Thinking aloud

Really quickly:

• I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey
• I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities. I heard Matt on the WordPress podcast just brush the whole thing off — these are developers with their heads in the wrong place.
• I’m writing this with Zoundry Raven — a Windows Live Writer competitor (if free software can be competitive in the real sense of that word). We’ll see. Setting up FTP for the images was, as always, the “trick.” But I am not so sure the UI is all that much difference from the WP editor. Lots of unlabeled icons in the toolbar that look just like the WP icons (a good thing since once you know one you know them all), but overall I am not sure what it adds to the mix — other than the ability to run off a thumb drive. That might be nice if you want to blog from, say, one of those open-sewer computers they offer at public libraries.
• Chris is makin’ might good progress over at his blog, but discovering it’s a lot of work.

This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list the ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ‘em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor?

1. Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese
2. Durian is the world’s stinkiest fruit
3. Both smell like shit
4. I need to demonstrate what trackbacks are to a friend
5. If you are a big, French software company, stop trying to pretend you understand social media

OK, now back to the post.

One of my colleagues is trying his hand at blogging. He’s also trying to harness the power of social media in the PLM (product line management) space. His blog is sort of a stealth thing, to see what the community thinks of his plan. In a recent post, (metaphor #4) he takes Dassault Systèmes to task for launching a blog with a license agreement — and credits me for encouraging them to blog. Chris also says that www.3dvia.com is “up and running” — though it looks like the same useless, ham-handed attempt at community it was in late 2007 (#5).

But the DS blog (#4 again) is, ahem, a stinker (metaphors #1 or #2, depending on your cultural linage, combined with #3.)

It’s the “standard” corporate blog (#5) — saying nothing, written by professional writers, devoid of personality, expectorating corporate propaganda without a point of view, destined for the dust-bin of the blogosphere….except that DS will assign 30 people to it and it will still be smelling like [pick one: durian or Vieux Boulogne] in five years (#1, #,2 and #3 — a trifecta — or for you, Chris, a hat trick).

I suspect that they got together in a big all-day meeting in Suresnes and decided that after www.3dmojo.com (#4 again, plus a little #5) , they needed a “real” blog. The Internet and PR people probably liked the idea; the brands probably said nothing in the room, while heaping derision on it among themselves.

What DS got on their blog is plenty of smell…and very little else.

This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking.

It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking than Gartner, I haven’t found it. I wouldn’t be surprised if their analysts talking about social networking and social networking companies were last working on an update to the wave on MVS/TSO, the “social network” for mainframe COBOL programmers.

Gartner talking about social media is like me going to a 20-sumthin’ nightclub in a Speedo. (I’m middle-aged and need to lose a few pounds…so there’s your image.)

They have nothing to contribute — except to the social media software vendors who wait in vain for Garnter to bless them and their space (all the while charging them outrageous fees for “access” and conferences in which Gartner pontificates to the 50 sleepy clients they’ve attracted for a junket).

I can’t claim to be on top of every social media happening out there. But I can assure you that whatever self-possessed, supercilious prognostication that Gartner social media analysts make (.9 probability) will impress only their very-late-adopter client community who themselves will never, ever really get it.

I’ve been way too busy to blog.

But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck.

It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage wrought by the market meltdown of the last two weeks since 9/30. Going from bad to cataclysmic has wiped out years of parsimony, leaving my personal financial situation questionable. We’ve often heard the stories of people “wiped out” in the Depression of the 1930’s. Could that be happening here?

Then, on a happier note I searched on “UMA” because I’d just gotten a BlackBerry that switches from the cell network to Wi-Fi. I think this is amazing because seamlessly switching from one protocol to another is no mean trick.

Clicking around, I found this story on college students preferring Wi-Fi to beer.

Sorry, but no. I remember college without Wi-Fi. The only thing we preferred to beer was women. And since I founded a failed Wi-Fi hotspot company in early 2002, I know how popular beer remains with respect to being…uh…”online.”

Now the only question is, if you can’t afford beer or the college loans it takes to get that free dorm-room Wi-Fi, does this absolutely guarantee an Obama victory next month, just as Roosevelt was swept in after the Hoover administration’s market-based dogma ruined the economy? (Sounds just like the current Bush administration, doesn’t it?)

And, if it’s Obama (oh yeah, it’s gonna be Obama), does he drink beer? Hillary did…that’s why I liked her.

Now you get the SSAT-level analogy that politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi, right?

I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970’s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the audience, it was more an attempt to fulfill a personal obsession. 

Newman is a musical genius the world seems to remember only for Short People, a song so unrepresentative of Newman’s work that its enduring popularity must be an unending annoyance for him. (Just today, the guys in the office were talking about loading up iPods…they talked about Led Zeppelin, Heart and Eric Clapton. Short People came up, too. What a shame.)

