This is a good take on something I’ve been advocating for a long time. Wearing both the security and network manager hats as I do it’s useful to remember the concept of the C-I-A triangle from your CISSP exam. The A stands for “availability”, something a lot of security professionals forget about. To many see “confidentiality” and “integrity” as far more important. It kind of reminds me of the three branches of the US government. “Availability” is the Supreme Court of security.

The three make more of a Venn diagram, really. The sweet spot is where all are in balance is what we should strive for as security professionals.

Putting my network manager hat on, the triangle is more about performance, resilience, and value. I don’t use cost as a metric for a variety of reasons, which will make for an interesting post on it’s own. Yet again, where the three overlap is the sweet spot for network availability.

The most fascinating aspect to these in my organization is the fact that the argument for both security and network are basically the same – what do you, the customer, want to pay for insurance that your location will stay up and running through most critical events?

Interestingly, it just occurs to me that in both areas simplicity is critical to success. I’ve seen severely over-engineered network setups meant to provide redundancy only to have the actual outcome assure that the network is more vulnerable to outage. The same happens with security. Labyrinthine machinations usually keep people from doing their work and dives users to find ways around.

What do you think about resiliency and simplicity as the aspirational end-game of security and networking?

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I needed this rest. I’ve walked what feels like one end of the island to the other. In reality I’ve just ambled about the north end and the large shopping center by the East Hotel hunting for Dim Sum for lunch.

The dim sum place I found, called Maxim’s, had a massive wait and a huge crowd out front. The biggest advantage of traveling solo is the ease at which one can get a table at almost any restaurant. Thus after the hostess and I spoke foreign languages at each other for a while she scribbled some numbers on my table wait ticket and pointed me into the joint. I was the only westerner in the cavernous establishment. The carts of soup and sides and baskets of bundled deliciousness pushed by my table every few minutes.

I found a store, Uniqlo, that had some nice clothes, but I rank a XXL by the local standards – a size too far. While my ego isn’t keen on that as I’ve dropped a lot of weight, my shoulders and arms do not lie. I did manage to find some tee shirts the kids will love. Hong Kong has no sales tax and the cost of goods is cheap to the US dollar in my estimation, so a double bonus shopping round for me.

My hotel is new. My room, a modest number according to the website, made awesome by the corner placement. It doesn’t take much effort to see out to the harbor even though I have no direct view. Looking out over the sea of high-rise towers with their dangling drip dry clothes and precariously placed air conditioner units is amazingly hypnotizing and strangely beautiful. Care is required to avoid fixating on the A/C units’ tilt angle as my fear of heights will cause the tickle in my tummy.

Speaking of Victoria Harbor, which I wasn’t, I woke early and after a light breakfast at the hotel headed out to walk the park alongside the harbor. It was foggy, gray, overcast, drizzling, and in all other ways not the picture of a walking tour. However, the roads and paths are well-marked and clean. The weather certainly didn’t keep the locals at bay. Many teams or crew or whatever you call a gathering of T’ai Chi practitioners were practicing their T’ai Chi in various little covered enclaves and nooks throughout the entire windy green-scape.

I took many pictures and will upload them as soon as I get to a place with strong wifi. My photography was a little shaky because of the fog but also the many cups of strong black coffee I had today.

My flight over was the picture of accidental awesomeness. The plane, a Boeing 777, was only 2/3 full. Quite a few people were upgraded to first and business class. I was not one of the upgraded. My ticket fare class was too economy for such things. Since my ticket booked economy plus, basically proving a few more precious inches of leg room, it was not too much a disappointment.

Once the boarding doors closed it was no disappointment at all.

The two people booked next to me upgraded, so I had free unfettered reign over a full three seat row for the 15+ hour flight. I found a way to stay buckled and lay down for some drowsy naps on the flight. There was an inebriated southern gentleman in the row ahead, and at one point he stood up to chat with me. He, undeterred by my diligent typing on my laptop, saw no resistance to chit-chat by my ears holding my earbuds, earbuds piping podcasts into my head. Because that’s what people do, I stopped what I was doing and removed my headphones to talk. I’m not sure what we talked about. I think it was about buying fabric and North Carolina (though with his accent I would have put him in Georgia) and going to parties and jet lag.

