Yikes

Go to http://www.keen.com/zenza1964. Read it. Enough said.

Watch Out TiVo Watchers

Laurie Sullivan from TechWeb says in the latest InformationWeek that a recent patent application filed by TiVo suggests that they plan on allowing the units to take advantage of RFID technology. With companies from all sorts of industries talking about inserting RFID chips into all sorts of products,TiVo could pick up on these in a household and customize media content on an individual basis.

Remember the RFID-equipped gallon of 2% you brought home last week? TiVo says it’s within a day of expiring. Get ready to see some very specific ads. Got Milk?

FJ,son of…Toyota Landcrusier

The Toyota Landcruiser of the 70’s and 80’s is possibly one of my all time favorite trucks,probably followed closely by the old school Jeep Wagoneer (you know the one I’m talking about). They’re big,boxy,and beautiful. The kind you see in L.L. Bean catalogs and in rural New England driven by bearded,wool-clad curmudgeons.

When I saw the picture in Forbes I knew right away what it was. It’s the 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser. Toyota’s VP of marketing says the idea is to “…step back toward the heritage of Toyota with the old FJ40 and the heritage of the original SUV”. It looks like Toyota will continue to sell the Land Cruiser as we’ve known it lately,in all it’s massive luxuriousness. It’s departed so far from it’s roots that it’s even sold under Lexus branding as the LX. That’s about as far from a working truck as you can get.

Automobile magazine gives it great reviews,although they do lament that it doesn’s have the removable roof sections that the original Cruiser did. The standard V6 version will have 245hp and 282lb-ft of torque which is higher than the competition offered by Jeep in their Wrangler Rubicon package but slightly short of the Nissan XTerra. It should also check in between 25 to 30k,depending on the trimmings.

It’s definitely different than anything out there now but I like it. There are clearly design elements taken from the original which allowed me to recognize it immediately. But as the article mentions,Toyota opted not to be too true and jump on the retro bandwagon that VW did with the new Beetle and Ford has with the Thunderbird. I like both of those cars as well. I’ve always liked the fit,finish,and reliability of Toyota so hopefully my Audi will make it to 2007 so I can take a serious look at the new FJ.

Stream of Consciousness

It was cold and clear when I stepped outside to get something out of the car. Maybe it was the crunching of my boots on the snow or the crisp air or the stars in the sky or the darkness or being alone and surrounded by trees but it made me think of the Battle of the Bulge. How cold were those guys sitting outside with ill-fitting coats and boots (if they had them at all) waiting to fight. It was about 5° here yesterday. How cold was it there? What was that like?

That made me think of the HBO series “Band of Brothers” which follows Easy Company from the first days of the war through the very end. I’ve heard rumors that HBO plans to make another series following another company,possibly one that served in the Pacific Theater. When? I’ve watched those ten episodes from the boxed set about five times each since getting them a year ago. It definitely ties with Lord of the Rings for title of my favorite epic.

Lord of the Rings,what a great trilogy. Peter Jackson did an amazing job. What does he have planned for King Kong? I hear it’s long. The reviewer on NPR last night said 3 hours 7 minutes. He also said Jackson probably could have shortened it to 3 hours 5 minutes if he took out all the unnecessary boring stuff. That sounds like a glowing endorsement.

Then I went back inside. It’s funny how the mind works.

A Quick Study

I’ve learned two things already in my new position.

1. Only a sucker shows up for a meeting on time.

   Maybe it’s that all the clocks in the building seem to be set for different times but inevitably,if I show up for a meeting at the time it’s supposed to start,I’m alone in the conference room.

2. Ridiculous is the new smart.

   Here’s a department objective from one of our corporate intranet sites:

   Organize our initiatives to better secure our systems,our data,and our processes to create more commonality and reduce unnecessary complexity in our infrastructure and our business applications and processes,leading to enhanced risk management.

