Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

I met Kevlin Henny back in 2007 at the PHPUK Conference in London. (For a year or so I called him Kevin Hennly until I finally got it right) One day out of the blue, Kevlin droped me an email and invites me to participate in a new project he’s working on for O’Reilly, a collaborative book called “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know“. Not being one who is ever short of advice and opinions to give, I gladly submitted two entries that eventually made their way through the editing process and into the final book.
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Dear Reader,

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 0
Days till I see the Lovely and Talented Kathy:07
Cities left: 7
Miles Traveled: 0
Cups of Coffee: 0
Current Current City: Utrecht

Random Statistic of the day

Number of takes for me to get a video right while sitting at a table with the waitresses all staring at me: 2
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Dear Reader,

If you know me, you know that PHP is my passion. Talking about PHP is fun, working with PHP is fun, helping others work with PHP is fun. Heck, I love PHP so much that I’ve worked it so that my day job for the last 3 years has been working with PHP and developers.

Over the past nine years of having fun with PHP, began to see that there are five categories of tools that I rely on more than any others. Sure, I’ve got a code beautifier, a standards checker, and a hand full of hand-written scripts I use for various things to make life easier. However when it comes down to it, there are five that I rely on every day.

So here they are in acceding order of importance. Let me know, what are your five? (let’s not start a meme or anything though, ok?)

5: A Unit Testing Tool

Whether you prefer PHPUnit or SimpleTest, Unit testing has proven it’s usefulness in the development process. As a professional PHP developer, you should be familiar with the concepts behind Unit Testing and Test Driven Development. You should also be able to identify when unit testing is a good idea and when it’s a bad idea. (Yes, there are times when it’s a bad idea)

4: A Debugger

As with unit testing tools, there are multiple options for you when it comes to debuggers. dbg, Zend_Debug and xdebug all provide professional PHP developers with tools to break down their code and find problems. Debugging tools allow you to step through your code, stop execution and examine the environment at any point. Debuggers are a developer’s best friend and every developer should have one installed on their development server. Bonus points if you’ve also got FireBug installed. Find you a good debugger and invest the time necessary to use it, it will be time well spent.

3: A ERD Tool

If you are doing serious PHP work then chances are good that you are working with a database. At some point your database structure will grow too large to keep in your head, you will need a tool to keep everything straight; that’s where an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) tool comes into play. Tools like MySQL Workbench help you visualize your database structure. More expensive tools like ERWin or Embarcadero’s ER/Studio give you more options for importing and exporting models and keeping your database model in sync with your actual database.

No matter whether you are working on your personal project or the corporate database, an ERD Tool will help you manage it.

2: A Version Control System

CVS, SVN, Git, or a host of other options both free and commercial will help you keep your code safe. Whether that’s safe from your development server’s hard drive crashing or safe from you next coding binge where you change something at 2AM that you really shouldn’t have; keeping your code in a version control system will help. Which system you choose will largely depend on how you or your team work. You need to research the options available and work with your team to make choices like central vs. distributed.

1: A Framework

The most important tool any developer can have in their tool box these days is a framework. Let’s talk about two different types of frameworks.

The first type of framework is a Content Management System. These days CMS systems are complex enough to be thought of as specialized frameworks in their own right. You need to know one good enough to get it installed, up and running and extend it to get the job done. If your needs are easily definable and your CMS of choice has extensions available to fit more of the functionality then learning one could pay for itself in only one or two projects.

PHP has a lot of good CMS projects available and listing them here would simply mean that I would forget one so I’m not going to try. Dig around on Google and you’ll find one.

The second type of framework that PHP programmers need to have in their toolbox is a more generic programming framework. In the PHP world we have a lot of frameworks from which to choose. Most developers chose one of three or four major frameworks.

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• symfony
• ZendFramework

The framework you chose will largely depend around the type of projects you work on your style. Each of the above frameworks has it’s own strengths and weaknesses.

Regardless your choice, you need to know one framework well enough so that when a project comes along, you don’t burn a lot of time “Yak Shaving” but can get the project up and running quickly.

The Mission Option

There you have them, my 5 tools that every PHP developers should have in their toolbox. One thing that did not make the cut was an IDE. An IDE is great for those who use them. However, if you don’t wall the overhead of an IDE, there are a lot of good Programmer’s Editors out there for you to use.

For me, I use Komodo. Yes, I know Komodo bills itself as an IDE and it has all of the important features of one. However, it doesn’t force me to code it’s way. I can use Komodo to write PHP or edit my hosts file. Active State realizes that every file is not a project and that a developer should only have to use a project when they actually want a project.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

[Editor's Note: This is an editorial that was originally published on Freshmeat back in 2000. As I'm cleaning up my content, it stuck me that I had never published this here.]

Me to the everybody: “Hi, my name is Cal… and I’m… I’m a manager.”
Everybody: Hi, Cal!

