Dylan Hunter

Just a quick word as I just donated to Matt Mullenweg for his / his team’s great work on Wordpress, (i.e. the blog software that I’m using here). As someone who has and continues to work with folks in the Open Source community, if you enjoy the results of the (truly tremendous!) hours of work that these folks put in, send them an email of gratitude, or better yet, a small donation, even if only a pittance, (I sent Matt $10) just to say how much you appreciate all of their efforts. It really means a lot to many of these guys, and to keep high-quality product rolling off the presses to let you do what you otherwise wouldn’t / couldn’t without having to separately budget for some ludicrous mismatch between cost and value, (MS Office for home use comes quickly to mind here) it should mean a lot to you, too. So - Pay them, will you!

Well, thanks to our friends at Google, a whole slew of the postings that I used to do on Usenet, (predominantly before getting married - the wife’s not too crazy about me spending personal time on the computer anymore! ) are still out there, (including 4 ancient ones from ‘92, when I was a senior @ Lafayette, and well before The Web - with an email addy of HD22%LAFAYACS.bitnet@LAFIBM.LAFAYETTE.EDU - how’s that for a mouthful - too bad they didn’t have anything from further back, but hey).

As part of the project I mentioned below to create a data store of insights / reusable info for myself and others, (as well as since way too few folks even know what Usenet is! ) I’m bringing them up on the website in an area I’ve decided to name, (for now, at least) “The Stepstool,” (Stepstool - “leg up” - get it? alliteration, repetitive letters, strong tie-in to pre-conceived ideas, even if slightly pushing the character limit, etc., etc. - hey, all I have to do is make the background red to elicit excitement, and I’ve got a winner branding campaign! - hey, if you can’t laugh at yourself, what’s the point! ).

This first set is predominantly focused on Excel and Business Modeling, as I used to spend a good bit of time trying to help folks out on comp.apps.spreadsheets, (and a few others) as I’m both a _huge_ believer in the value of extremely strong modeling skills for many career directions, (especially for the Marketing / Biz Dev / M&A / VC crowd) as well as the concept that the only stupid question is the one not asked. Note: it’s not pretty by any stretch yet, (not that that’s any different from any of the rest of my site! ) but as I’ve learned again and again over the years - content first, pretty later.

Just finished Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma yesterday. An excellent book, well recommended, and, more importantly, with some very significant insights to go into the top level of the long-term knowledge base, (work just commencing, as mentioned). For now, especially given the backlog, (i.e. just finished Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside! about a week and a half ago - need to get some good insights from that up, as well) will focus more on content, and will work on “re-purposing” a nice web design hopefully in the near future. And no, I didn’t whip through Christensen’s book in a week and a half, (it’s much too dense a work for that if one truly tries to examine one’s own business practices in light of what he’s suggesting) I often will start a book, read it for a bit, and if it starts getting a bit slow, etc., and/or if a pressing need for me to enhance / refresh some additional expertise comes up, will put the first book down for a bit, start another and come back (to some of them) later.

YES!! Absolutely love this - found an excellent page that shows exactly how to set up sshd on a WinXP box, (via Cygwin). Perfect - now I can finally shell in to my home box whereever I am to get files, do work on my home PC, finally fully access the PC’s in my home, etc., (ok, not “fully” - I’d need a gui login for that - but getting closer - then I could finally only load up programs, etc. on one box and run them from anywhere - dealing with lag, of course - ’tis one of the prime reasons that I keep playing around with Linux - that, and my just general aversion to any one firm having that much power over something, especially one with the highly questionable business practices of MS).

Note for most solo-WinXP owners that’s not in the article - you will need to put a password on your user account to SSH in. Go to Control Panel>User Accounts, click on your user, (if you’ve never dealt with users before, there should be only one) add a password and click “Ok.” This will make logging in a bit less seamless in that there’ll be a logon intercept page that you’ll now have to enter your new password for every time you reboot / startup, (which is a bit of a hassle) but it’s not terrible, (at least until your wife, daughters, etc. want to get on the computer and don’t know the password - ah well, security’s always a bit of a pain in the butt).

Well, finally getting down to doing a bit of blogging. For now, this is primarily for my own use as an adjunct to the space between my ears, which, though still operating fairly nicely for analysis, synthesis, etc. has definitely been showing a decreased capacity to retain some of the best bits of new, (and sometimes old) insights. So I decided it was finally time to start creating a virtual knowledge base of what I’ve found useful / important, so that when the time comes, I can hop back here, refresh my head and then move forward with the best insights that I’ve come across. And if others can take advantage of the efforts and experiences that I’ve had to build on as they tackle even greater problems - fabulous!

Warning - as you’ll no doubt find out over time, (and as my wife will very strongly attest) my mind does tend to be a fairly chaotic place, (which can be truly marvelous or darned inconvenient, depending on the day! ) so don’t be surprised if you see numerous radical hops in trains of thought, random tangents intermixed on equal footing with salient logic, and quite more than a few “what the heck is he talking about?”’s. Hey, nobody ever said running 4-6 continually concurrent trains of thought was easy!