Migrating from Nook to Kindle: A Philosophical Move

I liked my Nook. I really did. It had the usual minute frustrations one expects from technology that isn’t user-tested extensively enough among real users in the real world, but what would you rather have – an FDA-like wait for technology approval (they just wave through all kinds of dangerous things, anyway, if you’re a big enough company – think Monsanto – so it’s a wait for the bribe, that’s all) – besides, we already go through one level of wait as stuff filters out from the intelligence buffoonity – or would you rather be holding the latest tech a couple of years early, and enjoying its good points and simply tolerating a few little kinks? As far as I’m concerned, I want it now, and this review is about that.

So I got a first generation Nook, and loved it. Loved (past tense) because I sold it again. I’d easily take another one. They’re great. I’ll tell you why I sold it shortly, but here’s what I loved:

• It does EPUB – get books from the library, or right off Project Gutenberg – it’s a nice open-source format for e-books
• It handles PDFs very well. If you’re reading documents (even Gutenberg has some PDFs, like Silvanus’ book on Calculus – to preserve the equations), I found it superb for this.
• It pulls Google Books. So I’m reading a book that refers to another book, like something from Upton Sinclair, so I yank Sinclair’s book off of Google Books and begin reading it too. What a nice deal. That’s the only value I can see for 3G, actually – the ability to do that anywhere.
• It has WiFi,  and I didn’t bother buying a 3G. I never found the need for 3G. If I’m that far away from a wireless connection, I’ve already got the books I need – I spend more time reading than purchasing or ‘browsing’. 3G, to me, is a gimmick to ensure people can buy instantly from anywhere – it benefits the store, not me. And it’s only good for buying books – don’t think E-readers let you surf the web for free on 3G – they don’t. But WiFi has been handy – not because I’m going to web browse – it’s just not a good device for that – it’s not really built for it – just like the epaper phone we reviewed (Motorola F3) does text messages, but you really don’t want to. Bring a netbook if you want browsing – this is a single purpose device and hopefully will learn to be prouder of it. Wireless is strong. I can quickly enable airplane mode to keep battery use to a minimum. Then it automatically finds previously selected WIFI points in seconds. It’s really best for syncing down books I purchased online, and then being turned off again.
• The fonts are nice – I can get a nice big typeface in a nice, readable sans-serif, to go without glasses.
• It remembers my spots. I can jump out of a book, do other things, then press “current reading” and it takes me right back. I can switch books, read a while, then go back to the previous book, and it remembers my place in both, any, or all. It does this even after power off/on.
• The microSD card slot helped. I found the clip that holds the card in to be a bit dodgy. They should have done a better job there (they seem to think people will drop an SD card in once, and forget about it, not switch it out a lot – why that assumption?). They should have just made a simple slot with no clip, to load a card easily from the outside without having to take the back off . Goofy. Sony beats them in this area. But there’s a place for SD – that beats Kindle.
• It’s just damned handy as a device. This goes for any e-reader, one assumes, that isn’t overly annoying in some way (e.g. screen glare on non-ePaper models). If your primary goal is to get reading ASAP, there’s nothing wrong with the Nook.
• By the way, I don’t really understand why people insist on getting “covers” for these things anyway. It’s like putting a book cover on a book – it *comes* with a cover. The Nook isn’t showing it’s guts, so why? I hear people saying it’s to “protect” it. From what? I suppose if you get enough cushion, it’s good for dropping it, but if you’re carrying it in a briefcase or something, isn’t that cover enough? I want something air-light to hold, not to bulk it up with armor, and have to bend a cover around backwards. I’d like to see some drop-kick tests on the Nook and the Kindle. With the Motorola F3, another e-paper device, you could throw it out of a plane and just about not worry – no cover needed. On the other hand, I once knocked an entire laptop off a desk, by catching the charger cord with my leg, so I suppose.
• The stats – 16-bit or 8-bit, how many megahertz, how much RAM, just don’t matter much to me. I’m looking at one book at a time and so are you. So just because it’s what those guys at the kiosk think is important, doesn’t mean it is.

So why did I sell the Nook and what did I get in its place? Well, I sold it very reluctantly. Frankly, I loved it. But I wanted the latest generation Kindle (3) in graphite, and was willing to give up a couple of features to get it. I’m still waiting for it to arrive, though, so I’m reading a paperback  in the meantime. The Nook helped restore my love of books in general. Here’s why I went for Kindle 3:

