He rocks.

Yes, you rock Mr. Martin (in case you read my blog, which I doubt, but just in case.)

And let me explain why.

Many VP’s passed on my last twelve years at Nike. Since I am a small time manager, most of them never even knew I existed. Some did however, and I met a few. All were incredibly smart, efficient, productive people. All had great academic degrees. All had excellent professional success and years of experience to back-it up.

But none of them rocked…

Why?
I guess it was the way they stood in the corner, surrounded by their directors, untouchables to most of us. Maybe it was the way they acted cold and remote, as if unreachable. It was their serious faces, their focus on the business, yet literally empty of human feelings. They were all excellent people, and contributed enormously to the company. But again, none rocked.

But you do rock sir.

Maybe it was the way you talked to the crowd. Maybe it is the way you cut through bureaucracy or your pragmatic approach to the business. You make me feel that we are back in 1996, when the strategy did not take 99% of our time and we actually had space to execute campaigns and talk to our customers. Maybe it’s the way you chat with everyone, no matter what their title or position, or the way you act and speak with excitement. Or the way you challenge common wisdom and leave everyone wondering what’s next.

How much difference does that make?

A ton.

To people like me, it makes a ton of a difference. I promised you I would work 12-14 hours a day after your speech. And I stand by my word. I haven’t stopped working ever since. I have been in Panama, and Colombia, and I haven’t taken a break. Next three weeks I will be in Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and I am not even complaining, I love it. Think about it, you get double productivity and a burst of company loyalty just by changing the status quo.

Many manager don’t realize how easy it is to get the troops moving. No need for fancy consultants or complicated HR programs. You can get it done by speaking face to face with employees and breaking the ice. I hated the mood before, sort of like working for some aristocratic European bank… I like it now much more I know we are again a family. It used to be Nike’s greatest strength: our company culture.

Thanks a lot Mr. Martin for being so cool. And thanks a lot for making me feel part of the company once more. You have no idea how much it matters to me and my team.

So in one of those few opportunities my job allows I was able to lure Obsidian into one of our product launches, and thus meet him in his native Medellin city, in Colombia.

For those who don’t know, Medellin has a bad reputation, but it’s probably one of the five most beautiful cities in the world to me. I love going there, I love the people and the dedication the new government is putting into making it even a nicer place to visit.

There are so many qualities to like from Obsidian that I would not know where to start. Probably what most impressed me is his extreme discipline. Obsidian draws and publishes a comic everyday, no matter what day, and hasn’t missed a date since the last three years! When I think I update my blog once a month, I feel ashamed. Not only does he pencil, scan, color and edits the comic, he even writes a nice blog on it, every day…

Obsidian updates his site with new content and makes a living through commissioned artwork from readers and fans. He has decided not to settle for a job, and works diligently to ensure his freedom. I usually tell my friends how much I hate my job and how much I hate hating what I do. Obsidian came as an inspiration of someone not willing to settle for mediocre, and willing to pay the price with enormous amounts of work to back up the claim.

Another trait which I found very interesting is Obsidian’s approach to education. As a graphic design professor at a local college, O seems a rather strict tutor! His philosophy revolves around work, lots of assignments and homework, and hours of refining artwork.

Obsidian seems happy ti sleep four hours a day, and uses a great deal of time (2 or 3 hours daily) to exercise, ride his bike and practice Kung Fu. He lives alone with his two cats in an apartment he calls himself Spartan. His schedule is built around his obligations, and wakes up at 6 a.m. to start his drawings and commissioned work.

Obsidian made me rethink my whole schedule. I travel a lot, and thus I find multiple excuses not to exercise, eat healthy, write my blog, etc. But ever since knowing him personally, I have been striving to catch-up with my favorite activities, by following a very disciplined approach to maximize usage of time and stop not focusing.

Please, take a minute and visit www.commissionedcomic.com for Obsidians impressive work.

What is very funny is the fact that I was not hanging out with friends, in the pub, or drinking, but working on what was then one of the first accounting consulting firms with a CP/M networking systems running compiled Basic accounting programs (batch processing back then…)

I started to work half-days but was immediately drawn into the mist of programming.  I would spend all day learning how to extend the power of the language, building complete new curse libraries to liven the other way bare screens of the time. I did not mind working 12 hours straight if that meant learning something new about sending ASCII codes to the printer to make the invoicing scheme better or faster, or using my first ever relational database, DATAFLEX.

