Cars for Everyone

I know that plenty of people consider cars just a way to get from point A to point B. There are also people who eat, drink, breathe, sleep and dream about cars. I'm much closer to the latter than the former. One of the things that I enjoy is seeing exotic and rare cars in the flesh. Making a poster come to life is a really fun experience.

I've been to a few of the German manufacturers museums when I was in Germany. It was a lot of fun to see cars from another continent and their history. BMW and Audi and other makers have plenty to share.

But closer to home, here in SoCal, there are a few "Cars and Coffee" type events on most Sundays. One of the large ones each weekend is in Irvine, but that's pretty far to go. For almost a year now, I've been attending Supercar Sunday. Supercar Sunday was originally sponsored for years by Village Coffee Roasters in Calabasas, CA. However, there were some landlord issues in the strip mall and the event was shut down back in October of 2009. 

Over the past two weeks, it has resurfaced in Woodland Hills, right next door. While it hasn't quite regained the strength and size of the prior event, it still had some notable rare and unique cars. For example, a special edition Lamborghini was there, of which only 250 were/will be made. That's not too shabby. If you are out and about Sunday mornings in the West San Fernando Valley, I highly recommend that you stop by. It'll be worth your time. I promise.

Management, Mistakes and the Pursuit of Perfection

Management books, journals, magazines and podcasts. They are everywhere. And plenty of them are very useful and have great information about the art and science of management. But, it's rare that any of them talk about mistakes. Now, we are all human the last time I checked. (In the event I'm incorrect, I humbly welcome our benevolent alien overlords.) So, we make mistakes. Yes, even managers.

And in management, you can certainly make plenty of errors. Managers new and old can fail to act in the presence of poor behavior, allow bad patterns to develop and so on. Even worse, they can feel paralyzed by the results of their inaction. That can result in a manager who is in a miserable job. Patrick Lencioni ably writes about what happens to a company when employees are unhappy in a easy to read parable.

It's bad enough when a single or even a few employees are caught in that pickle, but an unhappy manager can make a lot of folks life unhappy. They have real or perceived power, the ability change things and they do control peoples' lives. It is a very bad combination when a manager is miserable.

But, there's almost no such thing as a mistake that cannot be undone in the world of business. That's not to say that it might not take a lot of work to right a few wrongs, but it can be done, one way or another. It does require strength of character and a dedication to the pursuit of perfection. If you don't have both, I'd argue that you might want to pursue another career path that doesn't include management.

One fellow I used to work for used to say that there were some "givens" in each job. These givens were immutable laws of politics in an organization. That might be a legacy worker, a certain vendor who was a relative of the owner or just a way of doing things. I agree with him to a point. There are givens at a particular point in time. But everything evolves and changes. In life and in business, we do not stay the same. So we must be alert to those times and opportunities in which we have a chance to make positive change, even if it means acknowledging our own mistake.

Build or Buy - The Flip Flop

So, I had decided to build my own desktop computer from parts so I could select exactly what I wanted. Well, I just changed my mind and ordered an Alienware Aurora. When combined with an EPP discount plus a coupon, the price was pretty much unbeatable versus ala carte. Plus, the Aurora is water-cooled which should make for a very quiet computing environment.

I've placed my order and am expecting delivery in about 3 weeks so I'll be sure to provide an update once I'm able to see how everything works together.

Build or Buy? An Update...

In a previous post, I wrote about how it's just about time for me to upgrade my PC and I was dithering between buying from a manufacturer or assembling one myself. I've researched most of the top PC vendors and I just cannot quite locate the exact blend of components and performance and price. 

So, it looks like I'll be taking the harder way out, but I will get exactly what I'm looking for. As with most things in life, there is always a trade-off between the two alternatives. But, in this case, it is something I'll use almost every day, so it's probably worth getting right. 

Wish me luck!

A Few Good People

What is the difference between a good company and a great one or a good company and a crappy one? A few good people. No surprise really, since it was in the title... :-)

In all seriousness, every company's production/productivity is driven by the people you employ. The extent to which those people are intelligent, engaged and hard-working is generally going to determine just how successful a company can and will be. Naturally, there are external factors that can influence performance such as a violent economic meltdown, but let's exclude those for now.

There is nothing wrong with going to work for the paycheck, but let's be honest... If that's the only reason you are going there and you are in career mode, you're probably in the wrong place. Each and every one of us spends the majority of our days at work. There is absolutely no reason that we cannot be going to a place that provides challenge, excitement and a chance for advancement. People who look at their jobs like this are capable of improving their lives, their jobs and everyone around them.

