This very blurry picture is proof that I met Mark Cuban. Fear.
The weird thing? He was a little drunk. A few seconds before this picture was snapped in Austin, he told me my hair smelled nice. He’s right, my hair does smell fantastic but, it’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear from a millionaire playboy. Crap. Maybe I missed my chance? I don’t know who that girl was on the other side of him, but I’m guessing that if I really had to, I could take her.
Mark, call me.
Promoting yourself at conferences is hard. SXSW is an especially tough field to compete within, as it’s crowded and full of the best and brightest among the blogosphere.
I nearly blew it. I forgot to order slick cards in time for the show, and I went into panic mode. Sometimes, panic brings the best inspiration to the table. Laying in bed two days before I left, I realized I had a perfect opportunity to stand out. Everyone — and I do mean everyone — would have amazing cards with pretty graphics, slick logos and clean cut edges. So, why not go the other way?
This passage from William Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic was the inspiration I needed:
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand- loading cartidges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.
So what did I load my shotgun with? Humor. I decided to tell the story of how I’d fucked up, forgotten to print cards, and beg for forgiveness; all in one paragraph. And hey, it couldn’t hurt to take a shot at Robert Scoble while I was at it, right?
This is my, “Oh, crap! I forgot to print cards for SXSW!” card. Laid out in romantic old-school fashion using tape and a Xerox machine, this card was forged on paper crafted from only the finest pelts of the most adorable baby seals and printed with ink containing the blood of Robert Scoble, god of first person pronouns. It may or may not possess magic powers. Please hold this card dear as a souvenir of my absentmindedness and an invitation to stay in touch with Download Squad”
It was pithy, reasonably short, and gave a bit of insight to my personality. I had no idea how it would be received, but I love to experiment.
The verdict? It worked. In a sea of slick business cards, my crudely crafted calling card stood out, stopped people in their tracks, and made them pay attention. I got more compliments on my card over the week than I ever could have hoped for.
Yesterday I found that Darren Rowse of Problogger had even given my card a shout out in his “How to Promote Yourself (and Your Blog) at a Conference” video, which was a huge honor. Weeks after the SXSW glory has faded, my cheap and easy business card still has legs.
The moral, “If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.” I can’t wait till next year. I won’t do it exactly the same way, but I’ll certainly take a lesson from this victory pulled from the steely jaws of defeat.
I’ve finally concocted a grand unified theory of lousy PR. Hopefully this will streamline the process of submitting things to the Download Squad tip box. Please use this form from now on.
Dear sir/maddam,
I’m writing to let you know about our
[x]incredibly boring
[ ]poorly conceived
[ ]misguided
[ ]useless
[ ]already done
product available
[ ]on the web
[ ]as a download
[x]via paid subscription
Our
[x]product
[ ]service
makes
[ ]Windows
[ ]Linux
[ ]The web
[ ]Facebook
[ ]Twitter
[x]Other
[ ]more useful
[x]less time consuming
[ ]easier to navigate
while also
[x]lowering total cost of ownership
[x]keeping your records in the cloud
Our clickwrap agreement is:
[x]complex
[ ]thick
[x]full of things you’d never agree to if you actually read it
only requiring your:
[ ] complete and total submission
[x] waiver of any rights to your own data
[x] first born child
We appreciate your time and consideration. Please contact:
[x] Our poorly paid and under-trained PR flack
[ ] Our expensive PR company
[x] Myself
[ ] No contact details provided
with any questions.
Sincerely,
[ ] CEO in title only
[ ] Eastern European programmer with lackluster English skills
[ ] The comic book guy
[x] Anonymous tipster who is actually a company representative
The whole fiasco Gizmodo created by firing infrared bullets of demo destruction at flat panel TVs all over CES seems to have blown over with very few actual repercussions — aside from a huge number of pageviews for Gizmodo’s own video of doom. Gawker’s no-give strategy dealing with The Scientologists over that crazy Tom Cruise indoctrination video pushed the calls for Gizmodo’s head on a platter right off the front page.
Coupled with this quote I ran across today, it made me think; Why is Gina Trapani still at Lifehacker?
The often fabulous Karina Longworth writes:
Actualy, come to think of it, why DOESN’T Denton fire all his writers, across ALL the blogs, and hire cheap[er] nobodies? You’d think that as soon as one of his serfs reaches the Gina Trapani/Mark Lisanti level of name recognition, they’ve outlived their usefulness. It certainly would empower his all attention is good attention as long as it translates into traffic mandate if he could funnel it through young rent-hungry writers too inexperienced to care about reputation or long term repurcussions.
I’ve got massive amounts of respect for Gina. At Download Squad we’ve chased Lifehacker, traded links with Lifehacker, and often watched in stunned amazement as Gina or Adam Pash cranks out yet another inspired piece. We don’t *directly* compete but enough overlap exists to keep us in the same room.
Having watched Gina closely over the last year and a half, I feel like I can say with a high level of confidence, she’s a machine — and I say that with the utmost respect. I firmly believe that Trapani is a replicant, crafted in a laboratory somewhere with the singular purpose of being a super-star productivity blogger. That’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night, as an excuse for not living up to my own potential.
The point of this being, Lifehacker is so out of place among the Gawker stable. While Idolator, Gawker, io9, and Consumerist are all busy taking cheap shots at the world like a pack of junior high kids, Lifehacker has dutifully created a respectable brand. That’s commendable, especially among so much noise. If Trapani could create that while mired in a platoon of blogs with the journalistic standards of a gossip rag, she could certainly create amazing value elsewhere.
