Well, I have had the luxury over the past couple months of not having to travel too terribly much, but this week it's back-on-the-road for me. Time to start racking up those frequent flier miles again, heh.

This week I will be in New York City (arriving this evening - I am on a plane in Chicago on a ground hold, just waiting to take off for LaGuardia... Nice to sit on a plan on the ramp for an hour and a half eh?). I'll be back home for a weekend on Mt. Hood with the youth group from church, and then Monday morning it's right back on another plane to head for Atlanta for a few days.

My hope is that I won't have to live the same crazy travel schedule I did last year, but my job calls for it, so a certain amount of it is to be expected (and accepted). If we ever get off the ground in the plane, that is. Maybe I'll spend the rest of 2007 here eating peanuts and working via Verizon broadband and a Cingular wireless phone. I guess it could be worse. I mean, they do have three (bad) movies in the tape library.

If you're in New York or Atlanta, let me know. I won't have a lot of free time but its always fun to try to meet people on the road if I can.

My friend and co-worker, Milind Pandit, is a wicked smart guy who can teach anyone a thing or two about lots of different topics. One of his areas of professional interest and knowledge is product management. The other day Milind presented a webinar focused on product management and dealing with risk, return on investment and real-world options. True to form, he eventually breaks it all down into a nice, clean metaphorical world that anyone can understand. Milind has a way of explaining things and keeping them simple (for which I am eternally grateful, heh).

Check out this webinar by clicking here.

We present a methodology for planning and tracking a product development effort. The primary tool for the methodology is a simple, one-page spreadsheet capturing actual and predicted expenses and revenues, from which IRR or NPV can be derived. Furthermore, the spreadsheet models uncertainty of predictions. By constructing the spreadsheet for a product development effort, real options are exposed. By maintaining the spreadsheet on an ongoing basis, the exercise of real options is tracked and the likelihood of product success or failure is clarified.

The simplicity of the methodology ensures that

• a product manager can independently stay up to date on the progress of a product development effort
• anyone from line workers to corporate board members can easily understand the state of a product development effort
• multiple product development efforts in various stages can be compared or aggregated into a portfolio
• investment and divestment decisions can be made rationally and with complete information

To demonstrate this methodology, we will construct and modify a spreadsheet for a commonly-understood project: the purchase, improvement, and sale of a home.

An a la carte menu style is in the making as the two big sat-radio companies are merging. Interesting.

The companies say this means everything will be even better. Reading the press release you'd think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Forgive me for being a little less optimistic. Sure, I hope this means higher quality and more selection, but one has to worry at least a little. The competition thus far has bred some quick growth and service expansion. What happens to that now? When was the last time a single provider in a market space was good for consumers?

Anyhow, it will be fun to watch. And it's just satellite radio, so not like it's the end of the world if they screw up the marketplace. If it gets by the SEC and FCC. It probably will.

"The transaction is subject to approval by both companies' shareholders, the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory review and approvals, including antitrust agencies and the FCC. Pending regulatory approval, the companies expect the transaction to be completed by the end of 2007."

Nothing like having an automated buddy on the other end of the instant messaging conversation to keep ya busy eh? Well, sometimes they can be practical.

If you use Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger), and if you're a film freak (or even if you just like movies), go to your IM client program and add moviescout@botmetro.net to your contact list. Then open a conversation window and type "hi" or something similar. You can set your ZIP code and start searching.

Once you've found a movie you want to look at, enter the number next to the title to get showtimes and a link to more information about the film:

It's pretty cool. A lot like using Fandango in your browser, I suppose. But on a mobile device this is cool stuff.

On February 15th, 2006 I was wheeled into a surgical suite to have the intervertebral disc between the L5 and S1 vertebrae removed and replaced with a three-piece mechanical replacement joint. The Kineflex artificial disc was in FDA trials at the time, so I was a test subject for an all-metal design that was working its way to market. As of the time of this writing, it's still working though the approval process. If my own personal experience is any indication of what ought to happen, then the Kineflex disc should be approved and shipped to the market as soon as possible. Granted, it's important that the device be used only where appropriate, but for people who today stand in the same shoes I wore up until a year ago, the artificial disc replacement (ADR) is a miracle, and can be a true life gift.

