Forbes says Google's gettin ready...

Google -- soon a $25 billion company?

This Old Infrastructure

Just Checked Out Doc's new "Doc Searls IT Garage" and was so impressed with this idea. I love it as it stands--a digestible weblog featuring the war stories of IT folks. Doc's tagline is "News, ideas and real world stories about how IT folks solve their own problems."

But I can see this blog evolving into more.

I don't know if it's the simple, welcoming design of the blog or Doc's loveable mug at the top, but I conjure images of This Old House meets Ambush Makeover. Or This Old Infrastructure meets IT Ambush Makeover.

Can you see Doc and company rushing into, say, Buy.com (on my current shit list due to my recent laptop purchase) and surprising them with the news that they've been selected for an Ambush Makeover for business?

Doc and crew would be the ones to put some foundation and lipgloss on the less-than-attractive e-commerce processes and infrastructure at buy.com. Can you see Frank shaking his head at the CTO -- "Uh uh honey--you need some help."

I bet after a makeover from IT Garage, when you place an order at Buy.com, you'd actually get an email back letting you know that Buy.com has RECEIVED your order. I dunno, call me goofy, maybe they'd even THANK YOU for your order. And I dunno, I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe they'd keep you INFORMED along the way about what's up with your order.

And I know Doc could run them down with a powder puff assault and a bold new cut with blonde highlights, so that if, let's say, you place a $1,000+ order with Buy.com, you'd even be able to find a PHONE NUMBER where you could talk to a real live person about your purchase.

And if Doc were in charge of the Ambush makeover, I just know he'd have the sense to throw some gloss on at the end, so that SOMETHING was inside the box that shows up three days late offering the buyer something special (say, a coupon for a new laptop case for me, or a 10% off thank you certificate = cross-sell/up-sell opportunities for buy.com; good feelings for happy.buyer).

This is more than IT, I know. It's process stuff too. But it's process stuff that is powered by IT, and Doc & Co. has the smarts, experience, and balls to do this kind of thing right.

I say get the cameras rolling and let Frank and Doc hit the streets donning cables and wires and hard hats with servers in tow, instead of sissors and hair dye and the latest low ride jeans.

You go, Doc.

Off center

It's way too easy to type on this laptop, the speed with which I can move now. It's a great great thing. It's also not such a great thing becuase I haven't felt like blogging. Blogging is so much a part of who I am now that I can tell something's up with me when I don't want to come here. I've been busy, that's for sure. New computer, still getting used to it. But it's more.

I don't know what. I wish I did. But I don't.

Maybe I do.

The shape of a memory that came back recently, about three weeks ago. I didn't know it was there. And when it came back, since it's come back, I haven't really been in myself at all. And when I'm not in myself it's hard to come here. This is where I integrate.

So I'm Dissociated, note the capital D, maybe. Okay, yes. Living outside myself, just off to the left and up a bit.

My sister tells me he was 87 pounds when he died.

pulled through a wormhole I'm transported lightning quick to an place and smell and grey white sky. That image. Oh Jesus. That one was hiding in the gaps. In the black space between my hyper-real colors. The place where if I'd never tripped upon it again, I wouldn't have noticed except that I've been living in and out of that black space all of my life.

Was he home?

Sometimes. He'd go into the hospital and then come back home, and then go back in, and then come home.

Did I go see him there?

No, you were too young to go up to his floor. You'd stand on the hood of the car and wave, and he'd wave to you from his hospital room window

shot through the wormhole again, ripped apart and reassembled at the doorway of the memory. I see him there waving, ravaged form hidden just enough by the drapes that I see mostly hand. moving back and forth. Daddy!?!

Over and over I say inside so very deep inside in the middle of my middle in the center of my soul: "I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him I want to go up and see him."

I still do.

Zooom or Gooom

You know on Zoom, the kids sing this little song about Zmail, which is email you send to the show. Zmail, it's email.

jeneane.sessum at gmail.com

google mail.

dig that gmail stuff.

email with google search capability might just save email. give us some meaning back by making it easier to talk to each other.

"Print Conversation" -- I like it.

Far too many innovations these days. I need to spread my excitement out. I can't keep getting jazzed about cool new things.

Well, Shit.

In honor of this, I went back and listened to this.



and...

