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Wednesday August 27, 2008

Sanuk Sidewalk Surfers I have a bad thing about shoes: I hate them. Partly this is because my feet are slightly different sizes, partly because my right foot has a deformed fourth metatarsal (ie, my right foot's topography looks like that of the San Fernando Valley in relief), partly because my feet are so wide that it's been suggested I purchase footwear at Build A Bear (home of the perfectly round shoes). I wore flip-flops for an entire spring semester in 1983, and more recently I've been a fan of Nike's "Free" sneaker which is the closest thing to a flip flop fit for non-beach wear that I've found. Until now.

A trip to the home of the original beach flip flops introduced me to Sanuk sandals, self-described as sandals with a shoe upper -- they look like shoes, but feel like sandals, or flip-flops minus the big toe thong. I think they rely on some of the same physics as the Nike Free sneakers -- using your own foot to keep you balanced and maintain stride, rather than the physical structure of a sneaker.

Now if only that improved balance could help me get up on the surfboard.....that's one that even Software CTO Bob Brewin finds intractable. ( Aug 27 2008, 09:35:38 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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Neal Peart's "Traveling Music" Back from a true week of vacation: thanks to the hotel's internet service provider's inability to maintain IP addresses consistently during a 24-hour period, I had almost no IMAP service and therefore no email. A week of bakery-fueled breakfasts, days of reading by the pool, and some random boogie boarding were a huge win.

First book I finished on the trip: Neal Peart's Traveling Music, a bit of a departure from Roadshow and Ghost Rider in that he didn't write it to chronicle a momentous occasion in his personal or professional life; he wrote it because he wanted to capture the backstory of his own musical influences. So the storylines wander, diverge, meander into seemingly unrelated areas to add color or depth. Of the three, I found it the most readable, probably because it's more about music than travel, and I thoroughly enjoyed Peart's implicit recommendations of bands and albums.

There were tons of little nuggets in the book to keep any Rush-head happy: seeing the lyrics for Workin' Them Angels (from "Snakes & Arrows") take shape as the epigraphs for each chapter; seeing how his travel adventures formed the backstory for the song; the exposition of Ellis, one of Peart's pre-Rush friends who is the "hero" in Nobody's Hero (a song which always reminds me of the great friend I have in Tom Chatt, who has been a hero of mine - for every reason Peart touches on - for 27 years. Thanks, Tom); the story behind Mission and the pressures placed on creative artists to continuously be, well, creative.

Best of all for me was the insight into how Buddy Rich's drumming influenced Peart. At first, I found this surprising; but listening carefully (especially to later Rush works) exposes what music critics in the 1970s referred to as "a jazzy drummer, like Bill Bruford." Peart quotes his teacher Freddie Gruber as saying "There are no straight lines in nature," imploring Peart to think away from the 1-(2)-3-(4) rock drum (straight) lines. One of Mr. Santoro's drummer friends put it another way: Find the beats in a circle, not a square. Beats on the downward stroke of the circle are straight-ahead -- it keeps you moving. On the upswing of the circle is laid-back -- you keep moving it. But never at the top or the bottom.

As soon as I put the book down I had Groovin' Hard by the Buddy Rich Big Band on the iPod. Non-traveling vacation music, straight ahead. ( Aug 27 2008, 09:13:51 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Monday August 11, 2008

Not So Evil Twin I always wanted a brother (and got one in the deal when I got married, which has been yet another huge win). But now I have a not-so-evil twin brother in (nerd) arms, too.

Me on the left, Art Licht on the right. We are frequently confused for each other, for obvious reasons:

We both enjoy talking about storage disruptions.

This picture was taken immediately after someone at the Americas Sales Meeting registration desk said "Art, you already registered." ( Aug 11 2008, 05:50:34 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Innovation Framework This essay/rant has evolved over nearly nine months, but was finally brought to a close after I re-used the material in an interview last month. Genesis was one of our sales executives asking for help in preparing for a customer meeting to discuss Sun's "innovation framework." I found the question fascinating, because I never think of having a process for invention or disruption; it just kind of happens. However, from a corporate strategy point of view, there are arms lengths of books published on creating new business models in the name of spurring innovation. If you can convert innovation into dead trees, there's a framework in there somewhere.

Our discussion turned into a cataloging of the mechanisms for identifying disruption and leveraging the corresponding change in market size (or market existence -- like that for pre-fab salad), operating costs, distribution costs, or costs of goods sold.

