Buck Owens: 1929-2006

We lost an American treasure this morning — Buck Owens has died and I am really sad about it.

Yes. . . .When I was a kid growing up in North Carolina, I watched Buck Owens on Hee Haw every Saturday night with my family like just about everyone I knew (seriously), but I didn’t really know much about him beyond his famous red, white, and blue guitar.

Despite being absolutely surrounded by it (and perhaps because of that), I hated country music growing up. When I was young, it just seemed silly. When I was an adolescent, it just seemed hopelessly corny and dated. I would complain whenever my mom put on her Loretta Lynn records and she would defend her music mightily, saying, “this music is about real life.” I don’t know if it was moving out of my native South to California or just getting older, but over the past ten years, I’ve grown to love country music. If you put my iTunes collection on shuffle, you’re just as likely to get Hank Williams (Sr.), Buck Owens, or Loretta Lynn as you are to get anything else.

Over the past few years particularly, I had really grown to love Buck Owens. Buck’s song “Love’s Gonna Live Here” lifted my spirits on many occasions after a painful breakup a few years ago (a little bit of the “real life” my mother had told me about):

Oh the sun’s gonna shine in my life once more
Love’s gonna live here again
Things’re gonna be the way they were before
Love’s gonna live here again
Love’s gonna live here
Love’s gonna live here
Love’s gonna live here again
No more loneliness only happiness
Love’s gonna live here again

I was fortunate to see Buck play live twice in the past few years: once in a ridiculously poorly-attended show with Loretta Lynn (before the kids became hip to her due to her Jack White collaboration) at the Masonic in San Francisco back in 2002 (the place was 2/3 empty), and then last April at the Crystal Palace, Buck’s restaurant in Bakersfield where he played every Friday and Saturday night.

That trip with Nancy to the Crystal Palace was a landmark experience. It was so unlike going to see a famous country musician in San Francisco, where such events can be so bathed in hipster irony that sometimes it’s difficult to connect to the music. It was different in Bakersfield. At the Crystal Palace in April, Nancy and I watched Buck Owens and his Buckaroos play while we ate steak and pork chops and drank beer. We watched grandparents dance with each other, and dads dance with their daughters, and we even got in on the action ourselves. Real life — just a Saturday night in Bakersfield.

One unfortunate thing about Buck’s death it is that I had been talking with my mother about taking her to see Buck in Bakersfield really soon (Nancy had been doing the same with her mother). You see, my mother has never been on a plane and she decided recently that she needed to try flying to California to visit, and I had been holding out the visit to Bakersfield to see Buck Owens as the reward for her getting over her fear of flying. I told her about the steaks, the pork chops, the dancing, and seeing a true legend up close in his hometown. That would pretty much be heaven for my mother, and I was looking forward to giving her a distinctively Californian experience while sharing a mutual love of country music that didn’t exist when I was younger. We can still go to Bakersfield, but Buck won’t be there. The lesson in this applies to many things in life: there is no time like the present. Sometimes “later” never comes.

We’ll miss you, Buck. My thoughts and prayers are with your friends, family, and fans. Rest in peace.

Excited about Hack Day

We’re doing another Hack Day at Yahoo! tomorrow — can’t wait. I have no idea what’s going to happen. And that’s the best part (and absolutely intentional). We leave lots of room for emergence.

See Jeremy and my post for info on the last one, plus some Flickr photos. Expect more after tomorrow.

Bonus reading:

Ruby vs. the enterprise

The whole “what does it mean to be ‘enterprise’?” brouhaha (see posts from Dare Obasanjo and David Heinemeier Hansson) over James McGovern’s post “More Thoughts on Ruby and Why it isn’t enterprise ready!” grabbed my attention for a few reasons:

  1. I used to write for an enterprise IT magazine, InfoWorld
  2. I was also CTO and had real day-to-day responsibilities, so I couldn’t get away with too much b.s. I had to live with what I wrote in a real environment and therefore couldn’t coast along on pure pontification.
  3. The combination of my roles in #1 and #2 led me to believe that quite often, the use of the term “enterprise” alongside many product names was a label used to part fools from their money.