But my mother was shocked. She considered that if I got paid for working 5 hours, I should not spend one minute more inside the office. She would rather have me inside the pub drinking beer, or going out with friends at night. The fight got so bad, my father wanted to go talk to the owners of the office so they would keep me away from the place after my five hours.

These are common traits of mediocre Latin America heritage. It is only now that the new generation is learning the advantages of passionate work, no matter how long the day gets. I love spending 14 hours straight working, and I loathe 2 hours of meaningless chat at a party where I hate the music, the people, and the environment. I was lucky enough to avoid giving up to my parent’s whims. Had they worked harder when they were young, they would not be in such a tight position now (they are basically retired on a minimum pension.)

Who thought my parents working over 8 hours was demonic (I find no other way to put it, it felt as bad as if my parents found me drunk)? I wonder why complete generations grew on these beliefs. The side effect is the actual state of Latin America, and only recently have we been able to break the mold and get people excited and proud about giving 100% no matter what the clock says…

I was recently looking for the second part of using Ruby On Rails for Leopard. The article was mentioned originally in YCombinator! but looking for it again a second time required that I login to the ADC member page. And that’s when I realized how ugly this website is.

Looking for the article in mention? I have no idea how to go back. If you accidentally hit the back button, you log out. Unless your browser saves in cache your login information, you have to type it all over again.

And what happened to the menu design? The home page has links poorly disguised as icons (and no, I am not so intuitive…) The ADC product icon takes you to another page where a paid connection is about a year’s salary here in Panama (and I am not sure if it gets any cheaper living in the USA). The download section has neat links organized on the side. It lacks any Ruby or Rails entry… It took me ages looking for the before mentioned article under some obscure link for Script Languages. Most of the free downloads are PDF books on Apple topics, which are basically twenty five pages explaining what a computer is, or what Java does, and then condensing all important API’s into five pages while one wonders where to go next (Google most of the time…)

I sometimes think that Apple does it on purpose to get paid subscriptions. Since I have no motivation for paying, I don’t know for sure. But it would occur to me that Apple would care about developers and design a very decent website. Maybe it’s because they developed the whole thing using WebObjects and JSF technology (okay, not JSF but at least JSP and servlets…) instead of a more friendly approach? I mean, all you do is download PDF files and some .dmg files, no need for big old Java, especially in the slow way these pages get updates… It seems to me they look the same since 2001.

Do we need good design for developers? I think my life would be easier if looking for part 2 of the Rails Using Leopard article was only a click away. I already bought a MacBook, but I might consider buying a new one even more if Apple cultivates me as a consumer. And please, not with glitter marketing (I majored in marketing…) but with cool products and even cooler service and support.

For example, there is no search box… and this is Apple’s website for developers! Even Sun has a half decent website where I learned the little I know of Java. For crying out loud, most of the cool pages I know for coding run on blog engines which are open sourced, and any of them look better than Apple’s Website.

So if anyone from Apple is listening, I will be more than happy to work on an ass-kicking, mind blowing, marketing fulled, eye catching, user friendly, and environmentally sound website for developers to get their goodies. I charge Panama rates, which are dirt cheap considering how much money you guys at Apple make. After all, the company that made DESIGN the fad word of the moment should have a compatible website…

That’s what I loved about nPost.

nPost is a company dedicated to promoting startups, with startup jobs at software and internet companies, startup interviews, and tech networking events.

The nPost site allows you to search for jobs, and has now launched a Widget much like Google AdSense. I have Google AdSense on my own blog, and I will spend the rest of the day comparing why nPost got it right (and Google got it way too square…)

First, let’s talk about design, since this is after all a blog about marketing Zen. Google has a format blue and flat, with a typical PHP look… I know, they don’t use PHP but Javascript, but it does have that square 1998 Internet look. As opposed, nPost gave me a modern, classy, web 2.0 design that really goes well with my own website. It looks way too cool compared to AdSense. I feel more compelled to click on nPost than Google, even if it’s only the first impression (and as you know, there is no second chance to make a first impression!)

