Striving to be mediocre

I awoke the other day with five words rambling around in my head.
"Be awesome - Change the world".

It probably comes from several conversations I have had lately with friends about the state of the universe, and my own disappointment over some of the technical progress we have made (or not made) as a species in the past decade. Maybe it is just because we are in January and I typically spend this time of year re-thinking my life choices, reviewing where i sit in the grand scheme of things, and deciding how I am going to improve myself and my environment for the coming year.

I believe it is everyone's responsibility to continually improve, push the envelope, and think outside the conformist box - for themselves and the world at large. Unfortunately, the mainstream world does not really share that view. It has been my experience that progressive thinking and challenging the establishment can actually be detrimental, which is the exact opposite effect that it should have. Creative people should have the freedom to be creative, solve problems, discover solutions without the threat of being thrown back into the conformist box.

I have seen this time and time again with the companies I have consulted for in the past and am thankful to be working with one now that understands the creative mind. Aside from a few select companies I know of, most corporate institutions prefer maintaining the status quo so that they can gauge performance against an even background. This may help managers measure comparative performance and allow human resources to pigeon-hole employees into nice calculation boxes, but it does nothing to grow "people" and expand opportunities.

I understand that there is an element of humanity who are starving for structure and actually like being inside the nicely predefined "box" where everything is known and predictable, but creative people stagnate there. For some people, it is comforting to know that the job starts at nine and ends at five, that there is a performance target to meet, but not really to exceed too much, and that you will only stand out if you are outside that known performance band. Forcing artists, designers, programmers, architects and writers into tightly controlled spaces where there is a predefined start and stop, where free thought is discouraged, is a company killer.

I worked for a software company years ago that was driven by conformity and tightly controlled processes. The workday was defined as nine to five in the office where employees could be constantly monitored for productivity, and working outside that construct was forbidden. The concept worked for many years when it was all about a simple, UNIX character based engine and was very technical in nature, but then the product evolved and we needed artists, writers, and young programmers to develop and deliver the new flagship software to the masses.

• Writers wanted the freedom to write from home where they were comfortable in their surroundings - denied.
• Young programmers played video games to free their minds so they could be more creative and productive in shorter bursts - fired.
• Graphics artists for the user interface and marketing material preferred to work in the early morning when they were most creative, right after crawling out of bed - denied, then replaced.
• Creative managers who understood the needs of these employees bent the rules to help them achieve results - reprimanded then fired or quit.

The product was never successfully built, all the customers left, and all the valuable employees quit.

Then that company died.

Everyone can let out a cheer at this point because the natural order of things is preserved - bad companies and their senior executive who do not understand the creative process will ultimately fail.

The opposite has also been proven to be true. One only needs to look as far as the phenomenal success of Facebook, where the money, structure and corporate order has always been a secondary concern to the creative genius that fuels it. From the CEO to the newest code monkey, from the database guys to the marketing people, they just want to do something cool and when they have achieved coolness, they reach further to see if they can be amazing. That focus has created a $25 Billion empire that is still just trying to create something cool.

Even brick and mortar companies that have been established for a century are recognizing that the world is changing and it is doing so rapidly. The future is being written by 18 year old students in university dorm rooms who do not care for pigeon-holed boxes and traditional corporate structure. There is a whole new breed of entrepreneur on our door step about to make an appearance on centre stage and they are ready to conquer the universe, but unlike their predecessors they have the tools to do it. Companies no longer require walls, desks and front doors, they require rack space, storage volume, and will power. I have had the privilege of working with some of these up and coming professionals and they are a force to be reckoned with… or joined and supported.

So traditional business should take note and react to the needs of the new workforce if they want to survive. If the current establishment does not sit up and take notice, some 18 year old is gong to eat their lunch and they are going to do it at 2AM from their dorm room wearing flip-flops and board shorts.

The key to surviving in the new reality is still rambling around in my head…
"Be awesome - Change the world"

Bienvenue 2011, Bonne Année à tous

Happy New Year
Bonne Année à tous
明けましておめでとうございます
La mulţi ani
Sretna Nova godina
Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku
Feliz Ano Novo

OK, I think that covers most of the languages of most of my friends, but if I missed anyone, I apologize. What an interesting conundrum that is - what language to wish your friends Happy New Year in. Not that long ago it would not have even been a remote consideration because your friends were always local to you, typically in your own neighbourhood, city, or country. That is no longer the case for many of us who spend our lives plugged into the Internet.

