New Jersey SPCA needs a better cause to fight

So I am catching up on Halley's Comment this morning and find myself reading an article about road kill candy that will stop production because of the New Jersey society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. It seems these folks believe that roadkill shaped candy will encourage children to be cruel to animals. Oh PAAALEEEEAASEE! Does having stuffed animals cause children to want to gut little animals and stuff them with foam? Does biting the heads off of gummi worms make kids run into the back yard looking for fresh victims? And just why are children in New Jersey driving Mac trucks around looking for wildlife to run over.

Children are cruel because they are raised to be cruel by uncaring parents that fail to teach right from wrong. By parents that don't even know who their kids play with let alone perhaps check up on them to see what they are doing. And what about parents that even after the kid is caught act as if their little angel could not be that bad. Even Jeffrey Dahmer's mom said after his conviction that he was a good boy. Despite the fact that he was cruel to animals through most of his childhood. And no, Jeffrey did not have road kill gummi's as a child.

Do laptops belong in schools? Cobb County thinks so

A county in Georgia is struggling with the concept of providing laptops to every student and teacher in middle school and high school. Teachers and students are for the concept while parents and residents have concerns. First is the fact that residents were asked to approve a special options sales tax based on a set of spending criteria that DID NOT include laptops for all. Laptops for teachers was one of the spending items in the tax but not the 63,000 iBook lease that is now proposed to by the laptop for all concept.

For myself I think the school district is making two mistakes. The first is doing this for all 63,000 at once. Big mistake, no matter what the experience elsewhere or what experience Apple has in this there could be very harsh and expensive lessons for Cobb County to learn. Starting out at one school for a year or starting with 6 graders only and learning from that experience would seem to me to be a better approach. Always do your own pilot of something this significant, never assume the other organizations pilot project covered everything you need to know and experience.

The second big mistake is the use of Apple equipment. Now before you start flaming me I am not an anti-Apple person. I love Apple, love their products and respect them as a supplier of technology. The reason I see this as a mistake is because a very significant percentage of the population has experience with wintel products and they could use this experience to help the children. A parent that has a PC and been using it with their kid for a few years can help when the kid runs into trouble. With an Apple all the parent can do is throw up their arms and call tech support. The other reason is that except for a few niche industries it is extremely likely that these kids will be using Wintel technology in the jobs they get. Of course the idea that Apple is starting a grass roots affinity for their products in this initiative is quite obvious to me as well.

I certainly believe that our educational systems need to make this move to technology. My own experience at learning online with the University of Phoenix has certainly convinced me this is the right move for our county to make. Unfortunately I think the one big bang approach is going to be a very costly lesson. On the upside this may help me to justify a cool PowerBook for myself so I can help my son :)

Is the plight of Mojtaba and Arash really that important?

I am not sure who decided that the blogging community should take up the cause of Mojtaba and Arash, but I do know no one asked me. See the BBC article if you want the full story. It somewhat surprises me that we should care about two repressed individuals while America is berated globally for caring about hundreds of thousands of repressed people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Caring about repressed people is important to me. The difference is I understand that if we wait for diplomacy to work on every case for too long that we all to often end up creating another Hitler for the world to deal with. I do not advocate shooting first and talking later but neither do I advocate starting to talk if I am not prepared to go all the way in resolving the issue. How far are the individuals who started this willing to go in the cause of these two people.

Iran exports around 2.6 million bbl/d, with major customers including Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe. Here are the countries that are supporting the oppression of these two individuals in Iran. Ironically China is another repressive country mentioned in the BBC article. Will bloggers in these countries stop purchasing oil products from Iran? As much as people might think that words have power the reality is the power of words pales in comparison to the power of money. Will the French companies that make profits from selling food to Iran do anything about this? That is the power of money, the power to eliminate oppression or the power to keep oppressors in place.

If bloggers really want to make a difference then find out what companies in your country do business with Iran and stop doing business with those companies. Write them and let them know you will no longer purchase their products and that you will be using your blog to get others to do the same.

GE felt this sort of heat and is taking the right steps

Honestly I want people everywhere to have the freedom to speak out and peacefully work toward change and I certainly would like to see truly oppressed individuals freed. Having a nice banner and a few words on my blog is a nice start but I doubt it is really enough.

