MoogFest day 4 and Wrap up

Another year another Moogfest in Durham, NC.  As the conference wrapped up I was able to look back and discover a problem with some of the sessions.  The Moogfest team had a mobile app that allowed me to setup my schedule and plan out each day; one thing I did was print out a copy of the schedule to make sure I could deal with the limited amount of time between sessions.  The print function would add a bunch of VIP only sessions.  Well, when I printed out my plan on the 13th, the app included a bunch of cool things, from LAST YEAR!  This App mistake really messed up the expectations as an attendee. I provided feedback to the team, and hopefully they will “Fix” the app for next year.

I went to a few cool sessions on Sunday including a technical overview of circuit design by one of the engineers at Moog.  Understanding the math behind the Moog 923 really was interesting and educational.  I tend to use MoogFest as one of my “education-vacations”.  I really enjoy learning and taking advantage of technical adjacencies in my life and career.  MoogFest provides this to me.

The second session was a product pitch, show casing a new Eurorack component.  I like these sessions as the guy basically spent 45 minutes making music while talking about how the system worked.

I ended Moogfest watching a movie at the Carolina Theater about Ralph Steadman – the artist who worked closely with Hunter S. Thompson on most of this work.  Very cool and educational.

Overall, another good year at Moogfest, but was it great?  Looking back, I’d say no, the musical selections were fun and enjoyable, but no real headliner.  The technical sessions were fun and educational, but nothing that really blew me away.  Will I go next year?  That’s the big question.  I really wish that the team over at Moogfest would give out more information about what is going to happen next year.  They have already sent a note about getting festival tickets for next year.  Given how little the music festival had any Major headliners, I did not take advantage of the offer.  I will have to think about it when they do “early bird” tickets in Dec.

MoogFest Day 3 – conversations and music

In college I got a degree in journalism, and even before college I was a big 1st amendment supporter. The reason it is the first amendment was to make sure that we have a set of checks and balances that keep our government in check. Today Chelsea Manning gave a keynote event at Moogfest. Unlike most conferences where a Keynote is a speech, here it is a conversation.

Sitting on the stage at the Carolina Theater Chelsea Manning talked about how music empowered her and continues to help in dealing with life as a trans individual.

After the presentation, I went and checked out Michael Stipe’s second video installation, Thibault Dance. Last year Michael debuted “Jeremy Dance” and this was the part of the same series.

After looking at the installation, I went to hear a conversation with Michael Stipe describing the installation along with an upcoming book called “Volume 1”. The cool part of the Dance installations, is how he made them. He would play a 120BPM song, and let the dancer dance. After which he would actually compose a score to go with it. So what you are seeing is a Dance that is interpreted in music, instead of the other way around. The book was cool – a bunch of pictures taken over the years. Seeing some of the behind the scenes of Athens was cool.

But the fun part of the http://g.co/magenta/demos day was the session by Cathy and Adam from google going thru the Magenta projects on using MI for creating music.

You can check out a bunch demos over here: Demos at g.co/magenta/demos

MoogFest day 2 – amazing stories and music

While some of the sessions I had signed up for had disappeared, I was able to hit a few really great sessions. The first was Madame Gandhi (not her real name but the name of her music project). She shared a lot of her musical influences and then showed how she builds up a song, and ultimately then infuses her political speeches into them. Her energy and passion were highly infective. And her music rocked. I picked up her EP voices and it became my jam for walking around.

I then got a chance to see the team of librarians from North Carolina State University, that manage their maker space. I tried to convert my GamesAtWork.BIZ logo to a key chain design. Using a device I printed a dog tag, but it didn’t turn out very good.

It ended up looking like a twisted map of Alaska!

And finally heard a discussion from a musician named Richard Devine, and his music had a lot of Depeche Mode – Remix sounds in it. The “talk” was a 45 minute jam session.. very cool

The rest of the day was listening to artists, and the most amazing was Armin Ra.. who played the theremin.. Pretty amazing stuff!

Moogfest 2018 – Day 1 Review

Well, Moogfest Day 1 is over, and looking back, I had a good time, but it seems that things are no where as organized as the last two years.

