Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Proof That Your Boss Probably IS a Lying, Cheating Bastard

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The London Times printed an excerpt from Freakonomics that is pretty interesting.  A former economist for the US Government went into business providing bagels to companies each morning and leaving a box for the companies’ employees to put money in if they ate a bagel.  He also provided a suggested price for them to pay.  After that he relied on the honor system for his payment.

Being an economist the guy kept detailed data about his sales.  He was able to track the payment rate (or cheating rate if you want to be negative) on a company-by-company basis.  At one company he was even able to track the cheating rate of the executive suite vs. the lower level employees.  Here’s a quote:

He also believes that employees further up the
corporate ladder cheat more than those below. He got this idea after
delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors — an
executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and
administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives
cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t
consider is that perhaps cheating was how they came to be executives.)

The excerpt also has some interesting comparisons of small companies vs. large companies, the  effect of weather and other factors.  Definitely a fun read.

FYI, I’m in the middle of reading Freakonomics (which is excellent) and I’ll probably be posting observations about it here in the future.

From Zero to Launch in 3 Hours, or Behold the Power of Blogs

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First a little background:  I was looking for an index of publicly traded companies in Winston-Salem and I couldn’t find it anywhere.  I figured there weren’t that many publicly traded companies in W-S so I wondered if I could create one myself.  That’s when the fun began.

First I logged onto the Forsyth County Library’s research site, which is free by the way.  Then I used the ProQuest feed from Hoovers to look up all Winston-Salem companies that they track (about 30 total).  Of those I found seven publicly traded companies and I created my own little tracking index on my.yahoo.

I was going to leave it at that, but then I got to wondering if there was any way to get a script that would allow me to post the index on my blog.  Within a few minutes I found a free service called barchart.com. All I had to do was input those same seven companies’ trading symbols into their system and it kicked out a piece of javascript that I could post on my site.  Pretty cool.

Then I thought a little more about it and decided that I’d like to create a blog focused solely on business related information for Winston-Salem.  I’ve been in W-S for about a year and in that time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on the local business community and I figured a blog would be as good a way as any to keep track of this stuff.  That led me to create the Winston-Salem Business blog.

Over the course of about 2 1/2 hours I set up the template, built some link lists to local publications, business groups, etc. and wrote a couple of fairly generic posts.  Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could set up a newsfeed for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County business.

Back to my.yahoo I went.  I set up a news search for "winston-salem"+"business" "forsyth county"+"business", and copied the "rss.xml" link.  Then I found a free service called rss-to-javascript.com that allows me to put in any RSS feed and it spits out a piece of javascript.  I can then paste the javascript into my site and voila, I have my own customized newsfeed.

This is pretty amazing.  I’ve essentially built my own customized business news site for next to nothing (I use Typepad which gives me three blogs for a flat fee, so technically I guess it’s costing me about $4 a month).  If I wanted to I guess I could commercialize it with very little effort, although to build readership would take lots of effort and keeping it relevant and fresh even more blood, sweat and tears. 

I guess what I’m most amazed at is how quickly and easily I could physically pull together a business news site.  It just drives home the fact that a properly motivated entrepreneur could pop up almost out of nowhere and start eating the local business press’s lunch.

**Update** While Barchart.com seems to load every time, it looks like by rss-to-javascript.com service is worth what I paid for it (0).  It only loads about 20% of the time.  I’ll try and find a better feed at some point.

**Update #2**  It doesn’t look like it was the fault of rss-to-javascript.com for the non-loading. It seems that Yahoo!’s feed was iffy, so I went with Craigslist for jobs and the Biz Journal for the business feeds.  Only negative is that those "Triad" focus, not the more defined "Winston-Salem" focus I was looking for.  If I can get a more focused, customizable feed I will, but for now this will do.

