To begin – this is NOT a negative rant.  It has a positive bent, but it is self analytical and brutally honest.

Regular readers will remember June 2008 where a bunch of software developers elected to “build a product in 30 days”.  Kind of the bungee jumping of rapid release and marketing. Those that followed will also be aware that only a handful of developers actually made it to the end in the sense that they actually released a product.

Sane commentary on the lack of value in the exercise for business building aside for now – yours truly was NOT one of those who made it.  In terms of 30 days it was an unequivocal FAIL for our products release.  The launch never happened because the product wasn’t completed – and still is not completed.  It gets close and then I find myself drawing back.  I’m going to cover some of these reasons over time.

During the course of 2008 I switched audio libraries from my own engine, to an expensive commercial engine and midstream during the 30 days to another commercial product which I still use but which has at times brought me mega pain due to a variety of “undocumented features” and downright agony with documented features that simply were not there or failed to operate reliably if at all.  The value of the latter has improved a great deal since my submission of bug reports.  However submitting bug reports on every other feature almost weekly for an expensive development library is counter productive over the longer term for a variety of mega obvious reasons.  The first and foremost one being the reason for using a custom library – to simplify and prevent wheel reinvention is utterly negated.

By December 2008, as documented in this blog, I switched from Delphi after 13 years to Microsoft .Net.  From a technical standpoint this was a sane move.  However, there is a tapering FAIL attached to that sanity in that the paradigm shift after 13 years is massive.  During my 30 years association with programming I have been forced to learn and apply, last time I bothered to count, twenty three programming languages.  Most of those are almost and in some cases entirely extinct now.  It’s true I figured Microsoft’s .Net was just another language to add to my belt – “three months, she’ll be right mate.”   FAIL.  Superficially three months is adequate, but not for complexity and not for truly commercial grade products.

But Wait – There’s More!

With all this on your plate award yourself a cigar if you figured you’d not take on anything extra.   I’ll forgo the cigar as I did the opposite.

Politics.   I’m here to tell you it’s impossible, if not utterly ludicrous to immerse yourself in politics while developing any business, let alone a software business.   Impossible if you’re serious about either and impossible if the political party you’re involved with is in serious “gasping for air” barely surviving mode.  Utterly bloody pointless if the factions to the far left, and ostensibly the far right, are united against the “centre” in an exercise of $%^^&&& (click the link for the definition and explanation of that omitted expletive in the political context – it’s point 1 of the list on the definition page, an ugly phrase but sadly very apt)  for their own ends.   This week the Australian people go to the polls and this time I have to decide whom I vote for, because this time I can’t vote for myself as I’m not running.  To be an endorsed candidate for the senate and then not run is a difficult conundrum.   It is a bit of a FAIL even though the reasons for not are damn good ones.  One tends to feel like a football player on the benches with a broken leg.  You can only watch but you can’t do anything.

Over on his blog Andy Bryce recently wrote an article providing commentary from ISV’s who, for a variety of reasons and a variety of levels, failed.  They are honest and there’s a lot to learn from them.  I seriously contemplated submitting something when Andy asked for ISV’s to volunteer stories.  It’s worth the read and it’s in context with what I intend to do here on this blog for a while.  In short I’m going to document the FAILS – my own.  The intention is to motivate me to do something about it and if that documentation assists even one other aspiring or existing Micro or larger ISV then the FAILS become worthwhile.

Andy’s article opens with:

“No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients.” – Proverb

Read his article, the ISV’s are brutally honest.  My intention is to document my own over time in a little more detail.

Scott Kane

“I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”

Benjamin Franklin

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CDROO has been around awhile, previously selling talking books and offering voice over’s.   As we found ourselves moving back across to software development as our main focus we decided to turn it into a resource to support our main products, such as MixAction. CDROO is a store that sells royalty free music and sound effects.  This basically means that when you need a piece of music or special effect for a video, podcast, voice over or training tool you are able to buy professionally recorded music without having to worry about the complexities of obtaining performance rights.

One payment and you’ve got usage.  The content is produced either directly by us in our studio or specifically licensed directly from the artist with the negotiated royalty free licence being extended to you.  The thrust of the site is certainly related to theater sound producers, podcasters and video producers, but in a sense ISV’s are a combination of these, hence the relevance here.

Now, because it’s the internet and because we know so many people are, like us, boot strapping, we’ve kept the prices low.  Just enough to cover processing fees, server bandwidth and still make it worth both your and our while.

Limited Offer To Readers Of This Blog

We’re offering readers of this blog, until the 31st of July 2009, a 35% discount on anything in the CDROO store for use in their videos, podcasts and multi media productions.  All the audio is 100% Royalty Free, as already stated.  That means you can include it in a “significant* production of your own”.  To take advantage of it simply use the voucher “RecursiveISV” without the quotes when you fill out the checkout cart – hint – it’s the last textbox item on the form. The website URL is: http://www.cdroo.com or click the logo above.

*Significant is a term indicating you can’t resell the content on it’s own, the license doesn’t cover that.  However you can incorporate it freely as background music, title themes, audio punctuation etc in videos, podcasts etc.

Presently, as one might expect for such a new service, the catalogue is small, but it’s fair to say the focus is presently on quality and not quantity.  However there are a number of packages waiting in the background to be published there in the coming weeks and months.  Our goal is at least one audio package a month.  Later down the track, after we establish an appropriate method of payment that makes it worth our while to offer it, we’ll add the ability to purchase single tracks.  Right now we’ve bundled them into collections.

You’re not going to be able to purchase “Britney’s Bipolar Blather” there or “Pink’s Popular Platitudes” or other “known artists”.  The content is original, which at the end of the day is exactly what’s needed, the last thing you want in a video or podcast is somebody bopping and not paying attention to your message!

“But Music Is Subjective, It’s Not Good In Product Videos”

Yeah – I’ve heard that too, mostly from programmers strangely – but never from people who produce audio and adverts for a living.  Hmmmm?

It depends, to be honest.  For starters it’s supposed to be used as “spice” not ketchup.  There’s a reason the pro’s stand out when they use it – they grasp this.

Flooding your viewer or listeners ears with a stream of audio anarchy is not going to help you win anything.  But used as an introduction and then either pulled back – or out – of the mix is a technique you hear on radio and television everyday. The idea is to use it to focus on your message – not become Radio ISV1234.

