Month: May 2014

Urgency, Importance and the Eisenhower Box

ianwaring DEC, Management, Metrics, Quality, Software Leave a comment

Eisenhower Box - Urgent, Important, non-urgent, non-important

I’ve seen variations of this matrix many times, though the most extensive use witnesses was by Adrian Joseph just after he joined Trafficmaster. The real theory is that nothing should be in the urgent and important square; it’s normally a symptom of bad planning or a major unexpected (but key) surprise.

When I think back to things i’ve done that have triggered major revenue and profit spectaculars, almost all fit in the important but not urgent box; instead, the pressure to move quickly was self inflicted, based on a clarity of purpose and intensive focus to do something that made a big difference to customers. The three major ones were:

  1. Generating 36 pages of text of ideas on how to increase software sales through Digital’s Industrial Distribution Division, then the smallest software Sales “Region” at £700K/year. Having been told to go implement, I never made it past the first 3 ideas, but relentlessly executed them. It became the biggest region two years later at £6m/year.
  2. Justifying and getting funding to do the DECdirect Software Catalogue. The teams around me were fantastic, giving me bandwidth to lock myself away for long periods of absence for nearly three months to work the structure and content of the work with Bruce Stidston and his team at USP Advertising plc. That business went 0-$100m in 18 months at margins that never dipped below 89% margin.
  3. Getting the Microsoft Distribution Business at Metrologie from £1m/month to £5m/month in 4 months, in a price war, and yet doubling margins at the same time. A lot of focus on the three core needs that customers were expressing, and then relentlessly delivering against them.

The only one I recall getting into the Urgent/Important segment was a bid document for a sizable supply contract that HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), where I was asked to provide a supplementary chapter covering Digitals’ Servers, Storage, Comms and Software products. This to be added to a comprehensive document produced by the account manager covering all the other product areas for the company. I’d duly done this in the format originally requested by her, but asked to see the rest of the document to make sure everything was covered – and that we’d left no gaps between the main document and my own – with two days to go. At which point she said she’d had no time, and had decided to no-bid the work (without telling any of us!).

The sales team really needed the revenue, so they agreed to let me disappear home for two days to build the full proposal around the work i’d done, including commercial terms, marketing plan and a summary of all the sales processes needed to execute the relationship – but just for the vendor we were accountable for. We got the document to Norwich with 30 minutes to spare. Two weeks later, we were told we’d won the business for the vendor we represented.

The lesson was to put more progress checks in as the project was unfolding, and to ensure we never got left in that position again, independent of how busy we were with other things at the same time.

With that, i’ve never really hit the urgent/important corner again – which I think is a good thing. Plenty that is important though – but forcing adherence to what Toyota term “takt time” to measure progress, and to push ourselves along.

A week of “Twitter is dead” memes. The true state is more complex.

ianwaring Amazon, Future Trends, Twitter Leave a comment

Social Network Icons

It’s the sort of news you expect in a Newspaper. I think M.G.Siegler was 100% correct in his article on Medium article entitled “Whither Twitter” (I think well worth the 3 minute read):

The reality is that Twitter is currently being torn down in the press so we can later get the Twitter resurrection story. That’s how this works. Why build something up if you can’t knock it down? And why knock it down if you can’t build it up again? Instead of one, consistent story, you get three for the price of one! The rise, the fall, the comeback. Rinse. Repeat.

That’s the preserve of the Newspaper Industry. One forum I navigate regular is “The Land of Serious Topics” on the UK Motley Fool, and it feels most days that over 80% the controversies come from the output of at least one of the six big Newspaper publishers here. Gotta sell papers. The more fascinating trend is that Newspaper readership is becoming the preserve of the (dying) old, and the younger sections of the population – who are more Internet savvy and get their information sourced more widely – typically see the world through more balanced, less bombastic eyes.

At face value, Twitter have gone public and suddenly all their numbers come into view for our consumption – and likewise for the industry surrounding Wall Street. They seem around 1 Billion people have registered for the service at some point, but monthly active users is around 200 million accounts – 1 in 5 still active. The market doesn’t see that growing, and having assumed a valuation based on high growth, the user count is not progressing to support their thesis. Quarterly revenues look fine, but the growth of users on the service doesn’t give folks the confidence that these can continue until the user base demonstrates healthy growth too.

