rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Miscellaneous
December 6, 2005 at 11:16 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
There has been a lot of recent discussion about Skype 2.0, what integrating video does for Skype and if it even matters. I have 2.0 beta and am still using it for (just) voice calls.
One thing that occurred to me, though, is that video calls (w/microphone and speaker-enabled cameras) might help reduce what I call the “Skype Scramble”, or for short, “Skrymble”.
If you use Skype (or any other computer / VOIP software), you know what I’m talking about. This is when your computer starts to ring and you start scrambling for your headset. It often goes something like this:
- Computer starts ringing.
- Where is my headset? There it is. Grab it.
- Begin untangling the wires.
- Instant message the caller to say “hold on, I’m untangling my wires.”
- Settle for your wires being hopelessly tangled and crouch close to your computer.
- Answer the call.
- Say “hello” a few times though you cannot hear anything.
- Adjust your headset volume through its built in dial.
- Say “hello” a few more times. Still cannot hear anything.
- Realize your computer volume is too low for voice. Adjust that.
- Now you can hear. Say “hello” again because the caller clearly cannot hear you.
- Flip the “mute” switch on your headset.
- Proclaim success. Apologize.
- Enjoy your free call.
A video camera with integrated mic and audio mitigates this problem, right?
At least if it is plugged in . . . 😉
OK, so maybe I don’t see why Skype 2 matters either.
Tags: headset, skype, voip
December 2, 2005 at 9:29 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I haven’t been posting to my linkblog recently because of the title/description duplication problem with the recent-links plug-in through FeedBurner. Eric Lunt, the FeedBurner CTO, pointed out the duplication is caused by the content:encoded element. Thanks, Eric.
If you have this same problem, edit your wp-recent-links-rss2.php file and look for the following code (towards the end of the file):
echo '< ![CDATA['.$new_link.' - '.$raw_caption.']]>'."\n";
The use of $raw_caption here is the problem. Replace this line with:
echo '< ![CDATA['.$new_link.' - '.$desc_rss.']]>'."\n";
November 23, 2005 at 10:55 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Steve Gillmor posts provocatively about attention, standards, timing, and Office, in Time is on our side.
I posted before that the work that the AttentionTrust is doing is very interesting with powerful connotations.
One valuable, pragmatic, insightful (and inciteful) thing they’ve done is to put together a way to track attention without standards bodies. Sure, those can come along, but nothing revolutionary happens through standards bodies. First you show it is interesting by doing real work (e.g., the AttentionTrust Extension, ATX; or ROOT Markets). Then let the interested (and threatened) get involved. Even in this case, the first format for attention data will soon be superceded by OPML.
I do want to point out, though, that I wasn’t slamming Steve for saying office is dead, exactly. It was I who brought up Office at the TechCrunch party. I was trying to poke fun at Steve about Office “already being dead”. This came from our earlier argument at the Berkeley Geek Dinner. He has been arguing this and Robert Scoble refutes it. I think what it comes down to is that Steve is saying that Office is dead (see Office Dead) meaning that the writing is on the wall for Office. I don’t think he isn’t saying people won’t upgrade to Office 12 (though he probably doubts that the numbers are significant); however, I see plenty of sales and opportunities for Office for both Microsoft and ISVs regardless of the Office Live strategy. In the mid+ enterprise.
Anyway, I think that Steve’s post supports that he views time differently then many. For example:
. . .when someone tells you how long something is going to take to make a difference, divide by 10. 10 years, 1 year. 5 years, 6 months. A year, a month and a half.
Most of us think in opposite terms: we tend to under-estimate how long something will take to make an impact. And I think the difference is, again, that Steve is talking about the implication of the “something” versus the practical, mass adoption of that “something” (or irrelevance of the alternative). I’ll leave that to him to refute, agree, or ignore.
And, I wish I hadn’t brought up Office, because we were having a much more interesting discussion about attention . . .
Tags: Attention, office, office12, Web2.0
November 13, 2005 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
My blog has a new look.
Now I know that this is not news, but I felt it worth noting just the same. The (major) changes are:
- Added a Linkblog using Recent Links by Markku Seguerra. My linkblog has a separate feed:
.
- A new heading graphic with a shorter heading region.
- Tweaked the <pre> sections to be more readable.
- Began to implement post categories, though I have not gone back and categorized my old posts (yet). I used categorization in GeeksWithBlogs, but that didn’t port cleanly. My new categories are: .NET, Grid Computing, Miscellaneous, and Web 2.0.
- And various other minor tweaks.
I hope these changes make my blog easier to read and use.
Cheers!
Tags: blog
November 4, 2005 at 8:28 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
This is the third and, I hope, final destination for my blog. It started out as Mind From R. Wandering at Blogspot. Then over to GeeksWithBlogs as “Expert Texture”. Then here. I moved from Blogger in search of a community (after all, blogger is a bit too broad as communities go: everyone on the planet who blog. I moved here out of a desire for more control over my blog.
This is just a quick post to make sure Feedburner is picking up my new blog correctly.
No time to blog right now — we have a lot to do today to get ready for the Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 launch in San Francisco on November 7th. Come by and see us at kiosk NC-12.
Cheers!
Tags: blog
November 2, 2005 at 7:25 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I stopped posting over the last few days due to the service changes at GeeksWithBlogs. They have decided to include advertisements on all of their hosted blogs and feeds. I can understand their need: the community is growing rapidly and it’s costing more money to support.
I would have preferred it if we (as a part of this community) had been given a chance to comment on this change and even been given the option of ponying up some money. My guess is that many members here would pay in advance for the service or even just donate money to keep it running free of ads. (Jeff Julian implies that there may be options for an ad-free premium service in the future once they get their new blogging system in place.)
Instead, we received an e-mail on Sunday morning. By Monday morning, my blog had an advertisement on it. BTW: I don’t object to advertisements, I just object to having no control over the advertisements.
This is kind of ironic for me as I have been trying to figure out how to get more control over my blog’s CSS template only to find that I now have less.
In Jakob Nielsen’s article Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, he says that you don’t want to let someone else control your blog. He even sites this very issue as a reason (see issue #10).
Yup.
Now what? Well, I am evaluating other options. And maybe I will move again. If you are a subscriber, please make sure you have subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering — this will ensure that if I do make a move, you will come along.
Update: One thing I forgot to say in this post: I do appreciate the community that GeeksWithBlogs is building here. I don’t actually expect service for free (and of course, that is what I have gotten and continue to get from GeeksWithBlogs). And I do fully appreciate Jeff’s need to make this change.
Tags: blog
October 5, 2005 at 11:58 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Robert Scoble posted some things he would consider when evaluating an acquiring company. I read his post with interest as in the past I was actively involved in the sale of a company I cofounded.
He asks if anyone else has any good advice for entrepreneurs considering a sale.
Here’s mine – I’m sure this isn’t complete, but it is a start:
- The deal makes financial sense to all of the existing owners (not just to the entrepreneur). Sometimes deals are put together that are attractive to the entrepreneur while attempting to cut out the other investors. Avoid this if at all possible. If the ethics don’t bother you, think of it as self-preservation: you may need those investors again even if just as a reference. After all, this probably won’t be your last start up and it means a lot to say that you made money for your investors.
- What are they buying: branding, company, people, product, technology, market share or entrée, credibility? Make sure that you agree with them about what they are buying. Which products are important? Which technologies are important?
- The deal makes financial sense to the buyer. People tend to ignore this (and maybe you should if Robert Scoble is buying you). I think this is important in understanding why they are buying you.
- What is the plan for the company once it is acquired? What numbers are you supposed to hit? What kind of money can you spend?
- What will happen if things go sour?
- Ask for examples of unsuccessful acquisitions – what happened to those people / products / technologies? How were those people treated?
- Make sure that there are committed-to budgets post-acquisition. Also, keep reinforcing that the numbers need to be trued up based on the acquisition closed date. One VC told us recently that she is seeing people state their numbers by “months after funding” instead of fixed dates. I call this out because our acquisition took 2 months longer than it was supposed to (and the numbers needed to be trued up several times). These numbers are often tied to management / group bonuses, so you don’t want their to be confusion about this.
- What kind of approval processes will be in place?
- How will they judge this a successful acquisition?
- Is the acquisition popular in the acquiring company? Will you be competing with others in the company?
- Finally, will you want to work there? Will you want to work with your new boss? In the group in which you are placed?
My motivation for some of these questions comes from my own experience. For example, we were bought to give credibility in a new market as well as to infuse our entrepreneurial spirit across the greater company to affect more ASP-related business. We had a brand, products, and credibility that supported the acquisition. But when it came down to it, we were bought by a “numbers” company. What mattered more than anything else was that we hit our revenue targets. Strangely enough, receipts, costs, and cash, didn’t really matter. Just revenues.
That said, our acquisition was a success by the most important measure: that company (Energy Interactive) and the core personnel (outside of the founding executives) continues to this day as a somewhat independent group, selling the same / similar products into the same industry.
Now, I don’t mean to imply by any of my suggestions that I believe that these criteria particularly apply to Microsoft; however, I do think it is a good thing for the entrepreneur to investigate these (and many other) issues when evaluating an acquisition.
Tags: acquisition
September 28, 2005 at 4:24 am · Filed under Grid Computing, Miscellaneous
Dan blogged that he would rarely post this week because of our work at the MTC in Mountain View. Boy, was he right — it has been pretty consuming. So, I’ve been quiet too.
We’ll be heading up to the MS Research eScience event next week. I’ll be blogging about that soon enough. If you’ll be up there, contact me. It’ll be a whirlwind trip for me, but it looks like there is a bit of “meeting“ time in the schedule.
Hope to see you there!
Tags: grid
September 26, 2005 at 3:19 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Dan noticed that he was no longer getting posts from my blog and that he had originally subscribed to the wrong feed (i.e., the Atom feed from Blogger) instead of my Feedburner feed: this one.
Those of you who originally subscribed to the Atom feed probably won’t get this post! Otherwise, please update the feed to the following:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering
I apologize for any confusion this might have caused.
Cheers!
September 22, 2005 at 11:51 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I have been using the Newsgator Outlook Edition for the past year and was pretty happy with it, but I just realized that it has been discarding posts somewhat arbitrarily.
For example, I had subscribed to the PDC Bloggers feed and hadn’t gotten a new post since the Wednesday of the conference. With all of the feeds I was reading, I didn’t even notice. Several other feeds have been behaving the same way. Newsgator online was working fine, though. Definitely not the feeds, just the reader.
A trip to the Newsgator support site clued me into “Shift-Refresh” as a way to force a refresh of a feed. This didn’t work. A service release (SR2) was released earlier in the month. Upgrading didn’t make a difference.
Uninstalling and then re-installing did work. Now I have (unfortunately) a whole lot of posts marked as unread. It is a good think that Newsgator can sync your feeds from the web site. Handy feature, really.
Tags: blog
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