The departure was 15:25 Thursday Eastern Time, and arrival scheduled for 20:45 Friday China Time. I strategically slept little (a lucky bout of insomnia) the night before, about 5 hours, and then did my dozes on the plane. I only had two beers (one before the flight) and two glasses of wine during the first meal, then only water. When we arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00, I was still sleepy. A longer than expected taxi ride after a longer than it should have been immigration clearing brought me to my hotel right around 21:00. Within the hour I was in bed and asleep. I woke to my alarm at 06:00 local time. I love how a small amount of planning and a bit of good luck eliminated my jet lag for this trip’s front end. We’ll see how it goes for the return.

The one thing that didn’t go well for this trip was that I didn’t realize my flight to Shanghai Sunday is earlier than the one I had asked for. Moving to a later flight would only cost over $1,000 US dollars, so I’ll head out tomorrow morning.

I took my light travel packing to a new high in low weight, practicality, and planning. It’s an 11 day trip, but 9 days when the flights factor in. I have two Land’s End blue no iron button downs, two pairs of LL Bean trousers – one khaki and the other olive, one J Crew black corduroy blazer, one black and one brown leather pair of Merrill barefoot shoes, my Col. Littleton hat, a Nike navy golf pull-over, and five sets of under garments. The joy of this is that, other than the hat and shoes and maybe the blazer, none of the rest of it needs to come back with me. The trousers still look okay in passing but are on their last legs (ha!). The shirts are okay but I don’t care for no iron shirts in general. The blazer I picked up at Salvation Army for $5, I think.

The Macbook Air, iPad2, Canon T3i, Kindle Touch, and iPhones will come back with me, but as a group are pretty light weight and easy to carry around. Add in the cables and such and the toiletry kit and I made it here in two underpacked bags. That let me bring over some Michigan treats for my coworkers in Shanghai. It also means I will have a lot of room to bring things back.

Back to Hong Kong, the sheer number of kid playgrounds and elderly exercise kiosks would put Starbucks or McDonald’s to shame. Not that there aren’t plenty of those here, too, but there is prime real estate taken up by parks and open spaces and cushioned playgrounds. They’re used, too.

There was one stop where the exercise equipment wasn’t just for the elderly. There were two Americans (by the sound of them) teaching a fitness class. Whatever they were teaching it is working. Everyone listening to them with rapt attention before eagerly implementing the softly barked instructions were fit to the point of being ripped.

As I’m typing this there is a little boy sitting at a toy piano singing “B.I.N.G.O.” as loud as he can while banging his hands on the impotent keyboard, just as happy as a clam.

Since I’m rambling on my recollections so far, I wish someone in that dim sum place had spoken some English. There was one dish I had that looked incredibly disgusting. It was, by far, the best thing I ate there.

Oh, and a note to people with braces traveling here – beware of the foul with the bones still in it. The last thing I ate at Maxim’s was chicken (I think) with the bones still in. One might be able to gnaw past the bones, but the bone shards are hard to extricate.

In my wanderings I went off of the beaten tourist path. There were a maze of twisty roads, all alike. The stalls sold everything. There were butchers, places that roasted chicken and ducks, fruit shops, spice vendors, convenience stores, hardware stores, street food vendors, appliance repair, and maybe a dozen other types of shops in 20 foot wide storefronts spilling out on the already narrow sidewalks.

One woman at a fish shop on a corner, with fish so fresh they were still flipping and flopping on their ice bed, hollered “Hello” to me and waved me over. She was trying to sell me something but kept pressing these little tasty morsels from the postage stamp of a kitchen into my hands. It was great, but once she realized I wasn’t planning on taking seafood with me back to my hotel (would people really do that other than Umberto Eco?) she focused her tractor beam elsewhere and I was free to depart.

