Category Archives: Technology

Engagement

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I just read this article and it reminded me of so much of what I was doing back in November of 2013.

The key to engagement is to be active and honest and produce the content that will get your message across. As the article states, what people want is not really what most organizations really want to share, they want honesty, heart, and (self-referentially) engagement.

A case in point, Jeri Ryan, an actress who has starred in many TV Series in her career. I bring her up as a great example of someone who gets engagement. The platform that she used was Google Plus, but it was only tangential to this topic. The important distinction was how she chose to use the service. She actually engaged individually with her fans, which is something more than a lot of other celebrities are comfortable with doing. I’ve written about this particular thing before on this blog. I have noticed that many people seeking or maintaining a certain level of fame think that they can create a social networking persona and simply use it to dump links and material to their work and leave right after that. It turns them from living people into two-dimensional billboards. When you elect to engage, you really have to pursue the entire endeavor otherwise people will notice your two dimensionality and while the initial surge will be impressive, there won’t be anything on the tail end to maintain your initial levels of engagement. Jeri Ryan proves that if you actually do engage, the rewards continue to build. In the case of a television celebrity, engaging with your fans brings them closer to you and perhaps they are more loyal, more attentive to what you have to say, quite possibly even more accepting of any causes you may want to share with them. Only Mrs. Ryan can answer the question of whether engagement with the fans was a good thing or not, as a fan, it was nice to see from my vantage point.

Which brings me back to November. Much of it is water under the bridge but there is still was a lot of work that could have been done. The level of engagement is key, and much like the linked article above, I still strongly maintain that if you have a cause or mission and you want to promote it, it has more to do with understanding your audience than it does trying to carefully construct some framework from which to launch some blind campaign. The difference is that people respond to an authentic message, one with heart, more readily than they do something that was pre-processed, sterilized, vetted and canned. To quote Chef Gordon Ramsay, if you want a successful restaurant you need to provide simple honest fare using fresh local ingredients. This wisdom can be applied to anything else, not just running a restaurant. It can also apply to engagement, with the core lesson being that you’ll get your best bang for your buck if you provide simple, honest engagement using fresh local talent. People want to engage with other people, not with a monolithic edifice. To draw back to the cooking metaphor, would people be more interested in eating a dish that was sourced locally or would they rather eat something sourced from Sysco or GFS?

Another thing that I was working on, was the notion of engaging the crowd. In the previous arrangement, it was a lead-in to the notion of crowd-funding a goal. At least from the company hosting the talk, that was their bleeding-edge analysis of where all this social networking and engagement is actually going in the future. The organizations that engage with the most honesty (heart) will have a better chance at meeting their goals.

Alas, all that is over now, but the article did move me to want to comment on it.

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

PAD 10-25-2013: Best Foot Forward

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PAD 10-25-2013
Daily Prompt: Simply the Best

NASA is building a new Voyager spacecraft that will carry the best of modern human culture. What belongs onboard?

In earlier treatments the best of the best was selected by Carl Sagan and others in the community that built the Voyager vehicles. They elected to place everything on a gold record and affix that to the vehicle, encoded like a vinyl record would be, only made of gold so it would be durable. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be maintained as the best way of encoding information about us, except I don’t know if even golds durability in space is long enough for the vehicle to be received. If you send a message with no hope of it ever being received, then sending the message is pointless. Then again, when you don’t know, that’s when faith comes in, we have to have faith that whatever vehicle we use can endure and that there is someone out there interested.

