augustjackson dot net

Very slowly I am finding the time to reacquaint myself with CSS and Moveable Type to get the blog and web site into better shape after a long period of neglect.  In the interest of historical completeness and cutting corners, I’ve gone ahead and posted the text archive of all of my previous blog posts.  Moveable Type’s import functionality and I have not been getting along, and I am VERY open to advice on how to get my old blog entries imported properly into this blog.

Finally graduating from the MBA program last Friday was a great experience,  My parents were in town, the weather was great, the ceremony was long but sufficiently memorable and we had a great dinner at the Tower Club on Friday night.  Other than some extreme traffic getting to the graduation ceremony everything went very smoothly.  It was good to take note of the accomplishment and celebrate the end of carrying a full-time class load on top of a full-time work load and some serious extracurricular activities.

Now the work begins digging out from underneath the pile that has been building up.  Actually there are multiple piles.  I have spent a good deal of time on this first weekend as a free man getting my Getting Things Done groove back on.  I’m tracking my tasks and progress using OmniFocus, and I’m excited for the 3G iPhone to be released (as I really, REALLY hope it will) and see OmniFocus for the iPhone.  That’s going to be some synchronization goodness.

Obviously the blog has been ignored for a long time.  Things started to go off the rails when my friend Mike’s server had some extended downtime.  I chose to move the content over to the hosted blogging service at GoDaddy.  That was an OK quick fix, but the blog publishing interface was awful.  After I lost one blog post three times trying to post it I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay on GoDaddy.  I signed up for a hosted MoveableType offering by Pair Networks several months ago, and I never really had the time to do anything with that.  Slowly, things will start to improve around here.  Among other things I will need to bring over my old blog entries one at a time.  I have not been successful in my effort to get the automated importing to work.  If anyone has advice I am open to it.

Another item on my list is the Competitive Intelligence Podcast.  It’s been about 10 months without an episode.  Part of that has had to do with difficulty connecting with prospective interview subjects.  The effort associated with coordinating interviews became too consuming, and so the podcast had to fall by the wayside.  Watch for new episodes very soon, because I have some of my own content knocking around in my head.  One of the things I’m very interested in exploring is the alignment of CI with corporate strategy, and I’ve been shopping around the notion of improving some standard CI tools such as the SWOT analysis and applying portfolio methods to CI products.  There’s a lot more value-add here!

Nobody should be surprised that I have a large back-up of media to consume.  I managed to keep up on TV well enough thanks to the DVR’s magic ability to skip commercials.  I was thrilled when the Economist began their audio edition, and I continue to be educated on current global events by the posh news readers.  In the last couple weeks I have over 20 hours of podcasts in my backlog, including several hours worth of TED presentations, multiple episodes of Coverville and a few hours worth of ChinesePod.  I’m on a bit of a treadmill, because it seems that the new episodes arrive at about the same pace as I listen to the old ones.

The real kicker is the pile of books that is waiting to be read.  There are about 20 books and as many audio books waiting to be consumed.  Part of this situation was created when Barry’s mom gave me a Border’s gift card.  Concerned about the possibility of a Border’s bankruptcy I cleared some books off my Amazon wish list.  Now they are waiting to be read.  I’m about halfway through True Enough.  Next comes Groundswell and Here Comes Everybody.  I’ve also got about six months of Harvard Business Review waiting to be read.  I have been looking forward to read books of my own choosing for 18 months now!

OK, I am back and very well-rested from a wonderful trip to London and Amsterdam. I have to say this may have been my best vacation ever, and Barry definitely enjoyed his first trip to Europe. He commented that London was a hundred times better than he ever expected. While I dont know exactly what he expected, I think thats a rousing endorsement.

We had a number of chances to catch up with friends and former co-workers, which is always great. It was also my first real opportunity to be a shameless tourist in these cities which I had gone to for work many times (Ive been to London dozens of times). Among the sites visited in London are St. Pauls Cathedral, the British Museum, Tower of London, the London Eye and the list goes on. The trip to Amsterdam was a short one, and we visited Ann Franks house and took a canal boat ride. Like I said, we were shameless tourists.

Links to pictures will follow in the coming days or weeks once I get a chance to work some production magic. Weve got about 700 photos to look through, choose the best and do all the rotating and editing of these pictures. There is a strong bias towards buildings since Barry is really into different architectural styles.