I found the local fire engine company, ambulance dispatch, police barracks, and a number of primary schools. Most surprising about that was seeing all of these uniformed children heading off to school on a Saturday. Well, actually the most surprising part was that they were smiling.

I had planned for one aspect of Hong Kong – they drive like the Brits do, on the wrong side of the road from the wrong seat in the car. While I am not driving here I will cross the street. My attention on looking right once while crossing blinded me to the minivan coming from the left on what was in fact a two way street.

I presumed that people would walk having people pass on the right as well, but that seems to be a myth. Old women would glare at me while they continued their forward progress assuming I would move out of their way, which I did.

What else?

There is a preponderance of western coffee shops. If you’re here for a bit buying a wifi pass would be a good idea. There is wifi everywhere. Take the train instead of taxis to and from the airport. If you do take taxis go for the more expensive but faster tunnel and bridge options. You can buy umbrellas almost everywhere, so presume the weather here will be at least a bit wet and humid.

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; org-capture
~F9::
If WinExist("ahk_class Emacs")
{
WinActivate
Send ^{c}
Send {c}
}
else
{
Run "C:\emacs-24.0.90\bin\runemacs.exe"
WinWaitActive, emacs
Send ^{c}
Send {c}
}
return
;

I have Ctrl-c c set up as the org-capture shortcut. I know there’s another option through something called org-protocol that might work better.

I just got it puzzled out, so I don’t know what my mileage will be. But I’m pretty jazzed at the prospects. Comments to the code might be forthcoming.

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Anyway, somewhere along the way Chrome became the OS default browser. I didn’t want that, so I change the default in “Default Programs” in Windows 7. The trouble was, the one application (Lotus Notes 8.5.2) that I needed to have open IE by default wasn’t. It wouldn’t let go of Chrome.

I reflected on this. It could be a philosophical stand by IBM against Microsoft, but this seems somehow an unlikely and obscure venue for battle.

Instead it turns out to be a bit of bad programming that points to some Registry Entries that don’t get updated when you change your defult browser. It took me a long time to fins the answer, but find it I did.

IBM described it here. In short, you need to:

Manually modify the following registry keys to remove Chrome and
point it to
iexplore.exe:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command\

HKCU\Software\Classes\http\shell\open\command\
HKCU\Software\Classes\https\shell\open\command\

… and from there you should be golden. If you want to change your browser to Firefox or back to Chrome I imagine you’ll have to edit those entries again. When I edited my registry (and you will make backups, won’t you?) only two of the four entries had to be changed.

Enjoy!

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I use Emacs‘ Org-mode for my GTD workflow. Emacs is ubiquitous for me on my computers. Org-mode is an add-on that I place a lot of stock in for information management and GTD. Mobileorg, the method/app that gets the Org-mode data to and from smartphones and tablets, is installed on my mobile devices.

Right now I use Org-mode mostly for work. Everything is in three basic files: inbox.org for capture, notes.org for note handling, and todo.org for task handling. These are more theoretical than practical. For example, I configured the org-capture function in org-mode to completely miss the inbox and place captured notes and tasks into their respective files. They should go instead into the inbox where I daily and weekly review and refile.

I also need my personal life captured in here. The line between personal and business time is beyond blurry. It’s more of a wind blown wave in the sand. Because of that and the highly similar nature of my day – it’s usual if not common for me to step out of the office for an hour or so to run an errand while I can be up the wee hours in my home office or hotel room working on budgets – I need to reflect my whole life in there and obliterate the microscopic distinction between the two. Plus my work life is generally more interesting of the two these days. Correcting that is a task in the new system.

This leaves me with a few open questions I’ve been pondering for a spell:

1. Is org-mode the right choice?
2. Is a one large file approach, several files approach, or a file per topic/project approach going to work out the best for me based on my current understanding and assumptions?
3. How will I share this information with others as needed?
4. How important are contexts in this new mix? For instance, will I care if I’m in the office or at home when doing most tasks? Do I care about a phone context since I always have at least one phone nearby? Same with a computer (though a keyboard context for writing might be good).
5. How much of the rest of my time is spent in Emacs?
6. How to keep safe, secure, and available?

