Jobster
Yes, I thought so. That is a woman with a mustache on Jobster:
Just for fun, by the way, here’s my profile on Jobster. I don’t quite like the results as much as my resume, but hey - fun to try.
Tags: resume, jobster, john koetsier
New Netscape: Doomed
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the New Netscape is doomed.
It won’t be successful, people won’t do what Netscape wants them to do, and Netscape will revert back to something more like what it used to be within 6 months.
Netscape is not a Digg-ish site: people can “vote” for their favorite stories. OK, that’s not a horrible idea, even if they are copying Digg and others, and trying to cash in on the whole social web meme.
But any site that starts its first page like this is doomed (see below). Instructions on how to use a web site? What were they thinking!
That in itself is the kiss of death: if it’s so non-obvious they have to put step 1, step 2, all the way to step 5 on the page, they’re toast.
Richard McManus has covered this on Read/Write Web.
Tags: netscape, digg, social media, doomed, john koetsier
Why I don’t have HDTV
I love gadgets and technology and cool new stuff, but I don’t have HDTV.
Why?
But the biggest problem is now we have 17 different boxes to power on to watch TV, and they have to be powered on in a certain order and with a certain remote control. And running Windows as the core OS of a PVR is just lunacy: I don’t want to deal with the blue screen of death, or spyware, or not having enough RAM to run my TV – I want it to just work. One night, my wife watched for several uncomfortable minutes as I tried to play a DVD on the HP PVR – there was something wrong with the disc, and eventually we gave up and watched it on one of our laptops in bed. All the while, she is mumbling how life has gotten so complicated that she can’t even operate our TV anymore and what is she supposed to do when I am not around to provide the necessary tech support?
Because when I upgrade to HDTV, I want a nice clean simple system that integrates at least three key functionalities with a minimum of boxes. That’s one box, btw, besides the actual TV itself, to do the following:
- TV
- DVD
- PVR
Whether the TV is satellite, cable, terrestrial or something else, I don’t care. I don’t want 5 boxes with 5 million wires. I don’t want a rat’s nest. I don’t want a living room server room. I don’t want mess. I don’t want complexity.
When someone builds that, let me know.
Tags: HDTV, TV, PVR, home theater, david strom, john koetsier
Urban deer
We live on Glen Mountain, which is a part of Sumas Mountain, in Abbotsford, BC, and often get deer in our yard.
This spring, a young doe had two fawns which we’ve been seeing quite often. Here is a quick video taken with my digital camera of one of the young deer just below our deck:
Only when riding
Teresa took the kids for checkups today at the doctor. Everything’s fine, and we now know that Gabrielle’s 58 pounds, Ethan is 48, and Aidan is 30.
But the magical moment was provided courtesy of Aidan.
Dr. Stepney, our family doctor, asked him if he always wore his bike helmet. Looking rather oddly at her, he gently shook his head - no.
I wonder if she was a little puzzled - maybe even surprised. After all, it’s the law for kids to wear bike helmets here in B.C., Canada. And what mother doesn’t make her child wear his helmet when riding?
Then Aidan spoke up:
“Only when I’m riding my bike.”
Jason Fried on Collaboration
I tried to watch Jason’s presentation at Collaboration Loop tonight.
Unfortunately Collaboration Loop uses Windows Media player, and it’s driving me nuts.
- it keeps stopping part way
- the play head is not scrubbable, so I can’t restart it partway
- and when I try to give them some feedback, the feedback form is braindead
I’ve noticed that others are having trouble too. Fix your site and use QuickTime or Flash, Collaboration Loop!
Tags: signal vs. noise, jason fried, collaboration loop, annoying, windows media player, john koetsier
My dinner with SCO chief Darl McBride
Darl McBride is the guy everyone loves to hate.
Current chief executive officer of SCO, the company that’s suing IBM over its support of Linux (and will, if successful, sue just about anyone else using Linux), Darl used to work for the FranklinCovey Company. So did I.
FranklinCovey is a personal and organizational effectiveness company. If that sounds grandiose, check out their current home page, which states: “We enable greatness in people and organizations everywhere.”
Very modest. Very FranklinCovey.
If the Covey part sounds familiar, that’s because Stephen R. Covey, the founder of the Covey part of the empire, is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, among other books, and a genuine guru. (Hyrum Smith - another guru - started the Franklin part, which eventually bought Covey.)
Way back 6-7 years ago, before anyone - even Darl - had thought of lawsuits against Linux, before Darl joined SCO, before IBM started placed big bets on Linux, and before Linux was the mainstream force it is today, Darl was the business manager of a unit of FranklinCovey that was going to take the enterprise into the brave new world of online applications and (perhaps more importantly) wonderfully gratifying internet company multiples in stock market valuation.
I worked with that business unit for over a year until its dissolution. Some of the people who lost their jobs when that unit died then subsequently asked me for a job.
At that time I was working (as I still do) for Premier - one of the top student success, student organization companies in the world. We sold (and sell) student planners, student success training, and more. What FranklinCovey is to the well-heeled corporate market, we are to the somewhat more pecuniarily-challenged education market.
FranklinCovey had bought us in 2001, so we were an allied business unit. I was Premier’s Technology Solutions Manager (basically led our web development team), and so I was in Salt Lake, FC’s corporate headquarters, 3-4 times a year, interacting with Darl’s group. Usually not with Darl himself; mostly with people that reported to him.
But what I remember most about Darl is the time when he visited Premier headquarters in Bellingham, WA. We had meetings for the better part of a day on web strategy and had dinner that night at a seafood place in one of Bellingham’s marinas.
