ExpressToll makes no sense to me. Why do I have to have a stupid plastic box stuck to my windshield in order to get a better rate?
I have the dumb box, but the majority of the time the license plate cameras capture the toll anyway.
So obviously, the transponder isn't actually required. They figured out I was there, and they figured out that it was my account and not a random driver. Why do I need the transponder?
In fact how many of you have ever changed the battery in your transponder? One of mine has a battery test button (not the other), but why would I ever click it? Why put it in the window? Why do I need the transponder?
I set up an account with these guys a long time ago. I think that makes me a 'better' customer than one who hasn't (they get my money ahead of time). But because I'm a better customer, I have to stick a brick on my window? I'm clearly not understanding the logic here. Why do I need this transponder?
I just leave them at home on my workbench now. It seems to make no difference, yet…..
I was on the toll way last week and they were broadcasting on the big signs a plea to make sure you attach your transponder to your windshield. I suspect people (like me) have stopped doing it because the basic logic of the situation says, why?
Am I missing something here? This whole situation is making no sense to me.
With the exception of software development, I don't learn well by reading. For some reason I could always read factual reference books I'm interested in with near perfect retention. Everything else - not so much. In fact I rarely finished them (or successfully start them). Show me a management theory book and I want to blow my brains out.
A while back I wrote a couple posts about the difference between the VP of Engineering role and the CTO role in a company. Of course this is only my opinion but it's based on my experiences of doing the roles and having been around people who performed the roles.
I was recently in an email exchange with a few people where the subject of the Sales and Business Development came up with regards to another company. The two roles were being used interchangeably which I took exception to. Someone on the thread suggested it would be a good blog post. Always looking for a blog post, I decided to do another in my series of, "Stuff I probably could have read but learned instead because I don't pay attention to things that bore me"
Sales
Ideally a sales person sells something you have defined as being "the product" and the company has likely sold before (at least once). Sales people by my experience are people-people. They love their job because they sincerely like to interact with people of all types. The job is a game or frame work for them to get people to do what they want, or more specifically when they want them to do it. The relationship with the customer is their most prized asset and they will tell you that. Creating things is not likely their main motivation. In other words I haven't met a lot of sale people, who paint, or write or build furniture. In fact most seem to gravitate toward sports, or other competitive activities that further the conquest of social situations (good and bad). They want something well defined, easy to sell, rinse-repeat. I have met sales people that like the challenge of selling an "ok" product, but most want to be associated with a "kick ass" product. Sales people are generally 100% money driven which is simply the yardstick of success they use to judge how they are doing. In fact the more of their monetary success comes from an overachievement bonus, the happier they are.
Business Development
A business development person is generally a much more holistic thinker in a business sense. A good business development person probably likes that a product may not be completely defined or even viable yet because this represents raw, malleable material used to obtain a goal. Business development thrives on trying to find innovative answers to simultaneous business problems. For instance, how can I get my customers to stock more product, get the inventory out of my warehouse, and recognizing revenue sooner. Or, I know a customer costs me $22 to acquire, can I pay someone with that customer $10 to promote my business to his customers and have a greater than 50% conversion? Often revenue is involved, but not exclusively. BD people are not usually money driven in my experience, more puzzle and praise driven. They want to be the person that unlocked the difficult problem. While business development people are also people oriented they don't drive toward the close, which is good and bad. Relationships are important to business development people but I find they are less "people collectors" than their sales driven brothers and sisters.
Based on the stage of the company and its maturity you may need one, the other, or both. For instance, in an earlier stage company where the product is still evolving (whether your admitting it or not), a good business development person can be critical. As part of their role they can identify the way each component needs to change by 10% to get the peg to fit. On the flip side a good business development person will get bored if you have all the knobs and dials tuned and its matter of moving stuff through the pipeline efficiently.
Conversely, having a world class sales person who knows how to get to the most influential decision maker the fastest sitting around and discussing product motivations and design issues is like four wheeling in a Ferrari – you look good doing it, but you're not going to get too far.