This would be the point where folks reading this entry will scoff, point at me and make fun of the "pie in the sky idealist." I'll point back and tell you that I have seen individuals make a difference in a company. Smart, engaged people who can innovate and change the nature of their jobs are capable of raising the bar in a work group, a department, a division. Those people should be celebrated and rewarded, because they can lead a company to success one person at a time.

And to the managers and leaders reading this, you are not that person most of the time. You are not on the front lines, you are not doing the work. You can provide the vision and educate the staff about what they need to do and why, but the only impact you can truly have on staff is to find those good people, reward them, publicize them and above all else keep them. Otherwise, someone else will. Cheerfully.

Ode to the Replay TV

Over a year ago, I broke down and bought a Tivo HD. It suffered from the same problem as every other out of the box DVR, I've every had - not enough disk space. However, that was quickly remedied with an off the shelf 1TB hard drive and the WinMFS utility. Tivo has some nice features such as scheduling shows via the Internet and being able to stream NetFlix and download Amazon video. It also uses a cable card which means no cable box which saves a few buck.

But,as you'll note from the title, this entry isn't about the Tivo. It's about Replay TV. Replay was one of the early DVRs in the marketplace. It wasn't the most polished of devices and software in the beginning but it matured nicely. And, it really peaked with the 5000 series.

The Replay 5000 series also shipped with too small of a hard drive. But there were bigger drives and tools to do the swap so that was no big deal. And this was in 2002. It had a lot of features and functions that I still do not see in the marketplace today.

• Internet sharing - did you miss a show? You could share a show over the Internet to another Replay owner. Predictably copyright holders flipped over this one.
• Streaming between units and your computer - You were able to browse all the shows on any other Replay unit on your network and play them on any other. You also could run a program called DVArchive which allowed your computer to join the party and play along.
• Unlimited pause. Press pause when watching live TV on your Tivo and take a phone call. If your caller is really chatty, that Tivo is going to start playing again after a half hour. Why? I have no idea. However, Replay would pause as long as it had hard drive space and tell you that.
• Discounts for multiple units. Sure it was $12 or $13 for unit 1, but unit 2 dropped to $7/month.
  
• And last, but SO nice was Commercial Advance. On playback of recorded shows, Replay would automatically skip commercials. It wasn't perfect - it would especially get confused during Law and Order with those black transitions screens, but my that was TV the way it was meant to be! Also, you didn't have to hack the remote like on Tivo to get a 30 second skip. It was there out of the box.
  

Replay TV was probably ahead of its time. And it was passed around from company to company and died an ignoble fate. Nonetheless, I salute all the product folks and engineers who made my TV so much more enjoyable for those many years. If it wasn't for High Definition TVs, I'd still be using those lovely boxes.

Long live the Replay TV!

Just a Little Bit Better

There's that old saying, "Don't confuse activity with results." And while that's important, all to often we confuse results with no results. Yes, I purposely wrote that sentence just that way to make a point.

There are plenty of times in live in which you can measure quite distinctly how you've done on something. That's the way life works. And even when you can measure objective success, that might not be that important in the grand scheme of things. The point here, is that sometimes it's too easy to focus so hard on the challenges ahead that we forget to celebrate the challenges conquered.

If you walked into a situation, whether personal or professional tomorrow and made it 1% better, would you be pleased with that? Most people would probably scoff at an improvement of one percent. They'd consider it a waste of time, a demoralizing failure. But what if you did that every day? If you worked just 200 days a year that would be 200% improvement. (And, no finance folks, I'm obviously not compounding here!) Now that's nothing to sneeze at.

But how do you measure these things? How can you say you've improved subjective things like staff morale, effectiveness, etc? Guess. Make an educated guess. No, it's not a fancy system. 

At the end of the day, give your self a point if you made things better, subtract one if you made things worse. Keep track for a month. The results will undoubtedly surprise you and it might just focus your goals and activity for the next day.

And that my friends, is both activity and results.

Group Change

Ever had a group discussion about how things need to change? Perhaps the group talks about reasons they are unable to succeed or problems with process or procedure. Do you ever get the sense that there's an undercurrent of "everyone else but me needs to change"?

It's often been said that the only thing that's consistent in life are the forces of change. Well, I'll provide the corollary to that. The other thing that's consistent in life is a person or group's resistance to change. Don't get me wrong, some people are better at embracing change than others. But human beings are creatures of habit, so it's all too easy to slip into a pattern, often without knowing.

In order for us to become better employees, managers and people, we need to break out a mirror and regularly take a good hard look. Is what I am doing right now the best, most important thing that I should be doing right now? Is how I am doing my job the most efficient way possible?

