Matt Ganis' BLOG and other ramblings

Becoming Agile (take the step)

2010-11-30T13:01:00.000-08:00

I talk to lots of teams that want to become more Agile in their processes. The other day I realized that I’ve actually internalized the scrum master role (at least I think I have). I noticed that every day, when I’m talking to teams I work with, I’m always trying to dig into what they are doing and understand what problems need to be removed from their path - and then removing the obstacles.

Often the problem is something like what happened to me the other when I was trying to send a package to Denmark. I went to the mailroom and dropped off the box, and filled out the export form. About 3 days later the mailroom guy calls me and says:

“Your package hasn’t gone out yet. I’m waiting for the guys in the other building to make a decision about how we ship, and I can’t do anything until they tell me”. Sigh.

So, out of habit, I just ask “who is it ?”

I lookup the person’s phone number, make a call and POW – roadblock removed within about 30 minutes. Turns out they in turn were waiting from someone in California (“oh, you know, they never called me back”).

I mean it really does work – you just need to take the extra step of making that phone call and asking the question “why is this being held up?” and from what I’ve found is that 9 out of 10 times the roadblock goes away!

I’ve noticed myself doing this more and more lately – I just don’t accept the answer “I’m waiting on (x)”. I guess talking about Agile (and living it for so long) – I’ve really internalized it.

Try it: It’s amazing how fast things can really get done – just take that extra step!

Discovering Agility

2010-11-14T03:48:00.000-08:00

I’m flying back from a pretty successful trip to Copenhagen. I was here as part of something IBM calls an “Innovation Discovery Workshop”. We met with one of IBM Denmark’s largest customers. It was my first time doing one of these, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Lots of high level, smart people talking about how the bank could change or adapt its business in an agile or nimble fashion based on customer needs – interesting but scary. The topic of the session was Business Agility - I was asked to attend so I could bring my perspectives on Agile Software Development into the discussion.

The two day session was held at a Spa/Hotel just outside of Copenhagen in a town called Skodsborg. My first challenge when I landed on Wednesday morning was finding a train from the airport to the small town about 40 minutes away. I have to say, I was pretty impressed with myself, having found the train and very easily wandering around the town to find my way to the Kurhotel and Spa.

Anyway, there were about 15 people from Nordea there and maybe 10 IBM’ers all from a variety of disciplines – and if you know me, I know NOTHING about banking and money so I was feeling a little out of my element!!! Anyway the idea behind the two days was to explore areas within the bank’s process and business model where they could be more innovation and agile in an attempt to respond to changes in the business climates. The first day wasn’t too bad – lots of good conversation and getting to know each other – the wonderful three course meal at the end of the day (complete with three courses of wine) helped to loosen everyone up.

I got to speak in the morning of the second day. I was scheduled to talk about Agile Software development and specifically I was going to focus on Scrum as an Agile technique. Unfortunately (for me) I got to follow one of our Distinguished Engineer’s and VP of Innovation in the CIO’s office: Francoise Legoues. She did an outstanding job – simply “wowing” the room and I think really setting the stage for just how innovative IBM can be. Lucky for me (not): A very tough act to follow.

So, armed with my lucky pink shirt I jumped in feet first and gave it my all! I think it went well – and it typical “Matt Style” (very animated and excited) I think I convinced them I know a little about the topic. There were lots of questions and comments afterwards – so I always take that as a good sign! I focused not so much on how to do Agile for software development, but rather how to “think” with an Agile and iterative (small step) mindset. They’re doing Agile development already. In fact Nordea is at the beginning of their Agile journey and like most teams just starting out, they have lots of questions (and lots of confusion) – They’re going to do fine though – they are very committed and very passionate about what they’re doing! It’s really exciting to see!

Did we help them ? I don’t know. They seemed to really get a lot out of it and watching Nordea talk amongst themselves about how to proceed (using ideas we forged together) I think I would say we did a good job!

I didn’t get to much sightseeing. The day ended around 4:00pm on Friday and a quick look at geocaching.com showed that there was a quick geocache about 0.2 miles from my hotel. After a brisk walk I quickly found the “cave” where the cache was hidden. It was really pretty cool. Around the back of that big opening was a little opening with stairs that led to the top (where the cache was hidden). Of course I left a Samstone there in memory of Sam Cohn (the son of a fellow IBM’er John Cohn) who was tragically killed in a car accident at the age of 14.

I did make it into Downtown Copenhagen for Dinner with two of the IBM workshop attendees: Adam Cutler and John Vergo – John works about 200 yards from me in Hawthorne, NY but we had to travel about 4,000 miles to meet – go figure! Other than the rain, it was a good night. It felt like Copenhagen should feel: wet and cold – in a good (European) way!

So, back home and back to the grind. Business travel for this year is done (I’m pretty sure).

Hey buddy, got a pen ?

2010-10-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night was pretty exciting – I did my first (and hopefully not last) book signing for “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum”. My signing was scheduled for 3pm but around 1pm I starting getting pretty nervous. I had been checking out the bookstore the whole week to see how the book was doing and it wasn’t pretty. There was a pretty large stack of books at the start of the conference (Sunday) and now here it was Wednesday afternoon and the stack looked about the same height (ie, nobody was buying it). So, naturally my fear was: if nobody is buying the book here at the conference, nobody is going to show up for a signing (duh!)

But, when I got to the bookstore, the people at IBM Press made me feel very welcome. We chatted about the content of what was in the book and even kicked around ideas for new books (which got me excited). Then before we started, I did a video interview for the IBM Press YouTube Channel - which was pretty cool. So at this point I was feeling pretty comfortable and when I looked at the front of the table I was SHOCKED to see a line forming to talk to me!!! Who would have thought that! How cool!

I met a team that was just starting to implement agile and had all kinds of questions about where to start and what some of their problems might be (that was my first signing) – we talked for quite a while about different approaches and techniques. Another guy was talking about his implementation at Northwestern University – He was worried about issues with his team being distributed, but it wasn’t overly complex since they were separated by only about 30 miles – BUT he was struggling with the cultural problems we talk about in the book since his team members come from China, India, Singapore, etc (interesting…). Another guy was doing his doctoral dissertation on Agile (I had a softspot for him ;-) We talked about all kinds of ways he could gather data and approach his problem. Lots of others…don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t running out of ink by any stretch of the imagination….but I made the most of the time I had with the people that did show !

Before I knew it my time was up and I forgot that I was nervous ! What a great experience!!! Can’t wait to do it again! By the way, somehow that stack of books was smaller by the very end of the conference – so they were selling (at least a little bit)

Streaking in the sky

2010-10-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

On November 17^th and 18^th the Leonids Meteor Shower will grace our skies. The Leonids happens to be one of the better meteor showers to observe since they tend to produce an average of 40 meteors per hour when they hit their peak. The shower itself has a cyclic “peak year” every 33 years where hundreds of meteors can be seen each hour with the last of these cycles having occurred in 2001.

So what is a meteorite and where do they come from?

