So I have done it. I have sent an email to my Verizon representative, Mr. Steven Miller with a letter expressing extreme interest in transferring our mobile infrastructure away from Sprint and towards Verizon on the iPhone device. We’re going to move 5 connection cards and 17 phone lines from Sprint to Verizon.
Now I wait with bated breath for the quote! Light I’m on pins and needles! To be free of this abominable Blackberry, I hardly know what to do with myself!
Just passed through the TSA checkpoint about ten minutes
ago and went through with flying colors. MSP didn’t stop and ask a
batch of impertinent questions and poke around my bag-o-tech one
little bit. Of course I am fully aware that the TSA is purely
“Security Theater” evidenced by me forgetting to take off my belt
which has a big fat stainless steel buckle. The magnetometer didn’t
even flinch at that. I suspect that it’s all smoke and mirrors,
that the theater is totally fake and transparent and that we’re
flying just as insecure as we were back in 2000 except now we’ve
spent an intolerable amount of money on shazam security that
doesn’t really protect us at all. We can thank the GOP for the
massive expansion of government in our lives thanks to Homeland
Security. That’s a government program that if it was devoted to
healthcare instead of campy theater would make every
dyed-in-the-wool liberal wet their pants. Technology of course is
facilitated by Delta, who saw fit to grace the local waiting area
with easy to reach electrical sockets. It’s an olive branch to
offset the notion that they are raping us over bag fees. So Scott
and I are plugged in, and because MSP’s wireless infrastructure is
pay-as-you-go, I’ve got my handy-dandy Zoom travel router happily
blinking away, converting my 3G access card into a WiFi hotspot.
I’m happily slurping down electricity charging my iPad, which I’m
using to write this blog entry, and my iPod Nano. The Zoom router
and its battery are happily soaking up the free juice as well. So,
for personal liberty 2011 is rather sucky, but for technology,
especially bullshit technological barriers, it’s pretty good so
far. Being able to establish my own WiFi hotspot at-will is a
really neat “sticking-it-to-the-man” kind of feeling. Now on with
the waiting!
I’m pursuing a new passion at work, advocating for increased use of social networking at Western. As I see it there are three phases to what I have to do in order to bring about change around here:
So far I’ve looked at a batch of social networking services and one thing is crystal clear to me. WMU has as an organization done very little to take ownership of its social networking “Voice”. The current Voice is being controlled by students, a mish-mash of staff and faculty, and various organizations in Kalamazoo such as the Kalamazoo Gazette. I myself was contributing to the not-WMU Voice wrangling before I clenched up my privacy and online security, so that my Facebook and Twitter streams are private now. The only still-public wrangling I give the Voice is here on my WordPress blog.
I would like to say I was shocked, but I am not. I’ve known for a very long time and I’ve been agitated with the knowledge that everyone else but WMU is actually in control of the “social message” of this University. This “social message” should be firmly in-hand here at WMU. We should be leading the discourse, guiding the “social message”. It’s not only that we don’t control our “social message” but we are also inexplicably ignoring a vast and ripe market space by treating social networking as a passing fad. It is very much not a passing fad.
I’ve often times used the metaphor of a herd when discussing market cohort groups. In case of “young alumni” I see them composed of Generation X and Generation Y members, people in my age bracket who graduated from University from 1995 into the current year. These people are easy for people like me to understand, as I am in the group. If it appeals to my model of what my cohort finds attractive and compelling then I know it will succeed. In many ways I imagine Western to be much like other institutions out there, we’re all competing for various scarce resources, such as money, students, legislative power, and finally, social relevance. Currently WMU and Kalamazoo are “on-the-map” because of a Glen Miller song, Teaching, Aviation, and Paper Technology. Outside of those sharp niches we’re just another public state school. Because we don’t actually inject any controlled content into the social networking sphere currently, our most powerful method of advertising and promoting our institution is in the hands of everyone else but us.
I have to admit that when I look around the sense I get is one of shy victimhood. Because we are never in control of the social message we are perpetually defending ourselves against every critic and because we are mute when it comes to our social message we cannot hope to make any progress on the sort of initiatives that matter the most to our organization. I think what is most telling to me is the nearly universal response I have seen from recent graduates and young alumni. The expressions they share are not of indifference but rather of belligerence, derision, and hatred. WMU didn’t do anything for them while they were students, and it continues to do nothing for them as Alumni, yet WMU calls with their hats in their hands asking for money. I’ve personally witnessed at least a handful of times being the message-mule to inform WMU that certain alumni want absolutely no contact whatsoever from their alma mater.