First and best-known entrant in the art of projecting disruption is scenario planning, popularized by Peter Schwartz and now institutionalized through the Global Business Network . Scenario planning combines market and behavior analysis; you start with a big pile of possible disruptions or exogenous events, and boil them down into two ideally orthogonal forces that will shape the business under evaluation. You then look at the four combinations of extreme situations of those forces, and build a narrative describing what the world will look like. Scenarios aren't about right or wrong, or optimizing for one ideal outcome; the future is typically a melange of more than one scenario as the identified contributing factors shape the market with differing degrees of force. What you're planning for isn't a singular future but the disruptions that shape that future.

Schwartz's claim to fame is that his scenarios prepared Royal Dutch Shell for disruptions in the oil market in the mid-70s. What's bad for some parts of the market (consumers) can be good for others (producers). I participated in one full-blown scenario planning exercise around the future of silver halide versus digital photographs. The market driving forces shaping our narrative were picture taking versus storytelling and standalone devices versus networked devices. Consider the mid-90s timeframe and these were fair questions, and our scenarios painted some interesting potential investment areas and disruptions to the market. The narratives we dictated back to management contained some "stay the course" advice; if digital photography never attained the quality of analog film, or if networking remained the domain of low reliability modems and AOL, existing franchises around film processing, rapid print making, and analog image science were safe.

What we missed, however, was that "storytelling" didn't mean using photographs for a storyboard or digital scrapbook. One of our scenarios was called "Personal Spielberg" describing a desktop digital editing and composition application. We had the ideas right, but the players wrong; it's not the digital photography players who built iMovie; it was Apple. And the demand for digital home studio output exploded with YouTube. We didn't know what a Long Tail was, and therefore we weren't looking for one. On a more practical and personal scale, though, storytelling circa mid-2008 is abundantly clear if you join FaceBook; your photo albums show another face to your life, with or without captions. Add some book lists, favorite music, share with your friends, and perhaps the Moody Blues were right about the Our scenarios were nicely constructed but completely missed the dominance of social networking as a continually evolving story, pictures as color commentary.

Scenario planning is much more of a strategy tool than an innovation tool, because it builds on known and project constraints and asks "What would you do if?" type questions. It doesn't push the boundaries of using technology to change the strength or force of those constraints.

More recently, Kim and Mauborgne at the Harvard Business School have promoted the Blue Ocean model for innovation. The basic premise is that "red ocean" markets are those already in existence, with each player growing as a function of overall market growth and through taking market share from each other. The blue ocean strategy focuses on finding new, non-consumptive markets based on the relative value of product or service features demanded by consumers in those markets. The disruptions come from combining the most valued features in non-intuitive ways to create a new market. Bagged lettuce combines the produce aisle and the convenience of the prepared foods aisle in the supermarket; nobody knew it would be a billion dollar business. One of my favorites (indicated by waistline) is Pret-A-Manger, the UK based sandwich shop that combines the speed of ordering lunch in a fast food outlet with the fresh ingredients and healthier eating choices of a local deli. The name itself is a play on pret-a-porter, the notion of high-end clothing (or food) ready to consume without the time intervention of a tailor or the guy slicing turkey one sandwich at a time.

Blue ocean strategies overlap in two ways with the digital world. First, open source software is a key entry point to non-consumptive markets. The best way to get someone who has never used your software to try it, evaluate it, or take an interest is to remove all barriers to entry. The analysts (and occasional) customers who ask me "How will Sun make money by giving things away?" miss the fact that "giving things away" is a blue ocean strategy that expands markets, while "making money" is a red ocean tactic to compete and take share in those newly entered fields of play. The second dip of the network endpoint in the blue ocean is the use of blue ocean strategic thinking to define new, small markets and identify the attributes that drive consumers to value them. It's Chris Anderson's Long Tail as seen by an MBA, not a web site developer. And I have to give Anderson credit for the most recent, and possibly most powerful, Long Tail model for describing innovation as the confluence of more products, better, lower-cost distribution, and a transition from mass-produced hits to niche-consumed special interests.

Disclaimer: the closest I've ever been to an MBA was going to a professional wrestling event at the old Boston Garden with two friends from Harvard Business School and a guy who used to call himself The Divine Bruce Yam (it involves Elliot Spitzer, so we'll stop there). That won't stop me from formulating a theory and giving examples, though.