• Compatibility doesn’t matter – Kindle will always be around. You could focus on the ostensibly superior compatibility of Sony or Nook (both do EPUB format e-books, and both take SD cards), over Kindle’s proprietary e-book format and no card slot. Kindle, however, is more like Apple. Instead of striving to be compatible, it sets a standard with which others will strive to be compatible. It’s a proprietary format, technically, but it’s just a similarly cross-platform MOBI format with a special header added, and Kindle also reads ordinary MOBI format (so you can easily download books from Project Gutenberg, for example) without any conversion. So where Nook and Sony reach for compatibility with traditional libraries (EPUB format), Kindle reaches for compatibility with online archives (like Gutenberg) with MOBI format, and leaves libraries alone for now – possibly a prescient move. Where Nook seems to beat Kindle for real is direct access to Google Books, but you can easily download the PDF of the same book from Google and put it on your Kindle, just like you have to with Sony. Yes, so Kindle also reads PDFs, just like all of the e-readers. Better, though, if you want your PDFs to flow, you can convert them (free or for a dime, depending on how easy you want it) to make them “flowable” for easier reading and resizable fonts. There are free, third-party applications that will simply convert a PDF to MOBI, though, which is how I prefer to do it, and then you can just drop it on the Kindle via USB or e-mail it to your Kindle if you prefer. While I think Kindle may eventually support EPUB, simply because it’s the standard that traditional libraries have chosen, I think they were wise to focus on online archives that are accessible to everyone first, and set their own standard – it’s not common for large collections of e-books to be available at libraries yet, and selections vary widely by locale. Early adopters have some, but not a huge collection. The reason is the libraries have to purchase e-books just like regular books and they check out just like regular books (two people can’t check out the same copy at the same time). The only difference is that the book automatically returns itself when your time is up (though I think there’s online renewal available on some library sites). I expect libraries will remain conservative (at least in terms of funding e-books) for some time yet. Funds are limited, paper books are still in wide circulation, yielding no need to acquire older books in e-format, and people are already treating e-books like mp3′s on iTunes – purchasing new books in droves and skipping the library shuffle, not that libraries aren’t valuable – I think one day, they’ll be rediscovered as the savers’ source of e-books. Meanwhile, though, Google Books will make all the difference in old books, by making as many available as possible, as soon as the copyright expires or the owners give consent. The full text ones are already downloadable as PDFs and therefore readable on any e-reader. Then there’s the force of precedent being set by Netflix – currently streaming a percentage of their DVDs over the net, but working to eliminate sending out DVDs altogether and make *all* movies streaming – no more environmental impact from making DVDs, shipping them, no more paper, etc. It may be hard to imagine that books, the last bastions of paper, which draw much of their self-definition from the medium itself (authors are aware that how something falls on a page affects the reader in ways that flowable text cannot), will go the same route, taking the remaining big magazines and newspapers with them. At that point, keep in mind, either Kindle will read EPUB, or everything will be available in MOBI/Kindle. Besides, how long are you going to keep your device? You could wait years for the compatibility issue to be resolved, while the rest of us are reading contentedly – we’ll all be getting later model e-readers years from now anyway. 5-years from now, you’ll be using a different one than the one you purchase today, and the old one will have a simple hack that opens it up to freeware you can install to read anything, if you just like the old device. It’s not like in the days of VHS/Betamax where machines still costed more than $1000 several years later, and content from one wouldn’t physically fit the other – digital changes things. These things work themselves out in mere seasons, now. Amazon even gave away Kindles for a while – the device isn’t the point – the content is. Sorry to your Blueray guys, but regular DVDs will be around for ages and ages, and everything will play them. Worried about your library being stuck in the wrong format? No, there will always be both EPUB and MOBI readers, and you’ll be able to get them on any device. Your books are safe, at least for your lifetime, and then there will be a gazillion converters that will batch-convert them to whatever is the latest format, and  makers of that new device will give you the utility free to motivate you “upgrading”. You needn’t fear. That worry is like saying PDFs aren’t a safe way to keep your documents, because of Kindle’s format, or Google Docs, or Word. Besides, converters for all these formats abound – it just isn’t a big deal, anymore – the early days of computers were different – nothing reads Wordstar, anymore, but this isn’t like that. Read now, or wait until everyone’s in the pool. I’d rather be reading.
• While I like the Google Android OS on the Nook, because I love Google, and it has already been widely hacked (jailbroken) to open it up to run nearly any Android applications, also spawning a custom-Nook version of many Android apps to make user experience even better, Android actually slows the device down a bit – e-readers just don’t (currently) have the resources to run Android full tilt. Notably, page turns are a bit slower on the Nook. I really didn’t find that much of a problem – a minute annoyance. I developed a timing for turning pages as I read the last sentence or two on a page. But Kindle’s OS is proprietary, if faster. A lot of us want Kindle to open their operating system so we can install our own software. First thing I’d install is an EPUB reader, of course, so I can read both major formats as well as PDF, then a Twitter client. In its defense, though, Amazon has jumped out there to offer sharing passages in social media like Twitter and Facebook. Remember, the device isn’t the point. It hasn’t been, since the PC got more powerful, even fully bloated with poor maintenance and the garbage most users allow on their machines. Current PCs are more powerful than the average user can keep up with or bog down, assuming the OS is clean – Windows 7 sure has some hiccups in this department. We’re not counting gamers here – they will always push for faster everything. But business users only need so much, after which it’s just posturing. Kick the tires, ask what brand it is (like that matters anymore), throw out some words like Pentium and “quad core”, refer to the newest (=best?) version of something – like Word 2013 – sure, there will be one. But it doesn’t matter. The guy with Windows 2000 and Word 2000 is typing out the same document as the guy with Windows 7 and Office 2010 (and the former’s document is readable by more people in more places). Since the device isn’t the point anymore, it’s just what you do with it (yep, size no longer matters – we’re all huge), what a lot of us really want is for Amazon to separate the OS, the software, and the device (like Google has done with Google Docs), by simply opening up their operating system. I think the situation will evolve, as it did for Apple/Mac (there was a time,  you couldn’t run anything on an Apple that didn’t come from Apple, and they’d sue you if you tried). Kindle will learn from the history, and do it better and, before long, you’ll have options, of some kind, on Kindle. But maybe (and this is heresy to the rest of the PC crowd, unless they’re running Linux instead of Windows, which incidentally comes from the same UNIX parentage as the Mac OS) – maybe having a completely open system is not the only way to drive development as far and fast as possible. Linux is really doing well, especially since Ubuntu became a game changer – it’s almost, almost there – so close – but Apple can just jump up and do things, and not wait for a guy in his garage to build a better WIFI or sound driver. Maybe Kindle keeping it partly closed (and you can read into this an argument for social democracy over pure laissez-faire if you want to), will take us farther, in better time, than just saying “here’s another device, go ahead and create stuff for it” like you do with a PC and a Linux install. Maybe the monopoly with a gazillion garage software writers can’t push a thing as far or fast as a company that says, no we’ll limit access, but we’ll strive to be better than the competition, not bribe our way to hegemony. Maybe, in fact, letting it be the uber-hackers, the guys that break the thing apart anyway, restrictions be damned, and build anyway, face some challenges to do so, will result in better innovation than just tossing the key up in the air, like AOL did when it let all its users out onto the net in 1994 and SPAM was the greatest resulting innovation, among other things. It’s hard to say if Kindle staying more closed is better – I think they have to open some – but if they manage to be Apple-smart while being Intel-smart on price break point, I think they’ll trounce everything. And what matters here is not what’s rated most highly by someone else (you have your own mind, don’t you), or who sells more (Chevy sells more than Mazda, Subaru, and Mini, but it’s not a better-built car), but who drives innovation farther and faster. Don’t be a herd person who looks for sales numbers to decide what to buy – look at what it means, and buy vision, or you’ll end up with another borg device in your hand some day, trying to figure out how to update your virus signatures.
• The Amazon store is unparalleled. They are the original online big box store, but they don’t really act like a big box. They’ve got heart. They’re more like Costco than Walmart. Frankly, there’s just nothing like Amazon – they’re a trend-setter, not follower. And I think the quality of the online store is at least as important as the quality of the device. B&N or Borders or Sony won’t ruin your day with their e-store, but amazon will make your year. Anything major, from toaster to t-shirt, I buy from amazon, unless I’m getting it used, closeout, or mom and pop (E-bay, Etsy, and I really like morethanalive.com). User experience is subjective, as is what you value about a device or the software that runs on it, but I think they’ve got the right idea with the amazon.com aesthetic. They’ve picked up on the social media vibe earlier than most, too, which is smart.
• Aesthetics of the device itself is something, however, that Apple brought to technology devices in a big way, and Kindle is keeping the tone. Apple kicks a substantial share of Microsoft’s easily found butt for many reasons, all of which amount to stubbornness, obtuseness, pride, and lack of imagination on the part of Microsoft, but one of the ways that”s easiest to spot is the Apple aesthetic, feeling like something you’d hold on the Starship Enterprise, versus the Borg-like quality of a PC – especially infected with (er… installed, that’s the word we want – with Windows installed). I benefit, personally, from using a PC, because on a budget, you can run down the street with my box, and I’ll have built another one by the time the Doberman is starting on your other arm. I’ve got parts in the closet, or I can just rip them out of any machine. Borg. “We are compatible, and you *will* be assimilated.” Yeah, but the Borg ain’t exactly the girl you want to take to the prom. It’s a geek chick who’s been in a wreck and got Robocopped. She’ll bring in your mail, but she kind of gets twitchy and blue-screens once in a while. No, Microsoft has a purely cerebral aesthetic, an authoritarian one, and of course emphasizes compatibility (she ‘gets around’ in other words, and has the viruses to prove it) and she’s not immune to everyone in their garage throwing together a spare program like something out of Johnny Mnemonic or a really bad demo tape, but that’s because they enslaved Intel, and bilked most of the creative types out of their copyrights, and so on. And they still managed to suck – now that takes doing – they can’t even *steal* greatness. OK, moving on, PC users, we all know it sucks and we use it anyway. Google is the Gandalf galloping over the crest of the hill at first light to kick some Orc ass out in Redmond (to you non-Geeks, that means Google is good, Microsoft is bad). Google made the document virtual. It made everything ‘web’, separating more than ever the document from the device – it made documents work on anything. Google and Amazon are doing more to beat the crap out of the Microsoft model than anyone. Ubuntu, Netflix, and some others are putting up a good show, too. And the result is, we expect a damned good online experience with our devices, and the devices themselves are therefore less important, so then we aren’t willing to put up with klunky Borg guts anymore – we want to hold something that’s a bit Bauhaus, a bit Frank Lloyd Wright, a bit John Ruskin and William Morris. We want a little elegance and simplicity and *pleasure* in how a device looks and feels. Apple and Amazon are saying that design is important, design shouldn’t suck, design is aesthetic – they’re saying that users of devices aren’t extensions of those devices – users of devices are whole people – devices don’t just exist in the mind or the specifications, they exist in the eye and the hand and in our space – the device augments me, not the other way around. Not top-down, adjust for us – the all-wise makers of your OS, and if you get stuck just look up common fixes for “ERROR_LOG_APPENDED_FLUSH_FAILED 6647 (0x19F7)” or click here to report the error to those diligent researchers in Redmond that get another laugh every time the bell dings over Gates’ desk that means some poor user somewhere hollered from one tin can to another across some wax string and thinks the phone company is listening and will get right on that connection problem – that’s not how we want to live. We want beauty in our technology. I think Kindle is second only to Mac in delivering it. The Mac’s cube computer is in a major museum, I’d like to see the Kindle go next.
• The store is dead. At least, as originally envisioned, it is. Don’t get me wrong – the shop isn’t dead, just the store is. Blockbuster knows it. They’re peeing themselves and will be twitching their last soon – the disease is fatal. Barnes and Noble is the book version of Blockbuster. Yes, as a big box store, if you set aside a love for mom and pop shops, or you live in one of those sprawling roadside suburbs and small towns that have sold your small businesses into subjection just so you can get a Super-Walmart and a drive-through Starbucks (tithes and offerings, baby – but to whose god?), it’s not the most horrible place on earth. I won’t go there, as long as mom and pop are still open, but at least, if I do, I’m not dodging diapers in the parking lot, or listening to someone on a cell phone in line at the counter talk about how she hit her man with a hammer last night, oh girl, or watching some 30-year old father in hip hop baggies scrape his tattoo sores and piercings with his kid in the other arm. Walmart – it would be theatre, if so many people weren’t really like that – as it is, it’s just freaking scary like a George Romero film – “they’re coming to eat you, Margaret”. Anyway, I do think it’s a very exciting feature, in theory, that you can take your Nook into any Barnes and Noble and read ANY e-book they have for an hour. I like the social opportunities that makes me envision – a group of us deciding to sample a book a week and talk about it – how fun. But, in practice, B&N isn’t a very social place. Yeah, you get the twenty-something date crowd, and students huddled over their standardized texts, and the line of fat kids with parents buying them the Venti frap with extra syrup, extra caffeine, extra whip, but it’s not particularly social – not like Powells in Portland, where a feature like 1hr previews would kick ass. And also, you can download a sample of any e-book online anyway. So why go to the store to get it? They’re busy building Nook kiosks in there that promise to let you plug in and download books, but you can download books from anywhere. What they really are is little sales desks, like you find in an AT&T store, trying to sell you Nooks and Nook accessories. But again, just buy them online, if you want them. Use your Nook to buy your Nook accessories – it’s got a crude web browser. The atmosphere is starting to sound even less social: stop in to your  local AT&T cell phone joint – does it make you want to spread out and chat about philosophy with your friends over over-roasted espresso? It makes me feel like I’ve been sent to Hell, and all my minutes there roll over. Stores are dead. Amazon, Netflix – these guys get it. And Google should be getting the credit for driving the nail in the coffin of ‘stores’, who with Google Docs made documents share-able, social, collaborative entities on the internet (leading to video and e-books – think Youtube then Netflix, Google Books then Amazon – OK, so Google bought Youtube and Writely, the original Google Docs, but they made a mountain out of the vibe), instead of the arcane and not-very-human model of documents as device-possessions that you store, backup, and timeout while sending as attachments (Microsoft’s rubric of compatible but not collaborative, ubiquitous but not social, send-able and control-oriented but not share-able and cooperative) . Give me a store, and I’d rather have a search engine. Give me a shop, OK, then I’ll go sit down and take along my device that does Kindle, Netflix, and Google/Youtube/Google Docs, and I’ll have that espresso, if you make it with better beans and don’t bombard me with “kiosks”. Kiss your kiosks goodbye – they’re the pulpits of an outdated religion pandering for loose change in the back of the pews  – even the Geeks are starting to follow the crowd (they always follow) – the crowd that strangely, in it’s completely disinterested self-interest, has sense enough to recognize the amenities of the Enterprise Lounge fits better than the Borg charging station – if you’re still human anyway – that is, if the crowd doesn’t spend all its time listening to geeks. That’s the point, technology is normal now. And that too is killing the store. When’s the last time you walked into a store and bought a song in mp3 format? Have you ever?

