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Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |
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Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround I heard that Imus was talking about Lou Gerstner's book this morning. My sources tell me that Imus said it was well written and anyone starting up a company should read it! I certainly agree and am sure many people are pre-ordering it. (read more) |
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Conducting Mozart - part 2 The Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra seems to get better each year thanks to the outstanding leadership of Sidney Rothstein, music director, and Sabina Slavin, president. I included some information about Saturday night's concert (10-26-2002) in "my favorite concerts" list but I couldn't begin to do justice in describing it. See a complete review by Courtenay Caublé from the The Ridgefield Press. As noted in Mr. Caublé's review, I will be guest conductor at the December 7th concert. Preparing for this has been quite an education. (read more) |
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Saturday, October 26, 2002 |
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Dinners In The Bag So many web sites are frustrating -- two percent solutions. I have written about many of them both here in the weblog and also in my book, Net attitude. It is so refreshing to visit a web site that is intuitive, easy to use, meets your needs, and does so quickly -- without wasting your time. There are actually quite a few of them, and it is not just Amazon and eBay. I have often cited stamps.com and myups.com but a few nights ago I had the joy of experiencing a lesser known web site that did all the right things. (read more) |
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Thursday, October 24, 2002 |
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Telephone Photography Reto Sigl, Director of IT at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory took some pictures at the recent IBM CIO Conference held at DisneyLand Paris. He used his Sony-Ericsson T68i mobile phone (with plug-in camera). The speakers pictures were not very clear due to lighting conditions and digital zoom, but otherwise very good photography for a telephone! (read more) |
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Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |
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Design Management Institute he Design Management Institute conducts four professional education conferences each year for senior management in the various design disciplines, strategic planning and marketing, who are interested in staying current on design issues, trends and best practices. This week's conference was held in Chatham on Cape Cod. It was a pleasure for me to be invited to give a talk about The Future of the Internet. The Chatham Bars Inn was a beautiful place to spend a day. I arrived on Tuesday evening in time for the DMI annual clam bake and not only got to enjoy some great clams and lobster but more importantly got to meet Earl Powell, DMI's president, and many of the conference attendees. It was a friendly and very interesting group of people. (read more) |
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Monday, October 21, 2002 |
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Health Care Integration I just read a piece in CIO Magazine entitled "Health-Care Integration May Be an Expensive Prescription". The story talks about a bill proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy which would require that hospitals, doctors' offices and insurance companies develop systems for sharing administrative and patient data. The story says that experts in health-care IT "are leery" of backing the proposal without "proof of its ROI". I don't belittle the importance of ROI overall -- spending money without a ROI is foolish. On the other hand some things seem so obvious. Did companies do a ROI analysis to decide to buy a fax machine? Would a company without a web site have to do a ROI to invest in one? I believe we are about two percent of the way into what the Internet has to offer. When we get to esoteric applications then it will be time to sharpen the pencil and discriminate between investment opportunities based on ROI. I am not suggesting that prioritization isn't important at this stage too but there are some things that businesses should be racing to do regardless of the ROI calculation. We are not even to the early stage of addressing the basics. (read more) |
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Thursday, October 17, 2002 |
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Le WiFi The trip from Agenda 2003 in Phoenix to Paris for the IBM CIO conference was fifteen hours door to door. I can't say it was a fun trip but thankfully it was uneventful. The conference wss actually at Disneyland Paris which is in Marne La Vallee, an interesting place unto itself (with a really neat homepage) and also part of Paris. The CIO conference is something IBM has been doing since Lou Gerstner's arrival in 1993. I am sure that Lou will mention this in his new book because I know how much he has enjoyed CIO conferences. (read more) |
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Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |
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WiFi Blogging I promise to soon make an index with links to everything I have written about what has emerged as my two favorite topics of late -- WiFi and blogging. The two subjects came together this week at the Agenda 2003 conference in Scottsdale. Last year or the year before (not sure which) the conference organizers began to provide WiFi Internet connectivity -- basically free public access to a broadband connection for the duration of the conference. They also provided electrical outlets so that attendees could keep their laptops going non-stop. Having continuous WiFi available at a conference raises a number of issues. (read more) |
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Monday, October 14, 2002 |
