FiberGeneration

Making Some Money Out Of The Crisis

Here's an email I've got this morning. Fact is, I don't have an account at Chase. A good laugh worth $50 ;-)

    From:     [email protected]
    Subject:     Customer Survey
    Date:     November 25, 2008 12:20:09 PM CEST
    Reply-To:     [email protected]

Due to the rumors of financial crisis, we decided to make a nationwide survey.
For the completion of this survey, we will credit your account with $50.

To take part, please click here.

Note - The information we gather from this survey will not be handed down to any third party.
 

Copyright 2008 JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Yeepee-derle !

Just This [17-08]

Isn't she lovely ? Welcome to the Pau Broadband Country, folks !

Times Change : A is on Twitter !

This is the message I've got last night :

From:     twitter-follow-mduchesn=mac[dot][email protected]
Subject:     Agilent Technologies is now following you on Twitter!
Date:     November 11, 2008 11:19:20 PM CEST
To:     mduchesn[at]mac[dot]com

Hi, Marc Duchesne.

Agilent Technologies (Agilent) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Agilent Technologies's profile here:

 http://twitter.com/Agilent

You may follow Agilent Technologies as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

Wow. My former employer is now following me. The question is: how will I convince "them" to hire me again ;-)

A New Web 2.0 App : Feedlytwitterlicious

Since a couple of weeks, I'm posting more and more on Twitter than on this blog, as many people out there in the Blogosphere.
Reading Guy Kawasaki' s advices on how to pick up followers on Twitter, I realized that I do share links for the rest of the Twitterers, but also for myself, using the service as a fast & easy substitute to Delicious.

Actually, each time I find an article interesting for the business in my Feedly pages, I click on the 'Tweet' button below the headline. Boom, the link goes on Twitter. Sometimes, I add a short comment or note after the linked URL, and that's it. Fast and simple sharing.
However, I continue to use Delicious as my main depository for bookmarks, as the tagging feature makes it easy to retrieve information.
You can find my Delicious page here, and follow me on Twitter here.

FiberGeneration The Company : D-19

Just to let you know that the next version of this blog will be part of the larger FiberGeneration website that I'm currently drafting somewhere at the back of my poor overloaded brain. Au menu, the integration of my Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.
That's still the Web 2.0 era, Folks ;-)

How To Go Faster Than A 7-Times Tour de France's Winner

See this. Thank you, Twitter ;-)

Just This [16-08]

Just This [15-08] and a bit more

"Darkness Falls Across The Land, The Midnight Hour Is Close At Hand.
Creatures Crawl In Search Of Blood To Terrorize Yours Neighborhood
And Whosoever Shall Be Found Without The Soul For Getting Down
Must Stand And Face The Hounds Of Hell, And Rot Inside A Corpse's Shell." - Thriller, Michael Jackson.

Thrilled by the global economy crisis ? You may think again. Fight like hell the Hell, and prepare a bright sunny future for your children's children.

I'm Legal Now :-) [by Andrew]

There was a time hole a couple of days before - working visa ended and I have to wait some days for the Living permission. Once I heard here: "Stay low, not get into a jam" :-)))
Now I have the Living permission and a registration in Lithuania.
Many options are accessible now.

Ed. note : this explains why Andrew was silent since so many weeks. We didn't want to put his new visa at risk, by putting his name onto the Google search engines. Welcome back, Andrew !
_Marc

Monday: No More My Blogging Day

Paul Boutin of Wired gives a pretty accurate look on the Blogosphere 2008. To make it short, amateurs' s weblogs are thing of the past, being replaced by Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook.

I'm 100% on the same page. Blogging requires so much time that either you do it the Seth Godin' short-form, either you keep your blog for the long-form *in-depth* articles.
Since a couple of months now, I'm part of the trend : moving to micro-blogging, thanks to Twitter, keeping FiberGeneration for the "long" stuff.

Actually, I do have plenty of material to publish here, with my different jobs within the Telecoms/Fiber/FTTH world : the many projects open on the Pau Broadband Country, the training & education with eXperide, etc. Unfortunately, Code of Conducts and Confidentiality agreements there hinder me to write about what makes most of my days since a year now. Finding ways to eventually post a couple of news here and there is fun, yet time-consuming : how to avoid legal issues when I want to publish a photo of a field-trial or a short note on a check-point meeting.

Plus, as many of us, I spend lot of time commenting and contributing to discussions on others' s blogs. That's the good-old-Usenet made modern.

Now, the funny part. Almost two years ago, I wrote a post titled "The Asymptotic Twitter Curve", which I started with those words : "Monday is going to be my ' blogging day '." The subject : a newly launched Web 2.0 service so-called Twitter. The post ended with this (really interesting ;-) question : "Today, I wonder if the Web 2.0 thing as a whole is not turning out to be a new Bubble : who cares about what I am doing right now, but myself or my wife ?..." I was then far away of thinking that one day, I would rather tweet than blog. To my defense, I was also far away of thinking that one day, I would have a tiny Internet device in my pocket, 24/7. The iPhone and its myriad of Twitter's clients
: the perfect fit for (micro)bloggers.

By the way : you can tweet me @mduchesn .

