Scrollin' On Dubs

Mar 30

Why weddings should have a business plan

Ponderings 15 Comments »

A bit of a departure from the normal topics but ponder this for a sec:

Would weddings benefit from having a short biz plan or executive summary drawn up?

I’m not speaking to the institute of marriage itself, just the actual event that is a wedding. I’ve attended maybe twenty weddings throughout my life and in at least 70% of them the stress level surrounding the preparation and execution eclipsed the enjoyment of the day for those putting it on. I’m thinking about why this situation occurs consistently and it seems to all come down to one thing: trying to desperately meet some expectation for what the day should be instead of just enjoying whatever it is.

I have a string of four back-to-back weddings over the next two months and I’m starting to handle the travel arrangements and gifts. It’s one of those odd cycles where a handful of friends have all chosen to tie the knot around the same time. Thinking about the resources spent from their angle as well as from all the guests, this is an enormous expenditure for everyone involved. What if we all just agreed to have a huge group vacation with that money instead?

The wedding industry is one I’ve never thought much about but as with any industry where there’s an entire ecosystem developed around it, it has unstoppable inertia. The industry revolves around perpetuating the idea that you need to have huge fanfare on that day– giant bouquets of exotic flowers, invitations hand-etched by buddhist calligraphers done on papyrus, dresses sewn from silk of an exotic butterfly, cakes made with wind-milled flour… The future brides of my guy friends all have these magazines that tantalize them with the various options for the flowers, cakes, dresses, invitations, etc. I do understand that it’s an important day that women want to have it perfect, but doesn’t it all seem a little… off?

You’ve probably seen those data visualization maps of the world that show countries disproportionate in geographic size that instead express size of the country relative to another scale like GDP or emissions or population. The data viz map for the typical wedding looks like:

I’m probably forgetting obvious things but that’s about how I remember it from my brother’s wedding. The funny thing is, in every wedding I’ve ever attended it’s never been about any of that stuff. I couldn’t tell you what any of the cakes looked like or how the flowers smelled- all I remember is the people that were there and the interaction of the different circles of friends coming together. If there was a map to express the ideal proportion of the elements involved, it would look more like this:

with the focus entirely on the guests. I’ll concede that having a skilled photographer is a worthwhile expenditure for capturing the moments and preserving them. But looking at the reality of how the normal wedding goes down, it’s strange to see how misaligned the budget is with the real goals. I can hear Kathy Sierra and her mantra of “help your users to kick ass” and how she would probably agree with the notion that your wedding should be about “helping your guests kick ass.” So this proposal will probably sound cold to anybody currently organizing a wedding but for such an important event, shouldn’t a wedding have a business plan for the same reasons that businesses have a business plan? It would ensure that the actual focus is accurate with the intended one and that the budget reflects the same story.

If that day comes for this guy, it’s going to be a pretty simple formula:

Friends + booze + tropical place + pictures to crystallize the memories = ideal wedding.

The mission: to get all the right people to a special place for the purpose of having an unforgettable weekend. All expenditures support that mission: axe the calligrapher in favor of web RSVP’s, scratch all fancy flower arrangements and expensive clothes and instead do a travel fund to disburse amongst guests to defray travel expenses and a local tour guide organizing a weekend of fun activities for guests to meet each other and enjoy the island.

So if you’re not already married but you’re in the process of planning a wedding, some questions for you:

What are the elements of your ideal wedding?
What would you consider the mission of your wedding day to be if you had to distill it to one sentence?
How would your budget support this mission?
Would thinking about the event in this way change how you execute it or is your game-plan already pretty much consistent?
If you had never seen a wedding before or had any idea of what they’re traditionally like, and someone asked you to set the tradition of how weddings should work, what would yours be like?
If you agree that the focus has been somewhat derailed by the economics of the wedding industry, is it possible/desirable to reshape how weddings are done and how could that occur?

Mar 23

Parking meter arbitrage

Ponderings 10 Comments »

Here’s a strange Friday thought:

Parking Meters are like gift certificates in that there’s always “breakage” one way or another.

If you think about it, you always end up either putting in too much money and leaving change in the meter when you drive away, or you make the more costly mistake of putting in too little and end up getting stuck with a parking ticket because you short-guessed it. The optimal payment to a parking meter is just enough money so that it expires right as you return to your car. Any other situation and you’re getting hosed.