A meteor is the streak of bright light that can be seen from Earth when a meteorite enters our atmosphere. The actual object entering the atmosphere is called a meteorite, and can sometimes be a piece of an asteroid. The term meteor refers only to the image created by this entry into our atmosphere, often referred to as a falling star.

The bright light of a meteor is a result of heat produced by the meteorite entering out atmosphere. Rather than friction, this heat is produced by something called “ram pressure” - which is a pressure that is exerted on a something moving through a fluid medium which causes a strong drag force to be exerted on the body. This pressure heats the meteorite and the air around it to such a degree that the image of the meteor can be seen from earth.

In the course of the Earth’s orbit, our planet meets (or passes through) a number of these streams and clusters of tiny meteoroids at certain points in its orbit. These streams and clusters and are believed to be fragments of comets that past through our Solar System over the years. As the Earth passes through this debris, millions of tiny particles enter our atmosphere and the sky will seem to be filled with a shower of sparks and streaks.

A meteor shower's radiant is the point in the sky from which all the meteors appear to originate. The Leonid radiant is within the so-called "Sickle" of Leo; a backwards question-mark pattern of stars that outlines the head and mane of the constellation Leo, the Lion. Hence theses meteors are known as "Leonids."

The Leonids are known to be made up of cosmic litter from a small, dusty comet discovered by two astronomers in the late 19th century and was aptly named Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonid meteors are thought to be the dusty legacy of Comet Tempel-Tuttle because the dust is moving around the sun in virtually the same orbit as the comet. As the Earth encounters the debris left behind by the comet's previous passes through our orbit, these tiny fragments of the comet – typically no bigger than a grain of sand -impact our atmosphere at speeds of up to 45 miles per second causing them to blaze briefly but brightly in the night sky.

(adapted from my Column from the Westchester Amateur Astronomer November newsletter)

Viva Las Vegas

2010-10-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

I’m out in Las Vegas (for the next 7 days or so) at the IBM Information on Demand (IOD) forum held here at the Mandalay Bay hotel. I’m actually here to help promote our book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum” – but, in order to get out here, I had to volunteer to help set up the show (laptops, printers, displays, network, etc) - FYI - my session is 3767 (Meet the author)

Being at a trade show brings back some good memories – I used to do a lot of this work back when we’re building computer networks and developing the IBM Internet Service Providing (ISP) network - anyone remember ibm.net ? – back then we had to make our own Ethernet cables and then "man" the booth for 8-10 hours a day ! (I think in day we made a few hundred six foot cables – ugh!)

What’s really fun about doing this kind of work is watching how everybody pulls together to get the job done. For example, we’ll drag out 100 laptops to deploy to a room – and between the 4 or 5 of us, everybody just jumps in – nobody asks ‘what should I do?” – people just jump right in: somebody is plugging in power, others are connecting the security cables – if someone finishes their job before someone else completes theirs, they don’t ask, they just start helping you out. It’s a great example of people working as a team (in reality we want to get the job done ASAP and move on) – but the teamwork is really phenomenal! Interesting that I'm here to talk to people about Scrum and I ended up participating in a great team effort!

Anyway, its been a long (and tiring day) – time for a martini !

Serendipity

2010-10-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

ser·en·dip·i·ty

1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. good fortune; luck

I just finished giving (yet another) talk. This is one of my favorite talks to give, it’s entitled “How to create Effective Team (without having to herd cats)”. I’ve given it a number of times, inside and outside IBM and to audiences around the world (that’s sounds more impressive that it probably is, but I was invited by several teams in places outside of the US to deliver it). Anyway…..I got to thinking: “How did I come up with this idea ?”

Well, one night after a Library Board meeting, I was talking to our library director about teams and how they can work better. Her eyes lit up and she asked me if I’d speak to the NY Library Association on the topic. So I created the presentation. It went over really well, so I offered to do it at IBM. They loved it, and I gave it twice (once in the US and Once to the Asia Pacific teams). Someone in India heard and asked me to do it (three different times) to teams in India. Just today, I did it again - this time to an audience of about 300 (again worldwide). Serendipity. I just so happened to be talking to Pat one night, and next thing I know, I have a lecture that is getting a lot of mileage ! I love it (wish I could say I planned it)

I think about this a lot. What if I didn’t go to school at Pace University in NY. I wouldn’t have gotten a part-time job at IBM, I wouldn’t have met my wife, I wouldn’t be teaching astronomy, wouldn’t have the dogs, wouldn’t live in this house, who knows about kids….etc etc. I wonder where I’d be and what I’d be doing. Interesting how one decision or one path in life can have such a ripple effect.

I wonder where I would be if had I gone to RIT or Georgia Tech ??

Mentoring

2010-10-07T13:58:00.001-07:00

I just got out of a meeting with one of my High School science student protégées. I wasn’t really looking forward to the meeting – I had WAY too much to do today – too many meetings, too many things that were due, and to top it off, I was going to lose time in travel. When I got there and we started talking, I started to get rejuvenated….Tyler is working on Astronomical Spectroscopy and is trying to determine what the limiting magnitude is for an average amateur astronomer in the collection of useful spectra. When I heard about the progress he was making I was really impressed and my energy level start to really soar!! I was getting excited at the prospect of him making real progress not so much on his research, but on his learning how to use all of the equipment and software.

Now, I do a lot of mentoring (inside of work and outside) – and as I was driving to my meeting today I was trying to figure out “why I do it?". It can be time consuming. It can be frustrating. At times it can be boring. And it’s usually at an inconvenient time. So why do it ?

But when I have days like this, it always seems to be worth while. I do it because Tyler looks and acts so confident when he’s at a science fair. Or because Vicky emails me an excited email that she “got the managerial job”. Or the excitement when Yaser makes it through the evaluation process and made it to the “next level” in his career. Don’t get me wrong, some of my advice can backfire – Just ask Ed about getting yelled at by someone when I gave him what I thought was a good idea.

So, for all the "good" advice I give (and I’m sure that’s a debatable point) – I think I do it for the excitement I get when they “move ahead” in their careers and the fact that I know they’re excited. I guess I also get a “rush” out of knowing that I’m helping – and that the trust they placed in me paid off. A quick Google search turned up this, pretty accurate:

Winston Churchill said, "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give” - So thanks guys….as always, you made my day !

You Talk too Much....

2010-10-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Its funny, everytime someone asks me “what do you do at IBM?” I have to pause to think about it and try to formulate an answer. It’s not an easy answer, I can’t say “I’m a programmer” – I’m not, but I try to help programming teams work better and I don’t build I/T systems, but I do specify how they should be created and built so they become more expandable or flexible over time. So really, when I think about it – my answer is: “I talk a lot”. I’m planning a trip to Copenhagen in November and when my daughter said “what are you going do there?” – I simply replied “I’m going to talk to people” (of course my son said “wouldn’t it be cheaper to just the phone” – I’ll talk about face-to-face communications another time !

