Being Mark Cohen

There’s a great story Stephen Covey used in Seven Habits, to explain paradigm shifts.  A US battleship (according to most legend and internet folklore it was the USS Missouri) was at sea, when the man on watch sighted lights ahead on a collision course.  The signal converation apparently went something like this:

U.S. Ship: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid collision. CDN reply: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision. 

U.S. Ship: This is the Captain of a U.S. Navy ship.  I say again, divert YOUR course. 

CDN reply: No.  I say again, you divert YOUR course. 

U.S. Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS MISSOURI.  WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF 

THE US NAVY.  DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW! 

CDN reply: This is a lighthouse.  Your call. 

That instantaneous elucidation is a classic paradigm shift.  Sometimes it’s tough to see the shift though, especially if the sailor is too bogged down in trying to stay on the chosen course.  In those cases a change in perspective usually helps.  Step away.  Look from the other side.  stand on your head if you have to.  One thing I do believe – the smaller thinkers will refuse to see the paradigm shifts, and fail to see the potential that is revealed.  Small thinkers will obsess about trivial details and not see the big picture.  This is one of situations in which I would agree with Simon Baker when he suggests in a recent blog post that when someone resigns – accept it.  People who miss the proverbial boat (excuse me overstretching the analogy) deserve every chance to go find another one somewhere else.

All of three days old. And he already has more hair than me. He’s got
that real old-man look about him and I’m already impressed by his
burping skills. There’s something reinvigorating and revitalizing
about the arrival of a new family member.

So, I’ve been very quiet on the blog-front for a while.  This has been due to a lot of stuff happening, not nothing happening.  Also due to my prolific tweeting which has shown me that half the things I used to blog about could be said in 140 characters or less (How sad is that).  The “stuff” that’s been happening has seen me changing jobs and moving into a CIO role with a small tech team in one of the larger Australian online retail operations.  

It’s a fundamental paradigm shift for me.  Moving from an enterprise to a startup is an education in its own right.  Beyond that though, everything we do is on the LAMP stack, and unlike most of my more recent experience the website is not the whole business, it’s a gateway into a massive operation.  And I mean physically massive.  My eyes strain to make out the far side of the warehouse, that massive.  

The most dangerous thing at my old job used to be Ollie when he borrowed Brent’s scooter.  Now we have an OH&S policy that says we have to wear glow vests if we’re going downstairs into the warehouse, and the HR lady would prefer us to always wear steel tipped boots in case we get run over by a forklift.  This makes things exciting, gives things a salt-of-the-earth edge which I enjoy.  And seeing a real-world effect of website traffic is fulfilling in its own right.  Those clicks on web pages and fallout charts ultimately end with people in glow vests packing pink shrink-wrapped parcels into crates on palettes, which disappear on the backs of trucks and make their way to people’s homes.  Real-world stuff.

So here’s me, making a promise to myself that I will try and blog more, already half-suspecting I might let myself down.  But the half that might pay off is the dull nagging thought that Twitter is not my Twitter anymore, it’s been busy growing into something else.  But those thoughts I used to blog about – they’re still mine.

I’ve had a whole bunch of accounts with a few different shared hosting providers.  On a mate’s recommendation I headed over to Dreamhost and happened to do so on a day when they had a 92% discount promotion.  $15 AUD for a year of hosting seemed a reasonable gamble for a year’s hosting so I signed up.  Dreamhost really do rock.  Their signup is easy, their setup is easy, and so far the sites I have there are reliably up-and-running non-stop.  They offer multi-domain hosting on the one account, and I can see the speed difference on this blog when doing a full-refresh compared to the old host in terms of image load speed – and best of all the wierd characters I used to get in posts look like they’ve vanished.  So after a few months using Dreamhost I highly recommend them for wordpress (that’s really all my php) or rails hosting (I’m using Passenger).

I also upgraded my Wordpress installation because I was running a really old version.  While I was at it I added in a few new plugins.  Specifically, I want to mention WP Hashcash, the spam trapping plugin.  I had a half-dozen spam comments coming in every hour before, which were getting trapped by Akismet.  With WP Hashcash I’ve had three spam comments in a whole month, and they were trapped and queued in “Spam”.   I can’t stress the benefit enough, to site owners, hosts, and probably even for Akismet.  Pure Gold