Marke’s Blog

As you know from a previous posting, I have been using BookMooch to trade used books. This week I received a mooch from “Prison Book Program“.

A quick search directed me to the web site explaining this is a non-profit organization that gives books to prisoners. I had no idea this organization existed. BookMooch seems like a perfect way for this organization to get books.

BookMooch has a charity page that lists the prison program as well as several other charities you can give your points to. I am going to give them a point (worth a book) for the one they spent getting a book from me!

You are probably wondering what book they requested… “199 Great Home Businesses You Can Start (and Succeed In) for Under $1,000.”

Posted from SFO Airport

As a user of a PC at work and a Mac at home, I am always on the lookout for applications that will allow me to get my work done using my Mac when I work at home. Eventually I would like to follow many others and switch to a Macbook Pro as my work laptop. Google Docs is on the right track, however it is missing some basic functionality that will keep most people from migrating away from their Microsoft suite.

I am performing on-line research for a vertical market conference I will be attending . This conference is attended by many organizations made up of many subsidiaries. There are also complex collaborations and joint ventures between the companies. I need to create a document for myself as well as my coworkers to help them to understand the complex relationships before going to the conference. Mind maps would be perfect for this type of information visualization, however I haven’t picked a mind map application yet so I decided to outline the information instead. Using Google Docs would give me cross platform capabilities as well as the ability to share with coworkers.

The only auto-numbering function I could find in Google Docs was the numbered list. The picture below shows the result of using this in an attempt to create an outline. I went back to a PC only tool, Microsoft’s OneNote, to create the outline. Since none of my coworkers have the application, sharing it can be accomplished by either exporting to MS Word and sending by e-mail or cut/paste to Google Docs.

The standard outline format survives the cut and paste into Google Docs, however it doesn’t keep it if you try to edit online. Zoho’s Writer doesn’t support outlining either. OneNote has great outlining support, but doesn’t seem to have the ability to create an editable document that can be accessed without having OneNote installed.

The cross platform issue I solved by running OneNote using VMWare on the Mac.  I also found jreepad an open source outliner that has versions for most operating systems, it doesn’t appear to have a web version. Evernote looks like a powerful version of Google Notes instead of a proper outliner. I will explore more once I get an invitation to the private beta.

Web based Dynamic List has both private and shared outlines. Firefox support, a numbering scheme instead of bullets, and an offline mode would make Dynamic List more useful.

Please let me know if you know of other solutions for web based outlining.

Posted from the Super 8 in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada

My wife and kids read at least twice as many books as I do per year, which makes our collective used book generation pretty significant. A few months ago I signed up for the Bookmooch service to give our used books away. I was surprised at how fast books where being mooched (requested) from my list. The first one was within an hour of putting the books into my inventory. This is cool. I can’t bring myself to toss books in the garbage, so they just stack up in my office or in boxes in the garage waiting for the next garage sale where I might get a 25 cents for each one.

Bookmooch certainly sounds like a better way. Give a book away you don’t want, get one you do. There are a ton of posts and videos on how BookMooch works on Technorati (link leads to search results). If you aren’t familiar with Bookmooch this is a good place to get all the details on how to use it.

Now that books had been requested I had to package them up and send them. Since I am paying for this I want it to be as cheap as possible. I found the best way to package them is to use file folders which are about 8 cents each. Wrap the book like a present using the file folder as wrapping paper and write the address on it. Using media mail rates I send books for $2.47. The total cost to give a book away is $2.55. An envelope is about a $1.50 which will drive your total cost to $3.97.

The following week while changing flights in Denver Airport, I saw a book on the shelf of a bookstore that I wanted to read. I took out my Blackberry, logged into Bookmooch, search for and requested the book. About a week later the book showed up. I really like this. Great, now I can get free books when I see them instead of shelling out 10 to 20 bucks for a new one.

About a week later the book arrived at my office. Bob (my officemate) was curious about what I was doing. His response to my enthusiastic explanation to getting a free book was “Hey, wouldn’t you be better off selling your books at the local used book store?”.