The Myth Of Multi-Tasking (Or why I miss Germany)

I'm no guru any longer (people called me *the fiber optics guru* back in the 90's-early 2k's - even at HP/Agilent, that says a lot ;-), however it seems that I do currently share the same trouble than Presentation Design guru Garr Reynolds. Actually, Garr's words in his recent post could be mine - I was to write something on that : " I find myself making more little mistakes and being less satisfied with my work overall unless I can take the time everyday to be alone and focus on one thing at a time. " 

Is it aging ? I don't think so : at 48 in 2 months, my brain is still in better shape than most of the Generation Y (just kidding, Facebook readers ;-). My take is - such is Garr's too - that we are overhelmed by this Always-Urgent mode we live in since years. Less and less time to achieve more and more fragmented tasks. This is no new discovery, of course. Yet it's quite disturbing.

Yesterday afternoon, back from a meeting in Paris with young entrepreneur Mathieu Husson and his team, I was hit by a strange thought : "maybe I do too much". I suddenly realized that I may be currently too much immersed in too many open projects.

Then, last night whilst watching French Champion Tsonga fighting hard against Electric Roddick, I took a brief look on Twitter with my iPhone. My wife went sarcastic : "hey, can't you get off the grid for once ?".

So, I remembered the days at Agilent Boeblingen, Germany. We were working hard and fast - 3 years looking like 3 months, that's the one thing that's comes to our mind when we talk about this period. Yet things were organized, the German way. Process, process, process. At the end of the day, it gives you the VW Golf : attention to the details. When I moved from HP/Agilent headquarters in Paris to Boeblingen, I was used to work on 30 different projects at a time. Friends were used to say that I was "Mister 100-ideas a day". After 3 years in Germany, I was doing just a handful of things at a time, and I was doing those quite well, according to our customers and the management.

That was just 6 years ago. What has changed, since then ? Maybe people like Garr and myself and millions of other guys are just too curious and hungry to learn and share. Maybe we're just workoholic. Maybe we're just tech geeks, relying too much on the Internet and the iPhone. Working on our regular job, reading our RSS feeds, blogging, commenting, twitting : we're always "online", and... disrupted.

I have no answer so far, however I have the solution - at least for myself. From now on, I'm going back to the German mode. Check email and reply from 8:00AM to 9:00AM, then leave the incoming messages for the next day. Read and comment the news from 9 till 10. Then work on the priority #1 project until lunchtime (and keep this one at fixed hour). Take a short rest, off the grid. Go back to work at 1:30PM, and work on priority #2 project until tea break. Then get back and work on #3 project until everybody leaves the factory - ooops, until the kids come back home.

There is definitely no new method here. Just basic, time-proven common sense. That's why this post is the very last one I'll write and publish over a week-end !

Thanks to Garr for the reminder, and for the video. Follow the link here for more.

Presentation Zen here.

It's Time To Re-invent Fiber Optics Training

With the economy crisis' s waves going to hit the Telecoms Land hard, most of the Installation & Maintenance contractors are already tightening up their investments and expenditures budgets, the Dotcom crash being still present in their memories.

The key difference between today and 2000 : there are people at the other end of the fiber. FTTx Fiber-To-The-Whatever is a reality now. And despite the forthcoming yet unpredictable downturn, Telcos, Utilities and Munis are keeping their fiber networks' rollouts plans on. Shifting some deadlines here, downsizing the network's scale there, but the goal is still : "we must deploy fiber" - see the recent announcement (link in french) by the french government.

That means that there is still huge business to come for the I&M contractors. The question is : how to train their technicians to build and maintain State of The Art fiber networks, whilst their budgets will be close to nothing ? Answer is : Re-invent the way we do training. Since quite a while, Installation companies don't send their techs for a 5-days hands-on session anymore, so it's going to be even worth now. Except for a few very specific technology or product training, they won't go off-site. They will ask for on-site (if not in-house...) training, as short as possible to not keep the techs away of the field for too long time. Today, a 3-days session is the standard for novices to become OSP Outside Plant technicians. Tomorrow, it's going to be 1-day (you get the idea).

We Fiber Vets all know that you don't become a true capable Fiber Install guy in a day. You have to practice at least a week. Hence the business case : how to provide a 5-days hands-on in just one single day. The solution : let's come to the Technician. Provide him with the training he needs when and where he needs it. Welcome to Fiber Training 2.0.

Today, we can get the relevant info we want when we want it, no matter where we are : it's called The Web. Let's use it. Do the shift from the old-fashioned way : the powerpoints, the lectures, the 20-people class-room, to the Web 2.0 one : audio and video podcasts on iTunes, training video clips on YouTube, photos collections on Flickr, discussion groups on Facebook, etc.

That's what a couple of Old-Timers, including myself, are working on. See here what Jim Hayes and his FOA Fiber Optics Association is currently offering. I'm also working on such tools. See here for instance, and here. Soon to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you : fiber news, photos, videos, and one more thing (and more ;-).

Of course, nothing virtual will ever replace the real world. You won't learn how to splice two fiber strands together with a video only : you must put your hands on the fibers, the cleaver, the splicer. It's like becoming #1 in Tennis : you won't beat Federer just watching his matches on YouTube ;-)