If I had to pick one thing that's been at the heart of Sun's culture of innovation for 25 years, it's been the insistence that everything be networked, and assuming that the density of connectedness is monotonically increasing. If you take our vision of "everyone and everything connected to the network" (or, I could argue, "a network" where there may be multiple, sometimes disjoint meshes), then getting in front of the disruption wagon means looking at the set of constraints facing your business, and relaxing them to the point where you'd do things differently. That spurs innovation in strategy, products, services, and market mechanisms. Best example I can think of: When Jeff Bezos realized that ordering a book from an online catalog was independent from the source of the catalog, and therefore you could relax the constraint of equating "catalog" and "retail book store inventory." As soon as you could order any book in print, amazon.com had disrupted the scale of online retailing.

So what are the constraints you can relax, spurring the need to think about markets or products in innovative ways?

Time. Time can be bent in non-relativistic ways by focusing on real-time as a customer service or data access attribute. How long does it take to get to the piece of data that you need to make a decision, refute a claim, or answer a customer question? The answer isn't always about writing neat SQL scripts or having an in-house search engine, because they are bound by the meta data (or lack thereof) that enables those result sorting mechanics. One part of the standard time-space trade-off is to optimize for available space (for example, making a large data set memory resident to avoid paging); however, space constraints benefit from Moore's Law while time constraints do not. Adding tags to data, building indices based on context, and aggregating data based on user input and feedback drives the time constraint. "Real time" also refers to the latency limited world; if you aren't thinking about solving these problems within the attention span of the average click-driven user, someone else will.

Space. Not only the classic counterpart to time optimization, relaxing a space constraint also means "removing assumptions about the solution space." Example: Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a model for "crowd sourcing" work across a much larger pool of talent. Just as amazon.com flattened the book selling space by making the entire books in print catalog available, any innovation that broadens the input space (what can be worked on) or the transform space (who can do the work) is going to drive a space disruption in the market. Almost all of these space disruptions rely on networking technologies to match the flattened input and transform spaces with each other, be it crowd sourcing or the Hadoop/MapReduce model of moving computation to storage instead of the conventional reverse approach.

Developers or Contributors. Who are the developers for your applications? Your own IT department, Facebook developers who may engage with affiliated user communities, open source developers whose work products you consume, or commercial software companies' employees? Or some combination of all of them? The "new" definition of developer includes content as well as application developer; user generated content in training, virtual worlds, and support has become de rigeur. Taking advantage of a larger pool of developers and contributors is only possible if you relax some of the classic constraints enforced around rights to use. Recently I heard Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life) talk about building customer premises Second Life worlds; Linden Labs gives away an edge of the network (and the rights they'd normally assert to be the ones building that world) knowing that users will want to populate those new boundary territories with walls, furniture, props, and other items purchased in the 2L economy. Relaxing the constraint about intellectual property distribution creates a new market player, and by extension, adds developers to the 2L network of economies.

Relaxing a constraint often leads to a surfeit of a resource formerly considered a rate-limiting factor. My introduction to this surplus economy thinking happened in 1985, in the days when a "network connection" meant you were on CSnet and could use a soldering iron, when I was on the staff of the Massive Memory Machine project. At that time, what was "massive" is less than you get in a single DIMM today, but challenging "conventional wisdom" about time-space trade-offs continues to drive innovation in computing. ( Aug 11 2008, 05:35:51 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Olympic Proportions I'm regularly blown away by the comparative "regular guy" nature of hockey players, from kids to adult beer leaguers to professionals who will stop to talk, meet fans, and sign anything (or anyone) at just about anytime.

Today's coolness: I'm on my way to San Francisco, in Newark airport for a flight delay that is now just about as long as the flight itself (hey, mid-day thunderstorms will do that, no harm, no foul on this one). At this point I'm unclear as to whether I renewed my airport lounge membership, or what affinity card works where. So I tried, was given a polite "no", and then the guy in line next to me says "He can be my guest, he's a fellow hockey guy." All because I'm wearing my favorite "Miracle on Ice" t-shirt, attempting to channel a bit of the spirit of Lake Placid to our athletes in Beijing (wrong season, wrong sports, right idea).

Turns out my line-mate of the random rotation plays (more seriously than I do) in Chicago, is equally delayed here in Newark, and was just being nice. You want the antidote to air (or road) rage? Play more hockey. ( Aug 11 2008, 05:07:19 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Friday August 01, 2008

Deconstructing My Cell Phone I suffer from information sprawl in a bad way. Partly this is due to loving paper notes, partly due to the proliferation of devices in tow, partly due to just not having the incentive to consolidate and clean up. My address book is a virtual data center in miniature: a little bit of everything, on every device, with every known format, operating system and application. Yes, there are even some text files that I search with grep. I've managed to combine most sticky notes, back of envelope notes, and electronic formats into a Mac OS address book, but the last frontier in data clean up remained the most formidable: my cell's phone book.