Also notable this week was Amazon announcing a capability to be able to tweet details of a product with the hashtag #amazonbasket and have it dropped into your Amazon shopping cart for later review and/or purchase. Article about this from the BBC here.

I’m convinced there is something unique under the covers that no other social network nor comms medium comes close to, compared to Twitter. The main one I see is the virtual water cooler when specific people engage in a conversation about an industry change or observation of trends. I often see Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) kick off a numbered list which lots of high profile people pick at one by one, agreeing or offering alternate views. The one this weekend kicked off like this (please excuse the reverse order – read it bottom up) – he mulls over how poor the Apple iPhone was at placing voice phone calls when it first came out, compared to Nokia phones of the day that were comparatively rock solid doing this):

pmarca twitter numbered list

One of the innovations of one of the other social networks is to post a notification to your handset if a quorum of people known to you start engaging in a conversation like that at any time. A sort of “Hey, there’s an interesting conversation between your friends x, y, z, a and b going on – like to jump in to listen and/or contribute?”.

Another is to at least flag back to you if a message you sent was received by the other party and read. Twitter tended to remove a lot of the DM “Direct Message” capability from their mobile clients, so many people zone out into other communication media (like SMS, WhatsApp, Snapchat, iMessage, Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, etc) instead. So, a lot of the communication you have with different people (or audiences) gets fanned out across many silos. I for one would like to be able to throw an annotated map of where i’ve parked my car to my wife when I go to pick her up from a store, and to know that the message made it through and was read. Further complicated by me being on a Nexus 5 handset and her on an iPhone 5S.

One related idea is to allow an invisible hashtag on a message that identifies my physical location and could be optionally sent with a direct message – so she knows not only when i’ve left, but where from as well.

Another is to mark a post that i’ve read it when i’ve done so, and not tolerate my frequent realisation that “i’m sure i’ve read that an hour ago”. That’s one thing that VAX Notes did so well in times of old.

There seems to be an ever dizzying number of different mobile communication apps, from short message ones, to group comms, to blogs, to forums and all the way through to publishing apps (like Medium, Longreads, etc). Ever more disconnected silos. I’ve even looked at the potential of moving this blog from WordPress to something like discourse.org, in a vain attempt to facilitate more two way conversation (rather than me just punting words into the ether). The one thing that’s surprised me the most, in running a blog, is the sheer amount of content and link spam I need to contend with; i’ve so far posted every day for 74 days (today is #75) and my automated spam filter has caught 4,124 attempts to litter my site; that’s an average of over 55 attempts at responding to each and every post with link graffiti. This will probably be a factor in any new product, but something that Twitter have largely solved already (I see very little Twitter spam).

There look like plenty of useful use cases for Twitter right there under the surface. I however suspect that they have not yet made up their mind what they want to be for their users, and certainly not deeply enough to say no or to focus on what is important to realise that vision. And to be able to markedly improve user engagement, to make new users stick and to reduce what looks like a shocking amount of churn.

Time will tell if they decide this on their own, or have a competitor come do it more eloquently instead. Until then, it’s something I think about a lot – and agonise over what it would take to be that competitor.

Apple buying Beats; one idea everyone appears to be missing

ianwaring Android, Apple, Future Trends, Xioami Leave a comment

Beats by Dre Logo

There’s been a lot of commentary on blogs and podcasts following the apparent strong rumour that Apple are paying over $3 Billion to buy the Beats by Dr Dre headphone business and associated music streaming service. Most of it very bemused as to why Apple would want to do this. Thinking about it, I have my own theory, though i’d be first to admit I may be way out.

In trying to deduce a theory, a few characteristics of the position Apple find themselves in today:

  • Worldwide, they have circa 70% of all handset makers profits.
  • In every market they enter, they displace the previous market leading high end Android competitors, and relentlessly ratchet up their market share (currently 20% in most established geographies)
  • They are parked in the premium, highest price volume segment everywhere they serve
  • In developing markets, a lot of their initial adoption comes from users buying previous model second hand or refurbished handsets.
  • The latest 5c model was parked a bit too close to the 5S, making it a decoy price in both contract and prepay markets. Colour did not lead an appeal to a younger demographic as was originally expected.
  • Carriers (with the exception of Japan) tend to sell a handset on a cost recovery basis, either upfront (for PAYG) or as part of a 2 year term (Contract)
  • Users change their handsets about once every two years
  • There is a burgeoning market for the collection, disposal and/or resale of old iPhones
  • Historically, the strongest competitor has been Samsung. However, upstarts like Xioami are taking share from Samsung in China, and showing signs of doing that elsewhere as they sell into more territories. Xioami’s target demographic is 20-30 year old, first time purchasers since leaving the parental nest; high quality product, thin margins, but supplemented by useful, high quality and paid online services
  • Smartphone growth has started to stall, where the growing segments are either at the bottom (feature phone replacement or first step onto the ladder) or in the midrange (circa $300)