Where there’s inefficiency there’s room to innovate and capitalize on the arbitrage. If you live somewhere where you are using parking meters frequently, would you pay $20/mo for a subscription to a service that ensured you never got any parking tickets and always optimized your payments to deposit only what was necessary to the meter while you used it? There’s a right answer here because you would know a month after using the service whether it was saving you money or not. If you use the meter twice a day and this service saves you from even one parking ticket or from wasting enough change each time from over-paying, it would be worth it.

I have no idea how to best automate this and it’s in the municipality’s best interest to not optimize this here- they win the more breakage there is in this situation (whether it’s through extra change left in the meter or through parking tickets). Affixing some device to all parking meters would be costly not to mention illegal due to tampering with government property. It would most likely not be cost-effective to have low-paid bikers with change purses being texted with instructions on where to deposit money either. I’m not sure the winning implementation here but there is absolutely an opportunity to middleman this situation and capitalize on the parking meter inneficiency problem offering a service that would save people money- the question is if you could do it in such a way as to be profitable. Estimate the number of meters in the world and the money wasted on each one on an average day and you have a fairly attractive market cap…

Mar 16

Crash course on the benefits of virtualization for the rest of us

Nerd No Comments »

Server virtualization is sweeping the IT industry- that’s no secret. But what does it mean to the average person that’s not an IT admin? We deal heavily with various virtualization technologies every day as it’s a key enabler that underlies the JumpBox platform. I wanted to take a stab at breaking things down in benefits terms vs. feature terms so the people without pocket protectors can understand some of the implications of this stuff.

First off, my partner writes a blog on virtualization – if you’re tech-savvy you’ll find the synopsis here remedial. Head on over to VirtualizationDaily.com for the more in-depth discussion for IT admins and CIO/CTO’s. This is the big-picture overview that will attempt to explain the benefits to a non-tech user.

What is virtualization?

The useful definition in this context is: the ability to run an entire instance of a computer in software.

Judging from the surveys people complete when they download a JumpBox from our site, most people are currently using virtualization for testing and evaluation purposes. Usually when you think of installing an application like Quickbooks or Office on your desktop, you get an installer that’s specific to your operating system and go through a wizard that sets up the application and its dependencies into a directory on your computer. It runs in the context of your operating system and generally has access to do potentially destructive things to your computer like writing to the filesystem (or making a bunch of registry entries if you’re on a PC). When you run a virtual machine it’s different.

Virtual Machines (or VM’s) are complete instances of a computer with their own complete operating system. It’s a little Malkovich-malkovich to think about running one computer inside another but essentially that’s what you’re doing when you use virtualization. A quick distinction needs to be made here- emulation does not equal virtualization. People that got a bad taste from using programs like Virtual PC and then later switched to VMware will testify to the performance improvements of using a virtualized environment over an emulated one. The goal of abstracting away an OS from its underlying hardware is the same but the means for doing so is different – if you want to read more about the difference, go nuts. Back to VM’s though…

So that’s nice that this capability exists to run one computer inside another, but why on earth would someone want to do it?

Implications of virtualization

For server applications:

Speed of setup – there is no more install process when using preconfigured VM’s for testing. You can download a virtual computer configured with an app and just turn it on and having working immediately without any setup. Setup processes that used to take anywhere from one hour to one day are now completely reduced to the time it takes to download a VM.
Efficiency – the average server runs way under capacity, let’s say for the sake of argument- 8% CPU utlization.Â By virtualizing the server and running multiple VM’s on the same physical machine you squeeze more efficiency out of your existing hardware. That means less space requirements in your datacenter, less power usage, fewer servers to update and service.Â This is the reason that California’s largest power company announced a 50% rebate to any ISP’s who virtualize their infrastructure.
Containment – let’s say your evaluating five open source software applications to see which most closely meets your needs. Traditionally you’d have to install them locally in your computer’s OS and risk hosing something and hope that 4/5 have a good uninstaller when you’re done so you don’t end up with a bunch of clutter on your system. VM’s run completely self-contained so you can try out an app and then throw it away and know that your system is still pristine.
Known setup state – there’s no opportunity to screw up the setup since that portion is removed. You’re using a freeze-dried application that was presumably configured correctly the first time and then turned into a VM.
Portability hence low entry cost – most people don’t want to purchase an expensive server up front on which to run an application. They’d rather serve it from a crappy box until they know it’s popular enough to merit purchasing more expensive hardware. Under the tradtional “bare-metal” install, you evaluate it on a test machine and then install the production version on the production machine. Any data you entered in the test version needs to be migrated into the production version or else it’s lost. Because VM’s however are agnostic of the underlying hardware, you can start off serving an application from your laptop and then picku it up at any time and move it to a fast server with no painful migration process or worry of driver or dependency conflicts.
Support – have you ever hosed a system so badly that you had to send it to someone for repair? Think about using a virtual computer and the notion that you can put the entire computer on a DVD or up on an ftp server and have someone fix it and send you the disc without ever shipping the hardware?