The last shall be the first, the first shall be the second, and the rest shall fall where they may.

6 – I will keep my org files in Wuala. My mobileorg publishing will be done with Dropbox. Both are cross platform and cross OS options. Wuala is encrypted for data in transit and data at rest with me holding the keys. Dropbox isn’t as secure, but it is the only method I can make work of disseminating the data between my device platforms. Mobileorg allows for simple encryption for the data in transit. I hope the developers continue to improve it and maybe offer different cloud storage options. I don’t like using external services for such things. There is no similar solution in-house, and no explicit prohibition of a public option for tangentially relevant data. Until there is a viable internal option I am using the tools that are available. Having two separate solutions will allow provider diversity, though I could integrate an internal SharePoint option later. I continue to take appropriate actions, such as checks for data integrity and

1- I think Org-mode and Emacs will stay my tools of choice, at least for now. I need to affix GTD as a habit more than I have. The tool used is largely irrelevant. When I bust out org-mode I not only feel like I have a better grasp on what I am doing, I actually accomplish things in a more strategic fashion. This is especially true in comparison to my Inbox. I always get burned when I use my Inbox as my todo list.

5 – Quite a lot of my time is spent in Emacs, actually, considering that my technical role is wafer thin. It is almost always running. Probably my best use is again with org-mode, but for doing presentations. I like drafting it in org-mode before subjecting it to MS PowerPoint or Keynote. It’s my external editor for Lotus Notes and my default for many file types in Windows. I used to use it for my Twitter client. I should dust that off. Emacs’ w3 is a great distraction-free web browser.

4 – I will ditch contexts in my GTD except for two – detached and keyboard. “Detached” (or maybe untethered) is for those times when I don’t need a network connection to work. These contexts should have all of the information needed stored locally. The other, keyboard, I need as mentioned above. Other tasks I can complete using an iPhone, iPad, Android device, or whatever. These contexts will be managed as tags on existing entries prefixed with the ‘at’ sign (@).

3 – Sharing information outside of org-mode is both incredibly easy and insanely difficult. org-mode uses flat text files. Internal logic presents the data in an efficient manner. While any old program can open text files, they can’t necessarily understand them. I think I can get around this by setting up agenda views published to HTML on the corporate SharePoint portal, for example. My group uses Lotus Notes for email and calendar, so I need to come up with a workable way to share at least the calendar stuff. Email I’m less concerned about at the moment, though if I can convince the powers that be to turn on secure IMAP …

2 – How to structure the file(s)? This is really where things go wonky for me and why I kept it for last. I love the idea of "one file to rule them all". A monolithic file will eventually get too big, too unwieldy, and too vertical for me to get Emacs and org-mode to handle it all. Too many small files takes the vertical problem and makes it horizontal. Having a separate file for each project, for example, is a great idea until one note or one task needs to be shared between two or more projects. My current sparse files option might be the best, but not how they’re currently setup. Notes and tasks need to be together.

I think my inbox.org concept is sound if I just use it.

I will kick things off with three main files: inbox.org, world.org, and archive.org. All of my daily capture will go into the inbox. All of my current stuff will reside in world. Nothing should go into world directly. Older items will go into archive. Daily I will empty my inbox. Weekly, monthly, and annually I will review the world. I will quarterly and annually review the archive. I will also have a “Someday/Maybe”-type file and a “reading room”-type file. I was going to have some miscellaneous files, but I don’t want to go too far afield on what I can see. Miscellaneous files may end up being out of normal view. I will reconsider this as things go.

I will keep my work calendar in Notes for the time being. If I can figure out a way to automate sharing the calendar between that and org-mode/Emacs calendar I will do so.

I will make projects contexts, tags prefixed with a ‘@’. A note or a task can be tagged with as many as needed.

