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What NOT To Do in the Midst of a Crisis

Posted on August 26, 2008
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 1 Comment

In the midst of a crisis, what you DON’T do is sometimes as important as what you do. This applies to business, technology, people - anything. So, the patient is on the table, chest open and bleeding. Here’s my list of mid-crisis don’ts:

• Don’t assign blame. It just doesn’t matter at the moment and only adds fuel to the fire.
• Don’t reflect on what you’d have done differently given another chance. This is just a distraction to the problem at hand.
• Don’t start the post-mortem early. This is especially important if you’re the general and not directly in the fight.
• If you’re the boss, be hands-on but in a hands-off kind of way. Providing just the right amount of support to the troops, while not micro-managing, is a difficult but important balance.

What are some things you think shouldn’t be done during a crisis?

iPod Touch + Click Wheel = Best Usability

Posted on April 28, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 13 Comments

I misplaced my iPod Touch the other week and went back to using my 30 GB iPod Video. Given my type of usage (primarily podcasts while driving) and some of the iPod Touch annoyances I wrote about previously, the iPod Video and other click wheel-based models definitely fit me better. For example, slewing back and forth in content with precision is much easier with the wheel. This is due to the fact that the distance your thumb must travel around the click wheel is much longer than the slide distance on the touch. As a result, actions like adjusting volume and moving back and forth in a podcast are much less sensitive and hence more accurate. A click wheel on the iPod Touch is entirely doable on the Touch’s multi-touch screen. It could be enabled on the screen when desired. It might look something like this (rendering my own):

Podcasts aside, I still believe that a virtual click wheel on the iPod Touch and iPhone would benefit all content types.

AOL’s Buy of Social Network Bebo is Great News…

Posted on March 20, 2008
Filed Under Internet, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment

…for the few lucky folks who’ll make a ton of money in the transaction. For AOL and the rest of us, it’s no big deal.

Why do I say this? Several reasons:

• Social networks are extremely trendy. Members Only jackets were all the rage once too. Bebo may be rich in advertising opportunities today and a wasteland tomorrow.
• Initiatives like Google’s OpenSocial will make it easier for developers to create cross-social network functionality and meta-social networks, which will in turn make it easier for users to (ex)port their contacts and social graphs from social network to social network. Stickiness to individual social networks will decrease as social aspects are built more into Internet plumbing.
• Bebo isn’t Facebook or MySpace.

I feel like I should have some witty closing sentence here but I can’t think of one. :)

Protect Yourself Using Desktop Search

Posted on March 20, 2008
Filed Under Internet, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

Must people accumulate lots of stuff; digital stuff is no exception. We’ve got mounds of files and other documents on our computers at home, work and in our various email accounts. Over time we’re bound to let some of our private information seep out and end up in places we don’t want it to be. Using desktop search products (e.g. Google Desktop or Windows Search) you can instantly search your files for occurrences of your social security number, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and any other information you’d prefer not to have floating around.

When searching for items like social security numbers, be sure to look for multiple formats, e.g. “xxx-xxx-xxxx” and “xxxxxxxxxx”).

While you’re at it, you might want to perform the same searches in your email accounts. Many email services provide excellent search capabilities.

Don’t forget to clear your search history when you’re done so you don’t leave any additional crumbs.

Opportunity Lost for Greatest Video Blog Post Ever

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

Most people who watched the video of last week’s satellite shoot ‘em-up were wanting of a more exciting and spectacular impact and explosion, Star Wars style. The video is cool but I’d prefer to see something like this.

What we should have done was taped uber-blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble - video-camera and all - to the missile and let him ride it all the way to impact. It would be like watching Major Kong from Dr. Strangelove ride the falling nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull, only funnier.

There’s always next time…

My Blackberry Feature Wishlist

Posted on January 30, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Corporate IT, Miscellaneous | 8 Comments

The Blackberry has been so successful as a mobile email device in part because it offers good enough completeness of experience and integration with corporate email systems (Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes being the canonical examples). By “completeness of experience” I’m referring to the fact that most of what you can do natively in the email lifecycle in Outlook/Exchange and Notes you can do on the device. There are a number of gaps - gaps which force me to use the native email client to accomplish basic tasks - and I’d like to see them addressed.

In no particular order (and from a Lotus Notes-centric point of view):

• Rich text support including the bare basics like bold, italics and support for colored text
• Usage of the Notes Drafts folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to message drafts
• Usage of the Notes Trash folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to deleted items. This would support undelete from the Blackberry as well.
• Ability to copy and paste attachments between messages, or for a functionally equivalent result the ability to forward a message containing an attachment and then delete all text except for the attachment
• Ability to edit portions of existing messages when replying to or forwarding them. The message body is immutable.
• Tab, indentation and bullet support

Any Blackberry/Notes experts out there that can comment?

The iPod Touch Could Do a Better Job with Podcasts

Posted on January 23, 2008
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 4 Comments

I’m a big fan of podcasts; I think the medium is excellent. I’ve used the 5G Video iPod and the iPod Touch and I think Apple took a step backwards with the Touch’s support for podcasts. The experience just isn’t optimal.

