The FCC voted yesterday to establish clear rules intended to protect an open internet and promote competition. As an initial reaction, it strikes me that the rules are clear and enforceable.  The full set of written rules has not been published yet.

There are clear rules against an internet service provider blocking or throttling traffic.  They may not create “fast lanes”.  There will be increased transparency, particularly in the case of reasonable network management practices.  In those cases, as well as, zero rating (think free Spotify) or peering (think Netflix) there will be oversight and review.  While there is potential for some policy changes alongside regime change, it’s a reasonable answer to a complicated issue. 

Verizon’s Public Policy group has issued a protest in Morse Code, a appropriate way for them to highlight the problems with using throwback law to manage today’s technology.  We can expect to see legal challenges from the ISPs in addition to complaints, but my personal feeling is that the large ISPs will benefit from clear definitions and rules over the long run.  Evidently the initial stock market results seem to agree.

In an era when gridlock and infighting is the norm, I think it is important to recognize that this rulemaking represents a significant accomplishment.  While the courts and marketplace will have their say in determining what the internet ends up being, it is important to recognize a job well done by the FCC.  This is a complicated issue, and they have done an excellent job of managing an open and transparent process.

Automate the Boring (sales) Stuff with Python

This is a great book for anyone that is interested in making the transition from learning Python code to actually creating programs that do useful things.

The book includes a basic overview of Python. It provides practical examples, starting with how to read and write data to files, then quickly moves into webscraping, creating spreadsheets, image manipulation, and other useful techniques.

It is both well thought out and well written. I’ve listened to a podcast interview of the author, Al Sweigart. He is an educator as much as a programmer. Some of his other work focuses on using games to teach young people about Python. In this case, the focus is on practical utility for adults.

This approach lines up well with my own views. We are just starting to realize the advantages of what I call computer assisted intelligence. For many years, people have viewed human and computer intelligence as an either/or proposition. Man versus machine. Automation or people.

It turns out that the answer to “Who plays the best chess” was neither the Grandmaster nor Watson. The winner was a smart kid with a cheap chess computer. People learn what an application does well, but also when they need to take over control.

People’s contributions become more valuable when they take advantage of computer assistance. For people in sales, this value goes directly to top line revenue growth. A computer assisted sales person should be able to book more business. One of the biggest challenges can be that each sales person has a different set of challenges, customers, and skills.

The root cause of failed sales automation initiatives is the imposition business processes that do not improve the ability to deliver more sales. There are many reasons for this. The most common is that management has prioritized system requirements for forecasting and reporting functions, not for sales. The sales environment is another main reason.

The sales environment is dynamic and competitive. Customers and competitors both present new challenges. The best salespeople adopt their strategy and process to the environment, not to internal systems.

Automate the Boring Stuff provides a great solution for this challenge. It puts the power of automation squarely in the hands of the sales person. It provides a great foundation in how to read and write data from spread sheets, how to scrape webpages for information, and most importantly, how to automate these processes for increased efficiency.

The book is subtitled “Practical programming for total beginners”. At the time that I read it, I wasn’t a total beginner, but would hardly call myself an accomplished programmer either. I skipped the first section on programming basics and went right to the section on reading and writing files to a disk. I then jumped to reading and writing excel sheets. In a fairly short time, I found two things. First, that I could actually read and write excel programatically in Python. The second was that I wanted to go back and read up on some of the foundational stuff that I had skipped over.

It is well indexed, gives wonderfully practical advice, and strikes a great balance between informing directly and encouraging you to “kick the tires” and learn for yourself. I’m working on a contact management tool for myself that pulls contacts, looks for duplicates, completes information from other sources and allows me to pick and choose what I upload into other systems and formats it accordingly into an excel spreadsheet format.

I would recommend this book for any adult that is interested in learning Python and would prefer to focus on things that will deliver practical results. Al provides the full text of his book online, so you can check it out and see its value for yourself.

Here’s the link to the online copy of the book

Monty suggested that we go to Mickey’s Dining Car in St. Paul. It would be cool, because Monty has a special kind of discriminating taste. He’s been unapologetically direct with his judgment for as long as I’ve known him. Others had told me that Mickey’s has the best burgers in the twin cities. The story that Monty told me was that Traveler’s wanted the property in order to knock the diner down and expand their building, which takes up the rest of the entire block. Mickey’s refused to sell out and stands there as this quirky little art deco diner sitting right next to this massive typical corporate building. We were going because it was a cool place run by righteous folk.

Monty Lee Wilkes is one of my favorite sound engineers. Major concert tours take a small army of people to handle production. Most of the crew are local, brought on for just the event. They work under the direction of the tour’s light and sound engineers. The front of house engineer is responsible for what the audience actually hears, directing the assembly of the sound system, and then mixing the live show itself.

The job lives in the intersection between technical capabilities and creative sensibilities. Sound engineers have limited truck space, electrical power, and time. Each location is a unique environment with its own limits. Dealing with those problems is table stakes for delivering what is a subjective and emotional experience between an artist and their audience.