Second, the way you set-up ads in nPost is way too simple. Just make your ad with a few mouse clicks (step 1), get a password (step 2), and fill your information (step 3), and done! The application takes you right to your ads where you can see the code for each ad you create and a little menu bar on top gives you editing, deletion, and your earnings up-to-date.

And this is really smart. It took me a long time to set-up my AdSense widgets, compared to less than 10 minutes it took to install the nPost widgets in my blog and index page in my website. That includes playing with the design. When I installed AdSense, I never got ads until some half an hour later, but nPost delivered them in seconds. That makes me feel good!

I took sometime this evening and looked through the nPost website, and I loved what I saw. Looking for jobs was a pleasure, as everything is well kept and organized in a way you never get lost. Some of the ads looked incredibly tempting, but all the job openings I saw were USA related (no thanks, I am one of those proud Latinos who would rather relocate within Latin America!)

Do I have any caveats? Well, a minor one. I wish ad formats could adapt a little more to my particular CSS design. I have a left column, which is 250 pixels wide, and the two available choices for the widget were a too thin for my taste. I am not sure if there is a way around this, but if there is, nPost will probably solve it before AdSense.

To set-up your own nPost widget, just click here and you will be done in no time. Or if you prefer, visit the website at http://www.npost.com.

Check out nPost, and if you are looking for a job, don’t think twice and send your resume to some of the great start-up and technology companies advertised there. Because making the next marketing break-through beats making PPT slides all day!

The project is the result of the collaboration of Adam Wiggins, James Lindenbaum, and Orion Henry. The three have made an incredible contribution to the Rails world by making it dead simple to deploy an application.

I signed up for a free account and got mine the next day. The control panel makes creating a project a snap, and you can quickly type in the details of your particular one. I had been working on my application for some time, so I had my source code handy. The only thing you need to do is tar the source code and import the zipped file into Heroku, like so:

Example: rm -rf myapp/{log,tmp}; tar czf myapp.tar.gz myapp/

That’s all.

Once you upload your code, Heroku does its thing, like change the database configuration file (they run on Postgres). After I was done uploading, a button called my attention and prompted me for running my migrations. I did, in the Ruby/Rails console provided, and a minute later I could test my application live.

The control panel gives you a tree view of your application structure, and you can use the on-line editor to make changes to the code. I have seen in the forums some people complain about the editor, but I think it’s great to make changes on the fly or if you happen to be away from your development box.

Since Heroku is still in beta stage, and the trio hasn’t yet worked on the payment methods, I can’t say how well the servers scale or perform. My application is destined to a small market, so I will never get close to even stressing the server. But I admit everything it’s pretty fast so far, specially given my lack of programming skills. I had a URL that I purchased through Yahoo! Small Business. I redirected the URL to Heroku’s own address and that worked wonders for me. Heroku is now giving sanctum quotas, which are faster bandwidth and more performance for people who need to go online now. I got mine pretty fast, but did not need to change CNAME by creating a sub-domain to use my own URL, which is the way Heroku prefers since it was easier to just redirect.

I hope the site continues to award free plans to those willing to test. The free quota is of 10 megabytes of space, and at the moment I don’t see a specific quota of bandwidth, but you don’t get always top performance (hey, it’s free!) I imagine for free development, in the near future there might be some limits, but I was very happy with the way the whole site performs so far.

I can’t stress again how easy it is to deploy. Just add DNS information and select from development to production status. That’s it! No need to worry about SVN, Capistrano, or other gems. Just tar the whole thing and upload it. So simple even I got it right!

Adam, James and Orion: thanks for the bottom of my heart. Free beer party if you are ever in Panama. You made a whole bunch of not so savvy Rails developer happy. But for what I see in the forums, there’s a whole bunch of very savvy developers using the project, so the impact might be even bigger than originally thought.

Check it Heroku and deploy the easy way!

I recently got a brand new MacBook Pro. I want to thank my boss Max for it and my buddy Glenn, Panama’s top Apple guy for giving me the best price available for my new Mac. It is such an incredible piece of machine I can not describe how cool it is.

But for such a cool design, I started to notice it got pretty hot, specially if working in places with no or little air conditioning systems. It affected me in my Bogota hotel, where I had the A/C system off since it was kind of chilly outside. But the temperature widget I had installed flashed 62 degrees Celsius and I started to worry abut the issue. I like my laptops to run as cold as possible. I know the cooler the system, the better the life span and performance.

While goggling around for solutions, I came across many in which some individuals actually reapplied the thermal grease used to ensure the proper dissipation of heat. Some say it voids your warranty, but I think it is a good advice given to people who are used to tinkering with hardware, and who are close enough to the best thermal grease money can buy. Since my Mac was getting hot on Sunday in downtown Bogota, I was as far away from the solution as ever.

After some research and a couple of misses, I downloaded and installed Hendrik Holtmann’s smcFanControl 2.1. It is a great program with GPL license that allows you to change the rate of your fan. For example, instead of letting my fan kick in at Mac’s standard temperature to start cooling the system at 2,000 RPM, I decided to have mine run all the time at 4,000 RPM. The program loads itself on start-up and is visible in the top menu bar.

In a properly cooled room, my average temperature of 54 degrees Celsius dropped to 42 degrees Celsius, and in some occasions to 38 degrees. It was late at night in Bogota and I opened my window (I was staying at the Habitel hotel, a great place to go!) It was really chilly, and the combination of fan and cold dropped the temperature way down.

In an improperly cooled room, I would have highs of 62 degrees Celsius, and at times even 70 degrees Celsius. This have dropped to around 48 degrees with some peaks at 52 degrees, but much less than the average stated above.

My only reserve is the fact that the fan spinning faster than the standard could ruin it. But I am willing to bet a cooler system is preferable to a well rested fan when the whole motherboard fries itself.

My friend Hendrik, congratulations for such a fine tool! Although I can not donate anything on my meager Panama salary, if you are ever on the Ithmus, I will buy you dinner or lunch!

Download the program from Hendrk’s website at http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/index.html

Panama had six past semesters of unprecedented growth. This year GDP will surely be above 7%, with financial services, tourism, telecommunications and construction leading the way. However, the economic growth and market liquidity brought along inflation, and the first ones to feel it were the lower classes.

Let me give some clear examples.

I used to make a supermarket buy every week. If I wanted to save money, I would go low and buy basic staple food (rice and beans…) I would buy cheap local ice cream and maybe local cookies. I could probably do it all within the 25 to 35 dollar range. When things got better, I started buying wine from Chile and Hagen Daze ice cream and I would spend around 80 dollars on a supermarket. But I did not complaint since I would enjoy my Spain paella and Greek olive oil.

Nowadays I buy a modest supermarket for 70 dollars. My expensive supermarket visit goes well over a hundred dollars. If you compare, the rich people are spending 20% more, from 80 to 100. But the poor people went from 35 to 70. That’s a 100% increment, which wasn’t met in salary increases.

The same goes for cars. In 1998 I bought a Daewoo Racer for 7,900 dollars. It was a great car and I loved it. The day I sold it I cried, and I would by a Daewoo anyday since I had two and they never broke down.

Ten years later, I can’t find a brand new car for less than 13,000 dollars. That’s around a 90% increment for the lower classes. Of course, the new BMW series 3 is around 35,000 dollars; it actually went down in price! So the young executive gets a saving cut, but the lower class worker gets a hefty increment he or she might not pay.

The last exhibit is Panama’s department stores. The ones with fancy names like “Madness” or “The Crazy Goose”. In the old day, a place like “The Cost” would have cheap beds for 89 dollars. It was fine. I planed my first home with a 500-dollar budget, which is not much but it did fine. I did not buy fancy stuff, but I got a bed, a fridge, an oven, etc.

Nowadays a place like “Conway” has elite furniture from India at two thousand dollars or more price tag. Even the cheaper furniture from China is getting a little to steep for the common worker.

No wonder the SUNTRAC, Panama’s construction union, went on strike. I can understand the predicament of poor people, yet I think closing down venues is not the answer.

Sadly for the average Panama person, the answer is meeting the new benchmark with more work and more savings. The era of spending it all and wasting it all in parties (I love Panama, but even Panamanians will agree to this) will be over soon. Those who do not step up to the challenge will be left behind.

What I fear is that discomfort among popular sectors will push fascism. Panama is notoriously known for its hate of the left. Popular sectors will gladly search for answers in the right wing fascist parties (such as the Arnulfismo, since Arnulfo Arias studied in Germany and was an eloquent believer of the German Miracle of 1936). The first wave of xenophobia against the Colombian immigrants is beginning to gain crescendo.

The ending of the golden era of affordable material items is over. Sadly the next era might be one of polarization where one sector of society grows ever more wealthy while another is weighed down by its own lack of education, drive and desire to evolve.

The Modigliani-Miller Theorems concern decisions about aspects of the accumulated savings stock. The basic model was formulated in Modigliani’s and Miller’s essay, “The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance” and “The Theory of Investment” (1958). Two other important essays followed in 1963 and 1966. Using this basic model, Miller and Modigliani derived two so-called invariance theorems, now known as the MM theorems. As Peter Bernstein asserts, “You have only to mention these letters to finance people, and they know what you mean.”

The Model of Portfolio Choice and the Capital Asset Pricing Model focus on financial investors, while Merton Miller, initially in collaboration with Franco Modigliani, established a theory for the capital market relationship between the capital asset structure and dividend policy of production firms and firms’ market value and costs of capital.

The main message of the MM theorems is as follows: a firm’s value is unrelated to its dividend policy, and policy is an unreliable guide for stock selection. The MM theorems have become comparative norm for theoretical and empirical analyses in corporate finance. Merton Miller, who died in 2001, is the researcher who has dominated these analyses during the last two decades. He has made a unique contribution to modern theory of corporate finance.

In the latest particular case of a college professor at a graduate course, the assignments revolved around establishing fictitious cases where the students had to resolve the MM theorem using given assumptions of the likely outcome of different investment, their expected pay-offs, and the cost of a fixed pay-off with insurance. This is an exercise that involves basic non-linear programming, and most problems are also solved using simple matrix multiplication.

The problem begins when the professor makes the assignment tedious, by making most of the numbers variables. When I saw the problems I recognized an equation easily solved with substitution. The problem was all of them gave me negative solutions, and negative outcome solutions in the system of equations meant the solution had no mathematical solution within the positive real numbers, so it could not be solved.

Now, I was puzzled. I did not study mathematics, but a majored in finances and have resolved more complicated problems using complex non-linear programming in Python and Java. So I was either having a very unlucky day, I had sudden amnesia, or all the problems indeed gave solutions outside the expected positive real number realm.

The student in question returned to class with an empty solution assignment, frustrated, and I was left to ponder why it had happened. No matter how hard I searched the Internet I could not find a solution to these problems.

It turned out the professor had indeed made all the problems unsolvable, and the rest of the class was spent making assumptions as to what the finance teams would have done in real life.

Is it me or this seems the most idiotic class in the world? I already have a big enough problem in Panama, where colleges graduate MBA’s who are hardly fit to manage a hot dog stand, let alone a more complex business. Why on earth would the professor spend so much time teaching problems without a solution? I could understand explaining one or twice of these in class so students would know what to expect in real life, but the whole class teaching unsolvable equations? I would think explaining non-linear programming to solve systems of equations is a much better topic. Or even explaining how to correctly rate given probability rates using statistics is also a valuable choice. But I fail to understand why a professor would show off his (lack of) knowledge of the matter with the poor selection of assignments.

I tend to find fault with the deans of these colleges, who barely look at the curriculum of their professors, and at the professors, who confuse a pile of papers stacked together from different sources with real college course material that coherently address a subject. Our colleges are full of said individuals, to whom form is more important than content, and who are more interested in using a suit while lecturing than the innate content of the lecture.

Mediocre professors produce a constant batch of mediocre students who later become mediocre businessmen and women. As the value of a college degree lessens every day, colleges will resort to softening doctorate programs as students are desperate to obtain another degree to make a difference in their resumes. Colleges will respond with doctorate programs of inadequate quality, but easy enough to keep the college income high and the students from dropping out. When money and not quality of education dictates the standards of society, the result is a mass of poorly prepared individuals who will surely fail when the benchmarks of market dynamics became unachievable to the ignorant and uneducated.

Sadly we might not have the students to blame, but the institutions and educators who were in the first place also ill-prepare to teach.