My feelings on the matter are pretty well summed-up by a feature story I wrote for InfoWorld in 2004, “Top 20 IT Mistakes to Avoid.” I described the problem with the “enterprise” label in mistake number 20: “being a slave to vendor marketing strategies”:

When it comes to network devices, databases, servers, and many other IT products, terms such as “enterprise” and “workgroup” are bandied about to distinguish products, but often those terms mean little when it comes to performance characteristics.

Quite often a product labeled as a “workgroup” product has more than enough capacity for enterprise use. The low cost of commodity hardware — particularly when it comes to Intel-based servers — means that clustering arrays of cheap, workgroup hardware into an enterprise configuration is often more redundant and scalable than buying more expensive enterprise servers, especially when it comes to Web apps.

I didn’t write about programming languages back then, but the same principles apply. In my opinion, choice of programming language has almost nothing to do with being “enterprise ready” or not. Take a tour through any “enterprise” shop, and you are likely to find at least a few ill-conceived Visual Basic or Lotus Notes apps (both on legitimate “enterprise” platforms!) quite literally holding back the business, just begging to be replaced by a well-designed web-based app built on Ruby on Rails or PHP. I’ll take a well-designed RoR or PHP app over VB or Lotus Notes any day.

But let’s be fair. As RoR and PHP grow increasingly popular in enterprise settings, expect some really poorly-designed RoR and PHP apps to stink up the “enterprise” joint. As Frederick Brooks noted twenty years ago in his famous essay on software, there is no silver bullet. So, RoR, Java, PHP. . . whatever. Just find me some talented programmers and we’ll figure it out (ok, the Lotus Notes and VB guys would be kicked aside quickly, but you know what I mean).

Unfortunately, despite the beating he is taking in the blogosphere, I think James is probably just providing a realistic (if somewhat cynical) view into how lots of “enterprise” IT decision-making happens: lots of vendor FUD being fed to timid IT staffers who outsource their strategic thinking to Gartner/Forrester/etc. It’s not a pretty picture.

Reading 2.0 and microformats

Yesterday, I participated in the Reading 2.0 summit (organized by Peter Brantley of the California Digital Library), a small gathering in San Francisco about the future of digitized material, with the digitization of books being a primary topic. Tim O’Reilly did an amazing job of taking notes.

As Tim notes, I gave a short presentation about microformats at Yahoo! (borrowing heavily from Tantek Çelik and microformats.org, who I credited in an intro slide before I even got into the topic). Since my slot was a brisk ten minutes, I decided to briefly talk about what microformats are, but then go straight to the markup. This approach seemed to work a few years ago when I found myself explaining RSS a lot. I always found that pulling up an RSS feed and showing the the simplicity of the feed itself got the point across that RSS was not particularly complex. I think microformats are similar in that regard.

An interesting question came from Cliff Lynch, who asked if it might be possible to use microformats to mark up genomic information. I have to admit that I don’t know much at all about genomic information, but to the extent that this type of information is on the web, decentralized, and can be structured consistently (preferably modeled after an existing standard, as hCard is modeled after vcard), I don’t see why not. That’s the beauty of efforts like microformats — anyone with the ability to publish to the web now (which is everyone) can participate in creating a microformats standard by putting it into practice and sufficiently documenting it. hGenome, anyone?

For more on microformats, you can see a presentation that Tantek gave on a recent visit to Yahoo, and microformats.org. There is also a microformats-discuss mailing list.

An easy way to get started with microformats is to use the hCard creator to build your own hCard (see my hCard).

Again, be sure to read Tim’s notes. Really cool stuff.