So I’m thinking about how I talk to people. I do it in a variety of different ways. As a professor I stand in front of a classroom and “perform” my lectures (twice a week this year). There’s a certain skill to presenting a lecture that’s both entertains and educational. I like to think that I cover both of those bases pretty well – I’m pretty animated when I talk, which usually helps with the interest level.

At work, lots of my talking is done via conference calls – either in meetings or presenting. As I was presenting to the Rational Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting the other day, I stepped back to look at my presentation space (here it is, in all of it’s messy glory). Yes, I was animated, walking around the room with my wireless headset – one eye on the screen looking at the presentation my audience was viewing while flipping ahead on my printed copy (on the chair). There was a real production going on. But was I as effective as I am in person ? I’m not sure – based on the feedback, I’d say “yes” – I think there’s an acquired skill to speaking on conference calls – different than in-person speaking. I can’t put my finger on what it is – maybe it’s just the tone of your voice and the passion you convey over the phone with your voice and the inflections in your tone (which equates to the animated motions in front of the classroom).

In any case, I’m thinking of changing my business card to say “Matt Ganis, talker” – wonder what the reaction would be ?

Show me

2010-08-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to do is to introduce someone to astronomy. Most people don’t need an introduction; they’ve been looking at the stars and dreaming of space travel most of their lives. But there are always those with questions like: “How far away is that star?” Or “How big is the Universe?”. Inevitably I get the Black Hole questions. This month, I thought it might be fun to locate some of the various places in our nighttime sky where astronomers believe there are actually black holes. This way, when someone asks you about them, you can point up and say “see that spot in the sky, that’s a black hole” (and yes, then you too can get the blank stare and often heard “WOWwwww…..”)

A black hole is a super dense object that has an intense gravitational pull due to its large mass. So, imagine a star, which is much more massive than our sun, and which has a mass that is large enough to cause a black hole to form. As the star collapses onto itself due to this immense mass, the question then becomes: What keeps this star from collapsing onto itself and becoming a black hole? The answer is that there is also an intense pressure caused by nuclear reactions within the star pushing outward, balancing the inward “push” of mass.

However, when the fuel that feeds this nuclear reaction gets used up this massive star can’t support itself anymore and it collapses to form a black hole – a region of incredibly dense material. It is interesting to note that when a black hole is formed by a collapsing star it is actually impossible to watch the final steps of the formation of the black hole from the Earth. In addition, it is impossible to see any object fall into a black hole. This is not to say that everything appears to freeze just before entering a black hole. As an object falls into a black hole it gets increasingly dimmer and dimmer from the point of view of an outside observer. By the time an object gets to the edge of a black hole, it will be completely black. This effect, called a gravitational redshift, is caused by the immense gravity near the outside of a black hole.

So, this is an interesting problem. How do you prove the existence of something that cannot be observed by definition? There are actually many methods used to see if black holes really exist in our universe. The first method is to look for objects in our universe that have a lot of mass, but are very small. For example we believe that there exists a black hole at the center of M87 in the constellation of Virgo. This object weighs about three billion times more than our sun, but takes up a volume no larger than our solar system.

Also, several thousand light-years away, near the "heart" of Cygnus two stars are locked in a gravitational embrace. One star, a blue supergiant star is about 30 times as massive as the Sun and 400,000 times brighter. The other star is a star that is 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun, but it's extremely small. This object must be the collapsed core of a star - Its mass is too great to be a white dwarf or a neutron star, though, so it must be a black hole. This stellar system is called Cygnus X-1 (indicating it was the first source of X-rays discovered in the constellation Cygnus). It’s one of the first suspected black holes.

The thought is that the X-rays originate from a disk of gas that's spiraling into the black hole. As the two stars orbit each other at a rate of once every 5.6 days, the black hole's gravitational pull causes the blue supergiant to "bulge" toward the smaller, more dense star. As a result, hot gas flows away from the Blue supergiant toward the black hole. Friction heats the gas to a billion degrees or more, causing it to emit a torrent of X-rays, providing a signpost for our blackhole.

So have a look – and when you see those beginners out there, be sure to show them a blackhole – trust me, they’ll love it !

Go climb a mountain !

2010-05-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

It was about 87 degrees on Sunday afternoon and pretty humid. So what did we do? We hiked one of the steepest trails around (well, steepest to me anyway). We headed north to Beacon, New York a
nd hiked up Beacon Mountain to the ruins of an old hotel/casino about 1200 feet above sea level!

The hike started at the base of Mount Beacon when a pretty steep set of metal stairs leading up the mountain. What was deceiving about this,

that while steep, it was easy going up the stairs and after about 5 minutes, we came to realize that this hike was going to be tough. The trails were fairly rocky which helped with footing but it was the heat that was a killer !

Along the way up the mountain we could see the old footings from the Incline Railway that existed here from about 1903 to 1978. Our goal was to reach the summit and the remains of the powerhouse that pulled the railway up the mountain. The foundation of the old casino and hotel were still there, but very little remained.

Once we finished our lunch at the base of the casino, we continue up the the mountain to the Mount Beacon mountain fire tower! I still can't believe I made it to the top - I hate heights! But after hiking all that way, I wasn't about to reach the top and NOT climb it !

All in all, it was a great day !!! Thank goodness the deli at the base of the mountain was open!!

Trenton Computer Festival - great weekend

2010-04-25T05:57:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to attend and speak at the Trenton Computer Festival this past weekend! I’m sure it’s not a widely known venue, but it’s been going on for the past 35 years ! I think I attended some of the very first of these events (held at the then “Trenton State University” – now “The College of New Jersey”) – This is an absolute Geekfest ! The best part of the show isn’t the speakers, but the computer flea market. Vendors set up in the parking lots selling anything from vintage reel-to-reel tape players, to SCSI disk drives and any kind of assorted cables, magnets, tools or anything else you can imagine! It’s a hackers dream come true ! I have to admit, I was really disappointed at the commercial vendor exhibit. I remember going to this when I was much younger and it felt like an InterOp (all kinds of manufacturers from around the country – it seemed) – this year it seemed like local vendors with stuff barely a grade above the flea market

My talk was titled “Agile Methods: Fact or Fiction” – It was pretty well attended. I didn’t expect much since this event is more or less for the computer hobbyist/hacker – but the people that attended my talk here professional programmers/Product owners and interested in how Agile can help them. Like most audiences, they’ve heard a lot about the topic in the press, but none have really tried. They all started out thinking it was kind of silly, but as I kept talking, you could see the realization in their eyes and you can tell they “got it” – its fun when that happens !

On a personal note, speaking at the TCF was really a thrill. Growing up in the early days of computing (with Kim-1’s, SYM’s and Commodore PET’s) – this show was a yearly highlight for me. I remember watching Hal Chamberlin, Frank Covitz and Cliff Ashcraft speaking at a TCF about Computer Generated Music and thinking how cool it would be to do that one day. Well I did it ! Only took about 35 years, but I feel like I finally “made it”

An interesting evening in Second Life

2010-03-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

I spent an interesting evening the other night talking to some new (and old) friends from Canada, Raleigh, NJ and California. No, we weren't at a conference.....it
wasn't a conference call - I attended my first Meetup (see http://meetup.com) in Secondlife. The topic of the discussion was "Distributed Agile" (yes, I know,
sounds riveting - but what can I say, it's a passion).