Another thing I can do, and this is something of an aside but an important one, is I will be able to open notes and tasks associated with my team (and others). So, when I’m with them on the phone or standing at their desk I should be able to pull everything up about them as a tag filter across projects and everything. That kills off the far too frequent "What was that other thing I wanted to talk with you about?" query.

This reflection and rambling course of action brings up another issue, one that is not specific to any tool or method. I need to capture better information. I had a conversation with one of my bosses not too long ago. It was a long chat. There were many concrete tasks I needed to deliver. One item should have been concrete and easy to do but I wrote it down incorrectly. By the time I got back to it in a late review I couldn’t remember the "what" and "why" of the conversation though I had a time frame.

I may have mentioned somewhere that I was a Journalism and Broadcasting major in college. I trained for capturing accurate information. I did this by asking six simple questions:

• Who?
• What?
• Where?
• When?
• Why?
• How?

Why I don’t do this at certain times is fodder for yet another post yet another time.

Some of you may ask, "But I don’t need all of those when capturing data, do I"?

No. A good rule of thumb is no fewer than three. In my vague example above what, when, and why would probably have been sufficient. Who was a given value of "me". Where and how wasn’t part of the equation.

My management style rarely has a "How" or "Where" component to tasks I assign, though from time to time one of those can be introduced. Since I travel constantly for work, the "Where" bit can play a role.

Before sharing your data with others, especially higher ups and customers, you need all W’s answered. You should have references where possible.

I think the most frustrating thing around this process is that it’s not as simple as it should be. A colleague of mine constantly rails against managing to the exception (pot-kettle-black; another post), and he’s right, but how do you define what constitutes an exception. That takes us off into yet another post for another day.

Am I addressing my personal life, such as it is, in this? Is this actually going to help or hurt or make no difference? I won’t know until I take the plunge. One thing that I might alter will be the Someday/Maybe stuff. Items for my employer I will want to separate from my personal stuff. There will be an occasional overlap. I’ll deal with those as they come.

Another issue that is still out there is the data. If I leave my employer, who owns the data? If I mix the personal with the professional with the employer-specific stuff, how do I divorce it if need be?

I need to make a task to roll in my aborted OneNote experiment. I tried using OneNote. It’s a surprisingly great tool. The lack of an easy-to-use internal reference system, the inability to dock it at login, difficulty in reorganizing or refiling data, no overarching view of tasks, and its GUI-only nature limits its usefulness. Maybe if I was on Outlook & Exchange and never left a Windows/iOS environment it would work better. It does have a lot of things I quite like: templates (though not as easy to use as they should be), audio capture as part of note taking, tabs & pages & notebooks as its metaphor, OS-integrated capture, some third party tools to fill some gaps, and integration with SharePoint and MSN/MS Live with strong encryption for the data in transit (not sure about data-at-rest). I can see using it as a replacement for org-mode, but it will take a lot of work and decisions by people senior to me to make it a true replacement for work.

Two other things play a role in org-mode: Emacs calendar/diary and BBDB. The calendar is as described. The Big Brother DataBase (BBDB) is another animal. BBDB is a contact list. More value comes from using it in an integrated Emacs environment. My contacts are all over the place and in serious need of review. BBDB will be my main contact repository. I can move things in and out somewhat easily.

This post exceeded any reasonable expectation for length, breadth, and buckshot content.

It brings up another important point. I should be able to edit posts in Emacs, too! Someday/Maybe, perhaps. There must be a WordPress option for Emacs.

I have some concrete deliverables from this, some things to work on, and some “nice-to-haves” down the road.

Here endeth the … whatever this is.

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The reason was that the phones weren’t getting the SNTP time servers from our dhcpd server. I added:

option ntp-servers x.x.x.x, y.y.y.y, z.z.z.z;

… into the dhcpd.conf file and restarted the daemon.

Boom!

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Every article I found talked about playing with the TCP/IP V4 interface metric, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

I searched around on the web and found the following at the bottom of a thread.

In the start menu, search for ‘network connections’ and press enter.

In the window the comes up, use Alt-key for menu. Choose Advanced. (alt-n-s) On the Adapters and Bindings tab, re-order the connections, putting your wired connection at the top.