Conversing with Pam Brill

Pam Brill left a very insightful comment for me about the underlying cause of both dysfunctional corporations and verbal abuse issues in school. We exchanged emails about the comment and it turns out that Pam is the author of "The Winners Way" and she was kind enough to send me a short PDF brochure with more details. Having read the brochure I found one very critical take away that I really believe is at the heart of both problems I have blogged about. To quote the brochure "put it all together to engage hearts and minds-your own and others". In my experience people spend to much time either ignoring the heart component completely or let the heart component completely rule their lives. From Pams' perspective the 3 A's, Attitude, Activation, and Attention must be balanced appropriately to the situation in order to better manage behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and ultimately the actions we take. For more details about this please visit Pam's web site "In The Zone". Very interesting reading.

This regular guy believes that most of what plagues us as individuals and even organizations boils down to beliefs which influence our attitudes and this cascades through behaviors, feelings, and our internal thinking. If we believe a change is bad then we find ways to make it so and act to further this belief. The same is true if we believe a change is good, we embrace it and act in ways that cause the change to succeed. Beliefs do not only come from the heart or the mind but are rooted in both domains. Balancing these two is not easy but it can be done as long as we choose to try. Or as my friend Steven would tell me, "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try". There are many ways to look at this concept, LifeTraks is another organization that has a spin on this concept, but all of them seem rooted in our beliefs. Beliefs about us, about our situation, or about life at any given moment. Seeing is not believing, believing is seeing.

You know your company is dysfunctional when...

Halley on her blog points to an article on dysfunctional companies that, while not all encompassing, is potentially a real eye opener for some executive level folks at many companies. The article only goes over 3 signs of a dysfunctional company, none of which speak to the morale of employees in general.

What does it say about corporate America when even the signs of being dysfunctional only concern themselves with CEO's and high ranking executives. It should not be news to anyone that people make up most companies and you can tell a great deal about the health of company by understanding how the employees feel and act in regards to their job and company. My thought is by the time the top level executives realize they are dysfunctional, the rest of the company is a walking zombie at best.

The number of dysfunctional companies seems to have grown in recent years with many famous debacles behind us like Enron, WorldCom, and even good old Fannie Mae. When companies ejected the concept of employee-employer loyalty in the 80's I think they removed a foundational relationship component that helped companies to remain functional. There were certainly problems even with this relationship but I believe more people were looking out for the good of the company as much as for their own good. Today people only look out for themselves because many companies have made it clear they are not looking out for the employees.

Why is verbal abuse so common in school today?

Verbal abuse seems to be very prevalent in our school systems today. Overweight children are mercilessly teased until they snap and kill their abusers. Verbal abuse occurs in many situations where the children are different from each other in any one of a hundred ways. How have we managed to allow or cause our children to revert to such behavior. Is it a parents lack of attention, is it the media our children are exposed to today, or is it just the nature of humans during development to act in beastly ways like wolves vying for dominance and position in the pack.

What ever the source of the behavior one thing is very, very clear. Too many children do not understand how wrong and destructive this behavior is to others and eventually themselves. This behavioral ignorance continues to perpetuate itself and creates more abusers every day. And it seems to me that the level of abuse continues to get more evil and destructive every year.

Is there any such thing as full-time work anymore?

I really enjoy my blog, but as you can see I have not had enough time to post lately. Besides having a family I also attend the Univerity of Phoenix Online as a full-time student as well as work. Between the three, time is very tight to say the least.

Speaking of work, my job has been a full-time AND a half job for what seems like years. Gone are the days of clocking in at 8 AM and going home at 5 PM with no worries. Now, I think a great deal about work while driving to the office instead of enjoying the drive (yes it is possible to enjoy a drive to work), eat lunch at my desk while taking another meeting, dial-in to conference calls from my cell phone on the drive home (almost never on time), and after getting home review some print outs and work on all of the stuff I couldn't do because I was scheduled in meetings all day. While my annual compensation is certainly good by the standards of the average household in America, on a per hour basis I could make almost as much working as a barista at Starbucks. All of which would not be so bad if I enjoyed my work more, to be more accurate if I worked in a better environment. Currently my company is trying to cut its way to profitability and trying to get them to invest where we need to for our customers is like pulling teeth from a Sarlaac. NOTE: The company is investing in some things but only those things that show an ROI within a very short time frame.