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Agenda 2003 - part 4 Very interesting afternoon with Dr. Richard Garwin, Eric Schmidt, Bill Gross, David Gelernter, et al. Then an evening with Michael Crichton. (read more) |
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Agenda 2003 - part 3 Speakers this morning from RealNetworks, Microsoft, Intel, and others. (read more) |
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Agenda 2003 - part 2 The reception and dinner were as expected -- meeting and chatting with many friends from years past. The first person I ran into was Sheldon Laube, chariman of Centerbeam, and friend for many years. A number of people from the press attend Agenda and after all these years I know most of them. (read more) |
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Sunday, October 13, 2002 |
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Agenda 2003 The Agenda 2003 conference is this week in Scottsdale, Arizona -- it will be the eleventh year I have attended. The speakers are usually good but the best part is seeing old friends and renewing acquaintances. I am heading to the dinner now and am looking forward to seeing many of them. I'll post more info here in the blog as the conference progresses. |
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Saturday, October 12, 2002 |
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patrickWeb Homepage Updated The patrickWeb site is now updated with full integration of the weblog. Thanks for a rainy day to give me the time to work on this. Any feedback, reactions, and/or critique will be appreciated as always. |
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Wednesday, October 9, 2002 |
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New Book By Lou Gerstner I was very fortunate to be at IBM for thirty-five years. Every one of those years was exciting and rewarding but the last eight were by far the best. Those were the years when Lou Gerstner was Chairman and CEO. A number of books refer to him on the cover or the highlights and countless others cite him as an example of a great CEO. In my own book I quoted from a few of Lou's speeches about the crucial importance of privacy in the world of e-business. He has been a visionary thinker and leader on this key issue. I have not seen his new book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance, but I look forward to it as I am sure many are. (read more) |
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Tuesday, October 8, 2002 |
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WiFi And Cellular Coming Together? Will cellular merge with Wi-Fi? Seems likely to me. The 1,400 public hot spot locations are expected to grow to about 42,000 by 2006. This growth presents the opportunity to create a national wireless network that could provide both voice and Internet connectivity using WiFi standards and a plethora of new WiFi technology for routing, meshing, hopping, range extending, and other functions. The telephone network and the cellular systems as we know them may be subsumed by the many initiatives that are underway. |
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Monday, October 7, 2002 |
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WiFi Extending Its Reach After enjoying the use of high speed Internet connectivity at the Admiral's Club, Starbucks, or maybe the local Subway sandwich shop, it is very easy to get spoiled. The more often we find connectivity, the more we expect it at other places. Fortunately, innovation is alive and well in the WiFi space. Two recent developments portend where things are going. (read more) |
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Saturday, October 5, 2002 |
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Motorcycling Homepage and Photo Gallery Today has been a day of Dreamweaver and Gallery -- cleaning up some outdated web pages and transferring a large number of pictures from the old gallery to the new one. The focus today was on the motorcycle section of the site. There are nearly 75 albums yet to move in other areas but I got most of the Asian travels moved over. The web site is going to be keeping me very busy for a long time. I have quite a few speaking engagements this month so I won't get all of the site work done that I would like. I have quite a backlog of weblog posting to do also. Right now I have to go put the jetski away for the winter. |
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Friday, October 4, 2002 |
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Making Progress Converting Photo Galleries The Photo Gallery was part of ibm.com from 1995 until 2002 when I merged it with patrickWeb. It has been a great way to share pictures from around the world with my friends and colleagues. The original gallery was fairly crude but then Dipen Mehta, of the IBM webAhead team, made a native Domino gallery. The good news was that it a slick way for me to manage pictures but the bad news is that Dipen moved on, I retired, and nobody knows how it works! I have looked high and low for a simple way to manage my existing pictures and add new ones. One excellent tool I found was Gazo and although, I was pleased with it, I have now found something even better called Gallery. Gallery is really cool. It is free, open source, and loaded with features. The management is all via the web and it is quite intuitive and easy to use. I think this will be my long term solution. Until I get everything converted there are going to be two galleries. Since there are nearly 3,000 pictures, this is going to take awhile. Thanks for your patience and your feedback. O Gallery |
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Wednesday, October 2, 2002 |
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We Can All Help Out This posting is not about spam or WiFi. Today started out with a meeting at the United Way of Northern Fairfield County to help think through some strategic issues with regard to their use of information technology. It is a very good feeling to be able to help non-profit organizations and I highly recommend that all of us do so as often as possible. (read more) |