Anyway, Newman records albums so infrequently that it’s a major event in my life when a new one is released. If Newman is pissed off that the current justices on Supreme Court will outlive him (as he sings in the blistering A Few Words in Defense of Our Country), I am none too happy with Newman himself for not trying harder to satiate the few fans he has. He claims in a video documentary that he has 80,000 fans — down from 200,000 — and none of us are attractive looking.

I remain awestruck by Newman’s early work, especially 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys. The recordings from the 80s and 90s, topped off by Bad Love didn’t seem as sharp or as even to me as the early albums. Now, the question I am thinking about is whether the new album finds Newman back in form. The short answer is, I don’t yet know.

But there’s no rush. Given that we might have as long as a decade to evaluate it, what’s the hurry? I mean, I’d love to have more Newman music to consider, so Randy, how about a new album in two or three years? After all, you said on your website that this only took eight to 10 weeks to write and another eight to 10 to record.

So, it’s not me I am worried about. It’s the rest of you who didn’t find Newman in your formative years. You guys, in your 30s and 40s, you’ve got several decades of savoring this music to catch up on. Unless you get started right away — savoring an album a decade — you’ll never get to Harps and Angels.

I’m more worried about your inability to catch up with the rest of us than about the fact that I’ll probably be dead before the next Newman album.

With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt.

After months of listening to Leo and Steve tell me how great these services were, I was feeling like someone who refuses to get the religion he’s supposed to if I didn’t try ‘em out.

Changing your router to use OpenDNS is plain, dead, dumb simple: you simply change two IP addresses in your router’s configuration. The OpenDNS IP addresses are on every page of their website. Can’t miss it. Total time to implement: 10 minutes.

The decision to use TrueCrypt was a little more involved: I run Vista Ultimate which offers BitLocker whole-disk encryption. So you’d naturally assume that the built-in encryption would be better. But after hearing that Steve Gibson’s Windows XP machine was actually faster after using TrueCrypt, I decided to try this amazing open source product. TrueCrypt doesn’t feel like open source…it’s exceptionally well documented and has the fit-and-finish of a commercial product.

Total time to setup for whole disk encryption on my ThinkPad T60p with an Hitachi Travelstar 200GB 7200rpm drive? 15 minutes, including the burning of a backup CD-ROM. Encryption itself took three hours.

I did have one problem, which was easily solved. I couldn’t hibernate the machine (which Vista isn’t really happy to do anymore anyway, but which is sort of the ultimate test for a whole-disk encryption program) until I deleted the previous hibernation file and allowed Vista to recreate it on the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume.

I didn’t see this in a couple of searches online, so hopefully if anyone searches for “TrueCrypt Vista hibernation file” they’ll find this post and give it a try.

Now, I can’t even “feel” the encryption…my laptop performs as before. My Vista performance base score was 4.3 before and after the whole disk was encrypted.

In short, for a computer user today, the tools to significantly increase your personal security are easy-to-use, free and astonishingly good.

I’ve been reading Consumer Reports since I was a teenager.  Without a doubt, they the most authoritative consumer product testers. And they know it.

I’ve always been amused by their combination of geeky testing regimens and their 1930’s-derived Socalist practices (purchasing a subscritption to the magazine makes you a “member” of Consumer’s Union and eligble to vote for their directors).

But they’ve always been both supercilious and self-righteous. For years, they claimed “no advertising” but gleefully pumped their (now-made-useless-by-the-Internet) car pricing “service.” Finally, after years of duplicity, they changed their claim to make an exception for their own ads without blinking an eye.

But when they decide they don’t like something, look out. They’ve tortured Suzuki (who deserved it) and Bose (who didn’t). CR was the earliest — and most smug — detractor of SUVs.

Unlike almost any major American news outlet today, their masthead contains zero, none, nada email addresses for readers’ responses. Alone among American journalists, CR doesn’t need to hear from anybody. Even the blog post I am about to blast doesn’t take trackbacks…their bubble is complete.

On now to a piece of advice I read tonight in CR’s auto blog. Tony Giorgianni’s mostly banal post on getting the most from a new car (offering wisdom like RTFM and “get winter mats”) also offers the surreal advice that new car owners should “Change a tire. It’s…a good idea to do a trial run with the jack and spare tire…”

Now I don’t know what planet Tony and CR’s editors are on, but I absolutely guarantee that nobody…and I mean no one…is going to test changing a tire. It’s so ridiculous that only CR could give this advice with a straight-laced face.

You betcha, Tony. When I get my next new car, I’ll suck down a large dose of fish oil and prune juice, then run right out and practice changing tires.

Update: As of the day after I posted a comment with a link to this post on Consumer Report’s original post, they haven’t approved my comment. Sure, they could argue I am trolling for traffic. But I’m not, and I don’t think they really believe that either. They’re just keeping the membrane impenetrable.

Last weekend, I attended PodCamp Boston. It was incredible. And there are two things I learned. First, my fellow vps of marketing in Boston, who at their networking event three days before Podcamp Boston indicated they’d never heard of this major event happening in their backyard, will remain with their heads totally stuck in the sand.

