Being Mark Cohen

I stumbled across this video of Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford last year while I was wasting time on YouTube. I love his quote “If you live every day as if it was your last, some day you will undoubtedly be right”

I sometimes feel like I have outgrown most of the people who used to be my mentors, and… well… I’ve outlived the others. It’s a really great resource to have such easy access to some crumbs of knowledge from people like Steve Jobs or Guy Kawasaki so easily online (I highly recommend that Guy Kawasaki “Art of the Start” video). It still leaves an unanswered question, how do you find the right mentors.

I used to attend monthly meetings of an organisation called First Tuesday, which was essentially a forum connecting entrepeneurs, venture capitalists and technologists. It started in the UK and rapidly grew to have chapters in many countries. The founders soon realised that they could cash in on the dotcom boom and sold the organisation to a private company for something like AUD $80,000,000. That effectively killed it. The concept was brilliant though, hundreds of entrepeneurial thinkers and VCs connecting every month, sharing ideas, listening to speakers (at least one from the sponsor company). I would be interested to know how many initiatives kicked off in that time actually had anything to do with First Tuesday. That was a less-than-well-documented dimension to the whole thing

It seems Skype is breaking out of the (pc) box and setting itself free with the introduction of Skype WiFi phones.

Skype users will soon be able to make Internet calls on the go, and without a computer. Skype announced that Accton Technology’s Edge Core, Belkin, Netgear, and Standard Microsystems will all release WiFi handsets later this quarter.

I suppose these phones would be of particular use to mobile workers in areas like the Sydney CBD where Telstra Wireless Internet is relatively easily accessible. A SkypeIn number could be purchased, and a virtual office is created. A simple bit of fiddling and a "land line" number is in your pocket. In theory anyway

This might make Skype a more viable second phone line at home for people with no other existing VoIP option.  It makes it more feasible to have a work / home number other than a mobile number, and above all it’s a cool gadget

My VoIP setup at home offers pstn failover, and I have it set up with a set of Uniden wireless handsets. My voicemail comes through in my inbox, as does my mobile phone voicemail. How much more could I gain from letting Skype out of my PC…. 

I don’t claim to be politically savvy or to be any kind of expert on the tragedies unfolding before our eyes. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand how little I know, and come to see far more shades of grey and far less black and white.

Ha’aretz is running an article about how high tech firms in Haifa are trying to keep functioning in the war. I didn’t know that both Microsoft and Intel were in Haifa.

Microsoft Israel, which has 180 employees in its Haifa development center, instructed its workers to stay at home. In an e-mail, employees were told that they did not have to come to work, if they preferred to stay with their families. They could, however, work from home if they wished.

Intel Israel, with 2,000 employees in its Haifa development center, decided not to take any chances and to abide by the instructions of the Home Front Command. Most of the workers turned up at the office, but stayed in shelters or protected areas. The employees are equipped with notebook computers with wireless communications. An Intel spokesman said that work continued as usual.

My wife’s uncle is a professor at the technical university in Haifa. He sent us this email on Friday

Dear all,
Just to let you know that Tallie and Yossie and kids are safe as their house has been bombed. Derrie and Shavit will be taken to a shelter as they can no longer get out of Nahariya – we are beside ourselves with worry.

Another article also on Ha’aretz talks about the Arab Israelis who’re caught in the middle, whose villages are also being hit by Katyusha rockets, and whose villages have not historically been shelled or bombed so they do not have shelters. This article also talks about how some of the Israeli Arabs in integrated societies feel.

The anger at the Israelis is explicit. “You don’t go to war over three abducted soldiers; for this you enter negotiations,” they said. The anger at Hezbollah is far more implicit and they hesitate to talk about it. “Hezbollah doesn’t know that there are lots of Arabs in this country,” says Ibrahim Hader evasively. Hussein Meri, a woodcutter and fisherman, takes command of the discussion: “They won’t tell you. But yes, I’m angry at Nasrallah. He doesn’t understand the reality here.He only sees Gaza in his mind’s eye. I have spent most of my life among Jews. For 30 years I worked in the market in Hadera. The Palestinians would think that I was a Jew, the Jews saw me as an Arab. Everything is reversed

Both of these perspectives are massively under-represented or ignored in the Australian media, with all focus on Hezbolla and the Lebanese.

From my (probably naive) perspective I always believed that technology was the great enabler, including in a social sense. In Africa I learned that wealth breeds contentedness and an empty stomache breeds rebellion. And now we are seeing a replaying of history with fatter, fitter, wealthier and better equipped fighters on either side. I guess religious fervour can replace hunger.

More expensive weapons, better technology, and kids still dying. As I keep saying I do not profess to know the answers, but my naive opinion is that this world needs far more Hussein Meris and Ibrahim Haders and their Jewish equivalents. Is it possible that “the two state solution” only means another border over which opposing forces can shoot projectiles at each other?

Vienna.  It’s a good desktop app, it has smart folders which are dynamic "folders" that work by filtering content based on parameters.  It also has a quick search which shows up in the footer of the window, similar to Firefox.  It also feels really fast when it is updating the feeds, and it is very quick to render articles when browsing through them.  What I think is missing is the ability to click on a folder and view all unread items in the folder as a consecutive "page".  RSS Bandit (PC software) does this really well.

There is a really interesting article on the Economist on marketing I have been reading.  There is a striking point it makes about online marketing being the dawn of measurable effectiveness of marketing.  But an implied point in the article is this:

• The worldwide advertising industry is likely to be worth $428 billion in revenues this year
• AdWords and AdSense produced $6.1 billion in revenues for Google last year.

This means that if Google gets no growth at all then they will still get about 1.25% of all global advertising spend.  That’s not just online advertising, that is the the total spend of the whole global advertising industry.  Google has taken out more than one percent of global advertising.  And that’s just so far.  That is so inspiring.  It’s like Guy Kawasaki says in Art of the Start, one of the ways to make meaning is to right a wrong.  Google came along (courtesy of Overture, with tweaking) and brought measurement to advertising.

Read the whole article here.

If you are or were a Monty Python fan, you’ll love this one. John Cleese delivering a true to form Eulogy at Graham Chapman’s funeral. This is old but still funny in a real life, dirt under the fingernails kind of way

I enjoy John Cleese as he is one of those comedians who can really push society to it’s limit and still come across as a gentleman. Watch the clip to see what I mean

Graham Chapman Eulogy

First off, I still love my Macbook Pro Right, having said that there is a known issue with Windows XP not keeping the correct time on a MacBook Pro. I *think* it’s something to do with XP expecting system time to be correct for your timezone and Mac OS expecting it to be GMT based. Rather than spending time figuring out why, I got some help from Brad the Deputy Systems Guru at work who pointed me to w32tm.

After a bit of fiddling, I found a few really interesting things out about time servers on the internet. Most importantly, I found pool.ntp.org. If you use these servers, drill down to your region in the pool (they offer an explanation as to why). Also, use the dns as the IP of the actual server that honours your request is arbitrary and changes hourly.

I have put together a little batch file that will sync with a time server on boot, which I will use on the MacBook to correct the system time when I boot into XP. It goes like so:

net time /setsntp:[your region].pool.ntp.org
net stop w32time
net start w32time
w32tm /resync

Note the [your region] placeholder, this bit needs to be updated for wherever you are on the planet. For those of us in Australia, the batch file looks like this:

net time /setsntp:au.pool.ntp.org
net stop w32time
net start w32time
w32tm /resync

This is the one of the few issues I’ve encountered with XP on the Mac. It’s not much of a problem for arbitrary surfing but it is a bit of an issue for time sensitive actions like interoperating with some source control servers. Also, a decent driver for the touchpad would be great.

There is an interesting article that Rob has posted on BusinessPundit.com.  I think the following quote sums up what he is saying quite well

If Google is going to succeed in the long run, their innovative drift should be primarily around search. That is the kind of innovation that moves the center along and helps a company advance as markets and technologies change. And that kind of moving center is what helps companies stay at the top for a long long time.

This premise feels a bit "wrong" to me.  I think it’s off target because, to use an example, if Microsoft had stuck to giving us better OS software they might have given us Vista last year but we wouldn’t have Office or c# or arguably .net or MSN Messenger (or Windows Messenger or Microsoft Messenger) or a lot of other great pieces of software.

Writing off Google’s web tools like Google Maps right now could be paralleled (granted in a very approximate way ) to when Schawlow and Townes invented the laser about 70 years ago.  It was not apparently useful at the time and could have been written off as largely useless, with the CD and the DVD and fibre optics being beyond a dream.

I suppose what I’m saying is I think  it’s way too early and too speculative to be making calls like this.  These bits of software could be part of countless bigger things. And besides this, with Google having people working on projects that interest them that may or may not relate to their work, and their mantra of "Don’t be evil", we should expect to see Google coming out with software that is interesting and cool and useful – regardless of whether it immediately contributes revenue.

I would be very interested to know how many of Yahoo’s mail users and Hotmail’s users moved to gmail.  For one, I did.