So look, I think the Nook is a good purchase, and a great device, for years to come. I’ve no qualms with purchasing another one, and owning it, and using it, and reading with it. If you’re buying it to read, then buy it and read, and don’t worry about the other stuff. It’s likely that I won’t have my Kindle3 in five years and you won’t have your Nook either. The technology you use now is either optimum, or you need to optimize it, if you can. But for me, I made primarily a philosophical choice. It’s the same reason I bought a very small car. I’m trading a little comfort, and my payments are more than the gas on the one I traded in, but I was also buying an outlook on life. I guess I’m kind of a philosophical consumer. Philosophy isn’t enough of a reason for most people, I think, to care whether it’s a Nook or a Kindle on which they’re reading their Jane Austen or the latest bestseller. In terms of every day use, you won’t notice or care. I’m just describing my reasons, what I think is happening to the industry, and why I think beauty and non-geeky reasons are great reasons to make your own choice of device.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Lessons Learned Cruising the Job Boards

Most of us have, at some point or other, applied for a job using a job board, or posted a resume online. Recently, I had the opportunity to put a large number of job opening posts (as an employer) on well-traveled job boards and in job search venues. During the next 30 days, I carried away a series of observations on how people look for and apply for employment.

1. Job boards are like singles bars – some people never keep that promised date. Ever realize that it was just a tease, that he or she is never going to call, or return your call? It’s amazing how many applications are filled out and quickly responded to, only to find that the applicant doesn’t really want the job after all. Why’d they bother? you might ask. Exactly – that fake phone number handed out in the hotel’s evening lounge might have been just to be polite, but hanging out verifiable contact information and then treating the contact like a call from a bill collector is just weird. Still, if Twitter has taught us anything, it’s that large numbers of people will do the weird thing, and the savvy – the businesses that thrive will figure out why, and respond to it. Personally, I think there needs to be a “no, I’m serious, I really want to have your children” feature on online job applications – something that specifically motivates people NOT to just check the box to be thorough. Are there any job boards that charge you for putting in an application? What about peer review – the same kind of effect you get from mistreating bidders and sellers on Ebay – a series of questions and answers after the engagement for both parties – yes, this employer contacted me in a timely manner (hold those corporations accountable for collecting resumes for months before they actually intend to hire) and indeed, this applicant responded to our response. You could even automate response tracking, so there is no chance of missed connections. But as things are, it’s like people who google for hair stylists. My wife is a hair stylist, and half the people that find her on Google and make an appointment don’t show, don’t call, and don’t return a call asking if they’re running late. Crass, trash people, in my book – worthless slobs who deserve to have their time disrespected by waiting with lousy magazines in Supercuts. But job applicants… you’d think… nope. Same people. The exact same people. Hi, I’d like to work for your company, I’ll be right back (and you never hear from them again). The truth is that an overwhelming number of job seekers in the US believe, even in a down job market with significant unemployment, that jobs will always be limitless – that you can burn contacts, blow off appointments, and still be in pretty good shape when you go looking again. Jobs, in the US, are effectively commoditized. So how do we adjust? I think the only answer, until electronic mechanisms for tracking get better, is to not take applications seriously until they show up at an initial screening. Most office places do that with a phone call anyway, these days. If you don’t make the screening appointment, it’s like you never applied. We give you one freebie – the application is tease – the screening is put up or get lost time.

2.  A lot of people are trolling the bottom, pitching anything that moves. Blanket cut and paste responses from India (yes, most of them are from India) “Hello, I’m confident that I can do any task if you select me for your position.” Not reading the posting (it says apply on the website, and they e-mail you an attached resume). The shotgun approach (getting the same resume that every posting got today).You can’t really avoid this, of course, but I think the answer is the same as for people that read the posting and apply correctly, and then vanish. Except that instead of screening (do you really want to risk that people who clone their efforts for everyone will actually move forward with an application?), you do pre-screening. Make every applicant do something unique, like sum up the position you’ve outlined – a kind of employment CAPTCHA (the place on most forms where you type in the letters/numbers you see to make sure you’re not a spammer).

3. Conventionality limits vision – the paradox of the jaded. Dinner and a movie? You have nice hair. That just doesn’t work for us. Our particular posting is for a unique kind of working arrangement, but we’re open to almost any position in any industry. The job boards, though, are rife with scams and gimmicks – attempts to rope people into sales gigs they won’t like, “business opportunities”, recruiters, and resume services aimed at separating out of work people from their last savings. Job seekers are understandably reticent to respond to anything new. The drawback of being jaded, of course, is that opportunities are missed. There’s no substitute for actually understanding what you’re rejecting or pursuing, but it’s easier to stay in the middle of the aisle and go down the well plowed path. In short, most job seekers aren’t bulls, ready to find new pastures – they’re cows who won’t do it until the pastures aren’t new – until the bull does it, and they seem him do it. This is good for bulls – they get to fill their bellies with the best, first – bulls always do that – they’re never scrounging, because they’re constantly exploring. So that’s great for employers if we’re targeting bulls – differentiate ourselves properly from the scam artists, and give them the things bulls need to hear (like we’re not going to charge you anything or pitch you – call us and we’ll explain – ditch us if you don’t like it). If you want the cows, they’ll eventually follow the bulls anyway. If you want the cows now, though, at the start, you have to come up with creative ways to get the message across right when they encounter that posting. A link to a Youtube video can do wonders. We did webinars, and they were great, but going forward I see the instantaneous value of videos being the first point of contact – the webinar is for those who want to go forward after that. Most job boards haven’t wised up yet to letting you embed videos in a posting.

4. Get beyond job boards alone. The singles bar may be part of the repertoire, but the search pattern has to be wider. Along these lines, job boards, on the whole, haven’t caught on to a lot of things. One marked us as spam right away – why? We didn’t fit a pattern they understood. That was Ebay’s jobs. You’re not conventional? End of discussion. Job posting options are inflexible, as well. There’s no way to list something like our openings – any job, any industry – nope, you’re required to pick one (accountant, project manager, IT professional). Sure, there’s often an ‘other’, but that gets you slotted into the oblivion that people check last. Why isn’t there a category like “any/all” – because it doesn’t account for how most people are working these days. Likewise, there’s often a selection of traditional employer, recruiter, staffing agency – but what if you’re none of these? A simple fill-in-the-blank option would correct these deficiencies in any pulldown. This seems to mean that, to really get sufficient airplay to attract job seekers, unconventional employers still need their own job openings page (as antiquated as that setup is), coupled with effective use of other media, including social media and PR to get their message out.

5. Unconventional seekers ARE reading between the lines. Be genuine and exceptional, and you’ll attract genuine and exceptional people. Despite all of the above problems, people get through, genuine people seeking genuine work relationships. What was interesting to me was not so much the number of false positives, nor even the size of the response (we’d like a lot more – or at least more that at least keep up the back and forth from application to interview request), but it’s that the ones that did get through were exactly the kind of people we were seeking – meaning we did it, basically, right. We gave the correct impression, said the correct things, and got a response from the correct audience. And out of those who responded, we learned that there are a lot of unconventional job seekers, in unconventional positions, who are interested in working outside the lines. Some want flexible work situations – in terms of hours. Some want a different pay arrangement. Some want to moonlight. Some want a different way to work in their current capacity. And these folks are looking, listening, and responding precisely to people like us who are trying to connect with them. I should say, incidentally, that I am one of the founders of Free Agent Source, and that’s the company seeking people interested in contract work in any field, any industry – or to adjust their work relationship, or their employment offerings (for companies), to reap the benefits of contract positions.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be using job boards again, and we’ll continue using the other media sources that work for us, especially as we  grow. In the meantime, it’s the processes of first contact, screening, and next steps that need to be refined. As job boards get smarter, which I hope our company will help inspire, we’ll get more mileage out of them. In the meantime, we adjust. The perfect match(es) are out there.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Moleskine – Tactile Aesthetic Technology

I’ve decided the Moleskine is the perfect notebook.

