Creed Chris O’Hanlon, on the couch, with Mike Walsh, Sydney, October 2003

8 October 2003

Dot-com flamboyance, and web design world domination, are terms synonymous with Australian entrepreneur Creed Chris O’Hanlon. Spike Networks, the web design company O’Hanlon co-founded in 1994, quickly expanded from its base in the Sydney suburb of Double Bay, into Asia, Japan, and the United States, thanks to the backing of numerous venture capitalists.

But Spike didn’t just do extravagant, and expensive, websites. At the height of the dot-com folly, Spike was even operating a radio station.

As with most things dot-com though, Spike came tumbling down in spectacular fashion, although O’Hanlon had left the company long beforehand. Workers (including someone I knew personally) lost jobs, investors were out of pocket by millions, while the rest of us were left wondering how so little could have come of so much hype.

Not helping matters were the stories that began emerging of the indulgent lifestyle led by O’Hanlon, during his time as boss. No expense was spared. Five star hotels, first class airline travel, and gourmet dining the world over, you name it. Then there was the extramarital affair with a Spike employee, which later resulted in allegations of sexual harassment.

So when an email from The Domain, a local media and technology professionals networking event arrived the other week, inviting me to see O’Hanlon speak, I knew I didn’t want to miss out. He would be talking to Australian futurist and speaker Mike Walsh, at the Hotel CBD, in downtown Sydney, as part of Domain’s On the Couch interview series.

Those expecting to see O’Hanlon pelted with projectiles however, would have been disappointed.

This despite Walsh pointing out O’Hanlon, in wearing a red shirt, had readied himself for any rotten tomatoes that might be thrown his way. In the end, the Spike co-founder only had to field a total of three audience questions, none of which related to dubious past activities, business or otherwise. Strategically, O’Hanlon headed off any acrimony, by admitting at the onset the “terrible” things he was accused of, were, “unfortunately true”.

Instead he offered an array of insights into online media and communications in general. He has been working as a consultant in Japan for a well known car manufacturer in recent times, and spoke of how mobile phones had changed the previously rigidly structured fashion in which the Japanese communicated with each other. O’Hanlon also spoke of the death of copyright, and the dearth of ideas when it comes to conceiving creative advertising campaigns for electronic media.

He also mentioned the upcoming publication of a book he is writing, which we were told would be titled The Zen of Failure. If nothing else, all of this shows that there are always opportunities to turn failure into, if not success, at least money. The right attitude is also useful, especially when trying to turn around a tide of negative perception. The gift of the gab, that is, the ability to sound intelligent, articulate, and well worded, is also somewhat useful.

Originally published Wednesday 8 October 2003, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Vale Windows NT4, you were the best

4 August 2003

My days of working with the Window’s operating system NT4 are all but over. It seems ironic that this outcome was brought about while I was trying to install some updated security patches for NT4, from the Microsoft website.

After the updates had been installed, I was unable to dial back onto the net. When I investigated, I discovered that all the dial-up networking protocols had somehow corrupted, presumably during the installation of the new security patches.

Then I noticed something else. Various icons on my desktop where jumping around, or sometimes vanishing completely when I clicked on them. I ran a virus check, and discovered the presence of some sort of hack tool in the NT systems folder.

There has been an increasing incidence of hack attacks on PCs in recent months, which has partly been caused by security vulnerabilities in some versions of Internet Explorer, which allow would be hackers relatively easy access to susceptible computers.

Possibly hackers had tried to access my PC while I was in the process of downloading the security updates. Talk about ironic.

To complicate matters, my anti-virus programme wasn’t able to remove the offending item. It turns out this particular hack tool is a rather tricky number, as it attaches itself to various computer ports and cannot be deleted easily because NT4 considers it a running or in use process.

It was enough to make me reconsider my PC situation though. My current “home” computer is now over six years old, and in more recent times has been developing an increasing number of small, though irritating, problems.

While it is nothing that a full system rebuild couldn’t resolve, I have decided that since I am doing more work from home now, it is well and truly time to upgrade my computer system.

I have a philosophy of running things into the ground before I replace them, and since I have had, up until now, access to more modern and powerful PCs at work, I had not been too worried about replacing my aging home computer.

All going well, I should be up and running using Windows XP, on a new super chunky PC by early next week. I am now waiting to see how XP compares to NT4, as XP is based on NT4. Obviously there will be a few degrees of difference in terms of technology advances between the two operating systems, but it is stability I am more interested in.

In the almost four years I was running NT4, the system only crashed two times. I consider that an exemplary track record, given the OS (Windows 95) I used prior to migrating to NT4 used to crash at least two times a day.

Originally published Monday 4 August 2003.