Where have all the heros gone? When I think back to my carefree days of childhood, I always had heros. The dictionary definition of a hero is “a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities”. It was naively easy to revere a famous astronaut, athlete or other celebrity as a child because you hadn’t had to deal with the world as an adult. And then, insidiously, the wisdom that comes with age starts to have its effect. You gradually become harder to impress, and you start to see you childhood heros for what they are: talented men and women who were in the right place at the right time.

Now, as I’ve pushed past 40 years old, it has become near impossible for me to assign the label “hero” to anyone. This is mostly because I’ve learned the world is a lot more about infinite shades of gray, rather than the crisp black & white view that hero worship tends to require. But it is also because my definition of a hero has evolved. Courage and noble qualities are still important, and all too lacking in our modern world, but a hero is someone who also makes a difference. And not just for today, but for tomorrow, or century from now. And to make it doubly tough, I think any living hero should be the kind of person you’d want to have a beer with.

When I hold up my yardstick to the currently living field of contenders, almost none measure up. The vast majority of modern athletes will be long forgotten in a decade and have no effect on the world. Sports isn’t about heros, it is about business. Astronauts are still cool, and most would probably be fun to have a beer with, but they’re just scientists doing their jobs. And modern “celebrities” fare even worse against the yardstick.

So who are the modern heros? Living men and women with courage, compassion, integrity and conviction, who are making a difference in the history books. And of course, they must still be down-to-earth enough that you’d slam back a pint with them any day. If we look back at the 20th century, I would put Teddy Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Mahatma Gandhi on this list, but they don’t count for a modern hero survey since they would be hard to have a beer with.

I actually had to wrack my brain for quite a while to even come up with few names that might pass the hero test. And as that list evolved, I also added another quality to my heros: the quest for truth. I couldn’t admire anyone as a hero who wasn’t willing to pursue the truth, regardless of whether it was the popular or politically correct thing to do.

I ended up with only two names: Sebastião Salgado and Reza Deghati. Both are names most people have probably never heard of, but have probably seen their work. They are two of the top photojournalists in the world.

So how do I arrive at a pair of photojournalists for heros? If you take a look at the pictures either has produced, their courage and conviction are clear. Pick up one of their photo books some day and read the prose. You’ll understand their integrity and quest for the truth. And their work is timeless. Generations will stare in awe at their chronicle of cultures and human experience that most spoiled westerners want to conveniently forget exists.

So we’ve got the personality traits, the quest for truth and the making a difference part. Now what about the beer factor? I haven’t read anything about Sebastiao that would suggest I wouldn’t want to have a beer with him. As for Reza, I met him and his wife at a book signing in Paris in 2006. His humility and kindness were staggering. He actually spent 10 minutes talking with every person who’s book he signed.

These are the kind of people the world needs more of. I proudly claim both as my heros. Now who are yours?

To start off the New Year, I did a little physical un-cluttering to go along with the mental part. My desk had become a disaster zone so I took some time this evening and solved the problem. As it won’t stay in this state for too long, I decided to capture what I view as the ultimate geek desk setup for posterity’s sake.

Here’s an overview of the whole desk. I’m a wide-open spaces person for desks, so my desk is a 30×60 inch commercial workbench. Simple and to the point.

My computer is a 13″ MacBook Pro with 4gb of RAM. I use a 23″ Apple Cinema Display at home. This gives me the best of both worlds. Plenty of screen real estate when I’m at the desk, while still having a small laptop for on-the-go work.

My only grief with the display is that it sits too low when I’m seated at the desk. A quick trip to my local Woodcraft store solved that problem. I bought an 8×8x2 inch block of nice hardwood and smoothed it down. I then glued a piece of thick brown leather on the top and felt feet on the bottom. It is the perfect stand for this display.

My second best investment was a BookArc for holding my MacBook vertically behind the display. It doesn’t hold the laptop completely vertical like in the picture, but it is very stable and helps save a ton of desk space.

Here you can see how the MacBook tucks in behind the screen.

For the keyboard, I picked up one of the compact Apple bluetooth keyboards. I love the compact size, and it is easy to get out of the way when I need to work on other stuff on my desk. I stuck with a Logitech mouse, the VX Nano. It is a shame Logitech quit making them. It is the best mouse I’ve ever used. It is a laptop size mouse but still works perfect for all-day work at the desk.