That's what I have learned about these roles so far. I hope I haven't offended anyone's sensibilities.
I'm sure there is a good book somewhere about this that I will likely never read J
I always wonder when video on phone calls will really take off. It has to be the most highly anticipated technology advancement that has never really happened.
I had a Skype Video call with Brad Feld today.
Without question video communicates more information and emotion. From this simple screen shot for instance you can tell certain key things not easily ascertained on a voice only call.
Brad had some bad sushi last night that clearly is still interrupting his day.
Brad has an avid exercise program going that involves spontaneously breaking into sets of chin-ups in the door way.
Someone has installed a microphone above Brads head to capture the secrets of such investments like Zynga.
Maybe Facetime on the iPhone will bring us all our calls in this kind of rich media!
Last night I decided to make grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. I don't generally do recipe posts, but it was easy and turned out amazing, so here you go..
I'm always inspired by looking at all the great food on Jacqueline's blog. I started asking around at the office for favorite ways to make Grilled Cheese. I blended a few ideas and added a few of my own additions and it turned out awesome. I took a picture because Jacqueline says it doesn't count unless you take a picture.
I used a stove top sandwich press, but I don't think it's strictly needed. I looked better than the photo and was hands down the best grilled cheese sandwich I have ever had.
Ingredients
Fontina Cheese
Edam Cheese
Sourdough Bread
Fresh Tomatoes (I grew mine)
Fresh Basil (I grew mine)
Butter
Garlic Salt
Instructions
I cut the Sourdough bread diagonal for maximum surface area. Butter one side of each piece and shake a little garlic salt on the butter. Use a 'normal' amount of cheese, whatever that means to you. Each sandwich had about 1/3 Edam and 2/3 Fontina Cheese. I put sliced fresh tomatoes from my garden with a fresh basil leaf on each tomato.
Place in pan, or in our case a sandwich press and cook till golden. The Fontina gets really soft and works great with the tomato and basil. The Edam gives it a little more flavor. The touch of garlic salt really works great with the tomato.
To give credit where it is due it's largely Colleen's recipe with me adding the Edam, Garlic Salt and Sourdough selection. Enjoy it and if you try it let me know what you think.
Hmm, I got this message about 25 times the afternoon of the 4th of July.
Someone suggested that they had seen this message when they had plugged their older iPhone into a dock in a hotel. However I didn't plug my iPhone into anything. There have been reports of holding the phone the wrong way can reduce signal strength.
Yesterday I flew into Albuquerque to see the opening night of the RUSH Time Machine Tour.
I make it a point to see RUSH a couple times on each tour. I love going to RedRocks because it's such an awesome venue, but frankly the sound usually isn't the best.
During the first leg of the Snakes & Arrows tour, in 2007, I went up to Chicago and checked out the show at the Tweeter Center south of Chicago and the sound was great. A month earlier I had seen the show at RedRocks and it seemed like the low end was missing. The problem with RedRocks is there isn't a good place for the low frequency PA cabinets and the venue slopes up at a pretty extreme angle. Add a little wind and you seem to be without low end and high end comes and goes.
Last night I was in the 7th row at Journal Pavilion, now The Hard Rock Presents - The Pavilion (whatever that means). The sound there was worth the trip - totally amazing. The venue is close to the airport literally sitting in a bowl of dirt. But, then again so is Albuquerque.
I really enjoyed the set list this time around. More so than the last tour. I was probably like 17 or so when I saw the Moving Pictures tour and have only heard some of those songs once or twice in concert and some never. It's easy to forget how amazingly strong that album was (ironically I didn't like it at the time it was released). Not liking new RUSH albums has been a historical constant for me, but I find after a few listens each becomes my new favorite. I think the first tour I saw was Permanent Waves and at the time Moving Pictures seemed too popish. I don't hear any of that now.