Truth be told, there's a backstory: My wife and I need new cell phones. Mine is so abused that the LCD screen has burn-in of my wallpaper and I've worn the finish off of the hinge areas. We had decided to take advantage of the fact that we have common calendar, address book and email info by getting iPhones, and were even ready to pull the proverbial trigger until my wife asked how I was planning on moving her LG VX8300 phone address book to the iPhone.

7-11 moment: Big gulp. This is the moment when I should have realized that deciding to do this electronically would lead to several hours of playing with device drivers, scripts and freeware, and the smarter answer would have been "I'll retype them manually." But that would have removed the nerdly fun. And it wouldn't have given me the satisfaction of being able to tell my current cellular carrier "No, thanks, I don't want to pay $75 to have you transfer my phone info to another of your phones." The challenge, then: extract phone book and picture data from two phones for less than $75 and before the weekend.

Plug the puppy in. Maybe this is a derivative of spending way too much time pretending to be a sound man, or buying useless cables at Radio Shack, but my first step was to buy the right USB cable to at least see the device from something with a keyboard and an operating system. First (and only) expenditure: USB Data Cable for the LG VX-8300. Under $20 with shipping.

Get the drivers. I'll admit the truth: I do most of this experimentation on an old Windows machine because I can always reload it when (not if) something goes pear-shaped and I roach my test bed. Found the drivers for the LG phone in a number of places ( this is an interesting index of available USB drivers); got the PC to see the phone on the first shot, which is far better than my experience with, say, most HP printers.

Extract the goodies. I downloaded bitpim to browse the phone's internals. Initial install of bitpim produced nothing, so I reverted to watching it fail in command line mode, installing a missing C library DLL and then making sure I had a functional python environment. Total time spent making freeware do my evil bidding: about half an hour. And with much better net net results than Randall Munroe would imply.

Inside of an hour, I had all of the phonebook entries off of my phone (about 170) and my wife's phone (almost 500), converted to CSV files and imported into our respective Mac OS address books. Now I can go back to the originally planned manual edit and cleanup, but I'm vindicated in thinking that I could save a few hours (and tedium-induced errors) with the right kit. There's a deeper, more ponderous issue here: who really owns the data on your cell phone -- you or your carrier? If it's impossible to extract the data and convert it, electronically, into another format, then effectively your carrier owns your phone book. Issues of data ownership are what got Scoble booted from Facebook, and are likely to pop up in increasing numbers as we try to move our personal pointers (and that's what phone numbers and friend information and "links" are, all due respect to entry level programming instructors who say "pointers are like phone numbers") between data realms. ( Aug 01 2008, 03:53:24 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Friday July 18, 2008

Not So Wild Blue Yonder Five thoroughly marginal tips for flying cross-country on a regular basis:

1. Pack an extra t-shirt in your carry-on. Several times, I've been thankful that I had a clean, dry shirt to swap out for one that was covered in coffee, soda, or something worse (only once, but it was really vile). If you don't wear it, you can roll it up and use it as a neck pillow. Current t-shirt of choice for redeyes: Underarmour relaxed fit short sleeve: soft and warm.

2. Instant oatmeal packs and a spoon > "Something in a wrap". Sometimes you don't quite know what the meal is, and other times you can decipher the wrapper that's been heat-welded to its contents and decide you'd rather pass. A few packets of instant oatmeal and a spoon are a wonderful alternative. Have the galley attendant pour 1/2 a cup of hot water into an insulated cup, you are Sir Mix-A-Lot of Row 12.

3. Sit on the aisle opposite your handed-ness. Lefties like me do better in the D-E-F right-hand side of the plane, particularly on the aisle. If you're trying to work on the brain annhilator strength puzzle, your writing arm and elbow can drift (somewhat safely) into the aisle rather than the midsection of the person next to you. A window seat yields the same benefit if the middle seat is empty, versus banging your elbow on the side of the plane as you frantically scribble notes for the talk you're due to give upon arrival.