It’s true enough that some people can be turned off something because they “don’t like the music”. No amount of salesman talk from me or anybody alters that.  So how come it works on radio, pro internet broadcasts and other places so damn effectively?

Because it’s used as spice – to reiterate.  Intro’s – extro’s (the word for the end of a multi media piece) and for punctuation where needed.  For Podcasts it’s absolutely essential but sad to say 99% of the time it’s done by either:

1. Using illegally a commercial artist’s work from the Top 40 – Epic Fail!
2. Using a terrible midi file with equally terrible sound fonts – Epic Fail!
3. It’s played full bore right through the whole piece.

Now, there are times it works when played through the whole piece – for example when what you’re demonstrating is in itself a multi media software tool, people expect it there.  But with your average video or podcast a little bit goes a long way and in turn lifts your work beyond the average, boring and ho-hum we’re exposed to in so many “rich media” productions in the Web.

Web 2.0 Is More Than Graphics And Social Networking

Web 2.0 is also about engaging the visitor – or customer.  Engaging them requires standing out from the crowd and doing something subtle but noticeably different.  In fact, I think, if we wanted a phrase to describe Web 2.0 for mISV’s it’d have to be something like “Subtle, but rich” which when you think about it covers the presentation, content and ethos of the most successful “Web 2.0″ sites.

It’s the age of wide spread broadband usage, the age of the “something else shiny just caught my attention” and frankly we need all the tools we can get.

OK.  This was the first time this blog has pitched a product.  Largely I don’t pitch here – even my own.  CDROO is primarily aimed at theater audio and podcasters, it’s not primarily aimed at ISV’s and I’m not pretending for a moment that it is.  But – this blog is focussed on starting up, it is focussed on web issues, ISV issues in general and to some extent my own business and discussion about it.  I’ve said here before, and it’s on the About page of the blog, that I don’t like Google adverts on blogs, that I prefer to sell product over clicks.  I also said that at some point I’d look at placing product where it was directly relevant.  Hence this post.

If you’re looking for a really good resource for ISV’s on the how to for creating product videos and voice over’s of your own for your company then you really should check out the folks across at ProCasts http://blog.procasts.co.uk/ and their blog.

If you’ve got any questions, concerns, issues or anything else in relation to CDROO, this post etc please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly using the Contact Me link above.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. – James Branch Cabell

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Very few however consider the basic tenets of what it means to survive, what a real company actually is and why profitability or lack thereof harms and devalues an entire industry.

A business is in many respects like the phrase sociologists use to describe the modern human family unit.  The “Nuclear Family” – or if you’re name includes the initials GW then you’d transform that through metathesis to “Nucular Family.” 

Most aspiring mISV ’s in particular don’t appreciate this or even acknowledge it.  One only has to look at the pricing models of most software downloadable from the Internet to get an inkling.  Most of it is under the dreaded ceiling of $29.  Most of it is aimed squarely at the home consumer, coined by some as “Clickware For the Masses”.

I’m not saying one should never price in this range, nor am I saying one should not write for B2C (Business to Consumer).  But there is a fundamental reason why B2B (Business to Business) software development companies have higher profitability rates in general.

That profitability gives them stability and long term staying power that is not evidenced by most so called companies hammering out product and selling it below thirty bucks.

Now, at this juncture it’s only fair to state that much of the under thirty dollar crowd are neither programmers not business minded people.  As always with generalizations there are going to be exceptions, maybe you the reader are one of them.  But across the board we see more abandonware in this price range than anywhere else.

The reasons are varied and complex in many respects and there are more than a few.  But it would be fair to say the most consistent reasons are under capitalization, no plan beyond turning $30 (I’m rounding out here – common price is $29.99 or – gulp – $19.99) a pop into the next Google and the sad fact that most programmers working in this price range as mISV ’s are not competent as programmers or business people.

A serious, often fatal deficit, arguably more devastating than under capitalization.  Not that they couldn’t improve their skills, but most don’t and they don’t while arguing vehemently why they should not which, all things said and done, is incredibly lame.

Consider for example that User Interface design is an integral part of software development and most importantly of our marketing and repeat sales in many instances.

Most User Interfaces in this price range look like limping rejects from Windows 95.  Rejects that were not even satisfactory under the Windows 95 environment frankly.

I’ve blogged here before that their choice of icons, or lack of choice, care over UI design issues, balance, contrast, colour, usability is virtually lacking in most instances.  Near enough is not good enough.  UI design is subjective to be sure – but the finer points of that argument are not under consideration in this article.  Rather I’m referring to the absence of any consideration or even an attempt to get it right.

But the developers I’m speaking of tend to disagree.  I have concluded they disagree because they are not selling a business to the world, but instead a forlorn hope that somehow they’ll luck it out with what under any other circumstances would be a product that violated basic merchantability and fitness let alone any rational attempt at aesthetics.

When software looks the way most of this crap looks the FOS crowd can crow and pronounce their FUD based dogma that “Software should be free”.  I’m not even going to discuss here those folks suffering from the mental aberration that causes them to conclude and pronounce that “Software wants to be free” as there is no evidence for an electronic Gaia in any universe I’m aware of.

But then most FOS software – with exceptions like nix itself which frequently sports nice UI’s – looks even worse than the worst bottom feeding mISV ’s effort.

Software should not, by definition be free, though I have no problem with a person being, what I consider, short sighted enough to give away hours of work if they want to do so – but I reject with total contempt any politically motivated nonentity trying to make it compulsory – unless they’ve recently invented a social system where nobody works, everybody is well off and they themselves can demonstrate that they are managing to eat without having a day job, stealing or sponging off social welfare. 

It’s not just UI either – it’s code, it’s scope, it’s market research it’s…

Well it’s all the things they tend to whine they can’t afford to do.

What we’ve done in this industry is manage to take an incredibly complex and disciplined process that takes massive amounts of time, effort, study and to some extent money (the best tools for productive development are rarely “free”) and tell everybody that “anybody can do it” leading to a stream of undisciplined underachievers looking for a fast buck.

We’ve told the consumer in no uncertain terms that our labor is worth very little by promoting product at a price that does not deliver economic sustainability.

It’s hard to find another industry or profession that has shot itself in the foot with so many projectiles.

We eulogize, fantasize and tremble over software piracy, hurling obscene amounts of money at products that all to often fail utterly to deliver the benefit they purport to supply.   Yet we overlook if not dismiss in contempt the obvious suggestion that maybe we are not covering our shrinkage.