This seems to do the trick so far. I’d like to find how to do this via “netsh” since the above isn’t at all intuitive. I also want to spend some time digging into these advanced options.

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No, this is not a Steven King’s IT related post.

The other day I took 100 bottles and cans to the local liquor store for a refund. Here in Michigan we pay a ten cent deposit on every soda pop, beer, and other beverage containers. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. The deposit makes a difference. After having spent 5+ years in a no deposit state (Oklahoma), a $0.05 state (Connecticut), and the afore mentioned ten cent Michigan, I follow the deposit refund options far more religiously in the Great Lakes State.

But that’s not the point of this post, either.

The point is that the other day I took 100 bottles and cans, some beer and some soda pop, to the local liquor store for a refund. That is $10 in a refund that I invariably spend on more soda pop and beer. I like high quality local breweries, so $10 will often not quite cover a six pack just in that. After having dropped the containers off the store employee in charge of returns, Robert, chased me down to admonish me for my containers.

The way the MI law is written, stores only have to accept containers that they sell. The stores with automatic return machines enforce this. That’s why I take mine back to this store – no machines policing the returns. The store itself offers a decent beer selection, albeit smaller and a little more expensive than the other stores where I shop. I always end up spending more in the store after a return run than the refund.

When Robert flagged me down and lectured me loudly in the store on how hard it is for him to get $0.10 on a bottle they don’t carry from the store’s distributor, I argued. Uninterested, he dug through every neatly packed bag (and I do rinse and orderly arrange things). After everything was reviewed only 12 bottles out of the 100 were questionable. Since I had in my hands two six packs of beer and one 12 pack of pop worth $23 before tax and deposit, Robert was arguing about 5% of my total spend with them on that trip, $1.20.

Again, Robert was not wrong. A store’s obligations under the program are laid out. While I argue that such limitations negatively impact the effectiveness of the law, the law is plainly written.

Nevertheless I put the $23 of stuff back on the shelf and walked out with $8.80 in deposits. I let Robert keep the extra bottles. I spent that $8.80 plus more at another store. That was a loss of $31.80 (the $23 I was going to buy plus the deposit I was entitled to) instead of a $21.80 in sales (presuming the store had to eat the $1.20).

Since I was treated so poorly I later returned another 27 containers for cash at that store on my way to another store where I spent $23 in more of the same. That’s over $50 dollars lost for the sake of $1.20. Once I exceed $120 dollars I will talk with the owners.

For me I spent next to nothing on the extra fuel since the other options are less than a mile away. I saved about $1.50 on my purchases.

This illustrates “Penny Wise & Pound Foolish” very well.

I would be a fool if I didn’t cast a critical eye on myself. What have I done that, in retrospect, was penny wise & pound foolish?

At work the big thing that leapt out at me, fit for public consumption, was being so far behind on my expense reports. It always takes more time to complete them the longer it takes me to do them. It takes money out of my pocket both in covering the expense in a timely fashion as well as in any late charges that I have to absorb.

At home I just went through a big refresh in various parts of my life, so it is too early to tell there.

“Penny Wise & Pound Foolish” is another way of describing the Law of Unintended Consequences. How much time and effort would it cost to ask “What happens if …?” before making a decision?

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I’ve had my TouchPad since 1 July. I picked it up on my way to the airport to visit my folks and family. I’ve now had a solid seven days of use. I have formed opinions.

First, the multitasking is top notch. The card metaphor works brilliantly. The interface inside of email and other apps, the multiple panes that can overlap and expand, is impressive to behold and mostly intuitive to use.

Second, the speed is good. It is better if you install PreWare from webosinternals.org and several patches to reduce the amount of logging to speed things up just a bit.

Third, they need more apps. I think H-P hurt themselves by not embracing what HTML5 apps exist today. They could have focused more on apps users would want off-line data for, Read It Later and Google Reader. No document editing day one is a critical flaw. The browser seems inclined to invite full page renderings instead of a more gesture-based interface. H-P should have partnered with more providers or embraced more homebrew solutions.