I have 15 degrees range of motion in the L5/S1 joint, which is excellent. My doctor told me at my one-year visit the other day that people with seven degrees or more range of motion are doing very well. So, that's good news. He's also very happy with the level of activity I have been able to take on since the surgery.

It's taken some time for me to get to where I feel pretty much "normal" (whatever that is). Shortly after my surgery I started to feel much much better. As time went on, I realized just how much pain I'd been in. And over the intervening months I have just gotten better and better. A couple weeks ago I went skiing with my friend up at Timberline on Mt. Hood, and was taking some of the smaller jumps without pain and without really even thinking (or at least without being concerned) about the fact that I have this metal contraption in my spine (and that, my friends, is the telling attribute of my experience).

The fact that there are days where I don't even think about my back is amazing. Who would have thought that I could go from being unable to sleep more than an hour or so at a time, and living with constant debilitating pain, to an active and almost pain-free person who can once again do almost anything I want. People who work with me and my friends can tell you how pathetic and practically crippled I was before surgery. Today they say I am a new person. When my doctor told me to go out and live my life, with no real restrictions (but to be sure to take good care of my back), I took him at his word. Nowadays I lift things the "right" way and I'm careful to respect what remains of my natural spine. But mostly I simply don't have to think about it too much.

The surgical procedure for ADR is a serious one, and not one to be taken lightly. Really, everything else should be tried before resorting to surgery of any kind. In my case they did injections, physical therapy, exercises, shrinking the disc in size... you name it. Even just medication. None of the other options helped. So, my choices were fusion of the two vertebrae or a prosthetic artificial disc replacement that was fairly new-fangled (at least in the United States, where many medical technologies actually get to market very late in the game).

I recently received an email from one of the creators of the Kineflex artificial lumbar disc, Malan de Villiers. That was cool, hearing from someone who actually designed the device that has changed my life so dramatically for the good.

I have my life back. That's something to be grateful for.

I did something today that's quite a bit out of character for me: I went to the WWE Raw live performance this evening at the Rose Garden here in Portland. As in professional wrestling.

And I had a blast.

You see, recently a friend of mine kind of got me watching a bit of the Monday Night Raw TV show now and then. I've always kind of laughed at the whole pro-wrestling thing for a variety of reasons, but tonight I can honestly say that the performance and the whole show was a lot of fun.

 Donald Trump himself even showed up in the arena to challenge the WWE boss to a match at the Wrestlemania thing on April 1st (which the boss rejected, so they came up with a decent alternative - they'll each choose someone to wrestle on their behalf and loser gets his head shaved right there at Wrestlemania).

Fireworks were everywhere in the arena and the whole experience was pretty darned well put together. And it was live on national TV to boot.

Probably the highlight of the evening, I am almost ashamed to say, was the final bout - An eight-man tag-team event that had some pretty huge dudes fighting it out. The cool guy of the bunch is John Cena, and as hilarious as it is to hear myself say it, it was a lot of fun to see him and the others perform. Afterward I asked my friends Rogan and Cory what they thought the best part of the whole night was, and they both had the same thought as me: It was at the end when John Cena stood on the ropes and looked right at us. Rogan and Cory were holding a big sign that had his name on it. It was actually kind of cool.

So there you have it. I confess. I went to Monday Night Raw live and in person, and had a great time.

Wow. That's kind of scary eh? Heh.

Tonight's show will be on TV this week on Thursday evening (for some reason it's a shifted schedule this week and they taped rather than going live).

Just the other day someone asked me why Internet Explorer had lost its menu bar after they ran a Windows Update. Of course, the "problem" was IE7 and the fact that the whole UI changed. Remember, IE7 is considered a critical update (and the first time an IE version has been promoted as such). The classic menu bar of the previous browser versions (and practically every other Windows application) is no longer visible by default. There are a couple ways to turn it back on, but when you do the result is not exactly optimal for some people. Maybe they're just whiners or getting old and set in their ways, but whomever you may be there is a solution for you. (Oh, and before people start saying "yeah, use firefox instead" please just stop and understand we got the point a long, long time ago. Firefox rocks, but this post is about menu bars in IE. tyvm.)

One thing many people don't realize is that the menu bar is actually still there in IE7, and one way you can access it just by hitting your ALT button. One tap and there it is, ready to use.

