chriskelley.org

Back from a week’s vacation and I’m realizing thatmy posting has slowed here to a trickle.  A quick update on a few things that have been keeping me busy:

• Well the obvious one is vacation last week.  Had a great time in Waves, NC in the outer banks.  The rental house we had reserved was struck by ligntning a few days before we checked in, so the hot tub was out for the duration of our stay and the solar pool heater was out for the first few days.  But other than that, the house was great and only a few feet from the beach access.  The dunes are a lot higher in the south and there was no wooden walk over, so there was a little excercise every morning to get to the beach.  Did all the normal things while there - went to the beach every day, ate out at restaraunts every night and consumed a fair amount of adult beverages.  Also did some out of the ordinary things: went horse back riding on the beach, went shooting sporting clays and went to the annual open house at the Dare County Naval Bombing range (will get some pics and vids of that up soon).
• On the work front, the marketing automation system we just bought is keeping me pretty busy.  We’re in the middle of implementation right now and will soon be in to pilots.  Still not sure how all of this will fit together, but it is interesting to see what state of the art actually looks like for marketing - and a little scary to see how much you CAN be tracked online.  A new alliance partner and rapidly increasing channel program are taking up whatever spare cycles I have after spending all day on marketing automation.  Oh yeah, and then there is the social media stuff that I got started and continues to gain interest.  All that combined with a hefty travel schedule have slanted the work / life balance definitely toward the work side.
• On the home front, you may have seen the post I did on the newest addition to the herd, Sheriff.  He and Levi are not getting along very well (Levi kicked down a fence to get to Sheriff…and not in a friendly way) so we are having to work with them.  Evidently either my wife or I have to become the ‘lead mare’, whose role is to get the rest of the horses in the heard in line.  It’s slow work, but interesting in learning how horses actually think and act.  I also finally pulled the trigger on a new (to me) trailer.  It’s a 4 horse Sundowner slant with a finished dressing room / sleeping quarters.  It’s a 1996 model (and all steel) but it’s in great shape.  Hopefully we’ll get to use it in the next few weeks to do an overnight trail ride somewhere.
• On the tech front, not much has been happening.  I think I am ready to hackgrade my first get iPhone to the 2.0 firmware so I can get exchange syncing setup.  I also dropped my HP 2133 back from Vista to XP SP3 and am much happier with the performance overall.  So that leaves only my HP TC4400 tablet on Vista, which will probably stay there since I do like the tablet features added to Vista.  I am also looking at moving from Foldershare to Live Mesh for my multiple machine syncing solution - not sure if it will handle my 30 GB documents folder.

I do notice that I blog / tweet a bit more while I am on the road so with the travel schedule, the updates should be a little more regular here over the next few weeks.

Lloyd in the ocean

Originally uploaded by aakelley

In addition to getting a new member of the herd on Wednesday, I had another interesting wildlife experience on Saturday morning.  Our neighbors needed to swap out some hay since they just got some and it was a little green to give to their horses.  We still have some from last year which is well aged, so they brought over their trailer with 15 bales on it and I walked up to the barn to pitch down some bales.  I climbed up into the new loft I just put up a few months ago over the two new stalls to grab some timothy and as I grabbed the first bale, a raccoon with the HEAD THE SIZE OF A GRIZZLY BEAR popped up behind the rest of the bales.  Needless to say I hi-stepped across the loft towards the ladder amd thought for a split second about jumping.  Fortunately the raccoon was just as scared of me as I was of it, so it just froze.

My lovely and talented daughter, upon hearing of my ordeal from my lovely and talented wife, had to memorialize the encounter in a cartoon series.  Talented…isn’t she.

And this is him:

We bought a new horse this weekend.  We’re going to pick him up on Wednesday.  After looking for a few months and having essentially a closed deal last weekend that fell through, we traveled down to Cynthiana over the weekend and got a visit the current owners of New Sheriff in Town (I think we’ll just call him Sheriff).  He is 7 years old and came out of a mare that they had, so they have raised him themselves.  He is a really well trained horse and has a wonderful jog and canter.  He’ll end up being my daughters horse, but we’ll all probably ride him to start.  The herd is now up to 3.  Probably get one more this year or next and then we’ll stop - only room for so many in the barn and in the pastures.

I’ll post a few more pics when we get him back to the farm on Wednesday night.  Hopefully Levi and Goliath will be on their best behavior.

As I somewhat expected, my rate of posting has gone way down here in the last month.  Two factors have contributed:

1. The launch of the corporate blog and my contributions there.  It’s not that I have nothing left to say to post here, it’s just that I have only so much time to say it in.
2. Related to the root cause of the point above, the work day has been getting longer and longer and there seems to be no end in site to the ramp up of a few projects I have had cooking for a long time.