4. Check your seat for power and width. The newer Continental 737-800 equipment has in-seat power, but only about halfway back. Many of the seemingly extra legroom bulkhead row seats are actually less comfortable than those in regular rows since they have the tray tables set between seats, reducing their effective width a few inches. For those of us in the shape more commonly called "round", cross-row seat spacing matters as much as seat pitch. I'm a big fan of SeatGuru to get a projection of my bin-packing problem.

5. Dunkin Donuts is portable. I bring the small individual serving sized vacuum packs of ground coffee and my own filters; any hotel with a coffee maker turns into a mobile Dunkies outpost. Since I'm an iced coffee fiend, I'll make a pot the night before, let it cool in the in-room fridge, and then add ice to my DD-logo cup for a bit of the home coffee field advantage on the road. ( Jul 18 2008, 12:43:16 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Tuesday July 15, 2008

Plumbing the Depths It was one of those weekends when I did many things, but didn't see a common theme emerge until I spent Sunday afternoon with my hands submerged in a failed attempt to blend art and plumbing and realized I'd had a trio of plumbing references as the meta data for my weekend. But I'm cutting to the chase....

Friday night: One of my all-time favorite summer activities is to announce Williamsport Little League Tournament games at the NJ District level, mixing up my own brand of John Sterling with equal parts radio DJ and CB radio operator. Given travel schedules and the fact that I'm no longer on the local Little League board, I get a chance to do about one game a summer. This past Friday night, I got to the ball field to find out that one of the teams had withdrawn from the tournament, their short post season flushed before it had begun.

Saturday night: Rush at the PNC Bank Arts Center. After having seen Rush in Philadelphia a month ago, I was expecting a repeat of the same amazing show. But having read Peart's Roadshow I should have known of the variation in venues, and how the musicians themselves often feel a show is only "adequate" or "competent", not the exhilarating experience those of us who paid $100 a ticket thought we were enjoying. Saturday's Rush show suffered from significant reductions in the lighting rigging, such that the "spaceship" type lights that normally ascend and descend toward the stage were fixed along the stage's ceiling. Much worse, the sound quality was "Delaware River mud" at best, with bass suffering from echoes and very tinny vocals (I know, I know, Geddy Lee sounds tinny in Carnegie Hall). I forgot how much the acoustics in the PNC Bank Arts Center resemble that of a concrete arena bathroom, and I can also see why Peart refuses to use corporate sponsor names when recalling stops in the roadshow.

Sunday night: I decide, after a fun-filled trip to Home Depot, to attack the two Kohler Rialto toilets in our house that are testing my patience. Toilet plumbing isn't really all that complicated, but when a former software engineer is facing a very low profile, very small tank plumbing fixture armed with a toolbelt and extension cord, only bad things can happen. In the words of Al Bundy, nobody appreciates a toilet for the work of technology that it is, and that's probably because in some designer's efforts to hide its function, it's function got too complicated. Charles Mingus used to say (with reference to jazz music) that anyone could take something simple and make it complicated; only genius could take the complicated and make it simple. This bit of plumbing was the work of the anti-genius; however; two hours, one session with the drill press, four different screwdrivers, a home-made shim, and one custom-cut fitting down the drain (literally) later, I think both toilets are functional.

If I get home to find they're not, I'm unbolting both plumbing fixtures and using them as lawn seats at the PNC Bank Arts Center. Art imitates art. ( Jul 15 2008, 01:09:39 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Thursday July 10, 2008

Ghost Rider Just finished Neal Peart's Ghost Rider, the story of his "healing road" of motorcycle travels after the tragic deaths of his daughter and wife within 10 months of each other. Normally I find travel literature really boring; I'd rather go and explore and get a sense of places first-hand than have context prescribed for me. But Peart uses the travelogue to establish the context for his moods, his thoughts, and in the second half of the book, a series of letters to his friend Brutus (who co-stars in Roadshow: Landscape with Drums, the successor story to Ghost Rider).

Snippets of Rush lyrics (written by Peart) appear at the opening and close of various chapters, and as adjuncts Peart provides along the way. It's eerie to see how some of his attitudes and thinking pre-tragedy shaped his recovery after those events; it's even eerier the Rush CD Roll the Bones deals with death and matters of circumstance, written long before Peart experienced those first-hand. At the close of the book, he describes the process by which he began to pen lyrics again, for the Rush CD Vapor Trails (and it's easy to pick up on the themes that later braced that CD, starting with small personal victories).

