Author: spierzchala

BL Ochman comments on her iPod Headphones. [here]
I’m not sure where she got her Sony headphones, but I have had mine for a couple of years and they are so much better than the ear-buds that came with my iPod Shuffle. I keep thinking that the Pod earbuds should go in the trash…errr, garbage. [I hate it when Americanisms slip into my writing/speaking!]
If you have a hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket, go with the Etymotic Isolators. I don’t, so the Sony Fontopia’s (in black) work just fine.

This is the Browser Percentage breakdown for The Newest Industry over past 30 days.

This is a part of an ongoing series inspired by the browser percentage graph at ongoing.

Dave Winer notes that Silicon Valley isn’t what it used to be. [here]
Now, with Yahoo getting its mojo back [here and here], and a few other happenings in the Valley, there are some signs of life.
But there is still a lot of vacant real-estate. The office buildings that housed Webvan are still vacant after 3 years, and they have a great view of the Bay and the San Mateo bridge. There is still a vacuum there.
I can’t speak of the lap dogs, as I am a mere prole.
However, I do disagree with the comment Dave W. makes about schools. If he is referring to Colleges and Universities, ok, I agree. But the public school system in the Bay area, and in California in general, is one of the reasons why I was not too upset to move to Massachusetts.
My kids were going into the highly underfunded, if not malnourished and dying, system of non-education in California that resulted from one of the greatest breeders of inequity in the modern world — Proposition 13.
I love this statement from Warren Buffett:

Buffett cited the inequity of property taxes he pays on his homes in Omaha, Neb., and Laguna Beach, Calif., and said the California cap on property taxes imposed by Prop. 13 “makes no sense.”
His $500,000 house in Omaha has a tax bill of $14,401. His $4 million house in Laguna Beach has a tax bill of $2,264. The taxes on his Omaha home increased $1,920 this year, compared with $23 on the Laguna Beach home, he said.

Complain about the other taxes; then remember that your kids are going to schools that are 40^th in the US by funding.
I miss the great garden we had. But my kids are learning more by not being in California Public Schools.

Heard this on NPR on the way home tonight. very relevant to this discussion.

Jeremy Zawodny weighs in with some comments on the growing differences in the WordPress and MT user groups. [here]
I agree with his comments, as I use b2evolution, which is effectively a branch in the WordPress family. It is all native PHP with a simple MySQL backend that I can run on a relatively underpowered server in my basement, and still look like I know what I am doing.
Heck, the app even survived a Scobelization last week.
Why b2evo over MT? I took a look a MT when I was shopping around for blog software to do self-hosting with when I wanted to move off TypePad, and when I read the MT user manual, I walked away. Sure, it may be richly featured and extremely powerful, but this is a hobby, not my life.
b2evo was so simple I neary cried. I unpacked the tarball, made some minor changes and I was blogging.
So, I thing that JZ is right on when he differentiates the two user populations. They will both be wildly successful, but WP will be for self-startes and maintainers, while MT will rely on highly-skilled IT teams for implementation and maintenance.
There is no good or bad; just different.

…then I don’t want to work for you. [here]
Fred Wilson nails this one. I am someone who has a degree from a good Canadian University, a technical certificate that allowed me to get a job, and then 6 years of very intensive work experience to get where I am right now.
I consider that my six years of on the job training better than any degree program I could have gone through, as I was able to focus on the key topics that affect my specialty as a part of real-world scenarios. A sterile, controlled academic environment could not have given me that experience, or even prepared me for it.
If someone tells me they went to an “prestigious” university, I say “So, what can you do?”. I have learned that you get your “street cred” by doing, not being.
So, Mr./Ms. MBA from an Ivy League/”Prestigious” university — what can you do to make my customers want to work with us? What will you do to make my company “remarkable”?
Do it; don’t be it.

David Parmet, one of the very few people who reads this blog regularly, has done some amazing US PR work on behalf of Tom Mahon of the English Cut.
As a reward, he is getting a finely crafted, hand cut, stitched and fitted bespoke suit.
If my style wasn’t mountain climber casual, I would be jealous.

Ed Sim has some great comments on how small firms can play against competitive firms that are incumbent in the same space. [here]
I work for the smaller competitor of the incumbent in our market, so I have seen the ups and downs of our approach. We do suffer from some of the faults that are listed here, but we also shine in some of the areas Ed talks about.
It was just a refreshing piece to read on a slow, thought-piece Friday afternoon.

Found a stupid GrabIP bug last night. When I clicked on one of the IP addresses in my log analysis system, it showed that the visitor was from Nigeria, then threw an error when the WHOIS attempted to get more information.
I realized that I did not have the code to handle the AFRINIC Registry in my tool. DOH! A simple fix and everything is good.

Stephen O’Grady describes “continuous partial attention” in this post. He notes Scoble’s decision to retire the link blog and try and devote more time to his life.
How much is too much? That is a question we all fight with daily. I currently have a half-finished Zen book, Beyond Bullets, and a long article out of the Harvard Business Review in paper reading.
I track 143 blogs…which makes me a lightweight, I know. But it is amazing how much I have learned and absorbed by doing this. How this has changed my view on things I look at every day.
But SO’Grady also talks about having times when you aren’t connected; where you can be free of the shackles. I read about folks who suck down a book a day. I am lucky if I can string together enough time in a day to read 5 pages.
I definitely suffer from “continuous partial attention”, a cousin of ADHD.

Even Steve Rubel is detecting the trend of blogging burnout. [here and here]

Read it here.
Interesting that most of the people who came to read my post about the sale rumour came from Forrester Research. Perhaps this is an indication that they were as surprised as I was.
I wonder if Brian Kardon, chief strategist and marketing officer at Forrester, would like to post a comment to set the record straight, as he is the one quoted in the article. Or perhaps Alan Meckler will comment on his theory why someone would want to start a rumour like this.