Big business has a herd mentality.  It seems all the financial institutions I use, and other large non-financial institutions I use, all use Epsilon.  I can’t see a reason for it except that they’re all acting like sheep.  Over the past two weeks, I’ve received three or four emails about Epsilon stealing my data. And I’m thinking, why is it that the big companies always screw us over, and then try to hide what’s been going on?

Now, I understand that shit happens.  Data get breached.  Of course, data don’t breach themselves.  And breach didn’t just come down about the data like a plague of locusts.  ”Data” are not “breached”.  Systems are.  ”Data breach”  is a blameless way of saying your shit got hacked.  This could be because of lax data, systems, and security practices.  Or it could not be.  It seems to me when this happens to big companies, two themes repeat themselves:

1. They try to hide or sugarcoat the problem
2. They care about the bottom line more than they care about me
3. They’re pompous bastards (maybe I can’t count)

On the other hand, the small guys, the startups, innovators, mom-and-pops…what ever you want to call them, really care about their product an their client.  Some of them fail because they spend more effort into creating a superior product than selling it.  And of course, we too are susceptible to “data breaches.”  But, to the one, we give it to you straight, we work with you to solve the problem, and we eat several helpings of humble pie.

I guess the difference is simple:  We are proud of our work.  Big business is proud of their bottom line.

Discuss,

Shantih,

—mickey

I participated in #Blogchat this past Sunday and the morning after I saw this post by Allison Boyer from Blogworld, inspired by a Tweet I wrote, “Whatever you do, you can’t make everyone happy.  If you got a hater or two, you’re probably doing something right.”  Following is excerpt from her post:

Easy enough to say, but I also definitely understand why some people get upset when a hater starts leaving comments. We put a lot of work into our blogs, to the point where they feel like our children. If someone doesn’t like our child, that’s anger-inducing…but when someone makes fun of our child? Well, I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to lash out right back.

It pays to remember what @EGlue mentioned – if someone is hating on you for some reason, it’s probably an indication that you’re doing a good job with your blog in general. People may not like a certain post you write or a certain decision you make for your blog, but they feel connected enough that they have to leave a comment. You want your community to feel so invested in your blog that they leave emotional comments when they don’t like someone. If you’re community’s reaction is, “Meh,” that’s probably an indication that you’re not doing a very good job connecting with them.

And remember too, there’s a difference between a hater and a troll. A hater might hate you, but they make valid points or actually have something to say, even though it might come out in a not-so-nice way. A troll, on the other hand, is just trying to piss you off (or piss off another commenter). They don’t actually care about your blog, your community, or even, in many cases, the topic. Haters warrant a response, though do so tactfully. Trolls rarely warrant a response and sometimes even warrant being deleted, depending on their comments and your blog’s policies.

The bottom line? Although negativity often hurts, try to find the constructive criticism in it and remember that just because someone has a different opinion doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong as a blogger. Work on building up that thick skin and keep moving forward. – Allison Boyer, Overhead on #Blogchat: Haters (@EGlue)

Yep, 140 characters doesn’t leave us much room to elaborate does it?  Thanks for the post Allison!

I like her distinction between a troll and a hater.  She is absolutely right, that trolls are only interested in getting you to react.  But “haters” are people that care (a lot) about the topic, or at least care enough about your treatment of the topic to let tell you a thing or two.

A tip here to keep in the back of your mind (or as a sticky note on your monitor) is that no matter what, your initial reaction to any criticism is naturally always going to be to go into “defensive mode” and that’s likely to be the wrong reaction.  Take a break.  Step away from the computer.  Think about the value of addressing valid criticism and disregard any haters where the middle ground simply won’t be found.

One of the tips we give give to our clients at Infamia is to stick to addressing the facts and leave subjectivity out of the discussion.  Everyone has an opinion, not everyone is going to feel the same way about it.  However, addressing the facts as to how you came to your conclusions and claims, is insightful and lets them know that you are listening.

Ultimately, knowing your haters is going to make you a better writer, decision maker, business person, leader, etc. in that you will be well aware where the friction exists between you and your readers. The haters that bothered to leave you a piece of their mind, gave you invaluable information as to where you might want to consider focusing and improving your message.

These are opportunities to truly show that you do in fact care.

BTW, a word to any would-be haters out there: it’s far easier to destroy than to build.  There is no real value in being a critic, unless you’re also willing to provide an alternative solution.

Our Africa Rural Connect project with the National Peace Corps Association has gone into its fourth round of the competition. We have been really pleased for our client as they continue to receive national and international media attention for this project; recently the Washington Post and The Seattle Times mentioned the ARC project, and it was featured on the radio across the African continent on Voice of America.

