Gadgets!

So me & Mrs. Skinny decided we were due new cellphones. It being several years since the last upgrade, and us finding out they've replaced the old rotary kind with these push-button jobbies.

A word about me & technology, specifically mobile technology - I'm not so into it. In fact I resisted getting cellphone for a few years, on the theory there was no one I wanted to talk to that badly. I gave in eventually, and it has proved to be a lifesaver for that vital human function - grocery shopping. List or no list, I can now call Mrs. Skinny twelve times in 6 minutes to ask what I forgot.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a wannabe geek with a great interest in technology & putting it to good use. I just don't see the value to watching Lord of the Rings extended version on a 2 inch screen, with or without director's commentary. Even if it means I can have my hobbits anytime, anywhere. Texting is another mystery to me - why the heck would I want to communicate in eight word, poorly spelled bursts?

So the plan for new phones was simple. Mrs. wanted something she could text on as she dips her toe into the sore thumb universe, and I wanted a nothing phone. Let me make a phone call and I'm pretty happy. We check out the offerings at what passes for Ma Bell these days, and I find a nothing phone. For free, as they often do. OK, I'm good, what about Mrs?

She goes to the store, checks it out, and identifies something a little higher rent with a slide out keyboard. We finally get to the website, plunk mine in the cart, and we're poking around a bit more before pulling the trigger. So it turns out the one Mrs. wanted was no longer available. By the time we sort it all out, the higher-end version of the one she wanted is now free. And the cheapo I was looking at - is now $30? How does that happen in less than five minutes?

Needless to say, cheap wins out over simple every time. So we are both the proud owners of the Pantech Matrix Pro with its accompanying doodads. I can't find half the stuff on it, much less use it. But I must admit - I just synced it up with my work calendar, and it was a breeze. Which I think is very cool, and I will now know my schedule wherever else I am.

I'm still not texting - you can't make me.

More conferencing

Day 2 of the official show. Some decent presentations today, even the one I walked out of to call in to a conference call that never happened. So I went back in & heard the rest of what they had to say (for the record, it was about using online video for distance learning.)

I have to admit I'm both excited and depressed by what I learned. Excited because there are some really smart people out there doing really cool things with online media. Depressed because not only am I not doing it, but we're in many ways just barely keeping up.

Plus all of these people have jobs and titles that I would like to have. Whatever. It was a good conference, I actually talked to a lot of people (kind of unusual for me with people I don't know), and tomorrow it's back to reality.

Which includes a major overhaul to a system that happened today and does not seem to be working properly. But that's likely to be another blogpost.

Conferencing

Spent the last two days at Streaming Media East, a gathering of all the geeks media professionals smart enough to get their bosses to let them goof around in Manhattan for a few days.

Had a really good day yesterday with one of our vendors who had a half-day session with a bunch of customers. They previewed some new software that looks extremely promising and will likely cure some headaches for us. Now if they can only get it released on a convenient schedule...

Today was typical conference stuff - keynote speakers and product shills masquerading as educational sessions. I have to say Microsoft really has a tin ear sometimes. They're offering a new approach to multimedia delivery and it's awfully complicated and probably unnecessary. The poor guy sent to tout this thing took kind of a beating from some people looking at a very time consuming and costly effort to convert a ton of pre-existing content into this new method. I have to say Microsoft seems to be stumbling into a lot of new ideas without thinking them through terribly carefully. I got my own question answered - we can keep doing what we're doing now and they can go fiddle around with whatever stupidity they want.

More of the same tomorrow - it's a day out of the office and that's almost always a good thing.

More Blog Mucking About

Seems as though Google now has even more crap to clutter up one's blog with. (So I ended on a preposition? Whaddaya gonna do about it?) Google Gadgets seems to include thousands of little doohickeys that add everything from semi-naughty pictures to quotes from every bible in existence.



Some looked OK, so I added two on the right - Today in History and Hubble images. I'd prefer not to bother with stock tickers or Super Mario games, but if the masses request it I'll consider adding them. For about 2 seconds, and then we'll go back to the bland dictatorship that is this trivial corner of the internets.

Whoa

Can it pop a wheelie?



I think at 18 I knew what a screwdriver was. Nice work, man, and keep it up.



H/T to the Corner, where Mr. Robbins notes that left alone, we can come up with answers far better than government.

Puttering

Took the day off, and I was poking around here & blogger has added a bloglist thingy that includes some info off the RSS feeds of some of the stuff I read. I'm going to try it for a bit & see if I like it.

At Long Last

the intranet redesign project is live. It's taken more than two years of effort, meetings, more meetings, even more meetings, but we've finally launched the site. I've been so incommunicado over the last month because of all the work that was necessary, but in the end we have essentially the site we intended. Not perfect, naturally, but awfully good considering the amount of work involved.



But. But.



A superior that need not be named deserves to be hit by a bus. I'm not pleased at myself for wishing harm on another human, but they deserve it. Not a thank you. Not a "we couldn't have done it without you." Certainly not a bonus or other formal recognition for me doing their job for them. Just insulting emails asking where everything else she wants is. Never mind that go-live is just the beginning for what has to happen, what with all we pushed off until now.



