Category Archives: Technology

Dust a Meeting

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Meetings are insatiable productivity black holes that complicate lives and ruin workplace flow. I recently tried a collaborative online system called Basecamp in order to asynchronously develop a software strategy at work. What I wanted and what I observed diverged so thoroughly that there was absolutely no point in continuing with Basecamp as it was just in the way. The entire endeavor made me a little sad, not a huge fan of failure.

Meetings themselves are time vampires. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. They are massively interruptive and obnoxiously presumptive. You set aside a date and time and a place where people have to attend to discuss some topic. A meeting is a monster even when it’s in the cradle, being thought up by someone who desires to meet. Out of their heads pop a snarling tentacled beast with sharp fangs that serves no purpose but to interrupt flow and get in everyone’s way. Even the birth of a meeting is an arduous agony, with each participant (or combatant) the multiplexed temporal complexity grows. Two people can find a time to meet. Three people and it’s an order of magnitude harder. I was attempting to arrange a five-person collaboration and I wanted to avoid a five-person meeting with every ounce of willpower I could muster. My intentions were to establish a five-person collaboration which leveraged technology (Basecamp) to achieve speed and productivity because all five collaborators could function asynchronously. You could contribute what you felt you had to when it was right for you. It respected flow and was not supposed to be interruptive or presumptuous. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this particular road lead to the very specific hell of a worthless unwanted but agonizingly unavoidable and loathsome meeting.

So now my efforts to avoid a meeting inexorably landed me right into setting a meeting up. Of course it was obvious that right after the first few responses I could tell the tell-tale sloppy-wet-sucking-sounds of a baby meeting unfurling it’s tentacles in my midst. The first agony of course is finding a time when everyone is free for a meeting. So right off the bat, two weeks went down the toilet as we had to wait for everyone to be ready. Then assembling it was a pain. It used to be easier with Groupwise, as a meeting organizer could see the public calendars of all the participants and select the time that would be best and then send it to all the participants which really reduced the interruption of flow quite a lot. Alas, we led Groupwise out behind the barn and we did-what-must-be-done. After we were done burying the corpse of Groupwise we were back to the way it was before – so A emails B, C, D, and E. Then they all reply, and then A shakes the magic eight ball and everyone agrees that in three weeks, we’ll all have time. It’s a lot of back and forth and this and that and it creates a nasty haze of meaningless email exchanges. So, the meeting is ripe for tomorrow at 3pm. Great.

So now I wait. I have a list of all the software we currently use and instead of spending the past two weeks discussing, asynchronously, the merits and flaws and coming up with a solution in at most a weeks time, this nascent baby meeting will likely take another month before there will be any resolution. Tomorrow is just going to be the First Meeting, where we trot out the new baby time vampire and give it a good feeding.

It’s a terrible way to do work. It trashes flow, it lowers morale, and it sucks time down a toilet drain. At least people aren’t fond of the parliamentary species of time vampire meetings, where you spend the first few iterations of the meeting discussing protocol on how subsequent meetings are to be held. That form of meeting is older, and much worse. I really must count my lucky stars that we usually only have the easier-to-cope-with modern meetings where the first three get-togethers aren’t set aflame with discussions on what words mean, how we are going to proceed, or what the definition of is, is.

There is wreckage however, even with a modern meeting. The person who had a problem and started all of this still doesn’t have what they need to get work done – we’ve been waiting for that special moment to arrive when we all can pet the baby time vampire and let it ruin our working lives. I can’t really get worked up very much, as least not as loudly as I used to a long time ago when I felt I could change things. It was pretty much obvious from the start that when the discussion immediately derailed with that most hated of questions “So, when shall we meet?”, heh, that was it. I knew that asynchronous collaboration was not going to work.

What’s really quite sad is that the technology has developed quite well and very elegantly. You see the edits and the collaboration realtime, there is “What’s new” and “Catch up” features, it’s free for 45 days, all of it – right there. Ready, willing, able, and if used, the promise of reaching a solution sooner-rather-than-later can be realized. Instead of that path however, we are going to have a meeting.

Not that anyones life is on the line for the work that has to be done, just the soul-crushing dread of having to endure another time vampire meeting. Having to go somewhere at a specific time, putting everything else on hold while we all waste our time and energy. The wry humor in the idea that we could have been already in the yea/nay phase and quite possibly be sending orders out to finalize the entire project, it could have been that way.