So, what’s Africa Rural Connect?

Africa Rural Connect introduces and encourages a new form of global collaboration. It uses technology to enable anyone in the world to build upon the ideas of others. When you read someone’s idea for Africa, not only can you comment on it and endorse it, you can rewrite it by adding information from your own personal experience and insight.

We also have been working to roll out new updates for wegora. A version of wegora is actually what is powering Africa Rural Connect, and it’s the secret sauce that made this challenging project even possible.

Sssh! You didn’t hear this from me, but the ARC project was developed and deployed in three months, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. Typically a project of this kind takes 6 to 12 months but the requirements of this project dictated a very aggressive schedule.  Several of my professional peers (aka competitors) expressed the view that we were crazy for taking it on, but that’s what we do at Infamia. We take big risks for great projects, and we make it happen.

And, if you’re going to do that as a contractor, you better really believe in the project! Of course, this project resonated with Mickey and me, and it resonated with our client, wegora. The vision there was to make this happen. Everyone got passionately on-board and we got it done.

If you haven’t yet signed up for Africa Rural Connect, please do. No idea is too small, no plan too elaborate. Just get on and take a look around and let us know what you think.

Related articles

• Bring your Ideas to Africa (ONE.org)
• Former Peace Corps Volunteers Called Back to Service (U.S. News & World Report)
• Africa Collaboration Goes Global (Change.org)

wordpress

I am picky.  I like substance rather than sensationalistic drivel. I get irritated by bad prose.  I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar.  And I actually spell out “you” and “our” when I text.  As thus, I rarely find a blog post I’m willing to pass on.  (Oh, the foreshadowing!) голова болит секс

голова болит секс

Of course, now I’m going to tell you that I did find a blog post worth passing on.  It’s from Matt, over at wordpress.org, on how to keep wordpress secure.  But don’t just stay on the first paragraph.  This is more about wordpress.  If you’ve ever been online, if you are now online, or if you intend to be online ever, you owe it to yourself to read that, and take it to heart.  This applies to car maintenance as much as it applies to wordpress or to any other online thing you do.  Matt doesn’t sew (I dabble at it), but the premise is ageless:  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I’ve expounded on this before.  Coincidentally, I just read some examples in a magazine that continue to car analogy.  Tales of a forgotten oil change costing the owner the price tag of a new engine; ignored brake pads that ended up ruining the rotors; ruined transmissions; the list goes on.

• голова болит секс

This post brings it down to earth: regular maintenance is a known cost. Budget for it. Lack of regular maintenance (leading to a hacked site, for example) can cost many thousands of dollars.  I was looking at a hacked site just this week:  Over eight hours at emergency rates just to investigate.  The site may require tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to make sure that all vulnerabilities are closed.

голова болит секс

I guess routine maintenance is your “business decision”.  Just call me when you get hacked. I may even be nice and not add the “I told you so” tax.

wordpress

I got an email about WordPress today.  The summary: Wordpress, at least the public version, does not scale well.  So, here I go…

уроки рисование девушек аниме

I’m not sure it’s the ‘public’ version that doesn’t scale well.  Some gripes with wordpress are really a LAMP stack gripe: Few complain about the L (Linux) and M (MySQL) parts of LAMP.  But Apache can be a hog, and PHP has the same issues as any other interpreted language.  Plus, no native db connection pooling (a downside of Apache MPM).

In benchmarks, WP out-of-the-box on an untuned server can serve an  over 600,000 requests a day.  I’d say that’s not bad for something that takes all of an hour to install.

If you want to scale beyond that, I don’t know of anything that can do so without effort.  If you want over a million requests a day, you gotta pay someone who knows what they’re doing. (more on that later). секс сайты г нальчика

As for bad plugins…they’re a curse.  Designers, non-developers, and non-sysadmins like WordPress because they can throw up some code, add some plug-ins, hack at a theme, and presto they got a website.  Then it breaks.  Then they blame WordPress.  Setting up a WordPress site can be easy; that does not mean that doing so correctly is also easy or simple, and it does not mean that maintaining it is easy or simple.  There is no Ronco “set-it-and-forget-it” website. You have to maintain it, keep an eye on those plug-ins, updates, and make sure everything you install is well-tested.  So, does WordPress encourage designers to deploy bad plug-ins?  Perhaps.  But why would a designer be running your site anyway? You won’t let your developer/sysadmin/network guru design your site.  Why would you let your designer be your developer/sysadmin/network guru?  (If you’re thinking “how bad could a plug-in be?”, the links below tell the tale of one site which went from 30s page load times to under 0.5s load times just be disabling one bad plug-in.)

