Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I just managed to fix the oddest MySQL problem I have ever had. And I have absolutely no idea how I did it.

Basically the MySQL server on my hosted web server had crapped up, it was non-responsive and had hung. When I tried to shut it down, I couldn’t do that, so I had to kill the process. When I restarted it, it started up with a database directory completely different from the one I wanted to use, why I do not know. I kept killing and restarting the process several times, until I was about to give up, because the correct databases would not show up with a “show databases” command. I was even starting to write a “this site is no longer available” index-page for a site that I am no longer actively maintaining, when I tried it again.

Lo and behold! The site was up again, fully functional, with all the data intact. I have no idea how that managed to happen.

What the hell happened?

This post will most likely make me come off like a conservative old fart, but here goes: I personally find 95% of all the “Social networking” technologies and sites that pop up to be more of a nuisance than benefit.
MySpace? Crap. Facebook? Can’t be arsed. Bebo, Meebo? What are they? MSN Messenger (and other IM’s)? Installed, but turned off by default so I won’t be disturbed.

The simple truth about Instant Messaging is that you will most likely be disturbed when you don’t want to, and no one will be around when you want to talk. And how the hell do you stop an IM conversation? I always feel obliged to continue forever, not because I want to, but because the other person just won’t stop blabbering. If I want to communicate electronically, I’ll use e-mail, thank you very much: I can respond when and if I choose to, and I can keep it to the point with no obligation for a long back-and-forth conversation.

As for the “social networking sites”, I just don’t see the benefit. What is the point of a MySpace profile if I have a blog and e-mail? I just don’t see one. It is just an annoyance. I can remotely see the point of LinkedIn, as a means of keeping track of business contacts that I do not socialize with on a regular basis.

Now, I do realize that I am guilty of using two types of “social networking” sites/software continuously: blogging and “photo sharing”. Although in my defense for the later, I have to say I use it mostly as an online backup/vault for my photos. I rarely, if ever look at someone else’s photos on Flickr.
Blogging on the other hand, I confess fully to: I am an avid blogger, I read probably 100+ blogs, and regularly comment on probably 10-20 of them. Blogging is the one thing I get about the “social web”: getting insights from people outside the mainstream media on subjects of interest is most valuable, getting feedback and interacting with them even more so.

If you want to see what I am up to, or what my thoughts on current events are, read my blog. If you want to interact with me, leave a comment (please do!). If you have something of a more business, personal or private nature to say, send me an e-mail.
But please, please, please, do not invite me to be your MySpace or Facebook friend! I just can’t be arsed and I definitely do not see the point. If you know me relatively well (as in you have known me personally for 6+ months), I might add you to my MSN list, but don’t expect to see me online frequently, because I’m not.

Yes, I realize I do sound like an old fart who “doesn’t get it”. But to be honest, “I do get it”, but only for the things where I actually see a direct tangible benefit for my use. If we’re talking about MySpace and all of the generic, no specific interest, no specific purpose sites, I just don’t see any benefit.
All I have to say is “Bah, Humbug!”

I’ve been using Gmail since late in 2004, over the course of that time, I have been impressed with the superiority of its spam-filters compared to other filters I have used: it catches 99.99% of all spam, and in the last three years, I can only recall three e-mails being spammed as “false positives”. The fact that you can also check your spam-box easily for false positives is a definite benefit. If you use Gmail with POP3 access, there is the added benefit that you won’t have to download your spam into your e-mail client.

Spam-filtering is by far the biggest benefit with using Gmail as your universal e-mail manager: I have all my personal accounts going through Gmail, even my company e-mail. But, going even further, Google seem to have built some intelligence into the POP3 access of Gmail: It can distinguish between mail-clients, thus you can keep clients on different machines in sync, without ever downloading the same e-mail twice. Perfect if you use several machines (I only use a laptop and a Blackberry, and I think the Blackberry server already has similar intelligence).

All in all, I’ve found Gmail to be brilliant for managing all my e-mail accounts, my only little caveat is privacy, but if I really want to keep something private, I would probably encrypt it anyway..

Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the London IT contracting market is currently alive and kicking: I am not yet looking for contracts actively (nor have I been looking actively since 2005), and the summer months are usually a slow period. Despite that, I have had no less than 6 recruiters call me in the last 1.5 days since I came back from my travels (I had my phone turned off during my time away).
Nor are recruiters balking at the rate I am asking for (it has happened before).

In other words, activity seems quite high, even though it should be a slow period..

Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame has started a blog, which so far can best be described in one word: brilliant!

Frequent, long posts about most things entrepreneurship makes it a great read, duly added to my blogroll.. Go and have a look.

I’m traveling a bit over the next few days, so the next post won’t turn up until Monday..

This is somewhat related to my post yesterday about taking time off to reflect over my own financial future, and how to manage personal and business financial risk..

If there is something my previous forays into entrepreneurship taught me, it was that blind hope and enthusiasm will get you nowhere. The DRM business I tried to build some 5-6 years ago failed for a number of reasons, but beyond those reasons I failed on a personal level as well: at the end of it, I was nearly out on the street.

