chriskelley.org

Just a quick test post from the wordpress iPhone app. Certainly easier than using the web interface on mobile safari. Should definitely add ability to mod comments. Overall two thumbs up.

In the last few weeks, I have been under attack.  First a few weeks ago a racoon decided to take up residence in the hay loft in my barn as was chronicled in a previous post.  I found out about the second attack yesterday.  It all started when we were driving back from vacation a few Saturday’s ago.  We were about 100 miles from home and the ‘Service 4WD’ light came one.  The really frustrating thing is that the exact same thing happened last year when we were driving back from vacation.  The service light last year resulted in 3 seperate trips to the dealer and nearly $2,000 in repairs over the course of 6 months.  So when I dropped of the Tahoe at the dealer last Saturday I wasn’t too optimistic about the disgnosis.  However, I didn’t expect the news I got back at all: my problem was caused by mice.  Specically mice building their homes in the fuse box and under the fuel rails. Take a look for yourself:

So it seems I have been running a mouse mobile home for the last few months or even a year.  The dealer tells me I am lucky that it didn’t start a fire, but honestly I don’t feel so lucky.  I now have a few options:

• Take the car back from the dealer and immediately trade it in on something new?  Not the most ethical thing I think…besides, I have no idea what car I would actually buy right now.
• Take the car back and clean it up myself and then wait and see what breaks next.  This doesn’t sound like a good option to me.
• Have them clean it up to the tune of about $500.  No guarantee that they will get all of it, but they will replace any parts that the mice have chewed up.
• Have them replace the fuse box and fuel rail (rather than just clean it) to the tune of $1000.  It seems my insurance will cover any expense above $500 so this is the same net cost to me as the third option, so if I go with the ‘fix it’ path, this would be the way I go.

So, now I need to do some serious rat/mouse/racoon/possum and wallaby (don’t laugh - saw some with one in their purse at Tractor Supply a few weeks ago) proofing of my house and barn, try to figure out what to do with the Tahoe..and determine what I have done to upset the rodent population so much!

I’ve done a few posts and saved a lot of things to del.icio.us over the past few months about the output side of social production.  Everthing from small contract manufacturers that will make product in very small runs based on digital models to desktop 3D printers that create your product right in the comfort of your very own home.  It occured to me a few weeks ago that I might be focusing on the wrong side of the equation: the next real leap of social production in the manufacturing space will more likely be triggered by innovations on the input side.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?  When I moved into our new house (3 years ago…) the exhaust fan / light in the kids bathroom wasn’t working.  I removed it almost immediately, but the hole in the ceiling finally got spurred me to action a few weeks ago.  I went to the parts I had removed and realized that none of them had any identifying marks - no stickers, stampings - nothing!  I took the parts with me to a few hardware stores and couldn’t find anything even close.  Giving up on the store route, I thought I would give the internet a try - but how to find something that has no part numbers or even a company brand?  Well I couldn’t come up with anything based on what I have now, but what if I had a 3 D scanner that I could drop the part in and then do a geomstry based search to find parts that were close to what I had.  I know that some auto companies do this today: they scan parts they get from suppliers to make sure they are close to the models they sent out (in some cases they found that the parts were perfectl matches…except they were mirror images of what was ordered!).  Think of the possibilities for the replacement market and aftermarket:

• Scan in what I have today as an envelope and ask someone to design something to do a job that fits on what I already have.
• Scan in a broken part and find replacements
• Send scans of a clay model to have something created in metal, wood, etc.

So now I need to start to look into cheap options to scan in 3D.  In theory this should be even cheaper than printing in 3D since it should all be lights/IR/lasers and there really aren’t any consumables (ink, pastic, etc) involved.  I also wonder if the same thing happened in the dektop publishing market (desktop manufacturing now?) - did scanning take off before printing or vice - versa.

Back from a week’s vacation and I’m realizing thatmy posting has slowed here to a trickle.  A quick update on a few things that have been keeping me busy:

• Well the obvious one is vacation last week.  Had a great time in Waves, NC in the outer banks.  The rental house we had reserved was struck by ligntning a few days before we checked in, so the hot tub was out for the duration of our stay and the solar pool heater was out for the first few days.  But other than that, the house was great and only a few feet from the beach access.  The dunes are a lot higher in the south and there was no wooden walk over, so there was a little excercise every morning to get to the beach.  Did all the normal things while there - went to the beach every day, ate out at restaraunts every night and consumed a fair amount of adult beverages.  Also did some out of the ordinary things: went horse back riding on the beach, went shooting sporting clays and went to the annual open house at the Dare County Naval Bombing range (will get some pics and vids of that up soon).
• On the work front, the marketing automation system we just bought is keeping me pretty busy.  We’re in the middle of implementation right now and will soon be in to pilots.  Still not sure how all of this will fit together, but it is interesting to see what state of the art actually looks like for marketing - and a little scary to see how much you CAN be tracked online.  A new alliance partner and rapidly increasing channel program are taking up whatever spare cycles I have after spending all day on marketing automation.  Oh yeah, and then there is the social media stuff that I got started and continues to gain interest.  All that combined with a hefty travel schedule have slanted the work / life balance definitely toward the work side.
• On the home front, you may have seen the post I did on the newest addition to the herd, Sheriff.  He and Levi are not getting along very well (Levi kicked down a fence to get to Sheriff…and not in a friendly way) so we are having to work with them.  Evidently either my wife or I have to become the ‘lead mare’, whose role is to get the rest of the horses in the heard in line.  It’s slow work, but interesting in learning how horses actually think and act.  I also finally pulled the trigger on a new (to me) trailer.  It’s a 4 horse Sundowner slant with a finished dressing room / sleeping quarters.  It’s a 1996 model (and all steel) but it’s in great shape.  Hopefully we’ll get to use it in the next few weeks to do an overnight trail ride somewhere.
• On the tech front, not much has been happening.  I think I am ready to hackgrade my first get iPhone to the 2.0 firmware so I can get exchange syncing setup.  I also dropped my HP 2133 back from Vista to XP SP3 and am much happier with the performance overall.  So that leaves only my HP TC4400 tablet on Vista, which will probably stay there since I do like the tablet features added to Vista.  I am also looking at moving from Foldershare to Live Mesh for my multiple machine syncing solution - not sure if it will handle my 30 GB documents folder.