The following are annoyances and/or problems (in no particular order) which I hope Apple will address with a firmware update:

• Landscape mode is more difficult for podcast listening than is portrait mode. In landscape for example, the play and pause buttons become miniscule and you can’t slew back and forth in a podcast.
• I do most of my listening in the car. When I put the Touch down, the screen invariably switches from portrait to landscape mode as the device turns sideways along it’s journey from my hand to the seat. (This is a case where a “feature” becomes an annoyance.) When you pick up the device you need to wait the second or two it takes to flip back to portrait mode. Note that this problem isn’t unique to podcasts.
• My fingers move faster than most devices can keep pace, and the iPod Touch is no exception. I wish the CPU was faster or the UI was more responsive or that keystrokes and gestures were buffered in hardware.
• Titles that are longer than approximately 20 (give or take, since the font is proportional) characters are cut off and there’s no horizontal scroll mode or marquee behavior to show you the remaining characters. Turning the Touch to landscape mode provides a marginal improvement since the screen is wider, but even then many titles display truncated.
• Screen real estate is poorly used. While a podcast is playing the majority of the screen is filled with the show image (if the audio file included an image) and the title displays in a micro-mini font.
• Almost nothing in the UI is customizable. Fonts, font sizes, screen colors are all fixed.
• Show notes (may include the text of the podcast, summary info, links, etc.) aren’t supported and aren’t displayed. Previous iPod models (and likely the new Nano and iPod Classic) display the show notes when you click the center button. I know the information is encoded in the audio files but the device just isn’t exploiting it.
• The volume should be adjustable with a tactile button on the unit. You often want to adjust volume in very fine increments and this is difficult as a touch control.
• Fast forward and reverse within a podcast are nearly impossible with one hand. The position control is so fine grained that you have to be holding the unit in one hand (or have the device sitting very stationary on a surface - not exactly the conditions while driving) and adjust the position with the other, while looking directly at the screen. Even with both hands you frequently overshoot your destination - makes it very difficult if you want to listen to the last several seconds or jump forward or back to different places in the audio. The click wheel-based iPods do a good job of this by giving you good control over the position. The Microsoft Zune gets this right as well - hitting forward or back jumps a given number of seconds or minutes, and if you hold down forward or back the device does a VCR-type fast forward/reverse behavior.
• Podcasts are marked as played even if you only listen to the first few seconds. This is unfortunate because you can’t turn to landscape mode to get longer titles until you start playing. So to just view a fuller title you’ve marked the show as played. The Zune doesn’t mark a podcast as played until you listen to the majority of the show (I’m not sure I like this method better.)
• You can’t download new podcast episodes or subscribe to new podcasts over WiFi. The iTunes WiFi interface doesn’t support podcasts at all. The root of this issue is that the Touch doesn’t contain a full blown iTunes client with separate podcast subscription capabilities and as a result, there’s no direct device-to-Internet podcast retrieval. The Zune doesn’t have a direct-to-Internet podcast capability either; you have to sync content from a PC running the Zune Marketplace software which in turn does the Internet downloads. See my previously written related rant.

Update 2-3-08: Added additional bullet.

• While in landscape mode you don’t get volume or position controls.

These annoyances are somewhat compensated for by the fact that the Touch is a pleasure to use, but it would be nice if Apple could address these issues.

Computer to User: “Go help yourself”

Posted on December 21, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

In a time where customer service reps are often less than helpful, we now have computers emulating that poor service. I called a colleague at his office today and got his voice mail. Since he wasn’t there I hit “0″ to get the operator. The convention for the “0″ key in most phone ACD (automatic call distribution) is to ring the switchboard. Not only did the system balk at my “0″ entry but it told me to get help elsewhere and then come back to try again. As you might anticipate, this wasn’t helpful at all.

Listen to a recording of this particularly rude computer. You can hear me hitting “0″ several times and the computer’s response.

Tip: Viewing Inline Email Images on Your Blackberry

Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Corporate IT, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment

I’m using a Blackberry against a Lotus Notes back-end. When I receive an email message with an image pasted inline (vs. as an attachment), I can’t view the image; it’s represented as “<< image >>”. I’m not sure why the Blackberry or the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) don’t present the image as a viewable attachment, but there is a workaround. If you forward the email to your web-based email account, e.g. Yahoo or Gmail and then browse there from the Blackberry, the image(s) will either be viewable directly within the message as HTML or will show up as a viewable attachment. As a quicker alternative, some of the big email services have an applet that you can run right on your Blackberry (I downloaded Google’s Gmail application for Blackberry directly from my device at http://gmail.com/app). With this approach, I simply forward the email to my Gmail account and view it (images and all) using the Gmail app.

Tip: Reduce the Pain of Replying to or Forwarding Large Attachments by Using Browser-Based Mail or Blackberry

Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 13 Comments

I use the Lotus Notes client (I assume this information applies to Microsoft Outlook against Exchange as well, but I haven’t verified) on my laptop for most of my corporate email access.  By default, most people work in “online” mode, meaning that the email client is communicating directly with the server, just like when in the office.  In this situation, replying to or forwarding emails with large (multi-megabyte) attachments can be painfully slow since attachments have to travel the network both ways - the email client has to bring the attachments down from the server to your machine and then send them back out again with the outgoing message.  (If in fact you choose to keep a copy of the sent message, the Lotus Notes client* will actually send the attachments to the server twice, once for the recipient and once to save a copy in your mail file, for a total of 3 trips across the network!**)   And since most residential Internet connections are asynchronous, the outbound delay is multiples of the inbound.  

A trick for avoiding this delay is to use either your Blackberry or browser-based email access to reply to or forward the large attachments.  In both cases, the attachments are kept server-side; the data never traverses the network to your Blackberry or browser.

* Tested with Lotus Notes 7.0.3 client against Lotus Domino 7.0.3 server.

** Verified using Ethereal packet sniffer.

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