The Blog of Burgher Jon

This may sound a tad bit egotistical, but I consider myself a bit of an armchair intellectual.  I thoroughly enjoy nearly-academic conversation about a wide variety of topics (especially technology and business).  The problem is that being a full-time intellectual holds absolutely zero appeal to me.  I love the fruits of productive labor too much to spend much time idling through intellectual thoughts.  Sure, I spend a lot of time researching technology and business when it relates to an investment hypothesis or a current project/company, but I’m not an academic; I can’t justify the time to do appropriate research on my every whim.

Take, for example, the post I made yesterday on waste in enterprise IT.  It involved a chart that showed the progress of IT over the past 40 odd years and the competency level of IT organizations over the same span.  I made that chart in 15 minutes in PowerPoint.  I shudder to imagine the amount of research involved to validate the assumptions made in that 15 minutes; developing methods to quantify the rate of growth of IT capabilities and IT organizational competency, applying those methods to various intervals over the last 40 years, creating a method for quantifying waste in enterprise IT, validating the hypothesis that waste is directly correlated to the difference between the two curves.  If you’re a doctoral candidate looking for a good thesis, feel free to take that one for a spin.  I’d love to read the results, I just can’t justify doing the research myself or even funding it.  While that post has the potential to underpin an investment thesis (namely shorting incompetent IT vendors and/or going long on companies that  are taking advantage of the closing gap), I long ago stopped investing in enterprise IT*.  I suppose the hypothesis is somewhat related to my current project, but not enough to make it worth the effort to validate.

Without blogging, the theory would have been discussed with a couple of colleagues and friends and forgotten on the whiteboard in my office.  With blogging, I was able to share it with the rest of the world without doing the research necessary for it to stand up as an academic paper or even industry magazine article.  I was even able to validate it informally, by seeing what other industry participants that read the blog think of it (one industry analyst informed me of this related editorial that she had written).  It’s this category of communication that thoroughly invigorates myself and other armchair intellectuals.

*For the record, I did this because the level of waste makes it difficult to guess who will succeed and who will fail.  It frequently has more to do with the Rolodex of the sales people, then the actual usefulness of the vendor’s products/services.

I’m apparently just a little too old fashioned for the modern world.  Forrester, yesterday, projected that desktop computer sales would fall to only 18% of the PC market by 2015.  Well this ancient just purchased his first desktop in nearly 10 years.

For the last several years I’ve owned two laptops, one for work and one for business.  This used to be a logical choice for me.  I was traveling 3 or 4 weeks a month (now only 1 or 2) and having two laptops allowed me to keep from mixing business and personal (call me old fashioned, but I’ve never really been comfortable with using company property for personal work).  When my personal laptop was stolen a few weeks ago, I did a lot of thinking and decided a new desktop was the best choice.  I wasn’t looking for your average desktop though, I was looking for something that would allow me to work in a way that the laptop currently limits me from.

I’m a multi-tasker.  I’m the guy with 20 piles of crap on my desk that’s working through all of them.  I’m fairly meticulous and by the end of the day I’ve generally cleared all those piles, but when I’m working I prefer to be able to spread out and jump from task to task and back again.  It’s with this in mind that I purchased 2 30″ screens from HP (they were actually cheaper from Amazon then they were through HPs website).  Each has 2560 x 1600 resolution, meaning together I can spread out all the crap on my desk over a 5120 x 1600 desktop.  At this moment I have open (and up in plain site) 5 applications that I’m jumping between.  I’m using Picasa in the upper right-hand corner of the left screen to crop the picture you will see with this post.  I’m using two Chrome windows, one with this post and one with my Google Reader.  I have Tweetdeck open and showing 3 columns.  Lastly, because I love torture, I’m watching the Pirates game in HD.  It’s enough to make this ADD kid giddy.

Now that I’ve got my nerd boasting out of the way, I can get to the point of the post.  I titled it “We’re So Mobile You Can Buy a Desktop Again” because I believe that’s the case.  More accurately, mobile technologies make the personal laptop irrelevant.  This frees me up to buy a home computer that actually maximizes the way I work at home.  For Example:

• The fact that all the files I modify on this computer automatically sync up with my work laptop via Dropbox makes it unnecessary to use the same computer at home that I use at work.
• The fact that I can check and easily reply to emails on the go with a mobile interface that’s miles further then my Blackberry was 2 years ago means that I don’t have to lug the work laptop around just in case I want to write more then a sentence in a work email.
• The fact that my mobile phone allows me to take/upload photos, check on Facebook, update Twitter, read blogs, post to this blog and more means I can go without touching a personal computer for a week or two without missing it.
• The fact that so many of the applications I use are web based (gmail, google chat, google docs, Mint, my MBA courseware, etc…) means that I don’t actually have to load software on my work laptop to use it for a few days while I’m in a hotel room.

The process of having my laptop stolen and buying a desktop replacement really has opened my eyes to how much personal computing has changed.

