This sounds really familiar...

If you have kids of a certain age and watch Disney, you will have seen Frozen II at least once.  And if you are of a certain age, Generation X and listened to Western pop music, you would have noticed that the song "Lost in the Woods" sounds eerily familiar.  It sounds like songs by Chicago, or REO Speedwagon, and for good reason.  As detailed in this blog post, the composers were inspired or at least big fans, of these 80's power ballads.  It reminds me of "Will You Still Love Me?". There's another 80's song that has a very similar lick, but I can't recall the rest of the song to find the title.

On the one hand, I can lament that nobody comes up with truly original songs anymore.  Everybody is singing some variation of I-V-viii-IV these days.  And the chord cycle is not new.  You can watch this clip to understand what I'm talking about.  And while reusing chord cycles are excusable, (after all, how many combinations can you make from seven chords in four bars, or twelve bars?), sounding almost exactly like another song is not.  The courts found Robin Thicke and Pharell to have ripped off Marvin Gaye, as detailed in this Rolling Stone article.  I personally didn't find that too close, but some of you may remember the Led Zeppelin vs. Spirit, "Stairway to Heaven" vs. "Taurus".

On the other hand, hearing familiar sounds soothes our brains.  When "Hey Ya" by Outkast was introduced, radio stations had to sandwich it between familiar songs, because "Hey Ya" was so different.  (Read this for more detail.)

What is the point of all this?  And how do we bring this back to business?  My point is, while companies are different, at a certain level, they are all the same.  They have the same challenges and business problems they are trying to solve.  Each company may just be at different stages of their journey.  If they were all different, then business applications like CRM and ERP will not find much success.  Everyone would be building custom apps for their own businesses.

And so while the song sounds new, it still sounds familiar.  The things you learned - skills, business processes, solutions - from previous companies are portable.  (Unless it's like "Hey Ya" - a highly specialized type of skill or knowledge that has narrow applications, like video compression codecs.)   

Customer Master and data cleansing is a common problem.  And it's not new.  Before web domains were commonplace, you would define an account as their headquarter location - a name and address.  Preventing duplicates is a challenge.  In the B2C world, (I worked for an insurance company), before email addresses, and without requiring people to give social security numbers, we relied on a name, a birthday, and an address.  And that's not perfect either.  I could have two policies, and on one, I gave my middle initial, and on the other, I did not.  Or I may have since moved.  How do we have one record for one person so we can treat them as one person?

And guess what's like a subscription business?  Insurance!  You want people to pay yearly, or quarterly, or monthly - whatever payment term they agreed to.  And you have to keep engaging with your customers, not just come around when the premium is due.  Otherwise, they could cancel, or just choose not to pay the renewal.  You also want to up-sell or cross-sell, or "land and expand" as they call it these days, as their financial needs evolve, you start offering other financial products.    

So, whether it's B2C, B2B, insurance, financial services, software, hardware, subscription, XaaS, pay-as-you-grow, consumption, everything is familiar!

What are you packing?

 

The edge of the area covered by the evacuation order is a quarter mile from our house.  If it does expand beyond that, we’ll have to evacuate.

 

Some evacuation orders are sudden.  You may be asked to leave immediately because you are in imminent danger.  And there are plenty of resources online on how to prepare, and what to bring if you only had 15 minutes tops.  Ready.gov is a good starting point.

 

But for us, we have some time to pack.  And what did we pack?

 

Besides the usual stuff that you find online – passports, social security cards, a change of clothes, personal items, we had time to consider other things.  Apart from practical considerations – what will fit in the car, for example – we asked ourselves two things.  And it gave us a chance to evaluate what's really important.

 

First: what things are irreplaceable?  I’m not here to argue that we should not be collecting things, but rather, experiences.  It is inevitable that those experiences have things associated with them.  We definitely packed photographs.  We are from the generation that still had printed photos and negatives.  While some have been digitized, many have not.  The hard drives with the digital photos were packed as well.  On the other hand, we have souvenirs from our travels that we did not pack.

 

The second, more difficult question is: what things are harder to replace?  Harder is a personal threshold.  It could be purely financial, or time-based, or both.  Clothes can be replaced.  You can walk into a Target or a Gap, or buy clothes online.  But what about that wedding dress?  We didn’t have a wedding dress, but I did have the Barong Tagalog (a traditional Filipino formal wear for men) that I wore at my wedding.  I ultimately decided not to pack it.  I haven’t read the book, but Marie Kondo’s question, “What sparks joy?” is appropriate here.