Happy New Year to all of my friends, associates, and family - some of whom I have never actually met in person. Due to the nature of business and the surge of social networking acceptance, many of the people I communicate with every day live in foreign countries and speak a different native tongue. I even have some family I have reconnected with after many years and a few actual relations I have yet to meet in person. 2010 was a very interesting year for the growth of communication in the Internet and evolution of the way we interact with each other. I am looking forward to the changes ahead in 2011.

This will be a fantastic year for creative thinking and emerging technologies to blossom - I can feel that already happening. If you are not comfortable with change, then I suggest you brace yourself now because 2011 is going to rock your world.

I personally will revel in it and soak up every ounce of new information.

Happy New Year!

Of Sugar Plums and Fairies...

Happy Hanukkah, festive Pancha Ganapati, contemplative Eid ul-Adha, joyous Yule, eventful Saturnalia, but most of all...

Merry Christmas to all my friends, colleagues, associates and readers.

Yes I said "Christmas" - go ahead and call the authorities, write me up, throw the cuffs on. You can haul me away in irons if you want to, but I celebrate Christmas at this time of year and I am not afraid to say so. I do not celebrate "festivus" or "winter break" or "December holidays", I celebrate Christmas as in Christ-Mass, as in the celebration of the birth of Christ.

Whether you believe December 25th is the actual birth day of Jesus Christ or not, and whether you believe that person was/is the messiah or a prophet or just a highly skilled public speaker, is completely irrelevant. There is no doubt that the person we know historically as Jesus Christ lived, taught, and died somewhere in the Middle East about 2010 years ago and he left behind a controversial legacy that still lives on our calendars today.

The fact is that it is highly unlikely that December 25th is an actual official birth date since most of us know that day was stolen from the Celts when the early Catholic Church "purified" that part of the world. Some date in May makes more sense based on celestial regression, but whatever. I still put up the tree, sing Christmas carols, decorate with copious quantities of light and celebrate like a Roman Counsellor throughout the month of December.

I make or buy presents for people who matter to me and I get them something that will make them feel warm and comforted. This is as close as I can get to the gift of life, peace, and joy that all Christians (all people for that matter) should aspire to. If we all thought this way throughout the year, there would be no need for borders, walls, armies or politics. I fill my world with bright lights, shiny bobbles and reflective things that make my house look like something Clark Griswold would be proud of. This is a purely symbolic presentation of "light" defeating "darkness" and all the metaphorical implications that go along with that.

Maybe it seems old fashioned, or quaint, or outdated to some, but I don't care. My Christmas season includes baking gingerbread and decorating sugar cookies with my family. We go to friends houses and sing Christmas carols by the fire with one of us playing an old upright piano and another handing out sheet music. Christmas morning starts with a full viewing of "A Christmas Carol" - the 1938 version - followed by a breakfast of Japanese oranges and an exploration into the depths of the stockings that were hanging by the fire just the evening before. Some time during the holiday, I absolutely must watch Its a Wonderful Life and Scrooge (Alasdair Sim version). My ideal Christmas Eve is spent with friends out for dinner or at a movie followed by a candle light service in a country church surrounded by fir and cedar trees - a little snow on the branches makes that perfect.

I have friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Pagan and I try to acknowledge their religious holiday's when I know about them. Its never a problem for me to say "Happy Hanukkah" or "Festive Yule", so why do people take exception when I say "Merry Christmas"? I understand the need for a generic "Winter Holiday", but when I say Merry Christmas, that is exactly what I mean.

So I hope my Jewish friends have a Happy Hanukkah and I wish my Pagan friends a Festive Yule. As we approach the 25th though, I want to wish my Christian friends a Merry Christmas filled with joy, peace, light, and hope for more of the same throughout the coming year.

Spear Phishing Attacks On The Rise

I am not usually one to jump on "the band waggon" and parrot what every other blogger is saying, but I am going to make an exception in this case because it is important - really, really important.

Within the high volume mail industry there are companies known as ESPs or Email Service Providers, who provide a platform for others to send mail through. Some of the biggest in the world are clients I work with and they help small to medium sized businesses send valuable mail to their clients and end users. These are not spammers, they are legitimate delivery platforms that provide a valuable service to legitimate clients. If your small business needed to send a product alert to 50,000 end users by email, you would probably use one of these services instead of spending thousands of dollars on your own mail system.

Here is the problem though. Some very bad people - lets call then "organized criminals" - have managed to inject a viral spear phishing attack into about 100 ESPs worldwide. The mail looks legitimate to the ESPs so they transport is as per their contracts. When you receive the mail, you may click on an embedded link that takes you to a third party web site that looks completely legitimate, but in the back ground this site is installing a virus into your computer that is designed to steal passwords and other important data.

