Working the weekend shift

After over twenty years in the world of high tech, I'm pretty used to some weekend work. I joined a new company in January, Webmail.us. Since we're a fairly new company that is growing rapidly, there is no shortage of work. Trying to hire the right people, providing them with the right training, and making certain that customers receive quick responses keeps all of very busy.

In talking to potential customers, you get to hear all the challenges that bring them to us. Mostly people want email that they can count on to be there every day, all the time. Then they want someone live who can answer questions when there are problems. They would also like to talk to a human being before they make their decision of where to host their email.

I think we do a really good job of taking care of our customers which means we end up with lot of referrals. This makes for a very busy time, but it is really is nice to know that American ingenuity can still create a very competitive business that has gathered over 17,000 customers over the few years.

With hard working engineers, a foundation of good Open Source software, we've been able to create a very scalable system that has the kind of redundancy that one would expect in a top quality email system. With our servers residing in one of the country's best managed hosting facilities, we have a very compelling proposition for anyone who is looking for business class email at very reasonable prices. Being a second generation Internet company, we offer a thirty days free trial just so people can see how good email can be.

I guess all that is worth a few weekends of work.

Welcome Apple, Seriously

Recently Apple Computer, Inc announced their entry, iWeb, into the world of blogging. I think we should all welcome Apple's acknowledgement that blogging is something that they can no longer afford to ignore. Apple once took out a famous ad to welcome IBM to the world of microcomputing. They went on to watch IBM help create a world of computers that dethroned Apple as the leader in microcomputers.

Based on early examination of Apple's first effort into blogging, I don't think there is much risk in Apple taking over the world of blogging.

As is often the case, Apple's efforts are sometimes colored by the company's solitary nature and isolation from anything that might amount to serious crticism.

For fifteen months now I have been trying various blogging software which has led me to maintain a number of blogs, including the one here, one at Radioland, one at Bubbler.net, and my two main blogs, View from the mountain, and Applepeels along with one rarely used over at Livejournal.

It was only natural that I bring one up with iWeb since I'm already a subscriber to dot Mac. Yesterday I did my first posts to David's Dot Mac Spot.

As I mentioned in one of my other posts, I think iWeb is a work in progress. I felt like I had hand cuffs on while I was doing my first iWeb post. I've been a little nervous about it since when I launched iWeb on a second computer, it didn't seem to see the blog that I had already created. I did manage to post a new page of photos from another computer, but you also can't use iWeb to manage the photos you've already posted to dot Mac so iWeb is something of a mixed bag so far.

I wander from computer to computer depending on what I'm doing. I depend on being able to work on the same thing from multiple computers. I haven't figured out how to do that from iWeb yet, but I've just started using the program so it's early in the game. As I'm fond of saying Apple products usually get better with patience, updates, and some time.

Right now I would suggest anyone that wants to start blogging, try something besides iWeb. Blogger is actually a very friendly and a nice free place to start. I think the tools have improved, and it seems very reliable.

It may take Apple a few updates to get it to reasonable functionality in their product.

I wonder though if iWeb will actually get updated quickly. Blogging isn't exactly part of Apple's corporate culture. Computer snooping might be, but blogging isn't actually encouraged at Apple.

Typepad appears to be down

I've been trying a number of blogging services over the last year, Typepad, Blogger, Radio, and Bubbler. I had settled on Typepad. However recent performance issues are prompting me to perhaps reconsider. I like the mix of features, functionality, and reporting that I get from Typepad, but if I intend to be serious about my blogs, no having access or periods of down time are things that I would chose not to have.

I guess this means I'll have to more seriously investigate alternatives.

Running from mother nature

It's not surprising that our neglected transportation systems cannot handle the evacuation from Hurricane Rita. What is surprising is that there are no government computer scientists who can model these huge problems and figure out ways to feed the vehicles onto the highways so that the traffic can move instead of sitting in a huge parking lot.

What is hard to believe is that we don't have enough roads to move people. I would like to think an evacuation plan is more than just someone assuming that everyone could get on the roads at the same time. People practice evacuations of buildings. Perhaps we need to get serious about planning and practicing evacuations. If the problem is everyone on the same roads at the same time, I guess we need to figure out other ways to get people out of towns. I might be wrong but I sure would like to hear from some transportation experts as to why the system seems to be breaking down.

New challenges

I just finished what may be my last historical post about Apple over at my Applepeels blog. It's taken me a long time to get to the point that I look back philosophically at my last year there. Now that I gotten this last post written, I feel a new rush of enthusiasm and hope.

It is time for the next part of the journey. I expect it to be an exciting time. I feel sorry for those Apple folks who are trapped in tough spots, but that's their problem, and I figure that given enough time, they too will escape Apple, get into their own recovery program, and find that life after the mothership is better than anyone can imagine.

Of course that doesn't mean that there weren't some great moments in the journey I had since selling my first Apple computer in 1982.

Apple & Good People

One of the benefits of having multiple blogs is that you're writing to different audiences. Here at blogger I don't do a lot of posts and don't have a large number of readers. At Applepeels where I can sometimes get a couple of thousand page views in a day, it is easy to step on someone's toes.

I get challenged a lot on what I say, and a couple of Apple folks have said some really nasty things to me and hidden behind non-existent e-mail addresses. The good news is that my blog at Applepeels now requires valid e-mails and I am moderating it so I can screen the comments that come. I don't have a problem with people who disagree with me, but it is nice to screen out the Apple employees who have trouble accepting the truth and insist on a twisted view of the facts.

Someone recently took offense that I challenged the quality of the sales management of Apple and suggested that there were lots of high quality employees at Apple. There's no doubt that there are some good folks at Apple, but there aren't nearly as many as there were in the old days.

At one time the biggest challenge of an Apple manager was keeping his employees from working themselves to death. People worked with a passion that drove them to excellence. They required almost no management. Today Apple is a world of micro-management. No one trusts the employees to do their job. Some that I know spend close to one third of their time doing reporting.

Unfortunately with a tiny sales force and a customer base unsettled by the upcoming Intel processor change, Apple can ill afford to burden its sales people with unnecessary reporting just to reassure the managers that people know how to fill out excel spreadsheets or SalesForce.com templates.

Folks that think Apple has great employees today have no idea how extraordinary a company Apple was in the early days.

Tempest in a Teapot

If nothing else the Apple-Intel switch has got lots of folks talking. I've lived in the PowerPC world so long and heard so many Apple SEs fervently pitch the G5 and ancestors' superiority that I think this is really pretty funny. I have had a Dell with an Intel processor since last fall. All my Macs haven't thrown it out of my home office yet.

The reality is that most computers are just computers. Blindly faithful Mac computer users aren't like the rest of the world. Some seemingly would jump off a building if Steve told them to do. Some can believe no evil of Steve. Those are the extremists and a small but vocal minority. I suppose there are likely still some folks who either believe Bill Gates can do no wrong or no right. I wonder if there are Windows users as blindly faithful as the Mac extremists?

Bill is becoming much more human to me, Steve is becoming much more of a control freak. I have done lots of speculating about this latest move, but somehow there must be some way to exercise more control over the faithful at the end of the tunnel. I have enjoyed these recent posts from the "Devil's Advocate." The first one was "Steve meets Osborne, Again!" and the follow-up is "Mac Punditry: Deranged and Dumb on any Processor." I would be really curious to hear from some of the folks who pegged this migration as impossible in their coments on my ApplePeels blog when I first commented May 24 in the post "The Apple-Intel Rumor."