Just the other day, we ran into an issue where we made a change to a customer account. There was some ensuing fallout related to that change. In post-mortem discussions, I found myself suggesting us using an email to notify everyone. That's NOT being an agent of change. That's falling back on old habits. For the past two years, we've been implementing an enterprise wide CRM system. So here we have this CRM system that is meant to unify customer information across the organization, and we'll go back to sending yet another email into the daily noise?!? Shame on me!

I was able to catch myself later that day and talked with the operations folks on documenting those changes within the CRM so that people in Customer Service, development and so on would be able to reference those changes and they'd be permanently documented rather than hiding in someone's in-box. Some days, the person who has to change is you and every day, you have an opportunity to make the right choice.

Putting All the Pieces Together

Earlier, I posted why I created this blog and the associated parent site, aaronhickmann.com. I suppose it is also worthwhile to talk about how I put everything together. Since this is a personal site, I wanted to take the most cost effective route possible, but also not have to struggle with difficult tools. I do value what little free time I have so I didn't want to have to bang my head against the wall any more than necessary.

First step, register the domain. In this case, it's just my name and since it's pretty unique, it wasn't hard to get. I locked that puppy up for 10 years (with the help of a coupon found on the Internet) for about 75 bucks.

Next, get a site together. There are tons and tons of free hosting providers out there. I signed up for a couple before trying Google sites. For me, Google would be fine. If I were a business looking to perform ecommerce functions, I would probably look at something like SquareSpace.com. In any case, the next item was to choose from the panolpy of templates and then start building content. Cost for the site was $0.

It had been awhile since I had updated my resume or even thought about my public presentation. So there was quite a bit of editing and content creation required. Once, there was at least some fledgling content, I set the site  to public and then pointed the domain at it using the domain and sub-domain redirection tools. Tip: Make sure to create a sub-domain called www to point to your site as well, i.e. www.aaronhickmann.com since most people will type in the w's.

My plan is to leave most of the content on the site relatively static. I don't change up my career or personality that much, but I did want to have some dynamic content. So, I created a Blogger account which is where you are reading this and linked it to my web page so that there is a unified location to get my information.  In the content, I also linked to my Twitter account and my Linked In public profile.

This site has only been live for a short time, but it's always good to get a sense of who is visiting, why and what they are looking at. So, I signed up for and configured Google analytics so that I can get reports of the activity and how folks are finding me. Also, helpful to tweak your site content and (sort of) see how Google sees your site are the tools and articles at Google Webmasters. Both of these sites are free as well.

So far so good in terms of cost. Now I just need to keep the content flowing and we'll see how this grand experiment works out.

Windows Home Server

Just over a year ago I bought an HP MediaSmart EX485 Server running Windows Home Server. I thought it might be time to look back and see how it's been. 

First of all, why did I buy the HP?

1. I had a coupon
2. I have an employee discount because my company has a purchasing agreement with HP
3. I thought the software add-ons were great
4. The form factor was fantastic with the hot swap hard drive bays

Secondly, how has the last year been? Well midway through the year, HP updated the software from 2.0 to 2.5. That added and update a lot of functionality, including the ability to convert videos on the fly a lot more efficiently. I primarily use this to stream to my XBOX 360, though I've streamed it to my iPhone as well over my WiFi network as well.

It's great to have an automatic backup system for my PCs and it does work on Macs as well. I also like that I'm able to put the server to sleep on a schedule to save wear and tear on the box. I found the hot swap bays to be a little clunky but still usable and I've loaded up the three available drive bays with 1TB drives so I have plenty of space for music and video storage. 

I will say that the drive and folder management is a little clunky. It's probably easier for a lay person than for a techie like me who is used to weird stuff like RAID levels and things like that. Nonetheless, it's quite workable and shouldn't cause a lot of drama.

The system also communicates well with you, letting you know when and if problems exist with storage, anti-virus, backups, etc. These are both software-based warnings and visual cues on the box itself. A great thing too, is that Microsoft has allowed software authors to create plug-ins so you can have the server Tweet to you if there's a problem or control an un-interruptible power supply.

With anything there is room for improvement. Streaming video performance over the wired or wireless network is moderate to poor depending on the size of the video files. That's a shame too, because, the other utilities seem to combine to make a nice package for that type of thing. In addition, I dislike the McAfee virus protection. Just try to extend the 1 year trial. I dare you. It's not that it's expensive, it's just ridiculously difficult to do.