Finally, two of my favorite desk accessories are a Rotring 600 Series 3 .7mm mechanical pencil and ballpoint pen. These are the older models with the knurled grips. They haven’t been made for over a decade and have become collectors items on eBay. If it is good enough for Jason Bourne, it is good enough for me.

So this is the current state of my geek creation station. We’ll see how long it lasts, but a clean desk feels like a clean mind.

Michael Jackson, an icon for an era, passed away yesterday at an overly young age of 50. His era was my era. I was in high school when Thriller came out. The album was pure electricity and a defining musical moment for a lot of kids. I’m still a big fan of 80s music, and this album was a lion.

It was sad to watch Michael descend into freak show status. He wasn’t ready for his celebrity status, and I’m sure he had too many handlers doing whatever they could to keep their gravy train going, leading to his decline. Michael became the human equivalent of a factory farm hog – fed, doped and bringing home the bacon for his owners.

So rest in peace, Michael. And remember, don’t stop ’til you get enough.

One of resolutions for the year was to give $100 a month to a different charity each month throughout the year. I’ve been on a pretty good roll so far this year, hitting five charities I’ve felt good about giving to. But there is now a kink in my plan.

I’ve discovered giving money to a charity is like giving crack cocaine to an addict. My snailmail box is literally overflowing with solicitations for additional donations. There is always a new campaign where they need money now. Worse, it is clear some of my charities shared my name with other charities, because I’m now getting bombarded with solicitations from charities I have never heard of.

So my naive approach of picking a differently charity each month is not a sustainable objective if I don’t want to use a handcart when I go to the mailbox. I realize the tight economic times have made a lot of charities have to work harder for their contributions, but I’m honestly shocked and offended by the quantity of garbage in my mail that results from a simple $100 contribution.

So going forward, I’m going to take a simpler, less diverse route. I’ll continue to give $100 a month, but it will only go to a singe charity: Médecins Sans Frontières. They were my first of the year, and are still my favorite. I’ll make an exception for Toys for Tots at Christmas, but otherwise, I’ll be focusing on MSF.

The last two weeks have basically gone by in a blur, so I finally decided to squeeze in some time for an update. At Orange Leap, we’ve been running at warp 11 putting the finishing touches on v1.0 of our product. I’ve been up to my neck in the bowels of Spring Security and attempting to integrate it with CAS and our LDAP server for single sign-on. It has been an absolute beat-down trying to get it all together, and I’ve developed a strong love-hate relationship Spring Security. It makes the simple stuff possible and the hard stuff really hard.

This past weekend, Dallas hosted the first ever Big (D)esign Conference. Organization was a bit rough around the edges, but the conference really rocked. I don’t usually hang much with the artsy design folks, even though it is something that interests me. This was like a breath of fresh air after too much time immersed in hairy backend coding. I met a lot of new Twitter friends and came away with some good ideas. Hopefully I can start back in on some frontend work in the coming weeks to try and apply it.

Some cool tech has dropped that I really want to find some time to get familiar with. Microsoft went live with Bing today, and it looks pretty cool so far. Adobe also dropped the first beta of Flash Builder 4 over on Adobe Labs. I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flex, but need to backburner it until end of June. I also signed up with Ribbit. It looks pretty awesome and is in the queue for brain cycles after I get comfortable with Flex. And I still want to find time to get deeper into Groovy.

Finally, Dallas Tech Fest is just around the corner and I’ve still got a lot of work to do on my presentation. It has been a struggle finding quality time to work at home. Zoe is has decided the best place to watch Elmo is on my lap at my computer, so I have to sneak in work at bath time or after she’s asleep.

My ongoing saga of charitable giving stays on a humanitarian path for April. Although I strongly considered giving more to two of my favorite previous charities, I decided to try something different. So for April, my $100 goes to Direct Relief International.

DRI provides worldwide humanitarian assistance to people in need, including inside the United States. This keeps a theme going I created with a donation to MSF in January. Based on their rating with Charity Navigator, I’m confident my $100 donation to DRI will be put to good use helping people.

My charity for March is one of my old favorites, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I usually renew every year with them, and since there weren’t any other charities that really stood out to me, I kept things simple and renewed for this year.

Every geek should be a support of the EFF. They fight the legal battles on the digital frontier that will have a huge impact on American cyber culture down the road. From blogger’s rights, to copyright law, to illegal wiretapping by the NSA, the EFF is there for us. So my hundred dollars for March goes to them, and I even get a cool T-shirt as a bonus

Has anyone else noticed a lot of companies coming down with a case of the stupids recently? It could be the economy is stressing people out and they’re commiting more errors, or, more likely, businesses are doing anything they can to boost revenue, including screwing their clients.

