www.nickhodge.com

this:

Avril says the above pic­ture “is me”.  That’s the effect of a great boss, com­pany to work for and a job that’s “you”. Remem­ber, find­ing what you love doing is the best piece of career advice any adult can provide.

to my last Adobe PR shot, which I just found:

I remem­ber the day the Adobe shot was taken: the local man­age­ment team were in the midst of a deep dis­cus­sion about a pretty stress­ful situ­ation that had arisen. Per­fect envir­on­ment for a ser­i­ous shot. I wasn’t sleep­ing much in those days, either.

Big mer­gers are the way of the IT industry. Small guys get big­ger, and yet are swal­lowed by the lar­ger fish. People make lots of money, and drive their Fer­raris around the twin coasts of the US. Then it goes around again.

Mer­gers of two com­pan­ies, such as Mac­ro­media and Adobe, from the out­side seem a “join­ing of likes”. A mar­riage made in heaven. The per­cep­tion that the com­pan­ies were very alike is external only.  I doubt since the acquis­i­tion that Adobe exec­ut­ives sleep bet­ter at night.

We are see­ing the internal cul­tural dif­fer­ence exposed extern­ally: the smart auntie Adobe of Pho­toshop, InDes­ign, Illustrator’s fame and friendly atti­tude being smashed by the boys-club, leather booted Mac­ro­media cow­boys.

This is prob­ably one major reason why I am no longer at Adobe. For­get­ting who your cus­tom­ers are has to be the first big strategy of big com­pan­ies aim­ing to be smal­ler. As a cus­tomer of Adobe, and with many friends who still work there — I would be saddened to see this strategy work­ing. [edit: I would be, not am]

I am at Microsoft as they recog­nise that for­get­ting your cus­tomer is a sin that must never be committed.

So, as an Adobe user (daily), share­holder: tone it down, talk to cus­tom­ers and don’t for­get cus­tomer base.

(yes, this is an excuse to put a pic­ture of one of our Kor­ats on my blog)

Accord­ing to The Inquirer out of the UK, Google is rethink­ing its ‘pets at work’ pro­gram. This was due to a pet python (animal, not lan­guage) going feral at the New York office. And the name of the pet is Kaiser. What the? Val­ley­wag had blow-by-blow cov­er­age earlier this week.

I’ve never got the deal with tak­ing your pets to work in the US. OK, I can take gold­fish if people get over the fact they seem to die weekly.

Tak­ing your beloved pets to visit the anim­als you work with just smells like animal cruelty to me.

From World in their Hands, Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald Icon today:

But Dr Jan Fletcher, of the Child Study Centre at the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia, is wary of vir­tual lives for chil­dren. “There is a danger that this online inter­ac­tion might be lim­it­ing the amount of social inter­ac­tion the child is actu­ally hav­ing,” she warns. “I want kids to talk to each other about what they’re inter­ested in, not about a world inven­ted by a toy company.

Hmmm, online inter­ac­tion takes many forms — and kids do talk to each other about what they are inter­ested in. Online, off­line, within and without borders.

It seems the world of “toys” and “inform­a­tion” joined together magic­ally means “edu­ca­tion”. What if inform­a­tion is actu­ally, well, fun? Gone are the book­ish days of read­ing an encyc­lo­pe­dia and wel­come to the world of instant information.

The crit­ical skill is inform­a­tion lit­er­acy.

As high­lighted by one of Australia’s lead­ing Social Net­work­ing thinkers in Edu­ca­tion, Mike Sey­fang, tech­no­logy in schools is already in schools. Mobile phones, the MSN Mes­sen­ger com­munit­ies, blogs, Myspace, Wiki­pe­dia: these tech­no­lo­gies are being used by stu­dents today.

One per­vas­ive tech­no­logy that hounds par­ents today is the use of MSN Live Mes­sen­ger. It’s the stand­ard tool for all kids today. Without Mes­sen­ger, kids are out­casts from their social net­works. They use it to gos­sip (like the tele­phone of pre­vi­ous eras) and to col­lab­or­ate on school pro­jects. And prob­ably bully, too. In all instances, col­lab­or­a­tion is king. Today, the abil­ity to col­lab­or­ate in work and life scen­arios is under­developed in K-12 (espe­cially at the pointy end of K-12) as the focus moves to indi­vidual achievement.

Unless you are stuck on a deser­ted island, your life is going to be col­lab­or­at­ive. Work, too. In a con­nec­ted world, this is amp­li­fied and pack­et­ised.

What is needed is policy and technology-frameworks to unlock the power of the net­works that exist. It might be Single-Sign-on (some­times referred to SSO), fire­walls and other pieces of tech­no­logy that cor­por­a­tions already use. Microsoft (my employer) eats its own dog­food: smart­cards, fire­walls, net­work secur­ity and the like.

How­ever, it is my con­ten­tion that the first hurdle isn’t the tech­no­logy: it’s enabling the pas­sion­ate teach­ers to engage in the learn­ing net­works. Remov­ing the block­ages of knee-jerk blanket restric­tions — as they do not work. Remem­ber, the inter­net was designed to deal with fail­ure and route around it. Cen­sor­ship is classed as a fail­ure, and there­fore is routed around.

I’d love to hear teacher stories.

TCP/IP is the low level stuff that has changed the world. VoIP, Web, Web 2 and all that stuff require TCP/IP to work. When I was first intro­duced to this pro­tocol in 1987 (late bloomer, here) I wasn’t that overwhealmed.