Second, even I haven’t gone all the way. This blog’s URL was www.alexneihaus.com, representing my old-style Internet persona.

Now, as the more observant of you will notice, we are at www.yobyot.com. (Toyboy spelled backwards.)

What’s the difference? At PodCamp, people signed their badges with their Twitter handles. I’d been dabbling in Twitter — not quite getting it — until PodCamp, when I met people who tweeted they’d met me while we were talking. The number of people I follow and those following me exploded (relatively…I am still building contacts there).

So, the only right thing to do is to lose the web 1.0 persona and become all I can be.

@I @am @now @yobyot

This is a post about product liability. Or, more accurately my fury at Whirlpool for making it nearly impossible to lift their refrigerators without slicing off your fingers.

Short version: we’re renovating the kitchen. Today, stainless steel appliances are all the rage. This despite the fact that they collect fingerprints, dent easily and cost more. Still, we do what we’re told by the kitchenistas and we dutifully bought a stainless steel fridge.

Through a series of mishaps, it turned out that the general contractor, the tile guy and I ended up having to lift this 600 pound beast up the three stairs to my front door and then into the kitchen to install it.

I was on the left side of this thing, trying to lift it up on the count of three. “One….two…three!” Bob shouted and we all heaved up and towards the door. I had my shoulder against the bottom and my left hand under the left side.

On step two, I looked down and was gushing blood. The damn stainless steel cabinet’s un-smoothed-off bottom edge had sliced deeply into three fingers of my left hand. It was painless (then) and so I was sorta detached from all the blood literally pouring from my left hand. (I am left handed by the way).

We finally got the behemoth into place, and as I was taking off the last of the shipping material, I considered whether or not to tilt the monster back and wipe the blood off the bottom edge that had so nearly severed my fingers. “Nah,” I thought. “Let the next owner mix his or her DNA with mine.” (Don’t anyone tell Tricia I left a souvenir on her now stained stainless steel cabinet. This is our secret.)

Today, as I sit at work and try my level best to type emails and collateral, I’ve considered calling a torts attorney (aka an ambulance chaser) and suing Whirlpool. It’s idle, but appealing, thinking (the cuts will heal). But one or two more steps, and I think the first use of the fridge would have been to chill my severed digits in preparation for surgical reattachment.

Had that happened, I’d have had a whole new career: torturing Whirlpool through the court system.

Years and years and years ago (OK, I’m feeling Boomer today), I was involved in the sale of a GUI-based application to the phone company. They resisted and resisted, despite our (and, unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s) ever-more-urgent importuning. We kept telling the executives that this was the future, it was the way they had to go and, damn it, you really need to get into the mid-1980s. They wanted to stay with character-based apps, but as the phone company used to regularly do (at least when I was with IBM), they did what we told them to do.

Such were the GUI wars.

But I didn’t realize that the war had ended…that we had “won”…until one Sunday in the early 1990s. I was, as I was wont to do, red-faced and furious on a Sunday afternoon at the amazing ineptness of the New England Patriots, who if I remember correctly, were losing 5000 to 0 to the Dolphins, when a Dodge Ram commercial interrupted the carnage. That commercial’s visual metaphor was a GUI. I realized that what was once “never going to happen” had now happened so completely, so permanently, that people didn’t even remember when they didn’t use and understand GUIs. It had crossed from a technological feature to a cultural idiom.

I’m not talking about Crossing the Chasm-style adoption. Instead, I am talking about how resistant everyone seems to be to something after which they are not only passive to it, they have amnesia about what life, or technology, or sports, or anything was like before they adopted whatever it is they’ve adopted en masse. It’s like we’re dogs: we live only in the moment.

So it is with podcasting. Nobody believes podcasting will ever be a mass medium. Nobody believes it can change the world. Pshaw! Phooey! Feh! All podcasting can be is a niche thing for techies.

Well, they didn’t spend Sunday afternoon with my college-age daughter and me. Returning from dropping my other kid off at summer camp, Sarah whipped out her iPod, plugged it into the car and said, “Dad, wanna hear my nursing podcasts?”

“Nursing podcasts? I didn’t know you were into podcasts!”

“Sure, Dad. [You helplessly out-of-tune old fart]. I listen to a bunch of ‘em.”

It was an instant replay of the Dodge Ram commercial. This new medium, which software company clients as recently as 2006 were insisting was irrelevant, to which nobody paid any attention, had reached its final destination: a fait accompli. And nobody remembers a time when they thought podcasting was a waste of electrons, spent for the enjoyment of social misfits.

Instead, podcasting, is, and always was, an excellent way to reach specific audiences. It’s part of every nutritionally well-balanced software company’s marketing strategy. Podcasts are the best way to reach your audiences….and they always have been.

The way people seem to be acting about this — without any connection to the previous reality — is gonna put a whole bunch of singing fat ladies out of business. After all, if nothing’s changed, who needs ‘em to signal a transition?