Reinventing the Pizza Box

Reinventing the Pizza Box


Who would have thought that the pizza box could be reinvented? I have seen hundreds of these over the years and the thought never occurred to me to ask "could this be designed any better"? Well, ecovention has done it in a creative way, using parts of the box as a serving dish and the remaining part as a small storage container that fits in the refrigerator.

BTW: I am a fan of pizza, and made my own pizza oven:

Projection Building Art

This was a fantastic display of four seasons projected on the
Chapelle St Etienne de Beaune (Côte d'Or), a building in Beaune France. We were at first amazed at the artistry and creativity, and weren't sure that is was the wine from dinner ....

Global Warming Calculation

I googled "Global Warming Calculation" to try to find out how much "man-made" activities are actually heating the earth. I could not find any. The idea to actually do the calculation happened over drinks when there was a lot of conversation about "of course man-made warming is real".


I pictured millions of homes burning oil, cars, truck, etc. and wanted to know what effect they have as "thermal pollution". In my mind, they would have to, but alternatively, once I am outside my house, I cannot feel the heat inside even though I know that all that heat eventually leaks outside (otherwise I would only have to heat my house once for the winter!).


I got tired of the Global Warming "Debate" based on "feelings", mine as well as others. That is when I decided to use some simple math.
So I decided to calculate how much energy it would take to heat the Earth's atmosphere one degree. It turns out if we take all of the oil produced for 56 years and burned it (assuming 100% efficiency and 100% heat retention) we could raise the temp of the atmosphere 1 degree.


Here are the calculations, which I think are accurate to within 10% (+ or - 6 years).  These numbers do not prove or disprove "Global Warming", but are simple data that I thought was missing.

---

Number of Years to heat the atmosphere 1 degree based on annual oil production

The Mass of Atmosphere (in kilograms) x energy needed to heat one kilogram of gas one degree.


The answer is: 9.46 x10^21 Joules.


Worldwide, 84.455,000 barrels of oil is produced daily. That is 1,294,695,150,000 gallons per year. Oil contains 1.3x10^8 Joules per gallon, making the energy 1.6831E+20 Joules per year.


Dividing 9.4576E+21 by 1.6831E+20 gives 56 years to heat the atmosphere 1 degree.


Here are the calculations:

Total Worldwide energy produced by burning all the oil produced:

84,455,000	x	365	x	42	x	1.30E+08	=	1.68E+20
barrels/		days/		gallons/		joules/		joules/
day		year		barrel		gallon		year

Total Amount of energy needed to heat the Atmosphere 1 degree. 1840 is the specific heat of air in joules.

5.1441E+18	x	1840	=	9.4651E+21
kg		joules/		joules
		kg

Dividing these numbers, we end up with years:

9.4651E+21	/	1.68E+20	=	56.24
joules		joules/		Years
		year

New NotesAppStore Reviews!

New Notes App Store

Vibrant Apps Community

The point of NotesAppStore is to show that there is a vibrant community building customer-tested apps for Lotus Notes. Anyone looking at Google apps can find many comparable apps in Lotus Notes. However, the Lotus Notes apps are more mature and have been field tested, some for many years. The variety and functionality of these apps also is unrivaled by anything Google offers to businesses.

The other huge distinction is vendor support. Most of the vendors in the NotesAppStore are small to midsize businesses (SMB) who are available to help install and support their Apps. They will answer the phone. This excellent app support will be critical when there is a problem. And they have references to prove it!

NotesAppStore Site Features

Under the Company Listing, I put all the Twitter name and company blogs that I could find, along with a link to the management page of each website. Again, most of these Lotus Notes App vendors are approachable leaders of small to midsize businesses who are quite visible in the Lotus community.

You can also Search for anything on the site.

There is also a place to Recommend an App and another place to Post a Comment to help make the site more useful.

So, Lotus Notes and Domino users, finally we can say "There is an App for that" !

Technical Support Done Right

I often joke that, unlike in college, I face problems where the answer is not in the back of the book. Technical Support Done Right, as described below, focuses on how I  find a way to solving a problem through 

• Subject Matter Knowledge
  
• Ownership and 
  
• Tenacity.
  

Tech Support, as it is generally defined, implies giving information to a customer so they can resolve the problem. But that is not how I look at it. That definition lacks a certain quality that is critical to my own definition of Technical Support, the ability to solve problems. When you look at it from the perspective of solving problems, the definition takes on an enhanced meaning. Problem Solving means active participation in the problem until it is fixed. A minor difference? Not at all. In my mind, a Problem Solver needs to have a spirit of can-do in every case. This spirit is not just wishful thinking, but it is based on my multiple successful experiences making things work in a variety of environments.



Subject Matter Knowledge

So, as a Problem Solver I see a problem or "challenge" and I think "I have fixed many similar to this one before" and "I can certainly fix this one, too!". This makes me as a Problem Solver an optimist, not in the sense of blind optimism, but in the sense that my experience and training, combined with an attitude of "can-do" provides the tenacity to try different solutions until a successful outcome is achieved.



