Wednesday April 12, 2006

Financial Analysis As part of an MBA we all have to study Financial Analysis of course, and learn about corporate structure, principal agent problems, and other things financial. It's all good useful stuff, if sometimes a little intense. It is amazing though how many managers there are in corporations all over the world though who clearly know little or nothing about finance. They're everywhere in fact. Most managerial courses in corporations focus on how new people managers should manage people, and often spend little or not time whatsoever on what it means to be a fiduciary. If you are responsible for a team of employees, then you are directing the resources of the coroporation and that makes you a fiduiary of sorts. Most new managers who say get promoted from engineering roles for example, only figure this out when they have to submit their first appropriation request for some equipment or project and get nit picked to death because they didn't quite do enough diligence in the preparation of the request. This is the fiduciary in action. Their manager may also not be well versed in the financial process, but knows what kind of questions the boss aways asks and so the process goes on. Then eventually the request, depending on it's size eventually hits the desk of a real financial manager for processing. Imagine if every front line manager went through not only 5 days or more of critical people management skills, but the equivalent amount of financial skills training. Then from the get go new managers are brought into the picture as to the way the machine works, and make more informed decisions from day one. I guess that's why the rest of us go and get MBAs to learn this stuff in more detail, as we realise how critical it is to running a business. It's not required to be formally trained but knowing this stuff is critical whatever management role you're in. Well there you have it. (2006-04-12 21:53:24.0) Permalink

Wednesday March 01, 2006

Weird Weird, I've just noticed that all of blog entries have been randomised in time! Weird. There not in the correct order at all. Never mind though, I ain't going to fix it. (2006-03-01 21:54:27.0) Permalink

Burning Out Am I burning out? I'm accountable for product quality for the first 90 days in the field of Sun's entire Ultrasparc IV+ product line at Sun, and that's a significant chunk of revenue. While that is going well, I also have to introduce Sun's next generation of server we are producing with Fujitsu. Lots going on let me tell you. It's quite an undertaking I feel. But is it too much. I guess I just need a vacation. What with two gorgeous kids, a pregnant wife, an EMBA and a busy but stimulating job, there seems to be littel time to sit down and just relax.
I'm in CA on business for a couple of days, and am sitting down at a friend's house taking it easy and kicking back. My friend is learning to DJ on his new mixing gear he just bought. Later on we'll probably crank it up louder. Then we'll be forced to start dancing and then I'll know i'm beginning to step outside of the mad world of working for a company that is on the brink of recovery (I hope - no forward looking statements here).
Got to figure out, how not to burn out. (2006-03-01 21:49:43.0) Permalink

Wednesday November 09, 2005

HPC for Sun in Oregon During Rainy Season Tomorrow Sun has a ribbon cutting ceremony on an HPC facility on the Sun Hillsboro campus in Oregon. Using our CRS manufacturing capability (Customer Ready Systems), we built, tested, cabled, labelled, installed, configured and deployed a large number of clustered racks of our new Opteron servers in a matter of a few short weeks. John Fowler is coming for the official opening and the site is all abuzz with the excitement. It's great for our campus and it's all the product of lots of hard work by our site management, manufacturing and engineering teams. It's a first for Sun and is sure to generate less heat from a thermal perspective than any of our competitors can do and also is sure to generate quite a bit of heat as our customers get excited and hot under the collar at this awesome and beautiful display of benchmark busting compute power. Sun is truly shining on an otherwise rainy day (most likely) in Oregon.
Oh by the way we've got a bunch of other kick ass products in the pipe too so, the competition is on. (2005-11-09 19:59:53.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday November 06, 2005

Preparing to go "On The Road" In the final planning stages for out trip from Texas to Portland. Why Texas you may ask, well the motohome I bought is in Texas and needs to be driven home! So yes it's gonna be hot, but we get to check out all the cool sights in AZ,NM and UT along the way. Should be an awesome trip. What remains to be seen is how our 18 month old daughter deals with the time on the road, and the heat, fortunately we have aircon as you would expect for a 37 Ft Diesel pusher. It's nearly the end of Q4 and I can't wait for a break. (2005-11-06 20:28:24.0) Permalink

Thursday November 03, 2005

All Wired in a Wireless World Have any of you noticed how many wires wireless devices actually need? For example my recently acquired bluetooth and my new cell phone both have different battery chargers, in fact I now have a box full of old cell phone chargers. Why is this? Is putting power into a device really that specialised that every single one requires a unique adapter? Anyway suffice to say I have more wires than I need for my wireless devices. Now the wind up wireless radio is truly a statement about the future IMHO. When will there be standards in this arena of charging? (2005-11-03 19:14:46.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday August 16, 2005