Someone said, ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’. That’s my life. But my life is also photocopying years’ old piles of napkins and post-its at staples, so I can scan them in, or pulling out less portable but dirt cheap notebooks, like the bound composition books that go for a dollar or less, ripping pages out, and scanning those. Those are great for studying Greek. They’re great for pursuing a subject. Not for what I need them for right now. Filofax (or Daytimer)? I switched off of that when I became so online with my business and writing that my google calendar is my daily friend. My office is my home, and I work in the virtual world, so I’m not carrying my Filofax to meetings anymore. I’d rather carry a netbook, and use many different kinds of online documents for work – calendar, docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, etc. And then there’s social media. A filofax isn’t social – it doesn’t collaborate. You have to offload it into something else to do that.

When I look at a moleskine, the miser in me says ‘too expensive, decadent, not sustainable’. But then I haven’t looked for knock offs. The moleskine is flexible in its cover. That’s huge. You get a kind of subtle portability off of a soft, flexible cover that doesn’t come from a hardback lined blank book, which is cheaper. The ribbon marker is hugely important. You might think it wouldn’t be, but it just is. The size is crazy important. The smallest bit too big, and it’s not going with you just when you need it. The smallest bit too small, and you won’t use it. Moleskine size variations are wonderful. It’s not that you might not find a blackberry useful, for instance, but it’s not useful for every kind of writing activity. The moleskine is very netbook like, as a paper object. It says ‘write in me’, not ‘play games on me, set me to vibrate, play with me on a subway’. Also, I could throw 10 moleskines into a manila envelope if I needed to move them – a moleskine doesn’t beg to be offloaded/scanned – it’s made to keep a record of your thoughts in between its covers and nowhere else. The kind of thoughts that either become something else in a different venue (like a book or blog) or aren’t meant to be shared – only used.

And if it’s used for what it’s designed for, it won’t be offloaded in that way. It’s designed for hashing up ideas that will take a different form elsewhere – at least that’s my take on it. You write out that bit of insight that must go into a book, but it’s not the book. So you don’t have to rip out the pages, and it’s actually kind of nice to think you could go back to your notes somewhere, and peruse or research them. Because it’s not a napkin or back of a business card or sheet of paper in my leather covered folio lined pad cover, it doesn’t pressure you to do something with it immediately, or threaten to pile up and become a fortress you have to demolish. It never becomes clutter – and filling it doesn’t make it an idea brick – something that you never really revisit that just takes up space in a file cabinet.

A moleskine says fill me, I can save these ideas for you as long as you like. I’ll be here. You might even enjoy flipping through me and reading me, even before you’re ready to use some of them. It’s OK, you can open up. Tell me. I’m a moleskine.

So I’m looking at this as a piece of technology, and I want it. B&N has them when I walk into the store, which is where I’m absorbing this out of the corner of my eye, not looking directly at them. But I need what they can do, and don’t have an alternative. I need a place to form ideas – ideas that won’t form unless I’m writing them in order to form them. It’s not a diary or a journal – it’s an idea clarifier and extractor.

Thing is – no matter how much you wish it, you just don’t always have an electronic device, and an idea won’t always come to you when you can use the device, and the idea won’t always stick around while you turn on and log in to the device, or while you’re fiddling with it. And then, importanly, where is the idea? It’s a file among many files, it might sit as an attachment among e-mails about your vacation or your dog or your day at the office. It doesn’t have a context that gives it the life of an idea. It needs to sit among other ideas in an idea context. It needs to live in a place that you visit to get your ideas back, review think, think about them and have more, and not just become a digitized, numbered file.

There’s something else. Nothing reads like a paper book. When I want to cram a bucket load of knowledge into me, I don’t want to use PDFs. I don’t want to scroll. There’s something about the rapidity and flexibility with which you can scan a physical page, and flip back and forth, mark something, etc. that no device, no device, can match. There’s something that tactile touch against the edges of paper won’t approach until someone loads up a truly leather-like flexible netbook-like cover with 250 individual e-paper pages (until the monitor is a series of paper thin physical windows), and gives you a stylus, and adds a ribbon marker. There’s something about the tactile communication with a book that can’t be improved upon, I think, or won’t be for a very long time. And this is coming from someone who loves his e-books, has an e-book reader (Nook), uses a netbook, and likes technology.

In the same way, for writing, for getting down an idea extremely fast, stream of consciousness, even a tablet and stylus can’t match paper of exactly the right size, width, situated in relation with other paper in a cover. Again – a moleskine. Handwriting recognition is really cool, but no matter how fast it gets, it’s not the same. Even with virtual lines on the virtual page, texture and tactile relationships to paper are so innately human, so grounded in the physical universe, that I think it’s safe to say that some ideas beg to be let onto paper, to dance at the end of a flowing, liquid, ink-pen, to receive pressure as part of their mental construction, so that the flow out of the ink actually helps shape the idea, to receive tactile inflection – gesture, before they’ll allow themselves to be dressed up for the digitized ball. I think that even the act of holding a pen in hand changes and contributes to the type and character and subtle dimensions of thoughts we have, in a way that’s perhaps not better than, but certainly different than hovering over a keyboard. I think one way with touching my chin and cheek in a thinker’s gesture, and another way when I’m typing – I just do – the inflection is different enough to change what I’ll say and how I’ll say it. I point this out as someone with a militantly paperless office who sees his computers as an extension of himself. Moleskine.

I’m looking at [alternatives] now to see if anything is more affordable, but if I have to get them off amazon.com at $10/each, that’s what I’ll do. A bundle of 5 will last a while. Alternatives would have to meet the subtle criteria for integrity (internal consistency), aesthetic feng shui, and the elements of tactile genius that make up a moleskine. Someone with a sense of what I’m talking about will have to have made them, or else just done a good job of copying. But I see genuine moleskines in my future, too. There’s no substitute for being able to grab another one of the shelf and keep going.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Simple Green Productivity – Hibernate

How many nights have you gone to bed and left the computer running. Not because you were downloading some file – how long does that take anymore, in an era of broadband? But because you had a number of things open and needed to pick up where you left off?

Actually, the original way that most of us tech types did it was to leave the PC running 24/7. In the old days, you put more wear and tear on the hard drive (which was then considered the central part of the machine – now it’s the cloud – the internet itself) – more wear and tear by starting up than by leaving it running.

I got my electric bill last month and while the main PC contributes only a bit to it, it’s enough to notice the nights I left it running. Why the heck aren’t you using standby or hibernate, you ask? Exactly. I could kick myself for all the months I didn’t. But I’ve started up again and now I’m using both.

Standby just puts it in low power mode. It *seems* shut down, but it’s really using just enough juice to keep your place. I launches faster when you come back in the morning, but if you have a power loss, you may be in bad shape. Hibernate stores everything the way it is (I would still advise saving any office documents that might be open – you can leave them up – just hit save, in case there’s a problem). It comes up a little slower, but a power outage may not lose your work.

If it’s just browser tabs, standby works. After all, good browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome will know if you have shutdown improperly and offer to bring the tabs back or, in Google’s case, just do it. Google is smarter than Firefox currently. You can set it to *always* bring back the last tabs that were up. Neither browser does one thing that would help a lot, though – allow you to hit a button and save current tabs for next boot. You’d think, but none of them do that, yet. You can bookmark all tabs to open at once, but then your bookmarks get cluttered up with temporary work.

So, in my office now, hibernate or standby are the rule, not shutting down, and not leaving it running. What are your green productivity ideas? Comment on this post.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Bookmark Productivity Tools

If you live on the web, or work on the web, or both, you know you need bookmarking. Yes, I know that google is the ultimate reason why you wouldn’t. After all, why bookmark if it’s all already stored in google. But even google results aren’t quite *that* personal. And bookmarking is a productivity device. I need fast, efficient bookmarking with powerful organization, so I can get all the sites I’m interested in off my screen and into actionable folders or reference archives. I may not need that online fax tool I stumbled across just now, but I need it later. And having 40 tabs open because I plan to research a couple of topics soon, is too much of a burden on work – I need to be able to dump them into action item folders. Bookmarking should work very much like an RSS reader, and less like it does in the built-in browser favorites motif.

If you *are* storing your bookmark in your browser, like I used to do, what happens when your operating system or your hard drive crashes? There are services, but one of those services is google itself. Install google toolbar, and start using the built-in google bookmarks button to store your favorites. One of the nice things is the ability to bookmark all your tabs at once under a category. Besides, bookmarks are hardly ever revisited without better organizaton.

I’ve been finding google bookmarks a bit slow to respond these days, though. Can’t tell if it’s google, firefox, some plugin, or all of the above, but I want to save and close, not save and wait. I need faster bookmarking. And bookmark management is just as important. Without bookmark management, I might as well be storing it in notepad. As much as I love google bookmarks, it’s got functioning management, but nothing stellar or very convenient, even if navigation is lightening fast.

