This will be my last post using Movable Type. I'm following the crowds and switching to WordPress. I'm leaving this page here temporarily so people know to visit the actual blog (it looks very nice), and subscribe to new RSS feeds.

So things have been, shall we say, insane, and absolutely wonderful. I was able to take about three weeks off of work, then go back for a week and then head down to Lex's parent's in LA for a week, so December was a surreal blur of diapers, no sleep, an unbelievable cuteness.

Now I'm back to work full time, and Alexis and Alana are enjoying full-time baby fun at home. New schedules are going to require new routines, but whatever I can do to maximize time with the girls is important because I can't believe how fast they change.

Babies are fun!

I've been so caught up in the plethora of excellent series on HBO such as Deadwood, Rome, Entourage, The Wire, and the ever-controversial Big Love, that I've completely missed some of the programming coming from Showtime. One show that caught my eye due to the actors that I like in it and the rash of Emmys that it won recently is Weeds. This is a simple half-hour show about a suburban mom who has taken to selling pot to her escape-needing suburban neighbors after her husband died. Now that sounds like it could be a dark and depressing subject, but its not the illicit activities that make the show, its the backdrop of her neighborhood in the picture-perfect "Agrestic" planned community.

Great cast, snappy writing, and good story lines got me hooked after just a couple of shows. I saved half the first season for Alexis and we plowed through six episodes in one night (she got hooked as well).

Season one is out on DVD now, season two should be soon, and season three should start broadcasting in the next few months. Check it out, I highly recommend it!

Long a staple in our freezer has been various forms of lasagna we like; with turkey sausage, without, zucchini, sometimes with goat cheese, yum. Well I tried a new "format" this weekend that I say wins hands down over the traditional long wide noodles and stacked presentation.

Basically instead of going through the palavra of boiling the noodles and laying everything together, I instead simply used some penne tossed in tomato sauce as the main component and then mixed in layers of mozzarella, parmesan, and basil leaves. The result was a fantastically tasty baked pasta dinner that could provide an excellent canvas for the addition of any of our other favorite ingredients, and doesn't suffer from the sometimes dried-out ricotta layer that is so necessary for structurally sound lasagna. Yum!

(Shoot, I should've taken a picture)

Blurb - Makes it easy to do semi-custom books with more text than iPhoto

Lulu - Self-print any sized book from a PDF file

This is the first step in a few changes around here, but is a major step before I add some very key content...

I was using one of these over at a friend's house last night and the clickity-click was as comforting as an old IBM PS/2 tank keyboard. I also liked the black color and NO LABELS on the keys.

Unfortunately thought they are still holding onto the old num-pad layout, which I've ditched in favor of getting the mouse closer to the right side using one of these.

If I was still using X as my primary environment and was using the num-pad to replace the mouse for getting around it would be great, but I guess I'll have to wait until they come out with Das Kompact Keyboard.

• BusinessWeek - Cover Stories
• Ebert & Roeper
• Endgadget
• NBC News - Meet the Press
• NPR: Story of the Day

And a recent subscription: 43 Folders Podcast.

I think one of the most important clarifications to make when describing what marketing does is to clear up the misconception that "marketing is just about telling people what to buy." That may have been the old approach for companies like Coke, but in my line (Enterprise Software), you can't just build something cool and then tell people to buy it, you actually have to build something they want.

"Marketing" is most importantly understanding the customer. Market research, customer interaction, etc. If I ever have to explain very quickly to someone what it is I do I sum it up as, "Work with the customer to understand what they want (to do), work with development to get it built, work with Marcom to communicate that value." I think the fact that "Marketing" is mostly associated with the last item is our biggest problem, maybe we need a new name for all of this which isn't so loaded with preconceived notions (or maybe its just that most people only see part C, so that's all they associate with Marketing).

Anyways, it is definitely true though that there are a lot of bad marketers out there who encourage the stereotypes and re-enforce the distrust. I've been following a number of good blogs these days that talk about the importance of sincerity and clarity in outbound communication: Seth Godin, Joel Splosky, and perhaps a new guy John Dodds.