What have I learned? That I won’t ever do this again. Part of the agony of watching a grand design fail is watching it fail in flames. Modern business culture just isn’t ready for the kind of asynchronous ease and productivity that these tools can provide. I’ve written before, tongue-in-cheek that hateful meetings are like intellectual memetic herpes. It’s a theme that we play over and over again, not because actually having meetings leads anywhere but that instead we’ve always had meetings and our peers seem happy and life goes on, so why seek out anything else? It’s an idea, a meme, that is replayed again and again. The fact that meetings are time vampires that suck all the happiness and color out of life isn’t actually a part of the deal. Nobody seems to notice. Every once in a while one of us wakes up and shakes their head and asks “Why the hell are we having these stupid meetings?” and then tries something novel. Then that detestable question, “So, when are we meeting?”

That question should be engraved on a gun. Instead of asking it, just load one bullet, spin the revolver chamber, clack it home and pull the trigger. So, in the end this is all so much bellyaching over nothing. Asynchronous collaboration isn’t ready yet, or more specifically we aren’t ready for it, yet.

Not every industry has this problem however. You see companies like Automattic, which is the parent company that manages the WordPress technology – they make use of the P2 theme which is a central driver (so they say) in how they manage their projects and such. I’m sure Automattic has meetings, but I suspect that they use asynchronous collaboration a lot more elegantly than is done in higher education or the non-profit sector. When I first started exploring Basecamp, for example, I was blown away. I could collaborate with my assistant and material would build because when we were both working on the project and working together as a team brought a kind of science-fiction cool to the dull things we were collaborating on. There is something quite breathtaking about watching an entire project morph and change and grow as you sit there and watch it. Like timelapse only in real-time. Another little bit that I really found super-compelling was how these technologies enabled asynchronous collaboration and respected workplace flow. There was no interruption, if you were in the middle of a task you could polish it off quickly and confidently because time wasn’t important. The collaboration could occur at any time. It also occurred to me that asynchronous collaboration might also benefit from the differeing themes of cognition during different parts of the day. That you are more clever for some things right after dinner than you are before tea, or if you wake up at 11:30pm with a sudden Eureka moment, you could hop on to Basecamp and share your stroke of genius.

Alas, this is all just prattle against the memetic herpes epidemic that is the meeting.

It warms my heart to imagine a world without telephones and no rooms in which to meet. It would preclude meetings completely and banish them to extinction and force asynchronous collaboration. *sigh* It’s only a dream I suppose.

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

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Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website

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Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website.

I saw this and instantly thought of the Milgram experiments and thought about an expansion to his basic study which might reveal more about humanity. The basic Milgram experiment was to deliver a painful electric shock to an actor who was pretending to react to the shock. The person in the experiment was the subject with the control board – to see how far they’d go.

Milgram touched on so many parts of the human condition in his experiment but there are drifting outliers that bear study. Putting a sadist on the panel, or putting a masochist there for example.

Of course, tongue-in-cheek a part of me idly wondered if you were in a Milgram type experiment and you were told that there was a politician on the receiving end of the control box would that change the resistance level of the subject to escalate? I think that the experiment would display a certain measure of class warfare or even have a kind of respectability-quotient attached to it. What if you had a salesman, a politician, or a lawyer on the receiving end of the control box? How would you progress through the various levels of simulated sadism of the Milgram experiment?

I get to laughing about this entire idea. Not because torturing people is funny, but there is a part of me that would skip all the controls and go for the lethal one at the very end and just hold it down and savor the howling screams of agony – for salesmen, politicians, and lawyers.

🙂

When mice are put into enclosures with limitless resources, their social behaviour degenerates dramatically. – Science – Aug 11, 2012 – Interesting Facts and Fun Facts – OMG Facts

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When mice are put into enclosures with limitless resources, their social behaviour degenerates dramatically. – Science – Aug 11, 2012 – Interesting Facts and Fun Facts – OMG Facts.

I love these studies! They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that without space travel Humanity is pretty much doomed. I can’t help but think of Star Trek. In that fictional universe there is no want, no need, Earth is a literal paradise. I wonder what would happen to that Universe if you kept everything else the same but eliminated warp travel from the story.

