TechWiseTV

The Sound of Silence

I just finished up a lunch meeting with a couple of engineers. Robb and I are starting to work up show ideas for season three of TechWiseTV. We always plan to make the show fresh and field ready so to do that we have to always be in the field. To that, I was meeting with some folks for some very fresh security content. The location had a bunch of TV's turned up full blast broadcasting everything from Dr. Phil to the 1958 Giants-Colts game.

I lost 30% of my hearing in Desert Storm but lucky for me, the hearing loss all in the high frequency range so it does not bother me that much...except in crowds. In crowds it is very difficult for me to hear what folks are saying. It all sounds garbled. At large gatherings, instead of saying; "huh?", "what?" and "can you repeat that please?" I just normally nod my head like some goober plastic nodding dog you would win at the county fair. I can not tell you how many things I volunteered for, that I actually did not realize!

Anyway, while that is an OK workaround in social situations, for business it will not work. So here is the problem: We need fresh content from the field. Most engineers like to share information over chicken wings and beer. Chicken wing and beer places almost ALWAYS have many very loud TVs. I can not accurately hear the content. My neck gets sore from too much nodding...

Enter TV B Gone from Cornfield Electronics.  If there was an Academy Award for the coolest geek/ninja tools, TV B Gone would sweep all categories. Basically, TV B Gone is a universal remote control that allows you to turn off (or on) any TV without the need to program it. Just press a button and within 60 seconds the TV turns off. I am averaging about 16 seconds for a set to click off. It does not damage a TV, it is just a very small universal infra red remote control, with one button...off! 

I reached into my bag, grabbed my small remote (hides in my hand) press the button and BLAM! TVs start clicking off. When I did it the first time, customers actually started applauding. The staff keep trying to turn it on, but I continued my TV DDOS until they stopped. Business meeting not only continued but it was enhanced because we were not distracted by the video and could communicate at a reasonable level. Ah yes, human interaction.  TV B Gone is MUST have in any geeks/ninja tool bag.

Jimmy Ray

Should we use Twitter with our Events?

I am not exactly sure how this is going to work out yet. The idea has been out for a while as I found a one year old post at jjprojects blog with some great examples of where this has already been successfully tested. The difference now, a year later could be that I see twitter reaching a tipping point already (a good thing)... no my wife still thinks it is silly for me to care about what Jimmy Ray is having for dinner or that Hideo is falling asleep on a conference call... but for the people I care about, I think this is interesting (plus they both post a TON of funny stuff).

The idea behind an event, be it our monthly show or perhaps when we are at a live event such as Networkers, RSA or VoiceCon. Would it not be cool to have a central, mobile enable chat conversation that bring like minds together? Time will tell.

Get on Twitter and add TechWiseTV. We can now be tracked at www.twitter.com/TechWiseTV

Jimmy Ray and I are still personally on Twitter as well: @JimmyRay_Purser and @RobbBoyd (note the 3 b’s in this version of my name...)

Further reading:

1. How the Twitter support page describes it
2. Patrick Ruffini tested one twist on this with the Iowa Caucus
3. I can’t currently test this but Fireball appears to be an interesting Mashup of tools we might find useful in the future. They are ‘sleeping’ currently as they only tested during the Web 2.0 expo. Blog entry on it.

Thoughts?

Robb

Concentrate on the Message

As many of you know we banned PowerPoint on the TechWiseTV show early in the first year... but to be fair, the issue is not PowerPoint, its how it has commonly been used.  Many of you already know this too well... we are all guilty of getting lazy and creating heavily bulleted, text laden presentations because it then becomes easy for these things to be a crutch we can rely on during the presentation.   But as most of us fundamentally understand, the focus during the presentation should be on the presenter, not the supporting tools (powerpoint and the like).

We must all do ourselves a favor and avoid distracting elements.   This is why I love this Lewis Black appearance on CNN.  Although this is over 2 years old I believe, I had never seen this until today and it perfectly illustrates these principles of a clean focus on the message by skewering CNN and their scroll of information.

One of the best authors to read as well as follow along with his blog is Garr Reynolds. He has a great book called presentationzenn and is very active with his blog by the same name.  Garr does a much better job than I on laying out these principles and giving you practical things to do and examples of people to follow.  Content from his book include the all important Preparation, Design & Delivery.

Check it out... and don’t get sucked in to creating more sucky presentations. 

sucky |ˈsəkē|
adjective ( suckier, suckiest) informal
disagreeable; unpleasant : her sucky job.

Cisco Support Wiki

This is good stuff - you know how much we like wiki’s. I like what Cisco is doing here... what do you think? 