Anyway, it was Wednesday night around 8:30pm and I had just finished teaching Astronomy at Pace University. I was tired and really wanted to get home,
but since Pace is about 5 minutes from my office in Hawthorne, I took the plunge and drove back to IBM to attend the virtual event - thinking I'd only stay
or about a 1/2 hour. The SecondLife Agile meetup is hosted by a good friend (and ex-IBM'er) Bill Krebs (AgileBill as he's known in Secondlife). When I got there
things were just getting started....We stood in a circle and went around the room introducing ourselves. The one interesting thing I noticed is that the Voice over IP really (and I mean REALLY) makes a difference in these social settings. They made an overt effort to not make this meetup a "stand and stare at a powerpoint" - it was all about milling around, chatting and using the spatial nature of secondlife. very interesting !

What I noticed was that my speaking cadence was much more measured, like I was having a face to face discussion with someone, not just speaking as another voice on a conference call. It was VERY MUCH a social experience. Yes, we sat around on beanbag chairs and chatted - and as
crazy as it sounds - it really felt like I was in a social setting (a party) chatting about various topics I loved it - met some new people and ending up talking and discussing topics ranging from the use of Second Life to how Agile works to what it means to be in this new medium.
By the time I knew it - it was 10:30 - and I had to pull myself away - definitely engaging and definitely worth attending again !

See Jupiter, Venus and the moon close together

2008-12-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

At the start of the month, the always bright Jupiter can found near the western horizon, making its exit from our skies – falling below our horizon by December 10th. If you get a chance, have a look on December 1st where Jupiter, Venus and the Moon form an interesting conjunction low in the western skies. A conjunction of celestial bodies occurs in the sky if those bodies are (temporarily) close together in the sky (within a few degrees)

Popsicle Stick Bridges

2008-11-22T08:53:00.001-08:00

Last night my Den competed in a popsicle stick bridge building contest. The idea was to build a bridge out of no more than 100 popsicle sticks, and then see how much weight it could support. Specifically the rules were:

The goal: to build the strongest possible bridge to take a matchbox car, using wooden popsicle sticks.

The Constraints:

• The bridge must span a 55cm gap
• No more than 100 popsicle sticks may be used
• The sticks may not be cut
• Only white glue may be used
• Construction paper may be used for the deck only
• The test load is applied to the top of the bridge in 2.5 lb increments, until the bridge collapses).

The boys did well (shown here in a group picture). The winner’s bridge held 270 pounds of weight – yes 270 !!!! Pretty amazing !

2008-11-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of speaking at the New York Library Association’s annual meeting this past Saturday, November 8th. It was held at the Saratoga Springs City Center center in Saratoga Springs, NY (luckily I just played golf there this past summer, so I knew right where to go).

This was my second time speaking to this crowd, and both times it was on the same subject, the creation of Effective Teams. I talk a lot about self organizing teams, and how to empower team members to be trustful of each other, and create an environment where people are willing to work together (but independently of management).

I decided to use a team building game based on the book ZOOM to (hopefully) highlight some of the points I’d be making throughout the session. If you haven’t seen Zoom,it’s pretty cool. It's a picture book (of about 30 or so images). The first pictures go something like this:

1. Close up of large red rooster comb
2. Rooster head and neck
3. Rooster with children in foreground
4. Rooster in distance, children in foreground in a room with an open door
5. View of farmhouse and children in a room with open door, animals in foreground in yard

You get the idea, the pictures are zooming “out” (or "in" depending on your viewpoint).

Anyway, I distributed a single picture to 25 of the attendees in a folder. They had strict instructions to not show the picture to anyone else, but they could talk to each other about what their picture showed. The idea was to figure out the “Story” that was being told.

It was amazing to see little groups form all over the room (looking for commonalities). Then groups starting changing, and then they realized they needed to talk to each other, then leaders formed, etc…they really saw how a disorganized mess could come together ! It was lots of fun.

If you’re doing a team building exercise or need an ice breaker, I highly recommend this!

Comcast seems to be going from bad to worse

2008-09-19T04:32:00.000-07:00

sigh....5 days, still problems.....

I get home tonight to find that my phone has NO dial tone now. I can receive calls into the house, but I can't make any outbound calls

No idea if the message is in place....maybe I shouldn't have put the request in - at least I'd be able to use my phone!

I'm not sure what's worse:People not calling me or me not being able to call people :-)

back to the 800 number....

Still not working

2008-09-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

So its been - let me see - 4 days times 24 hours.....96 hours (hey comcast, not 72 hours) and my phone still doesn't have a referral message on it !

So in my last posting I said I was able to change the answering machine message, so at least I could "tell" people my new number. Guess what ? Comcast turned off the voicemail about 3 hours after I posted that.

Know what people heard when they called me ?

"There is no mailbox for that number" (click)

so, I call again......they are trying - but what's the problem??? now this drives me crazy: The helpdesk that I call (1-800-COMCAST) say "that's not our number, we can't change it"

what ? of course it's your number, I've been paying you for the last 5 years....

No, not "ours" as in Comcast, "ours" as in this department. We can't update their systems, so we have to put a ticket in for you and they say it'll be done within 72 hours (umm..it's 96 hours now)

The left hand can't talk to the right hand !

SO - now, if you're within my area code - it seems to work, but nowhere else (maybe the employee that handles the "out of the areacode" database is out sick...god forbid someone else in the company can pick up the slack.

How to piss off (and lose) customers

2008-09-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

I don’t normally go to extremes to let others know about “problems” I’ve had with service providers. If I have a bad experience, I typically get mad (and like most people rant and rave at the poor customer service Rep), ask to speak to a supervisor, and typically get nowhere.

But here’s what happened recently with Comcast (my ISP/Phone provider).

I got a letter from them saying I had to select a new Long Distance carrier because they were changing to a new service model (Voice over IP) for their local and long distance service. Ok, it’s a hassle, but I try to deal with it and call them about my options. Turns out, I can keep Comcast as my Long Distance provider – but I have to move to a new service – which by the way ends up being about $3-$4 cheaper than what I’m currently paying (for combined Cable/Phone and Tivo-like service). Sounds good so far.

So I call to make the appointment to switch over and low and behold, I find that I have to change my phone number. Sigh. Turns out that however they were providing my service before, the owner of the land-line phone exchange won’t “sell” Comcast my number. Ok, I’m not happy but I do it (by the way, when I changed to Comcast’s previous “super service” about 5 years ago, I had to change my to number – to a COMCAST PROVIDED NUMBER – now I have to change again – They really would rather make my life inconvenient rather than servicing their customers)

So the guys come today, and change my service over. No problems. Smooth as silk. To test it out, I call my old phone number and I get dropped into my OLD voicemail. Hmm, I call Comcast and ask why they didn’t put a “referral message” on the old number so people can call me.

