Ben Brooks shared a link to Mailbox and Folder Management in iOS Mail and it has changed how I use Mail.app almost completely … in a good way. I have two folders I want to keep track of outside of the unified inbox, and now I have easy access to both of those folders.
Simply awesome.
Email is probably the most important communication platform that I have, and this just made iOS better for me in a non-trivial manner. The saddest part for me is that I didn’t know about it before.
In Customers for life, HP’s Mary McCoy tries out outline why HP is making a rather large change to how they handle firmware updates for their line of servers. ZDNet’s Ed Bott was the one who brought it to my attention via a retweet on Twitter and I chimed in with the following tweet:
Wow. An unfortunate decision by HP. I'll definitely think twice about purchasing servers from them. http://t.co/UuK8lFpKzh
— Bob Martens (@boblmartens) February 8, 2014
Today I stick by that. While I can’t speak for the whole of Martin Luther College, I know that I will not and cannot recommend that we purchase HP servers. Luckily, we don’t have anything in our server room at this moment from HP besides their ProCurve network solutions, but now I’m starting to worry about losing access to that firmware in the future as well.
That doesn’t sit well with me.
I understand that HP is probably looking for new revenue from existing customers as it seems the while PC industry is shifting to who-knows-what, but this will hurt HP in the eyes of many.
There are many times I scoff at the idea of technology being able to always change our lives for the better. That is not to say that it CANNOT change our lives for the better, but the idea that adding technology will ALWAYS change our lives for the better I think is not just wrong, but toxic.
However, there is one area where it does help me and that is in keeping track of what I am eating.
I am not going to pretend that the Lose It! app is going to magically make me more healthy, but what it does provide me is an avenue to look at what I am eating and to make some decisions. For me, it is portion size.
Being able to scan the bar codes of what I am eating/drinking and to know the nutritional contents of that item without needing to sit down and tabulate and read makes it something I am more likely to do. Keeping track over time allows me to keep track of how my habits might be changing. Adding the ability to track my weight at the same time gives me a measurable outcome with which I can see a difference being made.
Those are all good things.
However, it is also not enough. I still need to take that information and make choices about what I am and am not going to do. Technology can help us with things, but it cannot replace us as humans nor our need to make choices for ourselves.
So often technology tries to take the human out of the picture, but we love something important: the human.
Technology can help, it can be a tool, and it can enhance but it cannot, and should not replace.
I have been reminded that I should probably write some updates on how the farm projects are currently coming. We have a few “irons in the fire” so to speak, so I’ll just run through a few of them here.
For the first time we have taken the steps to create a business entity around some of the farming operation. Mainly we’ve taken our existing hog operation and turned it into a partnership and then had that partnership expand from there. It has allowed us to bring in more people officially and also start looking to the future and more expansion from our start.
By setting up the entity we are also able to free up one member of the family, my brother, to hopefully being working on the farm as his primary means of income. The hope is that this dedicated time will allow us to not just improve the existing operation, but free up some flex time for expanding into new areas as well.
The main area of expansion for 2014 is the doubling of our hog operation. This was the impetus for the creation of Martens Family Farm, the entity, and also will allow my brother the freedom to spend more time on the farm operation. It also means I will have a lot more to do with compliance paperwork and finances.
Right now the barn is nearing completion with much of the interior work to be done, but once the barn is complete we look forward to spending a single day bringing in all 4000 head of hogs into the entire operation and getting things up and running as quickly as possible. It is quite exciting.
This is my main goal. I want to try to eliminate as much of the physical paper being moved around the farm as possible. My parents own iPhones, and iPad, and an iMac so getting the files stored and moved around should not be a huge issue, I just need to start experimenting so that we can get things working.
We are using QuickBooks Online to handle the money portion or the business and their iOS apps make it quite easy to add receipts into the system. I have not really needed to touch the desktop web interface all that much since we started. It has been pretty good.
The next thing on my list is to purchase a small, portable scanner so that I can take it to the hog office, scan in the paperwork, and then go home and handle the task of organizing things from the comfort of my own home. I have narrowed it down to a few scanners and will report back what I will be using.
Some other ideas focus around the creation and completion of some simple iOS applications which would allow us to track the progress of the hog operation without needing to send faxes back to our partners every single day. That is a long-term goal, but I think I’ll have more to say on that in the future.
I’ve already stated one of them, the creation of some iOS apps to help with record-keeping and progress-tracking, so I won’t rehash that here.
I am actively looking at FarmLogs to help us track our crop operation as well, which is separate from the hogs but would allow us another testing ground for things. It would allow us to track more information about what we are doing and have done with our individual fields so that we would have some sort of electronic record of what is going on. I am just starting to see if it is something we could use in the coming year. When all of your partners in the operation own iOS devices, it opens up new possibilities.
We have a very small group of egg-laying hens right now and we plan on maybe starting to expand that as well. So far we have enough eggs for our family to use, but adding more hens would mean we would get to open it up to some of our friends in the area. I guess my grandmother used to keep 300 hens on the farm … but we are not looking at anything like that.
One larger project we are just beginning to talk about would be adding a small herd of beef cattle onto the place as well. We need to look at what permitting we would need to look into and also prep an area for the herd to graze, but we’ve always like the idea of keeping a small number of beef cattle around for our own benefit along with allowing us to sell custom beef to local people and restaurants. A lot more planning needs to go into this, but it is something we are actively thinking about.
There are many changes going on right now and many more to come. 2014 should be another banner year as we continue to push ahead with what we’ve done and diversify into new areas as well.
The agriculture sector is a mish-mash of expensive technology available only to the largest growers and nothing, which is how many smaller growers are still doing things. I think it is a fertile area for some small companies to make a big difference.
My family’s farm has a handful of egg-laying hens so I like the phrase “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. I tend to think it is a pretty good mantra to live by in many facets of life (not all, mind you).
In technology it gets to be interesting because many times we are encouraged to toss in as many “eggs” as possible into a single vendor’s “basket”.
Skype, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, Flickr, Pinterest, Soundcloud, and OpenOffice … Or just Google
— Rob England š¦ (@rob_england) December 17, 2013
That tweet made me just a little sad because the same sort of tweet could have been tossed around about Microsoft, or IBM before them. The “nobody ever was fired for using [insert platform here]” meme rings almost too true when it comes to technology decisions for many.
Now, I’m just as terrible since I try to stick as close to the Cupertino mothership as I can, but when making IT decisions IĀ spread the wealth around when appropriate. It is a “right tool of the right job” sort of approach which has served me well.
When leveraging a single platform you have so little control over to do so much, you put yourself at extreme risk if that platform owner would decide that they are going to amend the deal you’ve been working on. Think of it like poor Lando when Vader comes to Bespin. You better hope that Leia is there to save your skin in the end.
I know monolithic platforms can provide some benefits, but they also are filled with extreme risk. Google is no different from Apple is no different from Microsoft is no different from IBM. They’re all seeking money to stay alive (and create military robots … sorry). Relying too much on a single platform will, some point in the future, bring you pain.
The question is always: will the pain be worth it?