Colin Charles Agenda

I had the pleasure to chat with my former CEO, Marten Mickos, at LinuxCon Barcelona on his birthday. Marten is prolific on Twitter (@martenmickos). I’ve always encouraged him to blog, so I’m glad that he now has two blogs: CEO blog at Eucalyptus, as well as another on Wired’s Innovation Insights.

We spoke about many things, but one of them was email. Marten always replies to emails very quickly and it has always impressed me. He told me he felt bad that now he might take up to a week to reply to an email. He jokingly blamed it on age catching up.

It got me thinking about my email backlog. Across all accounts, I am embarrassed to say I have 3,821 messages that I have to process. I’m sure quite a number of those will require replying (even at 10%, that is quite a number).

There is no better time than now to take over my INBOX. I have the next couple of weeks to be home and a little more relaxed, so I’m going to tackle this email backlog. Once I’ve paid off this debt, I plan to answer emails fashionably quick. I mean if Marten, CEO of Eucalyptus, board member at several firms, can do it, so can I.

Thanks Marten for continuing to inspire me to be better.

For additional inspiration, I plan to listen to Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself. I’m sure it is one of Marten’s better inspirational talks!

Confidence is the honest belief that you’re highly capable of helping others. Arrogance is the honest belief you have nothing more to learn yourself. It’s a fine line, but walk right up to it. (Smugness is arrogance without the talent–these are the people “coaching” others who have never done what they’re coaching.)

Quote from Alan Weiss. Totally read the book: Million Dollar Consulting.

I just read that Coupang, in South Korea, has been fined for using false information by the Korean Fair Trade Commission to sell beef.

What’s amazing is that there was 117 million won (~USD$108,000) worth of beef sold at a 50% discount. The fine for false advertising, which is common in group buying sites as they beef up copywriting, was 8 million won (~USD7360).

Guess they’re big, but everyone’s got to play by fair rules. I wonder how many other trade commissions look into whacky copywriting in other countries.

I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation today. It was in an airport bus, wheeling us to our plane. The dramatis personae involve folk that are from America.

Lady: “Where do you work?”

Man: Almost apologetically states, “I work at Oracle, that big database company. Well, until I find something else to do.”

A whiff of silence in the air.

Man: “I used to work for a small company but Oracle acquired it about a year ago”

Another man: ” When does your lock up period expire? Can’t imagine you’d enjoy working there.”

Man: “Soon, real soon.” Giggles

Lady: “Well in this economy, you don’t want to be out of a job. I guess no one leaves a company before having yet another job in the line.”

Everyone nods in agreement.

What can we learn from this?

1. People apologise when they work at a big company? 
2. The economy is terrible that it might be an employer’s market, and there is no longer ease of employee mobility

However, this would be in contrast to the hiring battle that is being faced in Silicon Valley. The FT is the latest to talk about this.

Yesterday we (Gerry, Lars, Serg) had a mini-MySQL’er reunion courtesy of us all speaking at HighLoad++. Much thanks to the organizers for bringing us out here so that we could all catch up :)

We had a chat about how SHOW CONTRIBUTORS got into the code of MySQL as we were giving ideas to HighLoad++ organizers to raise money for charity. I distinctively remember it had something to do with a charity auction at one of the older MySQL User Conferences in Santa Clara. This was when we had quiz shows! And it was at the UC in 2006 for a charity auction where all proceeds got donated to the EFF. 

I see than Ronald has it in a presentation, and Sheeri was just saving to get married but still shelled out. Someone who’s a little quieter in the MySQL community, Frank, has a distinctive writeup, who reminded me that I too talked about this back then.

A lot has changed since 2006. SHOW CONTRIBUTORS is now deprecated, just like SHOW AUTHORS. As of 5.6.8, it is removed.

It will not affect how the database performs, but it certainly affects the “community feel” around MySQL, further cementing the idea that this is now a product at a very large company.

I just purchased The Humble eBook Bundle. I primarily use a Mac OSX based laptop (my MacBook Pro), and secondarily use Linux in various flavours (a Lenovo ThinkPad runs Ubuntu, various boxes run a combination of that and Fedora & CentOS, and virtual machines are growing).

It seems not only with regards to Orbitz showing better, more expensive, hotels to Mac users, even when it comes to the Humble Bundle, Mac and Linux users pay more. Are we just conditioned to pay more than Microsoft Windows users?

I’m glad to support DRM-free e-books & great content. Who knows, I might discover something new.