I’ve made the switch to a hosted account. Find my new (and hopefully final resting place) for “Delusions of Adequacy” at JohnSimonds.com No thanks to me for this. If it wasn’t for Steve O’Grady, I’d still be floundering trying to get it going.
Happy reading and see you over there at my new stop.
Update: As you can see from the above post, this is not the final move. I admit that this appears to be a better way to blog.
Last night, I was invited to be with a group of black belts to judge the final exam for PED 249A/349A, or Karate 1,2 or 3 at Meredith College.
Well, our scores didn't count as far as the college was concerned, but it put pressure on the students.
Officially, the real tester was Martial Arts Hall of Famer and co-owner of Karate International Kathy Olevesky.
She ran them through the test for either gold belt, gold belt with green tip or green belt. It was quite a feat for them to learn this much in 12 weeks of a PE class when your head is in your iPod or in a class about your major, (since this is a women's college, I'm not ruling out bf's either).
It was hard on us to judge 30 testers at once, trying to see everyone and giving a grade, but Mrs. O. has been doing it for 17 years and doesn't miss a trick.
BTW, everyone passed their test last night.
I learned that I'm never going to make it in the world of Web design. I flunked getting my wordpress to 1and1 and asked for help from Steve O'Grady who was kind enough to help me with this.
I also learned that you shouldn't put either a cup of hot coffee or a cup of ice and water on your desk where you could knock it over with the phone cord. I thought I'd done my yearly spill with the coffee, then launched the water later in the day.
Tonight, I'm going to Meredith College where I'm going to judge a final exam for a PE class where the students have to pass the test from white to gold belt. I've done this before and it's very nerve racking for the students.
I've been in process of moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I'd say I'm 95% complete, execpt for fixing the blogroll which has yet to appear. One of my co-horts said it's OFU….operator error.
Advertisement: I just finished the bloggerview with Grady Booch will be up this week I hope.
Here's the update.
I tried to go straight from blogger to 1and1, found out that couldn't be done without going to WordPress, so here I am. I got the import done easily except for the blogroll. I used the link manager and it didn't put them on the sidebar. I can live with that for now.
Tech support at 1and1 had me do this so that I could import the ftp dumpfile and bring it up, only WordPress doesn't allow it, so I'm screwed until 1and1 answers my Hail Mary or someone who has done it offers a suggestion.
For now, if anyone has the trick on how to make the blogroll appear on the sidebar, I'll be happy.
Part of my title says that I’ll blog about my escapades of trying to be a blogger. Here is one of those blogs.
Due to a number of reasons, I’m now on a quest to move my blog to WordPress. Here are a couple of those reasons:
1. I got complaints about Blogger’s comment ability by analysts.
2. It’s time for me to grow up as a blogger and go to a hosted account.
3. Having a blogger domain is sort of like an aol email.
4. Blogger is offline too much lately.
5. Catherine Helzerman blogged a long time ago that you weren’t real unless you were hosted and not on a free account, have tags, trackbacks, etc. I agree with her on this.
I spoke to my RedMonk buddies and they gave me options. I went for WordPress hosted for my by 1and1. My first step was to get an account which I did today, it will be deladequacy.com, still Delusions of Adequacy. Public thanks to Steve O’Grady for helping with the process on how to do it different ways and why hosting it was the right thing to do.
I’m blogging this to put the pressure on me to get it done and convert. Yes, I was getting comfortable with the limitations of Blogger, but we all have to grow up sometime. Keep you posted.
Yes, once again, my blog name gets dissed. First it was Euphemism's for stupid, now it's cutting comments by famous people, see below.
A List of Insults from Famous People
"A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults." -Louis Nizer (1902 - 1994)
1994)
"I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston Churchill
"I've just learned about his illness; let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"I have never killed a man but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
"He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul." - David Lloyd George
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open." - Howard Hughes (about Clark Gable)
"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." - Jack E. Leonard
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln
"You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy and I bet he was glad to get rid of it." - Groucho Marx
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." - Robert Redford
"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed
"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" Mark Twain
"A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity." - Mark Twain
"I didn't attend the funeral but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."- Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde
"He has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends."- Oscar Wilde
"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts–for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
Yes, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed the secret documents to not only fund the research for developing a nuclear bomb, but he changed the view of science, innovation and destiny. Now, humans had a means for self destruction. More important, it now focused the world on bringing scientists previously doing disparate research together to solve a situation. They had to take a theoretical concept to fruition.
Not only didn't they know how to do it, they had to invent everything along the way such as the first reactor to test whether fission would even work, and did all of this under fear that the Nazi's were ahead in this same project and would deliver the nuclear bomb to Hitler first. After only a year on December 2, 1942, the first test of a nuclear chain reaction was tested in unprotected blocks of graphite. Hiroshima was just around the corner.
If Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi hadn't delivered two letters to Roosevelt signed by Alfred Einstein declaring that this was not only feasible but possible (and Hitler might get it first and use it to control the world), the ways of innovation may have been different.
In 1961, John F. Kennedy declared that The United States of America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, at a time where less computing power was available than in today's simple GPS units. Again, much would have to be invented and built just to be able take the next step. We went from not being able to put a Satellite to another of the greatest feats in innovation.
The US came from having only the V2 rocket remains and Werner Von
Braun to putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969. For what it's worth, my father worked in White Sands, New Mexico preparing the site and delivering the V2, the beginnings of America's space program. Along with Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, we have velcro, microwaves, spandex, freeze dried food, wireless telecommunications and it sped up the progress of computers, all resulting from moon rocket innovation. Oh and IBM was instrumental in the design, development, innovation and execution of the moon rocket program.
Much of this focused discovery and innovation now is in the private sector. BusinessWeek just published a story on the World's most Innovative Companies. In the top ten were companies you'd recognize like Apple, Research in Motion, 3M. Others were interesting picks like Toyota and BMW. Toyota for having developed the Prius and driving research down to the development cycle with suppliers to save on all parts. Untold in the story is the $500 million that it is spending in Formula 1, the testbed of development and innovation for cars.
A newby and somewhat interesting company was Starbucks, whose use of Ethnography to fuel it's innovation.
Leading off the story and in the top 10 was IBM, but for a company that has been around for decades, it shows staying power. IBM has reinvented itself a number of times, for example when committing from a typewriter and tabulation to a computer company in late 50's/early 60's, long before most on the list were even companies.
IBM is so focused on innovation that it was the theme of this years Leadership Forum in Rome held recently. To quote Businessweek, "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano had made the day before: "The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating — innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models." This doesn't mean relying on a status quo maintenance model of business, rather to be like the Manhattan project, gather the best minds and drive to success, inventing and developing along the way. Of the top 10, only IBM, P&G and Nokia had all three Product, Process and Business model best practices.
What is interesting to me is that the chips that are in most of the computers, cars and maybe even a coffee maker, much of the technology in the computers that did the design of the products and software development of the companies in the top 100, came from IBM.
I've always been a techie type. I used to build my own PC's when you could actually save half the price by doing so, I have tech toys out the wazoo, I'm the only one that can use one of the two surround sound systems I have…and sometimes it erupts like it did this weekend.
It all started at BlackBelt Friday. I was asked to film the performance for a video podcast that will be on iTunes and produced by the same folks that did Karate for ESPN, and got to use a new mini DV Camcorder.
That
started the bug. Man I've got to get one of these, record right to disk, Carl Zeiss lens and it has a USB 2.0 connection built in.
Then, knowing I have travel ahead of me, went and got an iGo with tips for my phone and ThinkPad with dual power charge at once capability, car and airplane connections also. It also reminded me that I have the same cellphone as Jack Bauer this season of 24, but I had it first.
Then, knowing I needed a backup, I went and got a WD external USB 2.0 hard drive and backed up all my iTunes and data from my ThinkPad. Backed up everything.
It got to be too much, I was ready to go get my pocket protector. It reminded me of the Dilbert strip where the manliness of the engineer was determined by how many accessories he could put on his belt. Just call me poindexter
Well Nancy, that was my shopping this weekend, not Coach or DKNY…again, but I got some satisfaction and I'm on a techie high.
I’ve blogged before about issues with customer service Dell Hell, or as consumer advocate Clark Howard coins it, customer NO service. Since I worked in the PC industry for 20 some years, it is easy for me to talk about it. I frequently compare selling PC’s to the used car world with their respective salesman and policies, but that might be giving used car industry a bad name with this next example.
Tiger Direct has a rebate scam going that is documented by the Better Business Bureau, and Bloggers, and to add salt in the wound, they are also selling your personal info. As of this post, 42,508 customers have requested a reliability report on Tiger Direct in the last 36 months according to the BBB.
I always maintain that customers vote with their dollars (or Euro’s, pounds, rubles, rupees, whatever.), I wonder if this will be the case or is the drive to somehow get an extra discount worth going through this poor example?
It’s time for the PC industry to stand up and offer quality service rather than just a next discount. After all, PC’s are on just about every office desk, at most homes and travel with most businessmen and women.
Here is the opportunity for the HP’s and Lenovo’s of the world to stand up and inject some integrity into the industry, I hope that between the customers and the manufacturers, they/we can weed out those who do this sort of thing.
