Miguel Paraz

In Quora User Tips: Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Make a note of it (if I can be so eloquent as to state the obvious).

I use Simplenote, but there's also Evernote, and of course there's:



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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Absolutely. If you are in mobile or mobile is important to you (apps etc) then this is the one show that matters.

CTIA is a pale shadow, and then there are niche events - but nothing else comes close.

One question is Mobile World Asia: the same organisers are trying to promote that: in past years it was weak, but they are promising much gerater resources this year so it might be good.

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Start as a night auditor; preferably in the largest full-service hotel, with the most food-and-beverage, meeting and banquet, lounge and gift shop operations on premises, that you can get to hire you.

It's actually a pretty easy job to get as far as hotel front-office jobs go - the hours are crap. It runs in most properties at 11 at night to 7 in the morning, (and no, it can't be done in the daytime), which is why the demand exceeds supply when the economy is good and jobs are plentiful, and why supply doesn't exceed demand by much when jobs are scarce and you see more people competing for any job they can get (including hotel night audit jobs with crappy hours). You don't want to be there forever, but as you yourself pointed out, you're there to learn.

That's where you learn how the numbers go together and what affects them, essential know-how for the management of any business.

Pay attention to what you're doing in that job. Back in the day, experience was a plus, but if you brought along sufficient accounting skills to balance your checkbook the old fashioned way (using the form printed on the back of your bank statement, making the entries and doing the math; rather than just checking your balance online), you could be trained - balancing accounts, after all, is most of what the job of night audit is about. (Most business get audited by their accountants every quarter. Hotels are unique in that they get audited every night.) Nowadays, nearly all hotels have computerized front desk management systems; so to too many hire-for-personality-and-train-for-ability hotel 'administrators' and the people they insist on hiring, the job consists mostly of going down a list of reports to be printed, and printing out, and collating and routing, several stacks of reports. If it wasn't for the fact that it's necessary to do a bucket check and confirm the rates of all your guests, and make sure your cash and credit card totals balance (as well as your restaurant and banquet checks if it's a full-service hotel), a trained monkey or service animal could do it.

But you want to be more than a button-pusher and report printer: you want to read through those reports as you produce them, achieve an understanding of what those reports tell you, why they're necessary, and why they come up the way they do. Consider, every time you read through a bunch of numbers, if you want a certain figure on that report to come up differently (e.g., a revenue value to be increased, a cost factor to be decreased), what someone in the hotel must do to cause that to happen.

Cornell University, and quite a few other colleges and universities, have degree
programs in hotel administration for people who want to go to work for a company like Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott or Kimpton, and move on to run a big, full-service luxury hotel. If you're just starting out in life, finishing high school, and you're confident that that's what you want to do with your life; then apply to two or three of them, including Cornell. Nearly all of them are good (before applying to any degree program at any college, I'd check behind them to see where their alumni are placed); but Cornell has the School of Hotel Administration that schools of hospitality administration, etc., at all other colleges and universities around the world all gather around on Sunday morning to bow down and pray to. (The school of journalism at Columbia, the school of architecture at Yale, and Harvard Law enjoy similar status within their own respective fields: hotel management is the thing for which Cornell enjoys the highest reputation.) So, if that's where you are with your life, apply to Cornell as well as one or two of the others, just to see if you can get into Cornell. You don't have to worry about where Cornell's alumni are placed: if you can get them to take you, you could someday run the Waldorf.

Some of the stuff you're going to see here, however, is things that you can pick up at the local comm-tech - or even on your own. Formal education will give you a running start and some industry contacts, and teach you a lot of things it would take you a long time to pick up on your own. But if you don't have that much of it, don't sweat it. I've seen people with advanced degrees perform dismally at this business, and they still have a job. I've seen people whose education is limited to a GED and a few night classes, given the right opportunity, do well at it.

