Cam Findlay

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

With the Wellington round of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) on the table “in secret” this week, InternetNZ  hosted the PublicACTA conference at the Wellington Town Hall Civic Suites, Sat 10th April 2010.
I managed to make it along to the keynotes on Saturday morning and also followed it on the live stream throughout the day.

The goal was to pull together a declaration to be presented  to the negotiators at ACTA and call for more transparency and public consultation.

The so called “anti-counterfeiting” trade agreement really takes more action on digital copyrights, trademarks and patent infringement than dealing with the sort of counterfeiting that we normally associate with the word, that is “he problem of large-scale commercial infringement, for profit, that is direct and intentional” (PublicACTA Wellington Declaration, 2010).
Instead it seeks enforce criminal liability, statutory damages and possible Internet connection termination for BOTH commercial and non-commercial “infringements” utilising intermediaries such as ISP’s, public Internet access points, workplaces, website hosting to do the dirty work.

I could go on about the concerns of this agreement but really it is un-required and will not offer benefits to any parties that it seeks to protect (See Kimberlee Weatheral’s  and Micheal Giest’s keynotes from Public ACTA available from the PublicACTA website for more information).

The key issues, concerns and then subsequently suggestions from the 120 people that attended the conference (as well as many hundreds more following along at home on the live video stream and twitter hash tag #PublicACTA) have been complied and crafted into a concise declaration to what we as Internet professionals, consumers, producers, freaks and geeks would like to see taken on board within the Wellington negotiation round of ACTA.

The declaration and petition can be accessed here, please take the time to read through and sign the petition if you are in favour of fair democratic process and your rights as consumers of digital content.

Let’s start a movement.. like this guy…

PublicACTA copyright InternetNZ and is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Quick Wellington Update: I have been officially living in Wellington nearly a month now and all is going well.  Managed to find a great place to live with fantastic views (a bit of a hike up a hill though!).
I have also been working from my newly set up home office doing my job completely via teleworking, so far so good.

Technically everything is working a treat.
Before I moved we had setup a company wiki, project management through BaseCamp from 37 Signals, a bug and issue tracking system called Fixx and the all important VPN enabling me to connect to our main office, files and server.
Technology however is just a tool to help make possible what is really more important in business and company culture, that is communication and relationships.

I had many questions when I set about researching, putting together and trialing my teleworking program at the start of this year (2010). Most of these questions were around how to keep the company culture alive, make sure everyone has equal access to information and of course keeping those inter-personal relationships tended to in the workplace… while not being in the workplace.

Here are 3 important concepts in workplace communication as we use in our culture at RockStar Recipes.

1. Foster a culture of responsibility to communicate and share knowledge
That is we have worked towards building a culture in which people at all levels make it their responsibility to share knowledge and keep constant contact with those both in-house & off-site (and even customers but I’ll leave that for another post!).

All our staff have headsets and web-cams for video calling anytime, gone are the days where only the big dogs with expensive full tele-presence systems have access to this kind of rich communication.  We share knowledge through our company wiki intranet which we try to update with any useful processes that get used regularly and also fun facts about the company and it’s culture.

We are also less likely to just wait around to be told what to do, we all seek out information from others and work on a results driven paradigm.

2. Use the right communication tool for the right situation
I’m sure you have done this too, you email a college about a project asking a quick question, they email you back a slightly ambiguous answer,  you email them back to clarify, they email you back asking another questions and very quickly you end up in a huge never ending email spiral of doom and a subject line full of RE:RE:RE:RE:!

What we try and do is take a moment to think about communicating clearly, using email when hard facts and data are concerned, but in matters of discussion, brainstorming or where there is no clear outcome, it is time to change your method of communication to something more rich. Emotion and non-verbal cues get left by the way side in email and most other text based methods (instant message/SMS message/message boards).

Face to face time is often the best but in the situation of teleworking, video calling is your next best option and is surprisingly effective. The added bonus I have found in the past few weeks working this way is in the use of a combination of voice/video calling using Skype and utilising the collaboration  feature of Google Docs. We can all talk while all working on the same planning/brainstorming documents, all seeing and hearing what each other are doing which keeps production blocking to a minimum.
More great ideas… more ownership of those ideas by all our staff.

3. Make time for each other
Our work is a place we spend a lot of our time, most, more time than our homes (unless your teleworking like me!).
Rather than “…the only thing you have in common is you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hrs a day…”¹ being the norm, these days the workplace is a melting pot of cultures, lifestyles and personalities where great friends and company cultures flourish.

Not being in the office, you tend to miss out of some of the “in” jokes and the buzz in the office not to mention it’s easy to get busy and neglect the trust and relationships that you have built up in the workplace.

