Ben Benner’s Blog

While listening to Jason and Deb, on 101x, this morning, I learned that a recently published ‘study’ has stated that men named ‘Benjamin’ are the most miserable in Britain.

When hearing this on the radio this morning the word ‘Morose’ came to mind, but that just leads me to think of the following movie quote from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Well, look at these morose motherfuckers right here. Looks like somebody shit in their cereal… Bong.

While my demeanor has been a bit glum the past few months, to the point one might have called me ‘morose’, the last few weeks have been actually pretty decent.

Jeremy listened to Jason and Deb this morning as well and congratulated me on having the most miserable name. Both of us agreed that we didn’t know any happy guys named Josh. So, I guess that means someone needs to release the list of happy and miserable names for the USA.

Well, I best get back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Random 101x, ben, benjamin, jeremy, morningx

Every year about this time Austin is invaded by what seems like everyone. Last year I heard folks make a comments and there was even a twitter post to the effect of “The valley is empty, looks like everyone is at SXSW.”

Twitter is a buzz with all of the SXSW tweets going on out there.

Jeremy is one of the co-organizers of the AustinTweetup party tomorrow night. I will be attending, I am committing myself to the party, in that I have gone ahead and taken the following morning off. Which actually might work out as a two birds with one stone.

Len Edgerly of the Kindle Chronicles is in town for SXSW and has put the word out to all of his faithful listeners (like Gina and myself) that he would like to grab coffee while he is in town, around 10am or so. It would be really cool to meet up with Len. I think I will be able to make it to a 10am coffee, though it might be 10am BenBen time, which is more like 10:30am here in the real world.

I am surprised and yet not that surprised that Len also has a twitter account. It seems like everyone is getting into the groove of well, for lack of a better term ‘Social Media’. At a recent Tweetup, I participated in a brief discussion about whether Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are all in the same space, the topic started with a reference to one being better than the others.

To me Twitter is not even remotely the in the same space as LinkedIn or Facebook. And I also do find it kind of funny that MySpace was completely left out of the discussion. If memory serves, everyone (and by which I mean mainstream media) was all about MySpace.

Businesses saw it as a way to advertise to the youth who had gotten hooked on it. And they began to create MySpace accounts. Then Facebook came out of being strictly just for college kids and opened up to everyone. LinkedIn had already been out by that point (I should do some fact checking, but I am fairly positive LinkedIn was already out and about before Facebook opened up to the ‘public’).

LinkedIn was basically a business networking site, oriented towards helping professionals network. While Facebook, in my opinion was originally oriented towards reuniting with old classmates (you know like say Classmates.com), except that Facebook also had that hint of ‘What are you up to now’ in it, not just a historical “I went to this school” aspect.

Maybe that “What are you up to now” was what helped them transition from a purely a college student site to a mainstream site. Their ‘platform play’ I think is what helped them attract and keep the businesses, the idea that Facebook was not just a networking site but a platform to build apps ontop of, to integrate with your business, that is a powerful concept.

Then you have Twitter, which to me is more about communication, real-time communication. While, both Facebook and LinkedIn (and MySpace, and Classmates.com or any othe social networking site) has built-in mail and even IM style clients. Twitter (to me) is about communication.

The term mico-blogging doesn’t do it justice, I think to say that it is a smaller form of another means of communication is crap (i.e. micro or small blog). Twitter is a new form of communication, much the same way that IM was different enough IRC to not be called ‘Person-Person IRC’.

Twitter has been growing in popularity for the last couple of years. The last few blog entries on Rands In Repose have been about Twitter. Talking about the finer points of how to write a tweet and whom to follow.

Anyway, I have been futzing with the Twitter API, in doing so I have been running a search on SXSW on twitter. In just a few minutes the number of NEW tweets about “SXSW” has jumped to over 700.

And with that, I close out the SXSW Madness!

Laterz

bdbenner blogs, twitter facebook, linkedin, myspace, sxsw, tweets, twitter

I didn’t burn the bread, but I am still attempting to master the art of bread baking.