That made me think. Is paying $2.58 to give books away a good deal? Is selling it on Amazon better? Would selling it at the local used book store be a better deal? I can get money for my used books on Amazon and at the local used book store, which certainly sounds better than paying to give my book away, but is it?

It is time for an experiment. Over the next couple of weeks I will explore “The Economics of Used Books”. Check back for the results.

Posted from Santa Cruz, CA

I am glad I made it into the first 500 people invited to use Skydeck. After reading the basics about it the night before I couldn’t wait to get into the Beta. As you know I am in sales and I use my Blackberry as my primary communication device. I don’t have an office phone, I use my cell phone exclusively. This Web Application runs analytics on your cell phone data.

I am always looking into new ways to get analytics on my communications with my customers to enhance my effectiveness as a Sales Professional. Relying on my memory and the notes in our not so great CRM solution really isn’t the best way to keep track of the phone communications I have with my customers.

Skydeck is Web application plus a plugin for Firefox, which adds a toolbar. It installed itself error free on my Mac Pro. Next I connect Skydeck to my AT&T wireless account by providing my cell phone number and password. It reported that it was downloading my July 2006 statement. July 2006! That is awesome. I am going to get nearly 2 years of history! It took about as long as it does to import 2 CD into iTunes (which I was doing at the same time) to load my phone records. The Firefox Skydeck toolbar gained new information from my account records.

I checked my AT&T Wireless account to verify the minutes number. I have 6,194 mins in my rollover account and 597 left out of my 2,000 for this month, so this checks out. This is a nice feature, it would be nice to see it broken down between the two, however what I really need to know it shows, total mins available before I have to pay extra. When you click on the triangle you get a better breakdown including the number of mins used this month.

The other interesting statistics that it showed was the total number of minutes since July 2006, 39,884 minutes or an average of 1,899 per month. That certainly validates my 2,000 mins per month plan!

Next, I imported my contact list into Skydeck. I exported my contacts (all 4400 of them) from my Mac Address Book to a vcard and uploaded the vcard DB into Skydeck. It then processed these and created the Address Book tab. This shows who I call and who calls me. It also shows a meter of who calls who the most, the last call, volume, and rank.

I manage 30 accounts with an average of 7 contacts per account plus employees of iDirect, so I should see about 250 to 300 of these contacts as people I communicate with by phone. The rest of the 4400 are contacts from pre-July 2006 that I typically only contact by e-mail now and a few calls. At this point the program shows 315 contacts in its mapping of phone calls. I already know some numbers haven’t been mapped, therefore I expect this number will increase once I clean up the contact data.

There are some surprises here. I was surprised to find that only 8 of the 30 people Ranked the highest by Skydeck are customers. I use e-mail frequently to communicate with customers and not all numbers have been fully mapped yet. Over 50% of my top 30 Ranked contacts are employees of my company. When I look at the criteria for ranking I see they use:

- How often
- How long the conversations last
- When you last spoke
- other??

This starts to make sense, a lot of calls to employees last a long time. I normally have a face-to-face meeting with customers if I have a lot to say to them. My HQ is 3,000 miles away so I tend to deal with employees over the phone more than visiting them.

I guess it is good news that my manager and his manager show up in my top 10! Only 1 customer made it to my top ten. He happens to be one of my largest customers. The other 3 largest customers made it into my top 30.

Next I sorted on Volume which is defined as “…how many minutes you have spent talking with the person, relative to others in your address book.” This time only 6 customers end up in the top 30. Again, of the top 30 about 50% are employees. There are some different names here, but most about the same.

I click back over to the Call Log tab and right away I see a couple of issues I need to address. There are some numbers without names. I need to do an address book update for that. Two areas I am not sure yet how to sort out are:

1) Some companies do not have direct dial numbers, so I must go through the switch board to get to several different people. This is currently assigned to one of the employees.

2) Sometimes I meet customers on a conference call, which is a personal conference call number I use over and over again. These show up with no name associated with them. These 800 numbers also allow only one name to be associated with them.

Maybe they have addressed these items. Check back in a few days and I will post more experiences after using the application for a few days. I have a ton of suggestions at this point, but will wait to tell you about those until I find out if I missed them or not.

