Ever since I was young, I have had a passion for entrepreneurship.

My dad launched his own company. My grandfather and his brother ran a very successful small business. I guess you could say that entrepreneurship is in my blood.

While my long term goal has always been to one day launch my own business, I even view my time as a W2 employee through an entrepreneurial lens - I’ve been intentional about seeking out opportunities to work with the brightest entrepreneurs in startup and growth companies. I invest my knowledge, skills and abilities in startups and have passed up jobs at much larger companies multiple times because my heart and my passion is for entrepreneurship.

Recently, I received an offer from Volusion to come on board in the newly created role of Chief Customer Officer. In many ways, I see in Volusion what I see in Rackspace, or what I saw in the early days of Kinko’s - an incredibly smart team, an exceptional product, an amazing customer base, and the sheer unbridled passion that can only come from within an entrepreneurial company.

After much consideration, I decided to say yes. This was a very difficult decision to make as I truly love Rackspace, and still wake up every day excited to come to work. Rackers are amazing people, and Rackspace is well on its way to becoming one of the world’s greatest service companies. And it’s because of this that I knew that saying yes to Volusion was the right thing to do - the opportunity to build a customer-centric culture at such an early stage of such a promising young company was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I am excited to join the team at Volusion, and look forward to building a customer-centric culture that delights and engages customers. I start in March, and I can’t wait!

Yesterday I brought home a new piece of percussion equipment.

Now, for those of you keeping score at home (i.e. my wife), it’s not as if I was particularly lacking for percussion instruments before. In fact, some people would say that I have too much percussion equipment (again, that would be my wife saying that.)

I already have a pretty well stocked bag of tricks - congas, bongos, timbales, djembes and more. I also have a Roland HandSonic V-Percussion Controller, which synthesizes hundreds of sounds in a remarkably accurate fashion.

But, as can happen, I was hit by the urge to buy a Cajon. So I did.

If you are not familiar with a Cajon, here is a picture of mine:

As you can see, the Cajon is essentially a box. In fact, cajon means ‘crate’ or ‘box’. A thin piece of plywood is attached to the front of the box, and on the inside there are a series of wires to create a timbre effect.

You play the Cajon by sitting on top of it, tilting it slightly, and striking the front of it. You can vary the sound based on where you strike the drum (center for bass, top for mids, very top for cracking highs). You can also perform muting effects with your feet.

Because you sit on the Cajon, it makes it a very easy to integrate into your percussion setup - you simply swap out your stool for your Cajon! The Cajon has a unique sound, found often in Flamenco music, as well as Peruvian and Afro-Cuban styles. More recently, the Cajon is becoming the go-to drum for rock, pop and country musicians doing “unplugged” gigs. This is because a Cajon can be played in a way that closely mimics the sound of a conventional drum set, meaning that you do not have to significantly alter the feel of the song.

After trying several models, I opted for the Latin Percussion Mario Cortes Signature Cajon. Of all of the models that I tried, it had the best all around sound. I really am impressed with the range of sound from this drum - it has very low lows and a nice snapping high. The drum projects quite well - so much so that my wife asked me if it was mic’ed (it wasn’t).

Well, that’s all for now. I’ve got drums to play!

You can read my official LinuxWorld recap over at the Rackspace blog. Consider this post the “cutting room floor” - things that wouldn’t have made sense to post on the Rackspace blog. Enjoy!

• Are tech conferences dying? Attendance this year is noticeably lower than previous years. In fact, attendance over the past 5 years seems to be at an extremely downward angle, leading me to believe that the decline in attendance has less to do with the current economy, and more to do with some other factor. You could also see the scaling down of the expo floor. Companies that used to have massive booths now have relatively modest setups.
• Possibly related to the item above (and possibly the cause of it), the number of marquee names appearing at the conference has taken a drastic turn downwards. A few years back, the conference lineup read like a veritable “who’s who” of the open-source community. This year, the only big names that are appearing seem to be localized to the Golden Penguin trivia conference, moderated by Jeremy Allison of Samba.
• The death of conference shwag is very real. Years ago, you needed to buy a second suitcase just to transport all of the shirts, nerf balls, pens, and other marketing items. This year, the trend is split two ways. The first is the whole “attend our 30 minute sales pitch, and you’ll get a shirt after.” I personally hate this approach - listen, I don’t care about your HBA cards that much. The second trend is giving away a bigger prize via a contest or raffle. I personally like the contest approach - there was a “Open Source Idol” dance competition, a make-your-own Dilbert comic contest (more on that later), a mechanical bull, and of course, the Rackspace break-fix competition.
• Dice.com was sponsoring a make your own Dilbert cartoon contest. Essentially, you came up with a punchline, chose one of three backgrounds, and were green-screened into the comic saying your punchline. This was actually pretty tricky, because it is hard to deliver a punchline in a single speech-bubble without any setup. I spent a few minutes coming up with mine, which ended up as one of the winners. I’ll post the comic when I get back home, because it’s hard to explain the punchline without seeing the visuals. My prize was a copy of Scott Adam’s latest book, signed by the author with a hand-drawn sketch of Dogbert inside. Pretty cool.
• There are a TON of hardware vendors here, most of whom are selling fairly mundane items like Host Bus Adapters and Raid Controllers. Not surprisingly, most of these booths look like a ghost-town. Wrong audience.
• Speaking of wrong audience … the New York Times has a booth here for some befuddling reason. It’s actually a bit of an anachronism - I heard multiple people responding to their sales pitch with, “Wait, you want me to pay for news? Let me tell you about this thing called the internet …”
• Lots of vendors seemed very, very interested in talking to me when they heard I was from Rackspace. I won’t name names, but at one booth, two sales people and a sales engineer were asking me if I could get them jobs!
• The keynotes really illustrate how much attendance is down. You used to have to line up 20 minutes ahead of time to get a decent seat in a keynote. Now they are being held in rooms half the size, with the entire back half roped off. I strolled in to one keynote right before it started, and managed to get a seat front and center with no one sitting within three seats on either side of me.
• Attendance in the sessions is equally sparse. Honestly, I think that the fact that there are ten different tracks at this conference is a bad idea with attendance down so much compared to previous years. There are more tracks now than in the hey-day of LinuxWorld, even though attendance seems to have decreased dramatically.
• I’m not just saying this because I work with him - I really enjoyed John Engates‘ presentation. It was really useful stuff, and the audience really seemed to be engaged. I saw a lot of people scribbling notes on everything he said.
• The WiFi at this conference is being provided by Xirrus, whose tagline is “High Performance WiFi”. I’m finding it relatively hit or miss. 10 minutes ago, I was getting ping time to Google in the 1000 ms range. Now, I’m seeing 50 ms pings. When it’s working, it flies, but when it isn’t, I’m getting better speeds using my BlackBerry as a modem over Sprint’s network.

I should have some pictures loaded to my Flickr account in the next couple days. In them, you can definitely see the difference in attendance between this year, and just a couple years back.

Of the many bulk email lists that arrive in my inbox each day, one of my new favorites is Help A Reporter Out, run by Peter Shankman. It’s an great list not just because of its usefulness, but also because of Peter’s witty introductions.

I was struck the other day when Peter wrote about a topic close to my heart - and close to my waist. The BlackBerry.

Everyone says that BlackBerrys are the perfect thing for people with ADD. I realize that it’s the opposite. Killing 30 minutes before a meeting, I email a friend who works at Scholastic, because I’m close to her building. “Hey, a block away. Got time for coffee?” I hit send. Blackberry then takes like, 10 minutes to do a pull-check on email, when I get her response, “sure, sounds good!” It’s been TEN MINUTES. I have NO IDEA what sounds good - I’ve walked half a mile and am probably shopping or petting a Poodle or something.

As someone who normally has 1,000,000 things going through my head at any given moment, the BlackBerry is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it allows me to instantly gather data and reach out to the people who are relevant to whatever path my brain is taking at the moment. And a curse because having access to so much information can become a major distraction.

I’ve carried some form of mobile email device for the last decade or so. (Mostly BlackBerrys, with an occasional Treo or Windows Mobile device thrown in. I suppose that one day I will join the cool kids and get an iPhone.) During this period, I’ve picked up a couple of tricks that help keep the information overload to a manageable level. I have an incredibly strict filtering system that results in less than 1% of my email actually making it to the BlackBerry. I use different profiles for different times of the day, so that I never get woken up unless it is an actual emergency. And, most recently, I’ve picked up some of the tricks from Mark Hurst’s book “Bit Literacy“.

Mark is one of the founders of Creative Good, a customer experience consultancy in New York. Mark also runs the GEL conferences, goodexperience.com, and the Creative Good Councils (to which I currently belong.)

The book is all about letting the various “bits” go. That starts with using the OEM (Open, engage, move) method at least once a day to reset your inbox to zero. This deceptively simple step significantly reduced the number of open loops I have going on at any one time, helping to avoid “sure, sounds good” incidents like Peter describes.

Another topic that this books covers is narrowing down your media streams. For me, that meant using tools like techmeme, feedburner and friendfeed to aggregate my inputs. It also meant unsubscribing from about 100 “industry newsletters” that I never read, and only keeping the good ones (like HARO and Good Experience.)

And finally, the book helped me learn to be ok with using my inbox as an inbox, and not a to-do list or rolodex.

I’m curious - what tricks does everyone else use to organize the bits in your life?