After watching the documentary, I was impressed to see that it was consistent with HP the sentiments of people I’ve worked with or for who were former HP alums. Regardless of whether they were VPs, managers or individual contributors when the HP Way was alive and well, they all shared the same sense of nostalgia for a company they used to work for. Those conversations usually ended with, "that was an incredible place to work and to grow."

These friends and former co-workers always mentioned some personal anecdote about how something personal had come up or how some personal emergency would require an extended absence. In every case, regardless of how big or small someone was at HP, the response always seemed to be, "you and your family come first… we’ll still be here when you get back".

Thinking back at things, one of the companies that really espoused the HP Way, while I don’t work at Xilinx anymore, I remember a conversation I had with Wim Roelants, former CEO of Xilinx, and how he was proud to have taken what he learned at his long tenure at HP and transplanted it into Xilinx. To be honest, it was a perfect match. Wim shared many of the same values as Xilinx’s founders, Bernie Vonderschmitt, Ross Freeman and Jim Barnett. They all believed in the same philosophy that innovation comes from employees who feel like they’re contributing to something much greater. As a result, the employees felt more like they were part of a family or a group of close friends than a company, freeing them to innovate and continue innovating beyond the last project.

Learn more about HP and its history at The HP Way at HP Alumni Association, and learn more about Xilinx’s history at Xilinx: Our History.

I was looking up some information on Walt Disney and came across a documentary on HP. As it turns out, Walt Disney was HP’s first customer as Disney invented the first stereophonic movie with Fantasound — the Model 200B was used to test the audio equipment in 12 specially equipped theaters around the country.

Windows Advertising Campaign

Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the product. If they put as much thought into the product’s user experience as much as this commercial, maybe folks would be more willing to adopt the operating system.

I’ve said it before, I like Vista… not sure what the bitching and complaining is about.

Windows

I’m slightly annoyed at the Comcast tech right now. When he installed our cable modem, he also installed some crap on my system that replaced my default search engine. I don’t install software from vendors, unless I choose to. Given that I’m running Vista (and yes, I do like it), it also gives me more control over security by know exactly what is installed. Plus that, I don’t want my system secretly sending stuff, whether for monitoring the network, or collecting information outside of network activity itself.

BTW… I also dislike the new trend of installing browser toolbars.

Ran into a bit of a hiccup. I’ve moved the site from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal is overkill for what I needed, where I would use only 5% of what it has to offer.

I’m still working on moving my portfolio over to this site — until then, you can still access it at d2982402.u29.securedc.com.

Hmmm… I think I found something new that I could get into. I’ve been working with a couple of people on setting up their businesses from a marketing and e-commerce point of view. In all cases, each has resulted in greatly improved returns on sales and product marketing.

I need to investigate this avenue a bit more — seems I have knack for it.

It’s not the first time I’ve ever done anything like this though. It all started with Junior Achievement in high school where we I lead my class to the greatest total number of sales without being shut down (long story). Unfortunately, we moved to second place after needing to write-off excess inventory.

In college, I started a web design business in the early 90’s that became for more successful than I would have imagined… then I graduated, finished work for existing clients and moved on to the corporate world.

Nearly a decade later… I’m helping a handful of people start things up as SOHO businesses with excellent results…

I’ve been doing this all for free… maybe I’m on to something untapped… I’ve got to think this through…

Everything is in the process of being migrated to a new hosting service and to a new CMS/blog system. Hopefully this will be the last time I’ll have to do this.

I was starting to become unhappy with my previous hosting service. I’m now going to start hosting with MediaTemple. So far, everything’s going smoothly, now it’s just a question of migrating everything over.