I’m a member of quite a lot of social bookmark sites. I won’t do delicious for personal use, because it’s a yahoo property now. Furl is gone, though they’ve been replaced by Diigo which is pretty cool for social bookmarking for other reasons. I’ve got their plugin installed. So I went on the hunt for something to replace my google bookmarks, as a primary bookmarker, until they get it prioritized higher. Besides, while delicious is the obvious choice for some people, it doesn’t have the organization features I need – it sacrifices those in favor of the social aspects. So here’s what I found that would work:

Spurl: Survives where Furl didn’t. And Spurl has some pretty nifty features. It stores a cache of the page, much like google. And it’s got those nice social sharing features, plus a clean, fast, stellar interface. It’s the organization tools that make it worthwhile, though.

Blinklist: Mostly about the interface and organizational tools. The list organization vs. folder/category is not for me. I like it in e-mail, but in bookmarks I want my folders. For one thing, I bookmark sites as action items. I need to have folders for better organization. But the interface has got some nice customization features to it, and they’re fast.

Gmarks: This is my new tool. Like all social bookmark sites, its both a browser plugin and a web site, but the site in this case is actually google bookmarks. It lets me keep google bookmarks ,but gives me very fast linking, great organization and great management features in a sidebar. With a Gmarks browser plugin, google bookmarks is redeemed, and is now my confirmed bookmarks manager. I commend it to you highly.

That said, I’m keeping an eye on the other two. I think they’re better than delicious by far, for real bookmarkers, so check them out if you just don’t want to use the google stuff. Oh, and bookmark Rules of Work while you’re at it.

Opinion: I’m thinking about  engaging in conservation of links, by leaving out links to sites when we already provide the name. Everyone’s got google now, so just typing any one of these in your browser bar or google search bar will bring up the site for you. Links to everything are just, I’m beginning to think, old fashioned. Besides, you don’t know if they’re going to open in a new window or not at a lot of sites, unless you go to the trouble of right clicking and all that. Time will tell, but I’m interested in your opinion on this. Besides, too many outbound links give away search engine juice, in case you didn’t know.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

1-Click Refurbish Your Business PC

As we talked about in an earlier post, you can’t afford technology slow-downs (let alone melt-downs) with the equipment you use for work. There are three tools that are superb for keeping it lean, mean, and screaming faster than the day you bought it. What all of these do is clean your registry which, if you’re a Windows user, was full of crap from the moment you got the PC, and has grown exponentially more crap-filled since then. Some of them clean other things which get just as junk-filled – like your temp folder. Some go farther, scouring your hard drive for the detritus of software installs and software baggage. The criteria for each of these is simple: in my experience, they have cleaned thoroughly and consistently without doing damage. I won’t swear by any piece of software, but my experience with these has been quite positive.

Ashampoo Winoptimizer: This is the Swiss army knife of system cleaners. Great value, and they frequently offer this for $10 if you watch for it, though it’s worth the original price of $50. Try a free demo – you won’t be disappointed. Advice: don’t get crazy with all the tweaks this thing will allow. They’re good if you understand what you’re doing. If not, use it to clean, clean, and clean. The best thing they ever did in these later versions is include a “one-click optimizer”. I keep it on my taskbar. If I think I’ve lost any speed, I click it once, and keep working. By the way, it’s fast!

PC Onpoint: This is a single-function utility and it does it singly well. It cleans the registry. It has always seemed rock solid, high-end, professional (what some of us might tongue-in-cheek refer to as “corporate grade” – except, honestly, have more respect for it than that – this is good technology!).  It seems a little slower than Winoptimizer, but just a hair – a hair mind you – more thorough. Also, it has no tweak panels for you to hose your settings if you get click happy and aren’t geek savvy. My experience isn’t with the latest version, perhaps, but these comments were true as of a year ago.

Advanced System Care Free: This is a full-featured cleaner/optimizer that is also dead simple, once  you get the interface. Follow the ‘bouncing ball’ around the dial, so to speak, and it more or less takes care of everything for you, without you having to know any terminology. I have this installed on a family member’s PC. As a single, comprehensive, cleaning solution – especially since there’s a free version – it’s quite impressive.

Incidentally, I’m not intentionally excluding any other tools. I’ve tried a lot of them. But frankly, these in particular have been the most thorough, without causing damage to anything of mine, that I’ve experienced. In my experience, they’re the best.

That’s it. This is not primarily a blog about business tools, but when I find tools I like, I relay the information because what this blog is actually about is caring about your work. A friend and I looked at each other one day when lamenting a horrendous software choice on the part of a corporation and said, “in our own businesses, we won’t do things like this”. It isn’t just because we have a doctrine of technology. We do, but that’s beside the point. It’s because our work is a vehicle of meaning, as I can be accused of saying too often, and that means that we approach it, from a technological standpoint, differently than if our meaning came from some part at the expense of a whole – one project budget at the expense of a company, or whatever. So, if you’re using a PC – nothing wrong with a PC – remember, Microsoft didn’t invent them – they just dominated them for a long time, and that day is fast ending, then tools like these can help make using it more like driving a Mazda 3 or a Minicooper, and less like sputtering along in a Kia Sephia (ooo, mercy).

The real question is how many of you are going to go rogue and slip these onto your crawling, corporate workstation for a quickening test drive. Careful, Wilbur – there are eyes in them thar hills.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Backing up in a Blaze of Boring

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve tried nearly all of them, and settled on Backblaze.

Jungle Drive: I found it impossible to set up. Too many separate logins and setting up the connection between the software and the storage servers, albeit rock solid amazon servers, threw several hurdles at me. After a couple of hours, including forum entries, I gave up. If it’s this much hassle, I won’t do it. I just know I won’t. It’s like exercising or writing your book – if there are too many hurdles between you and it, it’s not going to happen.

Mozy and Carbonite: Similar services, some differences, but I was concerned about key things, including impact on system resources and security. They both seem like reasonable solutions, and I like the right click and add to backup capability that one of them provides. I’ve no real objections to them, other than the cost of getting a backup DVD if you want one.

Others: A plethora of issues too numerous to detail. Many of them are specialized – more for sync than backup. I found some with great security, but price was often a barrier. A few had technical troubles in their install/setup/registration process that just sent me away as quickly as I’d found them.

Backblaze meets several criteria that are an absolute must:

Content: They don’t care what you’re backing up. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t backup an .avi that your recorded with your own camera. I don’t ever want to go “Oh yeah, that’s one of the file types Carbonite doesn’t accept.” I don’t have time for that. I need to know my data, what *I* consider to be my data, is safe, secure, and accessible and darned sure not stuck in an on-site world where fire, flood, and theft can wipe me out.

Security: Your personal security key is applied prior to the upload, so even Backblaze would find it difficult to read your files. This is deeply important. If you can’t secure your files, you can’t protect your files from one of the key things that backups are designed mitigate – theft. Sure, someone can break into your building and steal your computer, but short of that, if you’re password protecting everything, it’s mainly important that your backups be secured from scrutiny. Backblaze triumphs here.

Ease: Setup and implementation is absolutely a no-brainer. In this category, Backblaze is in a class all its own. And this is important. I’ve got geek skills, but I don’t want to use them to think about my backups. Backups need to be so automated that I don’t have to think about them at all – they just happen. If I do have to focus on them, then they won’t be done consistently, and they lose most of their value. Backblaze says ‘you drive – I’ll keep the car maintenanced’ – it’s the virtual butler of backups. Ask yourself – if you’re not doing regular backups, why not? Isn’t it because there’s something you have to do? I let Backblaze worry about that.

Trust: This applies to all cloud backup services. I do an occasional backup of all data to an external drive, so yeah I’m insulated somewhat from cloud catastrophe. But it’s a formality. The latest version of everything is in the cloud. Mostly what I’m backing up is older documents that weren’t created in the cloud in the first place. In the future, when all that’s converted over, I’ll download the cloud content as my backup activity. Future utilities will back up multiple cloud accounts to one server, and to your own portable drive. I think the data loss stories people have seen around cloud data are frankly overblown. Compare it to the data loss experienced daily in corporations and homes, despite local backup plans, and it’s nothing – a drop in the bucket. The trust issue is a non-issue.

Some other things I like are that Backblaze is cross-platform. So I can recommend it to others, regardless of platform. And I like that BB will backup external drives (other services still struggle here), that bandwidth use is easy to throttle up and down if I want more resources, and that the cost is $5/month. You just can’t beat it.

