Progress on drywall

The drywall guys showed up on time (actually, 10 minutes early) and got right to work; they were happy with the cleanup we’d done and were able to put plastic over what was left exposed. When we got home, they’d removed the remains of the old intercom and had put drywall pieces in their stead, and had put compound over the visible seams in the ceilings. They claim they’ll be done on Thursday.

Progress on BlueLogs

I have my server set up and stable and I fixed the problems which were keeping statistics from being built (I deleted some sites by hand and didn’t get them out of the statistics part of the table; when the report builder tried to find out what was going on, it got confused by the lack of the site and gave up).

I’ve also updated the default home page and about page that gets created.

What I want to do now is to change the site defaults so that every site is public (anyone who’s a member of the supersite should be able to get to the discussion group and make comments unless the owner specifically locks it up); I’ve done this by changing manila.root, but I’m afraid it might get overwritten later and have asked on the Frontier DG.

I may go ahead and announce the server tomorrow anyway.

A Visit from Mike Nelson

No, not the guy on Mystery Science Theatre 3000; this Mike Nelson is my manager. He
was in town to talk to the Extreme Blue team through lunch; after that, we spent most of the afternoon together. This is very unusual — we rarely talk in person! It was rather refreshing, in fact.

Uh-Oh

When I turned on this machine tonight, the SCSI bootup did not go well; the first time around, it seemed like the disk didn’t want to stay “ready”, and the CD drives never responded to the card at all. A power cycle seems to have fixed the problem, at least for now, but I think I’m going to copy my critical data before powering down!

Specific Useless Information Sought

Do you know the program name for the OS/360 linking loader? Not the linkage editor — that was IEWL. But the loader which then ran your program immediately without creating a load module on disk. If you do remember the name of this program, drop me a note or put an entry in the discussion group. Thanks.

Actually, Emerson had it slightly wrong; this weekend, things were all over the place. We spent most of the weekend partially clearing the living room, office, and our bedroom in preparation for the arrival of the drywall people tomorrow. We decided not to move much of the furniture in the hope that they can put plastic over it (besides, we have nowhere to put our bed or the couches in the living room), but we still had plenty of stuff to move, donate to Goodwill, or discard. Diane did most of the heavy lifting in the bedroom and living room, while I concentrated on the office — I spent half of Saturday afternoon getting the last two months’ worth of financial records into Quicken so I could file the pile of papers which was already threatening to topple over at any moment.

In between the cleanup, there were other events — one of Jeffrey’s friends had his 10th birthday party Saturday afternoon, and one of our friends from our Havurah had his 50th birthday party Saturday night. Jeffrey had three different kinds of chocolate cake on Saturday (two birthday cakes and one which was “just dessert”), so he was happy.

More later….

It’s later

Our laser printer seems to have bitten the dust. It’s a Lexmark Optra R, and it refuses to feed paper automatically — I get an error 100% of the time. Most of the time, I get a “25 Incorrect Manual Feed” or a “28 Load Paper”, but once in a while, I can get far enough to get an actual “20 Paper Jam” or “22 Paper Jam”. In no case do I get printed paper out of the machine, unless I switch to manual feed, in which case it prints fine all the time.

This is the third strike against this printer; we had a similar feed problem a couple of years ago (right after the printer went out of warranty), which we had fixed for $400 by the nice Lexmark folks. Then last year, the fuser went out; by that time, Lexmark wanted $500 to fix it, but we found a local shop that did the repair for $200. I don’t think I’m interested in trying to get it fixed again (not when a new printer would probably cost less than getting this one serviced), but I just hate the idea of putting an almost-functional printer into the landfill (now that I think of it, that’s why I repaired it last year). *sigh*

[Update: A new paper tray fixed the problem.]

BlueLogs should go live tomorrow

With any luck, I’ll do a “soft launch” of the IBM intranet BlueLogs server tomorrow. For some reason, the “most read sites” and “most read sites yesterday” pages don’t seem to be being built (it probably has something to do with my attempts to remove test sites from my tables). If I can fix those problems, I can go live; if not, I’ll remove the report pages and go live anyway.

