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March 31, 2004
Such a perfect crime, he got caught
At lunch today a friend told me a great story about a scam a former co-worker pulled off that was so good, it got the guy caught. I'll call the guy Brad.
Brad was a support tech for a major hardware vendor. He also had a side business selling equpiment and third-party support contracts to customers of that same vendor, presumably so they could get support without having to pay so much to the vendor. His business model was highly profitable, at least for a while. The ingenius part of his business model was in the way he blended the two jobs together.
When a part went bad at one of his personal customers, he'd look in the vendor's database to find a vendor-supported customer with the same part. He'd make a "preemptive" visit to that customer, determine that that part was just about to fail, and order a replacement. The replacement from the vendor would go to the vendor-supported customer, the (still-working) part from the vendor-supported customer would go to his personal customer, and the failed part from his personal customer would go back to the vendor. And he'd pocket the full payment from his personal customer for the service contract.
He also was able to stock his personal business sales with an undercommit, overdeliver kind of approach. Like, order a 3-drive array for a vendor-supported customer who only needs 2 drives, and keep the spare drive for other uses. This allowed him to stock-pile 3 trucks-full of hardware over a few years.
Some time passed and everything was working well for him at both jobs, better than he though. At a regional customer conference where employees were recognized for exemplary service, his customers just couldn't shut up about how good he was. Customer after customer lauded his amazing capabilities to proactively identify hardware that was about to fail, and replace it before it broke.
After the customer discussion, his peers pulled him into a meeting to find out what his secrets were. They wanted to know how they could make their customers so happy. Brad didn't have much to say that they didn't already know. They were particularly interested in how he could proactively identify equipment that was about to fail, so they could do the same. Again, he couldn't say much. His peers were disappointed and began to get suspicious.
Not long afterwards Brad was escorted out of the company office by the county sherrif, minus his hardware stash and a job. Fortunately for him, he got away without any other repercussions.
Posted by pete at 2:23 PM | Comments (2)
March 30, 2004
Statistical thinking improves performance
I'm reading Improving Performance through Statistical Thinking. The premis for this book is that all work is a series of interconnected process, and that through understanding the processes, finding what causes variations, analyzing data from the processes, and acting to improve based on that data, we can improve performance.
Before you get to thinking that this is a book on statistical methods, one of the first points of the book is that statistical thinking is not the same as statistical methods. Statistical thinking blends key (and hopefully successful) concepts from reengineering, total quality management, benchmarking and systems thinking (a la Fifth Discipline), including:
So what is Statistical Thinking?
Statistical Thinking is a philosophy of learning and action based on the following fundamental principles:
All works occurs in a system of interconnected processes
Variation exists in all processes
Understanding and reducing variation are keys to success
Here's something that looks like a fun mind-stretching exercise for those of us who think we can control our corner of the world:
Like it or not, variation is everywhere. Helping people understand this fundamental principle and "unlearn" their deterministic view of the world is the greatest contribution the statistically literate, and only the statistically literate, can provide to society.
Hopefully this book will put me on the path to become one of the few and proud statistically literate.
I'll be writing more as I get further into the book.
Posted by pete at 1:46 PM
March 29, 2004
A growing network
I met with Alpine School District this afternoon to do some planning for the next months and years.
Alpine is the largest (number of schools) district in Utah. They have 41 elementary schools (with several more on the way), 9 (soon to be 10) junior high schools, and 7 high schools, plus a few special schools.
Many of the schools are experiencing serious performance issues. LearnKey (a Utah-based company, fortunately hosted by a CommIX-connected ISP) is being deployed district-wide for on-line training, classes and testing, and in many schools it is almost unusable because the school's bandwidth is already saturated. Some schools regularly experience Web time-outs during regular hours.
Fortunately, many of the high schools were connected via fiber many years ago for the IPITEK video project. Lehi high school is the only one not on fiber and its a struggle to keep enough bandwidth there. The fourth T1 is being added now, and most likely that will quickly be saturated. We talked about installing wireless as a temporary solution, and Qwest GeoMax as a long-term solution.
The other high schools will be upgraded to GigE using a spare pair of UVSC fiber, hopefully in the next several months. This will be a long-term solution to bandwidth problems in these schools, and hopefully to schools nearby.
The Junior High Schools were up next. All of them need more bandwidth, but few have many service options. We decided that the best option would be to extend wireless from the high schools to the junior high schools, to make sure there was enough bandwidth to meet immediate and near-future needs. We hope that in the next 2-3 years, fiber will be an option for these schools.