Nate Adam's Illicit World of Wireless

In bed. Oh god. So good. Supposed to be working but I have this keyboard that I don't have to backspace on. You don't understand. You remember when, through the kindness of my blog friends, when I got shitcanned/voluntarilyseparated from Ketchum your generosity gave me enough cash to get my refurbished Dell. And that was good. That was a lifesaver. But the thing is, even with the extra memory, it could never keep up with my typing. It would double type letters and skip multiple spaces. By last month I literally spent as much time backspacing as forward typing, and besides, after visiting a few sites, I'd get the old broken-link demons, even with spysweeper, which helped, my life was hell. I live on my laptop--literally--for work, play, and self-torture.

So along comes Sheila mentioning the very affordably priced Acer notebooks and there I go grabbing one from buy.com (DO NOT BUY FROM BUY.COM - DON'T BUY.COM - THEY SUCK) and this keyboard is a thing of beauty. I'm going and going and going and going. I'm FREEEEE!

Then add the wireless mojo on top of that and I feel like I just fell into the future.

But I digress. I'm meta-teching.

Frank, we could have a writer's workshop I suppose. But I wouldn't want anyone to write. We would have to do things like read history and poetry and play vollyball and roll in sand (first find some--maybe florida would be better) and sit at the edge of the ocean with just one foot waiting for the waves. It's not form, you know? It's not even techniques. It's stories. So we have a conference where we all set out to find stories. Maybe we don't confer at all. Maybe we go off in pairs or quads to explore woods and fish or something, and then we come back at night and tell stories. Or we roast marshmallows and weenies and sing by a campfire. That's what writing is.

Fuck blogging and fuck politics and fuck journalism and fuck religion (sorry AKMA) as TOPICS. Go live three layers deep within those things and then write your way out. That's how you tell a story.

That's what I say. And I have new keys to speak with, so watch the fuck out.

no possible way

there's no possible way i'm stretched out on the couch with this laptop, all wirelessly connected n shit. holy hot. this is the life. you guys been keepin a big secret from me. Here's how you blog like you do all the time. I've been tapping my fingers to the bone on these subpar machines, hooked into a cable and plugged into the wall, for years. When did technology get this good?

I have to push post now, just because I can.

In the words of Howard Dean

YEEEAAAAAAAAAAaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!!!!! On my new laptop, retreived from the wrong house, where it landed when UPS left it there, in the driveway, and now I'm on it wirelessly from my piano top and I don't even know how it's doing that. What's up with that? Does my DSL linksys router have a wireless thingy I wasn't aware of? Do I live in a hotspot? Or am I leaching off of my neighbors? Either way, it works for me!

I realized I've been living in 2001. It's nice to join the rest of yous. Oh, and I can finally TYPE without letters repeating and jumping and skipping all about. This is effortless. It's like floating in water. ohhhhh. i so happy!

okay, so can i ask a question?

I downloaded and installed the A9 toolbar and am assuming I don't see anything different because I already have the Google toolbar? Come on, can we all just get along?

Check out the "diary" feature of the A9 toolbar:


A9 Toolbar
Web Search: Search the web and Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book™ results. You can also do searches on Amazon.com, the Internet Movie Database, Google, and look up words in a dictionary and thesaurus.

Search Highlighter: The toolbar will automatically highlight your search terms in a light yellow. By using the highlighter menu, you can see how many times your search terms appear on the page, and jump to each occurrence of a specific word. Hint: You don't have to do a search to use the highlighter. Just type one or more words in the search box and click the highlight button.

Your History: Keep track of your last sites visited (on any computer) and your most recent searches. It will keep track of the Web pages you recently visited--even if you switch computers.

Diary: This is the newest and (we think) coolest feature of the toolbar. You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page.

Site Info: See information about the website you are visiting, including related links, site statistics (including traffic rank), sites linking to this site, and user ranking. Select from the menu to go to the site's page on Amazon.com where you can get more information and write a review about the site.

Pop-up Blocker: Stop those annoying pop-up ads.


So, interesting. On the google toolbar, you can have "blog this" which makes it super quick and easy to blog in Blogger as you surf. On the A9 tool bar you get the wild sounding "diary" feature that lets you keep notes about the sites you visit.

I want it all. Aninegoogle.

oh amazon, i love you.

I've seen enough. I'm in love.

zzzzzz

I can't decide if looking for a new laptop feels more like shopping for a new car or a new house. The strangest thing, and if you believe laptops can be demon-possessed then this may not seem so weird, but after I plunked the just over a thousand dollars down on a new acer, opting for the budget-reliability combo (and don't anyone say anything bad--it's not even here yet) with thanks to Sheila Lennon who uses an Acer Travelmate, and if it can withstand all the writing Sheila does I figure it can certainly handle mine, but I digress.... What I was saying was that after I plunked down the money for the new laptop, this one is suddenly behaving.