I turned the last page of the book last night, and was left with two striking thoughts that paired with a difficult day of work:

1. Tormented by time and space where he was, Peart rode his motorcyle. Fast. Speed and distance (changes in space over time) counted for more than direction. Forward progress.

2. He rediscovered hope by building on the things that gave him joy: first his motorcycle, then nature, then caring about the environment, and eventually meeting his second wife.

I put on Rush's Snakes & Arrows, a CD about hope and faith, in some ways the third part of the Peart mental travelogue, on the way home. It's audio Anne Lamott. ( Jul 10 2008, 09:56:37 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Facebook For Business I get (at times) grief for investing as much time as I do on Facebook, from creating groups to seeking out friends to thinking about how to build small, vibrant communities. One of my friends claims it's my competitive nature that makes me a "friend hound;" my kids insist I do this mostly to embarrass them (as if other embarrassment vectors weren't sufficient).

As I was reviewing the "Missing Manual" (O'Reilly/Pogue Press) for Facebook, I scribbled notes about business uses for the social networking site, from promoting themes and memes to building a readership to locating new channels for ideas. One of those channels hit me head-on a few weeks ago -- an old friend found me on Facebook, read some of my Sun blog entries that get imported as notes, and decided I might make an interesting interview for the Innovations Exchange for which she consults.

Today that Facebook "friending" turned into about 45 minutes of interview (which I'll recap another evening) and hopefully will show up on their site as a thought piece on where technology can disrupt the healthcare provider market. ( Jul 10 2008, 12:16:29 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Tuesday July 08, 2008

Raising the Roof: Sustainability Through Two Centuries Spent a vacation weekend in Montreal (and honestly, truly did no any work for four days, including blogging, reading email, or even texting friends from work). A work de-emphasis didn't stop me from thinking about architecture and sustainability, however, and those thoughts were front and center as I toured the Basilica de Notre Dame and the Olympic Stadium.

Flying into Montreal, it's easy to pick out the 1976 Olympic venue: at 175 meters, the inclined tower is the tallest of its kind. Along with the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, it's one of the few buildings you ascend via an "inclinator" rather than a purely vertical elevator. The stadium sports a permanent cover, making it look something like a piece of Tupperware encasing something that has run afoul of your refrigerator. Original architectural plans for the Olympic venue included a retractable roof, pulled up like a magician snatching a tablecloth from under a full place setting. However, the roof wasn't finished in time for the 1976 Olympics and after several design failures that resulted in ripped, torn, and unusable stadium covers, the current lid was put in place with a vengeance. In only thirty years, the Olympic stadium suffered structural failures, lost its primary tenant (the Montreal Expos) and now sits as a stark (and tall) reminder of bad long-term design. Quebec residents still feel "sustainability" of a different sort, as tobacco taxes fund the remaining financial burden of the stadium. Conversely, the spectacular Basilica of Notre Dame is now nearly 200 years old, has survived a fire and several reconstructions, and operates as a tourist and religious center on a daily basis. Partly, I believe the difference in long-term perspectives is due to the differences in the communities responsible for the buildings. The Basilica dates back to the founding of Montreal in the 1640s, and has had a strong community interested in its upkeep, structural integrity and long-term existence. Looking up at the ornate ceiling, completely supported by the exterior walls, I was reminded of Danny Hillis' discussion of the very long-term planning for the 14th-century era College Hall at New College at Oxford. Having a community commitment to anything, whether a building or a wiki, greatly improves the odds that thing survives in functioning form for more than a (technical) generation.

( Jul 08 2008, 08:53:25 PM EDT ) Permalink

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Thursday July 03, 2008

Musical Taxonomies and Global Economies On our walk between the hotel and biergarten for dinner last night, a few of us stopped into a local music store on the Ku'dam in Berlin. This is one of my favorite ways to get a sense of local culture: stop into a local retail store. This music shop was 80% equivalent to what you'd find at a good used-CD store in the states but the classification system for the CD trays made up the other 20% that was unique.

In addition to the Rock A-Z dividers and a separate section for new releases, there was an almost equal-sized area for German artists, which was further broken down by genre. If I didn't have (literally) half of our European management team tapping its toes to a different (hungry) beat, I would have browsed the selection of German Hip-Hop. And I was thoroughly impressed by the dedicated and sizeable stack of Kraftwerk, although I was somewhat disappointed that Edgar Froese didn't have his own section (in all seriousness, I would have picked up a German pressing rather than download his material from iTunes just to see the liner notes).

Hanging out with Global Sales and Services Chief Geek Jim Baty has given me an appreciation for artists in general, and what Jim calls "the discomfort that comes with good art." Alas, the discomfort of long queues for weisswurst took precendence over further exploration of the deustche music scene, but not before I noticed that in the "world music" section, there was a divider labeled "Klezmer/Gypsy."

I'd never considered klezmer orchestras as a variation on gypsy music, or derived from Central European roots rather than the stuff of Hassidic tales of Tsarist Russia, but it stimulated an interesting conversation for the rest of our walk. Turns out that Inka, part of our GSE team in Prague refers to "gypsy music" as something that makes you feel energetic but you're not really sure you like it because it's crazy music. That's a more accurate description of klezmer than that of a friend who tabbed it "high speed oompah with jazz clarinet." Yes, the discomfort of good art. In the case of my affiliation with klezmer music, it started around 5th grade when I was suffering through clarinet lessons. Occasionally my father would dig up his old "Russian music fake books", primarily badly printed, hand-written transcriptions of klezmer songs that had survived on aural tradition for decades. We'd play a few songs together, a little clarinet duo having fun with the score to definitely capture "energy" and "crazy music" at the same time.

Bottom line: this is why meta data matters. Whatever the surface level taxonomy - CD shelves, file labels, bookstore directions to "file under programming languages" - it only represents one view of the actual bits or atoms. What we associate with the content in terms of related concepts, family memories, national references or other, alternate filing systems adds to the appeal and reach of the content. What's frightening is that I'm starting to think that klezmer isn't so much of an acquired taste as a genetic predisposition to take liberties with musical tradition: at least that's how I explained my son's arco rendition of the bass line to Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused" at the end of a school concert. Discomfort, good art, crazy music, but I'm not sure where you file it. ( Jul 03 2008, 06:03:53 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

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Wednesday July 02, 2008

Random Thoughts En Route to Berlin There's very little glamorous about business travel. Continental has managed to maintain a perfect batting average in the past three weeks: five out of five flights have been an hour or more late. I'm going to spend about 24 hours in Berlin, and while it's the second time I'm visiting the city on business, I've never seen the remnants of the Berlin wall, the Brandenberg gate, or bought a Steiff bear. Hoping to correct some of these cultural deficiencies on this trip, if there are a few spare hours between our last plenary and bulk food.

Music: "In the Cage", Genesis Live Over Europe; "Pass the Peas", Maceo Parker Roots & Grooves (the bass line and guitar solo in this version just kill); "Ozark", Pat Metheny Group As Falls Wichita; "Your Majesty Is Like A Creme Donut", Hatfield and the North, The Rotter's Club; "Lines on My Face", Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive. There's probably some bizarre Cambridge (UK) connection between Genesis and Hatfield; I'm waiting for someone at our GSE meeting to fill me in (last year, someone handed me a sampler CD of Porcupine Tree and I was hooked).

Words: Finishing up Rush drummer Neal Peart's Ghost Rider, the travelogue of his 55,000 mile journey during which he attempted to re-assemble his life after the deaths of his wife and daughter. I read his Road Show: Landscape with Drums and adored the travel writing interspersed with behind the scenes concert vignettes so I went one level deeper into his work. Great backdrop for having seen Rush just a few weeks ago; the books provider greater appreciation of Peart's lyrics on the last two Rush releases.

Threads: I may be able to complete the hat trick of Diesel Sweeties venue-appropriate shirts: I'm currently sporting the metallic Clango shirt to arrive in Berlin, a tangential nod to Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk; on my way to Montreal on Friday I'll cross the border in my Canada 2.eh maple leaf shirt and then for California the week after, it's Electric Sheep and obscure Blade Runner references. The electric sheep shirt gets only slightly fewer stares than my xkcd sudo shirt, but that's part of un-glamour of business travel. I tend to travel comfortably unless I'm going directly from plane to meeting; if I have time to change I'm going to represent the Sun brand in my behavior (despite any number of delays, bad meals and weak coffee servings) but dress code reverts to my peculiar brand of culture. ( Jul 02 2008, 10:33:50 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

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Non-Random Thoughts On The Way to Berlin If I'm going to make a serious effort to improve my writing, and maintain something of a regular cadence, then I should attempt to blog every work day. I don't want to make yet another resolution on some calendar boundary condition that only returns "true" for a few days. I'm going to make a concerted effort to write with the clockwork regularity of gulping my daily Dunkin Donuts allowance: that means something every work day. One of the deciding factors is a need to be more transparent about what I'm trying to drive in Global Systems Engineering, and how that relates to our customers, our markets and the industries in which Sun has a presence. There's no better way to get that transparency than to essentially open up the daily diary.

Today's plan: I'm writing this 39,000 feet over France (listening to Genesis Live Over Europe, which just struck me as coincidental) on my way to Berlin to meet with the systems engineering management of our entire European region. We're about to get into the thick of kick-off season, where each country or group of countries hosts a meeting that's one part strategy setting and one part celebration. I try to convey my messages to as broad a cross-section of our management team as I can, allowing them to translate into local language, local emphasis and local culture. My themes this year: how we are going to grow into the space created by the "big trends" in computing infrastructure, how we are going to fuel that growth through cross-field organization teamwork, and how we equip those teams with stronger technical skills and communities in which to share, grow and highlight the applications of those skills. Customers, Competencies, Communities. That's FY09 in a GSE nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Tim O'Reilly. ( Jul 02 2008, 04:54:32 AM EDT ) Permalink

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Tuesday July 01, 2008

Happy New Year Happy New Year to my fellow Sun employees. While most of the world aligns to the Gregorian calendar and maps major events into the January to December timeframe, Sun operates on a July 1 fiscal year, putting it in an equivalence class with two of my other favorite things: the NHL and Princeton University.

For all things financial -- sales attainment, spending, goal progress, or annual giving contributions -- those of us who roll on July 1 reset the counters to zero today. It's a bit auspicious, but it's also exciting because the new year also brings new strategies, new tactics, and new challenges. The NHL free agency season is always a time (for me) of thinking strategically: who do my beloved NJ Devils need, in what role? What missing ingredient will make them hungry, hard-hitting, and perhaps even more prolific goal scorers? It's a clean slate for general managers, coaches and marketing organizations. That sense of building a team and refocused energies on the next season's goals is precisely what permeates the next few weeks at Sun.

The Princeton University July 1 fiscal year never really mattered to me until this year: as of midnight last night, I'm a member of the 25th Reunion Class, the semi-official "parent class" of this year's annual giving campaign, punctuated with what is typically the largest post-graduation gathering of classmastes in June. It's another sign that I'm officially an adult, but it's also refreshing. I began thinking about a variety of 25th anniversaries: the first NJ Devils game that I attended was in 1983 (I sat with my cousins under the scoreboard and we heard the non-stop click-click of the relays turning the scoreboard bulbs on and off for three hours) and my son won his first NJ state ice hockey tournament medal on the 25th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice. Both involve hockey, but both also involve putting some element of perspective on events -- I now go to games with my son, and rather than cheering for Chico Resch in the Devils' net, we cheer for him in the Devils' broadcast booth to the left of our seats. And by seeing the parallels, we have another bit of history to share as another parent class another 25 years hence.

I'm looking forward to renewing old friendships, to meeting my classmates' kids, and to participating in my class' capital campaign. I'm not the guy who calls and asks for large sums of money (too close to the day job); I will be leading a "participation team" whose goal is to get classmates to give at any level, just to show support and connect back to the university. I explain my motivation for this work derviative by re-telling a story I've rarely dusted off. 27 years ago, while attempting to complete the freshman physical education requirement, I decided to sign up for "athletic conditioning" not realizing it was a euphemism for "spring football camp." The first eight weeks weren't too bad, but the first day of actual "conditioning" involved running, up-downs, more running, rolls, sprints, more running, more up-downs, and somewhere along the way I think my left lung decided to go on strike. There was no actual blocking involved, or my insides would have liquified. What I remember vividly was Billy M, a guy I vaguely knew from our dorm and a class, telling me "point your head up, breathe in hard through your nose, blow out through your mouth." I cannot vouch for the medical authority of this aerobic guidance, but it worked. I've used that breathing trick when I'm exercising (rare), stressed out (less rare) or need to focus (frequently). Each time I do, I think of Billy M putting an arm around me so that I wasn't trampled by 300 pound offensive tackles, and I'm thankful that even though I was never on his team, he considered me enough of a teammate in some context -- classmate, fellow wheezer, survivor of multiple papers on modern European authors -- to offer advice.

Good teams and good teammates can even overcome even the obstacles posed by an asthmatic nerd, without anybody getting hurt. Happy New Year, Billy M. ( Jul 01 2008, 03:08:41 PM EDT ) Permalink

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