This points to another argument I made years ago when I brought this concern up to some paid consultants. I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I shouldn’t worry myself over these concerns. I have stated before that there is a huge social shift when you compare alumni who graduated in the 70’s versus alumni who graduated in the 00’s and later. In the great long ago it was a prideful privilege to attend a University, it was a mark of intelligence and was a source of pride and honor. The market, society, perhaps western culture itself changed in the 80’s and the 90’s and there was this shift towards a clear preference for higher education graduates and a dearth of employment for those without higher education. Suddenly a basic education was not sufficient, if you wanted a family and to be successful and happy you needed a degree of higher education added to your name. Higher education catered to this shift by admitting more people, but when they did it, they also became more insular and grew more callous, bureaucratic, and monolithic. What was previously something very special became exceptionally banal in just a few short years. Higher education changed from “University” to “K-16”. As this change was happening I was attending SUNY Buffalo and I immediately was confronted with something I was not expecting. Instead of an organization built on mutual respect, a passion for learning, and earned obedience and loyalty these institutions converted into featureless service and content providers. What was a chance to pursue difficult questions with like-minded adults and develop a higher intellect devolved into a high school sequel. This change has set both groups apart from each other, on one side the University with its staff and faculty and on the other side, the Student. What possible affection can be raised when your University is fundamentally indistinguishable from a Supermarket?
It is this shift that I brought up, that people graduating in my social cohort group are not enamored with higher education. It’s just another thing we felt forced into by society, we didn’t attend because we were passionate about it, we attended because there was no choice. These people are not going to give money to their University as much as they would write a check to a supermarket just because they happened to shop their once or twice. As I’ve moved along in my life and witnessed things, I have this sense that this shift was actually quite traumatic and there is profound scarring for both groups. I don’t know if modern Universities are ready to face a future where their better angels care not a jot for them and meet with closed doors, dial tones, and a profound lack of opportunities to raise money. All I can go on is what I have witnessed and that is summed up by this: “WMU didn’t do shit for me, I have a worthless degree and a lifetime of crushing debt. If they want money, they’ll have to find it somewhere else.”
So we return back to where we started. Will Higher Education embrace social networks? Can they? Is there sufficient scarring to make all of these arguments mute and this last sliver of opportunity, this last gasp of future relevance just so much pissing in the wind? At least for this place, I have hope that it is, I have hope that my arguments find some traction. Along with all of my hope comes my fear that a change-averse monolith simply hasn’t the capacity to move forward and that all this is just hot air being blown over a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead yet and hasn’t quite gotten around to laying down in its grave. I suppose only time will tell, as it does with everything else.
Just endured a Tornado Warning here at work. Everyone proceeded in a calm and orderly fashion into the basement of Walwood Hall and all in all we did quite well. The only thing I could really complain about was the stairs to access the area, for older folk with bad knees it’s definitely takes some time.
Once we were down in the basement technology shined. Everyone gathered around me and my iPad. I also had water, a fire extinguisher, and my Ready.gov emergency preparedness kit in a man-sized duffle bag. Several things I noticed were a lack of timely (where minutes count) updates from the National Weather Service, The Weather Channel app being sluggish to load and not having up-to-date data, again, in a timely fashion. I could access all the network resources I needed to, which was comforting. I have to find some source on Twitter that has as-close-to-realtime weather data as possible. For the entire event the only procedural problem was doubt surrounding the all-clear signal. Custodial Services delivered a premature all-clear that was in contradiction to the warning provided by the NWS. Which to follow? Who has authority? WMU really needs a centralized “GO” and “SAFE” system, what we have with the NWS is okay, but the confusion and doubt surrounding the “SAFE” declaration is rather upsetting.
Perhaps there is a technological solution, I’ll have to investigate. If anyone has any experiences, please feel free to comment and share them here. TIA!
Ever since my institution migrated to Web Mail Plus (I like to call it wimp for short) I’ve made it a workplace priority to never have anything stored on it that I can’t store someplace else. From the beginning, with our institutional migration to this new system I’ve been critical of it. I have no faith in either the dependability or privacy of the new system. The old system I did have a measure of faith in because my email was stored on my server in my machine room, not 10 feet from where I sit now. Now my professional email lives in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a place I have never seen and managed by people I have never met. There is a batch of paperwork that has been signed which should give me a sense of security, but again, it was one batch of strangers signing documents with another batch of strangers and a very nebulous promise that nothing upsetting would occur from this transition. As it is, I have developed a series of reflexes based on my zero-trust model that I use with strangers, especially institutional strangers. My livelihood is far too valuable to trust to the likes of my coworkers and peers. It’s nothing against them, but it’s a mix of wariness and “If you want it done right, do it yourself” mentality that so far has kept me happy and things working well in my life.