Why? Because I did not want to admit defeat, I lived on blind hope, enthusiasm and self-delusion for the last 3-4 months of it. Books on entrepreneurship often emphasize how the entrepreneur in the case study risked it all and came out winning, but they rarely mention those who lost it all: money, homes, and even personal relationships. Well, let me make one thing clear: if they risked it all without managing the risk, they got lucky, that’s all. In my case, I lost pretty much everything, not only what little money I had, but personal relationships too.

There are two qualities that are necessary for an entrepreneur if he is to rely on anything but blind luck: being able to be brutally honest with himself and others, and being able to judiciously manage risk.

Let me elaborate: for a more ambitious venture, its chances of being at least moderately successful may be 2-5% as a whole. But along the lifecycle of a venture, there will always be major and minor milestones of varying difficulty to achieve. Missing one milestone shouldn’t be the end of the world, and almost any new business will make mistakes, miss milestones and have to re-evaluate its business and business model from time to time. This is where risk management comes in: If you think you have an 80% chance of making a milestone, it might be worth risking a lot on it if it is valuable, but if the chance is only 20% it will only be foolish to risk it all.

If you miss a 20% chance milestone and only risked a small piece, you took the risk, yet you live to fight another day if you fail. But if you risked it all, there is an 80% chance that you will be completely wiped out! Given the riskiness and high-stakes of new ventures, living to fight another day and give it another try may in fact be a more valuable asset than hitting any one individual milestone. Why? Because new ventures are more of a process of trial and error, rather than a linear progress of events on a straight path to success.

Furthermore, if you do not manage your risk, and just blindly throw the dice every time, you not only lessen the chances of your business becoming a success, you also increase the risk of finding yourself completely wiped out and out on the street.

Admitting defeat in a single battle isn’t the end of the world, just as long as you live to fight another day.

I will officially have had time of between May 1^st and July 9^th of this year, I was pretty much committed to this from the first day I left my previous contract, as my calendar was booked with travel throughout this period up until the date in July. It also means that in practice I have probably foregone over £20K in potential contract revenue that I turned down, and rather than building up cash reserves, I have eaten away at my reserves considerably.

Do I regret it? Not a chance! Apart from having a generally great time, traveling, getting some sun and building up energy and motivation for my next assignment, I have had time for some productive efforts as well. In a short term perspective, I have been able to pick up on some new skills on my own that I wanted to get up to speed on. In the long term, the time off has given me time to reflect over my own future, what I want, and how I will go about getting there.

Perhaps most tangibly, I have reflected on how to best manage my personal and business finances and how to manage risk: how I intend to use my cash-flow in the future to both take some measured risks on financial growth, while at the same time being able to land safely in the short term should those risks not pan out. I have basically worked out a plan for a three-pronged attack on the future:

• Take measured financial risks for potentially higher financial rewards.
• Protect my downside, so I don’t end up on the street should those risks not work out.
• Protect and build my personal assets in a way that protects me from inflation and hopefully at least milder upheaval in the world markets.

Now this sounds a bit blurry, and it is, but I do clearly have a tangible plan in mind to achieve these goals which is anything but blurry. But I’ll probably keep my personal approach to asset management to myself (as I will when it comes to the size of my assets).

The bottom line to all this is that taking considerable time off may be a money loosing prospect in the short run, but I think the time for reflection I have taken will stand me in good stead for the future.

First off, let’s make one distinction: I differentiate between managers and leaders; they are two different breeds of people, who sometimes happen to co-exist within one person, but far from always.

But to begin, I’ve sometimes come across people who think leadership is about shining a spotlight on the leader. It is as if they believed that someone was given a crown when they supposedly became leaders. To me, this is the antithesis of leadership. Any person who thinks leadership is about personal glory, or popularity is badly mistaken.

Leadership to me is not about taking all the glory and limelight from others, nor is it to be someone who constantly has to assert their dominance within a group as some schoolyard bully. For me, leadership is being able to get the best out of the people around you. The essence of leadership is leading others to better themselves and their performance. That means the glory and limelight will fall on the team, and those individuals who made stand-out performances within that team, not on the leader. A leader’s ultimate satisfaction should not be through personal accolades and glory, but from the quiet personal knowledge of having had some part in the good performance of others.

Leadership is not about being a king, worshipped by those around you. It is about getting the best out of those around you.

Apparently wordpress’s hosted service has retired feedstats. This means that you can no longer see how many downloads your RSS-feed has, only the readership directly on your blog website.

This decision is both a shame and somewhat inexplicable. Even if feedstats did not give an accurate picture of your regular readership, it at least gave you an idea of what it was. A lot of people simply do not visit a blogs web site, they just download the RSS-feed into an RSS reader and read it there, which means their visits will no longer count in the statistics. This will make estimating readership especially hard on blogs with a more tech savvy readership (like this one). For instance, this blog had a considerably higher RSS-readership number than web site hits.

WordPress’s decision is a very odd one, I would rather have had the feedstats with an error-margin, than live without them. Disregarding RSS readers for a blogs statistics is like disregarding a newspapers subscriber numbers: just plain stupid.