Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Volcano webcam

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam

Hopefully when Mount St. Helens erupts, it will destroy the mutant monster flies...

Monday, September 20, 2004

Percentage (Quote of the Day)

"You miss 100% of the shots you never take."
-- Wayne Gretzky

Friday, September 17, 2004

Googling

You never know what you might find when "googling" around the internet. Can you spot two family members in this picture on this web page?

Sharks, Where are you?

Simply makes me smile :)



This picture was displayed over a year ago on Everett Family Blog, but deserves another posting.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Julie in Africa


Here is a short email from her describing what she is doing:

There is a clinic and hospital that IU school of medicine have been helping for the last 10-15 years. IU asked if we would be interested in providing support for the pharmacy. Students from Purdue will also be here for 2 months at a time. They will be mostly in the hospital helping to take care of patients there. I am spending most of my time helping the clinic pharmacist make reports to prove to our drug suppliers that they are going to need to be providing a lot of drug soon. The HIV program actually consist of 8 different sites. Some near Eldoret and some quite far. The program is the biggest of its kind in Africa.

It has been good so far although I am busy all the time. Seems from the time I get up till bed I am on the go. Makes for the time to go by quickly.

We need to decide where we will be going this weekend. I am kind of voting for somewhere near.

Love, Julie

Evergreen Times

The Evergreen Area of San Jose has its own little community paper called the Evergreen Times. I enjoy reading the paper when it appears on my doorstep. They recently created/expanded their exposure via the internet.

As always my favorite part of any paper is the "police blotter".

This month's favorite report:

9/2
Mountain Lion Sighting

Terra Nova Lane
Several citizens reported seeing a mountain lion in the back yard of a residence. Officers searched the area, but the lion was not located. Animal Control, Fish and Game were notified.

According to Yahoo Maps, Terra Nova Lane is 2.8 miles from my house. Terra Nova Lane is very close to where I watched Dale play soccer in my area.

Update: Links about the mountain lion sighting:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/news/090304_nw_sj_mountain_lion_sightings.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5907710/



Saturday, September 11, 2004

Another soccer page

You can follow Lily's team at the Saratoga AYSO website.

Click on the "U-10G" link at the top of the page. Lily's team is team #7, the Tigers.

Also, correction to last post. The DeAnza Titans have a tournament at the end of this month.

Friday, September 10, 2004

DeAnza Titans

The soccer team that Dale is on, the DeAnza Titans, has been doing quite well. Last weekend, they made the semi-finals at a tournament in Sacramento.

They are ranked fourth in northern California by the gotsoccer.com website. Here is the ranking page. Teams get points according to how well they do in tournaments and how prestegious the tournament is. They got a lot of points when they made the semi-finals in State Cup earlier this year. The Sacramento tournament is the River City Labor Day Champions Cup.

It's league play time now, so there won't be any tournaments for a while. I think the next one is in October sometime.

You can follow the Titan's league results by going to the league's web site. Click on the "Teams/Scores" link on the left of the page. Then in the middle of the page, click on the arrow next to the "BOYS U12 DIV 1", then click on the "DEANZA TITANS 92" link. Results are usually updated by Monday or Tuesday.

Earthquake!

This Thursday morning at 3:30 a.m, most of us were woken up by an earthquake. I hadn't felt one in quite a while. Dale woke up and said "WHOA"! Luckily it was a small one, so nothing was damaged, just a few cupboard doors opening up and a few toys falling off an overly cluttered dresser.

Here is the USGS earthquake report. As you can see, it was only a mile from Saratoga.

At least we don't have hurricane after hurricane coming after us...

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Sunday, September 05, 2004

Interesting Story about Arbor Software

I joined Arbor Software on March 18th, 1993. It was a very interesting and exciting place to work. The dynamics between individuals could probably be a good case study in a college class. Very strong personalities in the Engineering department of only about 14 individuals. Lots of conflict, not sure everybody liked each other, lots of fun playing foosball to unwind. The thing that did keep everybody focused was the product and the desire to go public (IPO).

The company eventually merged with Hyperion Software to create Hyperion Solutions. I will be celebrating my 12th year anniversery this March. I believe the company has about 2500 employees. Quite a bit more than when I joined.

Below is a snippet out of an article that describes a decision that was vital to the success of Arbor Software.

btw: Kirk Cruikshank is a graduate of University of Michigan.

The below was written May 06, 1999.