We talked about redundancy. Not only are the schools relying more and more on on-line resources for instruction and testing, a lot of more mundane services are being moved to the network. The building environmentals are already centralized and using the network for monitoring and management. The fire alarm system is partially (resetting the fire alarms) managed remotely. A new card-swipe system is going in that will be centrally managed over the network. A future video surveillence system will also run over the network. All of these systems have work-arounds if the network goes down, but a network outage is significantly more painful today than just a couple of years ago. Alpine district wants to have redundant connections to every school within the next few years. It looked like we could do this at least to the junior high schools and Lehi high school in this first project phase, but the rest will need to be planned for the future.
It's always enjoyable to go meet with our customers and understand the issues they are dealing with, and do what I can to help resolve those issues. We made a lot of progress yesterday. But as we met, I couldn't help but think about how insignificant these issues will seem a few years from now, when we are dealing with 10x or 100x more bandwidth, much more network-based education, and who knows what kind of security problems.
I'd better enjoy working on our current issues as long as I can.
Posted by pete at 5:25 PM
March 28, 2004
Bundle of potential or fixer-upper?
If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather than dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities. -- Bob Conklin
How much time do we spend leveraging the strengths we find in ourselves and others, versus trying to fix our and their weaknesses? How much more successful would we all be if we spent our time figuring out how to do something with our strengths, instead of ignoring our strengths while we try to improve weaknesses in order to become mediocre across the board.
During your last Performance Review experience (whether for yourself or someone you manage), how much time was devoted to discussing how to make the most of strengths, versus how to fix weaknesses?
Posted by pete at 10:47 PM
March 27, 2004
Why learn how when I can buy the expert?
I picked up The New Buffettology: The Proven Techniques for Investing Successfully in Changing Markets That Have Made Warren Buffett the World's Most Famous Investor last week and have read about half of it. One of the most interesting investment books I've read, and I've read quite a few.
But I realized shortly after starting it that as interesting as it would be to learn to invest like Buffet, I can just buy Buffet and have his expertise working for me. So I did.
I'll finish the rest of the book, and maybe find some ways to apply the principles, but as long as Buffet is on the market, I have no interest in trying to beat him.
Posted by pete at 12:27 PM
March 26, 2004
Fixin blog spam
I finally got tired of Blog spam. Came across two very good resources tonight and decided to invest the time to use them. First was a list of blog-spam-defeating methods by Yoz Grahame. Some of these are very trivial and even though they may not defeat all blog spammers, they will get a lot of them.
Then I installed MT-Blacklist, which I've read about a lot but hadn't gotten around to implementing. The installation was incredibly simple, the configuration was a breeze, and probably the best capability was being able to sort through all comments posted at one time and delete all of the spam ones from a single screen.
I set up a cron job to keep the MT-Blacklist blacklist file current, using Luke Reeves' script.
Supposedly MT 3.0 is going to resolve this problem with a totally different approach to authenticating comment posters. That will be welcome.
For now, I'm happy that my blog is once again spam-free and hopefully will stay that way for a while.
Posted by pete at 11:11 PM
March 18, 2004
Found on the airplane: OSS kicks proprietary butt
Someone left this in the seat-back pocket on the flight from Salt Lake to Tampa:
Some people say open source software has commoditized segments of the IT industry, but I would argue that it re-energized technologies that had stagnated and lacked innovation for some time. Customers have long felt exploited by the proprietary vendors who base their pricing on lock-in and market power, rather than innovation or value delivered. The open source movement is as much a customer rebellion against that exploitation as it is a developer movement. And it's not only about cost. On the flipside, traditional software companies had better be prepared to justify their value continually, or they risk falling prey to the next open source project. -- James Breyer, managing partner of Accel Partners
Lawrence Lessig is talking along similar lines this week at OSBC, that it's not an either/or of open-source vs proprietary software, but about open-source being a competitor that pushes proprietary software to be better than it has had to be.
Posted by pete at 8:10 AM
March 2, 2004
Well, if you would have said it that way
Found while searching for something else:
Most of us enter the investment business for the same sanity-destroying reasons a woman becomes a prostitute: It avoids the menace of hard work, is a group activity that requires little in the way of intellect, and is a practical means of making money for those with no special talent for anything else.
Richard Ney, The Wall Street Jungle
Posted by pete at 11:07 PM