You’d have Universe 25. It wouldn’t be pretty. HA HA HA.

So what is the most important thing in the Star Trek Universe? Warp Travel. Beyond everything else. LULZ.

Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT

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Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT.

What the TSA provides is twofold:

  • Security Theater
  • Technology Recycling

For the first part, the Security Theater, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a big show to make people feel safe. Not actually safe, but just the impression that someone seriously is quite serious and taking a serious look into serious things that seriously bother serious people. Seriously. But it’s a sham and we all know it. So we take off our shoes because they could be bombs and somehow in some world liquids smaller than three ounces couldn’t possibly be a hazard. Then we are invited to walk into a machine that is supposed to scan us for security threats on our body. A machine that uses radiation that has not been proven by the FDA to be safe for use. These machines are provided to the TSA by the minimum quoted provider. Who is to say what that machine actually does! Do you see an FDA seal on it? Do you know it’s safe? Do you really trust people who are putting on a show to actually know what the big plastic metal machine does? I always (and always will) elect for the enhanced pat-down. I understand it’s part of the security theater and I don’t want to get in the TSA’s face when it comes to rubbing their noses in it, but come on people! What it really comes down to is the ultimate failure of permanent vigilance. You can’t remain permanently vigilant. You can see it popping up left and right. Guns geting passed through X-Ray scanners, TSA agents falling asleep on the job, TSA agents leaving detectors unplugged for half the day. You can’t eliminate accidents or stupidity. No ruleset exists that people come into contact with that ensures 100% compliance all the time. Human beings aren’t built that way. We get bored, we get lazy, we get sleepy. After millions of old ladies, dudes, toddlers, and regular folk – it all tends to just blend together. You look down and notice the bright blue uniform and remember, oh yeah! You’re supposed to be serious!

Then we get to the second part. The technology recycling services the TSA provides. How many people have put expensive bits and pieces in their checked luggage, luggage that the airlines now charge you to carry no less, only to arrive at your destination finding your expensive bits and pieces are now gone? If you are lucky you get a length of TSA tape that indicates that some mystery bumpkin was pawing through your belongings. That’s why, when I fly, I fly with carry-ons only. Everything worth anything is in my backpack and that never leaves my sight, ever.

All of this is just security theater. I know it is so from direct experience. After recently flying and passing under the watchful always-vigilant eye of the TSA I have noted three discrete incidences where the TSA is just putting on a show. What have I done? Nothing dangerous or hazardous, so don’t get your knickers in a twist, but they did miss several key points which do concern me, in that it shows them for being about as vigilant as my cats are. Here’s what the TSA ignored twice, once at a little airport and once at a big airport:

  1. 4 ounce container of underarm deodorant. This is a gel and therefore falls under the three-ounce rule. Nobody is paying attention to this any longer. I decided I didn’t care if they threw a fit and tossed out my Old Spice deodorant, it was half-gone anyways and I’d be inconvenienced a whole $2.50. Alas, I wasn’t inconvenienced, beyond noting that the three ounce rule is hokum.
  2. 1 Liter Stainless Steel Hydroflask. It passes under X-Rays and it’s STAINLESS STEEL. Nobody has ever asked me to open my bag and show them the flask, or even open it to demonstrate that it’s empty. It is empty, but that’s not the point. The point is, that vigilance is taking a nap.
  3. 20 ounce convention flask. This also passed under X-ray without even a single notice. It too was empty, but what if it wasn’t? That’s 20 ounces of mystery fluid… vigilant, just like my cats.

So what this comes down to is that we are very sold on the notion of McSecurity provided by the TSA. It’s a huge government program that eats up huge government dollars and gets all these companies huge government contracts to build machines that nobody double-checks for efficacy or safety. They look at me, they measure me, they find me non-threatening. I’m just another schlub with a backpack, a roll-aboard, and worn-looking brown shoes. I approach with my United States Passport and I don’t make eye contact. I don’t say anything and my answers are affirmative grunts. All of this is theater. We have a role to play, to be pleasant, pliant, obedient schlubs just shuffling through the great machine being as plain, gray, and uninteresting as possible and their role is to pretend to run big complicated machines and seem strong, superior, and always exude an air of serious menace. That somehow being cold, officious, dour, and oh-so-serious somehow impresses on us all that when we get into a poorly-maintained aircraft with angry poorly paid stewardpeople and pilots that are overworked drunk bus-drivers-in-the-sky that somehow the TSA makes everything oh-so-right.