So, if I was Apple, what would I do in order to preserve the current high end volumes and profit margins, but dip down into growth segments? I think my strategy would be:

  1. In the car markets of the USA, Toyota sell Lexus at the premium end of the market, and Scion to the young, first time buyer demographics. Mindful there is also Honda/Acura and Nissan/Infiniti with similar volume/premium brands. Beats becomes Apple’s brand for the Xioami (20-30 year old) demographic; past that, many will hop onto the Apple brand as they age (or become wealthier).
  2. Apple formalise the bundling of a replacement handset and associated online services into a perpetual $15-ish scale monthly subscription. New replacement requires return of old handset, which Apple can continue to use in emergent markets; by doing so, they garner more wallet share. Telco services become relatively unbundled commodities.

I think that would give them high growth, more people in their 100’s of millions entering the Apple ecosystem, and without affecting the current iPhone business dynamics at all.

So, what do you think? It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming months.

Am I the only one shaking my head at US Net Neutrality?

ianwaring Future Trends, Internet, Newspapers, Politicians Leave a comment

Internet Open Sign

I’ve always had the view that:

  1. ISPs receive a monthly payment for the speed of connection I have to the Internet
  2. Economics are such that I expect this to be effectively uncapped for almost all “normal” use, though the few edge cases of excessive use would be subject to a speed reduction to ration use of the resources for the good of the ISPs user base as a whole (to avoid a tragedy of the commons)
  3. That a proportion of my monthly costs would track investments needed to ensure peering equipment and the ISPs own infrastructure delivered service to me at the capacity needed to deliver (1) and (2) without any discrimination based on traffic nor its content.

Living in Europe, i’ve been listening to lots of commentary in the USA about both the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable on one hand, and of the various ebbs and flows surrounding “Net Neutrality” and the FCC on the other. It’s probably really surprising to know that broadband speeds in the USA are at best mid-table on the world stage, and that Comcast and Time Warner have some of the worst customer satisfaction scores in their respective service areas. There is also the spectacle of seeing the widespread funding of politicians there by industry, and the presence of a far from independent chairman of the FCC (the regulator) whose term is likely to be back through the revolving door to the very industry he currently is charged to regulate and from whence he came.

I’ve read “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age” by Susan Crawford, which logged what happened as the Bell Telephone Monopoly was deregulated, and the result the US consumer was left with. Mindful of this, there was an excellent blog post that amply demonstrates what happens when the FCC lets go of the steering wheel, and refuses to classify Internet provision being subject to the “common carrier” status. Dancing around this serves no true political purpose, other than to encourage the receipt of Economic rent in ample excess to the cost of service provision in areas of mandated exclusivity of provision.

It appears that the 5 of the major “last mile” ISPs in the USA (there are 6 of them – while unnamed, folks on various forums suspect that Verizon are the only ones not cited) are not investing in equipment at their peering points, leading to an inference that they are double dipping. ie: asking the source of traffic (like Netflix, YouTube, etc) to pay transit costs to their customers for the “last mile”. Equipment costs that are reckoned to be marginal (fractions of a cent to each customer served) to correct. There is one European ISP implicated, though comments i’ve seen around the USA suggest this is most likely to be to Germany.

The blog post is by Mark Taylor, an executive of Level 3 (who provide a lot of the long distance bandwidth in the USA). Entitled “Observations of an Internet Middleman”, it is well worth a read here.

I just thank god we’re in Europe, where we have politicians like Neelie Kroes who works relentlessly, and effectively, to look after the interests of her constituents above all else. With that, a commitment to Net Neutrality, dropping roaming charges for mobile telcos, no software patents and pushing investments consistent with the long term interests of the population in the EC.