“Oh…we can do that – it might take about 72 hours to go into effect tho”
hmm….that’s 3 days – Not too good (why the hell didn’t you tell me this when I placed the order)
ok, but people that call me go directly into my old voicemail and are leaving me messages there, how do I get my messages?
“you can’t” – the Comcast rep tells me - now that number is invalid - you can't access it

So let me get this straight. You (Comcast) insist I change my number, you don’t tell me I need to put a “referral” message on the number, so to “penalize” me, you make me wait 3 days – AND – I have no idea who tried to reach me because I can’t get into my old phonemail !!!! and you Comcast think this is acceptable ?

So I call the 1-800-COMCAST customer service, and after explaining (in detailed length) my problem, they have to transfer me to someone else (even after speaking to a sympathetic supervisor) – do you realize that in the SIX times I called, they transferred me and DROPPED me each TIME – all 6 times – makes you think they really don’t give a damn about me or it’s a way to avoid a problem. I can understand it happening once, maybe twice – but SIX TIMES ? POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AGAIN – (actually I got NO service from their customer service). Does this phone company NOT know how to use phones ? could they be that inept (or are they just looking for a way to get rid of me ?)

Finally, I go to the local office, and the very nice woman tells me how I can access my old voicemail so I can change my greeting to tell people my number and to warn them NOT to leave a message.

Why could the “qualified” customer support agent not tell me this? (this is actually what I asked for on service call number 2) - Because they just don’t care. From what I’m hearing now, this same problem is happening to everyone that’s changing to this “wonderful new service”.

Now I’m on a mission to find a new Internet Service Provider and phone company. I’m sure I’ll have to change my phone number AGAIN. Like Cell phone providers, I should be able to take my number with me – but I’m sure I won’t be able to. Do I think Comcast cares ? I don't think they give a damn....It's just one customer - that's the part that gets me crazy....they just don't care......

For me, I’m avoiding Comcast whenever I can….

Mixing Agile and Waterfall

2008-03-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Westchester PMI (Project Management Institute's) monthly meeting. Together with Tom Hawkins, we presented on how we at ibm.com try to manage our Agile projects with traditional projects that tend to follow Waterfall methods.

I was really thrilled to see how many "traditional" project managers are interested in the benefits of Agile. In our presentation we discussed:

The needs of traditional methods and the need for project documentation.
The need to add another level of planning (A pre-planning game planning session) when managing waterfall and agile projects to allow for dependencies between projects
Requirement management when waterfall projects have requirements of the agile team (and vice versa)
and finally, how to deal with waterfall's need for details (functional specs) up front, we use capabilities (an abstract of detailed requirements)

I'd love to hear from anyone on how they handle these issues.

February Lunar Eclipse

2008-01-26T13:34:00.000-08:00

This month in our skies should prove to be pretty exciting. On the evening of February 20^th we'll be able to witness total lunar eclipse. And luckily for us, the entirety of the eclipse will be visible to the eastern half of North America. You should be sure to catch this one – we won’t see another total lunar eclipse until December 2010.

From start to finish, this February's lunar eclipse will last about three hours and twenty-six minutes. The partial eclipse begins as the Moon's eastern edge slowly moves into the Earth's umbral shadow. During the partial phases, it takes just over an hour for the Moon's orbital motion to carry it entirely within the Earth's dark umbra. The color and brightness of the totally eclipsed Moon can vary considerably from one eclipse to another. Dark eclipses are caused by volcanic gas and dust which filters and blocks much of the Sun's light from reaching the Moon. But since no major volcanic eruptions have taken place recently, the Moon will probably take on a vivid red or orange color during the total phase. After the total phase ends, it is once again followed by a partial eclipse as the Moon gradually leaves the umbral shadow. This eclipse will see totality lasting just under 50 minutes.

Event	Time(EST)
Partial Eclipse	8:43pm
Total Eclipse Begins	10:01pm
Mid-Eclipse	10:26pm
Total Eclipse Ends	10:51pm
Partial Eclipse Ends	12:09am

President's Volunteer Service Award

2008-01-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

At IBM late last year, I was honored to be selected to receive the President's Volunteer Service Award based on the number of Volunteer hours I logged IBM's On Demand Community program during 2006. The President's Volunteer Service Award is an initiative of the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation, in conjunction with the Corporation for National and Community Service and the USA Freedom Corps. It is administered by the Points of Light Foundation and the Volunteer Center National Network. IBM has partnered with this program to recognize it's outstanding On Demand Community volunteers and luckily I was part of this very elite group of employees to be recognized.

The question I get alot is: what do you do to accumulate all of the hours. Well:

I'm a den leader for Den 1 - Pack 71 (Webelos)
I coordinate the judging for the FIRST Lego Robotic competition held at Pace University
I teach at the Westchester Community College Collegium (Astronomy)
I'm also on the board of trustees of the Mahopac Public Library
I'm also a judge for the "We the People" Competition held at Pace University in NYNC

I know I missed some others.....but those are the "big ones"

Go fly a kite ;-)

2008-01-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

Boötes (pronounced BOH-uh-tees – not "booties") has a variety of myths and legends connected with it. One of the oldest says it represents the son of Zeus and a nymph, Callisto. Boötes was sent away and penniless by his brother and left to pick his own fate, Boötes invented a plow which was pulled by oxen. He farmed the land and made a decent living. Callisto was so pleased she convinced Zeus to place their son and his plow in the sky. So Boötes is sometimes called the Ploughman, because the constellation is near to the Big Dipper, which is, at times, referred to as the plough - others say the constellation looks like a big "Kite"

Bootes is also associated with the story of Zeus' seduction of the maiden Callisto, who was turned into a bear as result of the jealousy of the goddess Hera (Zeus’ wife). Before being turned into a Bear, Callisto bore a boy Arcas as the result of her liason with Zeus. As a teen, Arcas was hunting in the forest and encountered the Bear Callisto. Of course he did not recognize her and he set off to slay the large bear and to take the skin as a trophy. Callisto fled through the woods to the temple of Zeus with Arcas in hot pursuit. From the temple Zeus swept Callisto and her son up into the sky, where Callisto became the Greater Bear Ursa Major and Arcas became the Bear Driver: Boötes.

At one time, Boötes was considered by many to be a hunter – hot on the tracks of the Great Bear, accompanied by his two dogs Asterion and Chara (the "Canes Venatici"). And yet the constellation was once known as Arctophylax which means the protector of the Bear. Perhaps it was the Romans who changed his role, for they called him Venator Ursae: the Bear Hunter.

Nowadays Boötes is generally considered to be a Herdsman (as in French: Le Bouvier), as he eternally shepherds the stars around the North Pole. In fact, the brightest star in Boötes, Arcturus, is loosely translated as "Bear Guard” or "keeper of the bear". Its no surprise he’s viewed as a herdsman, since the journey around the pole represents his task of keeping the celestial beasts together.