It’s all pretend. It’s all a big show. It’s nice that they behave the way they do, the way they are told to behave. But the bullshit is thick and smears everything. The fact that airplanes don’t just drop out of the sky all the time is more of a testament to luck than anything else.

When it gets right down to it, when we have to ultimately decide between war, food, and medicine then we’ll see what’s what. When the money runs out to fund this magic McSecurity theater program called the TSA, what then? Will these oh-so-serious, oh-so-dour, super-stalwart, always-vigilant (giggle) watchmen of the folken work for free?

They better work for free. Because Americans are fear-addled pussies who couldn’t possibly handle risk. So we sacrifice our dignity and our honor on the altar of McSecurity Theater. What a wimpy pussed-out lot we are. Seeing demons everywhere. Little brown-skinned demons wearing turbans. Yeah, that’s what it’s really all about. Anyone who says differently probably has stock in the company that builds those cancer scanners they say keeps us all “safe”.

HA HA HA.

SupportPress At Work

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Several months ago I became aware of certain workplace changes that were going to only be a problem if I chose to ignore them instead of doing something about them. There’s always been a part of my job that I’ve been kind of awkwardly ignoring. I lacked any kind of real instrumentation to one of the major aspects of my job, in fact, it’s the part of my job that I regard as being truly central and my “first hat” and that would be the Advancement Services Help Desk. First and foremost I go to work to help people use technology. That I didn’t have any online structure in which this fit has always bothered me. I always rationalized it as “My shop is too small to need such things.” or “It’s too expensive and I can’t prove that the ROI will justify the price.” but all that changed when given a purpose by a workplace change that was coming, and me discovering SupportPress.

SupportPress itself is a WordPress theme for a WordPress.org installation. We already had a hosting company that we had a great relationship with, [iPage](http://www.ipage.com]. It struck me that while we had a site with the host I certainly wasn’t making the most use out of our investment as I could. After a long while I logged into iPage and noticed their SimpleScripts service off their Control Panel. SimpleScripts is an interface to install very popular LAMP-based scripts that add features to a hosted website. Various scripts include WordPress.org, Drupal, and a gaggle of other ones including some eCommerce scripts that I really couldn’t care more about. WordPress.org is the free-to-use DIY version of WordPress.com. WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform and it serves as the bedrock that SupportPress runs on. So setting up the WordPress.org site was exceptionally easy. It was a click and some typing, followed by a few more clicks in SimpleScripts and it was done just like that. A fully featured and functioning blog running on my web host. After that, I looked at SupportPress and discovered that the theme sold for $100. One payment and you get a license to run it on as many blogs as you like. It wasn’t a subscription, just a straight simple sale. After buying the theme from WooThemes I downloaded it in it’s native form, one single ZIP file. I opened up and logged into my WordPress.org blog and navigated to the administration side of the system and right there, as easy as you please is “Install Themes Here” and the preferred option is “Install Theme from ZIP”, which I had exactly! So I uploaded the SupportPress Theme ZIP file to my newly made WordPress.org blog and when I applied the theme and went out to my blog, everything was functioning as promised! Everything! A fully functioning Help Desk Support System was running without any extra tomfoolery. I didn’t need to muck about with source files, fiddle with settings or update anything to get things to work as they should. This software, all of it, from end to end is what writing ELEGANT system code looks like. It works without guff, simply, directly, and elegantly. After that, all I had to do was create user accounts for all my clients, assign a few as “Administrators” like my assistant at work and I was done. I had the entire project from plan to finish in about an hour!