So then, what to include? I would think that the best treatment would be an exploration of human rationality, our wits, first and foremost. These could be encoded as three core sequences of numbers. The first step is to establish a primer, so that we can be understood. The best primer? The Periodic Table of Elements. Everything in the observable universe is made up of these elements, so starting the primer here makes universal sense. We can make use of this table as a multidimensional primer. It can be used to cover mathematics, counting, chemistry, and physics. It would necessarily have to be elaborate, showing numbers associated with actual elements, what their electron configurations resemble and also include how some of the heavier ones break up into lighter ones so we can demonstrate our knowledge of the weak force of nuclear fission. With that we could cover all the basics and demonstrate that we understand how to annihilate ourselves but instead elected to communicate – which goes farther than at first glance. We would also need to involve the concept of time in the primer, so the best way to do that would be a scale model of our solar system illustrated with how long it takes light to reach our planet from our star. Since we’ve covered numbers and counting already, this would be an easy expansion, plus any receiver would necessarily already be expecting this sort of communication. The next step is to demonstrate ever increasing levels of understanding. The best first step would be the sequence of all positive integer primes from 1 to 100. Then the next sequence would be Fibbonacci’s, showing how the sequence asymptotically approaches the value of Phi and then as a callout from this, demonstrate our architecture which features this value, The Golden Mean, appears also in other lifeforms on Earth such as the disc of a sunflower and a Nautilus shell. Finally we’d demonstrate Pi, say to 100 decimal places and show that we understand shapes and relationships.

Once we have covered the primer and a demonstration of comprehension through mathematics, it would be in our best interest to follow what Carl Sagan pioneered, having recorded human voices offering greetings. It would also be best to feature replicas of our best artistic works, so a replica of the Mona Lisa, something from Van Gogh, a Renoir, and a Picasso would be great to show we understand reality and metaphor. The next section would be music, and that should be reproductions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.

I’m split on wether or not it makes any sense to include religious works on this disc. The goal of any communication is to build rapport and it may be difficult to make a good first impression if we even touch on the numerous ways we have fractionalized each other and splintered into violent groups. You don’t ever want to put your psychotic lunatic foot forward when trying to represent humanity. Yes we are a deeply troubled and damaged species but for all the nightmares we are capable of, we are also capable of great beauty. It would be best to leave much of the negative things as brief footnotes to the codex we send into space. It would be unfair to the recipient to pose as a cultured and enlightened species when we are most certainly not either of those things. We should emphasize our skills and the best parts of us and send that out, with a warning that we are en-masse rather herd-like, prone to erratic behavior and trampling.

Funny that it isn’t until you think through all the conditions that you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Earth ought to be quarantined until we stop being an infantile species. Perhaps we shouldn’t send any more of these vehicles into space, perhaps that’s the best way to put our foot forward, by not doing so at all. Hrm. Then again, if we do share the very best of us to the rest of the Universe they’ll eventually investigate us and listen to all the signals pouring out of our planet and be able to see exactly what would be in store for them during First Contact.

And that may have already come to pass. We may have already been noticed and placed in quarantine and we just don’t know it.

One Ring

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Today had a simple plan. The first step was to shake the lake effect snow off the Christmas-themed lawn ornaments in the front yard. A five minute job, easy peasy.

So off I went. Got all the snow off the ornaments and as I was shaking my hands to get the snow off them I felt something slip and I heard a bright metallic tink sound. My partnership ring, one of my most prized possessions slipped off my ring finger and tinked off my shoe and went piff right into a snowbank. The ring isn’t elaborate or expensive, it’s just a simple silver band that goes around my right ring finger. Right instead of left, because I am not like everyone else. I’ve had this ring for almost as long as I’ve been partnered. The ring itself isn’t worth much as a ring, it’s just a simple silver ring, but the meaning and significance is exceptional, at least to me.

So of course I look all around me for little ring-sized holes in the snow, checking each one and having to run inside because I can’t feel my hands with trying to paddle through about six inches of snow across the field of my front yard. I started to think of possible ways to get my ring back – heat lamps, vodka in a spray bottle, anything that might quickly reduce the snowpack and show off where my shiny ring is resting. Nothing. I shoveled and raked the snow, I hopped from one likely indentation in the snowpack to another trying to see if there was a silver ring somewhere just under the surface. Nothing. At all. At 4:55pm I called the local Rentalex, which is a tool rental shop. I asked the proprietor if he happened to have a metal detector, and he did. I rocketed out of my place and down to the Rentalex. They are located on Gull Road, so it was just a few hundred yards away as the crow flies, to get there before they close at 5pm. I was able to get the metal detector, a wee bit of training on it, and cashed out for $16. I got back home, and of course at this point the daylight is dying and I am facing having to scan my yard in the dimness of the lights mounted in the windows of my home and the streetlamp which is about 100 yards down the road.

I got out of the car, grabbed the metal detector and started to scan. I fiddled with the sensitivity and pushed it to the max. I swept and found about 8 different metal-signals all over the place. I think the detector found various bits and pieces, most specifically the sewer line and the septic tank. Many years before I bought my house, the previous owners signed up for the townships sewer system to be attached and I think they just left the septic tank in place and forgot about it. I only say that because there is a green square of grass that really does well in the spring and summer time and I think the grass is feeding off the now elderly and (probably leaking) septic tank. Anyways, the detector found lots of metal signals and I ended up scrabbling away, in vain.

So I decided that the best thing for me to do was use the detector and see if the snowbank had any signal in it, and if it did, shovel it all up into a bin and take it inside and rinse the snow with blazing hot water, melting the snow. The idea was, my ring was somewhere in the three-dimensional matrix of the snowbank. The detector could tell me where a metal signal was in two dimensions but since my shoveling panic, I had mounded snow up into a four foot high pile. I ran all over the yard, in places my ring couldn’t have been because you can’t say you checked everywhere if the missing object is still missing. I had abandoned hope that I would see a metal glint as the sun mocked me by setting right after I got home, about 5:30pm or so.

I got to scanning the entire yard, finding all the signal spots, and made a educated guess that if my ring was going to be “around” that it would be there in the high and packed snowbank from my earlier panic. I scanned up and down the mound, turning the sensitivity as high as it would possibly go, hoping that my ring would be close enough to the detector for something, for anything. The detector had two modes, a chirp mode and a squeal mode. I felt a little awkward in my yard with a metal detector sweeping over the yard as I walked like a waddling penguin. I started at one end of the snow pile and set the detector to maximum and to squeal. Very tight motions and very slowly, making a hell of a racket as it went along. I got halfway along and the detector went bonkers, huge wailing squeals in a very small spot. I got a big plastic tub and shoveled the entire snowbank, about two feet of it into the bin. I dragged the bin inside the house and parceled out sinkfuls of snow and leaves and debris into my kitchen sink and turned on the hottest water and used the sprayer. As the hot water tank caught up with my humor the water started to melt the snow. The first two trips to the sink from the bin were worthless, except that I had a sink full of rotting dead oak leaves and tiny little twigs. I emptied out the sink, making sure to feel each batch of goopy leaves for anything hard, as I figured my ring, if it was in the snow, and later on trapped in a pile of dead leaves would resist any hand-based squeezing. Nothing. I got to the end of the bin, tipped the rest into the sink and figured if the detector wasn’t going to help that I would end up simply shoveling the entirety of the front yard into the bin and melting it in my sink. I would win by sheer labor and attrition. So as I stood there, melting the snow and rooting around in the dead oak leaves I saw my ring. It was there. Hallelujah!

I grabbed it, rinsed it off, and cleaned up the rest of the snow, the bin, the sink, the leaves, and tossed the bag of leaves I was collecting into the garbage. I put all my other silly contrivances away and packed the metal detector up for it’s return tomorrow morning back to the rental company. Alls well that ends well. Of course the front of my yard looks like a disaster struck it, there isn’t any beautiful snowpack left, it looks all messy – but at least my ring is back where it belongs, on my finger. There is a new rule, if I am going outside to futz with the ornaments I will wear gloves! That way if I shake my hands, my ring has nowhere to go.

There was no sound more unwanted and seemingly mockingly final than the “tink” sound the ring made as it bounced off of my shoes on it’s random course into the snowbank. I couldn’t have done it, at least not this quickly or conveniently without Rentalex. The price was great, the detector was top-notch, and I’m a much happier fellow now that I have my ring back.