I really liked the mix last night and I thought the grit that Alex's guitar had on the Moving Pictures songs really brought them to life. This tour has some of the best bass riffs you will ever hear, so I hope RedRocks finds the way to bring them to us in August.
The second set is where everything really takes off. When I heard that Moving Pictures was the big draw, I thought "cool, good stuff there". But watching the entire thing played live back to back you really walk away saying, "I got to throw that thing back in my car"!
Moving Pictures is the highlight of the show.
Every tour has a new set of bumper videos that open the show, open the second half and close the show. The last video is a "get away" video that keeps everyone in their seats until the band gets away. All the videos are funny so it works well and no one leaves.
Last night I got lucky and my iPhone was able to connect to RUSH's backstage WiFi hotspot
This allowed me pretty good connectivity so I was able to upload the opening video segment right after I shot it in HD on the iPhone. These are always interesting and really funny so I had the honor of being the first upload on YouTube.
The video got picked up by RushIsABand a well known RUSH blog and started getting hits right away. They also highlighted my flickr stream so for a while there I was one of the only games in town. Pretty cool and have to say except for a few gripes the iPhone 4 did a pretty good job with the video. It needs away to adjust the aperture to keep the people in the spot light from being overexposed but the sound is really pretty good. I was right in front, right in front, of the stage right PA stack and thought for sure the sound would be totally garbled. My ears, however are still pretty garbled.
When I woke up this morning, that first upload had thousands of views and climbing. RUSH fans are pretty fanatical. I asked the people around me where they lived and no one was from New Mexico. A lot were from Texas, one couple from Toronto, others from Seattle, me from Denver. My hotel is full of RUSH tee shirts this morning. The airplane both ways had several fans making the trip.
Every tour the stage setup and props get a little more elaborate. This tour is no exception. The time machine concept is fully embraced with a whole Jules Vern vibe with custom amp cabinets that look like huge old radios and pipes and valves that blow off steam, revolve, go up and down... It's totally cool and an entire stage show. lots of cool physical props that are rare with rock shows. My favorite is the portal on the drum riser that opens and an eyeball looks around, funny.
A really cool part of the stage show is a massive full color HD screen that is the entire back stage. During the show there are live edits into the screen and combined with the aforementioned time machine looking graphics. It's by far the coolest video integrated into a live show I have ever seen and the quality of the screen is not like anything you have ever seen. This isn't some jinky jumbotron thing it's major-league. Lots of historic clips are mixed in and the screen returns to the "year" display between songs to reorient you. I really applaud whoever thought if the concept and tied it all together. It was very tight specially for show number 1 of the tour. There were small mistakes here and there but this audience could care less.
I'm excited to see the tour again in august at RedRocks. I'm just trying to decide if only one more time will be enough.
I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day. The Apps that I use on the Ipad are not the sites I visit on the web.
The top Apps I use on the Ipad in order of "time in app" are…
Mail: Mail is mail. No getting away from it.
TweetDeck: I do use this on my desktop computers and probably also the second most used app on my computer.
New York Times Editors Choice: Just well rounded news, never visit the site.
USA Today: Well rounded but a little lighter news – never visit the site.
WSJ: Good deep news, either really interesting or really boring – never visit the site.
Safari: Nothing to say about it, it's a bowl of vanilla pudding.
Flickpad: Surprisingly interesting, it gives me the visual version of facebook which is kind of more interesting than learning what everyone has done today in Mafia Wars
Flight Tracker: An amazing find. If you travel a lot it's a goto app, at least for me. I like being able to track my flight – while sitting on my flight.
Kindle: The Kindle app is actually better than the Kindle except when I'm on vacation in the Sun. I do most my reading on vacation in the sun so the real physical Kindle tends to be my 50% device for books with the Ipad the other 50%.
Looking at this makes me notice something that is key to why the Ipad works for me.