One of Bootes’ claim to fame is the bright star Arcturus. It’s one of the oldest stars in the universe, a member of what astronomers refer to as Population II stars. These stars are have only traces of elements other than hydrogen and helium, indicating they were formed when there were few other elements available in the universe. With a magnitude of -0.1, Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the sky and a mere 36 light years distant, it is however, a star whose end is near. Once it was probably similar to our Sun and within some billion of years, our Sun will equal its size.

November in our Skies

2007-11-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

From my monthly Westchester Amateur Astronomers column:

November. The month conjures up thoughts of pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce and of course, wonderfully browned turkey (ok, I’m getting hungry now). But what does Thanksgiving have to do with Astronomy? Well, not much really (other than being thankful for that 16 inch telescope you got last year).

Well, since Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I have my mind racing thinking about that drumstick, let’s have a look at some of the “birds” in our own skies. The first one that comes to mind, is Cygnus the Swan, now located in our Northwestern skies.

Cygnus, the Swan is an ancient constellation which appeared in Ptolemy's Almagest in the 2nd century AD. It had been known for centuries before as a bird, and often called a hen in some ancient mythologies. One of the more enduring legends suggests that it was the image of the bird into which Zeus transformed himself while visiting the King of Sparta's wife, Leda. Leda duly laid an egg, from which hatched not only the twins, Castor and Pollux (only Pollux was Zeus' son, Castor being the son of the King), but also Helen of Troy.

Nearby the Swan is the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle. In westem mythologies, the prominent shape of Aquila has been identified with a bird for at least 3,500 years. An eagle, raven, vulture, hawk or falcon was variously assigned to the pattern by the Babylonians, Arabs, Persians and Hebrews. For those that don’t like turkey on Thanksgiving, an ancient Chinese text from 500 BC identifies the pattern we know as Aquila as a draught ox. In Roman mythology however, Aquila represents the eagle sent by Jupiter to collect Ganymede, a shepherd boy, who would become cup-bearer of the Gods.

Now turning to our Southern skies, we find Corvus, the Raven. In Greek mythology, a raven serves Apollo, and is sent to fetch water. The lazy bird decides to rest on it’s journey because it sees a fig tree by a pond. The crow waits while the figs ripen and then slowly eats them. He sees a water snake and decides that he can use it as an excuse for being late. After finally obtaining the water in a cup the Raven takes back the water snake as well to backup his story. According to the myth, Apollo saw through the fraud, and angrily cast the crow, cup, and snake, into the sky (the origin of this story is likely to be the juxtaposition of this constellation with those of Crater (the cup) and Hydra (the serpent), in that area of the sky.

Still in the Southern skies, Columba, the Dove, is a minor constellation just south of Lepus (the Hare). The constellation is shown as a bird with flapping wings and holding a sprig of olive in its mouth. This constellation has two possible origins. It may represent the bird the Argonauts sent out ahead of their ship to help them navigate the narrow passage at the mouth of the Black Sea. Later accounts associate it with the dove Noah released during his voyage to find land. This dove returned with an olive branch in its beak, indicating dry land had been found.

To be complete, there is also Apus (the Bird of Paradise), Pavo (the Peacock), Grus, the Crane, Phoenix and Tucana the Toucan – but I’m running out of room. But remember, the next time you’re talking about your favorite hobby, and someone says “Astronomy, it’s for the birds”, just say “yes it is – at least 10 of them”

Creating Effective Teams

2007-10-24T09:08:00.000-07:00

I was just up in Buffalo, New York at the NYLA (New York Library Association) annual conference. I was asked to speak about how to form and run Effective Teams in an organization. It went really well – I was surprised to see I had an audience of about 50-60 people for a 9:30am (on a Saturday) presentation.

I started off with a little group assignment. I had divided the place into two groups of 10 people (in hindsight I should have had 3 groups of 10, but when I started I just had enough for two groups and a bunch of observers). Here was the game:

World War III has just occurred
10 of you find yourselves to be the only people left on the earth in a bunker
If 3 of you wish to survive, 7 of you will have to leave soon.
(If all of you stay, then all will die in 2 months)

As a group, they had to determine who would leave the bunker

There were 10 roles defined, and randomly assigned to individuals: A scientist, A religious leader, A married couple, A five year old girl, An army officer, An elderly woman, A disabled person, A lawyer, and A doctor. I did this to see if a leader emerged and to watch the group dynamics to make points during the presentation. After about 15 minutes, I did my formal presentation (which is available here) – and like I said, it went quite well.

Why was I speaking at a NYLA event ? Well, among other things I’m a trustee of the Mahopac Public Library and my director, Pat Kaufman (who is one of the chairs) asked me to speak.

Who is NYLA ? The mission of the New York Library Association (NYLA) is to lead in the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning, quality of life, and equal opportunity for all New Yorkers.

Astronomy outreach

2007-10-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been doing a fair amount of astronomy outreach lately within the community, Normally, it’s a boy scout troop or a school classroom for about an hour, teaching the kids about telescopes or planets. Every once in a while I’ll commit to doing a series of astronomy lectures. It started when Edith Litt called me and asked if I would teach 6-7 classes as part of a course on astronomy for Senior citizens enrolled in something called The Collegium at Westchester Community College. Members participate in 90-minute classes that meet for six weeks. They typically enroll for up to four of the nine courses and study sessions. It was a fair amount of work, but I really enjoyed the classes and the excitement and enthusiasm of these students (my class usually had about 40-50 students)

Recently I did a similar course for the residents of the Plaza at Clover Lake – this time it was 4 sessions on general astronomy – history of astronomy, exploring the moon, understanding motions of planets and stellar lifecycles. Again, the level of interest and enthusiasm was really impressive.

Last night, I spent about 2 hours under the stars with about 60 girl scouts of various ages (6-15). We learned how to identify some of the more prominent constellations in the northern sky: The dippers, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Cygnus, Lyra, Aquila, etc. The girls really enjoyed the view of the Milky Way through the binoculars and seemed particularly interested in the mythology of the constellations (at one point they were all sitting on the ground and silently listening to me tell them the story of Perseus and Andromedia.

Keynote at Dr.Dobbs SL 2.0 summit

2007-09-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

This morning I was lucky enough to present the morning keynote at the Dr. Dobbs SL 2.0 Fall Summit. (Update: 10/9 - I found a review/description of my event here)

My talk on was on Agile and how we use it to manage the IBM Virtual Branch Office in Second Life. Things went pretty while with quite a few questions at the end of the presentation. The abstract was:

The pace of change in the Internet is fast. That's a "no-brainer" - I know that most people involved in the latest technologies understand this, the question is: How do we deal with the rapid change and quick turnaround ? It's not easy. Our users aren't going to "go away" and come back in two months when

we've finally implemented some new feature or glitzy object. Users of virtual worlds like Second Life are perhaps even more demanding; expecting an even greater rate of change.