Of course, with all the tramping around I unintentionally made the snowbank into snowpack and I fell a handful of times. Now my legs and hips and back ache. Nothing worth mentioning, except that the heating pad I’m resting on has caught a certain cats notice and I am now sandwiched between a blazing hot heating pad and a rattling boat-motor-purring feline. I look at my ring, and I smile. It was worth it.

Tomorrow morning I have to remember to get up extra early and drop off the detector. It’s a neat device, but I’m glad it’s rentable, as it’s the kind of thing you need very dearly once or twice and spending a huge wad on it seems like such a waste. Hooray for tool libraries and tool rental shops like Rentalex! They saved my day! 🙂

OSX Mavericks Possible Data Corruption Bug

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Over the past two weeks there has been much upheaval in my life. Involved with this upheaval has been one of the most unwanted activities any IT professional has to do as part of their professional lives and that is bowing out gracefully. Sometimes IT professionals can actually achieve this state of grace, however most of the time fear overwhelms grace and trust. The morality I will leave to another blog post to come.

In rescuing data from a computing device a few days ago I discovered that the act of using a USB external hard drive with a Macintosh MacBook Pro with OSX Mavericks may have a nasty bug lying in tall grass. I had about 212GB of data that needed to be moved to another medium, and I elected to use a Western Digital external hard drive using USB 2. This drive had never before shown any signs of failure however after copying the data onto the drive using OSX Mavericks, the HFS filesystem on the drive suffered some mystery damage that I’ve never witnessed before. Thankfully the volume was mountable and I could rescue the data from the errant drive and copy it to another drive and effectively save my bacon. The error concerned a failure in the node structure when fsck was asked to diagnose the HFS Journaled filesystem present on the suspect drive. Now I can’t say for sure that OSX Mavericks caused this failure, but the proximity of it and an earlier email from Western Digital stating that there might be drive problems with OSX Mavericks also rang in my mind as a potential problem that points to this particular possible bug. Now the Western Digital warning was just for their drives that used the extended WD software to mount the drives to the Macintosh file system, I suspect that the bug is indeed deeper than even WD knows, or Apple perhaps.

If you are using WD, or perhaps any other external hard drive or memory-stick technology with OSX Mavericks the smart money is on frequent backup and sync to multiple locations. Really smart administrators will backup over the network to some other computing platform with it’s own independent drive technology. If you are using Macintosh OSX Mavericks, I would say it’s better to be safe than sorry and for the love of all that is cute and fuzzy, make your backups!

RSVP – A Saving Grace

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There is a fantastic class of applications that are available for the iOS, Android, and Apple/IBM Computing platforms that really assist with speed reading. These applications are based on the same reading technique called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

RSVP defeats subvocalization while reading. Many people subvocalize while they read and it becomes a habit. What most people don’t understand is that you do not need this subvocalization to actually comprehend what you read. The way to defeat this slow-reading habit is to fix the eyes in place and present the words too fast for you to vocalize them. Many of these applications start you off at around 300 words per minute, with sliders that let you adjust the speed up as you get used to the feeling of reading without subvocalization.

Recently I had a business need to consume a lot of written work, and I would have been hopelessly slow if I had continued my habit of subvocalization while I read. With RSVP I’ve been able to increase my reading speed to about 520 words per minute. Instead of taking half a year to polish off a 250 page paperback book I can now liesurely read it on-and-off over a weekend and be done with it. The nice part about RSVP is the faster you read the better your comprehension is, which seems to defy common sense. I’ve found that sometimes 520 words per minute is too annoyingly slow, and I’ve been known to push it to almost 600 words per minute, and it’s a pleasure to read at that speed.

