#RequiredReading: Stuck on Type? (and GOIN’ POSTAL!)… More on MBTI…

Apropos MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and WHY for some Social Media is just NOT goin’ to EVER cut it… “… Introverts must OFTEN feel like the Old Woman whom the well-intentioned Boy Scout kept trying to help across the street; the only problem? She just DID NOT WANT TO GO!” (Tieger & Barron-Tieger, 1998 “The Art Of Speed Reading People)

So yeah, by now I’m also thinkin’ of dear ‘zombies’ such as James B Dreisbach and Juancho Arraiz (yeah, u owe me a phone call, buddy!) and of course Ellen Soto and maybe even Adriana Mihaly et al… Gotta finish this though… “Extraverts are NOTORIOUS for trying to get their INTROVERTED friends, coworkers, spouses or children INVOLVED in activities they would rather AVOID… ” (SOUNDS familiar, y’all ‘E’ Types?)… (ibid) #ShallBlogAboutThisSnippetNext (And what would Kare Anderson say ’bout this too? Mind-Mappin’ wise?)

Voila!

… now try to mind-map THAT!… (Hint: if you read the book, you’ll notice that I DID alter the sequence for “punchline” effects… hehehe!)

[CHORTLES]

Oh! What Thomas Mann would do to be here on FB-land!

So yeah, who’d have thunk that Mind-Mappin’, Word-Games and Etymology, all COULD be combined in a famous Celebrity! (yeah, I’m still on that MBTI rant… get it? D’Onofrio? … check your ‘Saints’… got it? if not, ask Dr. Schmidt why he thought it ‘vital’ for me to find this pic?)(Well, besides my obvious fan-ship of the third sibling in the L&O Syndication Family, of course!)

[L&O SOUND FX... FLUTES... INTRO JINGLE...]

[GUFFAWS]

… and DEFINITELY a reason to study type? why some just go POSTAL when FORCED into Societal Situations that just DO NOT FIT? (Credit to Stanley Kubrick, though, for such a FORCEFUL illustration… ready for more Vincent?)

Seriously!… as The Tiegers continue around the same page…

“It’s not always possible to look to your work to determine your type, because many people’s work is not welll suited to their preferences. Frequently, Extraverts end up doing jobs [Yup, what is the army after all but just another job, for many?] better suited to Introverts and vice versa. If you are an Introvert, imagine what it would feel like t work as a tour guide or receptionist, where all day, each day, your job required you to meet and greet dozens of strangers, engage them in small talk, and make them feel comfortable.  Now for you Extraverts, imagine a job as a researcher, working on one project for weeks at a time, completely alone, without the infusion of energy you get from interacting with other people, or talking about different projects. Neither is a bad job, but both are potential prescriptions for frustration and BURNOUT [CAPS MINE!] if held by people not naturally suited to them” (Tieger and Barron-Tieger, “The Art of Speed Reading People”, 1998, p 15-16)

WHOA!… I think I’m actually ALSO making a case for MARTIAL DISCIPLINE?

[STANDS IN ATTENTION]

[CRIES OUT!]

“All preeeeesent and accounted for!!!!’

Need the IMDB Snippet to get this into your NetFlix queue? (Yup, assume some millenials may see Kubrick as some of us see Welles, too!)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093058/

And the Wiki-Zeitgeist? WOW

A two-segment look at the effect of the military mindset and war itself on Vietnam era Marines. The first half follows a group of recruits in basic training under the command of the punishing Sgt. Hartman. The second half shows one of those recruits, Joker, covering the war as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, focusing on the Tet offensive.  Written by Scott Renshaw {as.idc@forsythe.stanford.edu}

A two-segment story that follows young men from the start of recruit training in the Marine Corps to the lethal cauldron known as Vietnam. The first segment follows Joker, Pyle and others as they progress through the hell of USMC boot-camp at the hands of the colorful, foul-mouthed Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. The second begins in Vietnam, near Hue, at the time of the Tet Offensive. Joker, along with Animal Mother, Rafterman and others, face threats such as ambush, booby traps, and Viet Cong snipers as they move through the city. Written by Derek O’Cain