I am a developer who made the conscious decision to move into management. My training, my experience, and my love has always been developing software. I’ve worked under sales managers, business managers, and (shudder) a CTO who believed that all the good software had already been written so we didn’t need to write anything; we could just buy everything we needed. I made the leap into management for one reason: I had a manager who “got it” and showed me by example that developers can make great bosses for other developers. (Thanks, Paul M.!)

During my career as a developer, I learned many different things but the one thing that has stuck with me is this axiom:

“If you have never been a software developer, you have no business managing software developers.”

There, I’ve done it again. At least one third of you are now mad at me. But regardless of your feelings towards me, I stand by my statement because, time and again, whether through personal experience of 24 years or war stories from others, it has survived.

Before you fire up mutt and flame me, let me be quick to point out that I do not believe that this maxim is universally applicable to all situations or walks of life. I am not belittling any person or occupation, but I believe that, in most cases, we as humans, co-workers, and professional colleagues have enough shared experience to be able to relate to each other. I do not believe that this maxim applies to the sexes or to races. However, there are a few areas where it does apply, and the one I know most about is software development. Here are three different thoughts on why I believe this is true, what I believe has caused the current crisis, and what I think we can do about it:

The Balancing Act — Why we are here.

There are very few professions that combine the creativity involved in good software development and the rigorous deadlines, often imposed from the outside. Hurry up and create! The ideas have to keep flowing, they have to be scheduled, and they have to be completed on time. If you have to go figure something out, go. But make sure you are back after lunch and make sure your schedule doesn’t slip. Developers, especially now as we work in Web years, are under increasing pressure to “Get it out the door fast!”.

The rigorous detail work of quality software development, however, has not changed. It still takes time to develop quality software. (You can have it good, fast, or cheap; please pick two.) To those on the outside, it may sometimes seem that what we do is easy. (Heck, we may feel that what we do is easy!) The ease with which developers manipulate the tools of the trade is often misconstrued as ease with which the task can be completed. Only a developer understands the countless hours it takes to master new tools, new languages, and new concepts. In this age of rapid development, new concepts come at us like a fire hose of knowledge. We are supposed to know how to soak it all up and be able to use it in our next project. This is almost a bearable burden if management understands what we are faced with. The problem is that, having never been there, most managers cannot empathize. (And most don’t even bother to sympathize.)

The Boss From Beyond — What has caused the current crisis.

It’s generally accepted folklore in the IT community that managers are managers because they can’t do anything else. What has led us to this state, a climate in which developers don’t respect their managers and managers try to manage a software development team like an accounting department? Volumes have been written on when and why people are promoted into positions they are not qualified to hold. I won’t rehash that here. I have a different take on it.

The question we ask should not be “Why don’t managers understand software development?”; the question should be “Why don’t those of us who do understand the process step up to management?” The obvious answer is that there are very few developers who want to be managers.

In the past, developers would have to turn away from promotions to management (and sometimes raises) so they could remain in development. These days, they find other companies to work for that will pay them more and allow them to continue to develop (but that’s a story for another day). The problem exacerbates itself. The more developers steer clear of management positions, the unhappier software development teams will be with the candidates that become their managers.

We, the IT community, have the bosses we have because we refuse to step up to the plate and take the job. I am not advocating that all developers climb the management ladder; far from it. In most cases, a developer pressed into service as a manager will do no better a job than an accountant forced to code. But until the development community learns to train its own management structure, we are doomed to be managed by PHBs.

Managing In Chaos — What can we do about it?

So now we are all on the same Merry-Go-Round from hell. What can we do to get off? At least part of the answer is obvious. We, as a community, have to train our own managers. For me as a manager, that means that as I interview candidates for development positions, I have to keep my eyes open for potential managers. I have to make sure that I mentor as I was mentored. I have to realize that if I don’t train new development managers, I’m as big a part of the problem as non-development managers.

For me as a developer, and all other developers reading this, we have to make sure that we educate our managers.

We have to teach them concepts like:

• Deadlines cannot be set from the outside without input from the development team they are being imposed on.
• Sometimes, it just doesn’t come to you and you can’t force it.
• You can’t run most modern IDEs on crap hardware!

I’ve found that, in many cases, they can learn. They want to learn. They are PHBs because they’ve never been taught not to be. There are some that won’t learn or, worse yet, think you have a lot to learn about business. If you are under one of these and you work in America, change jobs! Life’s too short and the job market is too tight to deal with goobers like that.
Closing

To fix the present situation, we, as developers, have to make one of two choices. We can take a stand at our present jobs and educate upper management so that we don’t work for PHBs, or we can find other jobs. But make no mistake about it; it is ultimately up to us to fix the problem.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

I’m really curious about the origins of the Seven Things Meme. Anybody know where it started? Anyhow, I’ve been tagged by my friend Matthew Weier O’Phinney so I’ll play along. (It forces me to blog, something I’ve not done a lot of in the past 6 months)