Having set up sessions at a major conference before, I understand the complexity of trying to manage sessions, attendees, speakers, etc. And we are you are dealing with a spread out session like MoogFest I bet the issues are compounded. Having said that, the one thing you need to be able to do is communicate. Let your attendees know when sessions cancel or get moved.

I had finished organizing my calendar on the 13th, and the conference started on the 17th. imaging my surprise when half of the things I had planned on day one were no longer valid. Events are cancelled, performers are not here, and sessions have moved. I’ve been walking all over downtown Durham only to find that the things are no longer happening.

I heard two musical acts, one – Sister, Brother – was a the Pinhook. A small bar, that has the vibe of the type of place I my band in college would play at. That is not a bad thing. I also got to see a live scoring of the German silent film “The cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, at the Armory done by Suzanne Ciani. Very cool session.

I was able to go to one presentation, “How to build your own Synth for fun (if not for Profit”, by one of the Moog Engineers. It was interesting and informative.

Today’s big event, the “conversation” with Michael Stipe appears to be cancelled, which is a bit frustrating. As he was the biggest name for this year’s show. I also spent some time looking at my original scheduled (5 printed pages), and it is now not even 2 full pages. I am wondering if there will be a Moogfest 2019.

MoogFest 2018 Starts Today

I am excited to be at MoogFest 2018 for the third year. This year the the artist line up includes both returning acts from last year, and new acts that I am not familiar with. Additionally the CERN team from last year is back and there’s a session on Saturday to allow a group of people to work with some of the data from the LHC. I am on the wait list for that one, but hope to make it in. Will be exciting. More posts and tweets to come as the days unfold. Check out my Twitter feed at <a href=”https://twitter.com/michaelrowe01″>@michaelrowe01</A>.

Is Agile all that it’s cracked up to be?

I believe that one of the biggest fallacies in the corporate world today is that Agile is the way to go for all problems. The mantra goes something like this:

  • There are examples of great startups that got to be huge because they were agile
    • They started down one path, and kept pivoting until they made it big
  • As a giant mega company, we need to get bigger
    • So we should constantly pivot, to address market changes
  • If we do that, we can be successful like those startups we’ve read about

The believe that companies need to react to changing marketing conditions, is not the problem. The problem is that we believe that because some small subset of startups were able to be successful because they were agile. And as along as big corporations are agile they too can be super successful too.

Let’s break this down:

First, the number of agile startups that fail every year, is orders of magnitude larger than the few that succeed. So we must assume that there are other issues that are causing their failure (or causing the successful ones not to fail).

Second, markets change, and with those changes some companies (both large and small) will fail. Others will struggle to deal with the innovator’s dilemma, transitioning to new markets, business models, or technologies, while keeping their existing customer base engaged and satisfied to help fuel that transition.

Third, companies that have a strong and clear strategy (other than just making money), are better able to address those market changes. If we go back to the innovators dilemma, the difference between a Transportation company and a buggy whip manufacture becomes very important when dealing with market changes. Think of how Uber, Amazon, and Apple have all dealt with market changes, and what they believe their strategy is. Each of them has done a great job navigating transitions over time.

Apple’s Education Event

Teacher’s have one of the hardest jobs in America… I should know, I was hell on my teachers growing up. Just ask some of my favorite teachers – Ms. Johnson, Ms. Stansescu, and Mrs. Schwartz. But today, Apple is trying to make their job easier, with technology. While I am a fan of what Apple has been doing with the iPad (I am using it right now to write this blog), I wish today’s event would have included a large donation by Apple to help Cities, Counties, and States help increase teacher pay.

Most schools are fighting to keep their best teachers, and while new tools like updated iPads, Class Management Software, and virtual badges all sound great from a marketing perspective, the biggest thing we could all do for teachers is lobby our local legislators to increase their pay. When I hear about teachers taking their sub-par pay and using parts of it to pay for pencils and paper so that students from poor families can take notes in class, there is something wrong with the system.