I can’t take it, I have to include at least one suggestion now. I would like Skydeck to treat any 800 and 866 number as special and allow me to assign multiple names to it as well as different names each time it shows up in my call log. Ideally this would connect to my calendar program and pull the names automatically from the invitation list on the calendar activity for the meeting. It should give me a couple of options, divide the time by the number of participants and assign equal portions to each, assign the full amount of time to each person, and finally allow me to add a percentage of the time to assign to each person. I rarely have more than 5 conference calls in a week, so it wouldn’t be too much to deal with. This would also be useful for the case where I must go through a main number.

Ideally this will be integrated in CRM applications. This data along side all my contact and account information would be very useful. A Xobni like program plus Skydeck integrated into say Salesforce.com, would provide very valuable analysis.

Again, come back and I will post more experiences with Skydeck after I have had a chance to use it for a few days. The next step is to figure out how I will use this to improve my communications.

by Marke Clinger

This weekend I did the unimaginable.

I purposefully pulled out, one by one, every drive in my ReadyNAS NV RAID while it was running. I am pretty familiar with RAID technology because of the work I did in the late ’80s with several pioneering companies working on early RAID and network attached storage (NAS) implementations. Even with this knowledge I was apprehensive about removing anyone of the hard drives in my NAS RAID Array, it was outright frightening to pull all of them out and expect the data not to get lost.

The ReadyNAS NV is a fantastic solution which serves several purposes for me:

1) Network Attached Storage - Connects to the Gigabit network in my house.
2) RAID Array - Disks are redundant therefore I don’t have to worry about data loss.
3) iTunes Service - I can put all my music on this and it serves it up on my wireless and wired network. Music stored securely in one place, available in all.

It is a great solution for a home server that works well with both MACs and PCs.

This pull a disk, wait, pull a disk, wait is the published procedure to upgrade the size of your NAS volume. My plan is to replace 4 x 400G drives with 4 x 1000G drives. Infrant* has their own RAID protocol, X-RAID, that allows you to replace the disks in the array with larger disks to create more storage. My four 400G drives gave me a total usable volume of 1.06T which is 97% full. After installing the new drives I expect to have about 2.65T of storage.

After a careful review of 1T Hard Disks on Tom’s Hardware, I purchased 4 Seagate drives (Seagate ST31000340AS **) from newegg.com which has great prices on hard drives and good customer service. Then I checked Infrant’s web site to find out they weren’t supported. Oh well, let’s put them in and see what happens. This is where it gets a bit scary. I have my backups for the last 18 months, movies, pictures, music…all my data on this RAID array. Some of which is live on the other computers in the house, some is only on the RAID. After several hours of angst and reading Infrant FAQ, blogs, and their discussion groups I find that no one has reported successful use of Seagate drives I purchased. I guess I get to be the first.

I upgraded the firmware on my Infrant NAS to the latest release did a volume check and a resync to make sure everything was in order. Then, out came the first disk. My array is in the garage so it was a couple of minutes to get the old drive out and the new one in. When I made it back to my Mac, warning messages had appeared on my screen and in my e-mail. A couple where pretty scary. The web interface was reporting that the disk was initializing. That was a good sign. That took almost 4 hours, then it did a resync where the new drive joined the array which took 3 more hours. The Borg have assimilated my first disk into the collective!

The drive reports 931 GB of usable space, with only 364 GB allocated to the collective. X-RAID volumes are limited in size to the smallest disk. 24 hours later I am ready to install the 4th and final drive into the ReadyNAS NV. Now it is 8 hours since I put the last drive in, 32 hours since I started the process. My volume on the ReadyNAS NV is still 1.06T. I download the force expansion add-on, run it, and reboot. After several hours I decide this isn’t going to finish anytime soon and go to bed.

It is now Monday morning and all the lights on my ReadyNAS are still blinking like the night before. I go to work. I have the ReadyNAS setup to send me an e-mail when of the predefined events it keeps track of happens. When the APC UPS takes over during a power failure I get an e-mail. Evidently after the Borg have finished assimilating the drives and full enhancement of the collective is achieved I get an e-mail telling me. Nearly 14 hours after I rebooted the ReadyNAS my volume is now 2.738T. What a relief!

