($47/click), or auto accident attorneys ($36/click). Too painful, I’m thinking.
I just found out that the Washington mob is really, really big in San Diego. They’re even breaking into many previously legit industries, such as gas stations.
You may have noticed the snazzy new tag cloud adorning the right-hand side of this page.
(I’m trying to be trendy and web 2-ish, and possibly get acquired by Google or Yahoo for mad money.)
I noticed the Zoomclouds link at Guy Kawasaki’s blog – he just got a new tag cloud as well. I thought I’d give it a shot.
The good
First off, it’s dead simple. Give Zoomclouds your RSS feed, configure a few settings (or not), and paste some code into your source. Done. It’d be hard to make it simpler.
It’s also nicely configurable – and so I was able to get the colors to match up to my site colors very easily. (And if you know a little HTML and Javascript, you can customize it a little beyond the defaults.)
The not-so-good
It’s not a huge deal, but I don’t like the big Zoomclouds logo on my site. I’ll live with it to get the tag cloud, but I think that since you go to Zoomclouds’ site when you click a cloud item, and that Zoomclouds is putting Google Adwords on the results that you see there, that’s enough branding for them.
More importantly, the posts that feed the tag cloud only go back a few weeks in time. I’d like Zoomclouds to spider my site and present a tag cloud that reflects all the things I’ve written – not just the stuff since I added the cloud.
The kind of ugly
This is a mixed blessing/curse: tag selection. Zoomclouds is easy, so you don’t have to manually tag all your content. Excellent – I’m too lazy to go and tag all my previous 700 or so posts, even though I’d do it for stuff going forward.
However, this means that Zoomclouds makes a somewhat-arbitrary determination, based on parsing through your RSS feed, on what is a tag or not. This works, sometimes. Maybe even most of the time.
But it does mean that I have a tag on my site labeled poor bird. Umm … it’s unlikely I’d ever create a tag like that if I were doing it myself.
Hopefully, however, Zoomclouds incorporates some social intelligence into what should be a tag or not, based on all the sites using its service, and will get better over time.
(Looks like they’re working on this issue already.)
Suggestions
- Zoomclouds should understand categories, and automatically accept them as tags (at least for the major blogging platforms).
- Zoomclouds should allow for some form of manual tagging, if only as an option for geeks.
- A ping service would be wonderful, so that you could just add Zoomclouds to the list of pings your blogging software sends out automatically for each post. Knowing that you’ve added content recently, Zoomclouds could then refresh your tag cloud based on the update.
- A force update feature would be nice – something that you could click and force Zoomcloud to refresh its cache of your content and the tag cloud that it has created for you. (I’ve mentioned this one in a comment on Zoomcloud’s site.)
- And, as mentioned, it’d be great if Zoomclouds spidered my blog and made the cloud relevant for all my posts, not just the past few.
Overall
The results are good enough right now that I’ll stick with the service for a bit, and see how it goes. I like the look of the tag cloud, and I like that way of organizing and navigating information, and I’m hoping the service will improve over time in the areas where it might be a little wanting.
OK, this is crazy. This kid is ridiculously photogenic – it’s hard to take a bad picture of him!
(Disclosure: this is our youngest son, Aidan, at Ocean Beach in San Diego.)
Ethan is madly into rock-climbing, or just plain climbing, these days. He’s always looking for something to climb.
Here he and I are climbing some rocks piled up into a breakwater at San Diego’s Ocean Beach. He’s an amazingly good climber already at age 6 – good enough to give me the occasional heart attack.
I would not like to be Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates right now. (Well, they are both billionaires, but still … )
Microsoft just simply cannot seem to execute lately. Release dates on everything are slipping, re-organizations of major divisions are coming every couple of months, the bad news is piling up, and they can’t even buy good press anymore.
Daniel Lyon’s recent article in Forbes is a case in point. He absolutely savages Microsoft. Not that he’s trying to be negative about the company or that he’s looking for bad news to report … it’s just that the facts are so bloody grim.
Let’s see … what’s going wrong?
- Vista slipped (again!)
- Ballmer and Co. did not reveal the slip to journalists at a press event just 2 days before the slip announcement came out. He must have known at that point that it would slip, but kept hyping the coming technology with never a hint of a problem. This does not help build your credibility with the chattering classes who write articles and file stories.
- The new stuff in Vista and the Office 2007 is not (yet) plug & play for non-techies.
The new programs are phenomenally complex, with scores of buttons and pull-down menus and myriad connections among various applications. A Microsoft VP zipped through a demo, moving information from Outlook to Powerpoint to Groove to some kind of social networking program that lets you see how your colleagues and your colleagues’ colleagues rate various Web sites.
Well, what do you expect when the new features are primarily about relationships between applications. Anyone in development knows that when you build X, things are simple. When you build X and Y, you have not doubled your complexity, you’ve tripled it – at least if X and Y have to be able to play together. Well, Microsoft is integrating dozens of applications – the complexities (and therefore the difficulties) must be staggering.
- The new features Microsoft is coming out with are inventive (great!) solutions for invented (uh oh) problems … using your a) cell phone to b) call your computer to c) access your email and d) have it read aloud to you is so laughably, stupidly complex and over-innovated and cumbersome a process that you wonder how on earth it got out of an new product ideas meeting. Must have been one of those “no-idea-is-bad” positive thinking sessions. They’re great, but at some point you have to apply the bullshit filter – you need a brutally honest Steve Jobs-ish person who will tell you you’re smoking something.
- Microsoft is not connecting with tech buyers and tech journalists anymore. Can you imagine people just ignoring them and talking out loud as Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates addresses the room 5-6 years ago? Another way of putting it: would Microsoft have created such a useless “media event” 5-6 years ago with nothing really amazing, startling, new, or different to say or show?
- Free alternatives to everything Microsoft are getting better and better every day.
I almost feel sorry for Microsoft. How can they be in such a rut, screwing up enormously month after month, year after year?
One thing to keep in mind, however. $50 billion in the bank buys you a lot of second chances. Maybe even a decade’s worth.
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BTW, Lyon’s article is an example of good things that are happening in “real” journalism. It’s a much more real, personal, and authentic article than your typical journalist would ever write – even in an opinion piece. I think blogs are having an impact on the way reporters write their stories, and I think it’s a great direction to be moving in.
Doing groceries as a family, approaching the sea food area with live lobsters, crabs, oysters, and more …
Aidan pipes up: “Want to see the crabsters!”
Me, silently to myself: can I freeze this moment in time?
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
