100 Things About Me

This is an interesting exercise from the Yankee Blogger.  Here are 100 miscellaneous things about me.

1. My name is J. Scott Johnson.  The "J" is for John which I don't use.  People call me Scott.  A minimalist home page is here.
2. I'm tall, thin and in good shape
3. I am single and heterosexual if you care.
4. The glass is half full.  (Not "I believe", but it is half full).
5. I was born in Portchester, New York.  I grew up initially in Mamaroneck, NY and then moved to Wilton, CT where I spent my formative years (8 to 18).
6. I own a home.  It's for sale.  Want to buy it?
7. I blog.  A lot.  Often.  Generally with much longer sentences.
8. I am a confirmed believer in Open Source.
9. My cats names are Virgil and PeeWee.
10. I swore off TV this year except for Buffy, Angel and anything by Joss.  Firefly looks interesting.  Occasional I have since been known to slip up and watch the Simpsons if they are on while I am flipping channels.  I miss Futurama.
11. I've traveled all over Europe and the Caribbean. 
12. I'm pathetic at spoken languages and have tried most of the more arcane programming languages (Smalltalk, Prolog, Awk, Snobol among others).
13. I program daily in PHP and am investigating Python more and more.
14. I firmly believe that for all the myriad flaws the U.S. remains the land of opportunity and is still the best overall place to live.
15. But if I could live anywhere else for a time, I'd be very interested in Australia and Northern Italy.
16. I've been in high tech professionally since I was 19.  Love it.  Can't imagine working in any other field.
17. Number of companies I have founded: 4.
18. Current Employer: Myself.  http://www.fuzzygroup.net/.
19. I am a great worker but a lousy employee.
20. I grew up in family business as the bosses' son.  No surprise I'm a lousy employee.
21. I never smoked, not even once.
22. Management versus workers?  Traditionally I was always on the side of management.  After the current rash of scandals I am less certain.
23. Not a regular coffee drinker.  I do consume far too much diet coke. 
24. I am a morning person.  I will rise before everyone else.  I will get a lot done.  *Productivity* is a frothy good thing.
25. Manners are very, very important.  I may not always have them but I try.
26. I give great demo. Even when nothing works I give good demo.
27. When I work, I work very, very hard.
28. Most of my friends are smarter than I am.  Keeps me humble.
29. Bad customer service infuriates me.
30. Friends are important to me although I tend to be alone a lot.
31. Loyalty is, to me, a fundamental thing.  If you're my friend I'm loyal.
32. I try to keep my promises.
33. I cook well and often although cooking for one is less than optimal.
34. I'm not religious although not as skeptical as I once was.
35. Religion is personal; don't force your views on me and we'll be just fine.
36. I have no problems with the pledge of allegiance.
37. The number of days I have experienced in my life is greater than 12,433 but less than 12,771.
38. Average blogging frequency: Daily, multiple items.
39. Do I tend to post more original blog content or links to other people's things: Original !
40. Number of pages of technical documentation written in the past 15 years: Difficult to count but > 8,000 for sure.
41. Number of real, paper books written and published in print: 1 and change (co author).
42. Yes I was an Eagle Scout.  Yes I did break the records for the number of merit badges earned at Scout Camp.
43. Most influential author?  Robert A. Heinlein.
44. I am a happy carnivore although since reading Fast Food Nation I rarely eat beef and am contemplating organic chicken.  Fish is now my main protein source.
45. I love to read. I've been known to fish reading material out of the trash.
46. I will reread old materials without any shame.
47. Blogs are forms of conversation albeit often one sided.
48. I hate people that argue purely based on their economic interests.  You can be objective and honest even when your wallet is on the line. But it is all too rare; even in the blog-o-sphere.