I am looking forward to my next disk drive upgrade which will be to 4T Solid State drives which should bring me up to 10T of disk storage and blazing fast speeds.

* In May 2007 Netgear purchased Infrant. An outstanding buy on their part as the Infrant product line was way better than Netgear’s attempt.

** The Samsung Spinpoint 1T drive wasn’t in his reviews when I did my analysis. That drive looks like a leap in performance!

At 5:35pm tonight my phone rang with the area code of 408, Silicon Valley. Hum could it be mom? I don’t have any customers in that area code. I was still in my office in Santa Cruz, CA trying to figure out if I could track who downloaded a file using Yousendit’s Outlook plug-in. I created an e-mail in Outlook and attached the file I wanted to send. When I click send, the plug-in uploads the attachment to the Yousendit site and replaces the attachment with a note that contains a link to download the file. Nice when you are sending a 10Mb file to 100 people. I could not figure out how to track the downloads of the file and make sure it was sent securely when using the plug-in. Sure, this can be done on-line for $8.99 if I wanted to type in the 100 contacts into a Web interface.

At 5:21pm I sent an e-mail with two questions, how to upload 100 contacts into the Web interface or how to do tracking from the Outlook plug-in. I figure I will hear back by e-mail in a day or two, particularly since I have a free account.

I better answer this call. Pleasantly surprised I found out it was Michael from Yousendit calling to answer my question. Wow, I never expected a call back. He understood what I was trying to do and explained several ways I could do what I needed. He didn’t know if I had a free account or a pay account. Just saw the question come in and called to make sure he could clear up my issue.

Now That’s Service!

Note: The answer is sign up for a Business Plus account that automatically tracks downloads when using the Outlook Plug-in. I did with a 14-day free trial!

My position as a sales professional keeps me very busy and on the road. Keeping up on the news and events on the Internet is important not only for my profession, but also for my hobbies. Netvibes has been my feed reader of choice for the last couple of years due to its ability to maximize the quantity of information I can digest in the limited amount of time I have available. However, due to some missing features, I was on the verge of switching to Google Reader, until last week.

Netvibes Ginger Release has leapfrogged all of the Google Reader features that were tempting me to switch feed readers.

The most important requirement I have for a feed reader is the ability to see as many feeds as possible on a single page. This helps me make my way through the 450 feeds I monitor in a minimum amount of time. Netvibes displays 9 feeds of 7 items each on a single page while Reader displays only 5 with 3 items each. A mouse over the entry title gives me an AJAX pop up summary of the entry. My busy life doesn’t allow for much time to read news, so having this quick look helps me stay on top of the news with a minimum of time invested.

Netvibes’s ability to switch the viewing pane from feed view to website view provides the best of both worlds. The feed reading screen is divided into 3 sections. On top are the tabs (collections of feeds), on the left is a list of the entries in the feed being read, and the right is the viewing pane where you read the entry. I keep the feeds that I read in more detail in website view, giving me a richer experience.

New in Ginger is a feature that is going to change the way I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The widget for sites with multiple feeds has tabs that work as a mini-aggregator. The Wall Street Journal has 4 tabs What’s News, Business, Technology and Personal Journal which map back to a different RSS Feed from their site. The What’s News tab has a drop down menu with all of the feeds coming from that site. The first tab changes based on which of the 13 items is chosen. Wired, Mashable, New York Times, and TechCrunch are a few of the other feeds that use this feature.

Netvibes Ginger adds two other features I was really looking for, marking and sharing. Any news item can be marked as private or public, which puts it on one of two lists. The private list is useful for articles I would like to read in more detail or reference later. I can now share posts I find interesting with my friends list by marking it public. I can add friends who can see my public list as well as subscribe to it and become follower. This is a good beginning; I hope they add more social networking features to Netvibes.

Another very useful new feature is the Personal Universe. Using this feature, I have created a page that will aggregate information from the Broadband Satellite market (Marke Clinger’s Satellite News Feed). This provides a dashboard of the news from my company, my competition, and other Satellite News all on one page. My goal is to create a page that will add value to my customers day by providing them with relevent news feeds for their industry. Since many of the sites I want to aggregating do not have RSS feeds, I have had to create the feeds using Yahoo Pipes and Feedity to create feeds for these sites. A little added value and reason for those interested to monitor my Satellite News Feed.

