• The day’s not over yet, but I’ve got two but things coming up the rest of the evening and will probably want to zone out after them:
• I’m hosting a fireside chat with Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of our group at VMware (streamed in LinkedIn). She should be fun to talk with. And then I’ll go almost straight into this week’s Software Defined Talk (podcast here, watch here for the live stream).
• I’ve got a kookie setup for this (see pictures below), using my road A/V kit. This is the second time I’ve used it and I think it’s almost perfect. It’s a Rode NTG shotgun mic, a SmallRig iPhone stand, and then using my iPhone with continuity camera as the camera. The “secret” to that whole thing is that you can use the Rode as a normal USB mic. Thus, you have a dual purpose mic: for doing videos out and above, and then just a desk mic.
• What I really need to a separate tripod for the mic. What I have is OK, but I prefer to have the mic right up on my mouth. One day, if I get some new iPhone and an attachment to stick it to the back of my laptop, I think that’ll solve it.
• I had a long discussion with two colleagues, separately, about “strategy” today. “Strategy” is such a situational context per company, level in company, and just your personal opinions. I don’t think the basics of strategy (your classic Michael Porter stuff) are really sufficient to be useful. In the same way that programmers don’t like to be told how to implement something, in strategy, you’re not supposed to get too specific. But, I think this is usually a huge mistake. If you’re setting corporate strategy, you should have at least one (if not many!) detailed ideas about how it would actually get done. You’ll have to delegate it to someone other group to actually do it, and, sure, they might change it…but you can’t send them off on an impossible task to “figure it out.”
• The days are very long in northern Europe now. The sun comes up around 5:30am and doesn’t seem to go down until 9pm. In an adult daily life, this is mostly comical. But, that much light is really weird when you have kids that need to get to school. Getting them to start going to bed when it’s mostly daylight seems weird.
• I suffer through all the too much thinking that Dave Briggs does about blogging and social media - all the content holes. I’ve managed to string together some actions in Drafts to accomplish most of the cross posting and reformatting that he worries about. Also, I’ve tried to really consolidate down my long form content to my newsletter, coupled with putting in a dump of links. I use micro.blog and you can see I link-blog a lot here (that’s an action in Drafts). I roll those up (also in Drafts after using an action to convert the links to markdown) into one big chunk that I put in the newsletter. The bigger issue is, I think, that Twitter is all messed up - more accurately, that there are too many options to post to and you have to build back up your audience on those new platforms. I’m not really sure any of it is worth it. LinkedIn is actually the most solid, reliable one of all social things if you operate in the kind of “business, business, business” world that I do. Even then, I’m starting to think that most of my audience in LinkedIn are my co-works. That is fine for my own glory, but not great for promoting content among “buyers” of my company’s stuff.
• I have a Drafts action to post to micro.blog, of course. I’m using it to post this!
• Connected: I’m pretty serious into the deleting Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn apps on my phone. I found myself just loading the web pages, but then I caught myself. What I’ve started asking myself a lot if: sure, I will promote my stuff there, but am I ever happy after reading other posts on those sites? No, not really.

Travel Video Studio

I took the phone out to take the picture. Normally, the phone would be camped right under the mic.