See you in Austin for SXSW

Whew — it’s been a crazy week. I was at eTech earlier this week (a little hectic with the Checkmates prototype rolling out) and didn’t get to hang out and chat with people quite as much as I wanted. Then, in an unfortunate calendaring incident, I had rebooked a few days in Tahoe after postponing a planned trip in December to run the first Hack Day at Yahoo. Those days happened to be sandwiched right between eTech and SXSW, so I flew straight from San Diego to Reno/Tahoe on Wednesday, and now I’m sitting in the Reno/Tahoe airport waiting for my plane to Austin for SXSW.

I’m really excited about going to SXSW. I have been all over Texas, but never Austin. Over the past few years, I’ve watched from afar as it seems like lots of people are down there having fun this time of year.

Anyway, if you saw me at eTech and I looked a little rushed and preoccupied, well, I was — so be sure to say hello in Austin!

Checkmates: a mobile friend finder prototype for eTech

I’ve been working on a project recently that is really the convergence of everything I love about my work these days: promoting grassroots innovation at Yahoo! through events like Hack Day, building cool stuff, and trying to glimpse the future through prototypes that reach a little bit. (Aside: I just noticed that in Jeremy’s original post about Hack Day, he called it the first “annual.” We’re doing them quarterly, and in fact, we’re doing another one a few weeks from now. Can’t wait.) What I’m writing about today is actually the result of Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Karon Weber, and Sam Tripodi’s “failed” Hack Day project. At the end of our first Hack Day, Ed, Jonathan, Karon, and Sam had nothing to show but ambition, but the experience lit a fire that resulted in something really cool that we can now share.

I’m referring to CheckMates , a prototype for telling your friends where you are and seeing where they are on a map (i.e. check your mates) — on your phone. It wasn’t even close to working at the end of our last Hack Day, but it is now. You can download it now — just click on the Install link on this page and follow the instructions. One note: since this is a limited-release prototype, we’re capping registrations, so the downloads will pause at some point. There are a couple other disclaimers.) This prototype was built all on public Yahoo! APIs, so we’re also hoping that it will inspire you to build your own stuff! Theoretically, Checkmates should work on any Java/MIDP2 capable phone but it’s known to work on Nokia Series 60 phones like the 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 models, and it is likely to work on 3230, 6630, 6260 as well.

Mapping on a phone certainly isn’t anything new, but when you overlay a social network on top of the mobile mapping experience (in this case, your Flickr “friends and family”), it gets really interesting. When using the Checkmates prototype, you’re able to see your friends’ locations, what their status is, and when they last broadcasted their location (assuming they are also using the app).

Aside from pulling your social network into the mobile mapping experience, Checkmates takes things a bit farther — it takes you inside the building and lets you track your friends when you get there. Think of it as an additional zoom level, jumping beyond street level into a building or other space.

For this prototype, we put a map of the eTech floor into the app, but the mechanism we used (the Flickr API) to do that means that the possiblity exists to spontaneously map a world of semi-public and private spaces that have been unexplored up to this point. Imagine going to an amusement park, taking a photo of the map at the front of the park, then using that map immediately within an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile mapping application to track your friends and family while you’re there. Not to mention that you could share this map with other people who might need it after you. Cool, huh?

This prototype is so fresh that the URL for it is ugly (sorry about that — here’s a tinyurl instead: http://tinyurl.com/pya4x), but we wanted to get it into your hands to play with it despite a few rough edges here and there.

There’s a lot going on within Checkmates, so check out the page that explains how to use it and the FAQ.

If you want to let the team know what you think, email us at techdev-feedback (at) yahoo-inc.com. Remember, this is just a prototype and as such, has no support — but we still want to hear how you’re using and how you would make it better. We hope you have fun with it!

Update: Ed writes more about the inspiration for this, and Jonathan adds his thoughts.