I guess I need to trace through mainResponder.background.everyNight and see what I messed up in removing dead sites from my tables. If there was an easy way to save what I’ve done on my main site and the two user sites that have been created and otherwise do a complete reinstall, I would; I have a feeling I’ve left some other dingleberries behind that’ll get me later.

It was also the last activity of the night yesterday; I noticed that Diane’s car’s right rear tire was quite flat while I was dealing with getting the garbage ready for pickup. So I dug out the spare and the jack and changed the tire; this morning, instead of going to the office to set up the BlueLogs server, I went to the tire dealer, who immediately found the problem — a nail had been driven right into the tread. He said they could fix it; rather than wait at the dealer, I walked over to a nearby coffeehouse (not one with folk music, unfortunately, but at least one which serves coffee in real cups), carrying my trusty computer and cellphone.

When I got settled in at the coffeehouse, I realized that I should have given the tire people my number so I wouldn’t have to leave until the car was ready. This particular dealer is part of a chain, and they have an interesting system: you dial 1-800-33WORKS and your call is automatically routed to the store nearest you. So that’s what I did, and the person at the other end promised to let me know when the car was done.

Time passed. In fact, enough time passed that the car was supposed to have been finished. But my phone didn’t ring. And I decided I’d had enough coffee (besides, the lunch crowd was arriving and the place was getting noisy), so I called the tire store again. And they didn’t know what I was talking about. So I asked the question I should have asked in the first place: “Which store am I talking to?” And I discovered that I wasn’t talking to the store near me, I was talking to the store near the switching center which handles my cellphone. And they didn’t have my car. But they did have the phone number of the store which did, and sure enough, my car had been ready for a while, as promised.

Technology is wonderful, but sometimes it helps to know what’s going on behind the scenes.

Wine of the Day

I couldn’t find the 1998 Taltarni Sauvignon Blanc that I’d had at The Blue Room on Tuesday, but I did pick up a bottle of the 1999 ($10.99 at Beverages and More), and we had it with dinner tonight. I didn’t think it was quite as fruity as the 1998, but it was still very pleasant and is likely to take up a regular spot in the rotation.

Now, it’s off to Shir Hadash to help set up the Oneg Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom!

Work was fun, and I am continuing to make progress on unleasing BlueLogs to an unaware populace; today, I appear to have uncovered a Manila problem in handling the uninstallation of a site which shares a membership group with the main CreateAWeb site. I’ve reported it and talked with Brent about it, and he’s pretty sure it’s a straightforward fix; in the meantime, I won’t uninstall any sites on the machine.

I started Cryptonomicon last night; it’s going to keep me busy for a few days. Diane and Jeffrey are reading Harry Potter IV out loud; that’s going to keep them busy for a few days.

And we’ve come to an agreement with one of the drywall contractors (the other one never called or wrote with an estimate, even though he did come out to look at the job), and the work starts Tuesday at 8am. We’re going to have to move a lot of junk…err, stuff…out of the way this weekend.

One small step

I remember where I was 31 years ago today — glued to the TV, watching live coverage of the first Moon landing. I don’t think the anniversary was even mentioned in today’s Murky Nooz.

Got up this morning about 7am and I didn’t have to be at Lotus until 10, so I had time to exercise. I had a choice: walk 40 steps down the hall to the hotel exercise room and use a treadmill, or go outside, where it was 65 degrees and I could run alongside the Charles River. This was not a difficult choice.

So I left the hotel and turned right on Memorial Drive, heading towards Massachusetts Avenue. I don’t run very fast (nor often enough), but it still took me only a few minutes to get there and I didn’t feel like turning around, so I took the bridge over to Boston, where I took a left, planning to go to the next bridge and come back to Cambridge.

I forgot that the Charles River bends, and the two bridges are not parallel — the distance between them on the Boston side is about double the distance on the Cambridge side. It’d been a while since I’d run outside, and I hadn’t bothered to bring a water bottle along with me, so by the time I got to the bridge, I was hot, tired, and thirsty. I was very happy to get back to Cambridge, where I was only a three-minute walk from my hotel.

I gotta get outside more!

The Need for Speed

I’ve temporarily removed my favorites (“Weblogs to Watch”) and the ad to a random weblog in the interest of speeding up this page. One or the other of them was the culprit in the very slow loading times I mentioned last night, and I didn’t have time to figure out which one it was. Look for a static version of
“Weblogs to Watch” when I get home.