Here is the announcement: 

Collaborate, Co-create, and Innovate on New Cisco Support Wiki

Cisco is launching a collaborative support Website that will scale to provide important information to help you manage your network. This new external beta Website for Cisco customers, partners, and employees enables interaction in real time and access to the most up-to-date support information submitted on Cisco products, services, and solutions. In addition to threaded discussions, the Cisco Support Wiki enables dynamic information sharing and the co-creation of Web content to form a more robust and diverse information repository.

Launching with more than 36,000 pages of content, information includes:
- A full collection of Cisco equipment and technologies
- The TAC Case Collection
-  A full index of Cisco terms
- TS Web content

Web 2 ... Oh ... Security?

I often lament that I personally feel like Jimmy Ray saves his best articles for bMighty.com where he now has many of THE MOST popular articles. This title he used cracks me up as does his open... you must link below for the full article... but this should give you a good taste!

Web 2... Oh... Security?

Web 2.0 is here to stay and while it's cool, its security is tricky -- but not to worry. Jimmy Ray Purser will show you how to let your smaller business take advantage of the latest technology and stay safe

Most hard-core networking geeks out there today avoid buzzwords like I avoid tofu, bean sprouts, and light beer. Buzzwords are not technologies that I can go out there and deploy per se; they're terms to make analysts sound smarter than they actually are. Web 2.0 has really taken on a life of its own in the kingdom of buzzwords. I use Web 2.0 to help me get management behind projects they normally wouldn't endorse.

For example:

Scene: In an office surrounded by motivational posters, management books on a shelf, a think-outside-the-box in-box under the desk, a "No I in the word Team" poster framed on a white Formica desktop ... a knock on the door ...

Engineer: "We need to upgrade our firewall to increase our posture against the latest multilayer attack bots concentrating on Layer 7 applications in our DMZ."

Manager heard: ... Static: ... "I need money for something I cannot define."

Manager: "We just do not have the budget. But make our network secure anyway."

Now add buzzwords: Engineer: "We're not ready for Web 2.0! Our firewall just cannot support the applications!"

Manager thinks: Yikes! I will be the laughingstock of the county club! I must act fast!."

Manager: "OK, then upgrade the firewall as soon as possible. Nice job catching this."

Full Article @ bMighty

Real or Not...

I am sittin' here watching Pro Wrestling "Backlash" pay per view with my son. 39 bucks of my cash to the WWE empire. My son invited some of his wrestling pals over to watch it also, and truthfully, it is worth 50 bucks to watch them get into the match and fight each other. Man they get rough and I am hoping that they do not turn that young kid aggression on me! Here comes John Cena and these kids are fighting like hunger dogs over a single pork chop.

Gets me to thinking about skills and how they can be used without wisdom. These boys are punching each other in the cods, doing hair slams on the carpet. I am thinking I should be using my parental skills now but it is hard because I enjoy the show just too much. Many times it is just that behavior that trips up many script kiddies today. I am not a big fan of of data hackers because they are really posers which also is something they have tonight's show...

To me, hacking is leadership. Hackers think outside of the box and look for solutions to unsolvable problems. Like good leaders that lead from the front no problem or situation is too tough. Robb Boyd is a good example of a leader. I have worked with Robb for a couple years now, and he is truly a take charge kinda dude without being a whanker. He leads from the front which is also a form of hacking. I like to consider myself a hacker, data yeah sure that is just another vector to explore but really all things. For example, I had a neighbor bring over a Linksys router that was bricked. They were going to throw it in the trash, but, I said let me give it a shot.

When equipment is trashed, this is no risk hacking. I want to work on the JTAG ports. I broke out my Wiggler cable and started my research. The biggest time consumer is mapping the ports. Lucky for me the Linksys routers are based on Broadcom CPUs which are a type of MIPS32 processor. Broadcom has implemented EJTAG version 2.0 in their chips. This allows the use of DMA transfers via JTAG which, while slow, is faster than the implementation of EJTAG v2.5 and v2.6 which do not support DMA transfers. Very helpful since de-bricking can take hours at serial speeds. Maybe I should look at the Raven cables that run on USB for my next JTAG hack.

Anyway... long to short... I recovered the router and learned more about hardware in the process. That is what hacking is all about. Not just data, but all kinds of things. Hacking to me is a mindset. Not a process. Hackers that follow a process become script kiddies, leaders that follow a process become managers and a new champion is crowned....

Jimmy Ray

Thanks for the mention Carmine!

Carmine Gallo, author of 10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Communicators (my fave) and his new one 'Fire them Up dropped a nice name mention for me in his latest Business Week column: Three Keys to Better Web Meetings.  (if you are really good you may remember Carmine as a host from TechTV's Money Machine and ZDTV News) But I wished we had gotten a name mention for OUR show.  There is so much more we could talk about here. 