Update: NikF writes in to add this:
“Essentially a universal remote that cycles through every possible code, the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.’
That, sir, is the original Gizmodo review of the unit they used at CES to power off televisions.
Oh yes.
I kid you not. Never could it be more apt?
This both intrigues and frightens me.
While taking a quick shower after an 18-hour day at the office last week, I thought about the real difference between open source and commercial software. In the land of commercial software development you have deadlines: hard, aggressive, sometimes impossible deadlines.
Deadlines can be good. I’ve seen amazing things happen under the pressure of an unrealistic deadline. I’ve seen software that couldn’t make it half-way through Q&A without causing testers to become physically ill. Suddenly and miraculously, I’ve also seen the same software make an acceptable, if painful, trip through the cycle. Excessively long days by dedicated developers can make such miracles happen. Those developers usually expect a reward of some sort at the end. Often, they remain empty handed.
Under the philosophies of open source development, things like this rarely happen. There are no real Q&A cycles, although we have the largest quality assurance team ever recorded. We arguably turn out quality software in less time than ever thought possible. We achieve this with only dedication and a desire to see software that works. There is no pressure to go public, or attract investors. There is no reason to prematurely give something a 1.0 or even 2.0 moniker. There is no reason to include features that don’t make sense. Corporate civilization frets over the thing that makes us great: we simply don’t care.
We don’t care if our software is still somewhere south of 1.0. Enlightenment, arguably one of the most beautiful pieces of open source software, is still in 0.16. While far away from a 1.0 release, it’s more stable, feature rich and usable than many commercial products. Enlightenment’s age and the fact it hadn’t been through a 1.0 release and wasn’t available in retail would be considered a dismal failure. The product development manager would be summarily shot by the CEO whose fortune would have rapidly depleted as investors jumped ship like rats from the Titanic.
Why do you think we frighten commercial development so terribly? Because what we do works. We don’t meet deadlines, we don’t court investors; we just make good software. Really good software. The kind of software your mother wouldn’t understand and the 15-year-old kid next door would drool over. Software for the rest of us. While they’re busy designing and building wizards and aids that make the Internet easy enough for your grandmother to love, we’re making the future. We could really care less if the world comes along for the ride.
Why do you think there is such a push to make incredibly easy-to-use software on the Windows platform? It’s simple: to expand the market they must reach people who’ve never had a computer before. Without an ever-expanding market, they cannot hope to achieve the growth figures that stock market analysts so casually throw out while chatting away on CNBC. What they’ve all missed is an ever-shrinking market segment. One day we will replace those people, and when we do, what OS will the world run?
We are the children of technology. We are the ones who vaguely remember a day before compact discs but cannot remember what we ever did without them. We are the ones who for reasons of necessity learned a platform is what you make of it. We are the children of Pac-Man and Wargames and TRON and video arcades. We lived fantasy while there was nothing else. We wished it so hard that, one day, it just came true.
And what do we make? Software for those who grew up with computers. Software for people who hate wizards, and plug and play, and lack of control. Software for people who can see the beauty of a properly working system. We make software for people who love choice. We make software that works, even when hardware manufacturers won’t pony up the documentation, even when we have to reverse engineer things that should be publicly available, we make it happen.
These are the things that make open source great. This is why even after an 18-hour day, I still have the desire to settle down at my Linux box. This is why I work all week in commercial software and still look forward to a weekend of uninterrupted time to catch up with my own development projects. This is why I’m here, and why I’ll continue to be here. This is what open source is all about.
Originally published at Linux.com (RIP)
Security isn’t perfect yet, but Todd Lewis from Atlanta-based SecureWorks spoke to 60 members of Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts group about the company’s Linux-based outsourced security products. Other topics of this meeting included DSL over fiber-optic lines and the pending release of ALE member Bob Toxen’s book “Real World Linux Security: Intrusion Prevention, Detection and Recovery”.
Its members in “recuperation mode” after the successful Annual Linux Showcase event held in Atlanta just a few weeks earlier, the current list of projects for ALE isn’tlong.. However, the SecureWorks folks have been busy as of late, so there was much to discuss.
Lewis talked at length about SecureWorks’ latest offering, iSensor. A Linux-based stateless firewall product has a significant twist: remote monitoring done at the SecureWorks data center in Atlanta. SecureWorks has done a considerable amount of work in real-time intrusion detection, adding a dynamic rule set system that can autonomously react to exploit attempts. SecureWorkers follows this with their 24/7 monitoring facility staffed with security specialists trained to react to persistent attacks.
Lewis said the iSensor system involves a firewall machine purchased from SecureWorks as well as a service contract that covers the remote monitoring functions. It’s proof once again that Open Source solutions can be a profitable arena of computer science with the proper business model., he said. The focus of iSensor is on small to mid-sized companies who find it cost- or resource-prohibitive to employa full time security administration staff. Their goal is to offer enterprise level security solutions to businesses that may not be able to handle the labor-intensive tasks of monitoring and intrusion investigation themselves, Lewis said.
He took questions from the audience about the system from ALE members. Questions ranged from functionality to hypothetical situations and examples of their response. Lewis covered all aspects of the iSensor architecture.
Notable attendees at the meeting included Mike Warfield of another Atlanta-based Internet security firm,ISS. Warfield participated in the question side of the question-and-answer session following the presentation.
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