These reflexes regularly lead me to a state of geek nirvana, something called Inbox Zero. It’s a state where your inbox is totally clean, utterly empty. Nothing is malingering, loitering, and filling your mind with a fog of worry that if there are items there, you are somehow missing something or you haven’t completed something. Mostly it’s the sense that if there is something in there, I haven’t attended to it properly and that sits on my mind. It’s a kind of annoying background noise that lowers my happiness and sense of order, a fog of doubt. While this fog of doubt doesn’t really upset me or negatively impact my life, it contributes to my general sense of irritation and it’s one of those little passengers that contribute to stress breakdowns and spiraling vortexes of rage that I sometimes get trapped in. By eliminating this fog from my environment, it’s one less little niggling thing to wear me down.
My professional email gets only a few broad categories of information sent to it, that I have to attend to:
So my strategies for handling these messages are as so:
At the end of the day at best, or the end of the week at worst I should always be able to return to Inbox Zero. There is no reason to store items in the wimp, everything else can be sorted either into Evernote or Toodledo or the files taken out and placed in Dropbox with appropriate Finder comments attached. That all being said, I do store some things in my wimp account, mostly things that I probably should keep for documentations sake, especially if a coworker is going to wear their ass for a hat sometime in the future, it’s good to be at least a little prepared for those sorts of things. I principally store promises and protestations that something won’t ever happen again in my wimp account, and when they screw up, at least it’s handy there. Wimp glories in a 10GB quota. I use only a human-hairs worth of that quota and I have no desire to ever really make use of wimp beyond that. It’s a necessary evil, a funnel, not a bucket. I’m sure organizationally that bucks the conventions, as they wish it to be both a funnel and a bucket, but I have more faith in other buckets than what is in wimp itself.
Today has been quite an annoying exploration in the vagaries of 20th Century POTS bullshit. My assistant has been on the phone for the better portion of the day with various Sprint representatives trying to get our latest Blackberry device for our new VP to work properly. The phone came with the exchange 363, which when you dial it using any regular phone line ends up in a doo-dee-tiii (computer gobbledygook sounds). Sprint claimed they couldn’t do anything about the problem, so Andy had them switch the number to a brand new one, another 363 number, and the same problem. In the end we switched an old number onto the VP’s device using the 599 exchange, oh would you look at that, damn thing works! Really what it comes down to is that we don’t want to have to dial 269-363-yadayadayada, we want to dial 363-yadayadayada. It’s not that complicated of a thing to figure out now! Of course Sprint’s response was “contact the other POTS companies and complain to them!” Really Sprint? How about YOU DO IT YOU LAZY BASTARDS! Yeah, one little teeny tinny voice is going to command Qwest or SBC Ameritech or Verizon or … to hut right to it and correct a local-exchange switching error. While we’re at it, Sprint, I’ll be sure to refine our ability to FART RAINBOWS!
So what did we learn from this interaction with Sprint? That they’d much rather ignore a POTS problem and let their customers agonize over it rather than take the !@#$ high-road and own the problem and FIX IT THEMSELVES. I suppose I do make a little tactical error here, in that Sprint apparently no longer considers itself a POTS company, no-no-no! It’s a Telecommunications Experience Synergizer. Or something.
To the rumors and all the hints and allegations that Verizon will have an iPhone in January, we say “Oh God YES!” It’s things like this that add ammunition to my professional recommendation that Sprint be fled-from as soon as possible.
Apple has unveiled their latest technological offering, the Apple iPad. It fills a niche between their iPhone and their Macintosh line of computers (MacBooks cause everyones hot for mobility). I was on pins and needles for the entire event, which I enjoyed in fits and starts from the Engadget Liveblog page. Watching Apple demonstrate the device, chat up some of it’s features, and then at the end pull the pin and lob a hand-grenade of aggressive pricing at everyone, I was stunned!
What gets me is a bit of geek lore, at least at first. iPad, I’m sure Apple’s inspiration was a ‘notepad’ since the device is arguably most like a conveniently-beefy sized notepad. The word iPad though does have deep connections for many Sci-Fi Geeks who also happen to be gadgetophiles. In Star Trek TNG a common device that was handed from crewmember to crewmember was a PADD. A roughly 10 inch rectangular piece of metal and plastic that was touch sensitive and displayed information. Oh eat your heart out! iPad – PADD. For geeks like me, this is a blossoming of authentic science-fiction that has been turned into a real thing and offered to us. The act of handing our iPad to someone else to look at something makes that whole experience valuable – we saw that in Star Trek, we’re doing it in real life. It’s one thing out of a multitude, but it’s very much like heroin for geeks. If not for every geek, at least this one.
