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 Furl is gone, though they’ve been replaced by Diigo which is pretty cool for social bookmarking for other reasons.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.

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The 2-minute Resignation Letter

Here it is, time to write another resignation letter for a family member. This is sort of my area, so naturally I reach for the most tiny, most dull, most trivial versions there are. Yes, I’d like to say, “you people are tards who are running your own business into the ground by rewarding mediocrity and using some of the dumbest attempts at emotional manipulation there are – what were you thinking?”, but no I won’t say that. The best response to a business that’s no longer worth your time is to just take your participation elsewhere or else build a better one – not necessarily a bigger one or one as big, but just a better one. Even if it’s just one person and honor, it’s better than one with all the furnishings and none of the ethos that makes any size business great. Greatness isn’t always in the best location, and frequently it answers its own phone.

Still, in my ongoing search for ever more minimalist templates for firing an organization and letting a company go, I came across this one. What the letter says (not how it reads) is that I dictated it to my small child, who is sharper than the recipient, and I included drawings in case you get confused. Now that’s a very good letter, for when you really mean it.

I’m not sending that version, but I’m also not sending the kind that worries about leaving a lasting, but false, impression. What my version will boil down to is the following elements:

1. Effective Date: With your last words, demonstrate your effectiveness. For yourself. They probably don’t realize what they’re losing, and won’t.
2. Explanation: “Positive” but indirect. Not “I’m going somewhere better” but “I’m needing to take the next step in my career”. There. You’ve just said that you’ve realized that better doesn’t exist where you are. But you didn’t say that exactly, you said you were taking care of business.
3. One positive thing about where you worked: Even if it’s just “I learned a lot”. That can mean anything. Courtesy is the least you can do for yourself. Always opt to feel civilized, regardless of whether the place you’re leaving is civilized. That way you don’t take any of it with you.

Onward and upward. That’s the resignation letter I favor. If you can’t write it in under 2-minutes, it’s too much.

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Blog vs. Debt

One of the things I like seeing about this economy is the spirit of resistance and, often enough, of triumph that is coming in response. You can see it in the blogosphere. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, about how it’s going to be ‘over’ in a few months. I don’t think so. We’re never going back, folks. It doesn’t matter what people will say when they feel it’s safe to go back into the water of gratuitous waste, dishonest lending, foolish borrowing and general overextension of everything. It won’t be ‘over’ – it won’t be ‘recovered’ – it’ll be different. And I believe different is already here and here to stay.

One blog I found recently really turns me on: Man vs. Debt. It’s written by an amateur and that’s one of the things I like about it. Not every post is a winner, any more than it is here. Some are stellar. It’s real. My favorite is the one on how he decided to sell anything in his house that wasn’t nailed down – from diaper pins to soap dispensers – on ebay and in garage sales. A family member told him that surrendering their possessions would feel like “going backwards”, but he said that being in debt is being backwards – getting out of debt is moving forward, and they can always buy the things they really want again with cash once that happens. What a radical break that is with most of society in the West!

Aside: I live in the Midwestern United States, and here the value system is to get as big a house as you can (almost everything centers on the acquisition of a house), on the most land you can own, and then spend the rest of your life shopping at Pier One Imports or Walmart to fill it with as many things as you can (no empty space – it’s not allowed), and then die and give it all to your kids, so they can have an estate sale, and use the money to rinse and repeat. It’s Noah’s Ark syndrome. Build or acquire a really big structure and fill it with your own copy of everything – two of each. You need a dining room table, and a little kitchen table too. You need two cars. You need at least two TVs. Two telephones. And so it was that all the Noahs signed mortgages, as if theirs were the true ship into which two of every kind of possession must go, and they filled it with two of everything, and closed the hatch. And one day they died in there, and I bought their TV at an estate sale for $20, watched it for a year, and then sold it for $10 in a garage sale. I don’t think the rain is coming to wash away all our possessions. I don’t think we’ll never see furniture again, if we don’t acquire more of it. And what I like is neither do people that write blogs like that. They’re busy casting things out of the Ark! Swim! Swim, you useless curios and pieces of fiberboard crap! Swim back into the stream and be gobbled up by people who are building arks for the end of the sale!

I digress. Another example of some amateurs going at it is the spunky, youthful Five Girls Ditching Debt. Might as well be Spice Girls in my book. Ooo la la! No sooner do you click on these babes’ site than you see pledge #1 – follow David Ramsey’s Baby Steps. Damned straight. They got me out of credit card debt. The rules, not the five girls. Think of it like an exercise journal where  you maintain the will to victory by the sheer chutzpah of posting your goals and your progress on a public wall for the world to see. It’s like talking trash to yourself. Yeah, I’m going to kick debt’s arse! You hear me debt? Watch me! You got something you want to say? Yeah, I’m telling the whole world how I’m going to take you down after school. You’re mine, debt. What, is that a tear in your eye? No, these girls aren’t bullies. Bullies are just pussy cats who can’t deal with their inner softness. These girls are gym-kata fighters with the foo of debt erasure. I wouldn’t bet against them. Sissies would have just found a sugar daddy to pay things off. The five are keeping it real. Gutsy broads, all of them.