This last loaf, which I took out a few hours ago, stuck to the stone.

I believe that my problem is that I have not been putting enough cornmeal down. I bought some shakers at teh restaurant supply store in an effort to get more even spread of the cornmeal, vs just kidna shaking it out of a measuring cup.

This last time around, I was fairly certain that I had spread enough out, but the bread says otherwise.

I am going to put the next batch of dough into the freezer soon as it has almost been two hours.

I gave away my first loaf of bread to Jeremy and Nichole.

Jeremy has not tried it yet, but he said that Nichole has enjoyed it.

The majority of the next batch is destined for John, as he requested the regular Boule bread. After that is all baked, I am going to make a deli style rye, as I finally bought some carroway seeds. Thank you Central Market!!!

I want to give a quick shout-out to AustinTweetup.com, Jeremy and a couple of his Tweeps are organizing a an unofficial SXSWi party.

I need to get ready for bed.

Night!

bdbenner baking artisan bread, austintweetup.com, baking, bread, tweetup

It might be closer to 40, but regardless.

My beloved little server “Jules” who sits on a shelf in a colo in Dallas, had a hiccup today.

I still don’t know exactly what happened, but something caused him to go ‘dark’.

Thankfully the folks over at SprocketNetworks are fantastic, specifically Josh.

THANKS JOSH!

I have not had a problem with Jules in quite, quite a long time. If memory served and I should have gotten a snapshot of this. Jules had been online for over a year.

Things seems to be back to normal. Replacing Jules has come to mind. I am torn between something completely virtual, like Amazon’s EC2 or replacing him with a new box.

I am going to crunch the numbers and see what the best solution is.

Laterz, time to eat.

bdbenner Technology, amazon amazon, colo, ec2, hosting, jules, servers, sprocket networks

I was reading over some blogs this morning, trying to stay current on technology trends and such.

One blog that I keep up with is I, Cringley. Cringly used to write for PBS, his blog on PBS was also named “I, Cringly”. So maybe the new one should follow suit “I, Cringley 2.0″, but I digress.

He is known for as a technology journalist, but lately has also put on his “economics blogger hat”, Cringley’s latest post is an interesting mix of the two subjects.

Everyone is just waiting for the day the US economy turns around, because it can’t get much worse, right?

To be honest, I hope it doesn’t get much worse, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I definitely think that there are a lot of things that have been neglected as a whole in the US economy.

Namely, infrastructure. I do not just mean roads and bridges. I mean it more in the universal manner, like “network infrastructure”, “financial infrastructure” or even “human infrastructure”.

Cringley’s latest blog post touched on a concept from Charles Dow…

Among the many rules that constituted the Dow Theory was that Railroads stocks would lead any market rally or decline. That was because Dow figured that businesses would start (or stop) shipping items before the revenue from those sales hit their bottom-line.

When the economy is very focused on the production and shipping of physical goods, then the railroad stocks was a great indicator. As the infrastructure of the USA added Interestate Highways, I am sure that the trucking stocks became anothe great indicator.

With the US automakers on the brink of collapse (except for Ford) and all of the various types of manufacturing jobs that have left our economy over the last 30-40 years, one could definitely argue that the shipping of physical goods is no longer an indicator of how good our economy is doing.

I have heard over the last decade that our we are moving into a “New Economy”, occasionally some state that we have a “Services Economy”. I think that having a “Diversified Economy” is best, just like having a diversified stock portfolio is supposed to minimize your risk of losing money, current circumstances excluded.

Back to Cringley’s post, which is commentary on a talk he attended given by George Morton. George’s theory is that we can get a indicator on the state of the economy, based upon the number of CCIE (Cisco Certified Internet Engineer) there are in the US (or the world).

The idea basically stems from the idea that the more CCIE folks your country has the better your economy must be, because of the fact that the economy relies so heavily on data networking (i.e. Internet).

Morton’s theory is interesting, and I believe that the number of CCIE folks out there can be used as an indicator, as it represents the fact that companies are highering these CCIE folks or investing their “human infrastructure” to have their top engineers trained to pass the CCIE exam.