I do notice that I blog / tweet a bit more while I am on the road so with the travel schedule, the updates should be a little more regular here over the next few weeks.

Lloyd in the ocean

Originally uploaded by aakelley

In addition to getting a new member of the herd on Wednesday, I had another interesting wildlife experience on Saturday morning.  Our neighbors needed to swap out some hay since they just got some and it was a little green to give to their horses.  We still have some from last year which is well aged, so they brought over their trailer with 15 bales on it and I walked up to the barn to pitch down some bales.  I climbed up into the new loft I just put up a few months ago over the two new stalls to grab some timothy and as I grabbed the first bale, a raccoon with the HEAD THE SIZE OF A GRIZZLY BEAR popped up behind the rest of the bales.  Needless to say I hi-stepped across the loft towards the ladder amd thought for a split second about jumping.  Fortunately the raccoon was just as scared of me as I was of it, so it just froze.

My lovely and talented daughter, upon hearing of my ordeal from my lovely and talented wife, had to memorialize the encounter in a cartoon series.  Talented…isn’t she.

And this is him:

We bought a new horse this weekend.  We’re going to pick him up on Wednesday.  After looking for a few months and having essentially a closed deal last weekend that fell through, we traveled down to Cynthiana over the weekend and got a visit the current owners of New Sheriff in Town (I think we’ll just call him Sheriff).  He is 7 years old and came out of a mare that they had, so they have raised him themselves.  He is a really well trained horse and has a wonderful jog and canter.  He’ll end up being my daughters horse, but we’ll all probably ride him to start.  The herd is now up to 3.  Probably get one more this year or next and then we’ll stop - only room for so many in the barn and in the pastures.

I’ll post a few more pics when we get him back to the farm on Wednesday night.  Hopefully Levi and Goliath will be on their best behavior.

As I somewhat expected, my rate of posting has gone way down here in the last month.  Two factors have contributed:

1. The launch of the corporate blog and my contributions there.  It’s not that I have nothing left to say to post here, it’s just that I have only so much time to say it in.
2. Related to the root cause of the point above, the work day has been getting longer and longer and there seems to be no end in site to the ramp up of a few projects I have had cooking for a long time.

So to solve both of these issues, I am looking to bring a few people on board over the next month or two.  I am looking for good marketers and partner managers to fill 3 roles:

1. An entry level role looking after the partner marketing of our software and technology partners.  Typical functions would include website and brochure content creation and management of our annual developers conference.  In addition, the person filling this role would need to manage the negotiation and ongoing relationships with roughly 60-70 base level software and technology partners.
2. A junior level role that would be managing the relationship with one of our top level strategic partners.  Typical functions would include developing and alliance road map, joint value proposition and briefing the partner on out overall direction.
3. A senior level role that would manage a few of the software and technology relationship managers we have and look out overall for our software and technology partnerships.  Typical functions would include developing the alliance strategy, working with partner groups in the rest of the company to develop alliance marketing plans and managing the overall alliance marketing budget.

Good basic marketing and relationship management skills are a must for all three positions.  Know anyone that would be interested - please send them this link and tell them to drop me a resume.  I will definately be following up with anyone who’s experience and motivation fits the bill.  Help a blogger get some more time to do what he loves

This via Boing Boing today:

Disney World 3D models on Google Earth - Boing Boing

I know its been possible to add buildings to Google Earth for a while now, but this is the first effort I have seen to get complete sets of buildings for a particular area completed.  I wonder if they will just go straight to virtual advertising on the sides of the buildings from the camera POV, or if they will add an avatar representation first?  If all they care about is the add revenue (likely) then they may just skip the avatar, although the collaboration that would enable will give a few less reasons for people to stop by.

I am staying at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando this week for our user conference.  If you’ve never been to a Gaylord property (I think there are only 3 or 4 of them), they are gigantic buildings: 5,000 sleeping rooms, hundreds of meeting rooms and a gigantic dome with a themed attraction in the middle.  The theme for the Palms is pirates…and I guess swamp because as I walked down to my meetings this morning this is what greeted me as I turned the corner:

I here there are nightly gator feedings at 6:30. That may be something I have to check out.  I guess the roadside attraction of seeing gators in Florida lives on - they’ve just moved indoors.