Mopping Up

At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.

Too Much

Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.

Nike+ Walk to Run Program

I’ve started a program using the free Nike+ website which I started using originally because my iPod Nano’s built-in pedometer is built to sync workout data to the Nike+ service. It’s a tight bit of cross-integration between Apple and Nike. Once you start syncing your data, the next natural step is to go visit the Nike+ website. There you find games and challenges and lots of tools to get up and out of the house. Nike concentrates a lot on running and I’ve been doing a lot of walking, so when the Nike+ app lauds me for my best distance run, I know it’s just a long-distance walk.

One of the features of the Nike+ system are complementary coach-programs. You can select from a gallery of training programs to follow to achieve various athletic goals. They have a 5K training program, a 10K, Sprinting, and one that I elected to use called the Walk To Run program. This program is a 12 week long scheduled ramp-up to running. The first two weeks have been lots of walking with infrequently placed bursts of 1 minute run intervals. The idea is to get my body acclimated to running and to make sure all my joints, bones, and ligaments are introduced to this high-impact activity in a way that they can adjust slowly and most successfully.

The program so far has been a pleasure. I was using an old pair of New Balance sneakers, but I have a small laundry list of foot-related and run-related issues. First off, my foot size is unusual. I have a 12EEE foot. It’s big and it’s wide. No shoemaker actually makes wide shoes other than a handful and of those, only New Balance makes really nice athletic-style shoes for people with mud feet like me. My other problems are my weight, I want to lose seventy pounds, and lets face it, it’s not that I want to, it’s that I have to. I’ll have a much longer and happier life if I lose this seventy pound spare tire that I’m carrying everywhere. Another issue, and this is actually something I can’t change is that my feet are pronated. That means as I walk I put an uneven wear and stress on my shoes so that my toes tend to “fall inwards towards each other” as I stand and my heels on the outer edge scrub away. My feet are murder on shoes, eventually annihilating soles and their flat construction. My feet literally bludgeon new shapes into the soles of my shoes over a year or two. At the end of the year, shoes are utterly blown out and I have to toss them in the trash. It’s something I can’t change and I’ve accepted that my feet have this odd geometry. I muse that if I lose this weight, perhaps the pronation won’t be so pronounced. Only time will tell.

So far the Nike+ fitness program is working out well. Thanks to Scott I discovered a great picturesque spot to do a lot of my walking and running, around Spring Valley Lake Park. It’s about 2 minutes by car from my house and the paved path runs all around the lake. It’s about 3 miles around the lake proper and walking it twice gives a great walking workout, plus it’s nominally level so it makes running easier too. That all being said, I have run into a glitch. This weekend I’ll be going to Chicago to visit with friends and this could get in the way of my running program. I’m very fond of being able to “Have my cake and eat it too” so today for lunch, instead of sitting back and eating something bad for me I’m planning on going home, doing a quick-change, and running my program for lunch. I won’t be able to get to where I usually do my runs, but I will be able to get it in. While I’m in Chicago I’ll just have to wake up early and do my program run then so as to not get in the way of everyone else. Thankfully I have selected a fitness program that just requires sneakers, shorts, and a shirt. The gym is the road, and that’s very easy to get to.

So we’ll see how well this goes. My ultimate goal is to run 1 mile, then 2, and so on and so forth. I think that if I can train my body to run I can work myself up to 5 miles and then I can run to work. If I do that every day, twice a day, this weight that I carry around should start to drop off. We’ll have to see how it goes. I’ll blog more as I progress.

Fitting Punishments

Last night I couldn’t get the idea of punishing my Blackberry out of my mind. I was running over scenarios of destruction in my mind. How could I best bring my emotional needs to bear on this repugnant and abominable device? I thought of many things:

  • Taking the Blackberry out to the dock with our office sledgehammer and dashing it in a flurry of epithets and cussing. Screaming while I extracted a primal retribution for all the ways the device let me down and angered me.
  • Building a little bonfire and setting the piece of crap on fire. Watching it burn, drinking a very fine bottle of wine and when it’s all burned down to ash, putting it out manually.
  • Giving it a Viking Funeral, putting it on a little wooden boat and setting that on fire and pushing it off to float in a lake or pond.
  • Violent but paced deconstruction. Getting out my tools and pulling the device apart and unscrewing everything and when it’s in a neat pile, beating it with a hammer.