We do have our own challenges in the UK. Some organisations still profit handsomely from scientific research we pay for. We fund efforts by organisations to deliver hammer blows to frustrated consumers rather than encouraging producers to make their content accessible in a timely and cost effective fashion. And we have one of the worst cases of misdirected campaigns, with no factual basis and playing on media-fanned fear, to promote government mandated censorship (fascinating parallels to US history in “The Men who open your mail” here – it’ll take around 7 minutes to read). Horrific parallels to this, and conveniently avoiding the fact that wholesale games of “wac-a-mole” have demonstrably never worked.

That all said, our problems will probably trend to disappear, be it with the passing of the current government and longer term trends in media readership (the Internet native young rarely read Newspapers – largely a preserve of the nett expiring old).

While we have our own problems, I still don’t envy the scale of task ahead of consumers in the USA to unpick their current challenges with Internet access. I sincerely hope the right result makes it in the end.

Customer, Customer, Customer…

ianwaring Amazon, DEC, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, HP, IBM, Linux, Open Source, Pricing, Rackspace, Sun Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos QuoteI’ve been internalising some of the Leadership principles that Amazon expect to see in every employee, as documented here. All of these explain a lot about Amazon’s worldview, but even the very first one is quite a unique in the IT industry. It probably serves a lesson that most other IT vendors should be more fixated on than I usually experience.

In times when I looked after two Enterprise Systems vendors, it was a never ending source of amusement that no marketing plan would be considered complete without at least one quarterly “competitive attack” campaign. Typically, HP, IBM and Sun (as was, Oracle these days) would expect to fund at least one campaign that aimed squarely into the base of customers of the other vendors (and the reseller channels that served them), typically pushing superior speeds and feeds. Usually selling their own proprietary, margin rich servers and storage to their own base, while tossing low margin x86 servers running Linux to try and unseat proprietary products of the other vendors. I don’t recall a single one working, nor one customer that switched as a result of these efforts.

One thing that DEC used to do well was, when a member of staff from a competitor moved to a job inside the company, to make it a capital offence for anyone to try and seek inside knowledge from that person. The corporate edict was to rely on publicly available data only, and typically to sell on your own strengths. The final piece being to ensure you satisfied your existing customers before ever trying to chase new ones.

Microsoft running “Scroogled” campaigns are a symptom (while Steve Ballmer was in charge) of losing their focus. I met Bill Gates in 1983, and he was a walking encyclopedia of what worked well – and not so well – in competitive PC software products of the day. He could keep going for 20 minutes describing the decision making process of going for a two-button mouse for Windows, and the various traps other vendors had with one or three button equivalents. At the time, it followed through into Microsoft’s internal sales briefing material – sold on their own strengths, and acknowledging competitors with a very balanced commentary. In time, things loosened up and tripping up competitors became a part of their playbook, something I felt a degree of sadness to see develop.

Amazon are much more specific. Start with the customer and work back from there.

Unfortunately, I still see server vendor announcements piling into technologies like “OpenStack” and “Software Defined Networking” where the word “differentiation” features heavily in the announcement text.  This suggests to me that the focus is on competitive vendor positioning, trying to justify the margins required to sustain their current business model, and detached from a specific focus of how a customer needs (and their business environment) are likely to evolve into the future.

With that, I suspect organisations with a laser like focus on the end customer, and who realise which parts of the stack are commoditising (and to follow that to it’s ultimate conclusion), are much more likely to be present when the cost to serve steps off the clifftop and heads down. The real battle is on higher order entities running on the commodity base.

I saw an announcement from Arrow ECS in Computer Reseller News this week that suggested a downturn in their Datacentre Server and Storage Product orders in the previous quarter. I wonder if this is the first sign of the switching into gear of the inevitable downward pricing trend across the IT industry, and especially for its current brand systems and storage vendors.

IT Hardware Vendors clinging onto “Public” and “Hybrid” cloud strategies are, I suspect, the final attempt to hold onto their existing business models and margins while the world migrates to commodity, public equivalents (see my previous post about “Enterprise IT and the Hall of Marbles“).

I also suspect that given their relentless focus on end customer needs, and working back from there, that Amazon Web Services will still be the market leaders as that new landscape unfolds. Certainly shows little sign of slowing down.