Well enough whining from me about work. On the school front things are going very well. After 16 classes I currenly have a 3.98GPA and my current class on marketing ends next Wednesday, hoorah. For those who do not know marketing actually does run the world. Ever hear about the conspiracy folks who think the world is secretly run by 5 wealthy familes, WRONG! it is run by marketing folks that have power over everything everywhere. I can only hope I have not angered the all powerful marketing folks by revealing this little known fact. My professor has told me "You have a very good marketing mind" so perhaps someday I will be taken into the marketing fold and turned to the dark side (haha). (insert breathing effect.......I am your father Steven.....insert breathing effect). LOL!

What do you lose when loyalty is lost?

Recent discussions about companies considering whether employee blogging needs to be controlled, put under policy, policed, etc. have gotten me thinking about what the root cause behind the concern is.

When my father worked he knew that he would always have a job as long as he did a good job for the company and the company knew they would keep him on as long as he did a good job. This commitment between each other provided a great deal of benefit for both parties and I suspect a great deal more intangible value was obtained by the company from this relationship than my father got. One benefit was my father's loyalty to his company. This loyalty was strong and he always spoke very well of his company even when they did things he did not really care for. He seemed to believe that even though he did not like it he never believed the company did any thing that was not in the best interests of the employees

It is obvious today that there is no such commitment between most employers and their employees. This lack of commitment has broken, or failed to build, the bond of loyalty and therefore employees are much more free to speak about their employer. This is not to say it causes employees to speak ill of a company but it certainly does not have the power that loyalty has to prevent employees from speaking ill of a company. With loyalty the conversation seemed imbalanced in that more good and less wrong was spoken about. Now without loyalty it would seem that either side of the scale may be prevalent.

So are employers worried that there is a lot more bad to speak about than good?

Perhaps companies should count blogging as the blessing it is, knowledge they never had before. Instead of worrying about what is being said a company should consider why it is being said or not said.

For another interesting view on this topic look at John Porcaro's blog http://johnporcaro.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/blogging_on_the.html

Should employers be allowed to police employee blogging?

There have been several stories in the news about bloggers getting fired or facing other reprimand from employers because of their blogging activity. The Delta stewardess that was fired for her blog has started a campaign to promote a bill of bloggers rights. People are asked to visit the site and sign on as supporting this effort, even if they want to sign anonomously.

The rights as stated are:

International Bloggers’ Bill of Rights.
posted 01/04/05 (edited Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005 15:52)
We, the inhabitants of the Blogosphere, do hereby proclaim that bloggers everywhere are entitled to the following basic rights:
FREEDOM TO BLOG. FREEDOM FROM PERSECUTION AND RETALIATION BECAUSE OF OUR BLOGS:
1.) If an employer wishes to discipline an employee because of his/her blog, it must first establish clear-cut blogging policies and distribute these to all of its employees.
2.) Blogging employees shall be given warning before being disciplined because of their blogs.
3.) NO ONE shall be fired because of his/her blog, unless the employer can prove that the blogger did intentional damage to said employer through the blog. Blogophobic companies, who violate the Bloggers’ Bill of Rights, will be blacklisted by millions of bloggers the world over.

Seems to me that most companies already have an arrangement setup with employees that basically says do anything that reflects badly on the company and you are likely to be disciplined. A company can fire an employee for the way they behave in other situations why not in how they behave in their blogs. You may not like this but this is really how the business world has worked for a very long time. It is very common for employees to sign an agreement with their employer that essentially takes away all of their constitutional rights in any way that could be connected, even remotely, to the employer.

Most neighborhoods with covenants do the same thing in the covenants, you sign and agree to give up your constitutional rights as well. Many people do not know this.

I don't use iTunes Music Store for the reasons stated in law suit

I have been purchasing music online for about a year now and I chose to use Napster over iTunes because it provided me the flexibility to use the portable music player that I wanted to use. No it does not work with the iPod but this is because Apple does not want it to happen. I like iPod its a very cool portable music player but I also like options and with iTunes music store I did not get options I only get one choice, the iPod.

I know many will disagree and give me dribble about Apple being the Cadillac of computing technology, baulderdash. This issue is not about a better car, its about designing a specific restriction into the car such that you can only buy a car stereo from Cadillac. Something that Ford was once sued for doing.

I agree with the position this consumer is taking, Apple has no reason to have built restrictions into iTunes downloads other than to prevent consumer choice through use of a monopoly position, something I think they have accused Microsoft of for a long time.

Another year at the grindstone begins

Well, happy new year to everyone, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas or enjoyed other holidays that happen at the end of the year. My holidays were great as usual and I start another year counting down until the next holiday season. Yes, I am one of those cooks that really enjoys the entire holiday season, from Halloween on I am in a Christmas state of mind. I decorate my office cube, I start playing Christmas music and create new compilations from Christmas CD's I got the previous Christmas, I enjoy the shopping and I even enjoy the company of a grinch or two. Grinch's make me appreciate this time of year even more.

But now the real grind begins again in earnest. Besides working full time I am a full time student at the University of Phoenix Online Campus. Going to school online is the only way I am able to fit schooling into my life. Between work and family it is not possible to go to a campus at set times on set days of the week. The class I start today is Marketing, oh joy, oh joy. My view of marketing is not exactly a positive one so it will be interesting to see if this class causes me to drink the marketing kool-aid causing me to believe that a practice that consumes as much as 50% of the price of a product is really worth while.

I also wonder if the end of this year will find me employed where I am today. The industry I work in (IT) is cutting thousands of jobs every day and very few of us will survive the next 5 years. My boss reassures me everything is fine but I suspect I will be rated average at my next review and that is not a good thing when trying to keep your job. At my company all employees are ranked from worst to best in each department so the company always has a set of names ready to lay off. Of course they say the ranking is for other reasons but we never believe them, at least not me. I do like the boss I work for, although she is not the best I have ever had she is at least in the good range and getting better I think. Like all of us she is overworked but she does a good job of keeping in touch with her people. Some of my bosses in the past have been absentee bosses until something went wrong. Not my current boss, she is engaged, helpful and willing to provide constructive feedback that helps me to improve. This is a far cry from the bosses that do not help and only show up to chop your head off.

Let us begin the year together and hope that we end the year as happy as when we started.

On a last note, I do grieve with many over the losses suffered last year from natural disasters and I know that we will all do our part to help during the current crisis just like we do during any other natural disaster. Americans are strong, compassionate people and while not everyone agrees with our methods all of the time, no one can say we do not care.

So what makes a person rich today?

My Mom and I got into an interesting discussion about when people are rich. We were driving through town and I noticed that 4 high class day spa's opened up in town, all of them in facilities larger than most day spa's that I have seen. I commented that there must be plenty of rich folks around to keep that many day spas' running or at least to convince someone to open them in this area. Mom did not care for this comment, rich people do not live around here. Well of course what I meant was people with disposable income available to spend on luxuries like day spa's, not millionaires.

I think my Mom is one of those that truly fails to understand that most households in America have much less income than she realizes. I know that several years ago if your household income was above $75,000 that you were in the top 5% of all wage earners households in America. I work with a gentleman that tends to whine a bit about money and I assure you his household is in the top 10% at least if not the top 5% even today.

For me being rich is about choices once you start to earn in the top 30% of the country. You choose a big house, lots of vacations, boat, fancy cars, home theatre mega rooms, etc. then you have arrived at rich, wealthy, etc and when you don't have money for the 52nd luxury item you want then it is not because you are not rich, it is because of the choices you made.

I do not have all the luxuries I would like but I know that I am among the privileged in this country and would never dare to whine I do not have enough money or suggest that I am to poor to afford something like a day spa for my wife.

Is moving off of IE really the solution?

An article in informationweek discusses the move by Penn State to encouage all students and faculty to move off of Microsoft Internet Explorer

Here is a small piece of what the article says:
A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.
Penn State University on Wednesday issued an alert to students and staff recommending that they dump IE and use a different browser.

"The University computing community [should] use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities," added ITS.

Some of the problems from IE are caused by programming bugs and other vulnerabilities are features designed to make a users life easier. Unfortunately there are people that exploit these things in malicious ways and cause users trouble.

Do these "naughty hackers" take advantage of IE because the flaws are there or do they target IE because it controls a huge percentage of the browser market. If Firefox controlled 50% of the browser market how long would it be before these folks find flaws to take advantage of in Firefox. I suspect it would not be to long.

There was a time when the phone was used maliciously on a regular basis to make crank calls. The implmentation of caller-id technology and call blocking was put in to prevent a significant amount of these problems and it worked for awhile. It wasn't long before "caller-id spoofing" was available and the problems have resurfaced. I think the same is true in browser switching, the trouble will be back sooner then Penn State realizes.

I will stick with IE and rely on my virus protection and spyware protection to keep me safe, for now :)

The death of TV as we know it will probably empty our wallets as well

Frank Rose wrote a very interesting article about the plans that cable companies have to move to next generation network infrastructure so that true on demand TV becomes a reality and delivers more then you might think. The cable companies see this as the satellite service killer since TV on demand will literally provide every person with a TV experience customized to them. Something the satellite providers can not match, at least not right now.

Unfortunately I suspect this whiz bang very cool stuff with no competition will come at a very stiff price. One of the reasons satellite TV is continuing to kick cables butt is because the price point for the quality is better. Cable operators do not want competition they want to be a monopoly so that they can charge ever higher prices. We can only hope that competition emerges as a result of both baby bells and cable operators in a local market offering essentially equal whiz bang stuff. For now I am EXTREMELY happy with my DishNetwork service and will stick with it.

It all comes down to funding...

Businesses approach funding (setting aside cash to pay for a project) in a very logical way. They view the return on an investment as what they are owed for making the investment. And businesses are certainly in business to earn a return, after all if they can get 4% from a cd why would they invest in a project that only returns 3%.

The sticky ground I run into is when the return is hard to measure and quantify. Take a place like amazon.com, they rely on their web portal for their existence and they make changes that please customers because if they do not please the customers sales will drop. There is a direct connection between sales and quality of their web site and the projects they fund to make the site more productive. This all seems pretty reasonable, easy to connect and even pretty easy to measure.

But take a web portal that is removed from the direct sale chain and instead is in support of the customer after the sale. Customers visiting the support site are generally displeased, you know what displeases them, you know why it displeases them and you even know how to fix it to make them happy. The rub is how do you quantify in $'s returned to the company those enhancements that you need. An investment is needed to fix the issues but where is the return, and worse yet what if it will take 2 years to fix everything and the company wants a return in the next 9 months.

There must be a structured approach to connecting disatisfaction with a company after the sale with lost revenue or lost sales, I just can't seem to find it.

Laptop cooling

I have been considering purchasing a laptop cooling device to try and keep my laptop cool and performing at top speed. I contribute to a distributed computing effort with my laptop so the processor runs pretty hot most of the time. Post a comment if you have a laptop cooler that works for you.

On the lighter side of this topic it seems I may be worrying about cooling the wrong lap

Laptops a Hot Fertility Issue :)

The truth is out there....or is it?

While I have not personally seen the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 there does seem to be quiet a few that believe this is just another example of journalism with a goal and that goal is not to communicate the full complete truthful circumstances. Dave Kopel has published a file discussing 59 deceits in the movie while Michael Moore and others continue to defend the movie as factual.

Add to this the false documents that Dan Rather used during the election and we very quickly realize that the news media is no longer about the news. It is, and some will tell me has been for a long time, about political agenda's. (There is some great discussion about the Rather thing at Hugh Hewitt's blog.)

I could go on but the examples are endless on both sides of the fence and bloggers have certainly been no pool of purity when it comes to facts and the complete truth. Perhaps the truth really is not out there on many topics because all of us have blind spots to things we do not wish to acknowledge, confront or believe. In the final end most of what we believe may be our choice to believe those things that reinforce our previous beliefs or positions on a topic. Believing may truly be seeing.....

People's Choice - your vote can count again

CBS is getting ready for the next People's Choice Awards and is taking votes now. Everyone who is interested in an award earned from the Regular Folks of our country should vote for these. The diversity of candidates in each category was pretty impressive and I was able to vote easily for my favorites in each one. And just maybe the people that lost the last peoples choice election can win this one....

There were a great number of good movies released this year so the movie categories were a little tough for me to choose from. My top pic is for Elastic Girl in the cartoon character category, the character voiced by Holly Hunter was great!

Into the Blog we go, watch out for the bumps...

After having been a reader of blogs for some time I decided it was time I put more than a toe into this pool. I like the human connections that blogging facilitates and the people involved are generally my kind of folks. Blogs from Cat Schwartz to Steven Vore have captured my interest and provided a wide variety of topics for thought and discussion. I am lucky enough to be friends with Steven which allows us to continue our bloggin interactions in person as well, something I would like to do with Cat but I will not hold my breath.

This is just the first step in my blogging adventure and I know that I will stumble, turn back, retreat and charge forward over and over as I learn more about this unique universe and the people that live here. I can only hope that others will both knock me down and be there to pick me up as I seek to contribute in some meager way to this communications play ground.

Step one, complete.......