I am so sad. The Yellow Wiggle, Greg, is retiring. Apparently, he has been suffering from an ailment that affects his balance and standing and wiggling. The Wiggles won’t be the same especially since they may have jumped the shark. Greg’s understudy will be taking over as the lead Wiggle.
My husband puts on his seat belt when he is well on the road. It drives me insane. I am a put the seat belt on, then start the car kind of gal. It turns out my daughter is too.
This morning, my husband started the car before putting on his seat belt. My daughter says “BaBa, dees!” pointing at the driver side window. My husband points to several things to determine what my daughter wanted. It was the seat belt. She was telling him to put it on.
It seems that crime follows people. An article on BusinessWeek talks about how a new program, CopyBot, copies people and places in Second Life, decreasing the value of property. They even have gangs and the mafia. They are trying to find a solution.
What form will the solution take? Some players are asking Linden Labs to sue the copiers, but really, the person damaged is the vendor. So the vendor should sue. Perhaps on People’s Court with Judge Milian presiding. Or a Second Life version of People’s Court with a Second Life version of Judge Milian. If Second Life were to enact a government? What would it be? Dictatorship? Communist? Democracy?
We draw with my 2 yr old a lot. She tells me to draw a lion. I draw a lion. She tells me to draw a bear. I draw a bear. One time she told me to draw my husband. I drew my husband. My husband liked it so much, he put the cartoon into the flyer he made to advertise his class. Handsome mook, isn’t he?
Winder Farms delivers. We were visited by the Winder Farms sales person tonight. I heard about this service from a friend when we first moved here. The local dairy does door to door deliveries. But not only dairy, also fruits, vegetables, bread, bacon, beef. It’s awesome. If they had chinese vegetables and meats, I may never go to the grocery store again. This is perhaps the first time I found a reason to stay here. Oh, that and my husband and kid are here.
We are trying to launch a program for a customer in Saudi Arabia and I am learning new things every day. I work on a lot of global programs and know that each culture and region have their own business hours and holidays. For instance, the Spanish folk start and end their days much later than 8-5 and China is closed for business during the weeks of Chinese New Year. But Saudi Arabia has a different work week.
The work week in the US and most countries is Monday through Friday, give or take, depending on the timezone differences. Saudi Arabia’s work week is Friday through Tuesday. If I have it right, it means Wednesday and Thursday is their “weekend”. That has got to make it difficult to coordinate with a US based headquarters.
One guy had great insight into running global programs and that was that there is less friction due to cultural differences than there is due to time zone differences. The fact that we are Sun transcends the cultural differences of being from China, or France, or the US. The difficulty is trying to decide whose turn it is to wake up for a midnight call, and now, whose turn it is to work on a weekend.
My kid and I went to the Children’s Museum that just opened up in downtown. It’s pretty cool. The first area we visited is this kid sized neighborhood. There was a construction site, a house, a river, a farm, a grocery store, and a climbing wall.
The grocery store was a big hit with my kid. The kids get to play customer or clerk. They even have little aprons for the clerks. My kid picked up a basket and immediately went shopping. She would pick up a head of lettuce and inspect it, then put it in her basket. It was hilarious. I tried taking pictures, but my camera phone doesn’t do that well in low light.
She wanted a turn being a clerk, but the bigger kids were hogging the registers, so I convinced her to go take a look at the farm. She headed straight to the garden and starting planting the radishes and potatoes back in the “earth”.
There’s a bunch of other stuff there that we didn’t get to. We are going to get a membership as it’s the perfect place for kids to play in the winter. Our routine is to go to the park at least once a weekend. During the winter, we will have to stick to our backyard and the Children’s Museum.
Dean Kamen, father of the Segway, was on The Colbert Report last night. He was showcasing an invention that is newly available. The IBOT is a wheelchair that can climb stairs and utilizes the same self-balancing technology used in the Segway. It’s awesome. Colbert was rolling around on two wheels stacked on top of another and then the wheeelchair climbed the stairs.
Kamen also talked about FIRST, a program to encourage high school kids’ interest in science and engineering. The teams build robots to accomplish objectives that change each year. The kids compete, but the robots don’t fight each other. This is not Robot Wars, which was ruined once it became a TV show, but I digress. Each school team finds their own funding and has a coach, typically a local engineer. That’s how I know about it. One of my good friends has been coaching a team for a San Jose high school since ’96.
It is the coolest program. When I was in school, except for sports, I didn’t get the opportunity to be on a team. And I don’t play sports. Now, mech geeks can learn team work too. I don’t think there is a FIRST team in Salt Lake City. But rest assured, between me and my husband, when our kid is in school, she will be on a FIRST team.
I was reading the article on Amazon in BusinessWeek and my response is “Why not?”. Jeff Bezos just started this new venture, Elastic Compute Cloud, that rents out computational time and storage. As with any business, Amazon, has capacity to accomodate occasional peak times, a huge buffer that is left idle most of the time. The investment in infrastructure is already there, sunk cost, so why not try to make some money off it.
It seems that venture capitalists are directing their start-ups to Amazon for their IT. Makes sense. Now more of that invested dollar can go toward the core business competency rather than building and maintaing IT infrastructure.
Wall Street is not that enthused. They want Jeff to focus on improving the lackluster returns of the retail business. I don’t know. If Amazon’s core competency is in the technologies and operations of it’s online business, why not sell the expertise? It’s like what FedEx and UPS does. They deliver stuff really well because they have excellent logistics. So why not run the logistics of other companies for a fee?
Also, Amazon is doing for small businesses and startups what eBay is doing for small retailers. eBay brought small retailers access to the world market without the costs of being a multi-national. Amazon is bringing to small businesses and startups the IT infrastructure of a Fortune 500 without the investment.
Their not making any money on this venture yet. And it seems it may be a while yet. But the economic impact from businesses not internet related is an exciting prospect.
I know that email is part of Sun culture, but it kills me that people don’t just pick up the phone when there seems to be a misunderstanding. We are a global company. By default, English is not most people’s first language. Add to that the fact that you only convey 7% of what you communicate and BAM! you spend most of your time frustrated, using email to reiterate what you said without adding more clarity to what you meant. Pick up the phone and call them! Even if they are pissed, they can’t bite you over the phone. And it can’t get any worse than perpetuating misunderstanding via a medium that is really the least effective for communication.
com?mu?ni?ca?tion? /k??myun??ke???n/
–noun
1. the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.