I am a very mobile person, spending a lot of time travelling for my company. I use the Netvibes mobile interface on my Blackberry daily. Reading feeds on the go is a great to fill up standing in line time.

I am looking forward to future enhancements for Netvibes. Improvements to the social networking and WEB 2.0 features would be a great addition.

This posting is the second and final explanation for my blog theme My Second Life.

I sent my first e-mail in the summer of 1983 after joining Omni Products, a startup specializing in disk drive technology. Their claim to fame was a disk drive the half the size of a MacPro that provided a massive 30 megabytes of storage. That is not a typo…I did mean to say megabytes.

In Feb 1984 I followed several other employees who had left Omni Products and joined Sun Microsystems. I quickly became reliant on e-mail after building my first Sun Workstation from discarded parts. I used the Internet daily for a variety of tasks both work and personal. I supported customers using e-mail and file transfers on the ARPANET. Over the next few years I had spammed every employee at Sun, hacked into servers to expose security issues and sold my car using the Usenet discussion group misc.forsale.

In 1987 I participated on the inter-departmental team that implemented Sun’s Wide Area Network (SWAN). This team was tasked with building a global persistent network to interconnect Sun’s offices around the globe. The ultimate goal was to replace the UUCP network that relied on dial-up modems and store and forward message passing. The new approached relied on persistent connections and demanded a method to decentralize the management of this new global address and name space.

Prior to the implementation of the SWAN this information was centrally managed in a single file that was distributed daily by Engineering. If you wanted to add a computer to the network, you sent an e-mail and waited for the updated /etc/hosts file to be sent out the next morning. This wouldn’t work on Sun’s new global network. Fortunately the IETF had already recognized this requirement and Bill Nowicki had just finished porting the BIND (DNS) to SunOS.

This early exposure to the leading edge technology really influenced me. I have been an early adopter of technology both in my personal and professional life ever since. I have worked for eight different start-ups in a variety of technical, managerial, and sales roles. Three of those eight start-ups made it, Sun Microsystems, FORE Systems, and iDirect Technologies. All eight start-ups introduce new technologies that changed their industries. I learned as much from the successful as I did from the unsuccessful companies.

In my free time I register and participate in every private beta I find. My hobby is searching for these private betas and new technologies, understanding how they work and trying to work them into my daily personal or professional life. Some stick to become important tools for me, others get listed on e-bay or just fade from my memory.

The second meaning of My Second Life is my life on the Internet. This ongoing addiction includes topics relating to technology, the companies I have worked for and the Internet from 1983 to my current fascination with Social Networking, SEM, and SEO. Mostly this will be forward looking with links to the past.

I was looking for a theme for my blog when my wife suggested “My Second Life”. Her meaning was my work life, which is totally separate from my family life. That will definitely be a part of this blog. There are several reasons for this segregation of family and work, the biggest being business travel.

In the summer of 1988, my manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc. asked me to teach C programming and UNIX administration at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Not counting Canada and Mexico, this was my first trip out of the US. I worked for 5 weeks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, then toured Beijing, Hong Kong and Thailand for 3 more weeks.

Over the next 20 years I have traveled a fair amount and had the good fortune of two long-term foreign assignments in Europe. The experience of living and working abroad for 7 years has given me a lot of rich experiences. I continue to travel for work throughout the Western US and Canada that is interesting in its own way.

The first meaning of “My Second Life” is my travels for work, leisure and living abroad. My TravelMap will give you a good snapshot of the places I have traveled to. This blog and the pictures I have taken will hopefully give you a appreciation for those places. I also plan to discuss things I do to cope with being gone from home, the flight delays, and stress of travel.

My Second Life doesn’t stop there, for me the theme has a handful of meanings. Before you ask, I don’t have a multiple personality disorder and this has nothing to do with the metaverse Second Life.

Come back and I will explain the other meanings which all will lead to the theme of this blog. They are inter-related, tied together by the thread of the Internet.

Never forget, my first life is my family.