• My super power is thinking up titles for things
  Everybody has a super power, some of us just have to look harder than others to find them. Luckily for me, mine manifested itself early in life, I am good at making up titles. It doesn’t matter what needs a title, I can look at something or hear an idea and come up with a title for it. (examples would be this blog you are reading, or this one, or this one) Unfortunately for me, it’s not a power I can control. They either come to me, or they don’t. So if you are ever stuck coming up with a title for something, ping me.
• I wrote my own PHP framework.
  Ok, so who hasn’t? The only difference is that I wrote a PHP framework back in 2001. Apparently, SourceForge doesn’t clean out it’s closets often because it’s still there. The name of the project is a good example of how my super power doesn’t always work. (Matthew, you are not allowed to laugh at my code, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel)
• I didn’t have to take English 101 because I wrote a perfect paper
  This one will come as a surprise to anyone who followed DevZone closely. I can’t spell and I regularly butcher the English language. Names are my specialty. Give me a name and I’ll show you at least 3 alternate spellings. However, when I started college at the University of South Alabama, my first class was English 101. The first day, the assignment was to write a paper on what you did that summer. I turned mine in and the next day I was informed that I had passed the class because there were no grammatical or spelling errors in the paper. No one was more surprised than my mother, an English teacher. :)
• I want a tattoo
  I’ve wanted a tattoo for some time to complete my mid-life crisis. Kathy even designed me one but she won’t finish it up. Her design centers around “Property of Kathy” written in Tengwar.) (Do me a favor, drop @kateva a note on twitter and encourage her to finish it.)
• I used to produce live concert videos
  I wore a lot of hats before I donned the battered Fedora and started writing about PHP. A few years ago, that hat was a beret because I was in “the biz”. I produced over 40 live concert videos. Most of them were for Southern Gospel groups but I did a couple of contemporary Christian groups and even two comedy videos. I’ve moved on now and while I love programming computers, I can honestly say that producing videos are some of the most fun and yet the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.
• I met The Lovely and Talented Kathy while we were both working at Walt Disney World
  The year I graduated high school, Walt Disney World opened EPCOT Center. That summer, they went on a hiring spree to staff up for the fall opening. It was during this spree that I sneaked in, with the help of a couple of nice ladies who went to church with my grandparents. I was hired into “Cash Control”, basically, the bank for all of the stores in the park. (For those that care, it’s in “the tunnel” directly beneath the Carousel.) On my first day in Cash Control, I met The Lovely and Talented Kathy and knew I was going to marry her. Unfortunately, she didn’t quite see it that way. (I was a mere child of 18 at the time and she was…well a year or two older than me) One night, after we closed the park and then closed Bennigin’s, her car wouldn’t start. With a straight face and more than one Banana Banshee in her, she looked at me and said “Hey, my car won’t start, will you ride home under the hood and hold the distributor cap on?” The sad thing is that I was so smitten with her that I would have done it. That’s ok, she eventually came around…or I wore her down, I’m not sure.
• I got my job at Zend quite by accident
  Back when I was at Jupiter Hosting, I actually had time to write some code. I didn’t get to write a lot, but between meetings and other management crap, my team would take pity on me and give me a small project to chew on. One of the projects I wrote (I forget which one) I thought was pretty good. There was this company named Zend that had a code repository (it’s gone now) and I wanted to submit the project to it. I submitted the project and waited…and waited…and waited. After about 2 days of hearing nothing, I started emailing people asking what was up. I ended up talking to Jayons Minard who told me no one was managing the repository anymore, so I volunteered. I ended up managing it for about 4 months while I was working at a small start-up back in Nashville.

  When the start-up went tits-up, I started doing contract work until I found something I liked. One of the contracts I started working on was this new site that Zend was building and Jayson was in charge of, DevZone. One thing led to another and after about 3 months of working on contract for Zend, and constantly asking Jayson if there were any positions open at Zend, I got an email from him. He said that Mark de Visser, his boss, would be in Nashville the next week for a Red Hat conference and wanted to interview me. I had a great interview with him and had an offer letter in my email in box when I got back home.
  
  It was probably the weirdest journey to a job that I’ve ever traveled, but it was worth it. :)

Ok, there are my Seven Things. Now for my Seven People. I think this part may be harder than the seven things.

• The Lovely and Talented Kathy – She will have to post her entry here because she’s yet to join the blogger nation.
• Mark de Visser – The best boss I ever had and the man who taught me the value of a community to an open source project.
• Louis Davidson – My long time friend whom I talk to maybe once a year but think about every day.
• Joe Stagner – Because if more people at Microsoft were like him, it would be a much cooler place.
• Allen Fuller – Who if he doesn’t already know Keith Casey, probably should.
• Sebastian Bergman – the official photographer of the PHP community.
• Christian Flickinger – Spooooooooooooon!

And now, the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Wow, what a day today was!

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in this post so unless you are friend or family, you may just want to read the next summary and skip the rest.

For those in a hurry

For those who have not heard, yes, I will soon be leaving Zend and moving to Ibuildings. Yes, that means I am also leaving Nashville, TN-US for Utrecht, Netherlands. No, the lovely and talented Kathy will not be going with me immediately but will be joining me after my son graduates high school. Yes we are both very excited about it.