For the desktop user (all the above plus…):

Choice – you have the option of using a completely different OS as your desktop environment yet being able to run applications that only work in other OS’s. You could use Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux and run WinXP virtually for those applications for which there are no acceptable substitutes in the alternative OS. Or continue to work in Windows and have access to run Linux apps.
Productivity – when your virtual XP instance is crashing, you can still be productive working in your base desktop environment ;-)
Protection – Using VM’s you can do the latest upgrades to applications without fear of nuking your OS because if everything breaks, you can just roll the VM back to an earlier version.

There are probably many others but these are the salient ones that come to mind. If you haven’t already tried running a virtual machine, it takes five minutes to do and will change how you think about a computer. For a Mac, get either the Parallels trial or the VMfusion beta. On PC, download the free VMware player. Then either visit VMware’s directory of free VM’s or (shameless plug) download one of the JumpBoxes from our site. We currently have a blog, a wiki, a CRM and a discussion forums JumpBox available. The way in which we’ve packaged our VM’s is specifically known as a “virtual appliance” since you don’t ever need to see the underlying OS or how the application works- everything is configurable via a web interface.

All kinds of interesting possiblities exist around new types of hosting opportunities and support services with applications that are packaged in this way. As you might guess, this is why we are so excited about JumpBox. Have fun with it and if you are heavily into virtualization, join the ongoing dialogue over on Virtualization Daily.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Mar 14

Urgency vs. Importance and the 5th system for scattered todos

Productivity 16 Comments »

I wrote a little while ago about this concept of “if you’ve highlighted everything…” and why it’s good to keep your main list of current assaults lean. I wanted to explain the concept of urgency vs. importance that I mentioned in that post and then propose a simple addition to the 4 mechanisms for managing scattered todo’s that I use.

Urgency and importance are completely independent of one another. Once you understand that, doing triage on a todo list becomes way easier. The best way to understand this concept is through a simple graph of tasks:

I’ve found once you are able to visualize your todo list in this 2-d fashion it helps in a couple respects:

You’re able to tease apart those items which truly have the ability to advance your cause from the ones that are just stressing you out because they’re yelling for your immediate attention. It’s an important distinction and critical to being effective.
If you keep your items stored visually in this fashion it lets you quickly handle items in the right quadrant depending on the situation. You should obviously try to work on the right-most items as much as possible while giving attention to the upper right quadrant first. During the day, forget that the left quadrants even exist. When you’re decompressing, go to the lower-left. When you’re catching up on errands, upper-left. The point is you always know what you should be doing.
This leads to what David Allen calls the “mind like water” feeling of being at peace even in the face of massive amounts of todo items. Even when there’s a kajillion things going on, there’s something about having an accurate picture of the field and knowing that your items are stored in a trusted system and you’re knocking out the priorities first.

Where I disagree with the orthodox GTD cultish philosophy that Allen espouses is in the idea that you should try to cram everything into a single trusted system. I wrote about the 4 mechanisms I used to do what I call “Scattered Todo Management” and having tried orthodox GTD, I found this to be more suited to the way I work. Anytime you find yourself uncomfortable contorting your processes to match the latest and greatest productivity religion, I think that’s bad. Ultimately you should learn the fundamentals of various different productivity religions and pick and choose the elements that work for you and make your own.