We have found the best way of keeping and transferring that buzz is just to make a little time for your fellow college. We make time each morning to say “hello” and “good morning”, maybe have a quick informal chat about who won the last Foosball game. That goes for when your in the office itself or calling in via video chat.
Every team meeting we start with all our staff talking about good things that happened to them on the weekend (and hopefully bringing a little of Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build technique to the meeting by doing so).

Tending the personal relationship I think is the most important thing we can do in the workplace, it builds trust, understanding and means that communication flows smoothly and is more understood by everyone drinking the company cool-ade.

I am finding teleworking very interesting itself, not only am I getting a lot of my work done, but I am learning some more intricacies of communication in the workplace and that, physically being in the office is less important than having the right people, with the right positive culture, who are all great communicators.
As geographic boundaries become less and  less relevant, this type of work I believe will become more and more common place.

1. Great quote from the end of season 1 of Ricky Gervais’ “The Office” (The ORIGINAL UK series… not the bastardised one adapted for the USA!).

Not long to go now and I will be moving up to Wellington, NZ Capital.

What is most interesting is that I will continue to work in my current job, but remotely from my home office as I mentioned in an earlier post.

I have spent a bit of time working out all the finer details, now I have in place a pretty robust system and have schooled up the rest of the team at Rock Star Recipes on the finer points of digital communication to make sure we all keep in touch.

For any one interested in putting together there own Remote/TeleWork proposal and making a case for why it would be a good thing for you company to let you work remotely either part or full time check out all these links to blogs and articles I came across while researching to put together my proposal (and I even went as far as making a power point presentation!).

• http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/sep2007/ca20070918_304769.htm?campaign_id=rss_null
• http://www.readsolutionsgroup.com/2007/08/remote-leadership-when-you-cant-just.html
• http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/08/11/what-is-remote-leadership/
• http://www.worldatwork.org/waw/adimLink?id=34865
• http://telecommutect.com/employees/approval.php
• http://www.mannaz.com/mail.asp?mailid=62&topicid=583
• http://www.v3.co.uk/computing/features/2072443/vodafone-moved-mobile-environment
• http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/

I will post some more on a few of the key points I looked at in my proposal as well as an outline of what I included and maybe even a cut down version of my power point which might be of help to anyone looking into moving their role and presence into more 1′s and 0′s.

On another 1′s and 0′s note I have just started a pilot project looking into RackSpace’s Cloud Environment (which has become affectionatly know at work as “Cam’s House”). All going well I will post some of my findings and reccomendations if your looking to make your web hosting and delivery of content more cost effective!

Check out Pranav Mistry at TED demonstrating his Sixth Sense personal augmented reality device! A paper computer, taking photos with your gestures, a phone call on your hand?… wow pretty amazing ideas.

Part 1

Part 2

Welcome back to 2010, it has been a while since I last posted anything Techy or Samurai related it reminds me how quickly we can go from leadership thinking to management thinking when one gets very busy (My company re-launched our flagship Guitar learning product Jamorama at the end of 2009 which didn’t leave me much time for blogging, a poor excuse I know!).

As it happens it looks like Julia (my partner) and myself are moving to Wellington! (NZ’s Captial City) for a change of lifestyle and a lot more Film and Television work for Julia.  So I am putting together a proposal to keep working at Rock Star Recipes but remotely!

Remote work and more interesting, remote or distance leadership is something I have become very interested in, how can we in 2010 with all the technology easily available to most businesses lead from a distance?  What are the challenges? How does communication, face to face time, company culture and atmosphere differ? I suspect a culture of great communication, trust and respect is key.

I’m hoping to document as much as I can while I learn more about this and also put my proposal forward to actually experience and work as a remote staff member and remote leader…

Perhaps we are coming to a point where there is no real difference whether someone is in the office or not as long at the end results are met and accountability is key. In the 80′s they called it “Tele-Communting” more recently it was dubbed “Tele-Work” (Perhaps to make it sound more like working for those managers who could not let micro-management go?) but I think going forward it will just be “work” as the technology and easy constant contact and communication from anywhere in the world becomes the norm.

More to come…

Oh, and for those who need their Technology and Ninja fix… check out the new Nexus One powered by Google Android.

Just a quick update, lecture for my uni paper have finished up for the year… I’m currently on some study leave to prep for the exam… wish me luck.

So whats next for the blog? Well I have planned a series of posts with some great info on how to become more independent from your computer and make use of some of the great cloud computing tools available out there.