I love what people are doing to revamp their lives, hack society’s assumptions, and rethink the world of excess. It’s a revival of sorts, folks. And you can see the little conversions, the little salvific acts appearing all over the place. There’s a revolution goin’ on. I’d like to see Thomas Friedman shocked one morning to wake up and have to amend his friggin 37-CD set on the “Flat World” by saying that the US is starting to outdistance Japan as a nation of savers and investors. Not because I’ve got a flag up my butt and I’m waving in the patriotic wind, or breaking wind, but because it’s good for us, man. The times they are a changing.

The new wind is get up and liberate yourself from the bondage on debt. Paul Simon should make a new version of his song – call it “50 Ways to Leave Your Banker” – “Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.” That’s right, folks. Say it with the Beatles, too: “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” These guys (and at least five girls) are the “drop out (of the economy of economic serfdom) and burn your draft card  anti-debt protesters” of the new economy (today the draft is your credit card – it sends you off to Sam’s Club for a three year stint facing down the enemy of interest). These are the radicals. Don’t underestimate their potency. Hear them roar.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Fear, Loathing, Escaping the Cube

So when I first started building my business, I took a ‘day’ job. It was partly fear. It was. It’s hard to turn down a steady paycheck, healthcare, and the lascivious knowledge that somehow society supports your decision, where they seem to be bewildered by people who  break away from corporate life. It wasn’t a terrible decision, though. A job is a great way to capitalize your business. It’s a great way to shore up your resources, build your emergency fund, get your feet under you, and lend capital to your startup.

It was supposed to be for 10 months. A “contract” job, by which they mean you get benefits, you’re a full-time employee, but it’s essentially temporary – for a project. In this case, right up my alley – designing and training software and processes and being the face of the software rollout on the ground with the end-user population. As these things often go, though, it became two years. The business suffered. It suffered because I had to turn some clients away. I didn’t get to give it the kind of attention it needed. I throttled its growth, so I could keep doing what I was doing.

When the day gig started winding down, the temptation to look for another job was strong, I can tell you. For the same reasons. After all, you can never have enough capital, never really have enough in the emergency fund (it keeps getting hit by life’s emergencies), and when your primary peer base is employees who support what you’re doing – being an employee – you start sort of feeling the pressure to cave.

At some point, though, you have to cut the cord. Corporate life is like a mother that feeds you, true enough, but also ensures you never stray outside the front yard. As the project started ending, people would get sort of gentle and weepy-eyed on my behalf – you know, the kind of sympathy you get at funerals. “Are you going to be all right?” Imagine that too quiet, too soft voice like someone has died.  I have a low tolerance for that. What makes anyone think I’m all right being an employee? Is that what it means to be all right?

People respond differently when you tell them you’re leaving corporate life to do your own thing. Some like to insert the if’s everywhere they can. “IF you’re able to make it float. IF you’re able to last in this economy (they don’t realize that every economy is an opportunity).” etc. Others like to sort of glaze over and patronize, as though you’ve told them you’re quitting college to be an artist, or running away to join the circus. They figure it’s a phase, an expression of despair, loss, and grief at “losing” your job. Have they never been in a contract before? The whole point is for you to finish it, and for it to end. But the point is that they think you’re doing something self-destructive, like moving in with your mom and drinking a fifth of vodka every day, while you refinish wooden boats. Come to think of it, if it’s good vodka, that could be a business.

The thing is, at some point you either have to keep strangling your own business, or business plan, keep relegating it to the theoretical, actually lending creedence to its fairytale status, or you do in fact have to sack up, cut yourself loose from the dock, and float your boat out to sea. The sea is choppy, the sea is wild, that’s what they warn you about. It’s true. So true. But if you listen, what they’re really saying is, “the sea is scary”. They’re asking you to be afraid. They’re asking you to share in their own fear, to be afraid with them. After all, if we’re all afraid together, huddling in our cubicles – our cells, dreading the axe, the chances are some us will get a pardon. Gosh, I just can’t bear any longer to look at the world of work that way. Work is the fruit of a man’s loins, so to speak. Work is the product of his heart, his head, and his hands. It’s a glorious, sacred thing. The notion that fear enters into it, or somehow helps us, protects us, keeps us sane, stable, and safe is for the fainthearted who plan to spend all their lives living on another man’s dime.