SupportPress has two distinct interfaces. The first interface, the one I use is the “Administration” interface. It very closely resembles the “User” interface but has a lot more options. If I need to perform anything more in-depth I can always call up the WordPress.org administration interface itself (which supersedes the themes administration console, wrapping around it actually) and I’ll show off both interfaces in this blog post. The system is organized on the management of Tickets. A ticket is a self-contained event that requires help from me to my clients. A ticket could be anything from a lost password to a report that a copier is malfunctioning. A ticket in SupportPress has a title, a description, a status, a type, an owner and an assignment. As an administrator I can see every single ticket and manipulate every single ticket. I can change ownership (the client), the assignment (who is to help), the status (which all new tickets start as new), the type which indicates what category the ticket belongs in and I can add comments and attach files, anything that can be done in email, except it’s logged in a database. The best way to describe it is to show it:

SupportPress Administration Screen

SupportPress New Tickets

SupportPress New Ticket

This administration interface is a full-view while the next few screenshots show what the client sees. It is much more direct:

SupportPress User View

The system is a pleasure to use and goes so far as to suggest top-ranked KB articles for clients as well as displaying all the clients tickets and their statuses with two buttons that are clearly marked for starting new tickets. When clients type in a title for a new ticket the system will automatically (while they type!) scan for relevant KB articles and display them. Eventually as the KB becomes more robust users will start to discover fixes in the KB on their own and in some situations actually be able to help themselves. When a user submits a ticket, the administrators get an email notification and the ticket resides in the system as “New” and assigned to “Anybody”. Any of the administrators can log in to the SupportPress system and look at these tickets and assign them either to themselves or other administrators.

When an administrator makes a change to a ticket, that change is sent as an email notice to the client. Everything you do to a ticket ends up being sent in an email every time you submit a change. So if I see a ticket, assign it to myself, set it’s status to “Open” and change it’s type to “question”, for example, the user will get an email showing what category was changed, the old value, and a graphical arrow pointing to the new value. If there is a comment or attached file, the client is sent an email indicating as such with the comment sent along in email so the client can read the update.

Tickets go from New to Open, then either to Waiting or Pending, then to Resolved. Sometimes tickets go into “Researching”, “Recurring”, or “Limbo”. The last status, “Limbo” are for those tickets where the situation is beyond waiting, but we still want it to hang around for some reason.

If all of this wasn’t exactly what I was after, the cherry on top is that this theme comes mobile-ready as well. It renders beautifully on an iPhone and iPad, and technically any mobile device as well but those are the only two devices I have to test the site with. Technically anyone can have an account on the site and anyone can submit tickets. I really like how clients are insulated from each other and only see community information in the KB. For admins, it’s all open and available. I really like how that’s structured.

Sometimes clients ignore that we now have SupportPress and elect to get our attention other ways. If they email us, I simply copy the email into a new SupportPress ticket, and set the owner to the person who sent the email. I love that I can create a new ticket on behalf of a client as if they sent it! Any other method of communication that isn’t SupportPress now gets a ticket for each event. If it’s a knock on our door, a ticket. If it’s a phone call, a ticket. If it’s an iChat, a ticket. Everything I do for a client gets a ticket and that way not only do I instantly document everything but the client can see everything about their tickets in one convenient place anytime they wish. They can go into old tickets and see who responded, when, and what they did about the issue. I’ve also started to use the standard blogging features of the WordPress.org site that still exist. SupportPress shuffles that off to the “Blog” menu item. If ever there is something I wish to record, I just send the SupportPress blog an email with the contents of whatever it is I want to record and it ends up being placed in the Blog section. I like to think of that as my “Captains Log” which lets me write odds and ends about the function of my office in one central place. If ever I need to refer back to it, search on it, or print something off of it, there it is. One handy place.

The hosting was inexpensive, the installation of WordPress.org was free and took about seven minutes. The cost of SupportPress was $100 and took about five minutes to install. It took about thirty minutes to set up all the clients and after that we were on the ground running. So for $100 and less than an hour I went from having no help desk infrastructure to having a damn nice one. Nobody has complained and so I count that as votes of approval. Some of my clients have started to adopt SupportPress directly and others have not. I don’t care since I stop people before they get going when it comes to in-your-face interactions to tell them that I first have to create a ticket for them.

I couldn’t imagine going back to the way things were. This is so much more convenient and safe for me in general. It keeps everyone feeling good, feeling honest, and provides a huge amount of CYA if ever a problem of help desk performance should ever pop up. Each ticket contains date and duration stamps which clearly display how each issue was handled. There is no he-said or she-said, there is only the ticket and what it says. Objective, clear, and rational. Again, I couldn’t imagine running a help desk any other way.