So the inevitable, I hope, will happen. I will offer my services elsewhere, and hope that even if the praise is as hard to come by, I will be making enough additional money to compensate a little. There's no reason to treat your employees like servants, unless you don't care whether or not they remain your employees.

Environmentalism has Officially Jumped the Shark

How do I know? Viz. the following, courtesy of LiveScience via Yahoo:



Environmentally Friendly Bombs Planned



I grant you that toxic chemicals are, well, toxic, and we're trying to save the planet. But if there was ever anything unfriendly for its environment, wouldn't most of us say a bomb would be example #2 (following AlGore himself, naturally)?



I know there are non-deadly reasons people use explosives. But let's face facts - the reason most of this stuff is out there is to make really, really big booms that eliminate whatever (or whoever) was standing there before. Leaving dust, debris, and destruction behind. Most employers of this technology aren't really all that concerned about a coupla liters of toxic byproduct.



Which raises to me the likely ironic aftereffect of enviro-safe bombs. How long before Hamas or Al-Qaida steps up to a microphone somewhere and piously declares that as Islam is fundamentally committed to saving the planet, all homicide bombers (excuse me - freedom fighters) on their way to "convert" buses full of schoolchildren and shopkeepers will now switch to the kinder, gentler IEDs and strapped-on explosives.



Greening the Ethnic Cleaning, indeed.

Conferencing

Got a couple days this week to poke around the big city at a conference. Nice mostly just to get out of the office a little. Things have not improved appreciably, so any excuse not to be there is welcome. Not a ton of consequence at the show, but it's helpful to find out what people doing real work in the area are busy with. And I had a nice burger with pastrami on it for lunch with some colleagues who went to the conference.



Another day of it tomorrow, plus some other business I have to take care of. And maybe a nice juicy steak to top it all off.

Archives in the News

Nothing ever dies in this modern media world, as Wally World found out:



Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart



It's a marvelous tale of handshake deals, unintended uses, unintended consequences, and the ability of Americans to turn lemons into lemonade.



I imagine the exec who killed the arrangement with this video company is no longer a "new Walmart Exec" but an "ex-Walmart Exec." This highlights a real problem in all organizations regarding institutional memory and the dangers of losing it or missing the value in it. Chances are the exec looked at costs and said "we can get this cheaper." Not a ridiculous idea, but it REALLY would've been worth investigating the parameters of the deal, not to mention saving the tapes for posterity, archival use, etc. Lessons to learn, folks.



Thanks to an archive buddy for passing this one along.

A Paean

to irrelevance:



Fast amateurs give ad makers hits and headaches



If you read the story through, several things become apparent. First, several companies including Pepsi, are allowing their consumers to produce their advertising for them. Hence, the expensive advertising firms they're paying bajillions to are getting suckers customers to do their work for them. Meaning someone, somewhere, is going to realize that it's pointless to spend those bajillions when they can have those same suckers customers volunteer to do it.



Another thing I noticed is that, as usual, the corporate types just don't get it. There's talk of mad scrambles to buy up media & technology companies to handle this kind of marketing. But anything done in a scramble is usually a bad idea - you haven't thought through the consequences of the mergers, or the needs, or how you're going to make it work. An ounce of strategic planning is worth a pound of edgy new media.



Finally, did these yokels really get to go all the way to Cannes to sit through dopey seminars? How the heck did they explain this one to the bean counters and get away with it? "Uh, yeah, Frank, I'm going to a conference on New Media and advertising - I'm gonna need a speedo and a wine budget for this trip. Plus a suntan lotion allowance." I am definitely going to the wrong conferences.



One dopey Reuters article does not necessarily a trend make. Regular ad firms will continue to swindle willing corporations out of millions to write and produce ads that make you want to put a sledgehammer through the TV (yes, I am talking to you, the 1800 Sleepy's folks and the creator of every car commercial ever filmed). But I think there's something happening here, and I think the ad folks should start thinking about this phenomenon in a methodical, intelligent way if they want to still mean anything to anyone but themselves.



Or they'll just keep churning out crap - what do I know?

And to prove

that I'm not going to disappear completely, here's a link of interest to the historically, architecturally, or technology minded folks:



Experience ancient Rome, virtually



What I love about such an effort is the sheer cleverness of it, and the ability to put technology to use to understand history. It's so much more useful for people to have a physical representation, even virtual, of a space at a point in time. It's all very well to show people a ruin of a column, but it's so much more meaningful to show that column in it's proper setting - part of a building, or the base of a monument, whatever.



No, the electronic version of the forum or the Coliseum is not as powerful as seeing the actual space; but it's much easier for most people to see it in it's proper context when you can see all the surrounding buildings and spaces as well.