Seeing Life from a New Angle

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My oldest son, Michael, has been spending this week at Laurel Ridge, a summer camp run by the Moravian Church in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  But Michael isn’t attending the regular summer camp, rather he is attending a mission camp.  Here’s what the kids in the 2004 version of mission camps did:

In three weeks 100 youth and 30 adults worked with 30 families to:

  • build 9 ramps
  • clean windows in 17 homes
  • mow, weed-eat, & clean 16 yards
  • complete 11 painting jobs
  • replace one trailer floor
  • do 6 carpentry projects
  • provide general cleaning and organization for 8 homes
  • build 3 picnic tables
  • complete 3 roofs over decks
  • landscape 5 yards

It just so happens that my aunt runs Laurel Ridge and so we’ve gotten a little advanced feedback on Michael’s experience this week.  According to my aunt Michael has been working on a house that features an indoor and outdoor woodburning stove (on the porch).  The indoor stove is used by the woman living there for heat and for cooking in the cold months.  The outdoor stove is used for cooking in the hot months.

I can hardly wait to hear about this directly from Michael.  After all, this is a kid who was astonished when he finds out there are still people connecting to the internet with dial-up.  I’d say he’ll have a very fresh perspective.

Dell Ticks Off Jeff Jarvis

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Dell, my home county’s (Forsyth County, NC) new big employer (and recipient of a rather generous incentive package from North Carolina and Forsyth County) ticked off Jeff Jarvis who happens to be one of the more prominent bloggers in the  U.S. Here’s his rant:

Dell lies. Dell sucks

: I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my
home — which I paid for — he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as
well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days — plus the
time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for
them to F***** FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two
weeks.

Publisher’s note: I added the asterisks after the "F" in the post.  I don’t have a problem with the F-bomb, but my mom and kids sometimes read this thing.

Me-thinks the Dell PR people, not to mention their customer service folks, might want to get in front of this one.

Update: Apparently Dell hasn’t done anything to quell Jeff’s rage.  Here’s some links to some follow-up posts with excerpts:

  • Jeff’s second post: But that’s what bothers me most: I bought that warranty, the top-of-the-line, most expensive warranty that warrants to send someone to my home to repair my machine.

    Except that’s a big fat Dell lie. The person they would send to my
    home would not have the parts (or, according to some of my commenters,
    the expertise, training, and intelligence) to repair that machine.

    Smells like fraud to me.

    Smells like a class-action suit to some of my commenters and emailers.

    Calling Mr. Spitzer. Calling Mr. Spitzer.

  • In his anger Jeff then posted a piece with a link to what he eventually discovered was a hoax about Dell installing keyloggers ont heir machine’s at the behest of Homeland Security.  Jeff’s commenters quickly set him straight, but you can see the effect of Dell’s action (or inaction) on a normally rational and very influential person.  Here’s the post in question:

    Dell hell, continued: Laptop 51

    : I have no way to verify whether this is true, but a commenter in my Dell laments says he found a spy in his laptop.

    It didn’t take two seconds to smoke the hoax: see the comments. I
    posted this on the train; found the nearest starbucks; came online and
    there was the fact-checking mob. Thanks, guys. Of course, something
    smelled funny but I’m glad you found the cheese. You’re better men than
    I, Gungas.

Where are the Dell damage-control/PR folks?

And now this on 6/24/05:

Dell sucks. Dell lies. Continued and continued and…

: I just got my Dell back. They replaced the system board, the CPU, the
memory, the palmrest assembly, the keyboard, and the wireless NIC.

Within a half hour, it’s proving not to work. The heat, according to
an ap my son found, is up to 154 degrees. The machine is overheating.
The fan is on high. And the CPU is running at 100 percent. Dell sucks.
Dell lies.

Dell makes lemons. No lemonade.

Dell sucks.

 

Reporters are Using Blogs, But They Don’t Trust Them

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From Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion:

ClickZ reports
that a new study by Euro RSCG/Columbia University shows that more than
51 percent of journalists use blogs regularly, and 28 percent rely on
them to help in their day-to-day reporting duties.