 

What if you had a growing collection of items that took you years to collect, but not valuable enough to insure?  You could have a sneaker collection, or a stamp collection, or some other collection that has more sentimental than monetary value.  I happen to have a collection of knives.  I packed them. 

 

Say you did have insurance.  It only pays you the monetary equivalent.  If Bill Gates lost his Porsche 959 to a fire, the insurance company could pay him a million dollars for the loss.  But I doubt anybody else who has a 959 is willing to part with his.  That means even if Bill Gates was made whole by his insurance company, he will most likely not have another 959, not that reacquiring a 959 is top priority for him.  I have an older 911 which is insured for an agreed value.  That model is certainly not as rare as a 959.  We’re leaving the 911 if we were asked to evacuate.  While it does spark joy, it’s not top priority.  If I had a third driver in the household, then I would drive the 911 out of there.

 

So, what are you packing?

 

 

 

 

Comcast Gigabit Internet Delivers

A few years ago, I talked about some issues with my WiFi and AT&T.  For about three years now, Comcast has been my service provider.  I started with their 250Mbps plan, then 400Mbps, and now 1000Mbps.

 

I'm happy to report that, at least when wired directly to the modem via Ethernet, I am able to reach 942Mbps download speeds.

 

Now, four feet from the router provided by Comcast and only on WiFi, it drops down to 541Mbps.  I haven't tried turning off WPA2 but I bet that has something to do with the huge drop.

 

Stepping further away, one floor down, it goes down to the 400Mbps range - which is not bad.  But there are still a few things I would like to try in order to reach the maximum speeds. 

One of them is adding a mesh WiFi system.  I don't really need one because I have a small house, but maybe having one will help keep the speed above 500Mbps even in the garage.

The other more drastic measure is to hard-wire the access points.  I would also like to activate the Ethernet ports in the various rooms so that other people in my household can connect via Ethernet.

 

With everybody working from home and schooling from home, I need all the bandwidth I can get.

 

A Sad Day

On September 21st, 1972, then-president Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in the Philippines.  Letter of Instruction No. 1 immediately followed - directing the armed forces to seize control of all media.

Admittedly, this was before my time. But by 1984, when former Senator Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, and culminating in the so-called People Power in 1986, I became aware of the government’s control of the newspapers and the nightly news.  And thus began my general distrust of the media. Don’t believe everything you read or see on TV. And that extends to the Internet today.

In 1987, the new Philippine Constitution enshrined the freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Article III, Section 4.  Almost word for word, the First Amendment to the US Constitution was clearly the model for this section.

And while I still distrust the media, (they are after all, business entities that need to make money through advertising, and they are run by people with biases, organizations with a political agenda, and sometimes led by moguls who have less than stellar records), I still am thankful that, in principle, they can report freely without fear of government repercussions, providing that they are factual and accurate. After all, freedom comes with responsibility.

With all this in the background, I am saddened by the news that today, ABS-CBN, a local TV network that was once shuttered in 1972 precisely because of Letter of Instruction No. 1, has been ordered to cease operations, no doubt because they have been critical of the current Duterte administration.  Apparently, Congress has the power to grant, or in this case, extend a broadcast network’s franchise license. And the current Philippine Congress is filled with the president’s allies.

While I may not always agree with what the media chooses to report, I choose to defend their right to do so.

 

Blind Spot Monitoring v2.0

While we wait for Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy, we need version 2.0 of blind spot monitoring. 

Without blind spot monitoring, you can adjust your mirrors so that you do not have blind spots, as recommended by the SAE, and detailed in this Car and Driver article.  Most new vehicles have some blind spot monitor, whether it's a sensor, a camera, coupled with an audio or visual cue.

This is all well and good when you are going straight.  The challenge is that in the few seconds between checking your mirrors, and then attempting to change lanes, another car may also be headed to the same lane you intended to go.  And then you narrowly miss the other car, or you go back to your original lane - either one would piss off drivers behind you.  Or worse, you cause an accident.

Or, you may be going straight and a car just starts moving towards you.  While according to this Wikipedia article, Nissan has some proactive capability, it's not widespread.

So, Blind Spot Monitoring 2.0 should have these features: As soon as you switch your turn signals on, and you are over a certain speed (meaning you are changing lanes), a better visual prompt, maybe a heads-up display or even just on the dashboard or the screen, that lets you know if it is clear.  

When you are in fact turning vs. changing lanes, it should be looking for pedestrians or bikers, and their velocity, and alert you if they are going towards you.

Finally, the sensors should be able to detect whether another car is moving towards you or going straight in its own lane and alert you to execute a safety maneuver.  I've seen a few accidents where two cars wanted to move to the same space in the middle lane, and neither seeing each other.