Fourth, no Amazon Kindle or MP3 store at launch. I get that H-P is working on their own music app. I’d like diversity.

Fifth, the App Catalog and Pivot are great. I like the layouts and the concept. In the app catalog I’d like to be able to search exclusively for apps “made for TouchPad”. I’d also like to zoom in on the screen shots.

Sixth, Bluetooth tethering with my Pre 2 and bluetooth keyboard worked flawlessly. I have yet to have an SMS appear on my touchpad, but I haven’t really gotten into it.

Seventh, I like the backwards compatibility mode. I wish it could rotate with the tablet. I wish it could resize to full screen. I wish I could “Just Type” in them. I wish I could load more apps in that mode.

Eighth, no GPS in the WiFi version is a glaring oversight,

Ninth, I couldn’t care less about a rear facing camera, but I get why other people do.

Tenth, bring back the gesture area. Being able to swipe between apps without going to card view was one of the “wow” moments from other smart phone users.

I’m sticking with the TouchPad, and webOS in general, not because of the advertising H-P has put behind the launch (which I’m on board with) or their refrain that webOS will be crucial in phones & tablets & printers & PCs (though that’s good, too). Its because of the developers and the Homebrew community. I expect a lot of the interface issues and missing features will be implemented by the community and not by H-P initially.

I do like that a company as big as H-P seems to be making a gamble on webOS. I don’t think they’re doing it to cut into Apple or Google, through I’m sure they wouldn’t mind that. I think H-P is looking to make this a three horse race. If they can make a play that knocks Microsoft/Nokia and RIM back a few steps, they can make a go of this.

What do you think? Is H-P tilting at windmills? Or is there a method to their madness?

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I then went to Best Buy. I quickly climbed the ladder there in the computer department from part time sales associate to department manager.

I left Best Buy for personal reasons, then found myself back at the same store one year later. I was hired back in as a sales associate. Two weeks later I was promoted to assistant supervisor. Two months later I was promoted to supervisor. I was moved from department to department where I was needed. Eight months later I was promoted to manager.

I did the manager thing until I found myself at the top of a step ladder during the Christmas shopping season directing people to the 14 or so checkout lanes we had running. My department, the cashiers and customer service, processed well over a million dollars worth of transactions that December of ‘96. From atop my perch I herded the customers like cattle, each into their own financial abattoir. I dealt with people returning new-from-the-factory computers with bricks in them, people with electronics infested with insects and vermin, people with equipment we never sold demanding us provide them with satisfaction.

By January, the return season, I had quit and moved my family to Michigan. That story is one for another day.

Sitting in the Apple store in Troy, Michigan today I was reminded why I hated working in retail. It’s loud. It’s crowded. Customers are crazy. At least Apple has incredible margins that PCs don’t have.

The retail plus was the immediacy of the numbers. You didn’t have to wait for month’s end to see how you were doing. You didn’t have to wait for the end of the week. Every morning a fresh set of numbers were ready to great you on your previous day’s performance. You knew about that day in the week’s context, the month’s, the year’s, and the previous year’s day.

As a supervisor or manager, it meant that you could immediately adjust your approach, and your team’s, to the numbers. That was also the drawback if you only relied on the numbers.

The numbers wouldn’t tell you that the University of Oklahoma was in a crucial game, keeping attendance down. The numbers wouldn’t tell you there was an ice storm last year. The numbers wouldn’t accommodate for half the staff laid up with the flu.

The numbers certainly weren’t forgiving in cases of fraud or outright theft. That was what the twice-annual inventory audits were for. Back in the day there was a department supervisor taking tens of thousands of dollars of gear out the back door. As is often the case with thieves, the supervisor got greedy and took enough to get noticed. Even though that person was prosecuted to the full extent of the law, store management was held responsible for the loss, or shrinkage.

There are things that I miss from my retail days, but they are few. I am still extremely happy not to be in that space any more.

Have you worked in retail or still do? What do you like or miss about retail?

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