Strange Blog Encounter So I have not blogged in quite a while, but it seems someone read my blog! Well not that shocking, but the coincidence is this. My parents flew over to the US from the UK last week and my Dad was sitting in Frankfurt airport chatting to someone who works for SAP, and it seems that the chap from SAP recognised the name after my Dad introduced himself and asked if his son worked for Sun. So my Dad said yes and then the SAP sales guy said that he had read my blog! So this blog is about nothing more than a totally random blogging encounter. Mr SAP if you read this then please post a note to complete the roudn robin! (2005-08-16 08:07:40.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday November 02, 2004

Late Adopter with Questions

I used to be an early adopter of technology until financial (read two children) constraints made it hard to keep up with the speed things were moving. Anyway I just moved into the digital music world, and packed all 200 CDs away in a box last night, after ripping them all and dumping them onto my new iPod (I just love the interface) using iTunes, something like 7 Gb of data! Yes a little spend therapy made a big difference to my general state of mind, and I now need to find a back up strategy for my lap top, whose 30Gb drive is full. I have all my photos burned to CD, but feel the need to keep a double back up, and am wondering how to tackle this next problem. Any suggestions?

Wednesday July 28, 2004

Texas 2 Oregon in 16 Days - By RV I just returned from my vacation of two weeks during which time I drove my recently purchased diesel RV from Texas to Oregon. The first thing I will say is that 2800 miles is a little bit too far to go in two weeks. One more week would have been perfect. However along the way we saw and spent time in some of the most incredible countryside I've ever seen, between monument valley, Dead Horse State Park, Canyonlands, Canyon De Chelly, the Columbia Gorge and the roads in between. I experienced a sense of incredible awe to see the results of billions of years of earth activity and the results. Nowhere I have been before have I enjoyed that feeling quite so much.

That said, I also drove some of the most boring roads ever laid down; I10 from San Antonio to El Paso, I40 north into New Mexico, I 15 north out of Utah and some of the trip through Idaho.

Now I am back at work and feeling refreshed. (2004-07-28 09:00:00.0) Permalink

Friday June 25, 2004

skype.com - internet phone I just heard about SkyPe. Sounds pretty interesting. Anybody out there tried it yet? SOunds like free phone conversations to me! I will have to install it over the weekend and give it a shot? I guess all I need is someone to call :-) (2004-06-25 13:31:31.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday June 24, 2004

Edward Tufte Today I attended a course by Edward Tufte in Portland. What can I say but it will change the way you look at presentations for ever more. I don't know if this is true across all organisations but I suspect that the all too ubiquitous "Power Point" style presentation, has in the last couple of years resulted in bad decisions being made in the company. It's just my opinion but after attending this course I can definitely see how inappropriate and limiting the "Cognitive Style of Power Point" or Office presentations is. Why should you limit yourself to 6 words per line and 6 lines per slide, just because you have to project it onto a wall. Just write a doucment and include the data and text in context and discuss that instead. At least you can say what you really want to say rather than having to dumb it down for the sake of the medium. One of the many lucid and common sense points he makes is don't let the mdeium dictate the content. If you've worked hard to analyse some data, and have a good story to tell, why spoil it will a presentation when you could write a real story in a document. You can write complete sentences to explain yourself, as opposed to half baked one liners and annotate data clearly. Ever felt like you never really got to the point cos you couldn;t fit it on a slide in a big enough font to make it legible and then decided to leave it out!

Edward Tufte'sWeb page is definitely worth visiting and the course at $320 is possibly the best value day's training I have had at Sun in a long time. You get three first rate hard back (value $150), content heavy books, about his work and the pleasure of listening to a very fine presenter educate/teach you about the content.

I feel like a changed man and I don't say that lightly. (2004-06-24 20:10:59.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday June 17, 2004

Squirrells (sp) and Deer More on the WFH front. I just moved (evacuated) from the bay area to Portland Oregon as part of the manufacturing site consolidation, oops, I mean plant closure. Anyway, great move, I love it up here. Weather is not as bad as they say it is, especially when it's sunny! Also I bought a house where from my home office I can look out of my window and watch squirrels chase each other and the odd deer come by and eat the roses. According to my neighbour, roses are like candy (sweets in british parlance) to deer. They normally hang around till my daughter goes up to the window and bashes it to all hell cos she's so excited. Of course this does not distract me from my work at all, nor does blogging :-). (2004-06-17 07:55:53.0) Permalink

Wednesday June 16, 2004

WFH I worked from home today for the first time in a while, somehow screwed up my Ultra 5 Desktop, and had to reconfigure my Ultra60 home fileserver as my desktop. Now that I've switched I think I'll keep it that way, after all, two blackbird 450s and a Gig of RAM beats a Sparc IIi 360'and 384 MB Ram hands down. It's not a Jaguar Dual Core rocking machine, but it's good enough. I just need a second GFX card and I'll go double headed at home. Noice! (2004-06-16 20:43:51.0) Permalink