Last Saturday morning I discovered my car was robbed and my personal laptop was stolen.  The mass chaos that ensued (and the gross amounts of time it ate up) was:

1. I said “crap” (and perhaps another word or two of a similar length) – 10 seconds
2. I drove over to my office and picked up my work laptop. – 40 minutes
3. I drove home and put a full days work. – 0 extra minutes
4. I called my home owners insurance and got a check for a new one. – 20 minutes
5. I got a new laptop. – 1.5 hours (for ordering and such)
6. I installed drop box. – 10 minutes
7. I let drop box sync all of my files – Overnight, no extra minutes
8. I downloaded all of my old applications and reinstalled office off the – 2 hours

The entire process cost me a deductible and 4.5 hours (and 10 seconds).  That’s it.  I remember the days when my desktop crashing left me completely useless for weeks on end.  Reinstalling software meant searching high and low for CDs and floppy disks and then waiting hours while they installed.  Worst of all, reworking documents cost what seemed like years, even when my last USB backup had been a week ago.  Those days are gone and I thought I would call out the people responsible:

1. Drop Box: I started using it to sync files between my work laptop, my personal pcs and my home laptop but it functions great for backups too.
2. Quicken, Apple, Google, Mozilla and even Microsoft:  You can now download (instead of installing by CD) just about any lost piece of software.  Most, like Quicken, even link your license to your username and password so you don’t have to know a CD code.
3. Dell et al. for making it easy to order a new laptop quickly.

This is one of those processes that has become easier and easier as technology advanced and I didn’t notice until this week just how easy it had become.  I wonder what else has gotten easier without me noticing.

Look for Sauerkraut tomorrow.

Image via Wikipedia

Cleveland.com published an article last December that could best be paraphrased, “The State of Sauerkraut”.  In between facts about the declining use of Sauerkraut and the introduction of a sauerkraut martini was this nugget of great writing:

To some, sauerkraut is the Liberace of vegetables, a tangy flavor that sparkles way more than it should. To others, it’s the Tom Hanks of condiments, nutritionally reliable and sure to give an injection of pizazz to the heaviest surroundings.

Anyway, on to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Me

• Yesterday I crossed 1000 Tweets and didn’t mark the occasion. I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed.
• Celebrating a great Pittsburgh sports night is harder in Charlotte… but not impossible.
• I love Monday Mornings, something about fresh coffee and an impossible task makes me feel alive.

National Politics

• I just watched the P-G’s Tea Party story. It’s multi-racial like an episode of Friends http://www.bit.ly/930OKx
• People want to know why I hate Fox News, THIS is why I hate Fox News: http://huff.to/ca0iXS

Personal Technology

• Going to Windows 7 Today! Sianara Vista.
• Apple can’t be the portal that Yahoo wanted to be if they force hardware down our throats. http://bit.ly/bca3bG
• Dropbox App on the Droid could change the way I do business with clients when traveling. http://tcrn.ch/aJiHQv

Pittsburgh

• Mike of Bread Line Blog on how Sid became the face of a football town:http://bit.ly/bI0yoP
• After two weeks of following @RealWizKhalifa, I’ve learned he’s a good rapper, but a common pothead. Hoped for more from the Burgher.
• Southside residential development to have region’s first “net-zero energy” home. 5 blocks from my house! http://bit.ly/cV5Ffd
• Pittsburgh is the 22nd largest metro area with the 45th busiest airport? Why is that? http://bit.ly/aHkYkM

Sports

• 2 Penn State Players in trouble. Football players are ruining my baseball season. http://bit.ly/cmcwIh #Steelers #WeAre
• One of the things I love about baseball is the rules that are almost never used; stealing first, balk, etc…
• Big Ben Quote of the Day: “it’s a very serious matter, one we take serious.” http://bit.ly/cGJauA

Startups

• A startup is like a family, and there’s always a crazy uncle.
• Want proof that having a plan to monetize is important? GroupOn’s valuation is 20% higher then Twitter. http://tcrn.ch/95gmJX

Technology News

• NYT: Twitter Hints About What Developers Should Build — BurgherJon: Until we (Twitter) decide to build it.
• Great Analysis on what Twitter’s new ads will mean to the ecosystem. Kinda optimistic though. http://bit.ly/95vwhU

Unsolicited Advice

• Great men rarely say they are.
• Suggestion to improve basketball: Each game should be a best of 5 of games to 15, like volleyball.
• Favorites have more at stake. Underdogs have more to win. When you can, be a dog.
• Creating a great IT Architecture is at least 50% about making sure everyone uses the same vocabulary.
• If you think fulfillment is two kids and a dogs, you’re not very creative.
• Conversation <> Television

Other (Mostly Humorous Comments from the Week)

• If a butterfly flaps its wing in Japan or a Volcano goes off in Iceland does my flight go to the UK on Monday?
• Gatorade: Processed on equipment that also processes natural ingredients.
• Did he actually go to a barber and say, “Business on the sides and party down the airstrip?” via @JanePitt http://bit.ly/9AnXho
• If I were king for a day: the budget defecit would be illegal and there’d be a salary cap in baseball.
• Obama’s been talking a lot about nukes lately, I hope he doesn’t know something I don’t.
• I’m following @Jesus on Twitter, how did people have faith before Twitter?