In bricks and mortar retail sales to consumers, in particular, prices charged factor in loss of product through damage and theft.  How many mISV”s bother to factor in expenses let alone shrinkage?

Consider that the “marketing strategy” of most mISV ’s is deep discounting.  Their entire USP (Unique Selling Point) is “I’m cheaper than XYZ established brand” even though in reality the product is rudimentary by comparison, if not technically inept and shallow.  Even the ones who clone to the letter rarely offer any perceivable benefit – and rarely succeed as businesses – the obvious exceptions aside.

So What Price Is The Right Price?

Easy to answer actually.  The one that delivers a sustainable business.  Anything less than that is a total unadulterated waste of time and resources.  It’s not the one that Joe Blow the consumer told you he’s prepared to pay necessarily either.  People suggest pricing (high and low) based on many factors and you can bet those factors have nothing to do with commercial sustainability.

That’s not to say you don’t listen – clearly a product must be priced according to what the market can pay.  But you must listen and be prepared for something that you might not like to hear or conclude and that is:

Maybe your product isn’t commercially viable at all?!

That’s pretty alarming I agree.  But it doesn’t make it any less important, if anything it makes it pertinent and overriding.  If it’s not possible to sell a product – any product – for the purposes of deriving sustainable, achievable income then there is no point whatsoever in ever writing a line of code for it unless your intended goal is to:

a) Make a loss and go out of business.

b) You’re happy to stick your head Ostrich like into a hole.

c) You are a masochist and enjoy the process of financial failure.

d) You’re a Richard Stallman convert and your intention is not to sell in the first place.

Where do your interests lay?

FOS Is Shafting Society – Not Merely ISV’s

Yep.  Sad to say the implications of FOS go wider than socio political belief systems that somehow conclude, a point I’ve never been able to identify with, that commercial = Evil.

What the FOS crowd have managed to do is convince big business that using FOS is a really great idea.  That has an impact on every economy.  National economies, regional economies, employment economies and the often overlooked economies of scale whereby FREE tends to have the reverse effect of that which is intended and creates monopolies rather than eliminates them.

The whole model for paying for support not software has not materialized.  All these companies embracing FOS have embraced FREE – nothing else.  What this means is yet another series of twelve gauge, double rounds at automatic fire rates into our own collective foot.

The companies are abusing the concept, sure.  The only message they got, predictably, was FREE.  Nothing else.  There’s no ethics under consideration here, no goodwill to men and no concept of free as in “beer” or free as in “air”.

Merely FREE.

You can’t blame them.  Greed manifests in many forms and it’s only logical and predictable that this would occur.  That the premise of FOS would be overlooked and exploited.

Yet with each new corporate FOS conquest the FOS crowd cheer like deluded inmates of a byte ensconced psychiatric ward.

It’s not sad – it’s absolutely pathetic.  Given that many contributors to FOS – who contribute I believe for all the right and decent reasons in general – are corporate, cubicle style developers what they are doing is programming their own obsolescence.

But few see it or even consider it.  I guess it’s more fun to be an economic anarchist on Slashdot than it is to consider the ramifications of playing with economic anarchy as a hobby.

Don’t agree?  How much FOS have you donated to?  And if you do – how much FOS is used by others you know and how much have they donated?

How this ties to commercial software pricing is literally this.  We’ve always had free software, we’ve always had the bottom feeders too and their economic Sub-Antarctic pricing models, but now we’ve educated more people (big business in particular) that they can get it for nothing, that they should get it for nothing, that they have a God given right to get it for nothing.

This impacts even on the closed source free software, let alone the bottom feeders themselves in this industry.  They too become maligned for not releasing source and not releasing the whole shebang for free.

They too are criticized broadly and harshly for being bloated capitalistic fat cats when in reality they are struggling to make ends meet and put bread in their children’s mouths.

It’s not just software either – it’s music too.  Independently releasing musicians are tarred with the same brush by many as that of the mega record companies.  When in reality all they are doing is performing fee for service.  We’re telling people that right brained people and their creative output are worth less than those, the majority who couldn’t even begin to understand, implement and indeed invest the requirements for that output.

What’s right with that?

I’ve firmly come to the conclusion we have to draw a line in the sand as mISV ’s and ISV’s.  Advertising supported software is gutted every rotation of the economic clock, so there’s no long term model there.  The first victim of a recession is advertising.  The second victim is the deep discounter.  Marry this with a rabid belief that a type of human output should be free to suit a misguided theory based in economic misogyny and we have a recipe for a lot of pain for our sector.

To draw that line, particularly in the increasingly rare instances where you are the first or among the first players in a market, we need to price with profitability, with commercial viability in mind.

Prices can always be adjusted down as needed, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to price up.  Particularly in this sector – though it doesn’t seem to be to difficult for the oil industry to achieve…

Which brings me to the final point of consideration.  Our pricing structure has not kept pace with the cost of living.  We’re still trying, in way to many instances, to sell at a price scale that we were using pre dot com bust if not pre Internet era.

We need to factor this.  Few mISV ’s are in a market segment, especially the sharply peaking verticals, that allow them to enjoy the kind of turnover mass markets – and by consequence higher profits – enjoy.  Very few indeed.  Costs are incremental.  More downloads, more credit card processing and other costs manifest as higher fees when we aim for high turnover of product.  Scatter gun sales are not going to work in these markets – can not work – and we need to have the intestinal fortitude to understand it and price accordingly.

Fewer sales more profit is not the oxymoron business newbie’s think it is.

If it scares you then maybe it’s time to address your fears and quit hiding from your own reflection?

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
He was a genius – that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. – Robertson Davies

(Hint – Robertson Davies wasn’t talking about people advocating FOS).

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History is full of people who aren’t heroes, they don’t do heroic things, they just do boring things for years and years so that others can enjoy their lives free from problems certain other people wish to inflict upon them.  I think that about sums about the content of this article.

Ten years ago this month a group of Usenet newsgroups were formed.  The groups were created for the software industry as a moderated solution to stem the bickering and vicious flame wars that broke out daily on the parallel “alt” newsgroups.

In those days, 1998, there were no blogs, forums were in their infancy and Google was a search engine player that barely anybody bothered to use – or considered worth worrying about.

Usenet was the communication method of consequence then and previously.  It was not perfect, far from it, but it was the best we had at the time.