One engineer's quest for the perfect pen | DVICE

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One engineer’s quest for the perfect pen | DVICE.

Over time I myself embarked on a pursuit quite like the gentleman in this article. Looking for a pen that suited me because I wasn’t really finding a lot of usefulness in the market as it was.

I spent too long with pencils and their blurry, imprecise marks of graphite on paper that almost always faded over time until all you could note was the impressions the nib made on the paper after it was all faded away.

Mechanical pencils really didn’t help, except that they did do a rather good job in freeing me from manual sharpeners. The only time I took mechanical pencils seriously was when I took a drafting class in high school. I’ve dallied around with them at work, but they almost always end up going back to the coffee mug gulag where other writing implements go that aren’t good enough.

I then moved forward to ink pens, and here I wandered in vain for a very long time. Ball points, Gel Pens, lots of different technologies and they all shared the same awfulness. Eventually paper dust or age would clog their functional bits. These pens would suddenly skip, stop working, or after trying in vain to resurrect them they would eject their balls and void their ink all over the writing surface. I’ve never really enjoyed using modern cartridge ball point pens. I also tend to write quickly and these basic pens always leave me feeling cramped as my hand starts to resemble a claw more than anything else. Humorously, when I purchased my house I had to endure a flurry of paperwork and sign my name many times. At the end of the ordeal I actually couldn’t extend my cramped hand to shake on the purchase and so had no choice but to resort to using my left hand, which is like shaking hands with a dead bird. My left hand is nearly useless as my right hand does practically all the work. So, even these ballpoints were out. After some time I did some research on these devices and figured out that one of the chief reasons why I didn’t like them very much was that the ink really wasn’t so much ink as it was a kind of inky grease. The quality and feel of a pen as I write is more important to me, along with ink flow than anything else. As anyone knows, one of my dearest pet peeves is repeating myself. I hate repeating myself in speech and I detest repeating myself in writing. Ball points, grease pens, they all eventually fail me and force me to re-trace the same glyphs over and over again trying to deposit ink in the way that I need to in order to communicate.

As a rather humorous sidelight, I have for the most part abandoned this technology altogether for use of keyboards. In many ways I have even abandoned spoken word as I find it trying to get the right words out, especially when my poor male brain is agonizing over emotional processing and is just pushed that far enough where I can either hold on to an emotion or hold on to nouns, not both. There is something more even, more paced when it comes to writing that appeals to me, and as it turns out I’m more in touch with my emotions when I write than when I speak, it’s as if the paper provides me the mental room to explore my feelings as well as fish for the correct language to use to discuss them.

Which leads me to my own favorite pen, which runs counter to the pen described in the above link. My pen of choice, and frankly I have to admit that it is a very uniquely right-handed device is a Lamy cartridge fountain pen. It’s royal blue case and cap and ink cartridge are always with me. It shares space in my backpack with the other items I couldn’t go day-to-day without, such as my pocket watch, which I store while I’m at the gym so as to not injure it all wound up in belt and pants, as well as my gram-scale for measuring out my tea or coffee for my work life life-preserver. The way this pen writes, on any kind of paper is marvelous. The flow of ink along the feed to the nib means I don’t have to mash down and scribe the paper while I try to write along its surface and its unbroken ink means I don’t have to retrace what I tried to write, something that is worth more to me than any other feature.

Sometimes the best things are the old things. Just because modernity demands ball point, or gel pens and lauds their qualities doesn’t mean that modernity is correct. It’s been my experience that in this case, the very old design of the fountain pen, which hasn’t really changed in a thousand years from its first invention in 953 serves me delightfully to this very day. It’s funny that something so old, something that’s been with humanity for such a very long time endures. If you look out in the marketplace you won’t find these pens, I know, I’ve tried. I had to order this pen specially along with it’s ink cartridges. It wasn’t terribly expensive however this is not a pen you dispose of, this pen is something that stays with you for a very long time. It’s that function and durability that truly impress me. It won’t get clogged with paper dust, it’s not greasy, and the way it writes is beyond a pleasure. The only thing that I don’t do anymore is actually write letters with it, however now that it occurs to me, it’s something that would be a pleasure to do. Pursuing that is something that would send me off looking for the proper paper. My unusual eye would most likely be drawn by very fine paper in the A4 format. There is something delightfully rebellious and anachronistic about abandoning irrationally sized American papers for their more logical and pleasing metric counterparts. But that’s going to be another blog post, I think. 🙂