порно фото лунка

Back to scalability.  Wordpress benches about 650k requests a day out-of-the box.  It can bench  over a million with a  well-designed plug-in or two.  Then you can tweak further: WordPress.com gets roughly 250 mil unique visitors/month.  Sure, that’s not out of the box; you gotta work a little at it.

Check out:

• животные ебут телок фото

WordPress.com stats:

http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Slideshow on WordPress scalability:

http://barry.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/high-performance-wordpress/

Green Profits

Being environmentally conscious (and generally, socially conscious) has become fashionable.  And as with all fashion, it has become expensive.  Somewhere between Carbon Credits and Green Roofs, we lost track of the basics.  When I was a wee lad in Elementary school, you didn’t have to go broke and smell of patchouli to save the world. On the contrary, it meant being frugal and being conscious of your actions.  On this first article in our “Green Business” category, I want to explore a few green tips that are not only socially conscious, they also increase your “Green visibility” and will not break the bank.  For now, I start with bringing it back to the basics: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And you may even save  a few pennies in the process.

1. Ditch Styrofoam

I walk in a meeting, at some ungodly hour like 10 am.  Happily, the person at the desk is nice enough to offer a very welcome cup of coffee.  They come out with a styrofoam cup and packets of sugar and cream. Oh, and one of those plastic stirrer things.  And I’m thinking: Styrofoam? Really?!  Whether there’s any basis to my bias is yet to be determined, and there’s still some debate about the paper vs. styrofoam cup thing, but it is accepted in many circles that styrofoam is just plain bad, with health effects as well as environmental.  I don’t know why but styrofoam still persists. 

2. Ditch the paper and plastic, too

Now consider the alternative: I get a reusable mug with a spoon and a sugar and cream server if I wanted sugar/cream.  Now I think happy thoughts.  I think they care about the environment. I think they think of their work place as something more than a factory.  I think they care about their employees and probably have a rec. room. Chance are the coffee tastes better too.   I get kind of confused when I go to lunch, and they ask whether the food is “for here” or carry-out…only to serve it in the same disposable plastics when I’m eating in.

3. Ditch more paper

Especially in printing.  Generally people still print quite a bit, from shopping lists which will be thrown away in about 3 hours, to a shipping receipt that will be thrown away in two days when the shipment comes in.  Consider the alternatives:

• save documents to your computer
• Add pages as favorites
• Save emails, so you can search for them later
• Sign up for paperless billing, in the office and at home.
• Strive for a paperless office

4. Print smart, when you print

Back to my coffee meeting. I’m now in the meeting room, drinking my coffee, and the hand outs come out.  Wow! Double sided!  Not only does someone care enough to print double-sided, they also believe that I’m talented enough to read the left side of a handout without getting confused.  Amazing.

Here is another way to reduce paper when you must print.  While I’m at it, use post-consumer recycled paper.

5. Ditch the laser, lose the color

You can get business cards on vegetable ink on recycled paper.  But your day-to-day documents are either printer on an inkjet or a laser printer.  Most inkjet printers today use water-based ink which are already fairly environmentally friendly.  If you have laser printers, look into vegetable-based toner. Further, printing in grey-scale will reduce the amount of waste produced, and resources used. How’s that for the bottom line?

6. Timer-controlled light switches.

I’ve been in several apartment buildings lately which switched their trash chute room lights to these. Brilliant! I wondered how much they saved on electricity by switching.  Replacing your light switch with a timer is perfect for lightly used rooms like storage areas, some bathrooms, etc.  And when the day is over, don’t forget to turn the lights off.

More fancy, but similarly effective, are light- and motion-sensing switches, that turn the lights onand off  automatically.

7. Compact Fluorescent bulbs

These things are amazing and I can’t understand why people use incandescent.  Each bulb can save $30 over its life, and 2,000 times its own weight in greenhouse gasses.  Wow.

8. Fix it.

 One of my favorite topics on this subject is digital cameras.  Digital cameras today produce images no better, and sometimes worse, than they did two years ago.  There’s a push for more and more megapixels in an ever-smaller sensor. The results?  Horrible, noisy pictures.  Two years, I said?  The New York Times has warned about the megapixel craze since 2003.  They ran a similar article in 2006, and another a few weeks ago.  When my camera died, I had two options: sent it to the manufacturer for a repair, at $150.  Or, I could get a newer camera with more megapixels in a smaller sense at a “loyal customer” price of twice that.   So find out what it costs to repair things that work quite well, or better.  May be worth just keeping what you already have.