I need to stress that this is NOT the fault of the ESPs or their clients, but rather a complex criminal act perpetrated by third parties. There is a very good article on the problem and the background in this following link so I wont rehash it myself in too much detail.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/11/spear-phishing-attacks-snag-e-mail-marketers/

In a nutshell, do NOT click on ANY link in ANY email that you do not know has come from a trusted source. I received one of these myself and it looked like an update from a friend who had just been married and the link was to weddingphotos.net. That site actually looks legitimate, but in the background it tries to install malware that will steal your system passwords and try to install remote control software to your PC.


And here is another:

Dear Tom Mairs,

Stephanie just sent you an ecard from 123Greetings.com

You can view it by clicking here:

http://www.123greetings.com/send/view/2210394848736232

You can also copy & paste the above link into your browser's address bar.

Or if you prefer, you can go to http://www.123greetings.com/ and type your
ecard number (2210394848736232) in the "Search Box" at the top right of the page.

Your ecard is going to be with us for the next 30 days.

If you need any help in viewing your ecard or any other assistance,
please visit our Help/ FAQ section at: http://help.123greetings.com/

We hope you enjoy your ecard,

Your friends at 123Greetings.com
http://www.123greetings.com

We respect your privacy. You will not be receiving any promotional emails from us
because of this ecard. To view our privacy policy, click on the link below:
http://info.123greetings.com/company/privacy_policy.html

Note: This is an auto generated mail. Please do not reply.

If you have any other problem please contact us by clicking on the following link:
http://help.123greetings.com/contact_us.html

This email was sent by 123Greetings.com, Inc., 1674 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.



So please be very careful of anything you get in your email that does not look ligit - it probably is not.

If I could remember those days, I'm sure I would miss them.

If you are reading this then there is a fairly high probability that you were a teen in the eighties and survived to tell about it. If so then you were born in the late sixties or early seventies and most likely just barely remember the fall of Saigon in April 1975 that signalled the end of the war in Vietnam and the first of the major events that would shape our generation.

I consider myself fortunate to have entered the eighties with an extremely large number of functioning brain cells for if not, I would surely be a vegetable today. As much as our parents wreaked havoc on the "establishment" in the fifties and sixties, we made the nineteen eighties historically memorable for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. Those "Classic Rock" stations that fill the radio waves today are broadcasting mostly tunes from 1978 to 1991 because it is still some of the best rock ever recorded. Television and film were completely transformed during that decade as were the audiences who consumed them. It was the decade that saw the birth of the personal computer, the collapse of apartheid, and the dawn of a new age in realism. We invented "Grunge", re-invented "Punk", and developed an entire culture around the new concept of "video games" like PacMan and Space Invaders.

The title of this piece is a bit of a mis-label. Aside from a few purple-haze filled months in 1982, I can actually remember most of my teen years and from what I recall it was a blast. We saw the last of the drive-in theatres pass into history, but not without first experiencing Heavy Metal, Cheech and Chong, and War Games on those big outdoor screens long before iMax and Surround Sound. We were the first to have personal portable music in the form of the "WalkMan" and started the whole music copyright controversy. The fees we paid for our theatre passes fuelled geniuses like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to completely reinvent the film industry with revolutionary works like Star Wars and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

I also remember the fall of the Berlin wall in November of 1989 as clearly as if it was yesterday. With that we saw the beginning of end of the "Eastern Block" and a new era of nation building in Europe. Our generation witnessed the first flight of the Space Shuttle and saw the beginning of what would become the commercialization of space. I remember Black Monday (October 19th 1987), the largest one-day stock market crash in history that saw company values cut in half over night and like many others my age, gained a healthy appreciation for careful financial planning.

It was the end of the cold war and the beginning of the energy crisis. We redefined everything from education to politics to religion. Our music spawned a new level of global communication and social awareness. Student movements rose and challenged governments around the world to listen to the people's voice. Silicon enabled us to explore worlds that only existed previously in our imaginations, and we created them on Commodore 64s and Atari 2600s.

If you read this and you relate, then make sure your kids know....

We are Generation-X and we changed the world.

The Raspberry Thief

Last year we had a huge crop of raspberries. Large, juicy, tart raspberries by the bucketful. These are great berries and taste incredibly good with ice cream. The berry patch is all mature plants and they have produced volumes for years... except this year. This year we collected five, and I don't mean buckets, I mean five berries.

