What a pleasant surprise! I was able to upload files from Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu 8.04.1.

Just to make sure this wasn’t a fluke, I did downloads and uploads from Firefox 3 running on OSX 10.5.4. It worked again!

And here I was, thinking Skydrive would be coded to work only with IE/Windows. I’m impressed. And mighty pleased that Microsoft is taking this attitude of openness.

What did not work, though, was trying to access the site from Safari on OSX. When I have the time, I’ll try doing this from Safari on Vista. I’m still happy, though, to be able to access my Skydrive from the 3 OSes I use more frequently.

In another statement of Microsoft openness – I’m making this post from Word2007 – there’s a Blog Post feature that I only just discovered (while looking for something else). This post is actually a test, to see how well it’ll send this up to wordpress.

(Later note - the blog post from word2007 worked like a charm - image and all)

A long weekend well spent.  This was the weekend of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony (8th Aug) and Singapore’s 43rd National Day (9th Aug).  It’s monday night (today was a day-off in lieu) and I’m for the most part happy with the Dual Boot Vista and Ubuntu on a hp compaq tc4400 tablet.  Tomorrow, I move my datafiles across from my old Vista HDD, and start spending more of my working day in Ubuntu.

I depended heavily on the masses of great content on the web for installing the various Ubuntu components.  The laptop came with a Broadcom wireless controller, so the first order of the day was to manually get wireless working.  There were articles which went the “sudo get-apt…..” route - which generally worked well enough.  And there were articles that mentioned doing the same thing in the Synaptic Package Manager.  The latter method, where present, is best.  I managed to royally mess up another laptop (a hp compaq 6515b - more on this in another post) by doing lots of get-apt commands, and ending up with video that performed very slowly.

I’m depending on Google Toolbar to help me keep my URLs available to both Linux and Vista.   I’ve got a FAT32 partition that both OSes can write to.  Linux let’s me read the NTFS partition that VIsta sits on.

The summary of my install steps is at this page.

On the morning of monday 28th July 2008, wanting to do a work related search, I fired up Google and saw this:

It was a nice tribute. The link went to one of the many videos of Randy’s Lectures on youtube - the full lecture, and the one most worth watching.

“The Last Lecture - Achieving your Childhood Dreams”

It’s clear he prepared long and hard for the lecture. It’s full of humour, wit and wisdom ….. and teaching aids. Yes, this man was indeed a pedagogue to the core. It’s a lecture I want to watch over and over again (made easier by the nifty flv downloaders that you can get as firefox add-ons). Thanks to the lecture, I’ve been introduced to the Alice Project - and will explore the sw for use in the School IT Labs we’ve been building these last couple of years.

I strongly recommend investing the hour and a quarter it’ll take to view the video in it’s entirety. The slides and transcript are available on the Randy Paush webpage, as are links to projects he speaks about in the video.

I’m a quarter way through his book, “the Last Lecture”, which so far reads like a “making of….” tv special for a new hit movie. Like the lecture, it’s intelligent and inspiring, going behind the scenes of how it came to be, and adding in content he could not fit into the time confines of his speech.

Here’s a man not much older than I am - concerned about leaving something more for his kids than just setting things up financially/logistically and a few vague memories dulled by time’s passage, who’s loved and worked with technology all his professional life.  This sounds so familiar and is so easy for me to relate to.  Yet he was totally unknown to me and much of the world until his last lecture video became a hit all around the world, which would not have happened if he had not come down with pancreatic cancer. Suppose he had not had the cancer?  He could just as easily have passed away in a traffic accident on 25th July 2008, so the end result - his passing from this world by a certain date, would have been the same. But his having advanced notice, a time limit, and his focusing on the good he could do with the remaining time made possible his inspiring so many.  Credit goes to the vendors, technologies and communities of the Web2.0 universe that made it possible for his message to reach far and wide, free of charge, across geographies and eventually, across time to his grown up children who will then be able to understand the wisdom their father wanted to impart to them.

I have no idea how much time I have left. Nor do most people who have not been notified by the countdown that comes with a detected terminal illness. A priority for me in the coming weeks is to really seek out my passions, and see how to bring these as much as possible into my work-life, which consumes so much of my life energy today.

It’s one thing to see the Mini-Note on a website or magazine.  It’s another thing to hold it in your hand, fondle the rounded edges, tap on the excellently designed keyboard, and think of how this seems to be the machine that I could really bring with me all over the place.  The model I”m eying is the one with the Linux preload.  It’s not available in Singapore yet, but even if it were, I plan to wait a little so that I can get a 128G solid state drive into the HDD bay.  By the time these drives are available, they should be offering better performance (battery drain and speed) than the current crop of 64G drives and likely for not much more $$.  The HP Linux model ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop 10.  The good thing about going with the preload is that the wireless LAN drivers should be nicely setup and working.  The bad thing is that I won’t be needing some of what Novell has put into the OS - Active Directory support, for example.  I’d rather have Ubuntu on the system - it’s a lot more familiar, and I like how the updates are regular and reliable.