Either way, there is no substitute for the hands-on experience and the recordkeeping experience you acquire on night audit. If I'm doing the hiring for a general manager or assistant general manager -- any salaried management accountability -- of a property, I require a minimum of six months experience as a full-time night auditor - regardless of education (even a degree from Cornell) and previous experience (even successful hotel management experience) - and the only reason I don't require more is because doing so would thin out the pool of qualified applicants more than it's worth. I might, very rarely, cut someone a break on the requirement if they have previous management experience and I know them personally and know how they work (Favoritism? Perhaps, but reference checks have limited value in this business, I have to go on some rational basis, and I neither accept nor content myself with any substitute for my own personal knowledge . . .), but by the time I put them in charge of an investment worth four million dollars or more (probably someone else's investment, but one for which I myself am accountable), they're going to have some night audit experience - their first day on the job, like it or not, is going to begin at 11pm.

The knowledge, skills, and abilities required of a night auditor are
much the same as those required for a manager – and will be called into
play, if not quite as frequently, with a suddenness that requires
thinking fast and making choices that, when second-guessed, prove to be
correct, or at least respectable. (You're all alone, the only employee – indeed, the only representative of the entire company – on the property at 3:30 a.m. An incident comes up – often a recordkeeping mess left behind by a desk clerk, but perhaps something that challenges your diplomatic skills with a guest or visitor, perhaps something that tests your understanding of building engineering or maintenance, perhaps something bizarre or unusual, perhaps something that might have serious consequences for yourself, a guest, or even the hotel itself, or the entire company. The general manager or AGM can be called – maybe – but even if so, he or she will like you a lot more if you don't get him or her out of bed at that hour of the morning, especially if your own handling of the situation is sound. You're in charge – what are you going to do?).

And don't stop there. (As you'll see, you can be stalled there for a very long time if you do.) Another important part of it is sales and marketing.

• You can be an operational bozo with no organizational skills whatsoever, who isn't competent to manage the inside of an empty paper bag without letting it deflate; but if you have a high level of social skills, networking ability, lots of contacts, and a proven talent for bringing in business for the hotel, someone, somewhere will hire you in a senior management position -- and put people around you to serve as drones who are operationally competent, who pick up the slack, who actually do the work involved in managing the operation and delivering on the things you promise your customers, and who are put and kept there to make you look good. (It won't be me, although I might look at you for a sales and marketing slot. Sorry if I sound cynical, but I've seen it happen too many times: indeed, one of the reasons I formed my own company was that I got sick of seeing it. It's also half the reason that I - as noted - put limited faith in reference checks.)
• On the other hand, you can be the one guy who can be counted upon to keep the property running like a fine watch; you can have the highest technical skills, be absolutely aces when it comes to management ability, able to supervise a large staff and keep everyone working efficiently and happily, know and understand the business operation inside out, keep the rooms clean and the front desk operation and reservation system running tight and the building warm and the bottom line in the black no matter what the conditions or circumstances - but if you don't know how to generate business for your hotel, your career prospects could be limited to being one of those drones.

Many newer, larger and/or corporate-owned hotels have a 'director of sales' or a 'sales manager', at $30k per year give or take, but most of the training they get, at least from within the hotel industry itself, is all wrong. The biggest reason why is that it's all uniform, yet every hotel and every location is unique and has unique needs.

There are some common principles that apply to all hotel sales and marketing, but you want to do what works best for the hotel in which you're doing it - and have the wisdom to know the difference. How to do it right is a subject in itself, but try to get started doing it at a smaller property where you can pick up the sales and marketing accountability as part of another job in the hotel - just the opposite of the sort of property I recommend to learn to do night audit. Many smaller, family-owed hotels who don't have someone already dedicated to working on it will be glad to let you have it. (You don't have to worry about having, or earning, credentials for it: either you can do it or you can't, and if you can, word will get around . . .)

• Use the resources available to you by your hotel's franchise organization (e.g., study the group booking contract forms, know the revenue tracks, know the four primary travel market segments [business travelers, extended-stay travelers, leisure travelers traveling as singles or couples, and leisure family travelers] and how to identify and the address the needs of each, etc.)
• Realize that half of what you're going to attempt isn't going to work, and focus on identifying what's working and what's not, and doing more of what works and less of what doesn't work. Be candid about your results.
• Pay more attention to people like Seth Godin, and Karl at The Startup Daily, both of whom publish blogs you'll find useful (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ , http://thestartupdaily.com/ ), and limited attention to 'industry professionals' (I'll get back to those).
  