Many of the greatest musical artists of the last couple of decades have turned to Monty to make that connection. When we first started hanging out back in the 90s, he’d already established his reputation having worked with Nirvana, The Replacements, and many others. We hung out at some iconic places like the Roosevelt Hotel in LA, and also quite a few non-descript places where an awful lot of the music gets made. I’m thinking of the arena loading docks, hotel rooms, and backstage areas that all blur into one.

Throughout it all, Monty has always been faithful to his own sense of musical truth. He listens with his own ears and makes up his own mind. While that might seem like an obvious requirement for a sound man, in practice it isn’t as common as you might think. In addition to the paying audience, there are record company people, radio and other media critics and lots of people with their own opinions about what the music should sound like. The artist can’t actually hear the sound that the audience hears. They rely on the feedback that they get from the audience and media, who may not be very articulate about their opinion. Which is in sharp contrast to Monty, who is extremely articulate about his opinion.

Monty is an atheist and a scientist. He lives in a world of meters and controls. Power and sound pressure levels are measured and monitored. Time delays are calculated within milliseconds. All of this to create an illusion that you are listening to the artist, not the sound system. At its best, music is a transcendent emotional experience. Monty sees his job as creating the environment in which the artist can deliver that immeasurable moment at the center of it all.

Monty and I would reconnect every couple of years and catch up on music, life, and which artists he’d parted ways with. There were lots of them. Part of this is the nature of the business, part of it was him sticking to his own beliefs. Prince decided his girlfriend needed to be advising at the mixing console because she really understood him. Monty walked out. In another example, a lead singer believed that it was his job to bring Buddhist enlightenment to the rock and roll masses. Monty didn’t have that dial on his sound system.  He also didn’t have a dial for curing cancer.

Suddenly there wasn’t all of the time in the world anymore. So I got on a plane and he picked me up and drove me to Mickey’s Dining Car. He’d had chemo that morning. Once we got to the parking lot, he asked if I minded if he smoked some weed in his car. I didn’t mind, but chose to wait outside.

We ordered food and talked. Music is his center and he stays faithful to it. We talked about how powerful music can be in keeping someone just barely on this side of the sanity line. It can provide some profound moments of truth that cuts through everything and lets you know that you aren’t alone. “We were ‘weirdos’, you know?” Of course I knew. The creative world is much more accepting of who you are than the mainstream. “The whole scene really celebrated individuality, until the business took over and the bastards ruined that too.”

The food arrived. Monty was surprised that he’d ordered a milkshake, fries, and a full breakfast. “I don’t know why I ordered so much food.” Having seen the haze inside the car, I told him I had a suspicion. He laughed and explained that he was down to 120 pounds and was having a hard time eating, so this was literally just what the doctor ordered.

We talked about death. I asked Monty how he viewed the soul. “As a scientist, I’m compelled to believe that energy cannot be either created or destroyed. The soul or spirit is nothing other than pure energy, so it must be transformed somehow.” It seemed to me that he was fine accepting that, just like he recognizes the magic of the right musical moment.

On the ride home, we listened to music and talked about lots of it. I was surprised to find out his all time favorite band was The dBs. I had worked on a demo with them back in the offices of the New York Rocker long before Monty and I had ever met. Monty mentioned that Andy Schwartz, the publisher of  the Rocker had reached out and sent him a note when he had heard about the cancer.

He dropped me off and we left each other feeling a little less weird and alone.

AWS has dropped the pricing of their S3 and Glacier cloud storage by roughly 25%.  They’ve also taken the opportunity to simply and restructure their storage options.  S3, the standard cloud storage offer now has three pricing tiers depending upon your volume of usage.  Glacier is a cheaper storage for use (roughly a third of the cost) for use when your retrieval needs are not as urgent.  It is now offered in three models based upon your retrieval needs.   Glacier Standard allows you to get back your data typically within a couple of hours,  Expedited within minutes.  The third option is Bulk.

You can find more details about the storage price reductions.  The plan restructuring and Glacier changes make this a really good time to look at your object lifecycle management policies.  When you combine this price reduction with archival efficiencies, I think that 50% savings on cloud storage are a reasonable expectation. The good news is that you’re going to start saving on December 1, 2016 even if you don’t do anything.

With Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress today, we can expect lots of rhetoric. We have a privacy problem that is bigger than Facebook. There is real value in the platform that I don’t want to walk away from, yet I also do not want to keep unwittingly feeding data to a company that has demonstrated that it doesn’t protect it. I do not believe Facebook has been naïve, but I also believe that the mess they are in is not part of a clever strategy.

I was delighted to see Firefox announce an addon designed to limit Facebook data collection.

“Facebook Container isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of your web activity. When you install it, you will continue to be able to use Facebook normally. Facebook can continue to deliver their service to you and send you advertising. The difference is that it will be much harder for Facebook to use your activity collected off Facebook to send you ads and other targeted messages.” (Firefox description of plugin)

I think that is how most people expect things to work. I have used Firefox as my main browser for years. Its performance has always been fine, and having a nonprofit company in the browser wars always felt a little bit like Switzerland to me.

You can download the Facebook Container browser addon here.