My first example is Time magazine. I’ve been a subscriber for years and signed up for their auto-renewal so that I quit getting nags to resubscribe every year. This year was a bit different. Here are the guts of my Paypal receipt:

So the description says $29.95 for a year (56 issues), but they charged me $41.15. Needless to say, I was a bit unhappy. This seems too dumb to be intentional, but who knows anymore. After complaining to customer service, I should be seeing a refund.

The other idiots I’ve had to deal are GoDaddy. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with them for a couple years, but haven’t been annoyed enough to move my domains and sites elsewhere. They might have finally reached the tipping point this week.

I let a domain name expire that I wasn’t using, yet I still got billed for some crap that I didn’t order orignally that they decided to hang off the initial order (“Business Listing”). GoDaddy has a pretty unethical habbit of hiding stuff on your orders as freedies that they’ll ding you for later.

For example, last year they tried to bill be for an SSL certificate renewal. Apparently, my hosting account came with a “free certificate” that I never even claimed or used. They tried to charge me $20 for renewing the unused certificate. After I called and complained, they refunded my money after realizing they never even issued an initial certificate, so kind of hard to bill me for a renewal.

So this week it was the same story again. Trying to bill me for stuff I didn’t order/want. I’m going looking for a better hosting provider and someplace to move my domain registration where they actually respect their customers.

Both of these cases are especially remarkable given the sorry economic conditions. Smart companies should be bending over backwards trying to keep their customers, not screw them over.

The company I currently work at, MPower Open, is undergoing a seismic shift from a classic software company to an open brand. Since we’re small, part of the transformation includes a company-wide reading assignment of Kelly Mooney’s The Open Brand. While the book contains a lot of millennial/Gen-Y drivel, the key take away is that open brands are defined by their customers and online community, not the classical marketing department. Our migration to an open source platform offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) is just the first step.

The whole open brand concept is interesting. After reading the book, I’ve noticed most the brands I appreciate are open brands, in the sense they build community around themselves and listen to that community. There are also brands that pretend they’re open when they’re really not.

As an example of the latter, I put forth Maxpedition. They make pretty cool bags and supplanted Eagle Creek as my favorite bag maker. Eagle Creek used to make very nice, high quality bags, but in recent years has started to use extremely cheap materials. Driving up quarterly earnings apparently became more important than doing the right thing for their customers. I wouldn’t touch an Eagle Creek bag now.

Anyway, back to Maxpedition. I recently purchased one of their laptop bags. It is not on the same level of quality as the older Eagle Creek bags, but I liked the room, and the pockets. One problem with it is the shoulder strap. They really screwed it up. It does not have a non-slip surface, so I almost lost my laptop three times in the first day from having it slip off my shoulder.

Noticing that Maxpedition has a cutomer comments section on the product page, I left feedback saying I liked the bag but that the shoulder strap was flawed. Maxpedition violated the cardinal rule of open brands — they edited my feedback to omit the part about the strap and only including the positive stuff.

This is a company that does not get it. If you’re going to tread into open brand space, you have to be willing to take your lumps and feedback. Maxpedition has demonstrated their asshats who just don’t get it, and has lost a customer in me. I’d also encourage others to steer clear of them.

So I’m looking forward to digging deeper into what it means to be an open brand. There are also some great examples out there (Amazon) to model ourselves after. And if anyone knows of another good bag maker, let me know.

Yes, I have officially been booked. Facebooked that is. I’ve resisted signing up for Facebook until this weekend. I always considered it the hang-out for 20 somethings who finally figured out how uncool MySpace really is. One of my ex-military friends, who is the same age, mentioned there were a lot more of my former friends over on Facebook, so I decided to give it a try.

Within 24 hours, I had hooked up with almost a dozen friends I haven’t seen in over a decade, and serveral of them from even longer. The built-in chat feature is pretty cool, but is also no where near as realiable as a true IM client. I’d get communication errors fairly frequently.

It was really interesting to see the path a lot of my ex-military friends had taken. And also to see the families. We were all a bunch of dorks in our early 20s, and it is fun to see how most everyone had aged gracefully in to our 40s.

So yes, I’m booked. I’m looking forward to finding a few more old friends. But I still refuse to actively use Twitter. I’ll leave that to the ritalin crowd.