Inventing credibility

The Reflection story underscores an important lesson: Successful PR strategies build credibility at the same time they're building a buzz. For an example, we turn to Arbor Software Corp., a company that went public in November 1995 and racked up the fifth best performance for an IPO in Wall Street history. But just two years earlier, Arbor's future had been, at best, murky.

In that year, 1993, Kirk Cruikshank joined Arbor Software (now part of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Hyperion Solutions Corp.) as senior vice president of marketing. The startup had 32 people and a promising software application, still in beta, that enabled relational database users to slice and dice data into useful information. "The market segment and space [were] not there. We had to build the market," says Cruikshank, now president and CEO of TradingDynamics Inc., a Palo Alto-based startup that develops trading systems and applications for online business-to-business auctions.

Like most startups, Arbor didn't have the money to bankroll a mammoth advertising campaign, so Cruikshank targeted "free" media as he set out to invent a product category. "PR has phenomenal reach if you're good at controlling the message," he advises. Although Arbor hired a PR agency, because of the product's complexity Cruikshank wanted to shape the initial campaign message in-house. But he relied on the agency to supply crucial feedback and to orchestrate a full-blown media onslaught--including a press tour and speaking engagements.

Arbor claimed that its enterprise software made it much easier for office workers and executives to examine huge corporate repositories of data using ordinary computer spreadsheets. Cruikshank's plan: get a prestigious endorsement from an industry guru to bolster these claims.

Who better than Dr. Edgar F. Codd, the father of the relational database? When Cruikshank suggested hiring Codd's San Jose-based consulting firm, Codd and Date Inc., to write a white paper, his colleagues were skeptical. "They expected that he'd say, 'This stuff stinks,'" admits Cruikshank. "But he was a good scientist, open to ideas." The resulting white paper not only endorsed Arbor's software but coined the term on-line analytic processing, or OLAP.

Overnight, Arbor found itself with a highly promotable new product category. Although some competitors and critics discounted the white paper as nothing more than a paid endorsement, Arbor believed it now possessed powerful competitive ammunition. Then Arbor's PR agency, The Horn Group Inc. of San Francisco, noticed that Computerworld's editorial calendar featured an upcoming article on innovations in business analysis software. They pitched the white paper's conclusions to the respected trade publication, and the editors took the bait--an exclusive featuring Codd and his associates' unexpected conclusions.

The resulting story kicked up a storm of controversy. (And the editor in chief of Computerworld printed a retraction a few months after the original story, stating that the staff did not know that the Codd and Date white paper was commissioned by Arbor.) "It had an explosive impact on the industry," recalls Cruikshank. "Controversy is fabulous, as long as it's the right kind." By polarizing the market into camps, Arbor hoped to emerge as the new thought leader.

But the job wasn't over. Cruikshank recalls the advice of spin doctor Sabrina Horn, founder and president of The Horn Group: "[She] said, 'We [have] to evangelize this [the white paper].' So we ran East and West Coast dinners for analysts and all the major trades." For a startup, those image-bolstering meals weren't cheap--about $75 to $100 a head with good wine, appetizers and dinner. In the smoke-and-mirrors game of startup PR, Arbor was following one of the basic commandments: Start acting like a big company (even though you're not).

Arbor knew it was finally playing in the big leagues when competitors started joining the startup's OLAP Council. Gradually, OLAP became a new industry standard. Three years after going public, Arbor Software had 450 employees and fiscal 1998 revenue topping $82 million. It subsequently merged with Hyperion Software in August 1998 in a deal worth almost $800 million.

The full story

My Sister

PHPR Personnel - Julie A. Everett (found via Google)

Saturday, September 04, 2004

Current Top 10 artists on Steve's iPod


  1. The Beatles
  2. Joe Jackson
  3. The Who
  4. Steely Dan
  5. George Winston
  6. Counting Crows
  7. The Clash
  8. The Police
  9. U2
  10. The Beach Boys


These are mostly artists that I've been listening to since high school and college. I'm either very loyal to the music of my youth or not very adventurous musically. I think the first album I ever bought was from the Beach Boys. However, Counting Crows is a new addition to the top 10 list. And I'm working on others. I recently purchased music from The Wallflowers, Matchbox Twenty, and Dave Matthews Band.

You can find my complete iPod playlist at musicmobs.com


Current Top 10 Artists on my ipod

1. Van Morrison
2. Grateful Dead
3. Bruce Hornsby
4. Joe Jackson
5. The Wallflowers
6. Smashing Pumpkins
7. Ryan Adams
8. Train
9. The Rolling Stones
10. Dire Straits