These ever increasing expectations have placed new demands on the world of traditional Software development; forcing changes in how they develop, test and deploy new software systems. The term "Agile" refers to a mindset change in how we, as software engineers, go about our work. Agile implies an incremental approach to development that, rather than a step-by-step approach to the traditional development cycle, we do a little of everything each step of the way in an effort to become more responsive to change and the fast-paced world in which we operate.

In this presentation I will discuss what it means to be Agile and how we have adopted these methodology's as we continue to evolve and support one of Second Life Islands at IBM, the Virtual Branch Office. I'll discuss how we manage change in this fast paced world, using remote development teams that (sometimes) have little to no understanding of what Second Life is.

You can get at my presentation in either Powerpoint or PDF format at my website at
Pace University here

Your September skies

2007-08-23T07:16:00.001-07:00

As I got into my car to drive home from work tonight (around 8pm) I had to turn my lights on and I realized that it’s getting dark earlier! Woohoo! I don’t know about you, but to me, the autumn sky is the best time to get out and do some real quality star gazing. Crisp, cool evenings and the rise of the winter time constellations really gets me excited!

The planet Mars ushers in the month of September as it rises into our evening skies just around the midnight hour. The “red planet” is quite bright since it’s shining at a “healthy” magnitude +0.2 and brightening to a -0.7 by month’s end (no doubt due to the fact that it’s getting higher in our evening skies as the month progresses). Mars is currently in the constellation of Gemini making its way westward into Taurus.

While we’re talking about Taurus, you may want to think about having a look at the moon on the evening of September 3rd when it passes”over” (or occults) Messier object 45, the Pleiades star cluster. It might be interesting to watch the brighter stars of the Pleiades disappear over the course of the evening, starting with Electra, followed by Celaeno, Taygeta, Maia and finally Sterope (the prominent stars of the cluster).

Jupiter is still the “King” of the sky this month, shining at an impressive magnitude of -2.0. The planet rises in our skies around 2pm so obviously it will be well positioned in our skies as darkness falls. It will set around 11:30pm, so you’ll find it in your western or southwestern sky. This month finds Jupiter in the constellation of Scorpious, located about 5 degrees to the north of the reddish star Antares, the heart of the Scorpion. Artares is a huge star, if it were placed in the center of our solar system its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. On the evening of the 17^th (into the 18^th) look for the moon to be just opposite of Antares – about 5 degrees to the south (the same distance Jupiter is to the North of the star).

For those of you that get up early you can catch a glimpse of Saturn and Venus in the wee hours of the morning. If you look in your eastern skies around 5am, you’ll be able to see Saturn rising in the constellation of Leo (it actually rises about 4:45am). Venus is a bit higher in the sky (rising about 3:45am) and is located about 20 degrees to the Southwest of Saturn. The two planets will continue to approach each other and come within 3 degrees of each other in October.

2007-08-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Share in San Diego where I was presenting one of the five lectures on Agile programming. Several of us from IBM (Scott Ambler and Justin Gordon) are trying to help our Area leader Steve Ryder put together a Certificate program in share. The idea is that if you attend 4 (or more) sessions on a topic, you acquire a certificate, that while it may not mean much in the industry, it does show your management that you’ve taken a considerable effort to understand a given topic.

Our Sessions were:

8060 - : Scott Ambler - Agile/XP Keynote: Introduction to Agile Software Development
8061 – Matt Ganis – Introduction to Agile/XP
My slides are available at my website http://webpage.pace.edu/mganis

8063 – Justin Gordon - Agile/XP: JUnit and Test Driven Development (TDD)-Why and How in Enterprise Software (With Live Demo)

8064 – Jim Ruehlin - Agile Concepts and the RUP Agile Approach

8065 – Scott Ambler – Agile Database Techniques


In my session (8061) I talked about the drive to Agile methods and why people are
moving in that direction.  I spend quite a bit of time talking about the XP
practices and why they work together, and what some of the benefits are.

2007-08-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

Our Sessions were:

8060 - : Scott Ambler - Agile/XP Keynote: Introduction to Agile Software Development

8061 – Matt Ganis – Introduction to Agile/XP
My slides are available at my website http://webpage.pace.edu/mganis

8063 – Justin Gordon - Agile/XP: JUnit and Test Driven Development (TDD)-Why and How in Enterprise Software (With Live Demo)

8064 – Jim Ruehlin - Agile Concepts and the RUP Agile Approach

8065 – Scott Ambler – Agile Database Techniques

[http://shareew.prod.web.sba.com/displaymod/detailevent.cfm?conference_id=16&event_id=14784]

In my session (8061) I talked about the drive to Agile methods and why people are moving in that direction.  I spend quite a bit of time talking about the XP practices and why they work together, and what some of the benefits are.

Writings on Agile Software Development and Innovation within large organizations

2007-08-02T12:32:00.001-07:00

I’ve recently co-authored a few papers, and I thought I’d share the abstracts in case anyone is interested. They were published in a The Cutter Cosortium's IT Journal. I don’t think they are publically available, but I can make select copies available if someone has an interest - the quick link to them can be found here

The first was “Fostering Innovation from the “ground” up” which was co-authored with Garrett Hall from IBM. In this paper we will discuss how we at IBM.COM (an organization under IBM’s Sales and Distribution division) foster and implement new and innovative ideas. These are new features and functions that, when completed, will be deployed on our web site in such a way as to not jeopardize the highly available experience our customers currently enjoy. The article goes to say that within the ibm.com organization innovation isn’t viewed as something that “has” to be done, but rather, is viewed as a way to improve our site’s experience for the end user. In our organization, innovation is promoted in a “bottoms up” approach, where ideas are bubbled up from support staff rather than dictated or pushed “from above”. Ideas may stem from long stranding issues that were never addressed in a day-to-day process, or may be the brainchild of a developer that wants to take a different approach to a new or existing problem.

We are very interested in promoting innovative ideas that matter to a customer (as opposed to those that innovate just for innovation’s sake, or to tryout a new technology). While pure research is interesting, and has its place, our program looks to change our website’s experience (hopefully for the better) for a single customer at time; in other words: start small; prove the idea; then promote it. This means we need to act fast, implement fast and decide quickly on the future of the function. If the feedback is positive, we actively look to expand (and harden) the features to enable it to be offered to a wider audience, thus improving the overall experience for everyone. If ideas are proven to not be attractive to our customers, they are quickly removed to make room for the next idea (and to not clutter the website with ineffective functions).

Innovation needs to start at the grass root level, but with that said; the question of how to reward the innovator (or innovation team) becomes interesting. Having a strong management commitment to the process clearly helps, and that management teams needs to publically recognize the organization’s success. Simple awards in public meetings, peer recognition and community voting are just of few of the techniques that we employ and were discussed within the paper.

The second was entitled “Mixing Agile and Waterfall: Keeping the Peace” written with a member of my department, Tom Hawkins. In this paper we discuss the problems encountered when introducing an Agile approach to I/T development into an environment that has known only a structured, start to finish planned approach. Teams will likely encounter resistance, and finding themselves needing to compromise and adapt a methodological approach. We instituted control points, things we call “traffic cops”, and to found the need to depict what you are delivering in a way that proponents of the previous “waterfall” methodology will not just understand, but accept.

This article goes into some details about how we enabled our Agile teams to work with our “stakeholders” and their waterfall processes to achieve a happy co-existance.

If any of these sound interesting, you can try to get them Cutter, or if you want to talk about them, feel free to email me…….

August issue of Skywatch published

2007-07-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

The August issue of the Westchester Amateur Astronomer'ss SkyWatch was just published.

You can read about events happening in our New York skies for the month of August in my Monthly SkyAlmanac column or read about several smaller constellations (Delphinus, Vulpecula, Equuleus and Sagitta) located high in our summer skies in my Constellation Corner column.

The recent newsletter can be found here

Geocaching

2007-07-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

I just “planted” my third geocache on Friday (the 20^th) called “Sticky Rock Cache”. If you don’t know what geocaching is, it’s essentially a “high tech” version of a treasure hunt. You take a handheld GPS device, and put the coordinates (latitude and longitude) of a “treasure” in it, and it leads to a treasure (the GPS tells you how far you are from the object and in what direction you need to go). Typically they are “planted” in the nature preserves or public parks – there are strict rules about where you put them (see: http://www.geocaching.com) - but you’d be surprise to find out where people have put them.

Treasure aren’t “real” treasures, they’re more like trinkets, and the treasure chests are waterproof Tupperware, military ammo cases and sometimes those magnetic “hide-a-keys”. When you find a cache, you’re supposed to take something from the cache and leave something for the next person (but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule). I leave Mardi Gras beads, matchbox cars, little toys, etc. I’ve retrieved lots of keychain can openers, yo-yo’s, little stuffed animals – you name it, I’m sure I’ve found it.

My latest cache is a Micro cache – it’s a log-only cache, which means all you do is find it and sign the log – oh yea, typically when you find a cache there’s a log book for you to sign. I also made it a foreign coin exchange – I left an Austrian 5 Schilling and a Canadian Dollar, the idea is that you can take one of these, if you leave another coin in its place (or just add another to the cache) – to see my cache listing check out the "Sticky Rock Cache"

To see the all caches I’ve found, check out:

The Perseids are coming, the Perseids are coming

2007-07-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Since I write 2 monthly columns for the Westchester Amateur Astonomer's monthly newletter, I thought I'd include some of it here:

The legendary Perseid meteor shower peaks in early August (between the 12^th and 13^th of the month). This year’s shower is expected to display the greatest number of meteors on Sunday evening into early Monday morning (August 13) before dawn. Every year during mid-August, when the Earth passes close to the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle, it passes through the material left behind by the comet from its previous visits. This material rams into our atmosphere at approximately 37 miles per second (or about 60 kilometers per second) to create bright streaks of light in our midsummer night skies.

The meteor show should begin between 9:00 and 10:00 pm on Sunday, August 12th, when the constellation Perseus rises in the northeast. This is the time to look for Perseid Earthgrazers or meteors that approach from the horizon and skim the atmosphere overhead (sort of like a stone skipping the surface of a pond). Earthgrazers are long, slow streaks of light and tend to be more colorful than the trails that will occur later in the evening. You won’t see a lot of them; if you’re lucky, you’ll catch one or two, but it’s slow enough, they can be quite beautiful.

As the night unfolds, Perseus will climb higher into our sky and the meteor rate will increase. By about 1 am on Monday morning, August 13th, dozens of Perseids may be flitting across the sky every hour. The crescendo comes before dawn when rates could exceed a meteor a minute! (the estimate is about 60-90 per hour). Given that the New Moon occurs on August 12^th, the stage is set for a fantastic shower (assuming of course Mother Natures cooperates and keeps the rain clouds away). I'll post my observations after the event - would love to hear yours

About me

2007-07-14T06:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my Blog. I never thought I'd actually start a blog, but I thought it would fun to try and see if I could actually keep it updated. I'm sure this won't be read by many people, but let me at least intoduce myself and give you a feeling for what I do and what my interests are:

I’ve held many lead architectural and managerial roles in IBM over my 20 year career. He was hired into IBM as an MVS/JES3 system programmer in White Plains, New York in 1985 after receiving a BS degree in Computer Science from Pace University. a career changed moved me into the networking arena where I became a member of the core team responsible for building and deploying the first centrally controlled TCP/IP backbone network for IBM. Based on that work, I was involved as the chief architect of several new commercial TCP/IP based networks for IBM: primarily two commercially offered ISP backbone networks (ibm.net and attglobal.net). I was also a key architect in the development of IBM Global Network's consumer based TCP/IP offering (which was later sold and merged with AT&T’s Worldnet).

Around 1992 I was also responsible for the creation of the first IBM Corporate level firewall to the Internet - which is largely credited for exposing the general population of IBM to the power of the Internet. I’m one of the co-architects of the SOCKSv5 protocol (RFC1928), which is incorporated in almost all of the WWW browsers today as well as many TCP/IP Client applications.

Previous to that I was involved in creation and operation of the Internet infrastructure that served the Olympic Web Sites for the Atlanta, Nagano and the Sydney Olympic games. Part of the work in the Sydney Olympics led to the creation of a patent entitled: “Gathering of enriched web server activity of Cached web content” (US patent number: 7,216, 149)

Just before the Sydney Olympics, I was asked to be a representative to a newly forming organization called: iCAIR (the International Center for Advanced Internet Research) in Evanston Illinois. The iCAIR center is a joint venture of IBM, Cisco and Northwestern University. The mission of the Center is to Accelerate Leading-Edge Innovation and Enhanced Digital Global Communications through Advanced Internet Technologies, in Partnership with the International Community. The Center accomplishes that mission by undertaking projects in four key areas: advanced Internet applications, advanced middleware/metasystems, advanced infrastructure and policy.

I’m currently part of the ibm.com organization within Sales and Distribution where my responsibilies include personalization for the www.ibm.com website. I also spend a fair amount of time coaching Agile development teams, including the ibm.com corporate webmaster team.

Previously, I was part of the www.ibm.com corporate webmaster team. In that role, I was the lead architect for www.ibm.com I had the responsibility for the end-to-end architecture of IBM’s corporate portal, specializing in User Identity applications.

Outside of work, I’m also the lead architect of the International Space Station’s Amateur telescope (ISS/AT) project. The goal of this endeavor is to place to a telescope on the space station that would be used (free of charge) by any interested individual or group of individuals (worldwide) – especially schools in the range of K-12. This is a project of the Astronomical League in conjunction with NASA and Vanderbilt University.

I’m currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Astronomy at Pace University in Pleasantville New York where I teach at both the Undergraduate and Graduate level. I have a B.S. degree in Computer Science and an MBA in Information Systems from Pace University, a Master of Science degree in Astronomy from the University of Western Sydney Australia and Doctorate of Professional Studies in Computing from Pace University.

My webpage is at: http://webpage.pace.edu/mganis