Carmine was specifically talking about 'web presentations' and in my conversation with him I was speaking to both 'WebEx' style presentations somewhat intermingled with the high end videos that we create for TechWiseTV. We purposefully stand up on the show for energy reasons (and both Jimmy Ray I like to slouch when we sit) but due to lighting on the set, we can't move around much. When I do a web presentation with no camera, my preference is, as Carmine indicates, to stand in a room where I can pace around and project forcefully as if it was in front of a live group.  I also would always use a headset in those situations so that my location in the room did  not cause changes in my voice... i.e. wear your mic on your head or lapel to maintain consistency.

I really liked the point Colin Smith from WebEx made in regards to not using video for the entire meeting. Use it at the beginning and at the end perhaps. Not a bad idea.  This negates the need for one point I made where it is important to remain aware that the camera is on you.  If you are referring heavily to notes or even just looking at your slides, depending on your camera placement, you could look shifty. 

Practice in front of camera - it is amazing what this will teach you! 

Nice job Carmine, your material consistently hits home on the stuff we all need to do better and thank you for the mentions.

Robb

How deep were we really thinking?

So the New York Times ran an article 'On the Internet, It's all about MY' and how this term is the 'it' term just as we had 'e' and 'i' before it.  Now, I want to go on the record as to why the URL of this blog which started as an extension of our wiki: www.mytechwisetv.com starts with a 'my.'  I wish we could say it is because we are master strategists...but in truth, we just wanted something simple to remember that would help extend the brand of the show that we both appear on at Cisco.  TechWiseTV as a domain was not available and so we dove into an in-depth brainstorming process with our producer Brad Murphy and used our highly trained gray matter to synthesize our new URL in under 3 minutes.  Plus it was available from our registrar.

The article is pretty good at stating the obvious. Nothing really groundbreaking.  I completely agree that use of the term to try and 'trick' someone into a feeling of ownership will backfire. What the article misses however is that the bigger and more interesting story is the rise of the social graph. The ability to customize technology and extend your persona on the web via social networking is opening up new avenues of connectivity, community and productivity.  Don Tapscott noted this eloquently as he usually does in 'What Happens when MY becomes OUR"

Gaming and Geeking

I love video games. I am a true junky of fast moving polygon pixelation! I have a bunch of commercial grade arcade games in my basement...right next to the Code Cave...now that is planning! I play nearly all console games with the exception of PS3. Sony really torked my scene when they overcharged for proprietary memory in the PS2. So I swore off PS2 for lent and never went back. How many geeks out there are also gamers? Can I get a witness!!! When I travel I wear a ball cap. Not to hide my ever growing bald spot, but because I am from Southern Tennessee and it is the law that you have to wear a ball cap and be outside with said ball cap on at least 6 hours a day. (of course the reverse gold fishin' hook bill clip is optional)   I wear an Oblivion cap and I have many gamers come up to me and speak gamer code like we are trading secrets in Berlin circa 1982. Questions like:
What is your guild? Bummer about Lucien Lachance, What level did you close the last Daedric Gates?
And I get into it man!! I get as fired up talking about gaming as I do with networking...will maybe not that much...but still. I was getting a root canel and the Dentist said; "I bet your a Nord" //connection established// We sat and talked about gaming and our anticipation around KoToR III and Rogue Warrior. Then back to the drill, or we called it the "staff of dentalation" Much more cooler name then high speed dental drill...geez man...

Isn't it great to have something in common with folks you never have met? Robb and I love going to shows like VoCon, RSA and Networkers. Not because of the demos or the booth freebies (which were smokin at RSA this year) But because we can connect with folks that love networking as much as we do. Robb and I both are very grateful for the comments about the show and we are ALWAYS looking for more.

So as a researcher, I am wondering;
    -How many of y'all are geeks and gamers?
    - What type of gaming do you enjoy?
I love FPS games, Racing gear and some flying games. Flying games are tough because some are too realistic. Hey man, I just what to fly around and blow up stuff not get my flight quals. Reply back and let Robb and I know so we can host the first TechWiseTV LAN party...I have Robb's AMEX numbers...

Jimmy Ray

The Enigma

The NSA had a pretty cool booth at RSA this year with fake security guards and access passes you could keep.   What attracted Jimmy Ray and I was the Enigma machine they had on display.  The Enigma was a cipher machine first used by the German's leading up to and during WWII.  The story of the work that went into not only improving the enigma but improving on the competitive ability to solve (decrypt) the messages  created is fascinating. If you are a history and/or security buff...you should read this write up posted at the NSA: Solving the Enigma.   Fascinating.