What’s more the study found that journalists mostly used blogs for
finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43
percent) and finding sources (36 percent). And 33 percent said they
used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. The only nit is,
despite their reliance on blogs for reporting, only one percent of
journalists found blogs credible, the study revealed.

He goes on to point out that there is no excuse for not monitoring blogs, and that those companies that start and maintain positive blogging conversations will get more press.

On another note the study should be good grist for the ConvergeSouth conference in October.

For New Members of the Blog Reading Universe

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This is a post I’m creating for the sole purpose of having something I can point my friends, family members and associates to when they ask about any of the "new" web based technologies and services. Basically it’s an overview of things like blogs, RSS (real simple syndication), RSS readers, podcasts, wikis and some p2p (peer-to-peer) applications.  I plan on updating this post regularly.

Blogs
Definition: A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication
consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually
updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some
sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". (source: wikipedia)

RSS
Definition: RSS is an abbreviation for:

Here’s a good article to read from Business 2.0.  The author explains RSS this way:

RSS, or real simple syndication, is a way to subscribe to a website’s
regularly updated content without actually visiting that site. It
allows you to look at headlines and stories from as many blogs or news
sites as you like, all in one place. As simple as this sounds (indeed,
because of its simplicity), it is going to change the way you consume
information on the Web.

Robert Scoble, a famous blogger that works at Microsoft, provided a nice four step overview of the software you can use to subscribe to RSS feeds:

There are three basic types of RSS News Aggregators:

 

1) Server-based aggregators. Some, like Newsgator cross the lines
since Newsgator has a server-side service too. Other server-side
aggregators are Feeds.scripting.com, MyYahoo, Bloglines, and MyMSN.

 

2) Standalone client-side aggregators. RSS Bandit. FeedDemon. SharpReader. Radio UserLand. Among these, my favorites are RSS Bandit and FeedDemon (REX NOTE: FeedDemon has Nashville connections – use it).
You’ll need to download and install these. They don’t depend on any
other application being loaded, and are browser-independent too (for
the most part). On the Mac, NetNewsWire is the one most of my friends like. (REX NOTE: I use NetNewsWire.)

 

3) Built in the browser. OnFolio 2.0 adds onto IE or Firefox. Optimal Access adds onto IE. The Mozilla team offers Sage for Firefox users. Pluck adds onto any browser. My favorite here is OnFolio. Pluck is pretty good too.

 

4) Dependent on Outlook. NewsGator is my favorite here (it’s still the aggregator I use most), but there’s also IntraVnews.

Podcasts
Definition: Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple’s "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and
receive new files automatically. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files.

Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because of its subscription model, which uses the RSS 2.0 file format. This technique has enabled independent producers
to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows", and has given broadcast radio programs a new distribution channel.

Users subscribe to podcasts using "podcatching" software (also called "aggregator" software) which periodically checks for and
downloads new content. It can then sync the content to the user’s portable music player. Podcasting does not require an iPod or
iTunes; any digital audio player or computer with the appropriate software can play podcasts. The same technique can deliver
video files, and by 2005 some aggregators could play video as well as audio.
(Source: wikipedia)

Here’s a list of Podcasting directories from Loosewire (added to this post 6/25/05):

Wikis
Definition: A wiki (pronounced
[wɪkiː],
[wiːkiː] or
[viːkiː]; see Pronunciation below) is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. Wiki
also refers to the collaborative software used to
create such a website (see Wiki software).

Wiki (with an upper case ‘W’) and WikiWikiWeb are both used to refer specifically to the Portland Pattern Repository, the first wiki ever
created. A lower-case ‘w’ for ‘wiki’ is generally used by savvy wiki proponents. The name was based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning "quick" or "informal." It is used
commonly in Hawaii as part of its rich "pidgin English"— the native language of the
islands.
(Source: wikipedia)

The first wiki I’ve been a part of is for the ConvergeSouth conference planning.

P2P Applications
Definition: A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on
computing power at the edges (ends) of a connection rather than in the network itself. P2P networks are used for sharing content
like audio, video, data or anything in digital format. P2P network can also mean grid computing.