What has TCP/IP have to do with life? TCP/IP pack­et­izes data. Instead of have a chan­nel open (like TV, Radio) and stream­ing con­stantly — TCP/IP puts bits into dis­creet pack­ages at one end, throws them out the net­work, and expects the other end to re-assemble to get the data.

Maybe life and work comes in pack­ets, too? Bursts of energy and bursts of reflection

Why is there a 5 days work, 2 days week­end imposed on us by some dis­tant hierarchy?

Another key concept is latency, or the space between the pack­ets. Keep­ing the latency pre­dict­able, or as low as pos­sible, is another life skill.

Life and work comes in pack­ets and latency, that get munged. 

It has been three days of abso­lute pleas­ure in Adelaide.

Firstly, a big shout out and major thanks to Mike, Mandy, Jamie and Jemma Sey­fang for their hos­pit­al­ity and record­ing stu­dio (which doubled as my late night work area and sleep area) for three days.  Oh, and happy birth­day Jemma. Get­ting out of the hotel room shenanigans and liv­ing with real people made the dif­fer­ence on this trip.

It also gave Uncle Mike and I to dis­cuss the day’s events in depth, explore ideas and sug­gest dir­ec­tions. I must deeply thank Uncle Mike for his sug­ges­tions on improve­ments to “The Geek Stor­ies”. Hav­ing Australia’s premiere Social Net­work­ing thinker at your beck and call night and day, mak­ing you cups of tea, is a rare exper­i­ence.  The value is inmeasurable.

Secondly, a major thanks to my video sub­jects: Dave “Lifekludger” Wal­lace, Mike “Fang” Sey­fang, Kevin Richard­son, Glenn Butcher and Kingl­sey Fore­man. Unlike last Fri­day, I pur­posely spread the video cap­tur­ing over three days to ensure I was on the ball through all interviews.

Oh, and I rang Robert Scoble after he Twittered he was bored on his way south from Petaluma to his home. That’s Cali­for­nia.  Con­nec­tions and wir­ing brings us together in strange ways.

Con­nec­tions. This social net­work­ing thing is about con­nec­tions. Using them to pro­duce value greater than the sum of the parts. A com­mon theme emer­ging from all my inter­views is that either for life (Lifekludger), learn­ing (Kevin) or enter­tain­ment (Glenn) humans value con­nec­tions. Mak­ing them, and rein­for­cing linkages.

With Munge Brother, Uncle Tim Kleemann, we explored this from a busi­ness per­spect­ive. Tim owns Next­Byte, and ori­gin­ally hired me way back when I was a pimply kid in 1985. To Tim I owe grat­it­ude for the 21+ years in this crazy industry.

These human traits of want­ing con­nec­ted­ness extend to our kids, too. They have strong social net­works that extend into the digital world, and out­side of school in the home and on the pro­ver­bial bus — and the lines between school and home are becom­ing equally as blurred as work and home. Pres­ence via Mes­sen­ger; pub­li­city via MySpace and You­Tube. All around are con­nec­tions. Both vis­ible and invisible.

Uncle Mike is explor­ing some of the learn­ing aspects to these social net­works through his work with education.au; Dave exper­i­ences this every­day in his extraordin­ary life.

Ensur­ing Par­ents and Teach­ers under­stand the envir­on­ment of social net­work­ing in all its forms is the major chal­lenge for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies work­ing in this space: Microsoft, Google or whomever. I think the time is ripe for a major model change in the way edu­cat­ors think about online access, and the skills kids are going to need to sur­vive in a smal­ler, greater con­nec­ted and inform­a­tion rich world.

Return­ing to Immanuel to speak to Kevin, I learnt many things. I did not expect this as an old scholar. One learn­ing was that I owe Noel Volk and Greg Sharp a major thankyou. In my school years there was a con­cious effort to install com­puters into the school and use these as a part of edu­ca­tion. This effort lead me into this industry I now find myself. Money was siphoned off other pro­jects into this some 22 years ago. Like the Angle Park Com­puter Centre, Abefoyle Park pro­ject and oth­ers — the product of these efforts have not gone to waste. So thanks.

Inter­node is a con­nec­tion com­pany; the inter­view with Glenn and Kings­ley will air some­time next week. Aus­tralian gamers know Inter­node as the best gam­ing net­work, and ser­vice, around. You can feel their pas­sion for games; a pas­sion that extends from the MD of Inter­node, Simon Hackett.

I feel that get­ting people’s stor­ies told, and out there for all to see is import­ant. Geek Stor­ies or not, the con­nec­tion poten­tial is huge.

Send in your story, and let’s go make a difference.

Why learn cal­cu­lus, tri­go­no­metry, ionic reac­tions and inor­ganic chem­istry? So you can under­stand and con­verse with your son’s sci­ence teacher at a Parent-teacher inter­view.  And show how much you remembered from your own schooling.

Apart from that, I am at a loss to under­stand why I learnt all this stuff.

Blow up, walk through intest­ine at Chats­wood Mall.

Yeah, user error. My mis­take. I should have watched all the check boxes on the site. Mea Culpa. Now all my gmail con­tacts get spam from me. Ugly.

So, whilst I am on the topic: social net­work­ing sites should only opt-in, not opt-out. Make it a little more dif­fi­cult to show your friends you are an abso­lute dork and idiot. Plaxo had the same effect on people, and it made your Out­look run as slow as treacle.

I am a fan of linkedin.com; myspace.com is inter­est­ing but looks as ugly as Prince Charles’ second wife; not much else has caught my eye.