9. Reuse, recycle, freecycle, donate

Hopefully you already recycle paper, plastic, aluminum…the usuals.  But what to do with electronics?  These contain nasty chemicals that make them illegal to throw in the trash in many areas.  You can always sell them on craigslist, of course.  But consider your local nonprofit, and before you throw it out check out freecycle.org. Also, talk with your vendor about taking back old electronics.  

More at GreenSight technologies. Speaking of electronics, they have their own environmental rating now!

10. Check before you buy

Before you buy electronics, check them out at epeat.net.  EPAA is a rating system, similar to the energy star system, except it strives to evaluate electronics on more than their energy consumption.  Definitely worth checking out.  HP, Dell, Apple, and others are already adopting this young standard.

11. research your vendors

How do your electronics vendors fare?  Look not just at the EPAA rating for an individual unit, but the entire life-cycle of all the products, including taking the old ones back to recycle or dispose safely.  I believe Apple and Dell are pretty strong here.   Last year, Dell recycled over 40,000 tons of unwanted equipment, almost double from a couple of years ago. Apple has had a “take-back” program since 1994. 

Check not only your electronics vendors, but all your vendors. 

12. Create an environmental policy 

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красивое порно смотреть

And check your vendors’ policies.  Put yours in an environmental statement, display this prominently on your website. Spread the word.   Here are some links to get you started:

• California’s “Working green” policy guides
• Planing an event? Policies and guidelines to keep it environmentally friendly
• Apple’s Environment page, although not a policy, is a we good example of getting the word out about reducing environmental impact.

“Green Visibility”

You choose to be environmentally conscious because it’s the right thing to do.  You feel good that you print less, and you notice that others still print single-sided and double-spaced.  It’s who you are: you are becoming socially conscious, aware of your impact on the world around us, and you take steps to minimize it.  You quietly tell yourself that you’re doing well and will strive to do better.  

I submit, you should not be so quiet.

 Some of your clients or prospects will notice that you’re using mugs and not throwaway cups, sure, and some won’t.  Chances are, none will notice that you switched to vegetable-based ink.  In either case, speak out about what you do!  You can be as subtle or bombastic as you chose to.  But spread the word.  Doing so you up the ante with your competitors, you strengthen the environmental position, you tell the world you care,  and you show your clients or prospects that you provide extra value. 

Next Steps

Hopefully getting used to doing these things will put you on a path for more stringent ideas and policies.  As a company, your next steps will be guided by your social consciousness plan.  This may include a goal to be carbon-neutral in 5 years, or to audit your power usage and buy power from renewable sources only.  It may include a green roof or a rainwater collection system.  The choice is yours

In the meanwhile, there’ll be more posts here.  Did I miss anything?  Don’t just stand there, add a comment!

Peace! порно со взрослыми

the cost of unnecessary interruptions is $650 billion per year

This is mostly mundane matters, in large part dealing with email, IM, SMS, etc.  The majority of the cost is in the time it takes to get back to work

28% of a workday is spent in interruptions

For those familiar with Stephen Covey’s quadrant, this is in the “Not Important, Not Urgent” category.  Another 20% is spent in meetings (though whether these are important or ugent is not addressed), and part of 25% is spent writing “productive” emails.  This is almost 3 hours in a 10 hour workday.
On the email side, new terms are hitting the street such as “email apnea” (the condition of holding your breath when you realize you have 300 new emails), and “email bankruptcy” (where you have so many emails you have to delete your inbox and try again.)   Gmail recently added a “take a break” feature in Gmail, which locks you out of your mail for 15 minutes.

In light of this, I’ve decided to add a few more things to my list of email productivity.

Pick up the phone

This is an easy one.  Instead of exchanging 15 emails between 3 people to figure out a good time to schedule that meeting, pick up the phone and ask, how’s 2pm friday? Then send one email out that verifies the meeting is at 2pm friday.

Reply to one

Catch yourself wearing out that “reply to all” button?  Try the one next to it.  You know the one I mean: the one that won’t spam everyone else.  If everyone else needs to know the outcome of your conversation with Nancy, then summarize it after you’re done and send them an update.  Hopefully after they read it, they’ll resist the urge to say “thanks” and…

Reply to none

Aggressively reduce email by passively not responding.  If you’re planning on just saying “got it!”, skip it.

Let them wait.

I’m guilty as charged: My email app is running all the time.  As soon I see a new message, I stop what I’m doing as if the fate of the world depends on me checking that one email.  That’s bad.  I should only be checking email every few hours, for a few minutes.