People coming into the software world since the .com bust will probably not appreciate just how important and pervasive Usenet was – how much it was relied upon and how busy it was before it’s subsequent tumble into spam chaos and eventually – where it lays now, in it’s final twitches of death with the RIAA hammering in the last nails into it’s coffin.

Click To Zoom Into Picture

Download sites were the premium distribution method – for once I’m not going to rail on about those at all in this post. 

“Blue Sky Usenet” – something you read about a lot back in 1999, in the admin and moderator discussion groups – never materialized.

People often ask me privately, and I’m sure many more wonder silently, why I can go from mild mannered to a verbal hurricane of abuse in a forum.  Read on.  This post will explain at least some of the reasons.  Part of it is to do with being so bloody tired and having seen so much BS on forums from anon posters before…

ISV and MISV Not In Currency

The term ISV was rarely heard outside the hallowed halls of Redmond and mISV wasn’t even coined yet.

For mISV’s and many ISV’s the word was Shareware.  An established word, in many ways a good word and a totally misunderstood word both within this industry and without.

Even by the people involved in writing software that was released under it’s auspices.

A word I admit even I myself cringe from now, mostly because the word, but not necessarily the products, has been hijacked, as surely as the word “hacker” was hijacked by a clueless media and masses to describe a criminal element where once it referred to nothing more sinister than a programmer.

Hijacked

Hijacked by the same people, media and masses in many instances, and used to describe software in a negative light, even though it does not and never did represent this.

It never ceases to amaze me how desperately the media and masses embrace the idea of misappropriating the words and acronyms of the computer industry and software in particular.

If one called a football Quarterback a 25%Back they’d be outraged – fighting words! -and wouldn’t stand for it.  But misuse and change the meaning of an industry they participate in as consumers and not as professionals with little if any true understanding and they jump in without a care in the world and either re-assign or invent definitions.

Besides – why would they let truth get in the way of a good yarn, eh?

A distribution method, not a type of software.

A message that was never heeded and a message that falls on empty ears.  But also an ethos, in many ways, an ethos that puts a huge number of people who adhere to it in a position where they remain transfixed in the last century and an ethos that seems to require some to direct their ire and ridicule upon anybody daring to state this.

It is because of the public definition and the application of the ethos, by some, that I reject using the word and don’t want anything to do with it.  That the moderator of three newsgroups dedicated to the word and an industry advocate and volunteer for so many years should say it will no doubt direct fire in some quarters and has to be considered quite an irony.

In fact a handful, most don’t read blogs or have one, followed me to this blog and from time to time you may spot their “comments” to posts if you’re quick enough and I haven’t gotten to deleting them.  Deleted not because they expressed opinions that differ from mine, but because they are generally of the same caliber and character they exhibit on Usenet – albeit, there, they have tended to use their real names but post anon here – foul, vulgar and full of abuse and viciousness.  You’ll recognize the posts, they are usually malformed, parochial and full of cuss words.  The only comments I do actually delete.

But the wonder of IP addresses links them easily enough and names can be put to their comments.

Small Think

I also reject the name “shareware” now because it defines the worst of what I have come to see as “Small Think”.  Small Think surrounds one with a set of walls, beyond which one can’t venture by definition of thinking small.

To some extent the phrase “mISV” has the same potential – of smallness.  I prefer ISV, but if one must then mISV is a huge step-up from defining oneself as a “shareware author” in 2008.

Just like the term “SOHO” that was big in the 90′s (Small Office Home Office) and full of hype and buzz and now irrelevant, dated and “small” thinking, so is the word “shareware” as it is generally applied.

Knowing the correct definition of the word doesn’t change this.

Knowing better doesn’t change this.

The ethos behind shareware, coming from somebody who’s met the who’s who of that realm, worked beside them and calls some of them friends even now, limits ones expansion.  Mentally and business wise.   That’s the ethos – not the friends. 

Some people, it’s true, only want a small business and that’s a healthy enough thing, but most of us would prefer to expand our minds I should think…

There is simply to much baggage, to many hangers on with a vested interest in keeping things locked into the “Good Old Days” and to many miscreants determined to prey upon those adhering to some of it’s philosophies.

I promised I wouldn’t mention download sites – didn’t I?  

You may argue at this point – but why is a definition needed at all?

That’s a good question.  It’s basic human psychology.  To belong to something one must apply a name.  It’s what we do.  The adherence to the word “shareware” and the irritation statements like those I’ve made here creates, characterizes this.

If you don’t need to define yourself – more power to you.  But most people do – and most people will define you, or at least try to do so as a “something”.

In my book it’s better to give them a name to use that has a more positive connotation than “shareware” has.

It’s also important, in order to evolve ourselves and our businesses, that we look beyond the traditional fountains of wisdom.  The traditional sources and organizations and clubs and forums and see the wood for the trees.

Very few “shareware” authors have grasped the “Web 2.0″ movement and very few have tried to understand that the world has moved on from 2000/2001 and it’s a different, mind numbingly different, world to the one we knew.

Many, no most, start out with the actual goal of becoming “shareware authors”, instead of the goal of becoming a software business.  This is a critical failing point.  It’s the true definition of “Small Think”.

Meanwhile – Back To Usenet

Back to the three newsgroups created  -

comp.software.shareware.users,

comp.software.shareware.authors and

comp.software.shareware.announce

went through the RFC’s and votes were collated, a moderator elected, that being myself, etc as required to create a newsgroup in the “Big  8 Hierarchy” – a more complex process when they are “moderated.”

The tricky thing with Usenet moderators on the Big 8 groups in particular is that they are benevolent (some malevolent and some a combination of both) dictators – for life.

Short of the moderator retiring there is no method by which to sack or replace them.

As far as the newsgroups go they become the last word.  The charter that binds a newsgroups applies to every person bar one.  The moderator is free to do as they please, add or take away from the charter and so on.

In those days a moderator could (and did) pull Usenet feeds from recalcitrant ISP’s who supported spamming, through the network of other moderators and participating servers – known as “uplines”. Literally depriving the downline ISP of their upline feed.

As Usenet was then part of an ISP’s business model this was a big deal then that pulled recalcitrant ISP’s into line – even big ones – whether it be because they supported spamming in the name of “free speech” or allowed their customers to bypass the moderation process on a given group.

Now days it has zero impact and indeed is no longer possible to do.

A moderator could, and did, cancel posts, drop email addresses of spammers and abusers into anti-spam engines and bot’s and in some instances have a persons account pulled by an ISP for NetAbuse.