Also before I forget a big shout out to Simon Waterhouse a great photographer and designer here in Christchurch for his help on the photos and design of my personal development plan(PDP) assessment. Be sure to check out his great photography here www.simonwaterhouse.com

Another shout out to the great guys at Silverstripe CMS… i used this to power my PDP website… once I had the design I was able to integrate and drop in the content in just under 4 hours work! A killer speedy content management system for anyone looking to jazz up their website.
My final big thank you goes out to Juliette Powell, Author of “33 Million People in the Room” who sent me a signed copy of her book… made my day! A great read if you are interested in social media, co-creation, and where things are headed online. I was lucky enough to meet her at a conference this year and really enjoy her contributions online through twitter and facebook.

On the leadership tip, I will leave you with some words of wisdom from the women herself, Juliette Powell, enjoy….

Just follow this simple flow chart! (Source: http://xkcd.com) Click the image for a larger view…

I had my first harddrive fail on me last week… the “click of death” I had heard about makes so much more sense now!

So there I was… my MacBook was dead as a mouse but through some power googling and having had fixed and built many PC systems in the past I ventured forth and completed the repairs.  Saving a bunch on parts and labour if I had have taken it to the mac repair shop…like any good sports car, a mac computer stings you for parts once they breakdown.

So here’s how I did it and hopefully someone can learn from this… on a side note… this just isnt for replacing broken hard drive but also upgrading to large ones. If you find you are running out of space this will be the ticket to some more digital storage freedom.

You will need:

About 15 mins

Size 0 Philips Screwdriver

Size 8 Torx Head Screwdriver

Coin

New 2.5″ 5400 rpm harddrive

You can click on any of the photos below for a closer look at the repairs.

Step 1: Is my MacBook really broken?…if you are hearing a clicking noise and seeing this srceen… then yes its time to replace your drive.

Step 2: Flip that over… you need to take out the battery pack using a regular screwdriver or coin.

Step 3: Unscreem the 3 small screws on the bracket inside the battery bay using a size 0 (zero) philips head and remove the “L” shaped bracket.

Step 4: Find the small white plastic tab, pull the lower end so that the tab flicks out from under the drive. Give this a pull and the old hard drive should pop out.

Step 5: Remove the hard drive caddy from the old hard drive using a size 8 torx head screw driver. There should be 4 small screws. Pay attention to the way around the SATA ports are when the drive is within the caddy.

Step 6: Put the new 2.5″ laptop drive into the caddy, making sure to have it the same way around as the old drive you removed, the drive label should be facing up and the ports at the opposite end to the plastic tab. Replace the 4 torx screws.

Step 7: Fold the plastic tab under the drive, put the drive facing label side down into the battery bay and slide the new drive back into place. Give it a small amount of pressure to seat the SATA ports into position.
Replace the L shaped bracket to cover the hard drive bay and RAM slots.  Tighten the 3 small philips screws on the bracket.

Step 8: Replace the battery and boot up into your OS X DVD or CD by holding down the option key and selecting the dvd as your startup disk.  Follow the instructions to get your operating system installed and running again.

There we have it… your MacBook now has a new or upgraded drive!

Becareful when choosing a replacement drive you can get 7200rpm drives but this will increase your systems runing temparature… I reckomend using a 5400 rpm drive like the Western Digital Scorpio Blue or any of the Fujitsu range. If your doing some heavy audio or video work run your scratch disks from a faster (7200 or even a 10,000 rpm!) external drive via firewire400 or USB2.

We had (at work) a great core values session with Kendall Langston from the Results Group yesterday to really nail down just what it is that we believe in and want to ingrain in everything we do at RockStar Recipes.

This is what we came up with…

• Curiosity – To learn new things, in the future, in our history, in people and relationship building, teaching methods.
• Embracing technology - Adapting and utilising new tech as it rolls out, being tech savvy and aware of what is new and finding best places to use it (or not use it) to augment our teaching, our delivery, our work flow and our lives.
• The experience to teach – building mentor relationships, being skilled in what we teach, having great communication, producing great content and resources, inspiring students – this is internal as well as external… that is we at RockStar Recipes learn as much as our students.
• Being a musician – Being active in your music community, being creative, expression through music, seeing music as a universal language.
• Being a “tight band” (or band member) - Being a “good dude”, team player, serving the band not just the self, having a friendly vibe, laid back & focused, supportive of the other band members!

Companies don’t have core values… people within them DO and I think we have really nailed what makes us at Rock Star Recipes tick, no marketing or PR bullshit… bottom up not top down,  just real honest values that we live and bring to our work.  It’s just like being part of a band and we all bring our unique style and character.
We hope that our customers, fans and friends can also relate to them and join us in our movement to shape the next generation of musicians!

I finished reading Seth’s book tribes a few weeks back and really enjoy his work… Check out this great video, I will be posting a few other videos and interesting internet/techy/new thinking bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks as there are no journal questions for the next 2 weeks as we are on a break from university.