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The value of GTD

It’s been over a month since I started flirting around the margins of GTD, and it’s working pretty well. My inbox sits at about 200 messages, which isn’t bad for the volume of e-mail I get. I’m finding it quite easy to focus on what I need to be doing at any given moment.

In a work conversation today, though, something rolled off my tongue that really put the whole experience in context for me. I said jokingly to a colleague, “Look, my e-mail is so well-organized that I know exactly what I’m not getting done.” There’s certainly great value in that, but I would hardly call it the “mind like water” state that was promised. Still, I strongly recommend it. At least when you know what you can’t do, you use some other bits of the GTD system to make sure it doesn’t just fall through the cracks (still need to write in more detail about my experience, but it’s still on my “defer” list).

Disconnected from the desk actually means more connected

In Jeremy’s “where almost doesn’t matter” post, he mentions that I often gather my stuff and say, “I’m living out of my bag for the rest of the day.”

So why do I do that? Tim Converse nails it for me:

My hunch is that what being unchained from your desk makes possible is talking to more people face-to-face in more various places, which is really about greater personal control of the all-important Where (and the all-important face-to-face contact), than it is about making Where disappear.

This past Friday was a case-in-point. I left my desk in Santa Clara for the day at 11am to go to a meeting at our main Sunnyvale campus. I hopped the Yahoo! inter-campus shuttle and was soon instant messaging with one of my colleagues while going 60 mph down highway 101 (thank you, EVDO!) When I arrived in Sunnyvale, I IM’ed my colleague and asked him to grab another colleague and call my Treo from a conference room (we had something important to talk about). I was still connected to IM when I folded my laptop under my arm and stepped off the shuttle. My phone rang and I slipped into the landscaping for a little privacy (the mobile office does have its disadvantages). When I hung up, I got a text message on my Treo from Matthew with the room where we would be meeting. All of these communications were high-value, but none were face-to-face until I met up with Matthew. Oddly enough, by the end of the day, I had seen each person mentioned in the above scenario face-to-face for one reason or another. Living out of your bag doesn’t mean avoiding face-to-face meetings at all.

I think all the virtual communication is necessary in the era of Web Development 2.0. When you’re moving fast, lots of small decision points come up, and it’s best to get those decisions out of the way as soon as it’s feasible.

Side anecdote: if you live out of your bag, you have to make sure your bag is well-stocked for all circumstances. One of my great moments in bag history was a day when Caterina was asking around if anyone had a Treo charger because her battery was dead. I had the charger, but instead I pulled out a fully-charged spare Treo battery and traded for her dead one (which I charged later). It was the Silicon Valley high-tech office version of a Mentos moment.

I encourage everyone to pack an extra fully-charged cell phone battery in your bag. One day you will be sitting in stalled Manhattan traffic on a Friday afternoon on the way to the airport and need to make a critical call, and your phone will be dead. That’s when you will remember that spare battery and thank me.

Notes from Mashup Camp

Unfortunately for me, some pressing work obligations came up on the second day of Mashup Camp so I wasn’t able to attend, but I did make it the first day and had a great time while I was there. I apologize to people I missed. David Berlind and Doug Gold did an amazing job putting it all together and deserve massive praise. News.com has a nice story about the camp and how it all works.

A few quick random notes (work is insanely busy these days, so this will be short):

In one session, (“Chicagocrime and the ScrapePI“), I watched Adrain Holovaty demonstrate his amazing Chicagocrime.org super mashup.

Did you know Wikipedia has a third-party API? I didn’t: http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia. This an example of a “ScrapePI,” an API against information that has been scraped.

I also talked with Chris Law about some of the stuff we’ve been doing at Yahoo, particularly the “hack days” I’ve been running (explained very well by Jeremy after our first one). One of the reasons I’m so bummed about missing the second day is that I really wanted to see how the Mashup Camp hackathon went compared to our Yahoo! hack days. According to Edward O’Connor, Podbop won the “Best Mashup” award (check out the other entrants with vote totals). Congrats!