The access over the Internet is spotty at best. Microsoft gives you a free home server domain to use so that you can share your media over the Internet. Well, that's true in theory anyway. I continually get errors indicating that the server cannot update it's domain information. That's unfortunate, because it's a great way to take your media with you.

All said though, I don't at all regret buying this system. It solves a lot of problems for a multiple PC household and I'd heartily recommend folks buying one as well. Just a quick note that the model I purchased has been replaced with the HP MediaSmart Server EX490.

Why Does This Site Exist?

I currently have the role of Product Manager at my company. And while I'm not one to hide behind a title, there is a lot that does come with a particular role that you have to pay attention to. I was recently invited to our internal national sales meeting. Prior to the meeting, the Little Red Book of Sales was distributed and it came up quite a bit. It was used at the primary theme for much of the meeting.

My background really isn't in sales, so I enjoyed reading the book and spending some time learning more about the sales process we have instituted. The book was a straightforward, short (and fun) read. If you are in sales and haven't read it, you should pick up a copy right away as it is worth your time. That's not just coming from me, but from everyone at the meeting.

Ah, but look at me starting to digress again. One of the chapters in the book talks about selling yourself. In the Internet age, that happens offline as well as online. I was already on a few of the social networking sites, but wanted to put together a single place to locate my online persona. So, aaronhickmann.com was born. But, no one is going to visit my site without regular updates and so this blog will have that responsibility.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I had what most folks would call a blog back in 1999 on my own site, but I just got away from it over time. I'm happy to return and hope to blog at least a few times a week. Let's all keep our fingers crossed, shall we? :-)

Build or Buy?

In my everyday work life, this is usually a much more complicated question. We're usually talking about systems work millions of dollars. In this case, I'm really just thinking about upgrading my home PC to one of those new Core i7 processors. Typically, I build my own computers as I like to select each and every component. After all, I know what I'm going to do with it, so why settle for someone else's choice?

Well, as it turns out there's some value in that. A group of folks have selected presumably reliable components that all work decently together. Plus, you can still customize most PC's from major manufacturers like HP and Dell so it's not like you have to take it out of the box. And if you put it together yourself, each component has a warranty that you'll need to keep track of rather than just calling one, single vendor.

Then again, the last time I ordered a machine from a major vendor I was disappointed in the performance of that machine. It seemed like several of the components were bargain basement compromises rather than $20 more quality pieces. 

So, I'm still on the fence at this point as to which direction to go. But the old girl (which I put together) is starting to show her age, so I'm going to have to make the call one way or another in another month or two. Wish me luck!

Help for Haiti

As more information becomes available on the recent 7.0 quake in Haiti, the worse the news gets. If you are on the fence about donating something, please give what you can. I suggest http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti as an ideal place to send anything you can afford. They've been on the ground in Haiti for a long time. If not them, there's no shortage of places to give, but the sooner the better.

Give if you can, do something else if you can't - at least pass the word on.

Is 2010 the Year of Desktop Virtualization?

I've read a few articles that are declaring this the year when it changes. Desktops will wither and centralized virtualization solutions will begin to dominate. My take? Not so fast.

I'm certain large corporations that maintain large pools of computers that serve staff who all do extremely similar tasks will benefit from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). However, we still need to remember that the marketplace is dominated by Small and Medium Businesses (SMB).

SMBs don't normally have that large of IT staff so they do not have a large amount of free time to experiment. While we always hope folks are researching things on nights and weekends and trying to get better and put in the extra time, the reality is that a lot of that time is already occupied by off hours projects and service and maintenance work on existing systems.

After the last year, budgets are still under a lot of pressure so they likely do not have a lot of free capital to try something new. IT Managers will want to pursue a tried and true course with their precious budget dollars. It is expensive to move everything to a centralized system. And when you do, you better have a hot option for redundancy. Because when a single desktop fails, that only affects one user - when a VDI server fails dozens of users are idle. And that adds up to a lot of lost productivity very quickly, even in an SMB.

Third, SMBs do not typically have large staffs doing identical tasks. In smaller organizations, folks tend to wear a lot of hats. It's harder to get your bang for the buck on highly customized Virtual Desktops. I haven't even mentioned the challenges with outside and roaming employees who need to take data with them. Classically, VDI isn't there for them yet without adding more complexity to their lives.

So, I think it will grow this year and the technology will get better and cheaper. But we are still a long way from ubiquitous VDI throughout SMBs.

Jury Duty

I was selected to do my civic duty the other, day so I dutifully journeyed to the county seat to participate in the process. Here in California, jury duty is discharged if you serve a minimum of one day or one trial. You call in or check the website during the week you are on-call and if your group is called, in you go.