So this is the 5th System for Scattered Todo Management that I’ve been using and want to share. It’s a simple way of easily deferring and categorizing tasks while still making immediate steps toward the solution and preventing build-up of crap in your inbox:

Mentally superimpose the above graph on your desktop (or if you really want, draw it as your background).
Drag the resources (URL locations, documents, graphics, audio files, forms, whatever you’re working with) to the appropriate quadrants on your desktop. URLs are the exact pages on a site with which you need to do whatever task it is. You can chunk a bunch of related items for a discreet task in a folder.
Now rename the filenames to “verb-noun” (ie. “handle tax returns” URL item links to the online filing page on the IRS.gov site)

That’s the essence of it and simple as it seems, it’s a way to have a big picture view of the tasks on your plate and to defer the low-priority items while still “teeing them up” so you don’t have to weed through a daunting inbox of emails to figure out what each task involves. This is my desktop right now:

As you can see items are roughly thrown into the spots that correlate with the position on the urgency vs. priority graph above. I’ve found this technique helpful along with the other 4 systems to manage the things I’m doing every day. If you have a homegrown productivity technique that works well for you, I would love to hear about it.

Mar 13

Audio interview with founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur No Comments »

I just had the opportunity to chat with Peter Burns and get the amazing story of how he went from renting mopeds one summer on the island of Nantucket to recently landing a $250MM deal for funding start-up companies in Arizona through his Institute for Entrepreneurship. It’s fifteen minutes of a pretty incredible series of accomplishments. Listen first-hand to somebody who breathes this stuff.

Mar 09

My experience self-publishing a book

Entrepreneur 4 Comments »

It’s been a goal of mine to someday publish a kid’s book and that day came today. I’m officially a published author having used the Lulu.com system to self-publish my first book “Rebuild it with Moonbeams.” I wanted to condense some thoughts here after having gone through the process start to finish and I also want to publicly “tap” a few people I know to write a book of their own.

How

I looked at a couple different sites for self-publishing including Lulu, iUniverse and Cafepress and ultimately I went with Lulu. Their 5min video tutorial adequately shows the process for how to use their system – you basically create a word doc with the pages of your book, upload it to their site and then set a bunch of preferences about how you want your book to be printed. They take 20% after covering manufacturing costs which seems completely reasonable. Start to finish this project took a total of about 30hrs working nights the past 2wks with most of the time going towards doing the coloring on the illustrations. I sketched the illustrations at Starbucks then scanned them in and colored via Photoshop and used a creative fill technique with iStock photography. The publishing process via Lulu took the least amount of time of anything and was only about a 20min process. The book is a 40pg full-color paperback consisting of a series of whimsical “what-if” scenarios for kids in the same vein as Cooper Edens’ masterpiece “Remember the Night Rainbow.”

Why

The “how” of this process was relatively easy. Perhaps the more interesting question was “why?” And there are a couple of reasons. I started the book as a birthday present for a girlfriend-now-just-friend but the more I got into making it, the more I was curious about trying this as an experiment to see if I could do it. One of our goals with Grid7 is to know how to do a bunch of different things, to help others to build stuff they’re passionate about and to create a series of small, passive recurring revenue streams. This project was consistent with those goals and also satisfied a goal I’ve had for some time of wanting to write a kid’s book.

Kathy Sierra has a great post here that talks about the power of embracing constraints and forcing yourself to build something good in thirty days. It’s a great exercise and truly does satisfy something primal to just go and make something. I think about the story of JK Rawlings authoring the Harry Potter series on the train to work every day and I imagine what the world would be like had she not done that. I also think about “what would it be like if everyone rode the bus once a week and used that time to work on a book of their own?” You never fully realize the ripples of what you do – the prospect of creating a moment of shared closness between a child and parent via one of the scenarios in Moonbeams book is mind-blowing and is truly at the core of why I wanted to do it.

So without any more words, here’s the book. You can get the PDF online or purchase the paperback via the site. I put 1/3rd of it up on WithMoonbeams.com so people can get a flavor for what it is. I’m also challenging the following peeps to write a book of their own because selfishly, it’s something I would buy and read if they wrote it:
Noah Kagan – The Burrito Diaries
Jamon Metz – The Cobblestone Thesis
Amanda Harbin – The Wishmaker’s Playbook