Hated, despised, loved and respected and combinations in between.

The idea is that the moderator you elect is beyond reproach and saves the readers and posters bacon by being the final word on riff-raff, trolls and flame wars.  Cross posts, spamming and being on topic.

It’s a tricky balance because folks will always either agree or disagree with a moderators decision.  It’s not a popularity contest and a moderator in a busy newsgroup suffers personally to a large degree because of this, something most people never consider.

So why were these three groups created?

War…

I’m going to mention events in this post, but will change the names to protect the ingrates innocent.

In the alt hierarchy there was a war going on.   A nasty perpetual war.  Mainly between one protagonist and the ASP.  For the purposes of this article I’m going to refer to the person as Darren Rosethorn.

Rosethorn was at one stage an ASP member.  What made him unique was that he wrote viruses and distributed them.

Now – it’s fair and correct to say here that these were harmless viruses for the purposes of evaluating anti-virus software.  His intent, in this regard, was not to cause harm – at least not via the actual “product” he pedaled.

When the ASP was getting set to release a CD of “shareware” distributed software products Rosethorn wanted to be on it.  I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty details of what transpired in relation to that beyond stating the primary point…

“Shareware”, wrongly, had a reputation amongst the public and media as being a sure fire way to “get a virus”.  Whole erroneous articles were written in computer mags, computer “Experts” and “Whizzes” (man I hate that noun) spouted nonsensical claptrap about this over and over as only the clueless can.

The ASP, rightly, fought and was fighting to clean up this image.  So putting a virus on a CD, harmless or not, clearly wasn’t the way to get there…

To do it would have been a publicity failure on an epic scale.

So they didn’t, had their own internal war with Rosethorn and this “house mate Rosethorn” was evicted due to his ill behavior within their private forums.

That’s when the wars erupted in public.

Nursing his anger and in possession of a nasty tongue and typing hands (who’s spelling and expression was at middle Elementary school level it seemed) he exploded into the public newsgroups not just daily – but all day – and night.  His objective was to cause as much collateral damage to the organization and individual members as possible.

The problem was that newbie readers took him at his word.  So others would try and point out what was actually transpiring.  Resulting in a type written guerilla campaign from Rosethorn.

It got pretty ugly.  The pubic newsgroup was rendered useless as he entered every discussion and fired salvos.  Ignoring him made it worse.  He just got nastier and created his own posts – en masse.

He’d “evolve” quotes from people that were wrong or frequently fabricated and, as is common on the Internet, say it enough times so that it appeared real to newbs.

DejaNews (spelling correct for site name) – the forerunner of GoogleGroups indexed this stuff and it bled into the search engines.  It looked pretty horrible and caused potential reputation damage to anybody he “misquoted” or fabricated.

The problem with Rosethorn was that he liked to argue but was not terribly good at it.

• Long words confused him.
• Spelling eluded him
• Logic escaped him.

So when your’s truly entered the fray – though many other notables did a sterling and truly excellent job in those battles – he met somebody who didn’t care what Rosethorn called him, threatened him with or otherwise – and for the first time met somebody who would monitor and reply in the group to him for as many hours – and longer – as he did.

Previous attempts to create a moderated group in the comp hierarchy had failed.  The votes weren’t there.  But as Rosethorn went on, and to some extent myself and others like me, it became clear that the comp groups were needed and they needed to be moderated.

The problem was – getting a moderator is not easy.

Cutting a long story very short I volunteered, was nominated and elected as primary moderator, with Tim Skipper a co-moderator, though Tim disappeared some time later.

The groups were endorsed by vote, overwhelmingly – no matter how many times Rosethorn tried to duplicate his vote, poor guy just couldn’t understand the idea behind what an IP address did.

The first order of business was to work out a mechanism to approve or reject and even cancel posts.  Canceling was necessary as some deviants used to “approve” themselves by adding moderator headers to their posts.  In those days most news servers honored canceled posts.

To use the likes of RoboMod then  you needed a server that could interface with Usenet.  At that time this was not an affordable option for me.  So I wrote a desktop client that could do all of the needed actions with a single mouse click.

Basically when somebody posts to a Usenet moderated newsgroup it goes to the moderator’s email account.  Whether it be spam or a genuine post.  At that time server space was measured in tens of megabytes or in my case a hundred – and that was just short of a premium account for most shared hosting.  So receiving hundreds of messages was expensive, time consuming and a pain in the ass.  Made worse by a flood of spam.

So it needed to be simple and quick.  Basically it received the email, stored it and allowed me to read the message and approve it by inserting a header into the message and then injecting it into my local news server.  Rejections would send an automated reply – if I wished, or a detailed hand typed reply should that be more appropriate – and for the spam it just deleted them.

Today the groups are run on RoboMod and the spam is mostly handled automatically through Bayesian filters.

But not then.  I had to wade through the lot.  Moderation often took hours each day.  That you had to do it several times a day to keep the immediacy up (essential for the life of the groups as people quickly lose interest if there are delays) compounded this.

Rosethorn’s First Order Of Action Was To Be Banned.

On the day the new newsgroups went live Rosethorn posted hundreds of messages – cross posted – to each and every one of the three newsgroups.  Cross posting was not allowed  under the charter.  His messages were rejected.  Imagine your first experience as a Usenet moderator and being met by this?

It was my first experience of battling spam submission software – that’s what Rosethorn was using.  Type it once, submit it many times automatically.  Except in this instance to a limited number of groups, the one’s I moderated, rather than every group on Usenet.

If got better – or worse as the case may be.  He sent hundreds more, many decrying my “censorship” and the fact that I was ‘biased” against him and an all round Mr Meany when it came down to it.

I rejected them.  The guys was a nutter without question, but a clever nutter…

He’d worked out that if he sent a few hundred messages and cross posted them I’d have to reject them for each newsgroup.  Three newsgroups = 600 separate messages each time.  By adding the alt groups this became more complicated.  But then I realized something.

He added the alt groups last on the list of newsgroups.  By doing so he effectively handed me a method to moderate him on the alt groups simply by rejecting his messages sent to the Big 8 three that I did moderate.

If I rejected the first of each message he’d cross posted I rejected it for each of the three groups I moderated and the alt groups.  It’s a flow on effect.