Why

The first question most people ask me is why? I mean a lot of people asked me that. As I’ve said to just about anyone who would listen, I have a great job! Zend is a great company to work for, they provide for their people, and I have absolutely no complaints about my time at Zend. This will come as a surprise to a few Zenders as all they have ever seen me do is complain. I’ve been allowed to create my role at Zend and that is a rare thing at any company.

I was originally hired at Zend to be an editor for DevZone and I was just supposed to write articles and code. (those of you who have seen my spelling and grammar gaffes can stop laughing now) Over the course of 2.5 years, Mark de Visser, with the backing of Andi, Harold and the rest of this awesome company, put up with my antics. They paid me to work with the PHP community. I got to travel to conferences, hang out in IRC, they even let me be the Master of Ceremonies of ZendCon. This truly is a dream job. It is so great that in the 2.5 years, I’ve turned down most offers to interview and the few serious offers that came my way. This was were I felt at home.

So back to the question, why leave a dream job at a great company? The only answer I have is “opportunity“. Most of you have never read my article “Nerd Herding” (and I don’t recommend you bother now) but in it I talk about the fact that for developers, interesting projects are just as important as a good salary. While I still love what I do at Zend, the opportunity offered to me by Ibuildings was just too great to pass up. So that is why, after over a month of thinking about it and discussing it with the lovely and talented Kathy, we decided that this was a chance I couldn’t pass up.

/me <3 PHPC

One of the great things about my job, both at Zend and at Ibuildings is that I get paid to work with the PHP community. I told someone this at ZendCon but it bears repeating here.

PHP is my fifth programming language, that means I’ve been a part of 5 programming communities. None of those communities have come close to being as vibrant, fun and welcoming as the PHP community. PHP developers should not take this community for granted, it is something special.

It is to this awesome group of mixed nuts that we call the PHP community, that I give a big hug and say thank you. Thank you for all the tweets, blog posts, IMs and irc well wishes today. Thank you for your friendship. Thanks you for welcoming me in even when you didn’t have to. You guys and gals are teh awesome and I wish I could call each of you by name and say thank you. (if I tried, we’d be here a while an even then, I know I’d leave someone out so I’m not going to try) It has been a blast working with you while at Zend and I look forward to working with you at Ibuildings!

Looking Forward

I’ve talked a lot about Zend in this post but I can’t close without saying a big hello to my new Ibuildings family. Thank you for welcoming me in such a warm fashion. I’ve never had this much attention paid to me coming to a new company. Honestly, it humbles me to think that I’m moving to a new company and country and yet I already have good friends in both. I am looking forward to working with each of you!

I am positive that Zend will be hiring someone to take over DevZone and my other duties. I know that phpc will embrace them as you did me. (because again, you guys and gals rock!) DevZone has become a regular daily stop of a lot of PHP developers and I am sure it will only get better.

As for me? well, I’m not going anywhere. (figuratively speaking) I’ll still be hanging around on Skype, IRC and IM. If you need to contact me, my contact info is always on my EPK. I encourage you to ping me if I can help you.

It’s been an awesome 2.5 years at Zend and I look forward to a number of awesome years at Ibuildings!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

(YES! It’s been a long time since I blogged, why is another story for another time)

elePHPant World Tour is now live! This was an idea Ivo and I came up with one day while chatting. Here’s the basic premise. It seems obvious that elePHPants love to travel. Equally obvious is the fact that a lot of PHP developers love to take pictures. So, let’s combine the two. If you spot an elePHPant while traveling, like near a landmark, or making it’s way through the airport, snap a picture. Upload it to flickr and tag it with ewt08. Thanks in no small part to a bit of Web 2.0 magic and Wordpress, we’ll steal the picture from flickr and post it on the blog.

In January, the ever versatile and talented crew from phpwomen.org will look at all the pictures posted and pick the best one. (Best being a highly subjective term) The winner will get a prize package that, while is not complete yet, is described on the about us page.

So get in on the fun. Make sure you always have your camera with you because as you travel, you never know where you will spot them. (It also helps if you carry a spare elePHPant n case you are at a picturesque site and there’s not one just roaming about)

Hey, if you work for a company trying to reach PHP developers, and want to give a little link love and good will from the community, drop me a line. We’d love to have you as a sponsor and all it will cost you is a prize for the prize pool.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)(elePHPant)
=C=

p.s. Do us a favor love, tweet this post to help spread the word? Cheers!

Dear Reader,

For the first time in five years, the lovely and talented Kathy and I took a much needed vacation. This time, we decided to drag along our two best friends, Rick and Kim.

As with our last vacation, we decided to cruise, at least for part of it. Unlike last time though, we chose to cruise to Mexico instead of Alaska. To Thursday afternoon, after a nice flight, we boarded the Royal Caribbean ship, “Enchantment of the Seas” in Ft. Lauderdale and set sail. The boat was nice but not as nice as the “Radiance of the Seas” that we sailed on in Alaska. Still it was a nice boat and we soon found our sea legs and started relaxing.

The first meme of the trip came during dinner the first evening. Rick opened the butter dish to find that the gr in “grassland butter” was obscured leaving only “assland butter”. Those of you who know us know that it went downhill quickly from there.