When I hear people complaining that they don’t have kids, so why should their property taxes go up so that schools have funding for STEAM programs, it makes me cringe. We’ve become very short sighted. We’ve lost the sense of community and shared responsibility that has made our education systems one of the best in the world (and I believe it is why now we are lagging). Moving funds from public schools to charters and private school vouchers continues to exacerbate this problem. (Yes for an individual family it may make total sense, but from a societal perspective it encourages a further bifurcation of those haves and have-nots).

If Apple can show some direct causation (not just correlation) of iPads and Courseware to increased teacher retention, improved test scores, and an increase in life long learning, then perhaps this would be a great offering. I am sure direct causation is nearly impossible to show, so how about take the profits from the new iPad sales for the next 5 years, and use it to directly influence out legislators to increase education spending (not on technology, but directly) on teachers and students in PUBLIC schools.

So what was announced:

  • Upgraded and low price iPad 9.7inch – $299 (32gb) – And yes it supports the pencil!
  • New iWork with major collaboration features
  • 200GB of storage for iCloud accounts for teachers and students
  • upcoming Classroom software for Mac’s
  • better iPad management for students.. (any student can use any iPad, and it provisions in about 1minute – this is cool – would be great for a family use case too!!)
  • Pages now can be used to created iBooks – (I will test this out)
  • Clips and GarageBand have student friendly features

I am sure there is more… If you’ve not watched it – go check out the keynote available on Apple’s Special Event’s podcast feed.

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And one more thing (not announced on stage) you can now pay extra and get the cool space grey apple keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad

Wasted Time version 7.2

After a brief testing period, I have submitted a new version of Wasted Time today to the Apple App Store. This version completely removes Facebook Integration. I have done so, after looking at the data that Facebook provided in the brief period that version 7.1.1 was in the store. I have decided not to feed the monster. Than you for your support in all these years of playing with this app.

Understanding Mental Models

I had a great discussion with my co-host on GamesAtWork.Biz Michael Martine the other day over lunch, on why I am going to turn off Facebook. While I have been pretty vocal over the years with friends and acquaintances on why I won’t use Android (you are the product), I have always rationalized using Facebook as it allows me to promote things I am doing (this blog, my podcast, the shows I perform in, and cool things going on at work). And while the value of this promotion may be suspect (we’ve been losing listeners on our podcast for years), the idea that it was helpful was keeping this going.

It has long been said that when you use a free service, you (or your data) are the product. This has long been true of Facebook. Facebook’s business model is all about leveraging the value of your freely shared data, to sell insights to advertisers. As a consumer, the value should be better targeted ads. An event happened a few years back which has made me very aggressive in the active sharing of this information, and it is one of the reasons that I have for some time gone in once a month or week and cleared any insights from the data Facebook thinks it has from me (if you’ve not done this … I highly recommend going to https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences to see all the things Facebook knows). Every week this data grows and grows, with more “insights” about you, your preferences, your market segmentation, etc.

I recently did a fully Facebook data download (thank you GDPR!) and took a look what FB still had. AS you see in the previous post the data is still being captured, and my guess is used by Facebook, even though I had turned on the highest level of “privacy”. I believe this will continue to happen, as Facebook’s business model is to sell insights about me. This is the same reason why I no longer use Google as my default search engine. I am NOT a product, and as such, my mental model is – I want control of my data, and I want your business model not to conflict with my data privacy. In a world where more and more of what we do, and who we are, is captured in online systems, why should I support those who are not aligned with my privacy.

You may ask, why don’t I just restrict my usage of Facebook? Well, the value of Facebook is the network model it builds. It’s not just my data, but all the data about my data that is generated by Friends and Friends of Friends. So even if I refuse to allow people to tag me in pictures, it doesn’t stop others from trying. Facebook will let me know that they are trying to do so, and that data point is now in the network. Even the fact that I looked at the picture to say “no” is another piece of valuable information. At a certain point, the system can ignore my “no” flags, as 100’s of other data points say – Yes – that’s Michael. Think about it, you are not in control of your data. Just look how many times you see “Michael” is with “Someone”, based on “Someone” deciding to post that they are out and about.