He never did manage to work that one out and very few others have either…

What he’d also handed me was the ability to cancel his garbage in the alt groups – legitimately in the interests of “Usenet” which we could get away with back then, especially, if as these did, they were slanderous or advocated criminal behavior.  So while he could see his messages nobody else did and they stayed out of DejaNews and thus the search engines.

I applied this sparingly and only on the worst of his messages.  My hypocrisy does have some bounds. 

It took twenty four hours and Rosethorn was in my “Twit Filter”.  Basically a black hole in my little moderation software client that rejected his messages without me ever seeing them.  In my time as moderator only four people, other than serial spammers, ever made it into that filter.

Why didn’t I just put him there from the start?  It was always my goal to be fair.  Behave yourself and anybody could post.  Arguments were fine, flame wars were off the agenda.  In fact flaming was specifically banned by the charter from implementation of the groups.

Every person who wound up in the “Twit Filter” was given multiple opportunities to amend their behavior.  Frequently I would not reject a flame, but chide the poster and ask them to keep it nice.  Only serial offenders wound up there.

It has to be said that a lot of people hated that I would ban a person completely like this.  But then – they didn’t have to deal with this stuff and what they actually saw in the newsgroups was only a fraction of what I received by email – either personally or via the admin address.

I had a life too.  Dealing with this kind of tripe daily quickly makes it impossible to do anything else.

It was a requirement that people use their real names (even if that meant typing “John Smith” instead of “Bike Boy” or some other stupid anon name).  It was to protect the regulars from being slammed by trolls.  It worked, but for some folks it was an unbearable requirement.

Rosethorn also had his ISP pull his access, the details of how that transpired are something I’m not prepared to detail.

Mail Bombing Moderators

As I’ve said moderators were largely despised.  In 1999 I was “mail bombed”.  Mail bombing is an email with an attachment sent to the moderators admin address. At that time none of the webhosts I hosted with or could find had a mechanism to limit the size of an email message.

If you were hit, as I was, by a 100 megabyte email and given we were using dial-up connections (broadband was rare in Australia at that time and incredibly expensive) your server was effectively hosed for email sending and receiving and the whole server if your email account exceeded your hosting allocation.

That meant you paid more dollars to the webhost and if, as it did, happen on more than one occasion then you had problems keeping your hosting account.  A little war broke out between me and my then webhost because of this.

As I had clients who hosted their accounts through my accounts it affected them too when the webhost pulled the plug.  The plug being pulled because I refused to pay the $750 AU hosting cost per month that they were demanding to cover their “admin” costs for the mail bombings.  $750 AU for 100 megabytes?  Needless to say I moved and I’m not ashamed to say never paid them their retrospective new monthly charges.

It was a huge mess.  I learnt a heck of a lot about servers and how they ran in this period, including those we don’t give much thought too like POP3, SMTP and NNTP.

Spyware Raises It’s Ugly Head

Around 1999 a new idea swept the small software business industry.  An idea for getting paid.  An idea that was so “pre dot com bust” as to be laughable today.  The idea of embedding adverts into software and making the software free to use, the advertiser footing the bill through impressions and clicks.

What a fantastic idea!

Developers big and small rushed in and embraced it.  They raved, they ranted, they recommended and they didn’t see it coming.  To be fair here – neither did I, so no kudos to me.

The ads gave the company serving the ad inside the poor old developers product the opportunity to spy on the user.  The developer didn’t know.  Honest.  Who examined outgoing packets in those days?  Even firewalls were far less common than now.  So all that lovely data was streamed out from users around the world keen to use a freebie product.

From download software (the days of dialups so  anything that helped download a file without falling over half way through due to dropouts was a great tool), FTP clients, email clients, newsreaders, archiving tools – hell – anybody could join in on this merry- go-round.

Not everybody did.  But a heck of a lot did.  I was, I’m glad to say, somebody who didn’t. But not because I have amazing prescience, it’s just to my mind this.  If something looks to good to be true then it probably is…

When some people began to discover that what was being transmitted back allowed the ad companies to track their use around the web and more – all hell broke lose.

Reputations were destroyed overnight, software products were destroyed overnight.

Some developers recovered, others never did.

From my perspective as moderator of these shareware newsgroups it was another set of flamewars to contain and sadly another person to drop into the “Twit Filter”.

This person was all about “exposing” the evil software developers using the adware  in their products.  That the developer was also a victim in this debacle escaped those on their crusade – and one lady in particular, queen of the nutter’s, became so vile I plonked her permanently.

Her pet theory was that “shareware” was actually doing this all the long.  That it wasn’t viruses it was now spying.  That we were truly, truly ever so evil.  She even had a website naming names.

That website lasted two days before her host pulled it.  Probably the easiest take down I ever participated in.  

The TPA Attempts A Takeover

Around the turn of this century and for several years later a character appeared in the alt groups and then on the groups I moderated called, for the purposes of this article, Mr Fullohimself.  Sometimes posting under the name “Mike The Canadian”.  Yessir, this Canuck was one Mounty who’d fallen off every horse he’d ever ridden – right onto his head.

The TPA (Trialware Pontification Association if my memory serves…    ) was the brainchild of this Einstein of the tundra.  Never a dull moment, he did everything in his power to discredit people who liked to use the word “shareware”, banned his sheep, I mean members, from posting in any newsgroup that contained the word “shareware” (though it never stopped him from doing so) and kicked them out of his sandpit organization if they had badges on their site or links to download sites that even so much as contained the word “shareware”.

Oh yeah!

Further, he appointed himself as the arbitrator of what constituted the correct development tools, IDE and compiler (which was summed up in the word Delphi for the record) and declared all else “junk” and the software created with them as “junk”.

VisualBasic?  Junk says Mr Fullohimself.

C++?  Junk says Mr Fullohimself.

Java?  Junk says Mr Fullohimself.

Yep.  Junk.  Except he used terms and phrases that were, shall we say, more colorful.  Not content with this he would name software products that used these languages and label them junk.  Yep.  Sheer class he was, all the way.

I’ve always been good at picking the right button to push.  When I called him a “waste of space” he took it pretty hard.  Compete meltdown.  Then disappeared for a while.

Where it ties in to the groups I moderated is that he became the third person to be placed in the twit filter when he insisted on pursuing his pogroms there.

I asked nicely, demanded, warned, then plonk.

Maybe you’re starting to get a faint inkling about what I mean when I say I’m tired.