I know. I know. It sounds crazy. But look at me type. I've only had three double-tripple letters (which I fixed) in the last paragraph. That's pretty good for this refurbished Dell, whose keyboard issues started the day I brought it home.

So, who knows. Maybe my Dell felt the reverberations of all the searches I've done this last week. Or maybe not. Either way, a fall in status is in store for this puppy.

Listen, Sheila has some great info about Amazon's new search engine capability too. Check it out. I'm on my way over to Amazon now to do just that.

Compare prices and features for Laptop Computer in GA

Happy Anniversary - one year in business, now i gotta get a new laptop. How are HP laptops? Anyone have one? Recommendations on new laptop under $1400 welcome.

p.s., if you haven't used Salescircular.com before, check it out. It's a handy way to check out who's got what on sale before you run around town.

lata.

thought for the day

click.

aging pope chews off own thumbs

mindless

I have been assimilated. My mind is gone, no numb, no gone, no numb. Hello, What? (Once and Future King--I loved that book as a kid. Deep evergreen forests and knights with shimmering swords and magic and stuff. now they talk about harry potter. i don't know or care from harry potter. special defects and all.) So, hello, what? Work has been so non-ending, 5 a.m., 2 a.m., you gotta take it while it's there - this is the only time I miss having a team. No one to even cry to. My house--never, not in 10 years, this bad. Condemnable. The sweet-eating ants are back. I've decided to let them have the place. I am thinking to give them names like eatsy and beatsy and tiny and big boy (the one who carries his dead colleagues home--poor troops having ingested george's latest boric acid buffet, the poor man's biological weapons of mass instruction, which they are obviously breeding to resist) and fluffy and buffy and Henry and Gwenneth.

It just doesn't matter not any of it. It doesn't make the pain stop. It doesn't make meaning.

sleep.

The secret life of the infrequent meeter

I am an undomesticated animal in the pet store of business. No matter where I turn, I leek urine on the carpets, track in mud, and when they're not looking, I've got my eye on the beef-basted chew toys better known as free notepads and pencils.

Once I lived in conference rooms. Half-day here, hour there, full-day here and there. I remembered, yesterday, sitting in a four-hour meeting, swiveling in my corner chair, the comfy black leather kind that I couldn't resist leaning back in, folding my hands behind my head, thinking gee, long time since I've done that, drifting, feeling important. I remembered what it was like.

Once upon a time, I was a frequent meeter.

Smells of old meeting rooms come back in waves, the new-paint scent of the barely-occupied corridor on the 22nd floor, slippery cold welcoming my elbows on the laminated wood conference tables.

Coming to from my reverie, I notice seven black leather portfolios competing around the table, and me with my spiral-bound $1.29 Walmart notebook, college-ruled at least, which I flip through during the introductions to find a page without Barbie stickers lining the bottom. That little girl of ours can't keep her hands off a notebook.

The expert meeters write down the date and topic of the meeting. They have to do that because they go to a lot of these things. I doodle some geometric shapes instead, and then start scanning the faces. I guess at how many are married, decide one is definitely in an open marriage, I wonder where their kids are today, who watches porn and who doesn't.

This, of course, is not what I'm here to accomplish. But I'm finding that I've forgotten to keep my attention span in shape this last year, and whenever I'm around a group of people, I hyperlink off into places better left static. I've developed new habits as a worker in the knowledge age, and putting me inside four cramped walls is one of the worst ways to keep me focused.

The habits of the frequent meeters are so different from my own habits now.

We take notes on the same things, the frequent meeters and I, but my cadence is different; I'm already in an MSWord window in my head. I'm thinking in analogies and metaphors. I write down what I need to know; they write down a lot they don't need to know.

Frequent Meeters are used to working lunches, and they remember to put their trash in the nicely branded boxes the caterer uses to pack the sandwiches, chips, pasta salad and cookies. I notice, later in the day, that I used my lunch napkin to blow my nose and all my unused condiment packets are littering my personal table space. My mustard nudges my table neighbor's portfolio.

When frequent meeters finish a meeting, you know it. There's no real cue, but time for them is in-built, and each begins rumbling and stacking papers, reaching down for a briefcase, shifting posture, sighs, laughter. The icing on the cake: portfolios slap shut.

Like me, I think, they're glad it's over.

On the way home, I call RageBoy. I say, "I forgot about the cookies, man. You know--meeting cookies? They are big fucking cookies with those chunks inside them, all rippley. They were so good! I had two."