Finding the place was easy and parking was copious and free. I did find it mildly amusing that the center was called the Hall of Justice. It hearkened back to Saturday morning Superfriends cartoons. But I digress.

Anyway, they call over 200 people per day and it took a while to check everyone in. I thought it odd that after signing in, we had to answer a lot of questions that could have/or was answered on the jury summons form. Nonetheless, we then had just over 30 minutes of orientation before the wait set in. The docket had 86 cases requesting a jury trial so the odds were good that some of us were going to be called to serve.

It wasn't so bad in the morning. There was WiFi so I could work and TV, for those that didn't. There was also a cafeteria on site if you got hungry. There certainly are worse places to spend the day. Two groups were called in the morning, though I wasn't included on either. Lunch came and went and the number of cases requesting a jury had dropped to 23. By mid-afternoon, I was starting to go stir crazy. By the afternoon break, the magic number was 9. Just after 4PM, we were dismissed to the collective relief of everyone there.

It was a very long day, but I suppose it's a small price to pay for keeping our system of justice going. Good or bad, this been going for a long time and it's done a lot of good. I guess that's worth a day of my time. :-)

Social Networking, the New Magic Beans

It seems every issue of every business magazine I see has an article on Social Networking. News shows are starting to run segments on the phenomenon. What really caught my eye was the fact that facebook was the most visited site on the Internet on Christmas day.

Now it's hit the big time for certain! And companies of all size and types are flooding onto the Internet to try to be a part of the craze. But, I still have these feeling that they've got nothing in their hands quite yet, other than those magic beans. (I'm not certain if they traded the cow for them or not. Let's not take the analogy too literally, shall we?)

Social Networking has a lot of potential, that's for sure. With all those eyeballs converging into one place with a way to know what people like and don't like, it's an advertisers dream. But do you dare advertise there? Plenty will and fail. Because, remember folks are going there to hang out and have fun. Too much advertising will reduce the tendency of visitors to go there. And it's all too easy for each person to exclude you off their feed if you get too "sales-y."

Instead, the idea here is to have companies become part of the community discussion. Offer tips and tricks, offer information about your business that will benefit your customers. Become part of the trust equation and they will look for you when they need to buy next. And they will need to buy - economic slumps only last so long...

Re-organization in Your Organization

The world is changing quickly these days. Probably faster than most of us can even appreciate in real time. Our recent global economic meltdown is proof enough of that.

Individually, we can react to a shift in circumstances in the way in which we prioritize our tasks, the rigidity in which we might enforce policies and procedures and so on. But for an organization to properly address a significant shift in the marketplace, it must take a more drastic step of re-organizing. This process, sadly, often includes staff reductions, but is necessary to allow the company to place the right people and resources in front of the most important challenges.

These changes are not without costs, though. Change causes discomfort and can reduce morale as people often feel uprooted and unsure of the conditions. Productivity takes a short term hit as folks come up to speed with their new roles, challenges and staffs.

Regardless of the negatives, companies will need to continue to be agile in its approach to structure. And we as leaders, manager and staff will need to get better at foreseeing and shepherding change through our organization. We'll need to all work together to fill in the gray areas with detail and help people feel comfortable and empowered with change rather than merely being a victim to it.

I know, I know. Easier said, than done, right? Well, what isn't? Just because it's hard doesn't mean we still don't need to get better at it.

Dual Monitors

For years at work we have had every employee running with dual monitors. First it was 15" CRT monitors, then it went to 17" monitors. After awhile, we graduated to 19" LCD monitors and this year, we upgraded most of our staff to dual 20" or 22" LCD monitors. We've found that it improves productivity a great deal as so many of the tasks folks need to do nowadays require the use of multiple systems. For example, our customer support folks might be logged into our CRM on one screen and a customer's computer via WebEx on the other. Accounting might have the accounting system open on one screen plus an Excel spreadsheet on the other. And for developers, well, they love screen real estate.

In any case, I also have been running a similar setup at home for a while now. More recently, I caught a great deal on woot for some de-labled HP 24" LCDs. They run at a very impressive 1900 x 1200 resolution and I can fit all kinds of stuff on there at once. But of course, there's a problem in a paradise. (Isn't that always the case?) Two 24" monitors dominate your desk. I mean it eats up all the space.

Nonetheless, I like having my cake and eating it too, so I went ahead and rotated them vertically. So, technically they are running at 1200 x 1900. And I have some very tall monitors on my desk. However, I still get to keep my screen real-estate and now I get some desk back, plus access to all the cubbyholes behind the monitors as I have a roll-top desk. We'll just have to see how this configuration holds up, but so far, so good.