Multimodal traffic on 8/31 – 2 of 2

The Goodyear blimp flying low over the Long Island Expressway

Mercial Professional – 1988-2007

The frameset is Reynolds 531c steel, 62 cm with 74 degree parallel angles and virtually no rake – maybe 30-32 mm – which makes for a frisky ride. Mostly Campagnolo Nuovo Record, updated with Velocity rims and Look Keo pedals. A full Ultegra upgrade is to come this fall/winter.

The lugs are classic British style, hand-carved and pinstriped.

The bottom bracket sports handmade 60mm tangs – as if this ride weren’t already stiff – to eliminate flex.

Semi-wrapped stays. The name is embossed, not just painted and of course the lug is hand cut and pinstriped.

Mamma Mia

Jake’s Lego Mario

Ham and Oreo sandwich, anyone?

Its a favorite of Jacob's.

Social Media in the enterprise – best practice #2

I’ve heard that email spam got it’s nickname based on the physical behavior of its namesake processed meat product. Apparently you take a large quantity, throw it against a wall and see what sticks…I’ve lived in rural America, sometimes this is what passes for fun.

Unfortunately the scatter-shot approach is sometimes used in early stages of emerging technology deployments. Blogs, Wikis and IM have been no exception. You’ll see skunkworks driven by a well-meaning enthusiast pushing a technology out and justifying it by essentially declaring that ‘if we deploy it, they will come’. More often than not, very few people come. Resources are wasted, management finds out and the entire effort gets a bad name. When the subject is raised again, the resistance is high.

If you’re thinking of deploying a form of social media, it must have a defined value proposition, be aligned to a business process and demonstrably improve or enhance that process: eliminating friction, reducing errors, capturing undocumented data or knowledge and making it easily findable…you get the point.

If you crave a Sharepoint or other collaboration instance, find a project that is broadly distributed. Chances are high that too much of the process and communications is happening between a small number of participants via email and attachments. The rest of the team wonders what’s happening and the lack of visibility leads to a lack of engagement.

Show how document sharing and simple versioning reduces the problem of multiple unsynchronized documents driving people to actions based on the wrong version. Show how a discussion forum can help a person in a regional office stay aligned with a corporate framework, and how a person the the corporate office can learn who does what in the regions, and how they’ve needed to modify that framework to work better in their business environment. In short, show how these tools help people work more efficiently.

Best Practice #2: Show direct business value by aligning social computing to real-world work.

Cold Spring Harbor railroad station

9:20 am, August 29th

Brazilian hair straightening hurts

The price of beauty….

Bruce Hornsby Trio at the J&R Jazzfest

At City Hall Park, 8/25.

Dave Holland sextet

At the Blue Note, 8/25.

I guess it’s true.