The Kooks Arrive

There’s a group of fruitcakes on Usenet called the “Kooks”.  These folks spend all their days and nights hijacking newsgroups by replying to threads saying “kooky things”.

To join them you have to be a certifiable kook.  They even have their own newsgroups, vigorously defended, as a base of operations.  From time to time they dropped by and tried to kook-ify the newsgroups I moderated.  What I’ve failed to mention is that stupidity is also a requirement of a Kook and so they have never quite “gotten it” as far as moderation goes and eventually give up.

All the same – more unnecessary and unseen work.   Haven’t seen the Kooks active in my own newsgroups (or trying to be active rather) for years, maybe they finally worked out that “moderated” thingo…

Enter Mr Charm And Personality

Sal Plankton.  The ultimate purveyor of bovine excrement.   His name changed here to protect the men in white coats charged with his treatment.

Plankton was a “journalist”, so he assured everybody he corresponded with.  His was also a wanna-be “shareware author” and an ASP member.

Plankton delighted in making others feel wretched about themselves – any which way he could.  Within the ASP he raised many controversial issues, he wasn’t always entirely wrong, but he was rarely eloquent or restrained.  Every minute, every word typed was an opportunity for Plankton to twist and turn every thread into his own personal war zone.  Most people ducked for cover.  Some of us refused.

It was after one industry event that he labeled some ladies in the industry, also members, as “babes” repetitively and to this day, having known the man, purposefully I believe for his own amusement, and described them in what they felt, and I felt, to be unsavory ways..  When asked not to so by those ladies he accelerated his descriptions, leading to a huge war inside the ASP newsgroups and I admit I swore I’d not let him off the hook as this guy wasn’t prepared to let it go.

It concluded, whether it was to shut me up or because it was just time we’ll never know, in me being made Vice President.  I didn’t succeed in getting Plankton booted, though I sure tried.  But I made bloody sure he was suspended – or more specifically stayed up all night the day his suspension letter was sent as some folks in the board room were getting the jitters in respect of sending it.

In anger Plankton quit the ASP and erupted in the pubic alt groups.

A whole new war – except this one could argue, had command of a vocabulary and was a bit harder to press buttons on.

He made lots of threats, emailed officials with threats and succeeded in getting more lawyer letters to cease and desist.  He’s probably framed them or something, he’s that kind of guy.

Even as a, now, sworn enemy of the man I tried to maintain fairness as moderator in the comp groups and had an exception placed in the legal letter he was sent that allowed me to communicate with him if necessary in respect of the comp newsgroup operations should he post there.

He did, gently at first and then the cycle repeated and he became obnoxious and nasty and ignored warning and entreaties and finally he met the “Twit Filter” as only serial offenders did.  Becoming number four.

He was certainly gifted with a turn of phrase the old Plankton.  Labeling me, laughably as “Osama Bin Software” and “The Most Powerful Man In Shareware” as well as a host of other rather clever, but pointless titles.

To this day he still comes to the newsgroups and posts – at least the alt groups, stirs the pot, slanders people and post occasionally on the newsgroups I’ve moderated due to an amnesty granted three years ago.

Though I’ve written little about it this was probably the most exhaustive and detrimental of all the battles waged on Usenet for the newsgroups – and the one that coincided with me becoming extremely ill – though not due to it, it was just more stuff to heap on top of an existing and growing illness I had.

Illness

By 2003 until around 2005 I was sporadic in running the groups.  I was in hospital in 2003 eight times, for three weeks each time approximately, within twelve months.

Kathy Morgan, a long time reader and Usenet enthusiast and moderator, inspired me to kick things over again, did a lot of running around to get RoboMod running and hosted and basically gave me the kick in the backside I needed, Kathy becoming the Assistant Moderator.

The groups returned, but the momentum was lost and posts rose a little for a while then finally slowed to a trickle as the Usenet exodus began in earnest.

The Worm Has Turned And I Resign Today

Times have changed, Usenet is history and I’m dog tired of the whole thing.  This article only brushes on the surface of what was, for me, a job that was for many years harrowing and an enormous time sap.

Today their are few posts to moderate, much of it is rubbish and I find myself resenting every post that comes in as I have done my bit.  To my mind it’s time to concentrate on getting my own business together, some altruism for my own customers and the role of police officer, peace keeper and dictator is not compatible with this.

Ultimately, if I remain, I’ll have to reject a post from somebody making a software announcement that potentially competes with my own products.  I never have and never would allow myself to do this for any other reason than such a post violating the charter for some reason – but the accusation would be made as it’s the accusation of the moronic inept and frankly I don’t need it.

This wasn’t a problem in the past because:

1. There were fewer “developers”.
2. My products were so vertical that most people simply ignored or didn’t know of the market.

I’ve seen a lot during my time as moderator.

• I’ve seen the rise and fall of download sites (at least as far a ethics go).
• The rise and fall of many search engines
• The rise and fall of more software companies and products than most people see in a lifetime.
• The rise and fall of “this is the new thing, the old thing is gone, you’re all gone, look at me I’m the future.”

I’ve seen PAD invented and PAD abused, software associations spring up and wither and die on the vine.

I’ve seen newbs come in with bright eyes and expectations.  Asking the same questions year in year out and making the same mistakes year in and year out and those same people getting mad when it’s pointed out to them – even though they’ve asked folks for advice.

I’ve seen “experts” come and go, some spouting true pearls of wisdom and others spouting claptrap and mumbo-jumbo as only a shaman can.

I’ve seen flame wars on SAS becoming “the only way” for a decade, yet it never has become so.

That Linux would replace Windows going back to the mid nineties (actually mid eighties if you count Unix being said to take over DOS).

I’ve seen people claim web app’s would kill desktop software by 2002, yet here we are in 2008 and this hasn’t happened.

The boring and gut wrenching, at least for me, part is that these same claims, these same arguments, the same type of “newbie” hasn’t changed in a decade.  It remains what it always was.  A pointless, infantile outpouring of ill conceived typed diarrhea.

The concept of “Web 2.0″ is rejected by most adhering to the “Shareware Ethos”.

And frankly I don’t care anymore.  I’m content to divorce myself from those who cling to it, knowing that irrelevancy and time have their own mechanisms of change.

If there truly is a “Web 2.0″ ethos then there needs to be a “Software 2.0″ ethos too.  Many are doing exactly that.  I link to them in my blog roll for a reason – and it’s precisely this reason.  They get it…

In conclusion, I hope I managed to help some people over the last decade.  The newsgroups are quiet now, very few posts compared to their heyday.  I do know I have made many fine friends over the years, people inside the ASP, people on Usenet, people all around the world for whom I have the utmost respect.