Key West was our first port of call. We visited the Hemmingway house, did all the touristy things and then headed back to the ship because it was hot! The Hemmingway house was awesome, we had a great tour guide named Loren who made the tour very interesting.

That evening was the formal dining night on the ship so we all got dressed up and pretended we were adults for the evening. When it’s all said and done, I think we clean up pretty good. :)

The next port of call was Cozumel. For our excursion there we chose to see the Mayan ruins. Well, we thought that was the point of the excursion, it turned out to be an hour at the ruins, and a few sales pitches along the way. It was fun and entertaining though.

Since Cozumel is on an island, we had to take a ferry to the mainland to see the ruins. The ride over was a bit hairy because we sat inside, the water was real choppy and the guy one isle over lost his lunch. Luckily, they had passed out plastic baggies just for that purpose. The ride back was much better, we sat on the back deck and enjoyed the sun and spray. By the time we got back though, we were salt crusted. :)

The next day was our only full day at sea. we mainly just wandered around and did a lot of nothing. We did play TV Tune Trivia and if Rick and Kim had bothered to show up on-time we would have actually won. We were one point away from winning and they knew the first tune. Alas, they opted to take a nap and got carried away.

That evening was probably the most fun evening of the cruise. We saw the “farewell” show in the theater, played the scavenger hunt game on the opposite end of the ship and then went back to the theater for some late-night comedy. Our bartender from dinner just happened to show up at each location to make sure that we were “enjoying ourselves”. We kinda “over enjoyed” ourselves that night.

That was it for the cruise. I don’t have pictures for the dive portion yet so I’ll save that for another day. No cruise is complete without towel animals though so here are the pictures of ours.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Most of you who know me know that I spend way too much time on twitter.com. During all that time, I’ve learned a lot about twitter and the twitter community. I’ve seen companies succeed using it to talk to their customers and seen companies fall flat on their face. I even recorded an episode of Sixty Second Tech on the subject and even wrote a blog post about it.

Recently I started wrapping everything I’ve learned up into a single document. By the time I finished, it was 20 pages long. I sent it off to several reviewers, marketers and others, took their feedback and refined it over time and am really happy with the results.

So if you’ve ever wondered what works and what doesn’t when marketing on twitter, “Twitter for Marketers” is for you.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:30 CT, I will be the guest on Small Business Trends Radio. You can listen live or download the episode for later listening.

I’ll be discussion all things WordPress.

It should be a rocking good time and I’d love to see both of my readers tune in. So drop by and give us a listen.

=C=

Dear Reader,

Some of you who have been following me for a while know that a few years ago I wrote a series of stories for my mother titled “My Life as a Child”. I described these stories as “Autobiographical Fiction”.

In an effort to bring some order to my website I have decided that these stories would be better off being archived on their own site.

If you have ever wanted to know what it was like growing up as Cal, this site is for you. I present to you the entire archive of “My Life as a Child” archived at autobiographicalfiction.com.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Over at the Small Business Idea Forum, Staci asked about twitter and I replied. This, along with a couple of other things today are pointing me towards a blog post and possible a podcast this weekend.

Twitter has gone from WTH to ZOMG to “Hey, I can use this for my benefit!” I like any tool that hits that last stage.

Three things have come together today to prompt me to write this post.

First, my friend and editor Elizabeth Naramore tweeted today:

someone explain to me the reasoning behind a company “following me” on twitter; are they just hoping I follow them too?

She’s not the first person that has noticed this trend, just the latest. The trend of following everyone on twitter because a lot of people automatically follow you back is growing. The obvious benefit is if you follow 10,000 people on twitter and 10% follow you back because they don’t know any better, when you post, 1,000 people see your post. So as a side note to this blog let me jsut advise any twitter user out there, don’t auto-follow. When you get a twitter “follow” notice, check out who it is. If it’s not someone you know then it’s twitter spam. Don’t bother to follow them. (You don’t have to block them though, let them artificially inflate your follower number.)

Then I saw this post from Michal Arrington. (Whom I do not follow because I do not know and usually don’t care to hear what he has to say outside of techcrunch.com.) It was an A-Ha! moment for me. I do a lot of scanning with Google Alerts but his point is very important.

Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs.

It’s not enough these days to just monitor the web via Google alerts or some paid clipping service. Blogs are a trailing indicator these days. To be on top of your brand you have got to take it to the next level. tweetscan.com lets you do just that.

Finally, a forum post over at the Small Business Idea Forum again mentioned twitter and my reply there got me thinking.

Twitter started as a way to connect friends but is fast becoming a powerful marketing and business intelligence tool. I cover the former briefly in my forum post and on Sixty Second Tech but it’s the latter that I really want to talk about.

tweetscan.com

tweetscan.com is just what you think it is, a search engine for twitter. Yes, Google indexes twitter but these days that just not fast enough. Thankfully the guys and gals behind tweetscan solve that problem for us. It looks like they database and index the public feed. I don’t know where they get their resources but I hope to god they stay alive because this is something that twitter really needs.