   Holy run-on sentence Batman! Never mind our infrastructure,why don’t we start by reducing unnecessary complexity in our sentences? It sounds to me like somebody is trying to say that simplicity and modularity (or re-usability if that’s a word) lead to better security and less risk. How can we encourage that if we can’t even communicate it effectively?

   At some point people became more concerned with sounding intelligent than actually being understood. I suspect that anybody who heard that objective and didn’t quite understand it (lots of people in that room I’m sure) kept their mouths shut for fear of being thought stupid. Little did they know that the people to the left and right of them were most likely facing the same fear.

   To help you in the battlefields or corporate boardrooms,I present to you The Corporate Bullshit Generator courtesy of Office Diversions: The Productivity Reduction Discovery Center.

   Good luck out there.

Extraordinary Measures

Larry Beinhart,the author of the novel that was the basis for the movie “Wag the Dog” was a guest of Diane Rehm this afternoon talking about media spin. He has a new book out called “Fog Facts” in which he turns his attention to spin on real world events. A fog fact is a fact that has been published or could be easily known that has disappeared from the public consciousness. He uses the events of September 11^th as an example and backs up that assertion throughout the rest of the interview using examples of facts that seem to have been forgotten.

While I don’t intend to use this space to push any political beliefs or spout conspiracy theories,I think it’s important to sometimes examine things from an objective point of view. Critical thinking,especially when applied to subjects that are slightly uncomfortable produce the greatest results. I digress…

According to Mr. Beinhart,the media and government would have us believe that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use hijacked airplanes to attack the United States and that there was no way the hijackers could have been detected and stopped. It’s important to note that in order for this to feasible,then:

1. Ultimately no one can be held responsible for failure to stop events that were truly unbelievable.
2. Events that cannot be imagined cannot be stopped by normal means.

The events of September were truly unimaginable

The pilot episode of “The Lone Gunman”,a Fox spin-off of the X-Files,from March 2001 involves a terrorist plot using hijacked airplanes. Somebody made a television show whose plot was similar to an unimaginable event that wouldn’t occur for another six months,huh? Beinhart also mentions activities at a 2001 G-8 conference in Genoa that were temporarily suspended because of a suspected threat of attack by air. In fact,George W. Bush stayed on an aircraft carrier at that time rather than accomodations in Genoa. On December 24^th 1994,terrorists hijacked an Air France flight and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. This plot was ultimately stopped after a raid on the plane by French commandos.

These events aren’t madeup. They can easily be verified with a little research. If events so close to those of September 11^th have been attempted in the past,suspected in the past,or even fictionalized on television,then how can they be unimaginable?

Events that cannot be imagined cannot be stopped by normal means

On April 21^st 2001,one of the hijackers,Nawaf al-Hamzi,was stopped by an Oklohoma State Trooper for speeding. Al-Hamzi had been photographed at Al Qaeda meetings and the CIA knew he was a terrorist conspiring against the United States and suspected he was in the country. If the CIA shared any of this information with other agencies,Al-Hamzi would have been arrested on the spot. If I get stopped by the police,they can tell whether the car I’m driving is stolen or whether I wear contact lenses or not. Given that,why is it extraordinary that a man wanted by the CIA,FBI,and everybody else should get stopped by the cops and drive off with a fine? Zacarias Moussaoui,the suspected 20^th was arrested in Minnesota in August 2001 on immigration charges after flight school instructors became suspicious and called the FBI. Moussaoui’s name had been on the CIA’s radar since April when they were tipped off by an informant who met him at extremist gatherings in 1997. This association is confirmed by French intelligence in mid-August.

These guys weren’ master criminals. They made mistakes. At least two were in the custody of the police at some point after entering the United States. Al-Hamzi obtained credit cards and a social security using his real name. He also had a listed number while living in San Diego. How come nobody that knew who they were could find them? Who come no agencies that came into contact with them knew who they were?

According to Beinhart,government spin tells us we need to take extraordinary action (possibly including tortue) to protect our safety; that we that we needed to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and/or that we should suspend people’s rights in order to stay safe. The facts are,these guys were right under our noses for many months. Some agencies knew their backgrounds and were looking for them,some agencies had contact with them but had no reason to suspect they were anything other than ordinary. Nobody put two and two together. That doesn’t sound extraordinary to me.