49. Quality is very important to me.  My work isn't perfect by any means but at least I understand the importance of quality and striving for it.
50. Bad documentation is unacceptable when you charge money for something.
51. I love to take pictures but only digitally.
52. I am more of a cat person than a dog person.  I have two cats.  http://www.fuzzygroup.net/photos/cats/gretch/
53. Yes I was a dot commer.  Yes I left in disgust.
54. I rarely, if ever, respect Ivy League MBAs.
55. I'm currently disgusted with the entertainment industry and the current legislation underfoot.
56. If I lived in North Carolina, I'd vote for Tara.
57. I did vote for Perot.
58. Favorite Musical? Rent.  Number of times seen it: Twice.
59. Favorite Play?  Brighton Beach Memoirs.
60. Number of MP3 files?  Large but unknown -- it is in the 10 to 20 gigabyte range so I'd say thousands.
61. Next gadget I will get ?  Casio Exilim or Apple iPod or both.
62. Number of items on my Amazon wish list sent to me by other bloggers?  2.
63. Number of software products I've been responsible for shipping since 1987?  > 30. 
64. Most useful website of all time?  Mapquest.  I am directionally challenged.
65. I live in Nahant, Massachusetts.
66. I have the same IM identity, fuzzygroup, across Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Jabber.
67. Even though I am male, I can cook, bake good deserts, set a table, entertain and do dishes.
68. Yes I was a smart, unpopular kid in school.
69. No I really don't have anything left to prove to anyone.
70. I am actually an O'Reilly author for "Essential Blogging".  That and $3.80 will get you a Venti Iced Cafe Americano at Starbucks although it will get you a discount at O'Reilly conferences.
71. Favorite movie of all time?  Couldn't even begin to guess.  Favorite movie of this year?  The thrill ride that was Spiderman.  Brilliant casting of Toby McGuire.
72. Event I ran in College: "The White Castle Dance" where we imported over 2,000 white castle burgers in the back of a white mustang. 
73. I do own a hot tub.
74. Number of living grandparents and / or siblings: 0
75. Number of living parents: 2
76. I can't write fiction to save my life.  Non fiction?  No problem.
77. I am not well enough educated in my own mind.  Others seem to think I am fine.  I have high standards.
78. I believe in protecting women and children.  Sue me.
79. Creating media is more fun than consuming media.
80. Lack of sleep and / or food makes me mean.
81. I can swear like a sailor and / or take paint off the walls with my swearing if I so choose.
82. Giving gifts is better than getting them.
83. Largest number of people that ever reported to me: 40.
84. Preferred operating system: Linux.
85. I know how to: Tie a tie, Cook a meal, Paint a house, Program a computer, Repair a car, Wear a tuxedo, Entertain a guest, Clean a house, Make money, Lose money, Manage staff, Use the Internet, Blog profusely, Write a poem, Dig a ditch, Comfort the sick and grieving, Hammer a nail and more.  Specialization is for Insects", R.A.H.
86. I send lots of email.
87. Last vacation destination: Scotland then Amsterdam
88. I have swung from a rope swing into a tropical lagoon.  And it was good.
89. I have petted a manatee.
90. Software products I have created or been responsible for: Black Magic, Help System II, HyperWriter, Dataware II KMS, Dataware II Query Server, Inbox Buddy, FuzzyOffice.
91. My favorite season is Fall.
92. My musical tastes are ecclectic (punk to rock opera to some Jazz to TV theme songs).
93. My eyes are green and my hair is brown.
94. Given the power of Google, I fail to understand why people buy cookbooks at all except as ornaments.
95. Trading Spaces is a really, really cool TV show.  (Educational TV doesn't count with the above mention).
96. I enjoyed this exercise and only struggled a little bit with it (last 10 were hard). 
97. I prefer having a business partner to running a business alone.
98. Favorite IHOP breakfast: Pigs in a Blanket.
99. Even in the dot com days, my staff seemed to like me.
100. The world is a beautiful place.  Have you really looked at a sunset lately?