• Run your own source-of-business reports if your property's computer system doesn't do it for you, and analyze the heck out of the data you get back; where your present business is coming from, how to get more of it if it's working for you, and how to reach business that you're not getting.
• Don't get into cold-calling, or telemarketing, unless you're sure you'll score a sale out of it, unless you're specifically told to by someone who's micro-managing you, or unless you're one of those DOS types who feel they have to spend a lot of time doing it just to prove to management that they're trying. These are time-consuming techniques that are dismally ineffective by contrast to the time consumed doing them. (Many will argue the point with me, but even those people will admit they don't like being on the receiving end of a cold sales call, and hate telemarketers who call them.)
  

I could go on and on. This is one of those Quora posts that over time, I'll keep coming back to and editing.

It helps if you also show up with some background in

• building construction, engineering and maintenance. A repair can be costly unless you know enough about it to know which options to explore.
• food service. There is a new tier of hotel product emerging - the upscale select service property (e.g., Hilton Garden Inn, Hyatt Place, Courtyard, Hotel Indigo, Wyndham Garden Inn and the like) - and food service is re-emerging as a valuable skill in this market tier.
• retail. People skills will move you along much faster in this business. Some people put too much emphasis on that, but a certain level of comptence and confidence in this area is essential. For some people, it comes naturally; others (for example, introverts like me) have to work on it.
  

Read everything you can get your hands on on the state of the business. Find a recent edition of Jerome Vallen's Check In, Check Out (it's used as a college text, so the current edition will always be a little pricy, but you can get them used on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/mn/search/... - and the last previous edition will be current enough) - and an edition of the same book from about twenty years ago (it's changed that much since then, but the old information isn't dated or useless, and does a better job of starting with the basics).

Subscribe to as many industry blogs, and read all of the trade publications that you can. (My own suggestions are http://www.hotelsmag.com/init.aspx , http://www.hotelmanagement.net/ , http://www.hotelresource.com/ , http://hotellaw.jmbm.com/ to start, and you'll want to seek, find and add your own, and please share them with me.) Remember, however, that this material is informative, but judgment is required in application. Much of it is press releases by corporate owners or management companies (e.g., "Fergus T. Wingo Promoted To Assistant To Assistant Special Projects Director at Carlson Wagonlit"), and columns and blogs by people looking to advance their own resume value or marketability as consultants (e.g., "How to Engage Your Staff In Providing Fantabulous Service!"), all trying to make themselves look good. You decide whether they look good, and whether what they're sharing is, or isn't, useful from day to day. (Some of it is. You have to discern, and make the call - and revisit the subject from time to time, and notice when maybe you're wrong, and reconsider . . . It might work in theory, but will it work in real life? Nearly half the hotel managers in the world don't get that, nearly all of the other half don't even try. Be one of the ones who do both.)

Finally, I'll leave you with my usual disclaimer about career advice, resume-writing, interviewing, etc. - all of this will work great if I'm the one doing the hiring. It's what I'd want an applicant for a management job to show up with. But every individual has their own criteria; and as always, qualifications are whatever whoever's doing the qualifying says the qualifications are. What I'm telling you here is how to learn hotel management (and there's still no substitute for doing it), not necessarily how to get a job managing a hotel (before forming my own company, that one always kept me stumped more times than I care to recall . . .). For that, you're on your own. But I hope here to give you something you might find helpful, that will serve you well and empower you to succeed no matter how you get your chance at it.

Indeed, I've ripped off an interviewing trick from one of the smarter owners I've dealt with: if I look at you for a hotel management job, we're going to become e-mail pals for a few weeks. I want to hear from you all about what you're going to do with that hotel if I turn it over to you. It'll take more than one exchange of e-mails - I want to see that you're forming a realistic plan, for that particular hotel in that particular location, not just giving me your canned sales pitch, and I want to see you're asking the right questions. (When I look at a new hotel to sign, the first thing I look for now is its STAR reports if I can get them, its TripAdvisor reviews, and anything else I can get about that hotel and its nearby competitors - even photos and promotional material - from open sources. That'll give me a pretty good idea what I'm going to find - and look for next - when I get there) I want to see the motivation it takes to keep coming up with new ideas and keep those e-mails coming two or three times a week for several weeks. Keep that in mind as a potentially useful exercise as you progress in preparing yourself for a career move in hotel management. Just for drill, run it on any hotel you'd like. Get in the habit of doing that. (But don't neglect the other steps.)