If you have looked at their page by now and can’t figure out how to use it, please turn in your Internet secret decoder ring and shut off your modem. If you did figure it out, bully for you, you are as smart as a fifth grader! A couple of notes. If you read their blog and wiki (these people are on the web 2.0 ball!) then you know that they support OR and “-” operators. This makes life ever so much more interesting. GO ahead, play with a few queries like cats OR dogs. Hopefully they will add AND and NOT in there soon.

So, you can scan for topics. That’s kind of cool but other than replacing google egosurfing with twitter egosurfing what’s the pint, right? Here’s the point. Search for your brand! In my case I have searches for “Cal Evans”, Zend and ZF. All fine and good, as Arrington points out, I can now see things before they happen as twitter is a leading indicator. But who wants to go visit their page every so often and execute a series of searches?

FEED ME!

Thankfully, the people behind tweetscan are fully Web 2.0 compliant and they provide me with a custom feed for each search I execute. This means I can plug the RSS feed of the above search for “Cal Evans”, into ANY feed reader and voila, instant ego surfing!

Now, I use Google Reader as my primary feed reader and it does a wonderful job. However, these feeds (I’ve got 8 now) are much more important to me than anything I have in Google Reader. I almost need them to be push. The next best thing to push is pull in a program I already use. I did NOT want to have to install yet another piece of software to make this whole thing work. (Que Attensa to enter stage right) I used to use this Outlook plugin back when I was at Jupiter Hosting. It’s a great way to add RSS feeds into Outlook. It’s made some progress since 2005 and now is very unobtrusive.

Wrap It Up

So, to summarize; tweetsearch.com + Attensa’s outlook plugin = quick and easy business intelligence. Don’t forget to add feeds for your major competitors brands as well!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=
So,

Dear Reader,

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and mentioned that I have a podcast (yes, I routinely try and convert my friends to podcast listeners.) His response to me was “Yes, I have an iPod but I’m just not a member of the podcast generation”. His problem is that he is suffering from information overload. Others that I have talked to complain that they just don’t know where to start. No matter what your excuse, if you are not listening to podcasts on a regular basis then you are missing out on a lot (I mean a LOT) of good information, tips and entertainment that is there for the taking.

So, I’m going to make it my mission to try and convert people to be podcast listeners. I hope, along the way, I’ll pick up a few listeners to my podcasts but honestly, a rising tide floats all boats. So, if you don’t currently listen to podcasts on a regular basis, keep reading. If you are already a member of the podcast generation(you subscribe to at least one podcast), I want you to send the URL to this article to at least 5 friends that don’t. If you’ve got a twitter account, tweet it. Let’s see if we can’t increase the number of podcast listeners significantly in the next month.

Editors Note: If you are in a hurry, just skim the bullet points and visit the URLs.

Cal’s 4 Step Program to joining the Podcast Generation:

1: Figure out how you are going to listen.
If you don’t have an mp3 player, you are not out in the cold, it means you will most likely have to listen to them on your computer. I have 2 iPods myself and a total of 8 in the family and I still listen to about 25% of my podcasts on my computer. So don’t fret if you don’t have an mp3 player.

Most podcast sites these days have an embedded flash player. If you are going to be listening via your computer, take advantage of these. The only downside here is that you have to go check each podcasts site on a regular basis. The embedded players are great for testing out a podcast to see if you want to subscribe though.

If you don’t want to have to check each site regularly, You will however, want a “Podcatcher”. A podcatcher is a program similar to an RSS feed reader that gathers all the feeds from all the podcasts you want to subscribe to and puts them in one place. Your podcatcher checks each feed on a regular basis to make sure that when you are ready to listen, you have the content downloaded and ready to go.

By far, the most popular podcatcher on earth is iTunes. iTunes is free from apple and comes with every iPod. It works on Windows and on OSX. You don’t have to have an iPod to use iTunes but if you have one it makes life so easy.

There are a lot of other podcatchers and originally I was going to list all I could find. However, in researching the list I found that someone else has already done the research. If you don’t want to use iTunes, visit PodCatcherMatrix.org and find the podcatcher that is right for you.

I know that Microsoft packages software with the Zune but I do not yet have one so I can’t comment on it. If you have a Zune and the software, please leave a comment telling us what you like/don’t like about it.

2: Figure out what you are going to listen to.
This may sound simplistic but you really don’t want to listen to everything out there. (Actually, you probably couldn’t but that’s beside the point) To get started, pick one topic that you like and find a single podcast you like on that topic. This could be more difficult than you think. First, there are several good podcast directories out there. If you use iTunes, by far the most popular is the iTunes store. It is, however, not the only source.

• podiobooks.com
• podshow.com
• Yahoo’s Audio Search

Find one show that you like and subscribe. Then as you have time, find a second, a third, etc. Since most shows release every week or every other week, if you are using podcasts to fill time on your commute, you will eventually find how many you need to fill the void. Resist the urge to type in a keyword into iTunes and then subscribe to every one of them. Podcasts vary in quality of content an production values. Not all the high quality content podcasts have high production values and that’s ok. However, you will want to be selective in who you subscribe to. Also, don’t be afraid to drop a podcast that is not filling a need.Speaking as a podcaster I want “listeners” not “subscribers”.