This post is destined to be a little ‘blah’, and that’s exactly the way I want it. The backup system on my rig needs to be brain-dead simple and require the least interference and input from me. I want it so boring that there’s nothing further to say, because I think that’s what makes a successful backup – for business, for personal data, or whatever. I think we’re at that point, thanks to BackBlaze.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Today Only: Business Phone Under $25 – SIM ready – No Contract

I’ve reviewed this phone before, and now it’s available cheaper than ever (information courtesy of edealinfo.com):

Motorola F3 Slim Unlocked GSM Basic Phone » only $23.99

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Technology: The Sword between Personal and Corporate Life

The contrast is startling. Average of 5mb/sec internet connections in the US – average of 60mb/sec  in Japan [source] for about $25/month. South Korea, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Portugal… basically most countries that might deserve the term “wired” have faster, better internet.The US, birthplace of the personal computer and the internet, now ranks 28th in internet connections speeds. In terms of internet infrastructure, the US is to Japan and South Korea what North Korea is to the US. Likewise, the most wired country in the world, South Korea, which should have 1Gig/sec speeds by 2012, has 60-70% of private homes with broadband. They were there already when the US was at 34% – now 57%.  How does it feel to know that the “Rome” that is the greatest intersection of the information superhighway isn’t the home of Coke and Pepsi, but is on the other side of the known world – in fact, the home of sushi and Pokemon? Of course, if you add text messages and argue that we have superior skills in using the internet, the US looks like number one. But of course, that just begs the question – if we’re so good at using the internet, why don’t we have more of it, and a better internet infrastructure – instead of this dragging piece of junk. It underscores a couple of things – we can be frivolous and self-obsessed, and we think we’re wonderful, but we settle for technology that is to the rest of the world what the Yugo is to the Toyota. In fact, one is cautious to even discuss the quality of Chevrolets and Fords anymore, even if they are assembled in Canada with parts made in Japan, Korea, and China. In fact, the report claiming we’re “number one” – something we never tire of hearing – base part of the argument on the notion that we make better business use of technology.

Statistics schmatistics – supposedly, we’re first in class in technology in the workplace. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? Not if you’re the least bit technically savvy. I’m not counting the people whose first experience with decent technology was in their company. I’m talking about if you’ve ever had say moderately good tech at home and compare that with the technology at use in the average US workplace. If you’ve experienced the slow PC purchased at 300% of  it’s street value, with some other corporation’s badge on it, plugged into a single monitor (how do these people do anything – once you’ve worked with two or three monitors, and have realized 300% increase in productivity, going to the average corporate office in the US is like a slap in the face – again, if the best tech you’ve known is at that office, I’m not counting you – you just don’t know) – and then to have productivity-draining software installed (from cripplingly-slow antivirus to ridiculously lame e-mail software – like Lotus Notes), and to have that pc plugged into a slow network, and then locked down with draconian security controls – blocking online productivity apps, tools and utilities, and even reasonably good e-mail – if you’ve experienced these things, you know that this – this sluggish, luddite, scared, ineffective and inefficient corporate version of being wired does not make anything number one. You go home, turn on the three monitors, boot a PC with enough RAM and other characteristics to fly into full throttle, and you know that the corporate US has got something terribly wrong. You work from home whenever you can, because frankly, you have better technology. If not, why not? You can build a box for $300 that beats the one on your desk in a corporate office. Of course, then you get on our speed-throttled US broadband environment, where ISPs charge you outrageous fees to lesson tinker toy limits on an unlimited-speed medium (fiber optic), and you’re dealing with the dichotomy: the corporate office is to your home computer what  your internet connection is to what a 12-year-old has in his bedroom on the technologically civilized side of the world.

These two disparities, though, may not be unconnected. In fact, contrary to what a Canadian professor claims puts the US on top, I venture to suggest that the barbarically mundane, prehistorically inefficient,  and backwater-slow level of technology we associate with our workplace and therefore with our work, in the US, is precisely why we remain in the virtual dark ages of broadband speed and penetration.  Two things are the driving force in our consciousness when it comes to technology – work and play – and frankly, it is work that usually pays the bills for us and for technology.

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet. — [Wall Street Journal, November 15]

The Wall Street Journal ran the above article on November 15th asking the question “Why can’t we pick the technology we use in the office?” The article points out that instead of locking down the capability of installing software or using cloud-based software, virtual machines (which have been around since the mid 1960s, and incidentally are not only inexpensive but have often been provided by Microsoft for free), allow users to install whatever they want in a way that is hard-pressed to affect company security. You want to use a macbook or use your own graphics editor or paint program, you can. Virtual machines are like bringing your own hard drive, except it’s insulated from the rest of the environment. Better yet, if you hire people you can trust, let them bring their own hard drives. Most companies that don’t allow this, while officially banning USB thumb drives, would be hard pressed to find a manager’s desk or pocket that didn’t contain at least one. The WSJ journal cites ignorance and cost concerns during this economy as the barrier – but cost concerns should be driving the demand for more creative solutions to enhancing productivity, not less. In fact, I find it more likely that the barrier is psychological – the need for control, the parental attitude of the corporation itself – “we can’t “let” people do whatever they want or there will be chaos”. “Chaos” is the word corporations use to mean “too much freedom” – which makes the argument circular – ‘we can’t let people do whatever they want or there will be too much freedom’. The article laments the time lost waiting on bad search techology – like using windows to search a shared drive, or using Outlook – miniscule storage (I would say because one corporation that is not technically specialized thinks it’s safer to store it’s own data than partner with a company that is technically specialized to store it for less in unlimited space – after all, your corporation’s network has never gone down, has it?). Time to clean out your darned e-mail folders again. Add to this bad technology purchase decisions – not just in hardware but perhaps especially in software. Corporations are routinely buying fairly useless, anti-productivity (top-down design), and obsolete software – requiring not only retraining but further productivity loss to learn how to use the new productivity loss.

All good points. The cloud, of course, we’ve talked about before. You continually hear bird flu warnings about how a company lost it’s data in the cloud, and yes it’s possible. I wish someone would track all the companies that are losing data every day because they (mis)manage their own technology. The cloud isn’t just up and coming technology, it’s up and soaring. At the very least, all the naysayers should admit they’ve been using cloud technology for a long, long time – whether it’s aol, yahoo, or gmail for their mail. They just aren’t used to thinking about it for storing documents – and they should be, because the documents are far less likely to get lost into a searchless oblivion, get version-hosed or overwritten or wrongly moved or renamed, or be inaccessible just when you need them than cloud docs. The last corp I worked for sentenced us to Lotus Notes and the smart people hooked up a gmail account and simply set it to send mail from the web. Yeah, gmail is SSL, so it’s secure enough for prime time. Given all the hacking and viruses they’ve experienced on their internal mail network, it’s likely far more secure. Gmail not only automatically scans all attachments for viruses before they are opened, it does an unparalleled job of weeding out spam containing those attachments in the first place. Besides which, it has google as the search back-end, a state of the art filing system that makes folders obsolete, and virtually unlimited storage (because it keeps getting larger over time – by the time you use that much, you’ll have more room).

Regardless of the technological prescription one prefers, or even the political or economic one, what has to change is the prevalent attitude in the US about work itself. Those comfortable with the level of technology prevailing in offices are the equivalent of those comfortable with the level of productivity in the US automotive industry in the early 1980s (the K-car era). Increasing the level of technology at work won’t work. What will, the WSJ article correctly assessed, is providing a platform where people can contribute their own technology understanding and choices. The era of the all-knowing parental corporation must face up to the fact that it can’t blog to save it’s arse, can’t effectively handle e-mail, security, or searches (unless you’ve bought a Google server or are using Google Enterprise) better than AOL did a decade ago, and has grown accustomed to reinventing the wheel and then using it for purely ornamental purposes. It must let go – not entirely, but not a little – it must let go a whole lot. And it must favor technologies which favor letting go over management attitudes that don’t. It must, in fact, re-envision management models, team structures, and definitions of collaboration that enchance technological choice for the sake of productivity and for the very security and cost savings it has always referenced to justify it’s stranglehold on the electronic desktop. Corporations must redefine, as well, the workplace cubicle not int terms of the file cabinet, the telephone, and the pencil sharpener, but in terms of the wired and wireless desktop. It must, ultimately, like Jet Blue, go farther and tear down the cubicle walls, in favor of home workers, open environments that don’t suggest the hoarding and protection of office supplies – a gesture mimicking the secretaries of decades past – but rather the interaction of technologies, eradicate the emphasis on personal space in the form of portable felt walls – mimicking the corner office mentality of executives from the Mad Men era, and create an environment where productivity is combined with connectivity to achieve ubiquity – not the “face to face” of the every Wednesday team meeting, but the “any time we choose” of useful chat systems with video conference call capability (like Google Talk and Skype) and the truly collaborative document environment (e.g. of Google Docs). Stop flying contractors around, putting them in hotels, and taxi-ing them to the office to spend most of their time in a closed room using a laptop, and let them work from a technological cockpit whenever possible, saving money and increasing effectiveness. That “little something” you get from being able to stick your head in and talk to them is just your pre-Skype nostalgia talking – it’s a myth, already put to rest by effective distance learning in the academic field.

