Ken Schafer

A Valentine For All My Girls

How Often Does Your Calendar Clear?

I just checked my calendar to see what my week was like and nearly fainted:

I never have weeks like this.

We're not big on "standing meetings" at Tucows but I do like to make time to sit down with all my direct reports at least once a week. And I do the same with the Exec Team and Elliot. After that the rest of the week fills in pretty quickly with project-related meetings, sprint reviews, vendor discussions, customers time, and so on.

Loads of people are travelling on business or sick this week so my schedule is extremely light. Now, to be clear, this won't last. By the end of the week much of it will have filled in.

But still, it makes me realize how little time I often end up with to "do" stuff instead of talking about doing stuff. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting some projects of my own going this week.

I Go On The Record About Microhoo

Earlier this week I was quoted in an IT Business article about the possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft.

Here's what I had to say:

The two main things going for Yahoo is brand and massive audience, said Ken Schafer, vice-president of product management and marketing for Tucows Inc.

Tucows began as a domain name registrar in the early 1990s but quickly transformed itself into a service and software vendor for Web hosting firms and Internet service providers.

"Yahoo's problem is it has had a hard time in finding out how to leverage its main assets," Schafer said. "Yahoo was not able to execute as quickly as people had been hoping it would."

Schafer said Microsoft's bid for Yahoo did not come as a surprise, as people in the online marketing industry had been talking about its possibility for years.

"Personally, I hope they manage to pull it off. Competition means innovation, and the more competition, the better."

I'm not sure that history will prove me out. Right now it looks like Yahoo!'s board is prepared to put up a fight to keep the company out of Steve Balmer's hands (or at least to make him pay dearly for the honour).

Twas The Night Before Tucows

(I got a poem from Lucy for Christmas and - with her permission - I'm sharing it here)

Twas the night before Tucows, launched their domains,
Ken Schafer was stirring, simply going insane;
The plans were all there, displayed on his macable,
In hopes that domains, will soon be unhackable;

The macs were all snoozing, with screen savers in sight,
While visions of starbursts, were haunting him all night;
With Ken in his office, and Elliot abroad,
He was checking the URLs that seamed slightly odd,

When out on the roof there arose such a clatter,
Ken sprang from his desk to see what was the matter.
Away to the window he flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the slush, that covered Mowat,
Gave a dinghy appearance to objects below it,
When, what to his wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight cows, instead of reindeer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
Ken knew in a moment it must be St. Click.

More rapid than elephants his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Betsy! now, Martha! now, Ilsa and Daisy!
On, Patches! on Ellie! on, Moo Moo and Lazy!

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now clop away! clop away! clop away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an awkward, mount to the sky,

So up to the office roof the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of hard drives, and St. Click too.

And then, in a twinkling, he heard on the roof
The stomping and Clacking of each little hoof.
As Ken drew in his hand, and was turning around,
Down the heating vent St. Click came with a bound.

He was dressed all in red, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of hard drives he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a truffle,
And the beard of his chin was as white as his shuffle;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And Ken laughed when he saw him, in spite of himself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave Ken to know he had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the offices; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the heating vent he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!

This is the second Internet/Ken-related poem I've been fortunate enough to receive, following my mom's poem a few years ago.

Move Complete

It looks like everything is moving smoothly post migration to Typepad. DNS propagation took longer than I expected but my goals was to have everything in place for the end of the year and it looks like that is the case.

I'm sure I'll be fiddling more with the look of the site and with tweaking the content, but I'm pretty happy with the results even as they are now.

Let me know if anything looks funny or is broken from your end!

Back To TypePad!

I took a few hours this morning to move all the posts I did on the Wordpress version of my blog over the last six months to this TypePad version of the blog.

I'm pretty happy with the move (back) to Typepad and I'm looking forward to playing with the site again (something I couldn't do with Wordpress because it really needs to you to understand basic coding to get things looking the way you want).

Next step is to update DNS to point here to make it all official.

Did I Really Say "Good Vibes"?

Nestor E. Arellano (the "E" is to avoid him getting confused with all the other Nestor Arellanos out there - sorry Nestor I couldn't resist) interviewed me on Thursday for an ITBusiness.ca article called "Good Vibes Stem The Tide Of Talent Turnover".

One of the things I've learned as a manager is that my team has to understand why they are doing what they are doing, see challenge in the work, and enjoy the physical act of working (i.e. like the people and environment the work gets done in). If you don't get those right, it's very tough to keep anyone engaged. If they're not engaged, they might stick around if times are tough but given options (as people most definitely are being given right now), they won't stick around for long.

Here's How Healthy Ken Converts Can Comment

When I started healthyken.com I didn't think that anyone would really read it, let alone want to comment on the details of my eating habits. Turns out though that folks are reading it and quite a few have commented on the fact that they want to comment. Unfortunately tumblr doesn't allow for comments and I'm still not sure I want to move my health posts to this "official" blog.

Therefore I'm opening up a comment thread below for anyone who wants to comment on anything they read over at healthyken.com.

Enjoy!

Update 2007-12-26: I changed my blogging platform at the end of 2007 and unfortunately one of the things lost in the move were the 23 wonderful comments people had left on this post. Thanks for all the encouragement folks! You know who you are!

Healthy Ken

I decided not to clutter up this (ahem) "official" Ken Schafer Blog with details of my progress on going from Fat F__k to Healthy Ken, but if you are interested in my plan and how I'm doing on it, you can find all the details at healthyken.com.

Back In Blog

Well, that took much longer than I thought!

Since I sold One Degree a few months ago I've been on a blogging sabbatical. My goal has been to reboot the blog I ran at schafer.com from 2001 until 2005 and at the same time bring together a lot of the scraps I've left littered around various other blogging outposts since then.

With a little help from James I've managed to get the settled in here pretty nicely - once I put my mind to it.

So consider this a "Hello Again World" post!