A pure peer-to-peer file transfer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to
the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non
peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server. One user uploads a file to the FTP server, then many others download it, with no need for the uploader and downloader to be
connected at the same time.

Some networks and channels, such as Napster, OpenNap, or IRC @find, use a
client-server structure for some tasks (e.g. searching) and a peer-to-peer structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella or Freenet, use a peer-to-peer
structure for all purposes and are sometimes referred to as true peer-to-peer networks, though Gnutella at least is greatly
facilitated by directory servers which inform peers of the network addresses of other peers.
(source: wikipedia)

The Past Comes Back to Haunt Me

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So my brother calls me to tell me that I should Google my name and see what happens.  I do as he advises and there, as result number three, I find something called "Pictures2.html."

Kegserving_firehouse_party"Oh, God," I think.  I hold my breath and click.  "HOLY CRAP," I scream to myself.  There before my eyes are pictures of me and my fraternity buddies from almost 20 years ago. Apparently Brannen "Bourbon" Taylor has created a nice little alumni site with tons of pictures. I’m posting the best one here, because quite frankly the rest call my masculinity into question.

I obviously had a propensity for pastel colored shirts, and somehow I didn’t get laughed out of college.

Actually I have to show you my nice 80’s pant selection (see below) on a spring break trip.  That’s my fraternity brother Shane Womack in the towel. From looking at all of Bourbon’s pictures I’d have to say that my fraternity brothers had a propensity to wear no shirts at all…maybe that’s why no one noticed my pastels.

Springbreak_shane_and_jonAh, to hell with it.  I’ve been married for 13 years, I’m 38 years old, a father of three, a hell of a lot fatter and with a little less hair than these pictures show.  What do I have to lose besides the last shred of dignity I’ve been saving up for an emergency.

Okay, I can’t resist posting a couple more.  I’m beginning to realize how much I regret not staying in touch with these guys.  I still consider them some of the best people I’ve met.  I guess I’ll have to pick up the phone and start dialing.

FlagfootballThrd picture is our intramural flag football team.  I’m in the back and that’s my younger brother Russ in the foreground in the white shirt.  I was a fifth-year senior and Russ a freshman that year.  I’ve always been thankful we had the chance to spend that much time together.

Last picture is from a trip we made to Wyoming for a leadership workshop.
That’s Parag Amin, me, Keven Kvasnicka (back), Francis Shafer and Scott
Swahl.  Hard to believe it’s been about 17 years since that was shot

Workshoptrip

Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech at Stanford

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Dana Blankenhorn has a transcript (apparently not verbatim, but close) of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford.  Dana says it’s the best commencement speech ever…and I haven’t heard enough of them to agree or disagree. I can tell you, though, that it is definitely worth reading.

He talks about dropping out of college because he was aimless and felt he was wasting his working class parents’ money.  Then he did an amazing thing: he dropped back into college.  He just started going to classes that interested him, sleeping on friends’ floors and collecting bottles to turn in for food money.  Here’s what he said:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif
and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between  different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science
can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. 

But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh  computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the  Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had  never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have  never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and 
since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal  computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that  calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the  wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when  I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10  years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You  can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that  the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in  something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because  believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the  confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

He then goes on to talk about two more major events in his life, being fired at Apple and being diagnosed with cancer.  Here is his take on death:

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want
to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No
one has ever escaped it.

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the  single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears  out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But  someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and  be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your  time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t  be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other  people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out  your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know 
what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Why I’ve Always Respected Engineering Students

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There’s an engineering student somewhere who’s created a do-it-yourself air conditioner using a trash can, a fan, some tubing and ice water.  You can see it here.

This is another in a growing list of reasons why I’ve always respected engineering students.  Actually the list is for all non-English majors.  We EMs are basically a worthless lot unless you’re in desperate need for a font of worthless knowledge…then we’re it!