Signal to Noise: Music, VoIP, Telecom, Gadgets, and Technology

Steve Jobs Dead

Just heard it in a text message from my mom. Rest in Peace, Steve. You’ve done many wonderful things for many, many people.

Wind Efficiency Vs. Gas&Oil: What I’ve Learned

As a business owner, I define high-efficiency as the ability to get things done with either the highest operating margin or the lowest operating loss. With this in mind, and considering the amount of philanthropic hubbub surrounding wind power and the equal-in-volume guilt talk surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I decided to get to the bottom of the efficiency question.

Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:

- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply. According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.

- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage. Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.

- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed. The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement. I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth. These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.

Ted – Why Don’t You Blog VoIP Any More?

1. Divorce made me realize I needed more time with people. Writing takes away face time, and as shrewd as that is, it’s true.

2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on. Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers. More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily. They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital. Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now. I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

An Update from Signal to Noise

Friends, it’s been forever since I blogged, and, as a writer born and bread, that’s a pretty tough reality with which to live. So here’s an update, if brief.

Best Technology, my general I.T. consulting firm, now has six employees, and has grown like a weed since late 2008. In fact, I’m heading down to Miami tomorrow to consider a new business opportunity that represents a strategic significance to Best Technology–virtualization infrastructure and private cloud computing.

I look forward to giving you another update soon, and miss everybody in the blogosphere with whom I’ve lost touch over the last 18 months.

On Thankfulness

Yesterday, I received word from a client that a very special business acquaintence of mine had passed away. He was the publisher of the local newspaper here in Elyria, Ohio, and a man for whom I’ve had an immense respect since I met him. He was a generous, gracious, and quiet guy, and I’ve not met a single person who had a bad thing to say about him. I am thankful to have known him.

This passing really has me thinking about life and its pursuits, and the varying degrees to which we pursue meaning in life. What is our life’s purpose? And how do we achieve it, personally, professionally, and spiritually? How do we define purpose, and how can we work humbly and thankfully like my associate?

Before I wrote my books and began working as a technology consultant for small businesses, I went through a very difficult period of unemployment and financial insecurity. It was during this time that I realized that I must rely upon myself–not my family, or my friends, or the government–for success. To me, part of success in life is independence from the graces of other people, or the ability to avoid subjugation. To some degree, I have achieved this.

The other thing I figured out is that you’ve got to have fun. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, whether it’s work, play, or chores. And if you don’t automatically enjoy these things, you’ve got to have a good attitude–to try to get something out of them even if they’re mundane or difficult tasks. Maybe that’s why I joined a dance band. Do I like dance music? No. Do I like dancing? No. But I love when people dance ot the music I play. See how that interplay works?

Finally, I decided to stop separating my spiritual life from my social life. If the people in the church have a problem because I drink beer when I play in my (gasp) secular dance band, then they can be consoled by my non-church friends who think Christians are a-holes (many are, sadly). In good company (me), both groups can get along, and maybe even understand each other.

I’m thankful for this learning experience. I’m thankful that I’ve taken some lumps when it comes to being humbled. The biggest single thing I’ve learned is that I’m not happy in my work unless I’m helping other people succeed. .. and it was a failure to others succeed that got me unemployed in the first place.

Media talking heads beginning to turn on Apple

You’re seeing an increasingly resentful attitude towards Apple on a lot of blogs and newspaper outlets these days: Small but increasingly frequent editorial hints that Apple is no longer the darling underdog, but the resented 1000-pound gorilla that nobody can compete with. I’ll give you a few examples:

On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”. Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress. They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments. From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset. One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.

Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset. Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur. They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.

So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.

Don’t confuse hyper-private with offline.

The assertion that Facebook can protect its market leading position by entering into the smaller-is-bigger philosophy or going async (a la Twitter) is nifty, but not the answer to “what’s wrong on the Internet”.

After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points. For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).

Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities. To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging. We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.

Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion. Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board. We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team? Hardly. Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.

My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.

But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience. And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.

The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.

Signal to Noise

Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO

Steve Jobs Dead

Wind Efficiency Vs. Gas&Oil: What I’ve Learned

Ted – Why Don’t You Blog VoIP Any More?

An Update from Signal to Noise

On Thankfulness

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