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Why the Tivo / Replay Lawsuits are Futile

This is an article about how to build your own Tivo using Linux.  Think about that for a minute -- build your own digital VCR with off the shelf components.  There simply isn't any way to stop this type of technology from becoming utterly commonplace.  If people want to skip commercials, they will.

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/08/29/howardwen.html

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Old Hardware Saves the Day

Note: This may be strange and meandering.  If so, I fully blame Tylenol Allergy + Sinus ….

I recently gained then lost my first WIFI system and now have regained it.  And then today made me really think hard about the nature of our PCs.  Here’s what happened:

1. I moved my laptop from Windows 2000 where WIFI worked to Linux where it should work but Mandrake’s silliness (NOT RECOMMENDED) caused it to not work.  This took away my WIFI for a long time and I was definitely sad to lose it.
2. A friend needed a more powerful system with larger disc space so I agreed to swap an unused desktop for her somewhat damaged Toshiba laptop, a Satellite 4030CDT with 192 megs of memory and 5 gigs of disc space.  Given that I needed a Windows XP test machine, this gave me one with a smaller footprint than YADD (yet another damn desktop).
3. For humor’s sake, when I say damaged, I have to point out that this person had managed to dump tomato sauce into the laptop’s keyboard.  Now tomato sauce is apparently one of the most corrosive substances known to commonly fall into keyboards.  And, being this person’s favorite geek, I was the chosen “repair dweeb”. 
4. So I took this machine and installed Windows XP on it.  Sure … It’s only a Celeron but I figured it’s only a test machine.  Does it really matter?  I knew it would be slow but for testing, who cares ….
5. I started with a regular wired network card and then one day when I lost my dongle (no, no, no --- “dongle” = the thing that couples the network card to the Ethernet cable; dirty mind you …), I decided to drop my WIFI card into it.  And, what do you know, it just plain worked!!!  I was up and wireless within about 4 minutes.  No lie.
6. So I’ve been using this machine as nothing but a test box for some time now.  And it has been a little bit slow but definitely adequate.  The screen is 1024x768 and that’s pretty good. It isn’t 1600x1200 but I can deal.
7. This past weekend mold counts around Massachusetts seemingly skyrocketed and triggered a nasty, painful allergy attack.  It’s been the first time in literally years that I’ve felt this bad.  After trying to work at my main desktop for 2 days and sleeping a LOT due to Tylenol Allergy Sinus, I finally realized “DOH!  Dude. You’ve got WIFI !!!”
8. So I grabbed this clunky ass PC, dragged it upstairs to my guest room, turned on a hepa filter and proceeded to do real, live work. 
9. That's right real work.  On 3.5 year old celeron laptop running Windows XP and WIFI.  And, you know what?
   It's not all bad!  Given that I have WIFI access to my desktop w/ it's 20+ gigs of MP3 files and SSH to my Linux server(s), I'm actually pretty damn happy and very productive. 

Now this really does make me think about the problems that PC makers have right now.  As bad as this old hardware may be -- it's still fully functional albeit a wee bit slow (but I am running Outlook 2002, WinAmp, multiple SSH sessions and 10 IE windows in 192 megs, not bad at all).  When you come right down to it, unless you are playing games or editing images, old hardware is just fine.  What really matters these days is connectivity and mobility.  Not a big shocker certainly but it is always interesting to have these things proven.

It also made me think a lot about Microsoft's forthcoming Mira tablet PCs.  Here's an actually situation where you think that Mira would have been perfect -- sick person, wants to read blogs in bed, etc.  NOPE!  With it's essentially keyboard free nature, Mira would have frustrated the ever loving piss out of me -- I'd want to comment on a blog or bookmark something or respond to an IM.  And that just wouldn't work.

Prediction: Mira will be a huge flop this Christmas.  Cheap laptops will do way better.  Manufacturers that bet big on Mira will have a very, very tough time of it.

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Marketing 101 : General Comments On Starting Your Own Business

I ran into this url recently: 

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/000008.html#000008 
(and, no, I didn't have anything to do with his choice of pictures save appreciate them)

And I thought "Ouch!!! Let me give this dude some advice (he's a friend)" so here goes.  Since his style was kind of random, I wrote it as if I was responding to an email from him.  It just seemed appropriate.  My responses start with [SJ] and are indented. 

This week has been hell. I've been looking at starting my own business, with a couple of friends, but I feel like its all just going too fast. I make a pretty decent living, but at the same time, don't really enjoy working at the company I work at. It's sort of odd, having a good job at a badly run company. (I work at a company that I have no doubt would be all over fuckedcompany.com if we were slightly bigger, or more publicly held).

==> Read Story <==

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