3: For the first month, commit time each week to look for new podcasts
If you do this for a month, it will become as natural as checking your email. Just check the directories for new podcasts that match your keywords. If there is a new one and the description looks interesting, either subscribe to it in your podcatcher or give it a listen on-line if you’ve got the time.

4: Participate
This is where most of the podcast generation fail. Podcasters want feedback, we want lots of it. So if you like a podcast, take the time to tell the podcaster you do.

• If they have a blog, comment.
• If they are listed in iTunes, rate them.
• If they are on one of the directories, rate them.
• If they have a forum, post.

Participation is one of the things that sets podcasting apart from traditional “broadcast” media and it’s an important part of being part of the podcast generation. While most podcasts resemble radio shows in that the host talks to you, almost all podcasts have some way for you to communicate back to the host and we really want to hear from you. Regardless of the topic, most podcsts are one side of a conversation, you are the other half. Make sure you hold up your end of the conversation.

Many podcasts these days have “listener call-in lines” They actively encourage you to call in and pe a part of the conversation. You don’t have to have any special equipment or even a “radio voice” to have your voice heard. If your favorite podcast has a listener call-in line, put it on your speed dial and when listening, pause the podcast and call in. Let the host know if you agree, disagree, or just have more information.

Podcasts I listen To

That’s my four points. Now, I’m going to share with you the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. Not because I have some deep insight as to what you should be listening to but mainly as a small way of saying thank you to the people that produce these shows. Consider my listing them here as an endorsement, if they fall in your area of interest, I would highly recommend them to you. (These are in alphabetical order, not in any order of preference.)

• Technology
  • Sixty Second Tech (I produce this one)
• New Marketing/New Media/Social Media
  • Jaffee Juice
  • Managing The Gray
  • Marketing Over Coffee
  • The New Mediology
  • Podcasting Underground
  • Six Pixels of Separation
• Fiction
  • EscapePod
  • PsuedoPod
  • Scott Sigler Audio Books
• Programming
  • P3
  • PHP Abstract (I host this one)
• Entrepreneurship
  • HBR IdeaCast
  • Killer Innovations

So, there you have it, a primer on joining the podcast nation. As I told my friend, our dues are cheap and our benefits are plentiful. No more excuses, get out there and participate!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

[DISCLAIMER: I work at one of the greatest companies in the tech industry. They let me telecommute. They get it...most of the time. They rock.]

The Problem

Because I telecommute and of late travel a lot, I don’t often fill up my car with gas. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I fill my little Miata up with gas once a month. SO you can imagine my surprise when I went to the pumps recently and discovered how much gas costs these day! (I know, old news) This got me to thinking. Usually, companies hand out telecommuting privileges to employees as a perk. “You can work from home one day a week.”, crap like that. These days though, with gas prices high, pollution worries (no I’m not a global warming alarmist but I think we should take care of the Earth when we can) and the price that people are beginning to put on their time, I think companies should have to justify to the employee when they want them to work from the office instead of home.

The value of time

1 hour a day spent sitting alone, behind the wheel of a car, even listing to great podcasts, is still 1 hour a day of your life wasted. All because your employer either doesn’t trust you to do your work or can’t figure out how to do his work without you standing next to him. Quality of life is important to me and I’m sure it’s important to a lot of you. I know many people who would rather cut out their commute and spend that time with their family or just sleeping later.

The Solution

The solution I’m proposing should be obvious by now. The technology exists to allow almost all office workers to work remotely. Before they were purchased by Sun, MySQL had 70% of it’s workforce distributed around the world, working at their own locations. Telecommuting is no longer a perk to be negotiated for; it should be common sense. It’s not a right but it is a clue for smart workers looking to switch jobs. Companies that do not immediately tout their telecommute policy are companies mired in the 70’s and 80’s.

I’ve said it before and I know I will say it again, if a manager doesn’t feel that they can get their job done with a distributed team, that is a failing of the manager. If you are in charge of a manager who won’t let employees telecommute because they feel they will lose control, fire the manager, get someone in who can actually do the job.

Conversely, if you have employees that you can’t trust to telecommute, fire them now. If you can’t trust them to work on their own then having them in a cube near you won’t solve the problem.

All of this was sparked because someone I know was pinged today about a job he wanted but had been previously turned down for. Now that he’s telecommuting, he’s really torn because while he still wants the job, he does not want to give up an hour a day of his time just to have it. So I’m calling on all employers. If you manage office bound staff, take some serious time and consider, do you really need your employees in the office each and every day? Can they do their jobs using the technologies available without having to be in the office? Will it improve morale if you offer them a perk that costs you nothing and gives them freedom? Take a step in the right direction, setup a telecommuting plan and let people discover for themselves if they can do the job.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

I use iTunes every now and then to rent a movie for my iTouch; usually when I’m traveling. Last night I rented a movie via my XBox 360 from Microsoft and previously, I’ve rented movies from Amazon’s Unbox from my Tivo. Here is a chart laying out the basics of each of the three options. Below it I’ll discuss my thoughts on them.