Or maybe you want it on all the time. To accomplish that in IE7, click on the the Tools menu (it has a little gear icon) and select "Menu Bar" from the options there. Now you have the menu bar back full-time and you can do your File, Edit, View, etc stuff all you want.

But, when you enable the menu bar, it actually appears below the address bar, which is a little weird for some people. And worse, you can't unlock and then drag and drop the menu bar to rearrange things because the address bar is not in the draggable/droppable list of UI stuff. everything appears below it. Bummer.

Have no fear. Chris Hanscom has posted a nice little registry hack that lets you put things back to the way you want them. The little animation above shows the three phases of menu bar goodness: Turned off completely (the IE7 default, which get a little more web page content on the screen and above the fold), Turned on and below the address bar (IE7's default location), and post-registry-hack style, with the menu bar back where you've expected it to be since dirt was first made.

So, no matter what your preference is, you have an option to meet your needs. Enjoy. And thanks to LifeHacker via Omar for the find. Check out both those blogs if you haven't already. Good stuff.

I spent a good day and a half (off and on) trying like heck to get rid of some drivers that ended up being problematic in Vista on my new Z61t ThinkPad (which is a nice laptop by the way). The integrated Verizon WAN card was not happy (it needed updated drivers) and one of the virtual device drivers for the DVD-RAM drive was causing Vista to complain a lot. Despite al my attempts, the system would not allow me to remove or change them. There was not much helpful information about why my attempts were failing, though. After a while it was obvious there was a pretty serious access control problem.

It became clear that the issue I was likely up against was the new permissions and user account access limits established by Vista and its new security model. In order to get Vista to allow me, for example, to uninstall the software in question I had to go into the user managment applet in the control panel and disable User Account Control (UAC), despite the fact that my account was configured as an admin. Now all has been rectified and is well.

Interestingly, I have seen one application that, when run, included a button to elevate the privileges of the user running the app temporarily and just for that app so configuration data could be saved. Cool stuff and well-designed.

So, Vista's User Account Control certainly works - maybe even almost too well (if that's really possible). While I had to disable it to remediate some issues realted to drivers that were installed under XP originally, that's not necessary for items installed under Vista post-upgrade. And UAC is turned back on now, just as it should be.

If you happen to be at the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, get in touch and hopefully we can meet up sometime. I'm here through Thursday doing a bunch of media briefings and whatnot (for work) and (whenever I can) attending sessions. My cell number is in the right sidebar, or email me (greg-greghughes-dot-net).

Bad guys are not stupid. What the lack in morals they sometimes make up for in creativity and smarts. That's why they can be so dangerous. Think like a bad guy: If you wanted to find a way to take advantage of a large public event in order to gain fraudulent access to thousands (or more) individual computers so you could install keystroke logging software and trojan software to allow you to grow your rogue bot network, what would you do?

Well if it was today, maybe you'd think to yourself, "Hey the Superbowl is this weekend. Let's set up a fake site and trick people into going there with an email and screw 'em all over."

Or, if you were smarter, you'd just take over the server that houses the site for Dolphins Stadium.

If this doesn't tell you why you should be focused on security, then what does?

The news item is here, and an advisory with a description is here.

The official Web site of Dolphin Stadium, home of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI, has been hacked and seeded with exploit code targeting two known Windows security flaws.

In the attack, which was discovered by malware hunters at Websense Security Labs, the server hosting the site was breached and a link to a malicious JavaScript file was inserted into the header of the front page of the site. Visitors to the site execute the script, which attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities.

According to Dan Hubbard, senior director, security and technology research at Websense, the malicious site hosting the script has been taken offline by law enforcement officials but the hacked Dolphin Stadium site — which is attracting a lot of Super Bowl-related traffic — is still hosting the malicious JavaScript.

A visitor to the site with an unpatched Windows machine will connect to a remote server registered to a nameserver in China and download a Trojan keylogger/backdoor that gives the attacker “full access to the compromised computer,” Hubbard said.

Oy. What's it gonna take??

One of my all-time favorite coworkers and human beings is Phillip Forteza, who works in the QA department. He's started blogging, and I'm excited about it.