Two sort of interesting things

happened today at work. First off, we got to talking about new things to add to the Intranet. One of which was a blog, possibly for senior management. So we got to talking about blogs a bit, and I kept my mouth shut about my own little corner of heaven here. No point in making it easy for folks to see this crap - especially as one of our number has recently been outed. I just thought it was a funny conversation to be having, but I couldn't tell anyone else.



The other bit was the next part of that same conversation, where it appears our merry band of intranet geeks will soon be starting a podcast for our employees. It actually sounds like it could be a lot of fun, and my two partners in crime are more gung-ho about this than almost anything else we've done. I don't imagine it will be treasured by history as a podcast for the ages, but it still seems like it will be fun for us to do and I hope interesting for the audience.



I don't know which box we're trying to think out of, but I hope we're making some progress.

Sad Obit

Astronaut Wally Schirra, fifth American in space, dies at 84



I admit my first awareness of him was on Actifed commercials in the 1980's, but he frankly deserved a longer obit than what he gets on CNN. It's the only no-register link available that I could see, so I'm posting it anyway.



Hat tip to Tony Kornheiser on WaPo radio for tipping me off to this news.



UPDATE: Let me note that the NY Times has a much more detailed obit (Click here for help with registration), and I didn't know Captain Schirra was from New Jersey.

Blogger Issues

I seem to be having a problem with my extended entries - I at least can't expand any of them. If anyone else can do it I'd be grateful to know - it will mean it's a problem on my end, not Blogger's.



If anyone's desperate enough to read all my crap, click on the post title and you'll get the full entry.



Grrr.

Training called

over the last two working days, which I hope excuses my absence. (nothing can excuse my presence, so I'm not going to even attempt it.) I zoned out of much of the class - he got into stuff that I certainly will never need to adjust. Unless I suddenly have to rearrange the servers and access permissions, in which case we're in a whole heap of trouble.

Happily, after six months talking about the Magic Software that would be worth all the cows we could trade for it, I finally got to try & make it grow into a beanstalk. The results are somewhat encouraging - I have been able to get the thing to do some of what I want. Navigation out of the box (and by the way I have grown to loathe the phrase "out of the box") kind of sucks, but that's why we have to learn to do our own stuff.

The best part? I now have a Virtual PC setup with a virtual server, and I can finally get in to muck about with the software anytime I want. It has no practical effect on what we'll eventually be doing, but now instead of asking "hey, can we do that?" I can actually see for myself if we can do it.

There's work ahead to be sure (and several more training classes to go), but I'm no longer flying utterly blind.

Lest I be accused of lollygagging

I am actually around. I'm simply trying to figure out why no fewer than six people need to spend 5-6 weeks working on rebuilding functionality that exists natively in a particular piece of software. Especially when the whole purpose, saving some people a single click on a mouse, will easily be defeated as the scale of this effort grows.

I'm trying to be circumspect about this, but the bottom line is this is a huge waste of time, and I'm extremely PO'd about the whole thing.

On a more positive note

I type these posts on my old computer which has been wiped completely and utterly clean of everything else I had on it. For all intents and purposes, there's no remnant of all the years of crap I used to have on it before. I used something called Darik Nuke & Boot to wipe everything off.

WARNING!!!!

I do NOT recommend this unless you have an actual full copy of an operating system available to install. Or if you actually want to save anything on the hard drive in question. In my case, all the files were moved to my new(ish) laptop probably close to a year ago, and I'd been meaning to clean the old one up for months. Unfortunately, the disks they give you with a new laptop are recovery only, not install on another PC.

So with my Microsoft bux, I got a clean version of Windows XP Pro, and after three installs, including the aforementioned nucular meltdown, I have a pretty clean slate here to install all kinds of different junk from the junk I had before.

On the downside, I checked out a memory site online, and apparently I've maxed this thing out at 256 (!?!?!?) MB of memory, which is not going to cut it if I want to do much of anything. I wonder what would happen if I put a coupla 1GB chips in...

Change of Plans

We have not, in fact, made it to the Isle of Manhattan for a day of gallivanting. No, the folks in The City will have to make do without the Skinnydans for another day. It's cold, we didn't get moving quickly enough, and frankly none of us really felt like a trip in.

So instead we're hanging around the house, cleaning various offices of eons of old paperwork, and possibly going to the movies this PM. I am also attempting to install Windows XP on my old desktop to make it a bit more usable - possibly so the kids can play dopey Dora video games online.

I actually did the install once already today, but I screwed it up and put it on the wrong partition. I actually WANT to wipe out everything that's there, and I didn't. So now I go through it a second time, and this may take a while. I don't much care what happens to it, but I really want to get rid of all the crap that's on it now. The XP is a copy I got for going to Microsoft training last September - they didn't give it to me, but I got employee pricing on it which was extremely discounted.

Anyway, I seem to be making progress on that front, and I can see the floor of my office, so it's a good day all around.

May I say

that by the third conference call of the day, I'm a little weary of listening to ten other people on the end of their tin cans with strings?

And since each conversation is directly contradicting the previous one, I'm even more confused than usual.