When I'm at the computer I'm working. Working almost always means for me responding to email, plugging into twitter or working on presentations. I do research on the computer as well. By contrast, when I'm not working I'm catching up with news, work news and news news, as well as people I know. Twitter is kind of a cross over. I check in with Facebook way less than before because there is no Ipad native app. As I said before, Facebook does not resonate with me, but I'm much less likely to use it now because Facebook is my non-work-time task and my non-work-time is spent on Ipad.
I see one other major takeaway if you believe I am at all a normal use case. If I was in the publishing business and specifically news, and had the resources, I would build an Ipad App. The NY Times, USA Today and WSJ simply get zero % of my attention without coming to me through an App. Having an app does not guarantee I'm interested, I don't use the NPR or BBC apps I have installed – but it does appear to be a barrier to not have one, at least with me. I visit no news sites in Safari unless they are emailed to me. If I get a link in TweetDeck I tend to stay in the embedded browser.
My suspicion is people who don't resonate with the Ipad have less modal behavior in their life.
Love it or hate it, you have to be impressed with Apple. Yesterday in the New York Times there was an article (I read on my Ipad last night) that Apple passed Microsoft as the number 1 tech company. This was annotated wed when Apples market cap of $222B exceeded Microsoft's $219B and also Google's at $151B. To me the amazing part of it all is I sincerely believe it is 100% attributable to Steve Jobs. When that guy's gone, so is Apple.
I remember talking with my Dad a few years ago about the concept of breaking up Microsoft because it had become too powerful. As I recall I was an advocate at the time. As I reflect on that I think it was simplistic and ill-informed position to take. Even the largest of companies can be supplanted; sometimes it just takes the market to shift to make it happen.
For Microsoft the market just moved out from under them. They tried hard to keep people thinking the PC is the center of the universe. But the market is much stronger than even the largest company.
For Apple, they chose to pull the market toward their idea of what it should be by producing devices that people covet. I'm actually not an Apple fanboy, I really don't like OSX and it only runs on one PC in our house of 5 or 6. However, we do have 8 or ten apple devices in our house, amazingly. Some sucked like AppleTV, but the vast majority work pretty well and at the end of the day, you want them. I don't want Windows 7 or my Dell desktop.
Emotion is a strong propellant. For Microsoft they harnessed emotion on the negative side. People became so frustrated with their products that when Apple opened the door for consumer electronics no one even wanted to try a Zune. By contrast Apple sold the vision of personal empowerment and being you. People not only bought one Ipod, they bought nine. When Apple decided to innovate the cell phone, people bought in hoards even though you can't actually make a phone call on it.
No need to regulate Microsoft, consumers are regulating it just fine.
Something happened on 5/3/2010 that isn't being explained. On 5/3 the Dow instantly plunged 1000 points in an unexplained free fall and then magically recovered. Several theories came and went but no specific explanation every stuck. Then, the next day the NASDAQ nullified trades that were "out of bounds". On the 7th the WSJ reported,
"Meanwhile a heated debate has emerged about the various rules that govern equities trading. The biggest U.S. stock exchanges Friday fired shots at one another, each alleging that the other's market model contributed to the chaos."
Here's specifically what bothers me. In my mind you don't reverse or nullify trades unless you know what happened. If the situation that resulted in this is 'unexplained' then on what grounds do you reverse millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars of trades? Some have pointed out that they simple unwound the trades, no harm no foul. Well, not really. Although the trades are reversed the market can't be dissected like that. People made other investments, based on the investments that came before. It's not like they "rolled back" the stack market as if it were a database restore.
So why did some of the trades get unwound? I think someone does know what happened and the reason that information is not public is it would erode confidence in the system, and probably for a good reason.
I am a reasonably aggressive market investor with the help of a manager that I have used for several years. I mostly invest in ETF's rather that individual stocks. I think you have to be in the market for the long haul, just as everyone says. But I also have a substantive lack of trust in computers and the software that drives them. Not Ted Bundy'esc, but rather a healthy skepticism and understanding that complex software is actually complex. It's hard to write software for every conceivable situation and it's very hard to test software correctly. Ultimately, it's not that difficult for a system to be put into a situation that is beyond is design considerations. Computer driven automated trades that hold stocks for milliseconds anyone?