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

The American names are in katakana. (Japanese (language): Why does Japanese (language) use multiple types of characters (hiragana, katakana, and kanji), and when is each used?) The rest of it is sensationalized marketing language typically used on ad campaigns for certain highly anticipated books, movies or TV shows.

At the top,
スティーブ・ジョブズ　(suteiibu jobuzu)
Steve Jobs

ウォルター・アイザックソン　（worutaa aizakkuson)
Walter Isaacson

井口耕二訳　(inokuchi kouji yaku)
Translated by Inokuchi Koji

最初で最後の決定版伝記 (saishode saigono ketteiban denki)
The 'first and final' definitive biography

いま明かされる、カリスマのすべて (ima sayaka sareru, karisuma no subete)
Everything about that charisma now made clear

緊急出版! (kinkyuu shuppan!)
Rushed to the printing press! This line has to be the most worthless, ignominious and annoying of all. The exclamation mark takes the cake. It's like a commercial for a dramatic finale to a TV series (see below).

講談社 (koudansha)
Kodansha (the publisher's name)

Gotta love the exclamation marks. He doesn't like the cover either.

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An assessment:

1. Historically, gambling has been significant source of revenue for organized, as well as, unorganized, criminals.
2. Gambling is viewed as an "affront" to the "moral sensibilities" of many.
3. Gambling is an easy means to avoid tax collection.
4. Gambling is an easy means to launder criminal gains.
5. The presence of gambling has been historically tied to alcoholism and prostitution. As a longtime Nevadan, I can categorically state that if gambling is present, the above vices (as well as drug abuse) aren't going to be difficult find relatively nearby.

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Cloudera (Hadoop) and Rapleaf (reputation API) are two well-known examples, but there are tons of others. Java isn't great for the B2C startups that get a lot of press because tools like Django and Rails and the many realtime frameworks make it much easier to do what they need. Java is strong in places they don't see as critical and weaker on the client-facing web-app side where their products live and die. [1]

Companies in other spaces don't give up as much by choosing Java over Python and Ruby, especially if their products are more complex than traditional web apps. Apixio, my employer for the past two summers, uses Java because it's a solid, safe, and well-supported language that's great for heavy-duty backend work and acceptable enough for the web stuff once you whip it into shape. It's also nice when your engineers can switch between parts of the codebase without having to switch languages, though Python has that covered just as well.

It probably just comes down to what the company values. If they need Java's enterprise culture or the talent pool or the JVM but don't care as much about rapid development, it's gonna be a pretty easy choice. Likewise, wanting to move quickly and just bang something out with more wiggle room makes languages like Python pretty attractive.

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[1] The Play framework is looking pretty sweet, but it doesn't have nearly the traction of alternatives in Ruby and Python (or even PHP).

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Consulting companies and software shops writing custom software and glue code, and not products, live and die by Java.

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Having worked at one of the organizations initially funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I can honestly say that his initiatives are bold, necessary, and highly respected among the scientific community. Although I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs and what he was able to do with tech gadgets and industry, history should better remember Bill Gates for his challenge to society and particularly to the financial elite to solve real world problems.

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Code written by a women tends to have a lot more #'s or //'s.
They are more willing to comment code and actually write comments that are more than cursory explanations of what the code does.

Of course there are some women who are as cryptic as their male brethren, but in this day and age, if you see a well commented piece of code you can assume a woman probably wrote it.

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In Apple North Carolina Data Center: Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

People have gleaned hints about Apple's server infrastructure from job listings. Not surprisingly for a large company that's been around for two decades, they are using a range of technologies, including IBM servers running AIX, Sun servers running Solaris, Oracle databases, IBM and Oracle clustering and high availability software, OS X Servers, Linux, and more.  As to what's being used where, its hard to tell, but I remember reading that a lot of their consumer-facing services are built with WebObjects and run on Sun servers running Solaris.  Probably with an Oracle database back end.  How much of that they'll keep when they grow into the NC data center remains to be seen.