People seem to think that technology is unconnected to the other aspects of corporate life like the cubicle and the collared shirt. But this denies that the workplace has meaning, just as work itself does. I worked at a corporation that filled the building with so many file cabinets that it couldn’t find places for people to sit, and ended up shrinking the cubicles and jamming people in like egg crates. Most of those file cabinets stand empty, or contain boxes of analog office supplies like white out. What are we in the seventies? But can they keep the network up? Oftentimes, no. Can they equip people to work at home when it goes down? They’re starting to ask the question, but come on – does it have to be one or the other? Technology is connected to how we think about what makes a team a team. Is it people who order bad pizza together once a week, or is it people that collaborate with maximum efficiency and keep the company they want? If it’s the former, then you have to jam a lot of computers onto an overloaded network and force everyone to use the same tech just like you force them to get lunch from the same vendor for that warm, fuzzy once a week get together. Technology is connected to how we think about management? Is it the micromanager who hires someone to book his appointments (a relic of eighties), or is it the team traffic control operator who facilitates effective application of resources? If it’s the former, you’ll have to be where he or she is, instantly accessible in person, and you’ll spend most of your time commuting to and from work, eating at work, and staying late into the evening and coming in on weekends. Who *goes* to the office on weekends? Isn’t that a commentary on the shackles that lock our technology to our desk, us to this albeit obsolete technology, and convince us that this is the world of work, because we’re all in it together?

Being effective in technology requires, as a matter of principle, creating a work environment in which workers can be trusted with nearly any responsibility that is within their realm of competence, in which superficialities take a back seat to productivity (I’m reminded of the coworker people complained was “weird” who, upon researching his stats, it was revealed he was 500% more productive than any of them) – since when did a collar, a clean shave, and a complete absence of personality make you a better contributor to the team. And in which the shroud of control, of domination, of mistrust, and of outright implied condescension (“we can’t let them have that much freedom, because then we’d have to give it to everyone”) is left behind in favor of expressions and measures of results that make technology the ally instead of the enemy. It’s almost as if some companies are suspicious that too much use of technology makes you a dangerous nerd who’s going to seize control of the system – and from themselves. Let go. And, if you want to be successful, the president driving us to faster and more ubiquitous broadband, by itself, won’t be enough. You’ll need to let go more quickly, let go of more things, and change yourself – change the very definition of what it is you do for the company, what your work is, and what it is for others to work for you.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

The Incredible Scansnap

Have you ever owned a piece of equipment for which you had strong emotional feelings? It might have been that 65 Chevrolet, or your first mitre saw, or an early lugabout PC. For me, most recently, it’s the ScanSnap S300 scanner. Before I explain why, allow me to explain how this scanner differs from all others:

• Image by yoppy via Flickr

  By default, it’s not designed to scan to images like jpg, although it will. It is designed to create PDFs. If you’re looking for a photo scanner, this isn’t it.

• It’s lightening fast on scans. The video demonstrations on Youtube are spot on.
• It has the best OCR (optical character recognition) of anything I’ve seen. It creates PDFs from 30 year old typewriter type, that I can copy/paste into anything.
• OCR takes longer to process after scanning, but it’s automated. It doesn’t make you stop and spell check everything.
• It’s not a TWAIN scanner – which is to say it will not be picked up by your various graphics programs, etc. It does one thing, and does it exceedingly well.
• It comes with software that is amazingly versatile and can be configured to go straight to PDF, into Evernote, or do other things.
• It handles paper 8.5″ in width down to business card and receipt width. It comes with business card recognition software.
• It’s incredibly small. You can carry it on a plane. Open a lid, and it powers on. Close it, and it shuts off. AC or USB power.

Now, the reason I love it: I am tired of being surrounded by the thick walls of paper that have accumulated for decades of active information, entrepreneurial, and literary driven life. I’ve been on a slow, slipping, Sisyphean climb toward paperlessness for years. Unfortunately, it was hampered by inadequate technology. No more. Boxes and boxes of documents are now crisp, clean PDFs, searchable when needed. There is more to go, but I can see the stacks getting smaller. I can see freedom over the top.

At about the time that ebooks are on the rise, reducing the size of a library to a drive (for that matter, Google books is a great alternative), file cabinets are destined for the local Goodwill. All you need is a ScanSnap and a good shredder. I’ve got both and I’m watching my office shrink.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Putting Pixily to the Test

What is Pixily?: Pixily is a service that scans your documents with a high degree of privacy and archives them securely online, or makes them available for download as PDFs. By documents, we could be talking about almost anything. I tried the free trial, and put them through their paces, sending the prepaid envelope with approximately 50 impressions to scan to four separate PDFs.

Image via CrunchBase

Robust Testing: For the first run, I gave them what I consider to be an exceedingly challenging packet of material. It was piles of letters and hand-scrawled notes, separated by paperclips where the PDFs should be separate files. The paper ranged from notebook paper with spiral edges, plain notebook paper, typing paper, cards, flyers, stationary paper, newsprint, envelopes, parts of envelopes, and copy paper, to notes scrawled on various scraps of myriad sizes. All items were circa 1981-1995 (yes, up to 28 years old in some cases, and no newer than 14 years old). Memory is precious – I gave Pixily things I didn’t want to forget.

TEST RESULTS

• The PDFs were flawlessly separated. Nothing ended up in one that belonged in another.
• All pages were in the correct order.
• All the truly blank sides were skipped, including blank sides of lined notebook paper.
• Yet nothing with the smallest iota of print was skipped – including the back side of a “blank” envelope that featured a small code stamp. Simultaneously, the blank side of only half an envelope that contained no such stamp was appropriate not scanned. Consequently, bits of things I didn’t notice when I sent the packet were picked up and I’m glad they were not lost.
• Nothing more was cut off than about 2 millimeters at the top of some 20-year old stationary paper, so that the top of a hand-written page number was all that was lost.
• All pages were fully scanned, except for the bottom left corner of one piece of notebook paper that was solidly folded over. They tell you to unfold those, and it was my fault that I did not in that one case. Two words were obscured as a result of my mistake. Ideally, I’d prefer it if they’d caught and straightened it, but in a rather challenging stack of 15-year old spiral notebook paper, I’m not surprised. Not bad.
• All PDFs were flawlessly aligned. Even in PDFs with pages of multiple widths, all pages of any one width flowed spot on from one page to another.
• All text (even faint pencil) was eminently readable, PDF resolution was superb, and things that I didn’t think would be searchable were not only quite searchable in the downloadable PDFs (including newsprint that had gone beyond yellow to brown, and handwritten letters with elaborate penmanship), but the PDF size was surprisingly small and quick to download. Small means 9mb for a 20-page document that included a photo postcard with stamp, and graphically rich stationary, 10mb for a 22-page document that was heavy on handwriting)
• A note on the interface: it seems to go into perpetual ‘hourglass’ mode if you check a document and click “Download PDF” at the top, but choosing “Download PDF” in the More dropdown, next to any one document, produced an instant dialogue to save, and downloads were lightening fast, where not instant, even on 15-20 page PDFs with diverse content.
• I got my packet back in the mail in the same exact order as the PDF pages, with one exception – only the postcard on top had the front (photo side) scanned first (correctly) but the back (text portion) face up (just like I sent it). So they did better than perfect. I was able to rapidly verify every single page in each PDF before shredding the packet I received. The option exists to have them shred, but these documents were too valuable for me not to verify.

SUCCESS SCORE

Pixily scores a whopping 99.9 percent for doing better than exactly what they say they will do, within an astounding point one percent (.1%) margin of error (never cutting off all of a single word – and never really a word – just part of a page number – except in the case of a heavily creased and very small and hard to spot fold hidden deep in a stack of frilly spiral notebook pages (they tell you to take out such creases, so even though it’s a miss, they could have justifiably treated it as intentional – still, in an entire bankers box of business files, the possibility of a folded over corner here and there is high – so be aware and inspect before you send. In their maximum 50 impressions per envelope approach, it’s easier for you to spot when loading).

Conclusion: Simply amazing. In short, if Pixily maintains the quality control they have now, it seems you can trust them with just about anything. Rock on, Pixily. You’re the epitome of the kind of business I want to be in.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Skype Culture & Cell Future

Image via CrunchBase

Case in point: I thought of spending $60/year to set up a regular phone number in Korea that rings on my Skype, wherever I happen to be located, and on whatever computer I happen to have it turned on for at the moment. A little more for voicemail, in case I’m absent. But what’s the point? My brother over there has Skype, and he’ll just call me free through Skype. So, the only people who would need to use such a phone number are people who must call me on the go (from their cell) or who aren’t necessarily skype-savvy. Clients, in other words. And I don’t want clients reaching me instantly. And neither do you – it’s pretty hard to multi-task (to get much real work done) if someone always wants virtual face-time on demand.  Customer service lines are overrated – they mostly give you feel-good buddies, at a premium cost. I have most business lines set to go straight to voicemail and e-mail me the wav file.

Image via CrunchBase

This whole phone number system is predicated on the land-line model, which is more or less predicated on a postal address model. It’s like that company that’s trying to virtualize mail by assigning an e-address that exactly matches the physical address of every site in the US. What’s the point of that? They tell you it’s so businesses can sign on w. them and send statements etc. to a virtual address. Sounds like e-mail. You won’t send statements through e-mail, but you’ll send it to some virtualized street address on the internet? I’m still trying to get various banks and utilities to stop sending me their darned paper – so who knows – they’re still in the Jackie Gleason era – they probably dial the operator to ring up a customer.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Small is More for the MicroEntrepreneur

It no longer matters what operating system I use: Windows, Linux, Mac-OS. Every application that’s essential to me is online (I’m almost entirely supported by Google’s full line of applications), and every other one that I need is cross-platform (firefox and a few plugins, nvu, etc.).