So who is the raspberry thief and where did they take my delicious berries? That is a darned good question and one that is not easy to answer in a single sentence. The first indication of a problem went almost unnoticed when in the early spring we experienced a long stretch of unseasonably warm weather. The tall, thick raspberry bushes soaked in all the warmth and converted that sunshine in to new buds on the stalks within a few days. I was sure I was going to have a bumper harvest from the number of new buds I counted.

Then it turned cold again - real cold. What followed was 8 weeks of snow, hail, ice and -20C weather - none of which is good for freshly growing plants. When the weather finally warmed up again, the berry bushes had taken a beating and when I was able to get to the plants for the clean up, they had all but completely frozen at the roots. I was only able to save 4 of the plants and even then had to trim them down to 4" stubs to clean out the dead wood. The patch has started to come back now and is prospering, but won't produce a decent berry harvest for a couple of years.

it is somewhat common to have a warm period in the early spring followed by a cold snap, but this year's warm period was unusually long and warm which resulted in the raspberry casualties. The cold snap was also unusually harsh this year. Both of these are indications of global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it. To me it does not matter if this pattern change is the result of a man made hole in the ozone or the natural climate shift as the poles move, or if the tectonic upheavals recently have altered weather patterns permanently. If these climate changes continue to alter crop heath, we will need to start being very careful about what we plant and where, not to mention when.

My raspberry thief was a disappointment but not life threatening, however that will not be the case when it affects the national wheat harvest or decimates an entire region's corn feed crops. If you thought climate change was a political thing or not your problem, maybe this will give us all something more to consider.

Demand Zero

In the summer of 1979, I was 12 years old, I had the rest of my life to look forward to, and I lived in constant fear of being vapourized. The SALT-II treaty was signed in Vienna that year in June and being the overly inquisitive child that I was, I tried to learn everything about this interesting news event. I remember feeling sorry that I did. I am actually shaking a bit writing this as I recall reading the numbers.

I was not your normal kid by any means even though I thought I was at the time, but how many 12 year olds do you know that have an explosives license and have already built and launched 3 or 4 home made rockets? How many 12 year olds do you know can quickly take a news report on Strategic Arms Limitation, do the math and calculate that between the US and the Soviet stockpiles, the two opposing forces had enough nuclear warheads to incinerate the planet surface 38 times.

Since that time, I have been very aware of world events as they pertain to global survival and nuclear destruction. There were several years during the Cold War where things actually looked stable in a Mexican standoff kinda way. Each of the two super-powers had enough intercontinental warheads to obliterate the other as well as most of the life on the planet, so neither one was willing to actually "push the button". In a weird way, the extreme over-kill of the situation saved us from complete self extinction through the induced fear of the ultimate consequences.

When Reagan withdrew from the SALT-II treaty in 1986 sighting soviet violations of the treaty, all those fears came back. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, it was the beginning of a new age of fear and uncertainty for me. With the fall of the once powerful Soviet Union, there was no oppressive government to prevent radical waring factions from using those weapons on each other. Even worse, the Soviet economic collapse meant the nuclear fuel made for a very valuable trading commodity that was guarded by very poorly paid soldiers. Quite honestly, I am surprised we have not seen a "suitcase nuke" set off in New York yet, or that LA gangs are not trading in Uranium and Plutonium on a regular basis.

The latest problems in Pakistan and North Korea have me thinking about 1979 again and I worry about the safety of my children. Unfortunately it is not 1979 and the Cold War is over. There are not just 2 super powers pointing weapons at each other that they never really intend to use. This is 2010 and a thermo-nuclear device capable of wiping out 50 city blocks can be packed into a brief case. There are terrorists all over the world with more money than brains and plenty of poorly paid guards who would gladly turn a blind eye for a few thousand US dollars.

There is a whole new generation running the world now, watching and creating the news. We live in a world of social networks and interconnections that were unheard of in 1979. This new generation is largely oblivious to the silent horror that many of us lived with when we were kids growing up in the seventies and eighties. This new generation needs to know the truth of that history.

On July 23rd, a new documentary "Countdown to Zero" will debut in select cities and will trace the history of atomic weapons from origin to present day. If you have an opportunity to see it, please take the time. If you can't please do some research, contact your MP, congress person, or other government official and let them know that we have had enough. The need for nuclear weapons has long past and it is time for all nations to locate and dismantle all nuclear weapons. The time has come for all nations to come together to agree never to build these abominations ever again. The lives of our children depend on it.



Further reading....
http://www.takepart.com/zero
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
http://www.nucleartippingpoint.org/home.html