Don’t get me wrong: if someone wants to be an employee, that’s fine. Some people prefer that you give them their work. I’ve no qualm with it, ultimately. I much prefer to be a contractor or self-employed or both. Contractors *are* self-employed, if they do it right. But the notion that the employee has to choose being an employee out of fearfulness cheapens being an employee. If you’re that, and you want it, do it without fear. When you’re laid off, when your project is finished and you have to move on, when your company goes out of business, you know that’s part of the deal. Don’t be afraid, be ready for it. Be on top of it. I’ve seen successful employees do this. I’m not knocking it. I’m knocking terror in the sacred place of our talents and the product of our souls. People say they don’t feel afraid, until you see the boat start to rock, and then it all comes gushing out.

But in the same way, fear has no place in the heart of a contractor or a self-employed person. It’s an enemy, a slow poison. Sometimes, not so slow. It’s like being chained to some invisible, impotent thug who only wishes to be a weight that holds you to the mundane, stifles your imagination, and does its best to convince you to be like other men – to join and imitate the huddle. And that fear will stifle your business, where taking a temporary gig to fund it and build it, in and of itself, won’t do so.

To those who are shaking their head in sadness for my departure – you can rest assured I’ll be fine. Quite fine. I’ll land on my feet, because I know where they are. And if I ever get hungry, I’ll see you again, using a job to pack my bank account for a business makeover, or a rebuild, or a new birth. But the very idea that I’d fail presumes only one thing – that I lack the heart to keep running at it, determined to prosper. I have a much harder time buying that fairytale. I don’t even see *how* one can fail if you only determine never to stop, never to give in, never to let up, until you have what you are after. And what’s the worst case scenario? That someone like me does this all his life, running at it, making a new start, pushing at it, building, building again if it gets knocked down, until his last breath. Frankly, that’s a heroic way to live. I’m pretty comfortable with that. I don’t plan on that to be the story, but I wouldn’t mind it and, honestly you don’t have the emotional stamina to put yourself to work if you don’t have the heart to work that hard.

I do. You do, some of you. Or want to. How on earth do people think these things get done? I’ve heard the myth – every business that survives and enriches its owners is the creation of pre-existing wealth or is an accident of history in a far off place where someone else – always someone else – stumbles accidentally upon an idea or a process that makes them ’successful’. It takes a lot of faith to believe fairy stories like *that* one. Any decent survey of startups that have lasted a few years will show you that it’s *not* true. That happens, yes, but a lot of businesses, quietly making it, are just the product of someone so cantankerous, so obscenely arrogant, that he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t stop, and didn’t care what you thought about him (unrealistic dreamer and blowhard), even if he seemed pleasantly congenial during “team lunches”.

To those who think I’m unrealistic, what is real? Isn’t it what someone is actually doing? What I’m doing is real – it’s not imaginary. And what I will do will be real when I really do it. I’m not asking you to believe anything, let alone believe in what you can’t see. I’m not asking for anything at all. That’s the point. Be sympathetic, if you want. Be dubious, if you like. Just don’t be in my way when I’m working, because that and only that will give me concern. Just don’t call me late for dinner, in other words.

Now, in a blog about work, I’m not the point, per se. Not really. Nor is my personal history, and that’s not why I’m recounting it. Nor am I the paragon, holding himself up to suggest you live the righteous life that I myself am living. I’m writing a somewhat personal story because I think many of us are in the same boat, sharing the same goals and are surrounded by many of the same attitudes and… sympathies. And if nothing else, this is about more than encouragement. The blog is called Rules of Work. It’s about the principles of what we’re doing, and how we achieve it. We’ve written about fear in the past. “The mind killer”, as they say on Dune. So I won’t articulate that rule again. People who don’t get it just say “yeah, whatever, blah blah blah” (yes, I got such an e-mail). People who do, just need to know that many of us are unafraid. That courage is there to be found, to reach for. And that the fears of others aren’t the rule that must govern our lives. We are free of others’ anxieties, if we want to be.

You don’t have to burn every bridge. Like I say, I’ll get a job again, if I get hungry enough, and I’ll use it to fund a rebuild of my business. But you also don’t have to stay in the big “safe” boat (the news anywhere lately should tell you it was never safe and certainly isn’t going to be any time soon – smart people at least put a second iron into the fire). You can cut the rope, including the rope to all that emotional baggage that comes from other people, and just serves as an anchor to weigh you down. Nothing profound, perhaps. Just an alternative story – a different mythos than the one that’s coming over the top of the cubicle walls, or is in the mournful goodbyes if you’re leaving your gig. Be a rock star. Leave the stage just as well as you walked on.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pounding out the List

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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]

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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.

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