Full Metal Jacket begins by following the trials and tribulations of a platoon of fresh Marine Corps recruits focusing on the relationship between Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and Privates Pyle and Joker. We see Pyle grow into an instrument of death as Hartman has forseen of all of his recruits. Through Pyle’s torment and Joker’s unwillingness to stand up against it the climax of part one is achieved with all three main characters deciding their fates by their action or inaction. The second chapter of Full Metal Jacket delves into Joker’s psyche and the repeated referal to the fact that he joined the Corps to become a killer. When his mostly behind the scenes job as a combat correspondant is interfered with by the Tet offensive he is thrust into real combat and ultimately must choose if he really is a killer. Written by FMJ_Joker

During the Vietnam War private ‘Joker’ -the narrator, a future author- and his class are put through US marines training in gunnery sergeant Hartman’s verbally and physically abusive, sex-obsessed style. It’s all far worse for fat simpleton Pyle, who keeps doing everything wrong, even when gentle Joker is appointed his personal tutor, till peer pressure becomes group bullying. On their last day on Paris Island, when everyone graduates, the psychological time-bomb explodes. Only intellectual Joker isn’t assigned to jungle duty but as military war correspondent. He’s unwilling to play the deceptive propaganda game and violence catches up even in the ‘safe’ city Hue. Written by KGF Vissers (IMDB.Com, 2009)

Quotes?

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: I’m Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor, from now on you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and the last word out of your filthy sewers will be “Sir”. Do you maggots understand that?

[recruits answers: Sir. Yes Sir!]

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Bullshit I can’t hear you. Sound off like you got a pair!

[recruits repeats with a louder tone]

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human, fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit. Because I am hard you will not like me. But the more you hate me the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?

More?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093058/quotes

(So can this still be called a “Wall Photo”?)

Nupe… now it’s a “Blog” Photo… with a Tweet!

#SpeedBlogging, anyone? with a #Pictorial Twist? Apropos #Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, MBTI (Myers-Briggs) etc… http://bit.ly/33eDoL #FB

#RequiredReading: Time.Com’s Article on Google Wave (GroupWare)

Apropos all the Brouhaha related to Google Wave… here’s some from the Time.Com People… hope it helps!

“Google Wave is, in short, a remarkably full-featured collaboration and communication tool, powerful enough for enterprise customers and easy enough for civilians. It’s also a warning shot across the bow of pretty much every software company anywhere. It’s amazing how many people’s grills Google is getting up into with this single product. It’s real time like AIM and Twitter (and it can talk to Twitter by importing and exporting tweets).

It’s social and shares media, like Facebook. Anybody who makes an e-mail client or collaboration software should be paying attention to Wave. This is vintage Google: give away a product that does stuff your competitors charge money for, thereby burnishing your public image and, at the same time, sapping your competitors’ will to live.

The Next Email App?

But Wave isn’t actually an e-mail killer. In practice, it’s more like an insanely rich IM client. E-mail is asynchronous; you can wait an hour or (if you are, like me, a bad person) a week to answer it.

But because Wave operates in real time, it demands immediate attention like an IM or a phone call or, for that matter, a crying baby. When Wave is up, it’s hard to focus on anything else. That isn’t a defect, but it does narrow the scope of its usefulness. Getting more information right away isn’t always the most efficient way to work.” (Time. Com, 2009)

So here is also the official “What is Google Wave” video from Google’s Website:  http://wave.google.com/

Commenting: “The future is just like the past (but shinier)” Seth Godin’s Blog

Well, I guess Mr. Godin’s so famous now he does not need comments? BLISSFUL!

Seth Godin

@ SG

“What are you going to do about it? If you were starting your business today, knowing what you know now, how would you do things (very) differently?” (Godin, 2009)

There are key adages in the history of business that should not pass with the epochal changes in technology.

One of those, and how I plan to run my business, is the one about Overhead being the #1 Killer of Small Business and Startups.

I mean, with all the free and powerful applications currently being available and hosted all over the place, I’m sure a bit of research may yield what we once used to call “Shrink Wrapped” solutions to most any quandary; and if not, I’m certain that the codebase and/or hosting of more complicated solutions ought to be at a price point that would make custom code be as poisonous as spending your whole ad budget in a SuperBowl commercial…

IMHO, of course!

William Safire, RIP, 1929-2009

• “Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.”
• “Saber cómo funcionan las cosas es la base para la apreciación, y es por tanto una fuente de placer civilizado.”
• “Zu wissen, wie die Dinge funktionieren ist die Basis für Wertschätzung, und ist somit eine Quelle der zivilisierten Freude.”

William Safire's Dictionary of Politics

RT @FJPalacio “I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.” Apropos William Safire, RIP, 1929-2009 #Quote http://bit.ly/1FcWgz

Some videos from YouTube:

William Safire http://bit.ly/xgEFC

Bill Safire: “It Was My Kitchen…” http://bit.ly/16QCdM

William Safire Memorial Speech http://bit.ly/15XSUx

“Democrats vs. Republicans”:William Safire and Ted Sorenson http://bit.ly/gkd0d

“Youth Involvement”: William Safire and Ted Sorenson http://bit.ly/1Gb8Xd

Pas De Deux: Carrier or Device? on iPhone’s Bandwidth

Oinc, Oinc? (and where's my MMS?)

Been mulling this one over the whole weekend, thanks to an FB Friend’s Feedback on earlier postings about the issues raised by so-called “Bandwidth Hogs”

Upon my venturing to read into the future of these issues, specifically into the market’s future being segmented much like PC’s and Apples are today now, I asked:

“… if you had a chance to look at the latest blog entry… did you read me dissing Sprint for what amounted to a weekend incommunicado on my Blackberry? and this is about fifty miles from their corporate HQ?”

And about Palm, Nokia, Motorola and all the others: I feel that this is a time of consolidation, and that the main beneficiary, since you’re also reading ‘em trades, will be RIM; I mean, a recent issue of Fortune mentioned that since the iPhone’s launch, sales have tripled worldwide to about 3.4 billion USD, and they hold here in the U.S. a steady 50% market share…

… and just by the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen in my immediate family down in Venezuela, both millenials, boomers and x’ers appear to be craving for RIM’s products, as after all – and I’m not 100% sure about what I’m going to say – the iPhone has a very limited footprint, network-wise, given this exclusive deal with at&t.

Bottom line?

I can easily see the same pattern we had with apples and pc’s a couple of decades ago, with RIM in this case playing the role of Microsoft, fighting tooth and nail to keep their corporate clients on price and base functionality, whilst apple caters to those well-heeled enough to pay extra for the ease of use and “no need to compromise” as the most recent ad implies…

End of the day, competition may breed innovation, but consumers may simply decide to vote with their wallets (i.e. Verizon’s current BOGO on BB’s) and polarize the market with a couple of dominant brands that offer an installed base of mature and/or properly developed applications, which at the end of the day, are what have made IBM, Microsoft and many other stalwarts what they are today…

IMHO, of course!

To these comments, my friend stated in various responses…:

“Apple products have never been about feature lists. In fact, they’re often well behind on features. They just do what they do better. But, yeah, AT&T has been a royal pain in the butt. They had no idea what theywere signing up for with the iPhone. Way beyond their capacity… [There are] lots of elements at play: networks, devices, OS’s, apps. Still such a developing market, it’s too early to read any tea leaves… And how does app development and availability contribute? BTW and for the record, I think competition is good.” (JL, 2009)

... So what's MMS for, again?

Development and Availability are key, definitely, and when one ponders the true monetary factors (i.e. ROI, TCO) of the SDLC aspects (Sofware Development Life Cycle) that are involved in supporting TRUE applications, not just betas of widgets and gadgets a single guy is developing, but the threaded and secure kind of applications that are the lifeblood of a larger outfit, is where we may see the real battle lines drawn…

… and sadly, as though it may not be the best nor the sleekest, we have somehow managed to endure decades of dominance of the Windows setup, which if you recall, had a lot to do with the binary setup Apple chose NOT being able to communicate with the ASCII that mainframes are still using; in other words, sometimes a legacy application, given its higher monetary value, will trump all other considerations, as the cost of migrating an existing app … to an entirely new platform, when sometimes all you’re truly doing with the app is basic data entry (I/O) and querying; there, as the current market share numbers attest, the established and mature apps that still run on not only mainframes, but mid-range setups such as an AS400, an NT4 server running SQL Server 7, etc, whose data is valid and whose cost has been paid for for a while, may hold back the lines as moving everything over to a better yet more expensive platform.

Still Smokin'!

All about the money, dude, and as you know, BB/RIM is already cranking up its development efforts in a way where developers benefit more than them; which echoes what Microsoft has done to keep such a dominant presence in the market.

The best part? That all these back and forths, as you mentioned elsewhere, push innovation into new areas, DO give us better choices, as perhaps an SMB about to start operations may eventually find that using Open Source and an Apple Back End infrastructure DOES payoff in the long run – given, of course, that they can find the developers, first, and second, that they can pay them their fees.

So what do you think, reader?

• Would the lines still be drawn as they are today, as cheaper yet more “compromising” platforms allow for legacy applications to survive for a few more years?
• And is the availability of programmers still the core issue when it comes to embracing any platform?

From Fast Company, an “Overture to a Complete Educational Remix”

Based on a recent article disseminated via Facebook’s Home Stream, Fast Company magazine put out an article on the current movement aimed at integrating the free content some institutions have already posted on the web, and how such content could someday be integrated into a degree, in ways hitherto unexplored in higher education.

“A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix” http://bit.ly/l63Td @FastCompany

8:25 AM Sep 4th from web

The article, written by Anya Kamenetz, actually contains the word “Web-Savvy Edupunks” in its title; and with the key word being transforming, became a must-read for the author, in spite of it being a rather lengthy four pages online; was it worth it? You betcha, as I for one became a believer upon enrolling at University of Phoenix, currently the largest private university in the U.S., and a virtual unknown less than a decade ago, and whose business blueprint is now being copied by most every other outfit out there that plans to stay in business in the near future.

After a 1996 comparison with higher university being much like a string quartet, Kamenetz reminds us of the speed of change, by stating: “Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.” (Kamenetz, Fast Company, 2009)

Personally, I think the issue of cost is what will make these efforts viable, as with most every other area of our lives that the internet has touched, said cost benefits find their biggest impact in those places where issues of dire poverty and basic access to life’s conveniences are perhaps even seen as a luxury, as was my case when I dropped out of college here in the U.S., only to find that even though it was public and free, higher education in my country was actually more ‘expensive’, in many ways, than the humble community college I had to leave behind – and then, remain a dropout for over a decade, as I had to forfeit getting a degree for the dangers of bankruptcy and foreclosure that loomed over the family’s finances.

So it is easy to imagine, that outside the geographic borders of the U.S.A, and much like services such as Pay-Pal have blurred the lines of banking and finance at the microeconomic level, the thirst for these materials, now freely available to anyone who thinks of himself as an autodidact, and perhaps ready to be shaped in the next iteration of old fashioned “correspondence school”, can be.

To close this blog post, here is a quote that summarizes the thrust of the effort:

Sharpen away!

‘”The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros,” says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, “is the biggest virgin forest out there.” Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest.’ (ibid)

So therefore, seeing that an institution of the stature of MIT is the one leading the charge, that very soon us foreign students may be able to telecommute to Cambridge, and for a fraction of the effort, obtain a bonafide U.S. higher education certification.

Can only picture the impact in the economies of emerging nations, as again, a large percentage of international students come precisely from those places where the watering holes of knowledge can sometimes be as parched – as a summery stretch of the Kalahari.

Luddites Redux: The Social Media Chapter

Luddite Redux?

Personally, I find it rather disheartening to hear these “Luddite” kind of arguments being thrown out at new technology, specially when some of us are aware of the fact that the increasing number of users is merely fueling the ability of the developers to crank out more and more features, and getting some decision makers to start thinking about these “fads” as real business tools, which can help people communicate with each other – and make money in the process.

Today’s argument came from what I’ve come to consider as the proverbial well, Twitter:

@SocialMediaList Social networking: Filling a need or creating one? http://bit.ly/3o5k49 …. 3 minutes ago from twitterfeed

Upon review of the article on the link, penned by Dave Churchill, and after finding that his main angle merely derived on some early adopters now perhaps having moved on to the latest and greatest craze – precisely because of them being early adopters, perhaps?