Again,it’s not my intention to espouse any particular political beliefs but just to get people to think. These examples are all real news items that were published and probably widely talked about at the time. What happened? Is it true that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it?

Scope

I had an interesting conversation with a coworker at Citigroup this week. He’s been successfully consulting for close to 18 years now and loving it. By successfully,I mean consistently working. I’m not really certain how we started talking about it but he had some great insight on staying employable and advancing when it’s your job to go from job to job. He broke it down like this: Scope.

Scope is defined as the breadth or opportunity to function. Scope keeps you employable. Having a diverse skillset gives an individual a much more vast range of opportunities and projects to choose from. Becoming an expert in a field or technology is great but ultimately limiting. Narrow but deep technical skills decrease marketability by limiting a person’s opportunities. There are opportunities but few companies have a need for very specific skills and they’re usually limited to specific projects. Once that project is wrapped up,it’s on to the next thing. It might be a week or it might be a year but once it’s done it’s done.

Always take the project doing something or working with some technology with which you have no experience; even if it’s less money. Learning a new skill will pay you back,with dividends. Diversify and be able to tackle anything.

The Future of I.T.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately how experts are predicting a shortage of qualified I.T. people in the United States within the next ten to twenty years. The most common reasoning during these conversations is that the scarcity of jobs in this industry in the recent past has scared students into other fields. Add to that the large number of baby boomers retiring in the near future and apparently that amounts to a shortage of experienced technical people.

Most recently however,someone mentioned a factor I hadn’t heard before. I wish I could give credit where credit is due but I tuned in during the middle of a local radio show and turned off before the program ended. Currently the corporate mindset is to outsource low paying technical jobs overseas and keep high paying ones here. The guest had all sorts of facts and statistics which I don’t remember but let’s operate under the assumption that some of those high paying positions are filled by foreign nationals here for school or because of lack of opportunity in their homelands (China and India).

In the news almost as much as Paris Hilton is the fact that the economies of China and India are growing faster than that stuff in the bottom of a fraternity house refrigerator. It won’t be long before the appeal of opportunity in the US is worth less than the prospect of being with family and these workers leave for better opportunities at home and take their skills with them. In parallel,as quality of life and opportunity increases overseas,how long will workers there be content with lower paid support positions?

With a portion of our highly skilled workforce heading home,fewer entries into the field,and overseas contracting no longer as affordable,what does that mean for I.T. workers in the US?

Searchability

If you see the same content appearing in multiple areas of this site (I know,I know,there aren’t that many to begin with) it’s only because I’m working on getting static content into the CMS where it will be searchable (when I get around to implementing search that is).

Be More Productive

I’m currently Director of Technical Services for a small E-Commerce company in Upstate New York. Being the main I.T. guy for a small company means you do everything. If it plugs into a wall,they want me to fix it; computers,fax machines,copiers,telephones,anything. Sometimes I also take out the trash,pick up lunch (not the tab,just the food),and run to the post office. I don’t want these achievments however to overshadow the other stuff I do,like help people be more productive or save the company money. Those things are important too.

If you havent already,I’d like to invite you to download my resume. It highlights a few things that I consider fairly important achievements on my part. Below are some other successes I’d like to point out.

• Right now I’m in the process of writing an ASP tutorial for Spoono which I hope will be published on their web site.
• Implemented real-time,online credit card processing for a series of E-Commerce sites which saves 20 hours per week of manual processing time. Additionally,order filling staff no longer needs to wait for manual payment processing before shipping orders. They operate more efficiently and customers receive their orders more quickly.
• I devised a method of generating dynamic META tags for my current employer that gave our E-Commerce sites first page ranking for our keywords at Google.
• At Unisys,I assisted field sales reps and interfaced directly with large clients such as International Paper and the Marriott hotel organization.