Ownership

Problem Solver also means taking ownership of a problem. The word "ownership" is abused via overuse, and is usually just lip service. However, for those who actually practice ownership, it is truly empowering. "I am assisting a customer" generally does not create ownership. Thinking that this is my problem to solve moves me towards action. This is an element often ignored in Tech Support organizations. 

Lack of ownership manifests itself as passing the buck. I have been copied on too many tech support emails requesting my help with a support problem which are really just a form of passing the buck to me under the guise of "he is more knowledgeable". If a company had a rule that said "if you have to ask others for help, then you don't belong here", there would be a lot less people dumping their problems on others. Oftentimes the problems are hard and cause people to do hard work, which most people avoid. Work is hard, especially problem solving.  If work was easy, they would call it "tennis".



Tenacity

So what does Problem Solving look like in practice? My own experience is that total immersion in a problem is not only required, it is the only way to be sure of success. I become very creative and, because I feel ownership, I start finding resources that help to resolve the problem. It is up to me as the Tech Support person to find the resources even if it is not immediately apparently what those resources are.

I often find that the biggest problem can be finding the information to help solve the problem! That is where tenacity is vital. Tech support must be tenacious in searching and researching solutions, finding others who are knowledgeable for information or blogs or other internet resources that have solved similar problems. My experience is that you make your own luck. When I dig and dig, I get lucky and find relevant information. You really don't need to know where to dig. It is the digging that is critical to finding an answer.


So, when I am solving some problem, my strategy looks a lot like this:

• I have Google open in multiple windows to search for clues
  
• The customer computer systems is visible in another window (Sametime, WebEx or GoTo Meeting, for example)
  
• My own personal test computer system in a third window (every problem solver should have a dedicated system for testing ideas)
  
• Additionally, I have any email or KnowledgeBase information open
  
• One or more IM chat windows with other staffers who have similar experience.

So, think of it like "Who wants to be a millionaire". We chase the solution with the tenacity of a contestant close to the ultimate prize, we use 50/50 split to eliminate options, we "shout out" to a friend, and use all of our collected knowledge.

So, the elements of problem solving are:

• Subject Matter Knowledge
  
• Ownership of the Problem
  
• Attitude of "Can-Do"
  
• Tenacity when dealing with obstacles
  
• Tapping into others who have similar experiences and knowledge
  
• Never Quitting until there is a Solution

In my way, the job of "Tech Support" is not a dreary road, but actually a game show played by one. The prize isn't one million dollars, but I sure feel like a million dollars once I have figured it out!

Frank Paolino manages Technical Support at Maysoft.com

Kaizen in Medical Care

Tom Daschle is now the Health Care czar. His ideas are laid out in his book "What we can do about the Health Care Crisis". A key aspect of this his approach is a "Federal Health Advisory Board", an innocuous sounding idea that is effectively a governing board of allowable medical procedures. It looks like a cost-savings approach to increasing health care costs. In truth, it is a powerful approach that will effectively stop payments to physicians for any procedure that is not approved by the Board.

This is not Health-Care Rationing. It is significantly worse than that. This is anti-Kaizen for healthcare. This is "no improvement" for health care, locking down treatment and limiting future health care developments. Sound unbelievable? Let me prove it to you with a little thought experiment, which I will call "It’s a Wonderful Life”: Picture the year 1950, just after the end of WWII. If we had a Daschle-esque plan implemented, with allowable care guidelines listed, creative people (physicians, University professors, pharmaceuticals and affiliated hospitals and the businesses that fund them) would have stopped innovating as their products and procedures would not be "allowed" to be purchased.

With medical care frozen in 1950, we would have polio with us today. Anyone who can remember this knows what a scourge it was, and how it ruined many good people. 

• Jonas Salk would have invented the vaccine in 1952, but he never got the funding to continue his research.
  
• CT scanners were not invented by Hounsfield and Comack and they did not win a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979.
  
• The MRI was not developed in the 1970s. 
  
• The birth control pill was not invented in 1952.
  
• Artery stents were never invented. 
  
• Cholesterol reducering drugs do not exist. 
  
• Genentech did not develop synthetic insulin in 1980 to help diabetics.
  

Fast forward to today, in 2009, we do not have thousands of drugs, life savings procedures and knowledge. The list would be all the innovations of the last 50 years. Scary?

 
Well, with 1950s Daschle-care, we will never see some of the innovations that are being discussed, as funding for new ventures will dry up. If anyone thinks government can invent these items, they deserve the future they are going to get. His plan should be called "No more Health Care improvements. We have all the medical procedures we need".

So you see, even though the current health care system needs a lot of Kaizen to keep improving it, the wrong answer is to freeze it in the name of controlling costs. The right answer is to find ways to allow life saving innovation to continue, so we don't end up with 2009 healthcare in the year 2050.