Category: Life

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Life Technology

Why I Have This Site

Jonathan Poritsky wrote Medium Confusion over at The Candler Blog. It is a good read about Medium and what it might be in the future (or the present or … eh … whatever). Go ahead and read it before going on because I’m going to focus on just a small portion of the entire post because I agree with it entirely.

Here is one of the money quotes for me:

The paid writers bring their clout to Medium, the platform, in order to convince unwitting writers that they should contribute to Medium, the magazine, for free. The paid authors are thus pied pipers of a sort, luring not the readers but the writers out of the web and into Medium.

This has been something I have missed as the web has continued to be splintered into smaller and smaller little fiefdoms. It might be because I have the ability to stand up my own WordPress installation (which you are on) and fool around with programming enough to really hurt myself, but you see it happening more and more by people posting their thoughts to Facebook-only, or Google+-only, or Medium … it is all the same. It locks the information up behind something else. Sure, it might just be a free login, but will it always be that way?

I have this site not because I want fame, but because I want to have my own place to write and “call my own”. I dabbled with Tumblr for a little while, but the idea of being able to control my own content and not need to worry about whether it would meet the standards of someone else is refreshing.

It is also a single place where you can find out what I am doing. If you happen to read something I wrote about Novell you might also find out that I am into Nintendo, or web design, or agriculture, or … you get the idea.

It feels like we are losing that.

Categories
Business Life Technology

Saying Goodbye

Everyone seems to want to say goodbye to IT, but I have some things I would like to say “goodbye” to in the technology world.

  • Optical drives. They take up an insane amount of space for something that I use maybe once a year … if that much anymore. Disk space is limited. They are noisy. They have moving parts. Just get rid of the things once and for all.
  • I might be alone in this, but I would love to do away with hinges on technology items. Laptops. Convertible tablets. Game Boy Advanced SPs. Just get rid of the things. Almost no company can make a good one (some ThinkPads get really close) and they are the weakest point of almost any device. I would love it if we could just do away with hinges. This is a major reason I would love to go iPad + desktops only in the future.
  • Can we finally do away with printers? I know some people still swear by them, and I am fully aware we are not going to get rid of them, but they are really annoying and a major cause of headaches. Their drivers are flaky, at best. They are loud. They are noisy. They have MANY moving parts. They break … all of the time. Can we finally do away with these things!?
  • The phrase “I’m not very good with computers” should be retired. I understand that you might not be comfortable with everything involved with computers and modern technology, but pulling out this excuse everything time something doesn’t go exactly the way you expected it is more annoying than endearing. There are plenty of times things go wrong for me … that’s part of the business. Just ask for your help and we’ll get through it together.
  • All current, standard USB cables. The whole lot of them are terrible. Having the Lightning connector on my iPad mini and iPhone 5 has seriously spoiled me … when it comes to good cables. Reversible. Solid-feeling. All USB cables are a sham. There is hope since the future of USB looks to be reversible but … we have yet to see what that will look like. Even the Thunderbolt port and cables are light years ahead of USB. Shameful, really.
  • Websites trying to sell something without clearly listing a price. Usually they are something like “Request a Quote” or “Call for Pricing” instead of clearly listing a pricing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the final pricing … but I want to know what I am getting into so that I don’t have to waste my time. The likelihood of me leaving your site if you don’t list pricing increases almost ten-fold.
  • Websites trying to sell a software product without good, and representative, screen shots. Every operating system comes with some way to take screen shots. DO. IT. I understand that design is not only what it looks like, but I want to know what it looks like. If your product pages are huge blocks of marketing text … I’m going elsewhere. Immediately.

This is not a complete list, but you get the idea.

Categories
Business Life Technology

Making Decisions

When questions arise and you need to start making decisions, how does one start? What is the framework one might use to frame the discussion. You need something to start with, some way to start to try to piece together what a single decision might mean.

How you frame decisions is a good way to judge what is important in your company or just important to you. Is price the determining factor at all times? Well, that says something about what you value (good or bad). Do you look for what everyone else is using? The newest? The fastest? Best value? Least cost-of-ownership? Most readily available? Allows you the most control? Allows you the least control?