So to solve both of these issues, I am looking to bring a few people on board over the next month or two.  I am looking for good marketers and partner managers to fill 3 roles:

1. An entry level role looking after the partner marketing of our software and technology partners.  Typical functions would include website and brochure content creation and management of our annual developers conference.  In addition, the person filling this role would need to manage the negotiation and ongoing relationships with roughly 60-70 base level software and technology partners.
2. A junior level role that would be managing the relationship with one of our top level strategic partners.  Typical functions would include developing and alliance road map, joint value proposition and briefing the partner on out overall direction.
3. A senior level role that would manage a few of the software and technology relationship managers we have and look out overall for our software and technology partnerships.  Typical functions would include developing the alliance strategy, working with partner groups in the rest of the company to develop alliance marketing plans and managing the overall alliance marketing budget.

Good basic marketing and relationship management skills are a must for all three positions.  Know anyone that would be interested - please send them this link and tell them to drop me a resume.  I will definately be following up with anyone who’s experience and motivation fits the bill.  Help a blogger get some more time to do what he loves

This via Boing Boing today:

Disney World 3D models on Google Earth - Boing Boing

I know its been possible to add buildings to Google Earth for a while now, but this is the first effort I have seen to get complete sets of buildings for a particular area completed.  I wonder if they will just go straight to virtual advertising on the sides of the buildings from the camera POV, or if they will add an avatar representation first?  If all they care about is the add revenue (likely) then they may just skip the avatar, although the collaboration that would enable will give a few less reasons for people to stop by.

I am staying at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando this week for our user conference.  If you’ve never been to a Gaylord property (I think there are only 3 or 4 of them), they are gigantic buildings: 5,000 sleeping rooms, hundreds of meeting rooms and a gigantic dome with a themed attraction in the middle.  The theme for the Palms is pirates…and I guess swamp because as I walked down to my meetings this morning this is what greeted me as I turned the corner:

I here there are nightly gator feedings at 6:30. That may be something I have to check out.  I guess the roadside attraction of seeing gators in Florida lives on - they’ve just moved indoors.

I meant to post this on Thursday when things were ‘fresh in mind’, but honestly after the week of covering our analyst event last week on the corp blog was over, I was wiped out. So now, perhaps with a little more perspective a few thoughts on what went well and we things we can do better next time:

• The prep I did ahead of time is definitely a do over. I spent some time on Thursday gathering logos from customer presenters, URLs to blogs and websites and screen captures of their products in our products and crammed it all into a One note entry. This saved a lot of time when I was ‘in the heat of the moment’ but wanted to have confidence that I was getting the details right.
• I completely underestimated the amount of attention required to accurately summarize each session and the mental tax paying that much attention takes on you. The closest thing I can compare it to is taking 400 level engineering classes all day for 8 hours straight and having to take accurate notes for someone that is missing class. Next time: have two people there to do the summary blogging and alternate one session on, one off.
• The video stuff worked really well and is a do over. Ryan did a great job offloading all the hassles of doing video (getting levels set, actually capturing something interesting in frame, post production) and let me focus on asking good questions and just interacting with the people I was interviewing.
• The live blogging was a lot harder than I expected.  Some of this was due to tools: I had decided early that I had to do live blogging in the native expression engine back end, so all formatting had to be done manually.  Most of it was due to the length and pace of the sessions I was trying to live blog.  It really made me realize how much we put out in a small period of time when I was faced with trying to capture and summarize it all in relatively real time.  Next time, I will split up duties a bit more (someone else to take and upload pictures) and between now and the next time I live blog something I will try to get Windows Live Writer to work a bit more reliably with the EE back end and without creating multiple entries every time I hit publish.
• The overall work flow is a do over.  A short tweet at the beginning of a session, blogging while the session goes on (live or summary) with tweets for really interesting statements and publish within 5 minutes of the end of the session (for summary posts).  That seemed to work well and was manageable.

Overall it was a great learning experience that will definitely help determine what and how I do things going forward.  The best news of all is that it seemed to actually get some attention and without any announcement or other real promotion.  The blog got over 1,000 sessions in the 3 days of the event (staring from less than 100 for the entire week before) and we even got a few comments / questions.  A good start if I do say so myself.  Now its time to catch a breath this week and get ready to up the gain even more at next week’s user conference in Orlando.  We will be trying out some live streaming, adding a bunch more authors to the blog and continuing to tweak how we use recorded video and twitter.

And now he is food

Originally uploaded by aakelley

Ok, another dinner shot

Originally uploaded by aakelley