Darl talked about having worked on the team that built or sent Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that is currently exploring Saturn. It was particularly controversial at the time because as part of its path to Saturn it had swung around earth for a gravity boost acceleration - and it had 1-3 pounds of plutonium on board (as an electrical power source). A slight error in calculation and it was not inconceivable that it would hit the earth … and spread one of the most dangerous substances known to man over a substantial amount of the globe’s surface. (Imperial to metric, anyone?)
Darl was fairly slick. He had been a successful executive at Novell, and exuded “executese.” Even then, though, you felt there was something behind the man. That there was a Darl you saw, and a Darl you did not see.
But he talked the talk. One of the things we spent quite a bit of time on was his vision for Franklin Planner Online. Franklin Planner Online was the result of a $10 million acquisition that FranklinCovey had made in late 1999, just before Darl had come onboard. It was an online planner (originally called DayTracker) built in Cold Fusion by the prototypical two guys in a garage.
Darl saw it being the centerpiece of FranklinCovey’s clients planning and scheduling world: syncing to their Palms, printing to their planner binders, sending text notifications of upcoming events to their cell phones, and publishing to spouses or colleagues’ calendars.
It was a good vision … one that is probably not entirely realized even today. But there were problems.
The prototypical two guys in a garage company had made a prototypical two guys in a garage product: crap. I spent some time talking to the geeks at FC when I was in Salt Lake one time, and they told me they had to rewrite almost all of the application to make it enterprise-ready.
Guess how happy they were to re-write it all at $60-70 K per year when FranklinCovey had just blown $10 million on the source code? Not very! But this was the dotcom era, and when a big company that felt like a dinosaur needed to move into the 21st century, they did so quickly and perhaps not too carefully.
There were other problems.
In 2001 synchronization with desktop software meant a big, expensive software project. FC blew probably over a hundred thousand on that alone.
There there was the Flash version.
After having bought their multi-million dollar toy, FC realized that no-one actually used online calendars. That the 40,000 “users” of the calendar they had bought were signed up zombies who in most cases didn’t touch the app after day one.
The problem, everyone realized, was the lack of desktop responsiveness. And in those pre-AJAX days, the only option was Flash. So Darl’s division blew what I hear was a half million or so on a Flash version.
The last time I saw Darl was probably near the end of that project. The prototype had been built, and the plan was to offer this as a branded calendar to large companies. Unfortunately, the prototype was not skinnable, and money was running out. Darl looked a bit hunted, or maybe haunted, and I guess even at that time the writing was on the wall.
Soon after this, FranklinCovey shut down the division, laid off all the staff, and realized that they had just blown tens of millions of dollars trying to be hip and cool in a market that they didn’t even begin to understand.
The rest is history: Darl eventually joined a small, struggling UNIX company, and found a way in which to try to grow it again.
I kind of wonder what I would say to him if I met him again.
All the time while were meeting and talking and scheming, I was bringing more and more Linux servers online for essentially zero dollars … a much better deal than the thousands he was spending on provisioning NT servers running ColdFusion for FranklinPlanner Online.
. . .
. . .
Note: FranklinCovey eventually sold Premier, the company I work for, to School Speciality, which is still the company that owns us.
Continuing my Roman vacation
I continued my Roman vacation today …
I haven’t been working on my modern English “translation” of the book of Romans for quite some time, but I picked it up again today and will be working more on it in the near future (now that the Stanley Cup is finished).
Bumptop Piles: Apple, are you listening?
Check this out.
It reminds me of Apple’s Piles concept, which never really saw the light of day. But this is much cooler, and may be a significant step forward in UI design … if some big company takes the hint.
[ update July 1 ]
Niko Nyman disagrees with the idea that Bumptop has possibilities. Some good points.
My rejoinder, posted as a comment on his post, and recycled here:
There’s absolutely no question that as a metaphor for 1.5 million files, the desktop fails, and fails miserably.
Where I see something like Bumptop as useful, however, is the transient stuff: the files for the 5 projects you have on the go right now. That’s what is on your physical desktop: not all 1.5 million pieces of paper you’ve seen/touched/needed/wanted at some point in your entire life. And that’s what’s on your virtual desktop.
However, ultimately you’re right. The question is: what do we have to replace the desktop metaphor?
Tags: apple, microsoft, UI, desktop, john koetsier
War of the spiders
What’s up with Yahoo!’s Slurp?
That’s the question I was asking myself last week as I was peering at my blog stats. More specifically, the stats for which robots had been visiting, sucking, spidering my sites.
Yahoo! Slurp is visiting my sites almost constantly … in this 7-day period it requested a file (image, page, you name it) 12,521 times. That’s about 9000 more hits than the Googlebot.
Here’s the graph. (Note: this is only the Mozilla-compatible spiders, which in total account for about half of the spidering on my sites.)
There are a ton of bots that hit any blogs that have more than 20 posts and a few links to them. I think I once counted 50 or 60 - and that was a year or more ago.
But why would Yahoo! Slurp account for 65% of the spider hits to my site? During the same period, the MSN bot accounted for about 1200 hits. I confess I don’t get it.
Somehow, Yahoo! wants to know everything, immediately, repeatedly. That’s OK, I’m just wondering why.
. . .
. . .
Interestingly enough, the Technorati bot is almost nowwhere to be seen, with something like 90 hits on my site in the 7-day period.
Tags: technoratibot, yahoo slurp, googlebot, spiders, MSNbot, john koetsier
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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