weekly blog chat – Wireless Backhaul | Windows Tax | PR | Rats Eating Italian Fiber | e-mail

Chatting about blog-land this week. All of these are in my delicious widget on the right and @ http://del.icio.us/hNorth/blog. I’ll be trying to do this regularly again.

Technology

• Optical networking market tops $3B for third consecutive quarter — Lightwave – Ovum-RHK
• Wireless Backhaul is Mostly… Wireless — Nyquist Capital
• Are Large Tech Vendors Losing Their Grip On Customers? — there is always the dream that incumbents leave a few “big” scraps on the table
• Voice’s place in the fiber future – telephony online
• Dell’s Ubuntu Boxes Shed Light On The Windows Tax — TechDirt — Interesting that Dell PC’s with Linux are only $50 less than a box with Windows. I was thinking the difference was $200 – $300 bucks. The comments on this post provide a few reasons behind the smallish $ difference.
• What Trumps Email? – Fred Wilson — good discussion on issues with e-mail, IM, etc
• Fiber Fairy Tales — Global Crossing Blog — I always like when low-tech meets high-tech. Here is a story of German rats preferring to chew on fiber carrying Italian data

Careers & Mgmt

• Compulsive obsession with details will save your neck when giving presentations — Escape from Cubicle Nation — read this before your next trip

MarComm

Guy Kawasaki has 2 posts on PR gotchas … Interesting …

• DIY PR — Guy Kawasaki
• The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work — Guy Kawasaki

General Interest ( Fun )

• The Cost of Being a Fan | The Sand Trap — Calculation of what it costs to attend a Golf Major. No surprise … the Masters is the costliest

Music – Digging Into the Past (Again) with TMBG’s No!

Dinosaur Jr’s – Beyond has taken me back to my 80′s favorites. I loved They Might Be Giants (TMBG) back then. I remember my first concert — all the fans knew all the words. So much fun

eMusic has a fair selection of newer albums. I had to try out the “children’s album” No! It is so much fun! I love TMBG. There is a place for fun tunes. Get the whole thing and put it on an endless loop.

Memorial Cup – The Lost Ticket & Good Samaritans Do Exist

The best story of the today’s game came via my “prettier half”. She dropped us off, we went into the building, and she parked the car.

On coming back to the rink she lost her ticket

Then a lot of people helped her out.

• The parking attendants helped her search the whole row near her car.
• The “ticket scalper” said that he hadn’t bought her ticket and suggested that she go to the ticket office because they will reissue a ticket if it hasn’t been “used” yet.
• The ticket office said yes we’ll cancel and reissue if you can tell us your seat number.
• She didn’t know which ticket I had given her. So … the ticket office then let her into the building to find us and figure out which ticket she had lost.

The punchline — upon returning to the ticket office with the seat information the ticket agent says, “Oh that ticket, here it is … Someone found it in the parking lot and turned it in. Here you go, have fun watching the game.”

Wow! A big thank you to the person who found our ticket and turned it in. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

Memorial Cup – Giants Close the Deal!

What a great game today! All four teams are now champions It was great to the see the Coliseum full of towel waving screaming fans. (no empty “sold” seats today)

It was amazing to see the Giants get the forecheck going for the whole first period. Awesome effort, but kudo’s to the Hat to keep it scoreless.

All the goals were great, but I kinda thought the Hat’s goal was the result of an uncalled “pick play”.

But that “Hat” goal meant that the game was 1-1 going into the third. What could be better for us fans than a game being tied going into the final period?

In the final period the good guys closed the deal! Excellent Lucic won MVP, but it could easily have been any of his linemates. The Lucic, Rabbit and Repic unit was on fire the whole week. ( I’m guessing that Repic’s drafting rating is gonna go up a bit after this week )

This was my second Mem Cup. I was in Spokane for ’98. This is a great tournament. Cheers to all those who made it a great week.

Memorial Cup Semi Final – A speed thing?

It is strange that Giants and “the Hat”, both whupped Plymouth. It doesn’t seem like a fluke, or coincidence. I’m guessing that it would happen often.

I’ve had a very hard time figuring out the Plymouth team at this tournament. It looked like their plan was to score on the power-play, and grind down the other teams during regular strength. The plan didn’t work.

I’m thinking their problem with this strategy at this tournament is that they just can’t play at the speed of Giants and the Hat. It feel’s like a skating thing. Their size just doesn’t matter when they’re a stride behind. They rarely got to the puck first in any game. I think they were trying, and just couldn’t do it. Too slow. They only had a few guys who could keep up.

hmmm … Movin’ on … Sunday’s game is sure to be another track meet with blazing speed, crushing hits, and emotion. Excellent!

On emotion and antagonistic play — again knockin’ the Whalers … it is amazin’ how much more effective the Hat’s Dorsett (15) is than the whalers Boll (7). All shit disturbers can learn from this Dorsett kid. It’s like he got DNA from Tiger Williams, Fleury, and Linseman

Memorial Cup — Go Giants Go & Tiger’s Can Fly!

The Memorial Cup has been fun to watch this week. Took yesterday off — which means that I stayed home and watched the first two periods

The most striking things about this tournament are the strength of the goalies and the size of the players.

On goalies — Bernier of Maineiacs has been “other worldly”, but Sexsmith, Keetley, and Neuvirth have all been very good.

On size — it has been interesting that their are some huge guys (Whalers-Sestito is enormous, Maineiacs Denny is a tank, Giants Lucic is a “train”), but it is likely to be the Tiger’s mighty-mite speed & skill guys ( Russell, Bosch, & Ennis ) that are gonna take the cup.

FTTH in UK Posts

There have been some great posts on the future of FTTH in the UK recently.

• Jeremy Penston @ IP Development Network Blog £2.5bn or FTTH?
• Keith McMahon @ TeleBusillis BT & UK FTTH Economics

7,000 Spam hits as of today

hmmmm …. Spam hits have now exceeded user hits

Looks like I may have to turn off “comments”

New Telco Directions — Read Telco 2.0

I’m constantly impressed with the Telco 2.0 blog. This is the best site for learning about new telco directions. I do little traveling these days. But if there was something that I’d like to attend it would be one of their conferences.

I’ve been an advocate for the horizontal telecom services model for a long time now. The Telco 2.0 guys take “horizontal internet” to an new level of detail and have been fleshing it out very well. Here is their latest post.

The Telco 2.0 methodology — Introduction: ”

The journey from Telco 1.0 to Telco 2.0

The Past Returns — Dinosaur Jr – Beyond

I played Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind” sooooooo many times back in the ’80s. What a great album! ( I still bought vinyl back then ) Then I went to their atrocious concert at the Commodore I couldn’t forgive/forget. I’ve not listened to them (or anything connected) since.

I broke down this week and bought the new “Beyond” and have been stressing the MP3′s pretty hard. I love this “muddy/fuzzy” stuff! It’s gonna be in my car all summer