Phil is one of those guys that smiles, smiles, smiles - regardless of the day or the situation. He is a truly good person, one of the kindest I have ever met, and I am always glad to see him. I only wish I was as up-beat and positive as Phil is every single day, though good and bad. If I'm every feeling down and out and I happen to run into him, it's a guaranteed fact that his powerful attitude will lift me up and remove that monkey from my back.

Check out what Phil has to write, it's more than worth the read. We need more people like Phil in this world, but alternatively more spreading of The Phillip Way is a pretty good option.

I hope mine is not an exception to the rule, because this is pretty cool: I've been running the release version of Windows Vista on one of my laptop computers since yesterday (one that I use all the time and which does a whole boatload of work), and quite literally everything seems to run considerably smoother and faster than it ever did on XP. Now, I don't have Aero Glass/WDM on (graphics card doesn't support it), but Office, web browsers and all apps are notably better. Especially Outlook. Wow.

The only issue I have found so far is that the Explorer shell seems to hang every now and then. I probably just have a rogue random utility that's not playing well. I'll have to look into that. At least when I kill the Explorer process, it's sending trouble data off to Microsoft for analysis. That's a good thing. It recovers gracefully, though when the process restarts. While I have not seen this kind of issue since the Windows 95/98 days, the fact that the process comes back gracefully and everything still works is a plus.

I ran all the betas, and I for one am glad they delayed and fixed up some stuff. So far it looks pretty darn good. Some of the dialogs (like the new Start Menu style and file system dialogs) are a little goofy for a power user, but I intend to stick with them and see if I can make them work well. I am, after all, getting older and more set in my ways, so I find I need to allow more time for me to adjust than I used to, heh.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, January 30th) is the big day. That's when Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, long in the making and refinement, and it's Office 2007 suite will be available for purchase by the commonfolk.

Only this time around, you can choose between buying online and downloading or going to the store and picking up a cardboard box and CD. This is the first time the OS and productivity suite have been made available for purchase and download online.

On Tuesday, the Windows Marketplace site will allow you to make your purchase and get that immediate gratification, all from the comfort of you own easy chair (or whatever seat fits the bill). The Marketplace system uses their Digital Locker, which allows you to purchase software online and get back at it later - you can store your purchase online.

Vista delivers some significant and (I think) important security enhancements, so from that standpoint I see it as something akin to a must-have. However, with all the versions being shipped and the relatively complex hardware requirements to review before you purchase, be sure to take the time to see what you really need.

Office 2007 is something I can recommend whole-heartedly. I have been running it for a year or more in betas, and the release version, which I have been using since the day it was made available to volume license customers, is excellent.

What editions can you buy online on Tuesday? Microsoft will let you purchase and download upgrade copies of Windows Vista and and full copies of these Office editions:

• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Home Basic
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007

(via Trevin)

One thing I've noticed about all the weblogs out there is a significant lack of content on certain topics. Management and dealing with management issues is one example. There are a few out there that are quite good, but it's not a common topic. Probably because it's not exactly exciting, geeky or all that interesting to the average person. Or maybe because managers are afraid to talk publicly about problems they run up against. Or because not many managers blog. Personally, I run across complex issues all the time, and I enjoy talking about them in an appropriate way. I think it makes me a better manager in the long run to hear what others have to say. Hence this weblog entry.

A while back I was meeting with one of the people I work with and discussing the variety of ways communication problems can drag an organization down. It was one of those typically generalized philosophical conversations, the kind I like to think of as learning moments. Some call them teaching moments, which is also accurate, but I like to remember I can (and better) learn while mentoring, too. It's a given that inefficiencies can make it difficult to get things done in business, and inefficiencies in communication can certainly have a significant impact. As we traded thoughts back and forth on the topic, I realized that my compadre was unawaredly mixing two different problems together, and classifying them as one. We stopped for a moment, and I explained to him what I see as the difference between communication and behavior problems. There is a fundamental and critical difference, I pointed out - one that is often overlooked and misunderstood.

We've all known people who say or do things that don't contribute in a positive way to an effective team or organization. Unfortunately we often describe such people as having "communication problems," when in fact what they exhibit is instead a complex set of behavior problems.

Because the two types of issues are fundamentally different (as are the respective solutions), a well-honed ability to recognize the difference between them is an valuable and important management trait for one who has the desire to make changes in this area.