It no longer matters what kind of computer I have: – PC or Mac, because it’s the same internet. Once I’m online, it’s no longer relevant.

It no longer matters much how much processor speed and memory I have, along with the bigtime power supply to power it and numerous fans to keep it cool. What matters is connectivity. Bandwidth is everything. What matters is virtual.

For a portable computer, I just bought a netbook – in this case, the Asus Eee PC 900a: $300 with 1024×600 screen, 1.6ghz (a for)atom processor (ultra-low power requirement and ultra-low heat signature), 1gig ram, and linux instead of windows. Windows is dead – Windows has nothing left to say. It comes with a super-easy linux front end, but I switched it to the more powerful advanced mode and installed the KDE desktop. Now it’s a sophisticated little bugger with a regular less-toylike X-desktop.

No hard drive – it runs on solid-state SD, so it’s shock proof. It’s also consequently lighter than my alarm clock (the battery is the weight – the rest is like a paperback book). Thin LCD screen (e-paper is obviously the future) and ultralight keyboard.

At night, I reach over and finish up that last thing I was doing before I decide ‘enough is enough’ and go to sleep. In the car, I pull over at any hotspot and check e-mail and IM someone. This is truly internet you take anywhere. My focus will be to use it to work on e-books. I want my books (in progress) with me wherever I go.

This is not a computer you’d use to do your taxes or web design. It’s for blogging, e-book writing, e-mail, writing of any kind, and synchronous communication with clients. The parts of your work that are design-oriented, numerically intensive, etc. will require a full-sized monitor (I require three – productivity is precious.). You could connect one, of course (it provides for that), so you could make a docking station for it, but realistically, if you can afford one, you’ll want a dedicated workstation for the other stuff – a netbook that’s docked defeats the purpose – it’ll tend to never leave the dock. Still, the “box” version of the Asus EeePC is about the size of an external hard drive, and may suit for many purposes.

Backups: I no longer keep stuff one one kind of hardware (main hard drive) and back it up on other hardware (external hard drive). Instead, I keep it online, where I work on it, share it, publish it, collaborate on it, etc. The meaning of a document isn’t ownership, it’s interaction. And I back it up to an external USB drive. I remember the days of online backup services. Now I’m the backup service, and the originals are online.

Transferring Files: For fast file large file transfer between PCs not on the same network, I no longer burn DVD-ROMs, I either send it through an online service or spit it out to a flash drive in my pocket. They’re large-capacity, cheap, and fast, and USB ports are ubiquitous. Optical drives like CD and DVD hold no more appeal. I never use mine. The future is card media.

Printing: What the heck is printing? Well, I don’t have a GPS, so I’ll print directions from Google Maps, but that’s about it. I have a laser printer but, at this point, I’d rather just toss someone a $5 USB drive than buy ink and paper.

All of this and ubiquitous wi-fi conspires to do several things:

• Convince us, now more than ever, to have a paperless office. Scan all your old piles and organize, and any paper someone sends you. Shred it all. Scan and shred.
• Reduce the space and energy we need for the office. A stationary office can occupy a bedside table. Sure, I like my leather chairs, but I’m beginning to prefer to make the whole house the office – anywhere is the office.
• Make the office inherently portable, if with a slightly reduced productity (e.g. my 3 screens can’t go with me). You can toss the heart of your office, if you’re a webeneuer, onto your front seat, into your glove box, or tuck it in a pouch or book cover.
• Reduce the cost of a self-sustained office. $300 for an onramp, with free wifi nearly everywhere, and you’re working like a jetsetter.

And the result is…

Now, more than ever before, we can open a business in the closet of a hallway or at a borrowed table at your local hippy coffee shop (buy Fair Trade!), with little cost, little dependency, and high mobility. The life of work and liberty formerly available only to the operators of pushcarts or to jetsetters is widely available to the man with an idea and one paycheck.

This has already come to pass, even if we don’t realize it. This and more – increasingly, you can do whatever is in your mind, as technology becomes, not our superpower, but the vehicle of it. Whether there’s anything in people’s minds for it to extend, aid, and make prosper is another question entirely, and one each of us must answer.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Two Great Threes

With initial product reviews, I think it’s generally a good idea to revisit a while later, and see if the glamour has worn off, or if the product is still showing it’s value.

Two products I’ve mentioned here have been the Motofone F3 and the Mazda 3. So how are they holding up?

M3: There are four key things I love about my Mazda 3:

• leanness: I get over 30mpg in mixed driving, It takes up very little room, and it’s big on the inside.
• response: Stick shift, so it moves with me – no waiting for it – it keeps pace like a lover.
• air: The moon-roof is the ultimate accessory. It’s all about airflow. The brain needs O2, for thought, for recuperation, and for pleasure. With the windows down and the roof open, you get a lot of the pleasure of a convertible w/o the drawbacks. Driving home is a form of rejuvenation.
• black: Did I mention it’s black inside and out? I look good in this car. What’s more, I feel good in it. It’s a kind of portable, comfortable, womb of steel and leather with instruments and wheels.

F3: The Motophone F3 is still the best phone ever:

• leanness: It’s super thin, super light, and does only what I need – one key control, and it’s $40 free and clear – no dotted line.
• response: It’s got the loudest ring (but gentle at first), the loudest volume, the best reception, clearest screen in direct light (it’s e-paper), and super-long battery life. It’s also ultra-portable (slam in a sim card and go). Meters (battery & reception) are external and always on. Suitable for your primary phone. It doesn’t do music and photos, but neither does a landline, and this goes anywhere. Goes great with a Mazda3.
• black: Seems like a fine suit. It’s equipment, not a toy.

That’s it. Both of the above products are going strong. Excellent purchases, and I recommend them highly.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Business phone under $40

The Motofone F3. For one thing, it’s an act of dissidence, like entrepreneurship, so I like it a lot in that way: it’s been called the anti-iPhone. It’s the opposite of the culture obsessed with texting and constantly communicating with little of substance to say.

1. High durability – no glass and it’s practically armored, but scalpel-thin. You can drop it, throw it, stand on it, run over it repeatedly on gravel, toss it off a roof, then pick it up and make a call. No joke. Youtube videos abound putting it through just such abusive paces. It’s like the old 20-pound Bell phones (which were great for clobbering burglars), but this is the shuriken of phones.
2. High visibility (read it in direct sunlight). It reads like writing on paper. Shine one of those Homeland Security lights in your eyes and at least you can call your lawyer.
3. High battery life (if you get the GSM model – if you’re stuck in a CDMA contract, I’m sorry, but at least there’s a version for you). The battery life is due to the same reason (it’s got a display based on e-paper*, which only uses battery when the screen changes, so it’s always on, but with no video drain)
4. High call clarity – the best there is – sounds like you’re next door (I don’t need my clients and I to pay more attention to reception than to each other)
5. Flexibility – I got the unlocked version, so it’ll work on nearly any sim card provider in my part of the world (either a plan like AT&T or T-Mobile or pay as you go, in case you’re on the lam – or just prefer to live like it – no ties, ready to drop and go at any time)
6. Economic justice: it’s under $40 – it runs what a decent landline phone might cost in a discount store. It costs less than a month of service from most providers, and you own it. After all, why should I carry around the crown jewels, or have my equity, debt, or wealth tied up in telephone? Why should a phone cost as much as a mortgage payment, and need a contract to secure? Live light where you can – not to is a grave thing.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Pounding out the List

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Perfect Exercise for Intense People

This is it. HIIT! High Intensity Interval Training. It’s going to be my new best friend. I’ve been hitting the gym, but what I’ve been doing is just not for the impatient. If you’re a decisive, bottom line, goal-driven, task intensive, and even impulsive kind of person, HIIT is it! Seriously – this is the ideal exercise pattern for the person who would rather be doing something with a point.

[What is HIIT?] [How to HIIT] [Found it with LifeHack]

Twitter This

Usuario: Password:

Free Web-Ex Alternatives

Looking for a free Web-Ex clone? Web-ex is great for conducting webinars (web seminars), but perhaps a little bloated and pricey. This is a brief survey of free alternatives I’ve tried, all of which had mixed results.

• Zoho Office Meeting: Worked in IE, trouble in firefox. Slow but works.
• SlideLive: Only for PowerPoint (not webinars). Worked perfectly the first time.
• CrossLoop: Great marketplace concept. The installed software won’t launch (had to reboot after the install to accomplish that). Acct confirmation not smooth: (had to log out before confirmation link would work). Need to test this with someone – seems like it will work.
• Shareview (Microsoft): It’s Microsoft, but decent interface and application-based sharing. Never got it to work: maybe the connections don’t function thru the same router.
• DimDim: Easy setup, nice interface. Screensharing problems – never got it to work.
• VNC: Technical, but works every time.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password: