Being Mark Cohen

We’re heading off on a month-long break to South Africa and Mauritius, tomorrow.  We’ve been planning this trip for about eight months.  It was initially intended to be a time-out to allow us (me, in particular) to regroup and plan out what we’d be trying to achieve in the next few years.

As you’d expect, things are not what I had initially planned.  I started a new job a few months ago and things are really getting hot in our market-space. Next year, January in particular, is going to be a defining time.  And I’ll be away.  I can’t even articlaute how muh that stresses me out.  On the plus side, I will be seeing my grandmother who is in her late eighties, as well as the rest of my family.  We’re also going to be taking our kids to the town where my wife grew up.  It’s been six years since we were last there.

I’ll be online as much as I can manage, and I’ll be reachable at my private email address.  The contact form above works too.

Here’s wishing you all the best for the festive season and a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

Nick Sagan, son of the world-renowned Carl Sagan has a post on his blog about an inspiring idea, a global blogathon commemorating the life of Carl Sagan.

I remember the series Cosmos on TV vividly. It was a family event. We used to watch Sagan every week, mesmerised and fascinated. I remember the sadness we felt when we read of his passing away. I remember – vividly – reading his last book and being moved for days by the final part of the book, which was written by his wife after he died.

Today is a fitting day to have a look at wikipedia’s page on Carl Sagan and remember the man who brought the new physics to our homes and shared his joy and fascination with us. And of course to contribute a post to the “blogathon”.

Another real estate aggregator has appeared on the Australian web scene. Property guru is similar to spyk, only they are more feature-rich. It’s another mashup, this one uses google maps and apparently aggregates across a few portals. It’s also .net and appears to use the ms .net ajax libraries. The UI is obviously still beta, but the dataset looks fairly comprehensive. Tasmania is always a good place to look for different data sources as no one is massively dominant there. I saw the big three there, didn’t manage to spot more.

Ok, so it happens that you wake up one proverbial morning, walk out the proverbial front door, and find yourself confronted with a sack of proverbial horse shit. You stop. You think. You’ve read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning and you know all about Choice Theory (Thanks Peter ). So you realise for once in your life that in between encountering the situation and reacting to it you are king.

You get to decide what you will perceive it as, and what you will allow it to become. The realist says "It’s a bag of crap". The pessimist says more or less the same thing. The cynic says "Yeah, that’s about right for a Monday morning". The optimist says "maybe it’s here for a good reason". The visionary, however, says "Ah. fertilizer for my roses".

Too often people cloak their real motives (or lack thereof) in alleged optimism, and they call "Maybe someone else is going to sort that out" optimism.  That’s not optimism, that’s laziness or, more dangerous, apathy.  Whatever you call it, I don’t have time for it.  The people I find myself respecting more and more are the visionaries.  I am learning more and more about people, and about myself now.  I am discovering that I have less and less time for passengers and more and more for pilots. 

No matter how you try and regard a sack of animal excrement, no matter what attitude you adopt, it is and will remain a sack of excrement.  Until someone makes it change.  The person who steps out and says "I am not scared or lazy or frightened of failing" might be at the bottom of a corporate ladder, might be the quiet guy who works hard and battles with English.  But he or she is a pilot.  The guy who sits by and watches, he’s the passenger.

Pilots are visionaries.  They can assess where they find themselves and can formulate a plan to get to where they want to get.  They put themselves out there to see what will happen.  And they will see you through to arrival.  Pilots can understand a vision from their Squadron Leader and can understand their part of that vision.  Passengers, no matter how skilled or smart or amiable, are passengers.  They are here for the ride.

And as an afterthought, in a futile effort to tie my shocking analogies together,  the smell of manure after it’s been worked into the ground is usually the smell of imminent success.

Seth Godin spoke about the humble Captcha and mentioned an interesting idea that would pretty much destroy spambots. He suggests

What we need is a centralized captcha server that everyone can use for free. And how would it be monetized, you ask? Easy. Logos. It might be for soup or a server or an airline… Type the brand you see above, please.

This would be a culturally biased captcha test. It’s a bit like having an “americans only” sign on the registration page to a site. When you think about it, this is not necessarily a bad thing – for example, an Aussie captcha test that people could optionally drop onto an eBay ad would be able to exclude Nigerian bidders. Culturally-relevant audience filtering. Interesting concept

Rowan Bunning pinged me to ask if I was going to go to the first Australian Scrum Gathering last week Thursday.  Unfortunately I couldn’t make it as I was out of Sydney.  It’s a brilliant idea to form a community though, I think it will add value to people’s perception of Scrum, and it could also add value to it’s implementation.  There’s nothing like having a network of professionals who you can call on to discuss situations with, or even just to informally bounce ideas off.  Plus, there’s the beer…

I decided to take a gamble and try installing Vista on my Macbook Pro today. I blew away my XP and did a clean install.

• I deleted the entire XP partition (Clean install, not an upgrade)
• I upgraded bootcamp to version 1.1.2 – It sounded like it was signicantly improved
• I recreated the Windows XP Drivers disk using the new version of bootcamp
• I created a new partition to install Vista on
• Bootcamp will not allow you to proceed using the Vista DVD. It offers you the option to continue installing XP or to reboot into Mac OS/X. Insert the Vista DVD, and choose to reboot into os/x. while rebooting, hold down the option key. You will see the DVD as a boot option. Boot the Vista DVD.
• I used the RTM Vista build from MSDN (newer than RC2)
• Vista installs and lets you choose the partition you want to install to. The hassles people have discussed online about having to delete / hide the bot partition have been remedied
• Vista installed well, video drivers installed well. bluetooth and touchpad were both functional. Sound, isight and some other things did not install well.
• Manually extracting the Bootcamp drivers is necessary, as the executable installer doesn’t run on Vista. there’s something on that here. The only drivers that installed for me were the sound drivers. The ATI drivers did not want to install (and seem unneccesary as the aero works fine with the default Vista-installed drivers)

[UPDATE: fixed a broken link to apcmag]

resources: buy macbook ram online, used macbook pro

I’m in Perth for work, it’s been great here.  Last night we went out for dinner to Fremantle.  We caught a taxi back, and I tried to pay for the taxi with my credit card.  The card was declined when we got back here.  I thought "that’s odd, when I checked the internet banking I was over $200 in credit".  I dismissed it as a connectivity problem or similar and paid cash instead.  This morning I got a call from ANZ, informing me that they had observed a lot of suspicious transactions on my card.

Turns out someone has skimmed my card somewhere along the way or stolen my details from an online transaction.  The lady on the phone asked if I use my card in taxis.  Um, yeah…  Do I use it to shop online.  Uh, yeah.  Do I use it in restaurants.  Errr…  Yeah…

Turns out I’m just about the most likely victim of credit card fraud in Australia.  I was actually quite lucky in two ways.  Firstly, I have historically overspent on my credit card (with some help from my wife ) so I have set my limit low.  Secondly, not only did ANZ’s technology catch it happening, but they actually have me insured against this and they will dishonour the transactions so I do not have to pay.  I feel sorry for all the merchants who got stolen from on what must have appeared to be an authentic card but I am very happy to have a bank that protects me from fraud in this way.

Update: Turns out that my account has been closed, not just the card stopped.  This means I can’t even sign in to Internet banking to see how badly I got done over, or to pull a list of all the direct debits that I have on my credit card.  Bugg3r.