Hardware for builds at this scale are often fairly exotic (or exotic combinations of the most mundane components). One google datacenter consisted of a custom batch of commercially available motherboards, each hooked to a custom DC-DC power supply with a lead-acid battery, and two SATA hard drives. The modules had no case and were mounted with custom brackets into racks. In 2007 Sun showed off a shipping container full of racked and wired systems that just needed a hookup to power, a network, and a supply of water for cooling. Since then, both Google and Microsoft have done large builds using shipping container based modules of their own design, and these days, there are companies like SGI that offer systems designed for high-density deployment that can be delivered racked in a modular shipping container if that's what you desire.

As for what Apple is doing, little is known, but I've heard that in the latter phases of this build, they plan to use a significant percentage of the space for servers based on custom modules of their own design.  The basic design can be adapted to different uses depending on how the components are assembled. All variants have the same circuit board with dual ethernet interfaces. The board connects to a switched network backplane that also provides power. Each board can hold up to two CPU chips. For cost and power-efficiency, they a using a dual-core successor to the A4 ARM CPU in the current generation of iOS devices, which also bring advantages over the current A4 part in terms of max clockspeed and instructions per cycle. Each board can hold RAM, and flash memory for use as a fast solid state disk. It is not clear whether the RAM and Flash will be mounted directly on the board, or on some sort of of daughter card, like a standard mobile SIMM. Each board also has pads for connecting a header than allows attachment of two SATA disks to controllers on the CPU die (and power from the on-board DC-DC power supply). Each CPU has it's own bank of memory, but there is a cache coherent interconnect that allows each others CPU to access the others memory.

Choice of components is used to tailor the basic design to different roles. A balanced node has two CPUs, a full compliment of RAM on each CPU, 128 GB of fast flash, and is basically sandwiched between two large SATA drives (with a suitable air gap). Cold storage nodes have just one CPU, half the RAM, little or no flash storage and SATA disks. Cache nodes have no disks, two CPUs and max RAM + flash. It's rumored that the same basic board will be used in a consumer storage appliance offering, perhaps a successor to TimeCapsule

Modules fit vertically into a drawer like chassis (kind of like a Sun "thumper" storage server). Each case has its own backup battery and switching for the network backplane. Each node runs a special build of OS X/ iOS.  Modules with hard disk storage occupy the space of 3 or 4 diskless nodes.  What's cool is that power density is pretty constant no matter what kind modules fill the chassis.  For some applications, chassis will be filled with a mix of module types to take advantage of the crossectional bandwidth available within a chassis.

Ok. I'm sorry, I made the last three paragraphs up out of whole cloth (I didn't want to do dishes), but it's fun to think about, isn't it?

The real answer, I would expect that Apple will use hardware from a third party like SGI, or maybe Sun, that is designed for this sort of large scale deployment where failing servers are just disabled until they can be swapped out, rather than focusing on redundancy with each server itself. I'd guess that the servers would run Solaris or Linux if an external vendor supported it at the right price. However, a lot of these large scale builds seem to use an internally supported build of linux or similar. If Apple went that route, I think that they'd run a GUI-less build of OS X, rather than Linux.

We may never know the real answer.

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

You would need to organize them greatly (can be done, but its a nuisance). 'LIONS' (LinkedIn Open Networkers) love to suggest that you 'dig your well before you are thirsty. I like to reply, 'try the water.' You can have thousands of contacts - who know you for nothing. Try asking one for anything - an answer even. There is no relationship. Its not real.
Other than that - sure, go for it!

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

Yes and No.

Yes, if those contacts are connection amassing / bragging types.

No, if you're truly someone who's in a field (like business development for e.g.) who has accumulated these contacts over time.

Frankly, no one cares how many connections you have. Focus on being great at your job but don't forget to regularly add folks you come in contact with (at work and events) and quit counting.

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The current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox or Opera Mobile that include their own compilers and interpreters.

"3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework."

Browsers available for iOS use the built-in WebKit or do not execute any JavaScript on the device itself (like Opera Mini, which uses a proxy server).

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Miguel Paraz voted up an answer.

No, it's not rude to let someone know that they are being rude.A good way to handle this is to act a bit shocked at their behavior and say one of the following:

• Don't you think that's a rather personal question to ask someone?
• Wow! That's quite a question for someone you hardly know/just met.
• You know, where I come from we don't ask strangers questions like that.
• I am having a problem getting a handle on why you would need to know this.

The key is to say something that let's them know that they have stepped over the line.

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