There are thousands if not millions of other questions you can use to frame a decision, and each one says something slightly different about you, your company, and what you value. Good or bad.

Here are some questions I am currently sing to frame decisions at work:

  • Is this something we need to do?
  • Is this something we should be doing?
  • Should this be do-able on a mobile platform?
  • Do we need to have a mobile solution for this?
  • Are we legally able to do this?
  • How much extra effort will this take?
  • Do we have the expertise to do this well?
  • Do we have the resources in place to do this well?
  • Why are we going to do this?
  • Where is the money coming from?
  • Who is pushing for this?
  • Why are they pushing for this?

That is just a sampling, but they are usually floating up in my noggin just waiting for answers. If you look at this, almost every one of them could have the answer of “no”, and that is important because you need to be able to say “no” to things that really need it.

Does every question need a “yes” answer in order for you to do something? Of course not, but every question’s answer needs to be weighed in some manner so that you can make an informed decision when the time comes. Otherwise you are just making arbitrary decisions without really thinking things through.

Categories
Life

Great Expectations

My long-time friend Phil Wels just put up an excellent post over on Apathetic Thursday titled Disappointment and Expectations. I encourage everyone to sit down and read it as soon as you can.

Here is the crux of the entire thing:

You can only control you. You control how you act, you control how you react. Internally, you have control. You choose to be disappointed or not.

There is so much more good stuff, but I find myself parroting this to my boys are they grow older. It is something I needed to learn when I was younger and still struggle with to this day.

A good reminder.

Categories
Life Technology

Limiting The Future

Marco Arment posted some commentary to Matt Gemmell’s The Unacknowledged Compromise. While I’m not sure I disagree with much that was posted by the two gentlemen, the footnote added by Marco rubbed me the wrong way.

If you can’t afford both an iPad and a laptop, and you’re technically proficient enough to enjoy my site, you probably shouldn’t get an iPad at all.

You’d probably be better served getting a laptop (as your only computer) first, a smartphone second, and maybe an e-ink Kindle if you want a bigger screen for portable reading.

A lot of what he wrote is true, but I think it definitely underestimates just how much better something like an iPad can be for traveling.

It isn’t just the size of the device, or the fact that it doesn’t have a hinge, or the fact that the accessories are so much smaller for the iPad (compare a MacBook power adapter to the iPad charger). Those are all things in the iPad’s favor.

It is how you pack that changes when you move from a laptop to a tablet. A tablet is something you can add to any bag without needing to bring anything extra along. You limit the amount of stuff you need to bring along to be productive. I have my iPad mini in a case so, along with the power adapter, that’s all I need to bring along and I’m set. I can toss that into any bag that I might bring along on a trip or just carry it sans a bag.

That’s a big shift.

With a laptop I bring along a power adapter, an extension cord for the power adapter (because if you hang that power adapter on a wall it is going to take up too much space),  a mouse, an external hard drive with my “work”, another power adapter for my phone … you see where I’m going.

I had forgotten about that. The same charger for my iPad can double as a charger for my iPhone. That doesn’t even bring into account the idea that I can have LTE connectivity built into my iPad so that I am completely untethered. Those are big wins.

The reason we need laptops and desktops right now is because almost every single workflow we have right now is built around laptops, desktops, windowed operating systems, etc. OF COURSE they’d be easier to do on those devices, it only makes sense.

However, let’s not think that it will always be this way or even that it needs to be right now. Already email is easier for me to handle on an iPad or iPhone than on my desktop and media is easier to deal with on those devices as well. More and more we are going to see (here’s that word again) a stratification of tasks, workflows, and devices based on what they are best at.

I will state that we are not there yet and things are just STARTING to happen, but there is no way we are going to know what to do if we don’t try to push the boundaries a little bit. Pushing the boundaries can sometimes be annoying at first, but that is the only way to truly find the pain points.

This isn’t just about iPads and iPhones and MacBooks … but about the general tension between the mobile devices we are seeing now and the general computing devices many of us are used to from the past.