Wines of the Day

Today’s wines are courtesy of American Airlines, who were able to
accomodate my last-minute desire to not only go home early (albeit to
San Francisco rather than San Jose) but also be upgraded to Business
Class en route (there go another 6 stickers!).

Silverado Vineyards Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc 1998

Silverado Vineyards is the Walt Disney family’s winegrowing estate.
Need I say more? Well, I guess I should — the wine was OK, but had
some definite woody undertones (I wonder if I was given the
Chardonnay by accident?). I wouldn’t go out of the way to drink it
again, and I switched wines for the main course.

Ch&226;teau Ste.-Michelle Washington State Cabernet Sauvignon
1996

Now, this was more like it! Nicely full-bodied and a good
accompaniment to the steak (actually, far more appealing than the
steak — I should’ve ordered the chicken Caesar salad without the
dressing, but then I probably would have stuck with the Silverado).

Graham’s Six Grapes Port NV

I’ve almost never drunk port on the ground — but I enjoy it when
flying. This port is very full, almost chewy, with a lingering
aftertaste. It would have been better with a fruit and cheese plate,
but that wasn’t offered on the flight today.

Book of the Day

I’ve been carrying around Geoffrey Moore’s Living on the Fault
Line for a month or so, ever since our team planning session. I
decided it was time to get the weight out of my briefcase, so I started
reading it soon after takeoff. It’s a good thing that I’m on a six-hour
flight, because I didn’t want to stop before reaching the end — and it
wasn’t just because I’m a compulsive reader (I’ve got
Cryptonomicon with me, and I know that’ll keep me busy for a
long, long time!).

Moore’s thesis is that, in an era of rapid technological innovations and
accompanying market changes, the only valid measure of a company’s
success is its market value — not earnings or revenue. Further, he
claims (and I agree) that market value is based on estimates
of the company’s
ability to generate future earnings, not past performance (though, as we
all know, failing to deliver on projections can punish a company
severely [I write this before hearing IBM’s second quarter earnings or
the market’s reaction to them]) and that those estimatess are largely
driven by two factors: the company’s competitive advantage (the GAP)
and the length of time that that advantage can hold up (the CAP). The
bigger the competitive advantage, the more money the company can make in
a particular time period; the more tenacious that advantage, the longer
the period the market will project those earnings — and market value is
the present value of the sum of the projected earnings for as long as
the
market is willing to believe plausible. So if you have a high advantage
and a long time period when the market believes you can hold that
advantage, you’ll be rewarded with a huge market value
(witness Cisco), while if you’re in a commodity market or one with a
short fuse, your market value will be significantly less (witness Fresh
Choice).
And of course, markets are not static — discontinuous changes pose
threats to successful companies (not the least of which is denial).

The book expands on that thesis and describes the strategies that
companies can use in various phases of the market cycle (drawing on his
earlier work, such as Crossing the Chasm). To me, the most
interesting observation was that the hardest thing for a company to do
is to re-cross the chasm — that is, to conquer a new (or
changed) market when it’s still raking in money from old markets. This,
of course, is another statement of the Innovator’s Dilemma — and it’s
one I’ve seen many times at IBM. I also found his notes on corporate
cultures (in the final chapter) to be on target, as was the discussion
of the need to separate core from context and concentrate on core
activities. Recommended.

Yesterday’s Wine of the Day

After the Advisory Board meeting last night, several of us had dinner at The Blue Room in Cambridge, which I can cheerfully recommend (especially if you’re not paying the bill yourself). I had “Number 1 Tuna”, and to go with it, I had a glass of
1998 Taltarni Sauvignon Blanc (Australia). It was very fruity, and I enjoyed it greatly; I’m going to keep my eyes open for it in local stores.

Missing connections with Extreme Blue

I left Boston early because there was a last-minute change in the schedule for the Extreme Blue interns, and many of them were visiting IBM Research in Hawthorne, NY. I probably won’t get back there before the program is over for the summer; oh, well. At least I’m already home — the flight I was supposed to have taken is running late, so I would have been totally wiped by the time I got back to my house.

By the way, there was a great story about Extreme Blue (and other internship programs) in USA Today for 19 July. I wish there’d been programs like that when I was in college!