Stumbled across this a while back.  It’s too good to leave alone.  Someone somewhere needs to enter it in to a caption contest.

Postal worker delivers baby

I have relatives who subscribe to the axiom that you can never be too skinny or too wealthy.  Conversations drift towards these subjects like leaves to the ground.  It is inevitable and annoying.  This year’s Christmas dinner was an exercise in self-restraint capped with my wife pleading out loud that we talk about something other then money.

Jason Zweig has written What a Bear Market Might Teach Us which I found both humorous and uplifting.  If I thought my relatives would recognize the message I would send it to them - but I suspect the point would be lost.

“Money is not wealth”

A story entitled Satellite Radio Still Reaches for the Payday published on December 26th, 2008 describes the challenges facing Sirius XM.  There are several interesting insights shared in the article.  If you’ve read some of my other material here, you know this is a subject I care about.

Before the merger, I did not pay that much attention to Sirius.  I enjoyed the service XM provided and wasn’t really concerned with the business decisions being made by its competitor.  Not that it would have mattered - but I should have paid more attention.  Some of the significant numbers:

1. In 2005, Sirius secured the exclusive services of Howard Stern for 500 million dollars.
2. It costs between 250 and 300 million dollars to put a satellite in space.
3. The company earned 613 million dollars in the third quarter of 2008
4. The company has 1 billion dollars in debt due in 2009

That’s alot of large numbers.  But to balance the equation, the stock price of the company currently sits at 16 cents per share.  InfoWorld believes satellite radio will not survive the recession.  Add on that the combined company has let go approximately 25% of the company’s associates and you are left with few options.  The company’s chief assets appear to be its satellites and Howard Stern (based on the value they placed on his contract).

I like the service - but it looks like some banks are going to hold some more useless paper here pretty soon.

Don't panic about cloud based application failures

“Gmail isn’t working - OMG.  Call out the National Guard”

The recent discussion around the failure of some notable cloud based web services has reminded me of a comparable discussion in the transportation industry.  The number of fatalities associated with automobiles greatly exceeds those associated with air travel.  Why is that people assume otherwise?  Because when a plane crashes to the ground the loss of life is sudden and dramatic.  When an individual dies in an auto accident we are conditioned to view it as less significant.

What’s the point?  Gmail failed last week.  Amazon S3 failed the week before.  Twitter fails weekly (or so it seems).  These are large public outages which drive a lot of media coverage.  On the other hand, the daily (or more likely hourly) outages individuals encounter with their own tool set receive little or no media coverage. There is no way to measure them.  There is no way to report on the collective impact on productivitity associated with thousands of individual mail servers being crushed under the weight of spam.

Large scale service delivery firms that focus on service excellence will eventually drive down these failures.  You and I will continue to build things that break.  Oh well.

My favorite service disappeared today.  XM and Sirius have merged creating Sirius XM.  The Justice Department has indicated that the merger would not harm competition, er the consumer.  We effectively no longer have competition so we’ll have to cross our fingers on this statement. Engadget has the full announcement.

I am concerned.  My cable provider provides an almost weekly lesson in how the lack of competition creates a poor service provider.  This statement on Washington Business Journal is supposed to help me feel better.  It accomplishes the exact opposite:

Subscribers will also now have the option to pick from different packages of channels, known as a la carte programming.

My belief is that in a year’s time I will have the privilige of spending more to get less.  A la carte pricing = nickel and diming.

Update:
I ran across a few more quotes I’d like to add to my bonfire of disgruntlement…

He said the review showed that, because XM and Sirius equipment was not compatible, subscribers rarely shifted from one system to the other in their homes or cars; a switch could be expensive and time-consuming.

“Historically, once you choose one or the other of the audio services, you’re not going to switch,” he said. “A price switch is not going to cause you to jump to the other services.”

That rationale could be used to support a merger of any two competing yet dissimilar technologies. Do you suppose we’ll be asked to accept a merger of DSL and cable providers any time soon. It’s about the same exercise switching a satellite receiver and a modem. Right?

E-mail is top of mind for many people now.  The New York Times and other mainstream media sites have jumped on the bandwagon bemoaning the flood of e-mails burying us all.

“It is a poor craftsman who blames his tool” – or so it’s been said.  With so many of us abusing the same tool you’d think we would have figured it out by now.  But it’s not just tool abuse that is burying us.  We need some new disciplines– and at least one new tool.

Disciplines

The cure to our collective problem starts with each of us.  Just because we can send an e-mail doesn’t mean we should.  Spam not withstanding, we each are inflecting a small wound on each other when we send an e-mail that does not accomplish a purpose.  Be purposeful in what you say.  Be purposeful in what you send.  Are you informing/influencing, entertaining or collaborating?

Informing/Influencing:  Who needs to know?  If everyone needs to know then e-mail is not the right answer.  Post it on a web site, or a bathroom wall.  Whatever works.  How do you know who needs to know?  That’s a post in itself, but until then give some critical thought to each person you copy on each e-mail.

Entertaining:  Please don’t.  The world is full of people sending humorous and inspirational messages.  You can not improve the world order one bit by forwarding the latest collection of jokes.  Believe me – someone already beat you to the punch.

Collaborating:  This is our greatest opportunity for improvement.  There is a genuine need in this space – but we have not decided to use the right tool.  In my role, work is measured in issues, risks and action items.  None of these units of work are best accomplished through e-mail.  A group collaborating on an issue should have a central discussion – open to all stakeholders – of the decision criteria.  Risks likewise should have consequences, likelihood and other characteristics described in one place.  Finally, action items are done, being worked, or not really in action.  Communicate status – done or not done – and any associated issues and risks.  Do it in one place.

GTD advocates (and I’m one) describe a discipline for (mostly) reacting to what the world throws at you.  We need just a little more scaffolding around what we should do when communicating with others.  If enough of the GTD’ers take up the cause, the volume of non-UBE (ham) will be reduced.

Tool

We have the tools in front of us.  Any of the threaded discussion boards meet the need.  The biggest problem with these kinds of tools is they are either too public – or too unstructured.  Imagine a hybrid tool which documents community understanding once – in a central place.  All we need is some enterprising individual to take a basic discussion board and add some ‘smarts’ so that leaders (anyone who has an issue, task or risk) can pin an item to the board and others can link items and add depth.  Now add a nicer user interface and I think you’ll have a winning enterprise application.

I have arrived a little late on the open source scene so I tend to take things for granted. The expression “free as in beer” has always struck me as odd.

Based on tests I’ve taken, I am a libertarian politically. The Open Source movement is really a Socialist movement based on the comments shared in this video. It’s interesting that something this liberal could have such far reaching implications on the world economy. I mean really, where would we all be without Linux, Wordpress, and all of the other GNU licensed packages in the world?

Those of you who are English speaking will have trouble at times, but this background video on Linux produced in Sweden provides a really interesting background on the Linux movement.

No time for the book? Google has made video of a session David Allen conducted with their staff. Listen to David Allen himself describe the Getting Things Done system.

Now go get the book.

Anyone who has spent enough time in public positions sooner or later encounters people hostile to your cause. I’ve served in countless volunteer positions through the years and am constantly surprised when I encounter people who have assumed that some self serving or malicious intent sits behind the organization I direct. The fact of the matter is, we are all conditioned to see the worst in organizations (and individuals for that matter).

It’s hard when you work in a volunteer organization and need to recruit people to fill roles. Overcoming this ‘assumed bias/baggage’ can be challenging. I’ve learned through the years that people will judge actions (not words) but that not all of our actions are visible to others. If you don’t see it happen, it didn’t.

The worst case scenario is when you have to overcome another’s assumption that you are serving some nefarious purpose. I’m guilty without having done anything. My position in the past was to plead my case and try to influence others to believe the best of me. That simply doesn’t work. You have to demonstrate good intentions and avoid the debating your own character. Character can not be proven with words - only deeds.

I was pleased learn that there was a word for this. C.S. Lewis coined the term Bulverism in 1941. In his words:

assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly.

It’s hard to casually use the word. It is hardly a common label, but being able to put a label on it helps me to overcome the challenge.

What are the chances that this isn’t some kind of publicity stunt. How is it possible to be clever enough to steal the pulitzer prizes from a locked case inside a locked safe in a secure area in a business and then be stupid enough to sell them on e-bay?

Who knows - but the details are available on this NY Times article about the prizes being sold on e-bay.