I suppose this opinion comes from a career designing, writing, testing, debugging, and apologizing for software. At NASA we tested flight control software within an inch of its life and still missed stuff from time-to-time. By comparison all other software, outside that aforementioned "man rated software", is tested about 5% as rigorously in my experience.
I NEVER play any game in Las Vegas that is controlled by software. A game of chance is not a game of chance if it is controlled by someone's code to simulate chance. In fact this came up a week or two ago when someone won $42M on a slot machine the Lady Luck casino in CO. That turned out to be a machine malfunction. Really.. I'm sure it was, but I doubt it as a hardware problem.
It seems to me that software has finally reached that turning point where it can create meaningful and large scale disasters. This of course is inevitable in the evolution of automation and complex systems. It's also inevitable that these things will happen. Was 5/3 one of those situations?
All week I have been sharing emails with friends about cool Space Shuttle stuff. I suspect its all driven by the countdown to the last shuttle launch coming in the next couple months. The other night I was surfing YouTube on my family room Tivo ( Its pretty cool and apparently Google invented it last week) and found this really cool video sequence shot from cameras on the SRB's. The sequence is from launch from to splashdown of the booster which is a really unusual perspective I had never previously seen.. Very cool and worth a watch on your Computer, IPad, or soon to be on you GoogleTV (or Tivo for the last 18 months)…
Tonight my friend Tom sent me this amazing sequence taken with DSRL stills of the Shuttle from the processing facility where the shuttle is rehabbed (a huge deal), to the mate facility where it is lifted and attached to the external tank and SRB's, then rolled out to the pad and finally launched.
What is really cool about this is you see all the mechanics involved in putting all the pieces together. Between 1986 and 1992 I worked at NASA in CA. Lura and I got the opportunity to see a lot of shuttle landings at Edwards AFB. When the shuttle returned to service, after a several year hiatus, all shuttle landings were done at Edwards because they were considered lower risk for several interesting reasons (I won't go into).
Around 1990 or so I got the opportunity to go to Florida and walk through the Shuttle processing facility and the stacking facility shown in the sequence. In the processing facility I got to walk under a shuttle (which is much larger than you think) and see the connection on the belly of the shuttle where there external tank connects to the shuttle. The external tank supplies the fuel to the 3 shuttle main engines during launch. As I recall this is a 15" or 18" pipe with a flapper valve in the shuttle that shuts during the sequence of jettisoning the external tank. I remember the engineer that gave me the tour talking about how hard it was build a VERY fast high performance flapper value that's 15" (mass is your enemy when doing something fast).
After walking under the shuttle and looking into the white-room that connects to the hatch (you just don't walk into a shuttle) my host took me over to the stacking facility. This facility was built for the Apollo program to mate the sections of Saturn V Moon Rocket. In the sequence above you can see the shuttle being lifted hundreds of feet in the air and attached to the external tank and SRB's. For a point of reference when you stand in the middle of that room and look up you actually can't see the hoist mechanism at the top of the bay, it's that tall. When I was there they were in the process of lifting a shuttle like you see in time laps video. In the 30 minutes I was there the shuttle moved a matter of inches. This is NOT a fast operation.
When congress kills a new spy plane, fighter jet, or a piece of space infrastructure that has been under development for 10 years I don't think they fundamentally understand how much it costs to "start over", rather they focus on what they are saving NOW. Building this stuff is simply epic and takes huge resources that average people don't have a grasp of.
When the shuttle stops flying soon I'm not sure that most people will understand that the shuttle was likely the most complicated piece of technology every devised and built by man. The chances of a catastrophic failure of a shuttle launch is something like 1 in 75. It's simply amazing that it works that well. The shuttle was a grand engineering feat that probably, like Apollo before it, will not be appreciated until we can't do it anymore.