Separate your to-do list from your email.  When you’re done with a task, go back to your to-do list for your next task.  If that next task is “check email”, then check email.  And, to eat my own dogfood, I just changed my “Check email every…” setting to 1 hour. And shut off my email app.

And, in case any of you are still doing it…

Do NOT forward that spam to 5 other people!

It won’t bring you happiness. It will bring you eternal animosity from your friends.

Got anything else? leave a comment.

“Discourse,” I say? And “us”? Sure, I maintain that this is a conversation. Certainly between you, the reader, and Ernesto and me, the writers. But the “us” still remains unclear: Is it between you and me? Ernesto and me? You and Us? Us and Them? Besides bringing more frequent updates, what is my role here? Am I the ying to Ernesto’s yang? Am I the Mac to his PC? (Yes, I do use a Mac, and no, Ernesto and I don’t always agree.) After a little thinking about all that, I decided to take my own advice, the one that I meant to write about before the whole introduction business confused things: I decided to keep things simple. Forget about playing a role against my co-author, who is after all the originator of this blog and therefore has last say. Forget about keeping in costume. Just say what I have to say. Practice the fine art of spouting. Isn’t Spouting what blogs are all about anyway? And what better way to start spouting than with a bit of philosophy. So here is my spout about simplicity. And this being a technology blog, I will talk about simplicity in technology.

In deductive sciences, we often follow Occam’s razor and accept that the simplest explanation is the best. This is common practice in areas where we observe a phenomenon which we subsequently try to explain. In technology, however, we often create

the phenomenon. And we quite often overcomplicate it. The problem with this is not the creation or complication: computers and technology will perform their assigned tasks regardless of how simple or complex this tangle of tasks may be. The problem is that we assume that technology might fail while failing to remember that people fail as well. In fact, people fail more frequently. We take great pains to create fail-proof technology that is self-healing, doubly-redundant and fail-safe. We add spares, and spares to the spares. We double our servers, and add redundant channels and pathways. And things work. You take down part A and the Thing stays up. You bring A back and take parts C and B down and the Thing still stays up. That’s the beauty of technology: It does what it’s supposed to, no matter how complex its design. A technology architect can design a very complex system that performs exactly the way it’s supposed to, down to the last specification. Whether by assumption or by mandate from the customer, the design can be completely redundant with every piece independent of any other. And it works. The technology, that is, works.

The technology can do that, and it does. And we’ve come to expect that every piece of technology is over-engineered to that level. What we forget too often is the Human factor: sure, the technology works. But every modification (every new widget, framistat, gadget or sprocket that’s ever added, removed, or changed) needs to take into account all the intricacies of the original design. Of course, the original architect can make those changes. But every time a change happens, it requires human intervention. And every human intervention has one significant flaw: the human. As more redundancy is added to the system, more complexity is added as well. More variables enter the equation, and with each variable another chance for a human to make an error.

Case study: I had a customer a few years back that specified a fully redundant hosting network. And that’s what they got. Not a simple system, but certainly fully redundant. Fail-proof, of course. But fool-proof? Three things we can count on: Death, Taxes, and Human folly (the designer’s as well as the user’s). So over time, we had to add new elements, remove some old ones, modify existing ones. You guessed it: once in a while, the person making the changes would forget some bit of configuration, some variable. Most of the time, things would continue to work. But the redundancy was compromised and with every missed variable the system configuration resembled the original less and less. Eventually, things failed, with a long history of changes as the possible cause. Even though the equipment itself never failed, and the redundancy was never tested in a real-life situation, the system did go down. Due to human error.

So, to my point: A fail-proof design? Sure, we can do that. But only when machines, and only machines are involved. A system is operated by, maintained by, and interacts with humans. A well-designed system can be close to 100% reliable. A living being never so. The overall system includes the human fools that operate it: the reliability of the system depends as much on the human factor as it does on the technology design. If to err is human, then (symmetrically) to be human is to err. The more knobs there are to turn, the higher the probability for human error. Machines, by contrast, rarely err. It would best serve the client to take into account the probability of human error vs. machine failure. (And to help the client realize this inequality.) Most people (architects and clients alike) assume machines will fail (because they will), yet completely ignore the fact the humans will fail (and they will fail more reliably than machines).Told you that to tell you this: We all try to minimize machine error. But maybe (just maybe!) there are times when it’s best to compromise full redundancy to the benefit of minimizing the possibility for human error.

Most outages are caused by human error, not machines. A long post to state short philosophy: K.I.S.S.!