Thoughts In Grey

Brief notes

I've been offline and mostly sick for over a week, so just to catch up quickly:

• The big news is the Mac that I'm writing this on. See below for my first impressions.
• Markets continue to move up and down rather aimlessly. My own take is that people (both of the "political" and "business" camps) want to try to take us back to a place which we can't go back to.
• The same is true for housing. As the Tom Petruno suggests in the LA Times today, it may finally be time to stop trying to support the unsupportable and allow housing to decline to a market clearing price. Yes, it would be painful, but the pain will happen no matter what. Let's get it over with.
• I really enjoyed my friend Nigel Swaby's presentation at Ignite Salt Lake about his involvement with Casey Serin. The online discussions of Casey are where I got to know Nigel, and really regretted having to watch the video feed from home because I was too sick to fly out. Casey was, and in many ways still is, the personification of the financial delusions that have led us to where we are today. I found his bizarre "how the hell could this happen?" story to be as fascinating in it's own way as that of Martin Frankel.
• Chaos is on Prozac. Not something I really relished doing, as he's just being a cat after all. Unfortunately, he's gotten into a very bad anxious cycle since major surgery in March. Hopefully we'll get him back to a normal routine and slowly wean him off it.
• Dr. Beth Hagenlocker at The Cat Practice is amazing!
• I've been slowly continuing my energy audit. The results are not particularly shocking. The refrigerator is using about 30% less electricity after a good coil cleaning and slight increase in temperature. The cable boxes continue to be a major culprit. Simplifying my desk around the new Mac should also help.
• Credit is still there if your credit is good, though they're obviously still fishing for people who will make a mistake and pay hundreds of dollars in interest on a "zero interest" deal. Apple's credit parter Barclays gave me double what I needed for my Mac purchase. They're certainly betting I'll miss a minimum payment and not survive the "12 months interest free." I'll certainly schedule payments to make sure I do.
• This year's birthday trip was pretty light-weight. A few days with friends on the American River. A day in a raft, a couple of others in an inner tube. Just what I needed.
• Looking forward to the Bay Area, Utah and maybe Denver in September. New York in August. Haven't been away for a while.

mg

Confessions of a Mac neophyte (part 1)

I'm not sure why it's taken so long for me to make this move, but I finally got a Mac today.

I've been watching the Mac world from afar for many years, especially as I've struggled to move my photography hobby out of the dark(room) ages and into the digital curent and future. I've felt stuck deep in the world of Windows and PCs while my more artistically inclined friends happily dumped the Microsoft world for the one dominated by Apple, Adobe and the others that are at the forefront of anything graphics and design related.

But alas, as a project manager in corporate environments, I had to worry more about things like running Microsoft Project, and the Visual Studio development environment that most of my clients needed. I had to care about being able to share documents and spreadsheets with the people I worked with. I needed to be able to easily connect my computer to somebody else's virtual private network in the middle of the night in order to make things right when they went wrong. All of these forced me to remain in the Windows world for a lot longer than I might have.

Many things have changed recently to make those issues matter less.

For starters, I have been moving my photography out of the dark ages and have felt hampered by the restrictions of my Windows workstation and it's small 20" screen. At the very least, it seemed that a new high quality monitor was going to be necessary. At worst, I was going to finally have to upgrade the computer, the operating system and everything else.

But beyond that, many of the things I needed to do with my computer in the past have diminished in importance. I'm still managing projects, but spend much less time with my head-down in MS Project than I was doing for a long time. Lately I've been closer to the action, more "in the stuff" and less "in the paperwork." It's been a fun change and one that's led me to question the need for a powerful workstation at home running those business apps. For recent projects I've been experimenting with Workspace.com, a really neat online suite of applications available on a pay-as-you go basis. It doesn't have all the features of MS Project, but I never used most of them either! The emerging world of cloud-based apps is going to make our platform of choice much less important than it has been. For me it already has.

Energy Audit: Another Reason to Hate Cable TV

I recently compared electric bills with my brother and was rather surprised to discover that my bill was noticeably higher than his. We live in the same general area and have similarly sized but differently laid-out living spaces. Weather has been moderate and neither of us used any air conditioning or heating during the billing period. We're also both single and have mostly similar stuff in our homes, with the exception of some IT equipment that is necessary for my work. It didn't seem like that equipment --most of which is not used on a full-time basis --could be the difference.

To figure out what's going on, I started an audit, using a nifty device called the Kill-A-Watt (KAW) that cost under $30. The audit is still incomplete because the KAW can only be used on one device at a time and ideally should be left plugged in to the device for several hours or days in order to get a good reading of average power use over time. Generally speaking, the more intermittent the use, the more time should elapse during measurement. For something like a refrigerator that cycles on and off regularly during the day, 24 hours should be adequate. For a television set on which use varies from day to day depending on what's on, you might want to measure for longer, maybe a full week. Some devices are in consistent use and an hour or two of measurement will suffice.

I started the process knowing that many devices these days don't really turn "off" completely, rather they go into a suspended state (usually called "standby") in which they continue to consume small amounts of power, sometimes doing some background tasks like getting updates from the internet and performing system maintenance, or at times just using the minimal amount of power necessary to receive and process the "on" signal from a remote control. This electricity use, known as "parasitic load" or "vampire load" can vary widely across different products. Part of the goal of this audit is to quantify the full extent of this parasitic load in my home.

Being Rational

I'm currently taking a software project management class online at UCLA extension. I need the continuing education credits to keep my Project Management Professional certification current, and I can sometimes even learn something.

I was somewhat disheartened when the instructor started the class by asking us to read Kepner and Tregoe's almost out-of-print book The New Rational Manager. I say "almost" because while it's still available, you can only get it directly from the publisher, which also happens to be th consulting firm run by the authors. In today's world, if it's not available on/through Amazon, it's effectively out of print.

The reason for my disheartened feeling is that I had read an earlier version many years ago and did not find it all that useful. I am also quite biased against anybody who advocates "rationality" as a core belief in any business endeavor, given how disastrously other "rational" theories have worked out. My distaste is largely colored by what I view as one of the two great lies of economics, the Rational Actor Hypothesis (RAH), which presumes that we all live our lives purely rationally, making rational choices that carefully balance long term benefits and costs. On top of this, a whole science of Rational Action Theory has been built, and been used to justify the most absurd economic actions, essentially stating that if the action weren't rational, people wouldn't have done it. The blind spots in this theory are largely responsible for the bubbles and subsequent meltdowns of recent years.

HP and the End of the Imperial CEO

A decade ago I worked at HP (NYSE: HPQ) and have naturally followed the craziness related to ex-CEO Mark Hurd's rapid resignation and departure since the new broke on Friday.

I'm anything from an HP insider at this point. I left just six months into Carly Fiorina's reign as would-be queen of tech-land because the reality of the coming disaster was written on the wall from day one. Even most of my old friends are no longer there, but lots of us are still quite in touchespecially within the services organization headed by Ann Livermore.

With that disclaimer in place, I have to agree with my friend Herb Greenberg's opinion that we are, to some degree, being "spun" when told that it's all about some falsified expense reports. Admittedly, HP does have much higher standards than most places I've worked with regards to such things, and even five years of Carly Fiorina did not destroy that. Hurd, to his credit, seemed to realize that when he took over the CEO post and from what I've been able to determine, had tried to re-instill some of the old HP values of trust and honesty even while cutting heavily, though he hit a major stumble last year.

But HP's values and relatively low tolerance for such stuff is the minor issue. The bigger issue is that he has hit major stumbles in recent years and the loss of employee trust is only one of them.