12 years of data recording leads to dose of the obvious

ianwaring Fitness, Gym, Medical, Metrics, Statistics, Tableau Leave a comment

Ian Waring Weight Loss Trend Scatter Graph

As mentioned yesterday, I finally got Tableau Desktop Professional (my favourite Analytics software) running on Amazon Workspaces – deployed for all of $35 for the month instead of having to buy my own Windows PC. With that, a final set of trends to establish what I do right when I consistently lose 2lbs/week, based on an analysis of my intake (Cals, Protein, Carbs and Fat) and Exercise since June 2002.

I marked out a custom field that reflected the date ranges on my historical weight graph where I appeared to consistently lose, gain or flatline. I then threw all sorts of scatter plots (like the one above, plotting my intake in long periods where I had consistent weight losses) to ascertain what factors drove the weight changes i’ve seen in the past. This to nominally to settle on a strategy going forward to drop to my target weight as fast as I could in a sustainable fashion. Historically, this has been 2lbs/week.

My protein intake had zero effect. Carbs and Fat did, albeit they tracked the effect of my overall Calorie intake (whether in weight or in the number of Calories present in each – 1g of Carbs = 3.75 Kcals, and 1g of Fat = 9 Kcals; 1g of Protein is circa 4 Kcals). The WeightLossResources recommended split of Kcals from the mix to give an optimum balance in their view (they give a daily pie-chart of Kcals from each) is 50% Carbs, 30% Fat and 20% Protein.

So, what are the take-homes having done all the analysis?

Breathtakingly simple. If I keep my food intake, less exercise calories, at circa 2300-2350 calories per day, I will lose a consistent 2lbs. The exact balance between carbs, protein and fat intake doesn’t matter too materially, as long as the total is close, though my best every long term loss had me running things close to the recommended balance. All eyes on that pie chart on the WLR web site as I enter my food then!

The stupid thing is that my current BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate is the minimum level of energy your body needs when at rest to function effectively including your respiratory and circulatory organs, neural system, liver, kidneys, and other organs) is 2,364, and before the last 12 week Boditrax competition at my gym, it was circa 2,334 or so. Increased muscle through lifting some weights put this up a little.

So, the basic message is to keep what I eat down to the same calorie value, less the calories from any exercise, down to the same level as my BMR, which in turn will track down as weight goes. That sort of guarantees that any exercise I take over and above what I log – which is only long walks with Jane and gym exercise – will come off my fat reserves.

Simple. So, all else being equal, put less food in my mouth, and i’ll lose weight. The main benefit of 12 years of logging my intake is I can say authoritatively – for me – the levels at which this is demonstrably true. And that should speed my arrival at my optimum weight.

Fixed! Tableau on my Mac using Amazon WorkSpaces

ianwaring Amazon, Android, Apple, Fitness, Medical, Microsoft, Software, Tableau Leave a comment

AWS Logo

I found out today that we may need to wait another month for Tableau Desktop Professional for the Mac to be released, and i’ve been eager to finish off my statistical analysis project. I’ve collected 12 years worth of daily food intake courtesy of WeightLossResources, which splits out to calories, carbs, protein, fat and exercise calories – and is tabulated against weekly weight readings.

Google Fusion Tables – in which I did a short online course – can do most things except to calculate and draw a straight line, or exponential equivalent, through a scatter plot. This is meat and drink to Tableau, but which unfortunately (for Mac, Chromebook and iPad user me) runs only on Microsoft Windows.

I got a notification this morning that Amazon Web Services – as promised at their AWS Summit 2014 in London last week – had released Amazon WorkSpaces hosted within Europe. This provisions quite a meaty PC for you, but which you can operate through provided client software on your local PC, Mac, Android Tablet or iPad. There is also a free add-on to sync the content of a local Windows or Mac Directory with the virtual storage on the hosted PC, so you can hook in access to files on your local device if needed. There are more advanced options for corporate users, including Active Directory Support and the ability to use that to sideload apps for a user community – though that is way in advance of what i’m doing here.

There are a number of options, from the “Basic” single CPU, 3.75GB memory, 50GB disk PC up to one with 2 CPUs, 7GB of memory, 100GB of disk and the complete Microsoft Office Professional Suite on board. More here. Prices from $35 to $75/PC per month.

I thought i’d have a crack at provisioning one for the month, and to give me 2 weeks to play with a trial copy of Tableau Desktop Professional (i’ve not used it since V7, and the current release is 8.1). Within 20 minutes of requesting it off my AWS console, I received an email saying it had been provisioned and was ready to go. So…

WorkSpaces Set Up

 

You tell it what you want, and it goes away for 20 minutes provisioning your request (I managed to accidentally do this for a US region, but deleted that and selected Ireland instead – it provisioned just the one in the Ireland datacentre). Once done, it sent me an email with a URL and a registration code for my PC (it will do this for each user if you provision several at once):

AWS WorkSpaces Registration

 

Tap in the registration code from the email received, it does the initial piece of the client end of the configuration, then asks me to login:

AWS Workspaces Login

 

Once i’d done that, it then invited me to install the client software, which I did for Mac OS/X locally, and emailed the links for Android and iOS to my email address to pick up on those devices. For what it’s worth, the Android version said my Nexus 5 wasn’t a supported device (I guess it needs a tablet), but the iOS version installed fine on my iPad Mini.

AWS Workspaces Client Setup

 

And in I went. A Windows PC. Surprisingly nippy, and I felt no real difference between this and what I remember of a local Windows 7 laptop I used to have at Computacenter some 18 months ago now:

AWS Workspaces Microsoft Windows

 

The main need then was to drop a few files onto the hard disk, but I had to go revisit the Amazon WorkSpaces web site and download the Sync package for Mac OS/X. Once installed on my Mac, it asked me for my PC’s registration code again (wouldn’t accept it copy/pasted in on that one screen, so I had to carefully re-enter a short string), asked which local Mac directory I wanted to use to sync with the hosted PC, and off it went. Syncs just like dropbox, took a few minutes to populate that with quite a few files I had sitting there already. Once up, I used the provided Firefox to download Tableau Desktop Professional, the Excel driver I needed (as I don’t have Microsoft Office on my basic version here) and – voila. Tableau running fine on AWS WorkSpaces, on my MacBook Air:

Tableau Desktop Professional Running

 

Very snappy too, and i’m now back at home with my favourite Analytics software of all time – on my Mac, and directly on my iPad Mini also. The latter with impressive keyboard and mouse support, just a two finger gesture (not that one) away at all times.

So, I now have the tools to complete the statistical analysis storyboard of my 12 years of nutrition and weight data – and to set specific calorie and carb content to hit my 2lbs/week downward goal again (i’ve been tracking at only half that rate in the last 6 months).

In the meantime, i’ve been really impressed with Amazon WorkSpaces. Fast, Simple and inexpensive – and probably of wide applicability to lots of Enterprise customers I know. A Windows PC that I can dispose of again as soon as i’ve finished with it, for a grand sum of less than £21 for my months use. Tremendous!

New Learnings, 12 week Boditrax Challenge, still need Tableau

ianwaring Fitness, Google, Gym, Medical, Statistics, Tableau, Training Leave a comment

The Barn Fitness Club Cholsey

One of the wonderful assets at my excellent local gym – The Barn Fitness Club in Cholsey – is that they have a Boditrax machine. This looks like a pair of bathroom scales with metal plates where you put your feet, hooked up to a PC. It bounces a small charge through one foot and measures the signal that comes back through the other. Measuring your weight at the same time and having previously been told your age, it can then work out the composition of your body in terms of fat, muscle, water and bone. The results are dropped on the Boditrax web site, where you can monitor your progress.

For the last 12 weeks, the gym has run a 12 week Boditrax challenge. Fortunately, I pay James Fletcher for a monthly Personal Training session there, where he takes readings using this machine and adjusts my 3x per week gym routine accordingly. The end results after 12 weeks have been (top  graph my weight progress, the bottom my composition changes):

Boditrax Challenge Ian W Weight Tracking

Boditrax Challenge Ian W Final Results

The one difference from previous weight loss programmes i’ve followed is the amount of weight work i’d been given this time around. I used to be always warned that muscle weighs considerably more than fat, so to try to keep to cardio work to minimise both. The thinking these days appears to be to increase your muscle mass a little, which increases your metabolic rate – to burn more calories, even at standstill.

The one thing i’ve done since June 3rd 2002 is to tap my food intake and exercise daily into the excellent Weight Loss Resources web site. Hence I have a 12 year history of exact figures for fat, carbs and protein intake, weight and corresponding weight changes throughout. I used these in a recent Google Course on “Making sense of Data”, which used Google Fusion tables, trying to spot what factors led to a consistent 2lbs/week weight loss.

There are still elements of the storyboard I still need to fit in to complete the picture, as Fusion Tables can draw a scatter plot okay, but can’t throw a weighted trend line through that cloud of data points. This would give me a set of definitive stories to recite; what appears so far is that I make sustainable 2lbs/week losses below a specific daily calorie value if I keep my carbs intake down at a specific level at the same time. At the moment, i’m tracking at around 1lb/week, which is half the rate I managed back in 2002-3 – so i’m keen to expose the exact numbers I need to follow. Too much, no loss; too little, body goes into a siege mentality – and hence the need for a happy medium.

I tried to get a final fix on the exact nett intake and carb levels in Google Spreadsheets, which isn’t so adept at picking data subsets with filters – so you end up having the create a spreadsheet for each “I wonder if” question. So, i’ve largely given up on that until I can get my mits on a Mac version of Tableau Desktop Professional, or can rent a Windows Virtual Desktop on AWS for $30 for 30 days to do the same on it’s Windows version. Until then, I can see the general picture, but there are probably many data points from my 3,800+ weeks of sampled data that plot on top of each other – hence the need for the weighted trend line in order to expose the definitive truth.

The nice thing about the Boditrax machine is that it knows your Muscle and Fat composition, so can give you an accurate reading for your BMR – your Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the minimum level of energy your body needs when at rest to function effectively including your respiratory and circulatory organs, neural system, liver, kidneys, and other organs. This is typically circa 70% of your daily calorie intake, the balance used to power you along.

My BMR according to the standard calculation method (which assumes a ‘typical’ %muscle content) runs about 30 kcals under what Boditrax says it actually is. So, I burn an additional 30 Kcals/day due to my increased muscle composition since James Fletchers training went into place.

Still a long way to go, but heading in the correct direction. All I need now is that copy of Tableau Desktop Professional so that I can work out the optimum levels of calorie and carbs intake to maximise the long term, relentless loss – and to ensure I track at those levels. In the meantime, i’ll use the best case I can work out from visual inspection of the scatter plots.

I thoroughly recommend the Barn Fitness Club in Cholsey, use of their Boditrax machine and regular air time with any of their Personal Trainers. The Boditrax is only £5/reading (normally every two weeks) and an excellent aid to help achieve your fitness goals.

Just waiting to hear the final result of the 12 week Boditrax challenge at the Club – and to hope i’ve done enough to avoid getting the wooden spoon!

Boditrax Challenge Home Page

 

In the meantime, it’s notable that my approx nett calorie intake level (calories eaten less exercise calories) to lose 2lbs/week appears to be my current BMR – which sort of suggests the usual routine daily activity I don’t log (walking around the home, work or shops) is sufficient to hit the fat reserves. An hour of time with Tableau on my data should be enough to confirm if that is demonstrably the case, and the level of carbs I need to keep to in order to make 2lbs/week a relentless loss trend again.

ScratchJr – programming for kids 5-7 – Fully Funded: yay!

ianwaring Amazon, Android, Apple, Kickstarter, Kids, Learning, Software Leave a comment

ScratchJr UI

I’m absolutely delighted to report that ScratchJr – a tablet based system that teaches 5-7 year old kids how to program – duly hit its $80,000 funding goal just after bids closed on Kickstarter. With that, we have a version for the Apple iPad and a version for Android Tablets this year, and work is now underway to produce the associated teaching curriculum aids and materials.

Just waiting to get news of the ScratchJr t-shirt I get in exchange for my $45 contribution (which went via Amazon Payments as soon as the end date and successful funding level had been reached). I’ll order one in a size that should fit our 2-year old Granddaughter (and iPad Mini user) Ruby.

Full text of the announcement from the Project Lead Mitchel Resnick here.

If you haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend watching the video there. It’s an absolute delight to see kids so young speaking so authoritatively about the projects they have created on this platform at such a young age. The next step is to get Primary School teachers in the UK engaged with this; running something like the Education work we executed at Demon Internet (which got free and useful materials into over 95% of UK Secondary Schools for a cost of £50,000, plus £10,000 for associated competition prizes) would be fantastic, though mindful that there are many more primary schools than secondary ones here.

Three year lease, including support, insurance and warranty, for a tablet costs parents or their schools circa £10 per month over that term for an iPad Mini class device. Whether or not kids end up programming, it nevertheless gives them all sorts of other logic/sequencing skills applicable to a wide number of career options later in their lives.

ScratchJr in Use by Pupil

The older sibling product Scratch, the excellent Sugarlabs work (also being implemented on tablets) and Raspberry Pi also have a solid place, albeit slightly higher up the age range.

So, a gift well worth giving in my humble opinion. And kudos to the ScratchJr team for giving us a platform to fire up the imagination of kids from an even earlier age than before.

 

 

Announcing DECola (then compare to how you buy Cola)

ianwaring Android, DEC, Google, Software Leave a comment

Digital Equipment Corp LogoI had another of those days when simple things irritate me – nominally because the designers of some software went off designing something I use with no appreciation of what happens when someone just wants to get something done.

The first was to add some capabilities to a web site to allow users to avoid creating yet another identity to login to one of my customers web sites; so, let’s give them the ability to login using their Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Twitter credentials instead. Simples! I put in the add-in to WordPress to enable this, which then left me to register as a developer on each site, and retrieve an API key and an API secret (effectively the username and password that identifies my login application as being interfaced by programmer me). Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – easy peasy. Google? I gave up after trying to find the API secret for an hour.

The second one was this morning, with my valiantly searching for a proper recycling bin to dispose of two spent HP ink cartridges in Reading while Jane was shopping elsewhere in the town. I thought she was a long time contacting me, so I fished my Nexus 5 phone out of my pocket, and lo behold – a bar on my screen indicating a missed call from Jane. I didn’t have my glasses on, so just pressed the notification expecting it to immediately return her call. What did it do? I got a complete (and to me, fuzzy mess) of a screenful of options, which offered me opportunities to contact her in a wide variety of ways – but no obvious one that suggested it would place a phone call. So, out came my glasses, looked at the screen, and I still couldn’t work it out. SMS, Hangout (video call!), Email… then in one area was her name (repeated twice), one with her current phone number, one with her old O2 phone number – so I pressed what I thought was her current one. Bingo – up popped her picture, and it duly rang her.

WTF. Isn’t it obvious that if I have a missed call, the thing that 99.9% of users seeing it will do is to call right back? After a brief wish that the 20 year old Google employee that wrote the code should be sentenced to wearing glasses to degrade their sight like someone a bit older, and to test the usual usage patterns for a day or two with them on, I thought – this reminds me at some things at Digital.

One personal case was doing the DECdirect Software Catalogue – where we aimed to take the time to look up the part number and price of any of the 250+ products we sold (and over 40,000 part numbers!) to something that could be achieved within the normal attention span of a good salesperson (around 30 seconds). We distilled that down until we hit that 30 second goal every time, often faster.

Ken Olsen (CEO at Digital for 16 of the 17 years I worked there, and many years before that) had a habit of issuing long parables, some of which we spent some time on trying to decode into applicability for us working at a Computer Manufacturer. He would decide he needed to dig a short trench in his back garden in Lincoln (Massachusetts in this case), pop into the local Ford tractor dealer, and try to buy something to give him what he wanted. I should probably note here that he was a Main Board Director at Ford at the time also. The following Monday would come out a parable about going through a tortuous sales process, where he was expected to know the dimensions of the trench and all sorts of detail about the type of soil – and that even before he got subjected to all the different tractor models and payment options available. He closed off the text saying that he often sees that type of situation inside our company, and that we need to fix it.

So, off went a debating round trying to assess what he really meant. In this case, I think he ended up running an offsite (known there as a “Woods Meeting” – due to it often being held in a hut in the New England Forests) and getting the assembled VP’s to order a Minicomputer from Manufacturing, which was duly delivered to where they were meeting. And then he invited them to go build it from the parts shipped, just like a customer. You didn’t have to wait more than a day before all the VP Management edicts started being rained down across the organisation – to vastly simplify the whole installation process for customers.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer anyone at Google a visit to such a Woods Meeting. All I can do is to give one lurid example from someone who got fed up with the complex way we used to tell salespeople how to order a system for their customers. That person wrote a spoof article, styled in exactly the same typical structure as articles that appeared in the Monthly Field Sales Magazine, “Sales Update”. In it, they announced a new bottled Cola drink called DECola (you may need to click on the image to make the text big enough to read):

DECola Sales Update Article

DECola Sales Update Page 2 - Ordering Table

If I ever got close to developers of the Google Login API/Secret keys developers website, or of the “Missed Call” flow on an Android handset, i’d be sorely tempted to send them these two pages, Ken Olsen style.