Ok, first my thoughts on each service:

XBox 3060

I love my XBox for gaming; I even use it for watching DVDs. However, I don’t see myself renting many movies from them. First, they are the most expensive option, per-movie for new releases. I bought 500 “points” from them for $6.95 and “3:10 to Yuma” was 480. Maybe it’s cheaper if I buy more points at a time but honestly, I hate the whole points system. Why should I buy up a bunch of points and let MS hold onto my money? Microsoft needs to grow up and let adults use currency for our transactions, this isn’t NeoPets. Finally, while rumors abound of being able to download movies to a portable player (Zune, which I don’t have and probably won’t be getting any time soon), Microsoft doesn’t yet have a strategy in place. You watch it on your XBox…period. Honestly, that’s probably fine for a lot of people, but not for me.

XBox 360 Summary

Reduce the price of movies, let me rent them using hard currency instead of your company scrip, and let me move them to my portable device.

iTunes

I am not an Apple fanboi. There are parts of Apple (like their horrid customer service after the sale) that I deplore and makes me wary of purchasing from them. However, I do believe they have got it right this time around. The Apple TV can be added to any entertainment syste for $329. There are no monthly fees for usage and you can download damn near anything to it. I don’t yet have one but I’m a big enough iTunes fan to see the potential here. I have rented movies from iTunes for my iTouch and can say that the experience is painless. I’ve probably bought 5 movies from them and rented 1. It’s always very easy and the price for rentals isn’t bad. The only negative I have is in the licensing but that really applies to everyone so I’ll save it for a special section below.

ITunes Summary

It’s the winner, hands down. They have cheap hardware, no monthly fees, reasonable prices and a portable device strategy. Really the only downside is the stupid licensing…which I discuss later.

Tivo/Unbox

I’ve had a Tivo since they first came out. I currently have 2 and love moving things between them. When Tivo announced their deal with Amazon unbox, I was excited. I’ve now rented 2 movies from them and overall, I am happy with the experience. The downside is unless you catch them on a special deal, you have to pay a monthly fee for your Tivo service. I waited till they put them on special then bought my HD with Lifetime service so I don’t have a monthly fee. (Given my history with Tivo devices, I do actually save money buying the lifetime.) I have 2 problems with Tivo/Unbox though.

1. I like the ability to move things to my iTouch. Tivo/Unbox won’t let you do that.
2. You currently can’t rent HD movies. That’s a huge negative in my book.

You can rent movies and download them to your laptop via Amazon Unbox. This may give some small comfort to travelers. I’ve not tested this though so I don’t know if you can watch the content untethered from the Net. (i.e. in an airplane)

Tivo/Unbox Summary

It’s not a reason to buy a Tivo but if you already have one and can live without HD, it’s a good system.

Wishlist

Ok, here are the things that none of them get right and I wish they would.

NetFlix/Microsoft

Rumor has it that Microsoft and NetFlix may be working on a deal. I don’t see why Microsoft would be interested in this deal as it would kill their rental revenue but if they did, and I could pay my monthly NetFlix fee and have my queue downloaded straight to my XBox, that would rock. They would have to work out the licensing issues as right now I can watch a movie an unlimited number of times and that’s an important feature. This union, if it happened in the right way, may make my XBox the most important piece of equipment in my entertainment system.

Microsoft/iTunes

I’m dreaming here but the best of all worlds would be for Microsoft to cut a deal with Apple and let me use iTunes on my XBox like I can on my PC. This would totally rock because I get Apple’s pricing, downloads to my iTouch AND my XBox too. There are just too many reasons why this won’t happen (the main one is you can’t fit Jobs’ and Gates’ ego in the same room.) but it would be awesome if it did.

Better Licensing Terms

Now that I can rent movies from iTunes, I won’t be buying anymore. Mainly because I can only play them on one of 5 iTunes devices listed on my account. The reason I LIKE DVDs is I can give it to my son, he can take it upstairs and watch it, I can take it over to the neighbors and we can watch it with friends, heck, I can even use Handbreak, rip it and stuff it on my iTouch. This “You have x days to watch it and it expires 24 hours after you press play” is bad. Get rid of it now and I’m much more interested in rentals and downloads.

Summary

Downloads and rentals will kill physical media in the next 2-3 years. Most of that is thanks to Apple and Amazon. Overall, I think this is a good thing. However, I’m one of those weird people who can live without the content produced by the major television and movie studios. There has not been a movie produced in the last ten years that was “must see” for me. So if the hardware/software industry is going to keep treating me like a criminal (with abominations like Vista) and the studios are going to keep trying harder and harder to make me pay for their content each and every time I watch it or for each devices I want to watch it on, I’ll just watch less and less of it. There’s enough good stuff being produced out there independently to keep me entertained. However, if you let me watch my content where ever and whenever I want, I’ll keep paying you.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=