It was the latter that had a post which inspired me to write something: Geek Marketing 101. His top points that really resonated with me include:

1) Marketing is not a department. (Exactly what I said above)
2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don't speak geek. (One of the reasons I think I'm good at this)
7) Technical Support is marketing. (I would expand this to say that every single person who touches the customer is marketing, and you want feedback from them all)

* - After spending enough time in Marketing I started to realize that the real dark side is Sales...somewhere that I hope to dabble a bit in the future just so I can better communicate with the other side of the table in my day-to-day dealings.

GTD has been a tremendous boon to me in managing the insane number of responsibilities I've been juggling between work, school, and home over the past six months. Only now during the relative calm of summer break have I sat back to look at the major change its had for even those non-panic'd times of my life. I've recommended the book to a number of people, and while some have dabbled, its sometimes hard for them to take some of the first steps. One of the most helpful things to really get me started was some pointers by my friend Mark as well as him letting me poke around in his personal organization system so that I could get an idea of what a "real-world" solution that works for someone looks like. When Mark later came to me and asked about the system I developed and said that was helpful to him, I realized it was time to get around to acting on one of my deferred actions and put together this article.

Our IT department at work recently decided to switch from Webex to Raindance for our online conferencing needs. Raindance looks pretty sweet, so I'm happy to make the switch. The only problem though is that they don't have a presentation tool for the Mac. I'm not sure if IT planned this out, but the timing was such that they were able to quickly come up with the workaround, "We'll give all the presentation users Macbook Pros." OK, cool, new hardware for me (except for the fact that its a first gen Apple laptop, and those always have problems...this one has been no exception).

So now I've proven that Windows and Raindance will work successfully under Parallels on the Mac, I'm trying to get Windows "activated" so the whole thing doesn't shut down in 4 days. This is perhaps the most ludicrously complicated process there is, and MSoft's support personnel are not only clueless, but their phone systems seem broken. I've been sent on circular goose chases between three different departments, hung-up on while transferring several different times, and still not a single person has gotten me any closer to resolving this issue.

The amount of time I've wasted on this is criminal (for my company). All of the business media I read these days whines that "American's must get more productive in order to compete in the global market!" Here's a first idea, ditch Windows.

Raindance is a good product. They obviously care (somewhat) for user experience. I'm surprised they don't have a Mac version. :P

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. We help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait?

Doodle helps scheduling meetings – it's simple, quick, and free.

Coghead provides a web-based application that allows tech-savvy businesspeople (that is, non-programmers) to create and deliver their own web-based applications...Coghead’s website is both an application authoring tool and an application delivery service. At Coghead’s website people can create an application using simple-to-learn methods (or pick a pre-built app from Coghead’s application gallery) and then invite co-workers to use the application.

This is a fantastic idea, and something I've been thinking about for a while. Imagine if you could take the power that Wiki has had on corporate data sharing and then put structure behind the data and add logic for processing. Very powerful.

As I've moved away from programming into more business-oriented functions in my company, I've identified many latent needs for quick-and-easy web applications to fill a variety of purposes inside a corp. Now since I'm an ex-coder I can (and sometimes have) put together a few simple systems to meet these needs, but its always kind of a hack and there's always the ongoing issue of support through IT. What's worse, 90+% of the other people I work with aren't programmers at all, so we resort to using the wrong tools (Excel), crappy tools (Intuit QuickBase), or no tools at all (ack!).

The real power of Web 2.0 (or Office 2.0, or whatever 2.0) is putting creative power into the hands of everyone. We saw the first explosion of this with blogging, which lowered the barrier of entry so everyone could start posting. I think Coghead could be a material step forward in making the web (and not just computers) an incredibly productive tool for everyone.

* - OK, so I first read about them in Business 2.0, so its not like I'm the first on the block to see this, but the fact they got glossy print even before launching the Beta is a good sign that the people in charge of the company has clue about running a business outside of building technology (which, by the way, they haven't proven yet).