So this simple fact gave Dave the ammunition to tell himself that, “For my part, I’m going to risk life without social networking…” an argument much like the ones we used to hear – and still do, believe me! – about more mature technologies such as email, texting, and uploading videos to the web (which according to the heads at Google, is not only worth the hassle and money of expanding one of the largest infrastructures ever deployed out in the cloud, as the adage about “a thousand words” echoes in the clips and snippets loaded to it every minute) which, if we are to believe half the hype of certain product launches, are key to key consumer demographics.

Point being, every time I personally hear someone decrying the push others have imposed on them, as in Dave’s case it was a matter of both challenging his age, but also, challenging his need to expand outside the boundaries of what he used to consider to be his job, I can vividly depict the many instances in the history of technology, specially in the last few centuries, where a group of established users challenged the advantages of newer technologies.

Not that I was glad to read his work on the online edition of his publication, which allowed me to get in touch with his point of view at the click of a mouse, but that as we all hear the bad news about the newspaper industry settling into the latter chapters of its history, and as many others have been reshaped by the Internet, is there room nowadays to disregard the advent of such changes?

I for one try to at least find out the “angle” or better, the rationale behind why not only millions of users are congregating in these “watering holes” of information, but also, why are corporations putting their money, sometimes subtly or sometimes with a lot of gusto and bravado, behind them?

In the case of Social Media, a recent article in Fortune stated, much like I’ve been mentioning since I started getting more and more into the application functionality of Facebook, that the time for corporations to start asking for these feature sets in their Enterprise Groupware was near, as those of us in technology know how comfortable it would be to migrate from a large and distributed Exchange organization, for example, onto an SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, the newest moniker for the old ASP, or Application Service Provider business model of the late nineties), thin-client and mobile enabled private, secure version of that same software that we learned to use so well, whilst being facetious with our friends?

[CRACKBERRI BEEPS…]

[ANOTHER FACEBOOK NOTIFICATION AWAITS]

… or was it a work notification in there?

Para la version en castellano, aqui

// Share on Facebook

#InCaseYouMissedIt: @ExaminerCom: #SoFresh Tampa: February 8th, Calling All Local Social Media Pros & Marketers

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This note was originally posted on Examiner.Com

This is a quick post based on a Facebook Event created this morning to invite/rally Locals to attend the closest iteration of the Social Fresh Event in Tampa… based on earlier articles posted here, I’m sure y’all can see the value in terms of Networking, Learning and Face-to-Face interaction with those pushing the envelope in the industry…

First I tweeted out the event…

• Via #FB: http://bit.ly/5wP71Y for #SoFla Locals (I.e. #SMCSFL, #SMCPBC and #MMS Tweeps) attend @SoFresh Tampa 02/08/10 (Either Carpool/Bus?)

And the event page on Facebook actually reads.

Hola!

Are you heading to Tampa for #SoFresh on February 8th?

We are trying to rally a few locals here in SoFla to see if we can either carpool, or better yet, hire a bus to take us back and forth, ought to be more affordable than staying there overnight; hafta leverage the proximity, right?

Don’t know what SoFresh is? Cruise was a BLAST, and this ought to be too!

** Social Fresh Website at: http://socialfresh.com/tampa/

**When?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

7am to 6:30pm +/- Happy Hour

**Where?

Doubletree Hotel Tampa Westshore

4500 West Cypress Street

Tampa, FL 33607

Tel: 1-813-879-4800

Fax: 1-813-873-1832

** Social Fresh Tampa Speakers

Social Fresh flagship events will have on average 30-35 speakers split between two rooms of content, stand alone featured speakers and panels. The below list is just the start of who will be joining us in Tampa.

Check out http://socialfresh.com/speakers for a look at all past SoFresh speakers.

So I hope this is a good, advance notice, a sort of “New Year’s Resolution” for those working in the field…

Saludos!

20091112-SoFreshCruise-DepartureDayAtSeaW#Gr8TweepsChillaxin-WelcomeBy@SoCruise_EOS5D_FACEBOOK_ – Images by Francisco Palacio

Want to review the whole event? sure! here’s the stash at my blog