The frequent meeters, they don't remember the cookies.

A Paying Gig for Bloggers

Blogsister Roxanne Cooper is offering $250 (paid via tipjar, amazon, or powells) to the person (with a valid email address) who comes up with the best new name for her blog.

Not often we get a chance to name a cool blog and score some cash. Get on over to Roxanne's and see all the cool names folks are leaving. Then, if you're like me, you'll say, crap I can't beat those.

Serenity Now!

The first bump, bruise, toe stub, stumble or tumble that marks the beginning of "one of those days" usually seems like "just one of those things."

You can't know it's going to be "one of those days" until you've stubbed at least twice, broken more than one glass, lost your keys behind the basement steps *and* burned the toast. One of those days requires an accumulation of errors, miscues, and minor ailments.

I hate those days of surprise. There's really no such thing as a little surprise for me. I don't handle surprises well, feeling them morph into shock, no, not around the curve, inside the drain, on the stairs, or in the oven. Surprises are like sushi to me--I can't get the hang of it. Even good surprises bother me.

It's a fight or flight thing. I get stuck somewhere in the transition. That space in between fight and flight, better known as terror.

Some days I feel as if I've made a permanent home there.

Days like this.

Worthwhile

Halley and friends have started a new bloggerzine called Worthwhile. A nice lineup of contributors and already some good posts up. I've just been released from an all-day meeting, so I finally have five seconds to check it out--YAY!

Musings on the Anniversary of My Emancipation

April 1st one year ago, five years to the day after I started there, I took my last walk into Ketchum to drop off the paperwork that got me a little bit of money and 30 days more of health insurance, which, at nearly $1000 per month for COBRA, was like walking in to receive a gold nugget.

The weather hit spring here a couple of weeks back. As the softness returned to the air, it dawned on me that April Fools day had more meaning than the tricks Jenna tried to pull over on us all day long. I remembered that it had been a year since my emancipation from the corporate world.

The realization hit suddenly, since I generally go missing from myself somewhere around St. Patrick's day. When the dogwood blossoms sprang and I got wind of the season having changed, I had a few different thoughts (listed in no particular order) on the startling fact that I had made it through my first year as an independent consultant of the "writing" flavor:

1) holy shit, I made it!
2) holy shit, I'm tired.
3) holy shit, it's tax time!
4) holy shit, holy shit.

For me, the transition from agency to my own business has not been as jolting as it might have been if I hadn't already been working from home.

Essentially, I realized significant efficiency gains, as one might say if one had to write such phrases for a living, through having only ONE email account to check each day, only one channel through which clients and friends could communicate with me electronically.

Gone was my Ketchum email with so many dozens of messages each day, approximately 1/4 of them useful to me; Gone was Lotus Notes (praise be!), a requirement for working on IBM; gone was YAHOO messenger (another IBM team requirement); gone was logging into the corporate Intranet; gone were meeting notices.

gone gone gone.

On April 2nd, 2003, it was just me and bellsouth.

I felt both puny and free.

No more teams. No more resources. No more "global network" or best practices.

Sometimes, what's missing is just what needs to be missing.

One thing that eased the transition from part-time corporate citizen to full-time Net citizen was my home in blogspace. This space has been my workplace for so long now that losing my "internal" business colleagues was far less traumatic than it might have been. When you work from your couch for five years, and then you sign some paperwork, and go back home and work from your couch another year, the realworld watercooler just doesn't figure into the grief equation.

The friends I had "inside" are still my friends (though few are left "inside") and the only difference is that I get emails from them at my home email account. I've collaborated or have been turned on to work by so many of them over the past year, that they really haven't gone anywhere. And neither have I. At the sametime, we've all gone everywhere compared to where we'd been.

During this first year I had some pretty cool successes, and I'm thinking I need to round up links to what I can and update my e-portfolio (which I haven't touched in a year). If I do, I might post some links here, to remind myself what year one of my sole proprietorship was like.

I don't miss my real job. It seems so unreal to me now. A flip in perspective, a flip in priorities.

It seems unreal that I ever made the commute, infrequently as it might have been; it seems unreal that I ever sat in that cube, or in my fancy glass office at the job before Ketchum; it seems unreal that I ate lunch at restaurants; it seems unreal that I ever talked to clients on a phone with a tethered receiver; it seems unreal that I printed on a laser printer; it seems unreal that I ever knew what time it was.

It sees unreal that I ever did anything other than what I'm doing right now.

And I guess, in some ways, that's because I never have.