Out of Place

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So when I walked into the local asian food market I definitely felt a sense of being a stranger in a strange land. I was clearly the tallest person in the market, as I walked around I realized that I couldn’t recognize a single thing on any of the packages. I was after ramen noodles and I didn’t think they would be too hard to find. After 15 minutes of wandering around the store I eventually did discover where the noodles were. What I found in the market that surprised me was that everything came in very strange sizes, initially it was all 11.3 ounces, so I originally thought that the issue was that they came in different metric values that made sense. After looking at the products I discovered that the metric values weren’t correct either, they were just very strange.

What added to my awkward feelings were that the market pleasantly requested that customers only purchase in cash. I did not have a problem with this, however I had to visit the bank first to get out $20, then make my purchase, then return to the bank and deposit cash. It wasn’t unpleasant as the bank was just around the corner from the market however it was a little funny.

As I drove off I realized that I could have just gone to Meijers markets instead and got what I was after all along. Now I don’t have any problem with patronizing the asian market however it would’ve been more convenient to visit Meijers and I could’ve saved the run around back and forth to the bank.

The next time I need a very special ingredient, of course I will go to the Asian food market for this purchase. For regular stuff I’ll just go to Meijers.

Special Note: This blog entry was 99% dictated using Apple’s newest OSX, Mountain Lion. I think it did a pretty good job. The only thing it didn’t get was special terms like “Meijers”.

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

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I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Answering War

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Many things occur to me out of the blue when I least expect them to strike. It’s as if a part of me has been working on a problem, chewing on it, and when it reached a solution it gathers up all its paperwork and knocks on the front of my brain and says “Here, we’ve done all we can do, frontal lobe, here’s this for your consideration.” And I stand there in the middle of something really mundane and I’m stuck. I stop moving and much like when you open your door and find a brightly colored box with a bow on top, you spend all that time forgetting about what you were doing and stand in shock at the box. So it was with me earlier this evening.

Apparently a part of me was working on military strategy. Turns out part of the paperwork also included a method to cause a cease of conflict and effectively short-circuit a war, going from conflict, skipping over death, and moving to resolution. How you ask? I  was myself shocked at the answer and it comes from mother nature herself.

If you grow a very large amount of Cannabis Sativa, dry it out thoroughly and then set it on fire, then blow the resultant smoke out onto the battlefield, saturating every square inch with a thick white fog in about 15 minutes time all combatants will spontaneously stop giving a damn about whatever it is that they were fighting about and put down their weapons and sit down on the ground, some may lay down, others will likely lean back on their elbows. The key here is that every combatant will stop caring about killing and just want to “hang out” and “take in the majesty of this place, maaaaan” some may fall asleep and the rest will be overcome with feelings of euphoria, laziness, and extreme hunger.

Then, once you’ve smoked both sides until they have stopped fighting, you roll in hot dog carts, pizza carts, falafel carts, whatever. They go ding-ding-ing onto the battlefield and since everything is free (it’s war, this is what you pay for…) everyone is calm, feeling just fine thank-you-very-much, and the idea of getting a gun and killing someone else is about as far from anyones mind as humanly possible. You’ve just eaten five pounds of whatever and really all you want to do is take a nap.

Those that might be wearing gas masks will see the beatific joy and happiness on their fellow combatants faces and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to take off their masks. If not, then you still have to contend with an angry army, however if you continuously smoke them eventually any gas mask will saturate and stop working and people have to breathe. Over time, those that hold out with masks will just stop caring and get hungry like all the others.

This method would work perfectly for a peacekeeping force between two belligerent sides, so, for example, Americans versus Iranians – the United Nations peacekeepers cultivate millions of tons of dried cannabis sativa and start working on a smoker-gun and then we drop them into the middle of the battlefield and they just sit back with a beer in their hands, on a folding chair, making sure the machine chuffs out smoke nice and evenly. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what you are fighting about, or anything. Once exposed to this smoke, nature will take its course. The course is not war, killing, or death – but rather just relaxing, taking in the sights, and wondering where the nearest falafel cart is.

I dare anyone to challenge this idea.