So my dream configuration will be easy to carry around and power efficient.  I’ll stay with the standard battery for size and weight reasons and have no fear of head smack and HDD media damage thanks to the solid state drive.  I feel safe enough to run Ubuntu without Antivirus software.  The machine would follow me everywhere, and I’d use it to keep notes and write whenever inspiration strikes.  Suspect I’ll be making good use of Google Docs and Gears.  Gears will allow me to write offline.  Docs will allow me to access the articles from any other PC or Mac with network access. 

Linux Journal has a rather eager video review of the Mini-Note by Shawn Powers:

I’ve been listening to an MP3 recording of a lecture delivered by William McDonough to HP Employees at Roseville (California), where HP operates a massive recycling plant. It’s been a year since the first time I heard this talk, and there seems so much more I’m getting out of it with this second listening.

McDonough has a very systems approach to looking at environmental sustainability, living systems and the physics and chemistry that go into them. There’s a good amount of science in his talk, and there’s a lot of sense and wisdom there as well. An architect by profession, he was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s heroes for our planet in 1999.

You can watch and listen to a talk he gave in Feb 2005, on the TedTalks website - this is the link to the video, which runs for about 20 mins.

If you enjoy the video and want more, pick up a copy of “Cradle to Cradle”, a book McDonough co-wrote with Michael Braungart. This book is printed not on paper, but an easily recyclable plastic. It looks just like a normal paperback, but it’s not cheap - I bought my copy for S$50 at Books Kinokuniya. (actually, a thoughtful friend picked it up for me - thanks, Hui Ching!). If you live in Singapore, you’re welcome to borrow my copy. This is the blurb from the back of the book:

Waste Equals Food

Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset, so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as “biological nutrients” that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be “technical nutrients” that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed loop industrial cycles, rather than being “recycled” - really, downcycled - into low grade materials and uses.

Here are a couple of quotes from the talk to HP that I find most memorable:

Imagine this design assignment.
Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, acrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes color with the seasons and self replicates.

I’m a big fan of clean nuclear power.
I’m especially fond of nuclear fusion.
I think we should spend a trillion $ trying to capture the benefits of nuclear fusion immediately.
And I thank God that we’ve already got our nuclear reactor exactly where we need it, 93 million miles away. It’s 8 minutes. It’s wireless.

A good amount of my past work has been in technical support. It’s a job full of rewards, and when support is being provide over the telephone line (internet chat in those days was non existent except for the hardcore unix chaps) methodology and communication skills become vital. You can neither see or touch the remote PC or Printer or Tape Drive you’re trying to fix. You guide the technician at the other end with your voice. The biggest insight I gained from my time in tech support is related to the title of this blog.

There were situations where remote support just didn’t cut it. Which led to times like where I was doing all nighters at Bukit Kayu Hitam, a remote town on the thai-malaysian border. The problem we were looking at there happened only with a specific combination of components - Chipsets with a specific date code + 3Com Token Ring Cards + OS2. I remember wandering between the immigration counters in the dead of night, rain beating down on the high roof. Forests all around. Insects singing from the trees, and some of them being drawn to the lights. Typing this has suddenly made me aware of the sound of the cicadas and crickets in the trees outside the balcony window. It’s just before midnight on a hot, sweltering saturday evening and going by the insect sound level, this must be ideal weather for 6-legged courtship.

I’ve been watching with interest the new fee based support models that have been emerging. You can get tech help at special counters in stores, help over the phone, and over the internet. The newest I’ve seen from Web Chat type support is at www.supportspace.com.

Supportspace has an attractive site. In paid support, the first thing a company has to sell is confidence. There are lots of visual elements on the site to give customers the impression that the person you pick (yes, you get to choose the tech support person to engage) is capable both technically and professionally. Your payment does not reach the tech support person until you are satisfied with the solution provided.

Each of the Techs has a page listing their charges (each sets their own fees), products they can help with, certifications, the kinds of services they provide and ….. the part I like best …. customer feedback with dates, comments and star ratings. From the page, I can tell how many cases the tech has helped with, hence his experience level with this kind of support. From the comments, I know what kinds of problems the person has solved. From their prices ……. I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that higher prices are an indication of their confidence in solving the problem quickly and cleanly.

Support is given over web chat. The specialist can take control of your PC to diagnose and apply fixes. They’ll help remove viruses, do backups and make broken software work. They’ll help with not just PCs and software, but printers, digital cameras, MP3 players, TV. Give buying advice even.

There was a good range of Techs to choose from when I looked. Going by the names and photos, there are Russians & Indians, as well as the expected American Caucasians. I found myself clicking on the icon for a lady who calls herself “MommyKnowsDesk”. Her customer ratings were impressive.

I don’t need such a service for myself (where a typical 20 minute session might cost $25 and a virus clean up costs $89), but if I were on business travel, and my wife called to say that our home PC could not send eMail despite trying the simple instructions I gave her, I would happily pay one of the supportspace experts to fix the problem via remote control. The savings in call roaming charges would more than make up for the cost of the tech support session.

Which brings up an issue with web based support and remote control, whether done by a fee-based agency or from a vendor’s warranty support team. This support will be no good for a PC that can’t boot into a decently functioning operating system, or that has lost internet connectivity. The other gotcha is browser support. The first time I tried the “Connect Now” button, I was told that the firefox browser I was using would not work with the service and I had to use Internet Explorer. This probably means the target customer is a windows user, as not too many mac users will be using IE.

Why does supportspace matter? They’ve put a Web2.0 slant on remote support via Web Chat and Remote Control, by enabling users to choose WHO they want to have support them, voting with their wallets, and rating their support experience. If the ratings system is not tampered with, the opinion of the crowds will enable the Techs with the best knowledge, methodology and manner to rise to the top in a very visible way. These Techs will get more customers, and the lower rated Techs will improve their services to rise in the ranking. Poor performance and service delivery cannot be hidden.

What if such a system were to be introduced into warranty support, and the techs were paid according to how good a job customers think they did, instead of how many hours they spent in the support centre? What if a corporate HR were to introduce such a system to enable management to see who was truly delivering and teaming well?

If Web2.0 can bring benefits to customers in an area like paid tech support, it can do the same in many other areas of endeavor.

I’ve been clearing up my work area quite aggressively. A new team member will join us next monday, and my collection of scsi/power cables, drives, ancient folders and manuals was clearly in the way of a proper place to sit for the new colleague.

By good fortune, I chanced upon an old BusinessWeek article I had liked so much, back in late 2004, that I printed out a copy for keeps. The article is an interview with Steve Jobs, titled “The Seed of Apple’s Innovation”, and can still be found on BW’s website at this link.

I liked that Steve had good things to say about HP:

“Both Steve Wozniak and I … and I can speak for Woz — got our view of what a technology company should be while working for Hewlett Packard in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the first rule over there was to build great products.”

The article teaser went like this: “CEO Steve Jobs says among other practices, it’s “saying no to 1000 things” so as to concentrate on the “really important” creations. Which seemed really apt because I had gathered 1000 things worth of junk, to the extent that this gem of an article was buried and hidden within the pile. Suffice to say, this inspired me to discard much of the plastic, metal and paper baggage that had been following me from office to office. It’s always easier to de-sentimentalize old possessions when one is inspired.

And talking about inspiration …. the part of the interview I like best is at the end. Jobs talks about how Apple ran an ad campaign that celebrated great men and women who embodied the idea of “Think Different”. Ghandi. Dylan. King. Henson. Picasso. Ali. Lennon. Einstein. Edison……..

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
Are the ones who do.

Jobs: “It [the think different ad campaign] was certainly for customers, to some degree, but it was even more for Apple itself. You can tell a lot about a person by who his/her heroes are. That ad was to remind us of who our heroes are and who we are.”

Which made me think. About who my heroes are.

From History, there’s Lincon. Martin Luther King Jr. Francis of Assisi. Ghandi.

From Business, there’s Bill & Dave (HP). Yunos (Grameen Bank). McDonough (Cradle to Cradle), Kuhlmann (INGDirect). Jobs (not surprisingly).

And so many more from Literature and Comics and Movies. Heroes. Building a better world.

Read a great posting on a Marketing Sherpa blog post by Anne Holland. It mentioned Barack Obama’s thank you page. Once the donor has completed the donation transaction, he/she is treated to a youtube video that’s designed to inspire and reinforce their action. It’s a great video - it leaves one with a “we’re one people with one cause” kind of feeling. To help the video go along it’s viral way, the page displays a prominent “tell a friend” box. This is the link to the page with video and tell a friend block.  This is in stark contrast to many websites where after you’ve posted your query or completed your purchase, you’re left staring at the webpage equivalent of a blank wall in a blind alley.

The most recent total care event in Singapore was held last friday, 25th April, at Raffles City. I brought JenMei along, and she stayed till just after 9am when she had to leave for work via MRT. She knew the function area well because of the conference she helped with while working at IE Singapore, and showed me a great place to get some quiet for finishing up my slideset. We chose a topic for my talk that tied in to the the kind of business our customer speaker (Jacelyn Tay) owned (The Health Club). The Health Club is a business that brings western and eastern techniques into play. Jacelyn has done well for herself and is no stranger to internet marketing - you will find that both have good web presences - a wikipedia entry for herself as well as a number of fan and business media postings, and a link to a YouTube advertisement for The Health Club.

The HP talk was built around the analogy of a fitness and health program for a SMB company’s IT Systems, and comprised:

• Fitness - Building PC, Server and Printer Strength and Endurance
• Hygiene - Practices and Education for keeping bad things out
• Building a strong Immune System - resilience against bad things that do manage to get in
• Having the right insurance coverage and planning for contigencies

The talk closed with a list of first things to do to a new PC/Server, then Weekly, Monthly and Annual maintenance tasks.

It was fun working with the media corp people - being able to put faces to familiar voices on the radio was such a joy.

This is a link to the Singapore Total Care campaign page. Apart from information on the events, there’s a link for the radio snippets - which includes one that I recorded.