robmello.com

My First Business Proposal

My mother recently discovered my very first business proposal - a note I left for the tooth fairy when I was 5.  (May of 1975 - we didn't have Power Point back then.)

"Hi fery wold you trad-e this penny for A dime.  LOVE Robert mello."

Blizzard 2005 Movie

A 7-minute video of the 2005 blizzard can be found in the Lily video folder:  http://www.robmello.com/lillian/videos/

Boy Scout Chili

Superbowl Sunday is right around the corner!  Click the image to the left (complete with tomato sauce stains) for a really tasty chili recipe.  My friend Alison's mom got it from a collection of recipes used by a local Boy Scout troupe. 

Chris Rock on Hypocrisy

"White people are the only people who profit from pain.   If black people owned Phillip Morris, cigarettes would be the most [expletive deleted] illegal thing ever.  You'd get 60 years for a pack of Newports! White man makes guns, nobody gives a [expletive deleted].  Black rapper says 'guns,' congressional hearing."

Chris Rock, from his ‘Never Scared’ tour, 2004

44.1 or 48?

A colleague recently asked:  "Can anyone honestly tell the difference between sound that is sampled at 44.1k from sound sampled at 48k?"

No - assuming you're sampling on the same piece of equipment.  (Keep in mind that converters on box A might sound much better than box B no matter what the sample rate.)

Rule of thumb - sample at whatever rate your final project will need. If you sample at 48 for a 44.1k final format, it will typically sound worse than if you sampled at 44.1k to begin with.

Unless you can sample at 96 and fidelity is worth the trouble - for classical music recordings or birds singing for example. You'll have to downsample, but you'll have the original 96k recording for future hi-fi formats.

Different rule for bit resolution:

A noticeable difference is found when increasing the bit resolution. 20bit recordings sound much better than 16 bit recordings, and it is better to sample at the higher bit res even if you are to downsample later.

Most Snow Ever

It's official.  Yesterday's blizzard dumped the most snow ever here on Cape Cod.  It's amazing how 16 hours later, things are almost back to normal - unlike 1978.  What a difference when you can see it coming... 

Computer Programs

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."   (Harold Abelson, et al, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)

Google's Most Valuable Feature

Google has more than a few useful features and capabilities, but by far the most valuable is the ability to view a cached version of the page you’re looking for.

A cached page is a copy that Google makes on its own servers.  This copy is accessible even if the link changes or disappears from the original web site. 

How many times have you seen in the list of search results exactly what you’re looking for only to get a dead link once you click through?  When this happens, click on the little ‘cached’ button after the page summary.  This will link you to Google’s copy, and often to the information you’re looking for.

Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it.

This is a great article by Bob Weinstein on product management – with some excellent thoughts on sales engineering from Steve Johnson - an instructor at Pragmatic Marketing, a product-marketing training company in Scottsdale, Ariz. and webmaster of productmarketing.com.

You can find the article here.  If this link vanishes, then you may be able to find it through the Google cache.

Some quotes:

The typical [software] company is accidentally market-driven.  Rather than creating a product to solve a problem, they're betting on creating a need. Johnson calls that "possible, but stupid thinking." Sharper Image exemplifies that kind of thinking.

"Product management supports sales channels; sales engineering supports individual sales efforts," Johnson adds. "In fact, many companies would be better served hiring fewer product managers and more sales engineers."

SE's - Sales or Services?

In software companies, should sales engineers report to the services organization or the sales organization? 

It can be a challenge to keep SE’s in-sync technically with the services teams.  Your services organization is what makes your company bloom from a political entity (pulling strings, making promises) into an industry leader.  They build the last-mile connections between what your company is offering and what the customer needs.  Ultimately, it is the services team that ensures that your customer enjoys a successful implementation, and that your company enjoys a referenceable customer.  The alignment between the SE and services organizations needs to be solid, trusting and synergistic.