Then I thought about maybe having my assistant video me turning my Blackberry into a pile of slag in some of the less-personal-approaches to destroying it. Then as I laid there last night thinking about it, a part of me piped up about how if there was a video, first it would be hilarious, very Office Space of me, but it would also be rather incriminating as I would be technically destroying a workplace device.

As I continued to play scenarios through my head I started thinking about truly sadistic things I could do to this obnoxious horrible device and it hit me. It gives me a different non-destructive path to take that actually is more spiritually torturous. I have resolved to consign my Blackberry to a Velveteen Rabbit Hell. I will remove it’s battery and I will put it in a dirty disused cardboard box and I will lock it away in a locker nobody ever uses and I will forget all about it. It will stay in the box, inert, forgotten, and effectively gone from my life. Everyone wins. No video of me destroying it, no crime, nothing to upset anyone and I still get to punish it, long-term. When I do remember it I will relish its silent cardboard grave.

4G

I’ve caught myself in one of my first fuddy-duddy moments. It has to do with 4G. Mobile phones have taken on this moniker to help people understand that lower values of G are slower than higher ones. So far 3G is pretty snappy, and 4G is on the horizon.

This has me wondering what exactly would one use 4G speeds for. I start to think about the nature of the devices, what people are likely to do with them. I would say that for most people, voice still dominates the use of these devices but data use is nipping at voice’s heels. People are starting to request more data through their mobile devices and I think that the majority of the data is internet services followed up by the packetized SMS data traffic on the back-end. People are getting their emails, sending and receiving pictures as well as video over these data links and this use will only grow. I can see 3G filling the need for these services quite well, but I start to wonder about 4G, and what it could be useful for. Certainly 4G is overkill for most data traffic, as most of it is designed to flow neatly over current 3G signals. While shopping for new phones at our local Verizon store they started to push 4G on one of my friends. First of all, 4G isn’t in our market yet and I dare say it won’t be for two or three more years. Even if you did have 4G, what would you do with it?

The only applications I can think of are data tethering other devices or a group of devices to that signal, but that would only work well if the data was unlimited. As it is, I seriously doubt any provider will ever offer such service where the data cap isn’t 2 to 5 gigabytes per month, with more money due after you blow by that limit. So, what is the use of 4G? If I was using it, I’d say video calling would probably be the first use, but with a 2-5 GB cap, how many of these calls could you make before you started digging into your limit? If you artificially put a limit on a thing, people are going to use it and fill up their lives with that thing until they hit that limit. Much like how a goldfish will grow to fit the tank it lives in, if it’s a small tank, it’s a small goldfish, if it’s a giant tank, it turns into a carp. With the speed that 4G is pushing, the only other use that springs to mind immediately is BitTorrent. Now what would you be BitTorrent’ing over your mobile phone? Chances are pretty good that it isn’t a legal use of that protocol, chances are it’ll be porn or some pirated data.

I think what I’m getting at is, the nature of these devices may have all the speed they need to do what they do. That any more speed is a solution in search of a problem, and that almost never works well in the end. Is it speed people should be clamoring for or is it network coverage they should be clamoring for? I think that I’d be hotter for a well-fleshed out network than a network that is super speedy. It comes down to the question, what could I do with that speed, and when I hit my data cap, what then? What good is 4G speeds when you’ve burnt through your 2GB cap? In order to not accrue more charges you’d turn off 4G and float around with 3G or 2G. What use is that? And if there weren’t caps, what legal uses of 4G traffic are left? Video calling, yes, but beyond that? I’m not so sure.

A good portion of this argument comes to mind when I see TV spots for AT&T pushing their network speed over their shitty network coverage. Verizon makes the opposite argument, that network coverage is more important than speed. I personally agree with Verizon and am critical of AT&T. Yes your network may be very fast, maybe even 4G fast, but unless you live in a megalopolis and happen to catch the network when a minimum of people are using it all at the same time, then yes, I can see the benefit. But how many of us live in a megalopolis *and* can count on nobody in said Burg from trying to hit the network all at the same time? I call bullshit on 4G data currently. Those companies pushing 4G have an intended-use mismatch and they should probably get in touch with their legal and compliance teams to see if their customers will use 4G traffic for purely innocent and legal means. I am full of doubt.

So, why not just embrace 3G, call it a wash and concentrate on expanding network coverage? That’s an idea worth pursuing.