There were comments made by readers of the blog that possibly the rise in CCIE certs came from laid-off engineers were taking the opportunity to further their training and get certified. However, Cringley remarked (and I agree) that the costs associated with the CCIE certification is expensive and thus unlikely than an individual would pay for it themselves. My two-cents is, that it highly unlikley an unemployed engineer is going to pay for CCIE certificiation.

I do not think that we should expec the economy to just rebound, too many pieces of the “infrastructure” have been neglected. If the economy was a football team, having just suffered a horrible season, you woud likely hear people say “It is going to be a building year.”

I think that the companies in America are going to be investing in their various infrastructures. Training their staff, so that their human infrastructure can produce higher quality work. There will be some that invest in new software and hardware, taking advantage of price breaks, utlimately enabling their business to have greater efficiency, doing more with less. As those “improvements” happen, the economy will feel the benefits, but not in my opinion a rebound.

In my opinion the economy will really start to rebound as new businesses are formed, thus creating new jobs, buying new equipment, filling up the vacant office buildings, printing new marketing materials, which will in turn be delivered by UPS.

I heard from a smart business man once, “You can only grow your way to profitability.” To me, that statement if applied to the whole economy, means that the economy will not rebound merely by propping up the BIG businesses, it needs to have new businesses started, therefore the work that the government is doing to try and improve the “financial infrastructure” is important.

Who knows, maybe there will be new businesses that create products that can only be shipped by railroad.

I think I got off topic.

Laterz

bdbenner blogs ccie, cisco, cringley, economics, economy, railroads

I do not follow many blogs, nor do I repost or comment on others blogs here much. I guess I am a bit anti-social even on the web. I am endevouring to change this, but that is not the topic of this post.

One of the few blogs I follow, Anil Dash, had a really good post yesterday, the title was ‘re:Vision’.

“…is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off? My sense is that we’re more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.”

Those closing lines of Anil’s re:Vision post, are what made me feel compelled to comment on his latest article. I have been paying more and more attention to product design over the last couple of years and I don’t just mean the style of the design, i.e. how cool something looks.

I have started asking myself whenever I come across a new product (or service), “What problem does that solve?” Because, a great product should solve problems (or at least more problems than it creates).

Rarely, have I thought about “is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?”

I think to looks a product/service and be able to really answer that question, you do need to look at the vision, move beyond what is quite frankly just the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem”.

“When launching the new version of Amazon’s book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” It’s a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device’s initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world’s biggest bookstore. “

The opening paragraph of Anil’s article. He quotes Jeff Bezos, who states the vision for the Kindle(2). I mean, in terms of solving a problem, if there is someone out there that truly needs access to every book ever printed and they need it in less than 60 seconds, then Amazon’s Kindle devices are going to likely be their best bet.

But, as I said, moving beyond the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem” the idea of being able to access any book in the world in less than 60 seconds (for a nominal fee of course) is amazing. It would seem like the stuff of the future just a couple of decades ago, only the futuristic worlds of the Jetsons or Star Trek would allow you to have that sort of information at your fingertips.

But thanks in part to many of the other companies, some of which were mentioned in Anil’s article, like Microsoft and Apple that dream of instant gratification has become a reality. After reading books like “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, “What the Dormouse Said”, “Accidental Empires” and lastly “Dealers of Lightning”, I would have to add companies like Xerox, IBM, Bolt Beranek and Newman, government agencies such as ARPA (later known as DARPA).

I also want to also mention Vannevar Bush for his idea of the Memex (proposed in 1945) having influenced J.C.R. Licklider who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science. Lick, as he was known to friends, wrote a fairly famous paper Man-Computer Symbiosis.

My point of all of that is that, the idea of being able to access man’s collective knowledge is something that has been around what seems like forever (in Internet time). And I applaud Amazon as taking up the vision where others have left off.

I am glad to see that there are companies out there that are doing more than just solving problems, they are trying to change the world. I know that the made for TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley comes to mind, in regards to a young Steve Jobs talking about how they are “changing the world, overthrowing dead culture” (paraphrased).