It’s been an epic year for me

The last twelve months have seen me do more than I’ve done in the last six or seven.

• I ran as a candidate in a Federal election here in Australia November 2007.
• I swore off ever writing software again and decided to concentrate on audio.
• I quit the ASP as a member, and I admit as a protest on a specific issue I felt strongly about – and still do.   As an ex Vice President and ex Board Member and a volunteer there for many things in that organization it was a difficult, but timely decision.
• I discovered the meaning behind the idea of “Web 2.0″
• I realized what I’d been missing.
• I read books and articles by people, some of whom are in the blog roll of this blog.
• I realized, in no small part thanks to Bob Walsh that I could believe again in building a software company – though I doubt Bob realized exactly how life changing and the kind of thoughts that emerged from my own study of his works.
• I made a decision to write MixAction.
• I decided to do it right – build a company and not just a product.
• I paced myself during June 2008 for 30 Days to build a product and came up with a neat prototype for MixAction that is now being fleshed out to become a more rounded product.
• I launched this blog as an experiment and rediscovered what I’d forgotten.  That content is a more powerful tool for search engine ranking than any number of SEO tips, tricks, tweaks and download site submissions.
• That my family and my business were and are more important than anything else. with the possible exception of politics in respect of my business – but never instead of my family.
• I’ve gotten a handle on a major life changing and truthfully life ending illness – and won.
• I’ve stopped adhering to the old ethos’, examined new ones and decided the best ethos – for me, not necessarily for you – was the one I developed for myself based on what I thought I knew, what I learnt and am learning and what might be most likely to transpire.

Do I regret being a Usenet Moderator for ten years?

No.  I learnt a lot.  I saw a lot and I learnt to respect a lot of people and I hope earnt their respect too.  Sure I made some enemies, but overall most people were great people and to those people I say thanks for the opportunity!

An EPIC FAIL became an EPIC GAIN and it is also with some mixed feelings, it’s true, that I resign today as moderator of the comp.software.shareware.* (css.*) newsgroups – and yet an incredible sigh of relief escapes me and I don’t regret the decision one bit.

I’ve done my part for this industry – at my cost, financially and personally – for ten years.  Enough is enough.

Thank you to each and everyone that supported me over the years – you will not be forgotten by me.

A big thank you to Kathy Morgan – previously my co-moderator and now the primary moderator of the newsgroups.  Kathy is a wonderful person who did a fantastic job in getting me off my butt and the groups moving again at one point when I was experiencing some of the darkest days of my life.

Thanks to my wife for sacrificing so much of herself, and without wanting to her own life indirectly, through putting up with having a husband who was a Usenet moderator.

Scott Kane

Ex Moderator comp.software.shareware.*

Quote of the day:
Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia. – Charles M. Schulz

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1. What is MixAction?
   MixAction is a Windows software product (Win 2000, XP and Vista or above) for theatrical live audio playback.
2. Why are you blogging about it?
   Transparency.  The idea is two fold.  One it keeps me moving forward as I chart my own progress, secondly it’s my hope that it the blogging process assists others starting up in their efforts.  I also hope it encourages others to start their own blogs and blog about the development of their own products.
3. Wasn’t this supposed to be finished in 30 Days or something?
   No.  The idea was to see if a product could be written and released in 30 Days.  That 30 Days was from June 1st 2008 to June 30th 2008.  What I ended up with was a working prototype for the product.  Given the complexity of multi-media software, the requirements for live playback and the necessity to make it genuinely simple to use while working using paradigms that fit with live theater (theatre) in particular, 30 Days simply wasn’t enough time to do the product justice.  So I bit the bullet and held of releasing and instead continued to refine the product.
4. So you’ve abandoned the idea of “release early”?
   Not at all.  The defintion of “release early” is certainly not “30 Days”.  While a simple product can be written in that time frame a complex product can not.  It can take months and even years.  At this point though I expect to release this product this year, though I am not prepared to even estimate the actual release time.
5. Isn’t the audio playback software market crowded with freebies like Windows Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp and so on?
   In the context of just audio playback yes.  But if you have ever done live audio, or theatrical live audio – as I have – then you would know that using one of these tools for this purpse is quirky, unreliable and extremely limiting. Many live audio people are still using CD’s and fighting with mechnical failures, disk skipping, bad labelling and human error. MixAction’s name was chosen because Mixing Action is exactly what it does, further it does it in a manner that supports the notion of Acts and Scenes and allows for automation and project building in order to minimize mistakes and mechanical failures during a performance.  Increasingly MixAction leans more towards being a simple to use live performance DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) rather than a “player” given the toolkit the software is shipping with right from release.
6. You make a lot of noise on this blog about “domain knowledge”.  What’s yours?
   I’ve been involved in software development since my early twenties at a professional level.  I’ve been an ISV before – though at that time the term was not used – the term mISV wasn’t coined until a few years ago.  So I have several decades of experience as a developer.  I began programming however when I was sixteen.  My first product was a music synthesizer using the Vic 20 and later the Commodore 64′s SID chip.  Yes, I actually used this as an “instrument” live in a band and on multitrack recordings.  I began doing voice over work in high school.  I appeared first on an a parody production of Jeff Waynes “War of the Worlds” and later on an original musical production of  “The Time Machine.”  Later I gained a certificate in radio broadcasting in Melbourne and did voice overs for radio commercials for Melbourne’s 3AW and 3XY.  My voice can also be heard on many training and sales videos for software developers on the Internet as well as some DVD’s available in Australia to companies for staff training.  It also appears on many telephone answering services.  In addition I hold certification as an audio engineer and own and operate a small recording studio, used primarily by myself, in my office.  So I’ve worked as an audio engineer and as a live sound engineer.  Most of these roles where performed in addition to my full time employment as a programmer for several multi-national companies.  I have also worked at night as a nightclub DJ in the 1980′s and have taught computer related subjects and programming at tertiary level as I hold some limited teaching certifications.  I have also taught and assisted startup companies in the process of business development.  I guess you could say a wide variety of “domains” here.   Needless to say my work in live audio meant direct hands on experience in theatrical evnvironments including plays, musicals, pageants and as the voice and music for county “fairs” or “shows” as they are called downunder.

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