One thing did strike me at the end, if the really compelling use of 4G is video calling, who wants that? Do you really want to have to shave and look presentable, wearing the right (if any) clothing to make a call? It seems neat and does have some very limited use, but after all, who really needs it? Oh that’s right… Pornographers do. And that’s what will sell 4G. Mark my words. 4G will be powered by pornography, and you know deep in your heart that men will order up 4G porn while back-benching it at church on Sunday with their naive wifeypoo and accidental children. Mark my words.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 113 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 520kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 12th with 109 views. The most popular post that day was SmashBurger – Kalamazoo, MI.

 

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, alphainventions.com, mail.yahoo.com, and myearthgarden.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for blackberry vs iphone vs droid, blackberry vs droid, smashburger kalamazoo, blackberry vs droid vs iphone, and bluedepth.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

SmashBurger – Kalamazoo, MI August 2010
4 comments

2

Blackberry vs. iPhone vs. DROID May 2010
1 comment

3

Droid vs. iPhone September 2010

4

Apple iPad April 2010

5

Solving Comic-Con Ticketing Issue (#SDCC) November 2010

Kicking The Can

Sprint is utterly adorable. So far there have been two notable problems we’ve had, the first was trying to get a new line established for a new staff member in the office. They gave us a number with the exchange 363, which fails local dialing because the other POTS companies don’t understand that 363 is in the 269 area code. Sprint’s solution wasn’t “We’ll fix it” but “You should call the other POTS companies and request it be fixed.” Oh, really now? The second problem we had been crappy service in Kalamazoo Township. Instead of owning the problem, they simply just gave me the 1-800 number to essentially DIY. If I had 3 lines and ran a dumpy mom-n-pop shop out of Climax Michigan I’d be fine with it, but I’ve got damn near 25 lines and I spend two grand a month – I would appreciate some TLC god damn it. So here is an email I wrote to Sprint…

Thanks for the information.

This is the second time that Sprint has kicked the can as it were, the first time was Sprint’s determination that their customers were the proper party to resolve local carrier exchange switching errors and now with poor signal quality, as well. On some level I could be upset that Sprint has refused to take ownership of problems related to their network and problems brought to them by their customers but I am really not that invested in haranguing either of you about this. The first time is a mistake, the second time is by design. I have made a personal resolution to reduce the amount of stress and trim my rage for my own personal health and wellbeing. We are learning quickly that Sprint isn’t really invested in the whole ‘taking ownership of problems’ practice and because of these failures we are awaiting the announcement of an Apple iPhone 4-CDMA class device to be brought to Verizon and when that device is announced and manufactured I am going to recommend that we take our business to Verizon.  I don’t expect any better customer support from Verizon, but at least I won’t be filled with fantasies of skeet-shooting my mobile device any longer and feeling little blossoms of cluster headaches whenever I reset my device and get mocked by “SprintSpeed”.

As for the twin problems, the first one being the 363 local exchange switching error, we’ve avoided that by swapping numbers with a line number we already had possession of in the 599 exchange, solving that problem by sheer abandonment. As for the second problem, conditions may have improved for my user who was having problems, and if they come up again I will not bother either of you but take the issue to BWTS directly.

Thanks

So all we have to do now is wait. Wait for Verizon and Apple to ink those contracts, make sure Qualcomm has enough Viagra to go the distance, and hope that Foxconn doesn’t endure anymore “It’s Raining Men (and Women)” 🙂

Sprint Bork

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.

Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies

Unlike the Death of Obsidian Butterflies, which is a neat little construct in the Exalted RPG, I am the unpleasant recipient of the Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies. First while making Guacamole for friends that are house-sitting for us while we are off to San Diego Comic Con I regularly, and in this last instance accidentally missed scraping the lime zest with my handy-dandy microplane grater and accidentally grated a bit of my ring-finger knuckle. Nothing to bleed over, but enough to make the rest of the Guacamole a trip through pain-town and dinner, which was Greek Lemon Chicken Orzo soup to be exquisitely painful as raw lemon juice soaked into my boo-boo. It is only aggravated today by TotalTech. I ordered a data cable that will allow me to move data from machine to machine without savaging the local ethernet network. The adapter came in a box and wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally scrape the same boo-boo against the staples that they use to secure the shipping manifests to the cardboard boxes. Just a little glint of sharp staple point, not enough to make me bleed, but lucky enough to hit me in the EXACT SAME SPOT.

They weren’t trying to get me, so I’m not, and can’t be angry about any of this, but ouch, the mild irritation of obsidian butterflies. 😉