And of course, it just also happens to fit nicely into Amazon’s business plan to be able to give you access to any book in the world, with no physical delivery to deal with (or a warehouse, or physical returns, etc).

Latez

bdbenner Technology, amazon, apple, blogs, kindle amazon, anil dash, apple, kindle, microsoft, vision, xerox

OK, maybe not a thousand words, more like a sound, maybe “Gurpasdkhf”.

Kevin just looks like his eyes are going to roll back and the rest of him fall forward.

Kevin is holding a gift that he made for Val as it is her birthday.

Jeremy brought in his camera and he snapped a few photos of Kevin’s gift and Kevin. I kinda dig this one.

Check out the Jeremy’s whole Flickr set.

Happy Birthday Val! (well, tomorrow anyway.)

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner blogs, friends, kevinNuut birthday, jeremy, kevin nuut

My life that is, flashed before my eyes.

I went to turn on the Kindle yesterday morning and to my surprise, nothing. The screen save didn’t change, the silver dots did not dance, as a matter of fact the silver dots were abscenst altogether.

My first thought was that maybe it had “locked-up”, I sort of remember it doing that to Gina once. She fixed it by switching the power button on the back to the off position.

Nope, that didn’t help.

Troubleshooting 101: Reboot!!!

I found the reset “button” on the back, I grabbed a paperclip and pressed it into the hole.

Nope, that didn’t help.

Troubleshooting 200: Disconnect and Reconnect the battery.

This was a bit harder to do, it is locked in there pretty tight.

Nope, that didn’t help.

I searched the Interwebs for a few minutes and came to the conclusion that the battery was dead. Not broken per se, just out of juice.

When Gina gave me the Kindle the other day she mentioned that the battery needed to be drained. From what I could see the battery should have had between a 1/4 and 1/3 charge remaining.

I unfortunately had neglected to put the Kindle charger in my laptop bag and unlike Kindle2, the original does not charge via the USB plug. Kudos to Amazon for making sure that drawback was not passed on to Kindle2.

Grabbing the charger as soon as I got home, I quickly connected the Kindle. I immediately saw life in the Kindle, the little silver dots along the right hand side began moving up and then down, in a rhythmic pattern indicating that the Kindle was charging.

I gave it a minute, then woke it from it’s slumber.

A sigh of relief was released as I was able to see the list of books on my Kindle, meaning that my wife would not summarily end my life for breaking the precious gift she had so recently bestowed on me.

In other news, I finished reading the first Artemis Fowl book last night.

I need to go and get ready for work.

Laterz

bdbenner amazon, kindle dead battery, death, kindle

I still really want to do a custom theme, but just have not had the time to figure out what I want, let alone build it.

I took a look around and I liked this one, it was a very simple install. I of course, will definitely need to find a theme for Gina.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology new look, themes, word press

Accepted answers:

“Because it was there.”

“It was in the way.”

“Because I could.”

Unacceptable answers:

“Mountain, what mountain?”

“It was a hill when I went up there.”

“The guru ordered a pizza.”

Ok, I don’t really have a good reason for the bad mountain climbing philosophy bit. I brought up the philosophy like question, due to something I have been working on in my spare time. I really want to need to write a better post about this and I will.

In the meantime, please take a look at the program I have been working on.

First off, let me apologize about it being in VB.NET. I haven’t worked in a client-side language in well about 10 years. VB.NET was easy enough for me to pick-up where I left off with VB6 so many  hears ago and yet was incredibly frustrating.

Not knowing the specific syntax for what you want to do in a given computer programming language, is like having the words right on the tip of your tongue and yet everything you say comes out sounding like gibberish.

My VB client for HashServer.

As I said earlier in this post, I need to write a much longer one to explain exactly why I was working on this, the short answer is I got the idea from reading Eric Sink on the Business of Software and of course because I could.

I have to shutdown and get to bed, I need to get into the office extra early tomorrow.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology hashserver, programming, vb.net