The iPad is not only chock full of sci-fi technoromanticism (portmanteau bitches!) but it has the capacity to change the world. The iPad, like the iPhone and the iPod is a device that does something and from the track record of Apple, it will do the tasks very well. Whether you get it chock full of storage or not, wireless up the wazoo or not, the device itself means something. A full color illuminated display for books with authentic graphical representations of the behavior of real books will enhance literacy and impact the printed page. It won’t demolish the print industry, but it will liberate books from the tyranny of limited printings. If you want a book and it’s in a digital format, the idea that “We’re all out, we are waiting for a second printing” simply goes away. This will ensure that books can be spread, retained, and even published without the usual prohibitive costs related to acquiring an editor, a publishing house, signing book deals. The iPad (et al) will do for books what the iPod did for music – ie release creativity. People who couldn’t necessarily get their music out into the world via a record contract could suddenly record and put their music on MySpace or thru a Podcast and then the record companies didn’t matter so much, the consumers could approach the artists directly. Same goes for books. Before if you wanted to write the great American novel you’d have to pound it out, submit it to publishers and they controlled whether it spread or not. The iPad (et al) can release literature from control, bypass the gatekeepers. Everyone can publish.
When I say (et al) what do I mean? iPad isn’t the only device out there that can render literature, so can the Nook and the Kindle. The iPad presents an overwhelming challenge to it’s competitor devices, not so much for the principal context of literature, but because the iPad can do much much more than the Kindle or Nook could possibly muster. Playing Music, Movies, Extensibility through the App Store, these are things that the Nook and Kindle just can’t accomplish (save music, which I know the Nook can…) and it’s this extensibility, full color, and full touch sensitivity across the entire device. The iPad is a killer device for many forms of literature, but the form I’m personally most driven by is that of comic books. These books are bright, graphical, textual, and often times have callouts where hypertextual links would offer incredible convenience. One thing people have to understand, and this is true of the iPad as well as the Nook, is that you do not have to wait for some DRM’ed eBook to be published to read literature, whether it be a classic like The Iliad or Green Lantern Volume 2. You can do the legwork yourself, these two devices have open extensibility, in the Nook it’s the ability to dispaly PDF files and open eBook formats – while for the iPad it’s the foundation of the iPhone OS and the sure extensibility of the App Store.
Waiting for eBook publishing to catch up is not as compelling a reason to hesitate as may be feared. Routes to getting what you want will always exist as long as there is an analog hole. For print matter, the analog hole is the print itself. You buy a book, disassemble it, feed it to a sheetfed color scanner and in an afternoon you’ve converted a physical book to it’s digital counterpart. You can then spread that digital representation to whomever you wish, it is definitely not legal, but it is something you can do, thanks to the analog hole. This is most paramount to content providers, publishers and the like. Your lesson is this: Change your business model when the technology changes and you will succeed – Fail and you will be buried. If XYZ Publisher refuses to heed this warning and refuses to publish their product in a digital format then the customers will be forced to cope and create the knockoff digital content on their own, they know what they want and if it’s possible for them to obtain it, they will. XYZ Publisher will find their sales drying up because nobody wants dead trees anymore, they want digitial content, and if that has leaked into the network, all those potential sales are gone and XYZ might as well board up and close shop. It is better for XYZ, and their customers if they immediately produce digital content, leave DRM by the wayside, treat their customers with respect and they’ll make profits like gangbusters. A perfect example of this is Marvel and DC Comics. For years people have been disassembling these comic books and scanning them and making the entire archive available on the network free of charge. By not leaping on the bandwagon immediately, they’ve missed a golden opportunity to extend their product into a entirely new economic ecosystem. The drop-dead-date has not passed yet, but it is coming, around March when the iPad starts to sell. For example, if DC wanted to jump on top of this immediately they’d need to get a DC Comic Book App set up in the App Store, set up a channel for paying for content (which you can now do through an App) and then deliver digital editions of their entire line available through their iPad App. Charge the cover price, skip out on the cost of printing, happy customers. Win win and win.
What then for the Kindle and Nook? They will always have a place at the table. I don’t see iPad annihilating them, however I do see Nook leading Kindle to the MC Escher Staircase and pushing it. Kindle’s living nightmare, an Apple competitor, is now here. Nook will push Kindle and iPad will shoot it once it lands at the bottom of the MC Escher Staircase. It won’t be pretty.
And just so everyone is aware, I am saving money so I can buy myself an iPad. I couldn’t imagine not having a PADD. 🙂