Trey blog tagged me a long time ago. My Five Things entry found its way to the bottom of a very large pile which I have never been able to get to. On this pile are terabytes of MiniDV tapes I have been shooting since I started at Sun (and started a family). At the top of the pile is my interest in finding a scalable way to organize my photography including dealing with thousands of slides, negatives, lone prints and tons of digital images from recent years.
I have recently made a small dent in this and having a lot of fun with it. Commodity personal computing power and especially cheap storage leave me with no excuse. Fat+cheap pipes available where I live make it possible to experiment with even large scale data sets.
In all honesty, the real reason I never got to my Five Things is that I procrastinated on my Sun blog strategy. I had grabbed a blog account very early on and drafted many times. However, I struggled as to whether my contrarian views would be too distracting professionally especially within the influential Sun Blog community (and this community has a backchannel). Whenever I considered sharing amusing anecdotes, I felt compelled to focus on work. My friends don't want to hear another goofy story from me until I cough up the "tiger video" anyways (stay tuned). Proprietary and competitive information, in progress patent applications, warnings about tainting and of course the primary obstacle to web platform (i.e. linking) architecture at Sun - the Sun Wide Area Network (SWAN) always had me stuck.
What many people do know about me is that I opine freely, encourage change and lead with sometimes out-of-the-box ideas but I make decisions and face mistakes; I collaborate extensively on corporate web platforms. Those who work with me know of my encouragement to use "less email" and my pressure to just do the right thing with enterprise search (i.e. write the check). I am the first person to stand up and applaud when Jonathan speaks passionately about "accountability". (everything is about accountability)
What many people do not know is why I never posted here. Admitting the primary and normal reasons, all I can say is that I believe that a blogging community needs to be fully transparent via a participatory platform - that is what allows a good community to become great. Full transparency is hard for any enterprise and I understand why. Change is hard.
Less Email
So before I get to my Five Things, I will share one contrarian idea. Nothing like waiting until the last minute!
If I were to ever catch Jonathan in a casual, discrete moment I would pose this hypothetical and see what he would say.
"Jonathan, this won't leave this elevator, I promise, but if you could eliminate five NetAdmin email aliases which ones would they be and why?"
I did an interesting experiment recently. I few months ago, GMail became IMAP capable. People have written some clever hacks in recent years to upload your email folders into GMail - none of them compelling enough for me. With a 6GB+ capacitity I thought I would give it a whirl. I created just 16 labels (tags) and consolidated through IMAP all my email in GMail. I have 57,000 conversations consisting or hundreds of thousands of emails and I have sent 23,000 emails. I know I spent half my time deleting emails over the years. I am stunned.
From my iPhone I can find anything in seconds in Google /m but this information is only available to me.
I wonder though, how much knowledge is in my email silo. I wonder how much transparency and agility is lost because of email. If email is here to stay - and of course it is - how valuable would it be to an enterprise like Sun to move to Google /a ?
Five Things About Me
In July last year at Karie Willyerd's CLO Summit she had everyone attending submit a personal fact which was used at some events as ice-breakers. In anyizable crowd there is always some people who have really intriguing things to reveal such as: having died briefly and been resuscitated; having witnessed a historical event.
I often respond to such a question sharing that I am an Eagle Scout. My wife has made it very clear to me that this is so brutally obvious that I don't have to mention it. She asserts that when people meet me they are sure to think, "(nice guy...I like him...what a Boy Scout)". Nevertheless, I find that revealing this (rank) has interesting results and is most positive professionally.
On a consulting engagement in Tampa, Florida at CityBank campus and I was waiting for a taxi at dusk outside the lobby. It must have been the reflection of the setting Sun on the glass side of the building but I was almost clobbered by a blue heron which came slamming into the side of the building. I ducked just in time.
There is an anonomized photo of me on a few Sun web sites and I think it is still floating around on the Training Site. The story behind that photo is kinda cool.
I was at JavaOne 2005 and ran into Dan Malks at the bar in the W Monday night and he tried to enlist me to code a Java application for the Live8 Concert in Philadelphia. The next day Tuesday, I heard Scott and Jonathan keynotes on the participation age and sharing and eliminating the digital divide I was inspired help Dan out. I texted Dan and said "Okay" and that afternoon before trying to head back to Philly, Dan grabbed a Sun photographer and he shot some Dan and I up on the analyst stage - totally posed. I don't think we slept for 4 days but the app ran and worked nicely for the eight hours of the concert. You never know when someone will call on you to code an app for 800,000 people and have a few days to do it with no specs. It was the most exhilarating thing I will ever do in my lifetime and it was great for the Sun brand. I even wore my NetBeans Day shirt and the app was entirely produced in NetBeans. What I am most proud of is a photo from the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer taken of the concert venue on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from atop city hall. The photo was taken right when the application displayed "Participate" centered above the stage. This front page was perfect imagery for Jonathan's assertion.
Today is my last day
