The task before me is to write the content for the website.  The “services” page, no problem.  Even the home page wasn’t a horrible undertaking.  But this “about us” page is killing me.  I want it to be personal, not corporate. I want it to be interesting, maybe a little amusing, and direct.  Because it’s supposed to be about “us” and that’s who we are.  We work hard, we do our best for all our customers, we’re reliable, honest, and capable.  But getting that into an “about us” page is proving nigh unto impossible for me.  I’m super-frustrated and roadblocked.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with, and thinking about the publish-subcribe concept.  I’m an enterprise guy, so that’s the arena I’m working in. Drawing inspiration from Harper , building on the work of Anders Conbere , and using the excellent rabbiter module, I’ve worked up a proof of concept that sends status updates from a document management system via xmpp to a micro-blog (For ease of reading, I’m just going to call it twitter).  Which led to more thought.  So many things could be powerfully enabled by this technology.  A twitter feed of your voicemail?  Helpdesk feed? Production stats?  It’ll need a widget, probably built using  Titanium, because we’re strong open-source advocates. Groups should be fairly trivial given the ejabberd framework, and dropping to a private conversation should be seamless as well.  OAuth can take care of trust and authentication issues.  A timeline view needs to be an option, and I’ll have to do some research on that one, but I doubt it’s insurmountable. An “important” flag would be nice too. 

Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are always welcome!

I’ve reached the tipping point in my ongoing quest to get Time Warner cable to provide working versions of the services that I pay for every month.  I have one HD DVR and one standard digital cable box, with their Ultimate Platinum Super Duper Every Channel Under the Sun Plan.  And virtually none of it works right.

The HD box music choice channels don’t work.  The sound drops out for 5-10 minutes at a time at irregular intervals.

The Cable box in the bedroom ONLY gets channels 1-13 and the music choice channels, although on this one the music choice channels work correctly is finally working right after approximately 137 reboots.

Customer “service” has been onsite twice, both times leaving things in exactly the same state they were pre-visit.

I’ve had enough.  There’s really no good place to put a dish, but at this point, if I have to build a tower to hold the damn dish, that’s what I’ll do.  I’ve had enough.

In the last few years, the pharmacological industry has unleashed on the public a smorgasbord of products to improve our lives. Need a harder penis, take a pill. Need hair? Got ya covered. Whatever the ailment, we now have a pill. And recently they’ve even come up with a drug that will help you grow longer *EYELASHES*. It’s called Latisse, and they’re projecting they’ll sell $300 Million dollars worth in 2009. 

Now certainly these are all huge steps forward in the advancement of mankind, and I’m certainly not going to presume I am the authority on what people should value in their lives, but seriously. Eyelashes?

Perhaps my friends at KRAPPS should expand their horizons and start just pointing out general  krapp in our lives.

Back in 2001 I was working for a company called Siemens as a senior network engineer. We were living in California at the time, and my wife was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy with our third daughter. I’d been working on projects mainly in California, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, doing network design and managing implementations.

On Friday, September 8th, the head of the Eastern seaboard of our company called me and asked me if I would be willing to take on an 18 month project, re-architecting the network of the New York City MTA. I didn’t really want to spend a year and a half in New York, with the new baby on the way and given the difficult pregnancy, and so I resisted, to the point where I told them I would be forced to quit rather than take the assignment. They relented, and sent a friend and colleague of mine, a Mr. Randy Drake, in my place. Four days later I watched in horror as the workplace I was supposed to be assigned to crumbled to the ground. Mr. Drake died on that day. It could have been me. Out of respect to him and his family and friends, I try to live each day as if it might be my last. You should do the same.

I started as a corporate wonk. Working for IBM, AT&T, Mitsubishi, Citibank and others, I designed and built global networks and information systems. But after a while I saw a need. I started my own business with the idea of bringing the technology available to the large corporation to the SME market at an affordable price. The strategy worked well. My customers got cutting-edge technology, and it gave them a business advantage. Well, I think now the landscape has tilted, with the advantages moving toward the SME, and it may be time for me to rejoin the corporate workforce.

You see, back in the day, BigCo had the advantage. They had research and development. They had big budgets and talented personnel. And the SME market had a lot of “computer engineers” that really had no clue.

What’s changed? Well, lots of things. Dropping prices for computing power, open source software, and affordable gear designed for the SME market all have played their parts, so much so that it seems clear to me that innovation is now flowing the other direction. What starts in the SME market, now percolates to BigCo. As the larger companies try to put lipstick on their pigs with a more “human” presence, they face the daunting task of trying to re-learn how to innovate and adapt. It may be time for me to try to make my mark once again with a forward-looking BigCo, to see if I can bring the lessons I’ve learned from my smaller customers back to the world where I started. Seems like a daunting task, but if I find the right environment, I think I can make a difference. I’m gonna start polishing up that resume.

But not here. Not now. Not like this.