After listening to the audiobook version of John P. Kotter's "The Heart of Change", I decided to also read his book "Leading Change". Kotter is an expert on change management, i.e. the management and leadership skills to lead an organization and make the necessary changes to adapt it to new situations and implement new strategies. I've read chapter 1, "Transforming organizations: Why firms fail", and I'm hooked. Kotter explains what errors are common causes of failing change efforts: Allowing too much complacency Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition Underestimating the power of vision Undercommunicating the vision by a factor of 10 (or 100 or even 1,000) Permitting obstacles to block the new vision Failing to create short-term wins Declaring victory too soon Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture Looking at some of the organizational changes I was in some way part of, I can see instances where most or even all eight of those errors were made -- with the appropriate results. I want the changes I'm about to undertake to be a better success, so I'm curious what Kotter has in store in the following chapters.

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Into the woods!

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Finally, there is proof that it’s better not to wake me too early. A scientific study shows that people who get up later in the day are able to stay productive longer:  If you allow them to live on their preferred schedule, then they can outperform the morning types. Please don’t call before 1pm tomorrow. :-)

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Following up to the recent entry about Google's custom server chassis, in this video we get a glimpse into one of Google's datacenters where those servers are in operation. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3Et540-_s&hl=de&fs=1] Again, Google does it their own way by using separate containers with the necessary infrastructure built in instead of having different rooms for all the racks. The data center building itself delivers power and cooling. I guess it's because of the more modular structure that allows replacement of a complete server "room" why Google chose that approach.

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Finally, there is proof that it’s better not to wake me too early. A scientific study shows that people who get up later in the day are able to stay productive longer:  If you allow them to live on their preferred schedule, then they can outperform the morning types. Please don’t call before 1pm tomorrow. :-)

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At this year's Efficient Data Center Summit, held April 1st 2009 at Google's Mountain View, CA campus, Ben Jai, Google Server Platform Architect, displayed one of the servers they deploy in all of their global datacenters: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J139Aelaf0g&hl=de&fs=1] While there probably are many other well-known ISPs that use custom-built servers, I find it interesting that Google goes as far as to add a 12V battery to every server to replace the traditional large UPS systems normally used in datacenters.

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[www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/1...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/apple-your-mighty-mouse-sucks-please-fix...) The Mighty Mouse is in my opinion the proof that even great hardware manufacturers have product failures.

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All those sick days (of the last three weeks, I've spent two in bed) had one advantage: I had time to tackle some things. One of those things was consolidating my old Serendipity blog and the current one, running on Drupal, into one Wordpress blog. I wanted to switch from Drupal to Wordpress because WP is more focused on blogging and there are some features (e.g. trackbacks, remote blogging via XML-RPC) that Drupal doesn't do as well. It took me about 12 hours of Perl hacking to write a converter that reads posts and comments from a source database (Drupal or S9Y) and writes them into a destination database (WP). So, all posts since 2004 including their comments should have made their way into the new blog! Let's see if the new possibilities help me in writing posts in shorter intervals. Of course, that's what I've been telling myself for weeks now. ;-)

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[feedproxy.google.com/~r/oreill...](http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/oreilly/radar/atom/~3/YpcjizorWqo/tweenbots-cu...) Sometimes, cute and simple trumps expensive and sophisticated. I’d like to have this experiment myself. Those robots are just too cute.

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On Friday the FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit debuted a radical redesign of the product for about 15 journalists, technologists, and Robert Scoble.

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