A communication problem exists when there is a process gap or other barrier that makes it impossible to successfully communicate some critical information. For example, in the IT support world, we often wonder why users don't provide us with the information we need to help them. Instead they tell us a life story and pass on a lot of information that won't help us solve the problem, all while leaving out the critical nuggets of data. Then the IT employee wonders why and spends significant time chasing users down and trying to gather the missing details needed to work the issue.

But the communication problem in this case is not the lack of information provided by the customer. Rather it's the lack of a properly-defined process. I suggested, in our hypothetical conversation, that if an IT help desk employee has to regularly perform the same tasks and if the information necessary for success is challenging to gather from users, then the solution should be in doing something to ensure the proper information is collected and that the users know what's needed and expected. That's a communication process. And a well-defined communication process does a couple things: It sets clear, unambiguous expectations and provides a known mechanism to accomplish the activity it defines. It also needs to be reasonable and usable, to be fully successful. Perhaps the IT help desk would deploy a standard form, for example, which collects all of the information required to resolve a class of issue. At that point, once the user population has been made aware of the form and process, it is reasonable to expect the users to take advantage of the tools and instructions provided.

Now, if our information communication process is in place and communicated effectively and sufficiently, yet the people to whom the process applies neglect to do their part, we no longer have a communication problem. At that point, we have graduated to a more complicated class of issue: The behavior problem.

Behavior problems are individual in nature, and are more closely related to personality and situational issues. They're not typically resolvable with processes. Instead, they require individual guidance and potentially some form of discipline. Now, the term "discipline" here does not have to be a negative word. Rather, I use it in the context of behavior and performance management. And what works for one won't always work for the rest. This is the area where the professional manager earns his or her stripes: Working with people to change default behaviors in situations where the behavior cannot work. It's hard work.

Perhaps the most useful set of terms we can keep in mind when it comes to defining the issue and a solution: Communication Management and Behavior Management. Understanding these and knowing the differences are what we really need to be concerned about. That and the fact that even with a good communication method in place, it still takes the people and personalities that can and will work within any processes established to be successful.

What kinds of behavior problems are often confused with communication issues? Well, there's the "that's not what I want" class of problems. And then there's the "I didn't think of it so I can't get behind it" philosophy. Or the "that doesn't apply to me because I decided I didn't want it to" issue. Often behavior problems involve some form or another of what I refer to as "terminal uniqueness" - People who believe that they are different and their jobs, situations, wants, needs, requirements and desires are completely different than those of anyone else, and  that therefore nobody else can possibly understand or make decisions that might affect whatever they're focused on. And there are, of course, many more.

Anyhow, I have a variety of stories from my own management experience (both as related to me personally and with others) that illustrate this point, but one person's examples only help to define the situation in a self-limiting form. Do you have examples of your own experiences where the cliche "communication problem" term has been applied, but in reality the issue was people not playing nice? How do you deal with those situations and people?

And I should finish up by pointing out that I am far from perfect in this area. None of us are. I've not been the easiest person to manage at times over the years, to be sure. But a good healthy conversation helps us all to be aware of what's happening around us and within us, and allows us to learn and grow. So, let's converse.

What do you think?

I ran across the Giveaway of the Day web site the other evening and was intrigued. I've watched it for a few days now and have downloaded a couple of the programs they've offered. Basically, the site has a different piece of commercial software (typically smaller, utility-style stuff but you never know) that they give away for free for 24 hours. The catch, if you can call it that, is that you can only download any given program during its 24-hour offer period, and you have to install it during that period, as well. If you wait and try to install it later (as I did in once case), the product cannot be successfully registered.

But for free, whatcha gonna do, complain? I mean, come on. Heh. This is an interesting vehicle for getting people to check out other software offered by the companies whose software is featured, I suppose (they show examples of other software titles offered by each company with links).

Worth checking out. Be sure - as always - to use caution whenever downloading any software from the Internet. Good antivirus and antispyware software is important to have in place and running before you start downloading stuff. Heck, before you ever use the Internet for that matter.

In addition, the site has a freeware library that contains some interesting stuff as well as a Game Giveaway of the Day site. Same methodology, only it's games you get to play with.

Here are today's software and game give-away's: