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!

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I’ve broken the social media sites that I use into these categories:

Publish Regularly
This is generally where I create new content.

• The Rackspace Blog: This is where I blog about work related things.
• Twitter: My microblogging platform of choice. Without a doubt the most frequently updated (usually several times a day).
• Flickr: Where I post my photos
• DaveMitz.com: My personal blog. Not updated as much as it should be.
• LinkedIn: Professional social networking site.

Publish Occasionally
These are the sites where I publish content from time to time.

• del.icio.us: Bookmark sharing site.
• SlideShare: For sharing presentations
• Last.FM: What I’m listening to.

Aggregate
I use Profilactic to aggregate all of the above into a single stream, which is then piped to …

Display Content
These sites display the content generated above. I rarely create new content for these sites (with one exception).

• Facebook: I know this is supposed to be “the” social network, but honestly, I use it just to connect to people and then as a display mechanism for all of the other places that I generate content.
• Tumblr: Used purely to display content.
• FriendFeed: Used to display, aggregate and comment. I rarely publish on FriendFeed, but often use it as my primary feed reader.
• DaveMitz.com: This one fits in two categories - I publish data here, but I also use the “My Lifestream” and “Where to Find Me Online” sections as major aggregation and display points.

So, there you go … it seems like everyone has a different flow of social media content, and this one is mine. Feel free to send me a friend request on any of the networks I listed above. I almost always accept.

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!

• 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.

Today it became apparent that the normal checkout time of noon wasn’t going to work - I needed to extend the checkout to 1:00. No big deal, right? I’ve done this a couple of times before, and it’s never been an issue.

I went to the front desk and politely asked if it would be possible to extend my checkout time by an hour. The response I received back has been running through my head ever since.

“As a one time courtesy, I’m going to extend your checkout time.”

Now, on the surface, it looks like this response is perfectly reasonable. I asked for something, and they said yes. However, when it comes to customer service, phrasing makes a huge difference.

“As a one time courtesy …” communicates to the customer that you are going out of your way to help them, and you’d better not ask again. I’d expect this sort of response if I was asking for my room to be comped. I would not expect it when I am asking for a one hour checkout extension in a hotel that is only 70% full.

If I ask for a late checkout in two months, will I get denied? Does Starwood keep a database somewhere of favors that I owe them?

(Obligatory Godfather reference): “I will extend you this courtesy of a late checkout on this, the day of my daughters wedding. One day, I may require a favor from you.”

So, how could the same message be communicated in a way that is more customer-friendly?

“No problem! I’ve gone ahead and changed your checkout time. It’s usually noon, but you can checkout at 1.”

It communicates the same information, but in a way that sounds less like the DMV, and more like a customer-centric hospitality business.

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?

1. Our dog, Jack, stays outside during the day because otherwise he would destroy our house.
2. Jack was freaking out at the armadillo
3. The armadillo was too scared to move because there was a 70 pound labrador barking at it
4. The armadillo was too far under the deck for me to get to

We quickly figured out that the only way for this situation to resolve itself was to just leave the armadillo alone, hoping that once Jack wasn’t around, it would extricate itself. Of course, that meant that Jack had to stay inside, which meant that I had to work from my home office so that I could keep an eye on him.

This, of course, resulted in a hilarious email to my boss in which I had to explain that I wouldn’t be in the office on account of an armadillo.

Only in Texas …

So, I’ve updated this blog to reflect that. On the right hand side, you will see two new features. The first is a section entitled “Where to Find Me Online”. In this section, you will see a list of online services that I use, along with a link to my profile so that we can connect!

The other new section is entitled “My Lifestream”. This section contains an aggregated feed of all of my activity on the various social networks that I use. Pretty cool, huh?

If you are so inclined, you can also keep up to date via Twitter.

We closed on a new (to us) house. As such, we’ve spent the last few weekends painting, laying down flooring, and various other tasks to get ready for move in.

For the most part, the house was in great shape. You can see a few pictures of the house before we did any work here

If you look at the pictures, you will notice that the all of the downstairs had green and gray checkered tile. The seller’s agent says that it matched their furniture. Needless to say, it did not match ours.

We decided to go with a laminate floor - namely, Pergo. We chose the Brazilian Cherry from the Global Passages line.

I’ve laid Pergo before, but never in the quantity that we have done in this house. We ended up doing the entire downstairs, save for the kitchen. Our friend Mike was awesome and helped out on the first weekend, which was a huge help.

When all was said and done, we laid about 900 sq. ft. of floor, and made over 100 cross-cuts and 40 rip-cuts. Fun times. It took two full weekends - three of us the first weekend, two the second.

You can see pictures of the flooring process here