I read that Facebook has released a new version of it’s PyTorch artificial intelligence tool. It seems to be a hybrid, combining the creative prototyping Python front end capabilities with an eye towards streamlining the pipeline for production later on.

I haven’t had an opportunity to look at it, having mainly been working within Rasa and trying to get my head around applications. My interest is piqued though.

Had I known of Chris Matthews’ history as a speechwriter, I might not have been better prepared for the best commencement speech that I’ve ever heard. 

After some local color, he got to his focus, “I want to speak about what I’ve learned all these years watching this country’s leaders–not about the politics that so much divides this country, but for a cause that unites all of us here today: the future of these graduates we’ve come to honor, that they get off to the best possible start in life, that they make the right decisions, the right moves, find the best ways to show and put to use what they’ve got.

He gave simple and direct advice. 

Show Up – “I want you to build a muscle memory for those times when you have to choose between going to something–getting suited up–or skipping it.”

Ask! – Anyone in business out there knows that every salesperson needs to ask for the order, just like you have to ask for the date–don’t you?

The point that resonated most strongly with me was “The important little secret of human politics is that the man or woman who does give you your chance will back you up later. … You see, when someone gives you a job, they’re making an investment in you, a bet on you.  People tend to double-down on that kind of bet.“

Here was Chris’ summary of his key points.

• Show up! Do everything you can to get in the door.
• Show up for your friends. Don’t wait for a classmate to call you. You be the one to call up and keep the friendship alive.
• When you see an opportunity, ask for it. Never say “no” to yourself.
• And hang on to your values–honesty, loyalty, duty, basic goodness.

All of that is simple advice, which is not to say it is easy.  Full text of Chris Matthews’ speech to the OSU class of 2014.

I spoke today with Paul Brewer, who is part of the University of Delaware Center for Public Communication.  They conducted an independent opinion poll on net neutrality.  They had been surprised to see that there was almost no research on the subject, even less that had not been sponsored by someone with a position.

The main finding was that the majority of the public really didn’t know anything about net neutrality at all.  The majority of those that did had gotten their information from satirical late night news sources. John Oliver had the highest.   They used a good and objective methodology, which required careful wording of the questions due to the complex nature of the subject.

They didn’t use the phrase “fast lanes” but asked questions that went to the heart of whether or not the public want tiered internet services.  The finding was that the public does not. The more informed the sources were, the more strongly felt the opinion was. 

Perhaps the most illuminating finding was that people that watched streaming video were much more likely to be familiar with the issue than people that only relied on traditional cable programming.  I may need to have a good think about it, that might be the whole issue in one single factoid.

You can download the full report here.

A couple of things conspired to make me think it was time to make sure that I’m capturing and keeping my own data.  I’ve been keeping a self hosted WordPress site for many years, but frankly, rarely update it.  I tend to think of it as appropriate for long form writing with no actual audience. 

If I want people to read something, I tend to post in Facebook or Twitter,  sometimes Google Plus.

I was  looking at some cutting edge cellular network planning tools that incorporate twitter location data as a reference to compare against cellular network data.

It made me realize that there is problem an awful lot of data that I could use to document where I was, what I was doing, etc.  A passive diary so to speak. I’ve been aware that other’s were tracking what I was doing, but had this epiphany that it might be nice if I actually used that data. 

The other news item that caught my eye was to see that Google is abandoning much of it’s archival activities.  It just doesn’t seem relevant to their core mission anymore.  Which added some urgency to me to make sure that I download dumps of my data from Facebook, Google, 4square while I can.

My intention is to import that into some type of blogging platform such as this one, so at least I have access to it. 

I’m most familiar with WordPress, but have lately been looking at some others based on Python (my current programming kick).   Hopefully I’ll share my findings.

Here are the links to instructions for downloading your information from major social media.

1. Facebook.

2. Twitter

3. Google

I would love to hear if anyone has any tools for re-importing this data into some type of CMS.

I love my country and I love the principles that my country stands for.  We believe in individual freedom.  We believe in free speech.  We believe in limited powers of government.  We believe that you are innocent until proven guilty. 

When I was 16, I spent a summer living in France.  This was not long after Nixon had left office after his abuse of executive powers came to light.  What surprised me was the high regard that the French held for the American people because we actually did something about it.  

I have been increasingly worried about the damage to our country being done by abandoning some of our dearest principles.  In a recent Ted Talk, a European security expert @mikko came to a pretty obvious conclusion.  He recommendation is that the rest of the world that are “foreigners” had better start developing their own technology and get off US systems as quickly as possible.

The US commitment to our principles has always been a positive differentiator.  We have earned the world’s trust. That trust is now under scrutiny, not because of the Snowden revelations, but because we are not standing behind our own principles.  Free speech is a founding principle of our great nation, yet I continue to read that the US government is still operating “business as usual”.  Intelligence agencies continue to overuse “gag orders.  The President is hedging, explaining that he supports encryption, yet uses terrorism to justify current practices. 

My hope is that Citizenfour winning the award for the best documentary at the Academy Awards will act as a catalyst to remind us of our principles.