F1337 Command comes to life

F1337 Command is the working name of a retail company I am making to provide quality products to geeks. The goal of this company is to create a brand that people like me can identify with and for that brand to give them a conduit to top quality products and services that they find interesting and desireable. 

This idea comes from several dissapointing experiences I've had with products targeted to geeks. Specifically clothing products. The quality of the products I've found is very low. My goal is to provide products that don't suck and are cool.

Over the next few months I'm going to focus some energy each week to the further development of this product. For now I'm working on the following three things:

1. Review of the working name.

2. Creation of a logo.

3. Create a black high quality light jacket which displays the company name and logo along with a high quality artistic science fiction inspired graphic.

If you know anyone who is interested in this project (in a real way) please give them my email address.

If you or anyone you know is interested in a top quality jacket with a cool image and a cool company name please let me know. I'm interested in your ideas and feedback.

Can Windows 7 please be the last version

To Microsoft: will you admit that your outdated model of platforms for application development and delivery should be put to bed? By keeping the entire world dependent upon Windows you avoid the major revolution that everyone can see coming except for you guys.

If you don't figure it out Google will and then we'll have a light weight OS sitting ontop of a robust opensource kernel that will kick your asses. Figure it out guys or risk losing it all.

If you leave it to Google and they do it anything like Chrome I'll convert all my computers over to it and go with applications that run on it before you can blink an eye.

Pull your heads out Microsoft. Stop shipping yet another version of Windows and build an OS people actually want or let your competition do it and pay the price.

Project Management Tools

Project management tools don't get work done.

My company like so many companies I've worked for is trying to get the tools the team needs to get their work done. My friend John Moren has said many times that the most common problem he's run into in his career is the lack of tools. Specifically the lack of a company to invest in tools to automate important tasks for him.

The other side of this coin is that simply rolling out a tool for people to use doesn't get them to use it. Some say we need to train them, some say we need to motivate them, some say we need to provide process for using the tools. They are all right of course. Unfortunately they are also completely wrong.

Training, motivating, and providing written process will not actually result in anyone doing anything. They are only fascilitations. They are important fascilitations. The truely impactful management technique that will make things get done is "putting the rubber to the road."

Getting something actually done. So the true measure of a Project management tool is the ability for it to serve three purposes:

1. Organize the work into bite size measurable chunks that when completed can be checked off.

2. Provide a common repository for work artifacts so that the measurable bite size chunks of work can be seen, reviewed, and utilized.

3. Provide a way to compile, agregate, or deploy the work products that have been created.

Unfortunately none of the worlds Project management tools do all three. Most do the first item ok. A few expensive ones do the second item. But because of the lack of integration to systems like AGILE, software build systems, or other development and deployment systems there is a serious lack of true project tracking to the end deliverable. 

This means that progress reporting cannot be automated against the actual work. Instead people have to report on their progress.  Whenever you have a system where people are reporting instead of the work speaking for itself you are going to have inaccurate reports. 

The common sources of inaccuracy are: 

1. Miscalculations

2. Missunderstanding

3. False reports

The problem is that often by the time you determine that inaccuracy in the reporting you are in trouble. 

Oh i can go on and on. 

But I'll just summerize:

Project management tools don't get work done.