Here are some applications that I’ve found that feature RSVP:

iOS –

  • Velocity – This free app on the Apple App Store can connect to Pocket, as well as act as an Open In… target for other applications that handle text. Velocity can also detect web addresses and present the text on the page as RSVP quite well. The interface to Velocity has a lot of polish and is quite a pleasure to use.
  • Fastr Pro – This is another free/low-cost application on the Apple App Store which features RSVP. This application has something special as far as I’m concerned and that is an open data locker where you can upload your ePub files and synchronize your library and last-read bookmarks across your iOS devices. I’ve run into some bugs with the software, but upon later analysis it was purely operator error, not the fault of the software. I was too impatient for Fastr Pro, and because I wasn’t willing to wait, I caused my own headaches. This app is written well and the developers have a fantastic sense of humor and are exceedingly friendly to work with.

Android –

  • Speed Reader – I’ve only been using this app for a little while. It’s free and the software is quite good. I ran into a little bug where the end of my ePub files were being missed in the conversion, as the app converts ePub files to TXT files before processing them in it’s RSVP engine. Something causes the last chunk of data on the ePub to not appear in the TXT file, as far as I can tell.

Windows/Mac Computers –

  • Spreeder – This is a website that works well on browsers on these two platforms. The site, www.spreeder.com has links to the Java applet as well as a Bookmarklet that enables one-click access to their RSVP engine. The nice thing with Spreeder which I appreciate is there are more adjustable settings with its RSVP engine. You can elect to chunk words, so it speeds up around small words and slows down around large words, keeping your average reading speed set to your preferred speed as well as a host of other thoughtful adjustments. I encourage everyone to visit the site and investigate for a full view of this product.

Generally these programs can help you increase your reading speed, allowing you to chew through written works much faster, and with much less eye-strain than with other speed-reading techniques that I have tried. I find it works better than skimming, which sometimes leads you to miss small salient details, and after a while using my fingers to release eye-strain just pushes the strain into my hands. I encourage everyone to look into this technique. RSVP revolutionized my professional career and quickly enabled me to consume a lot of written text much faster than I ever thought possible. I’m sure if I really invested serious concentration I could increase my rate to ever higher numbers as RSVP becomes easier as you get used to it, almost like exercising a muscle.

If you liked this column, please comment. Now that I am an independent IT specialist I thrive on feedback!

Many Thanks!

iOS 7 and Logitech Ultra-Thin Keyboard Cover

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I’ve run into a very curious issue with my Logitech Ultra-thin keyboard cover for my iPad 3 running iOS 7.0.2. Here’s the problem:

1) If you are in any application when you start all of this with the application ready to accept text, the iOS virtual keyboard appears. So for example, I start Drafts and start to type on my iPad.

2) Turning on my Logitech keyboard makes the virtual keyboard drop down off the screen, as usual, and I can type using the keyboard. Everything is all regular up to this point.

3) If you turn off the keyboard, the expected behavior is for the virtual keyboard to reappear. It does not, at least not on my iPad 3. I can open any other application that features text insertion, like Notes or Email (with an open new email) and the virtual keyboard will not appear.

4) So far I’ve found two ways to fix this. The first is the inglorious kung-fu grip of holding down power and the home button at the same time to reboot the device and the other solution, which is more acceptable but still annoying is to start the Logitech keyboard, open an app that uses text insertion functions and press FN-F3, which should make the virtual keyboard appear. Then turn off the Logitech keyboard and you should be good to go from that point forward.

If anyone has noticed this problem and knows of a fix, please leave a comment!

Thanks!

EDIT: As it appears, the keyboard is not reliable so it seems that I’ll be resetting my iPad after all. Blah!

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

iOS 7 and iMessage

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After I upgraded to iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 I ran into a really annoying problem. Whenever I would send iMessage messages to friends and family the message would look like it’s sending and then the progress bar along the top would stop about 1/4 inch from the end and just stay there for hours. Never sending the message. I tried the Kung-Fu Grip to only partial avail. The solution is to reset the network settings on the iPhone:

Tap Settings
Tap General
Tap Reset
Tap Reset Network Settings

Once the phone resets, and you reset your Wifi and turn on all the cellular bits, like voice and data roaming (at least for me) then after that, everything works as it should.

If this helps you, please let me know. 🙂

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

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Museum of Communications

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult