Category Archives: technology

Things you miss when they’re not there…

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I learned two very important lessons today. The first is that I can spend eight hours at work and not have access to a computer and not feel like I’m missing all that much… Especially when the nice lady down the row prints off the important stuff and hand delivers it to me. I can’t say the same thing for working in a place that has some of the worst cell phone coverage in the industrialized world. Seriously. My phone went between one bar, searching, and no coverage randomly throughout the day. And when there was coverage, it wasn’t 3G. Yeah. That slow.

You don’t realize how much you rely on your cellie day-to-day, especially when you have a working computer to keep yourself distracted. When suddenly it’s the only commo you have and it’s not working with any reliability, you find yourself in for a long day. And no, the irony of a massive communication hub being smack dab in the middle of a dead zone isn’t lost on me in the least. That’s just Sam doing his thing.

Tracker…

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There’s been alot of press this week about the iPhone “tracker” file. Sure, if you didn’t know about it, you might be tempted to think of it in terms of an invasion of privacy. But since it’s right there in the Terms of Service, I’m not sure what the fuss is about. If you’re spending alot of time in places where you’d rather not be seen, I’ve got bad news for you… there are already cameras everywhere and your cute mid-twentieth century notion of “privacy” is quaint. How much of your information have you willing posted on Flickr, WordPress, or Facebook? More than you’d think… and generally done with a time and location stamp built right there into the electrons.

Sure, you can keep some things private if you try hard enough. Stop using social media, or really just stop using the internet all together. Hand over your GPS and your cell phone. Cut up your credit cards and your ATM card – although you’ll find it hard to withdraw money from the bank without showing up at a branch and getting yourself on film. Stop going to public places – Big Brother loves watching crowds at places like airports, city centers, and shopping malls. Turn off your TV and maybe even your car with the fancy OnStar system.

The internet is alight with people decrying companies that are trying to “steal” our private information… but they’re not trying to steal anything. We sold it to them bit by bit. We did it for convenience. And maybe some of us did it without even knowing. That’s the price we pay for living in our brave new world. If you think we can roll it back now, you’re deluded – always-on, technology that’s fully integrated into our lives has seen to that. The best any of us can do is embrace the public nature of our private lives, learn the new rules, and make sure that we are the best advocate for our online selves.

Apple Care…

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For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Apple Care. There’s something to be said for an operation where you can make an appointment, walk in and generally get a repair or replacement within a couple of minutes.

After a few weeks of struggling with a glitchy iPhone, I finally decided to make my appointment before I was too tempted to send my phone hurtling towards the fireplace. I’m pretty sure blunt force trauma isn’t something that’s covered as warrantee work. After meeting with my “Genius,” the official diagnosis was “home button intermittent.” The cause, officially listed as “You have too many apps running in the background.” The exchange went a little like this:

Genius: If you shut those down once a day you shouldn’t have a problem.

Me: Yeah, I do that already. I’ve even done the half dozen other “fixes” recommended in the forums.

Genius: Ok, I’ll shut them down and you should be good to go

Me: Uhhh… yeah.

This is the point in the day where we spent five minutes trying to get the home key to respond in any way.

Genius: Well, we’ve managed to reproduce the problem.

Me: Yep.

Genius: Uhhh… Why don’t we just get you a replacement…

Me: Perfect

I had also hoped to look at the possibility of swapping out my iPad because of a stuck pixel. One very annoying bight blue stuck pixel. Apparently, though, some degree of “stickage” is considered to be within performance standard. On an $800 consumer electronic product, zero defects should be the performance standard, but arguing with the genius wasn’t going to get me anywhere. In fairness, she did offer to swap it out using my one-time warrantee replacement for accidental damage, but being this early in the life cycle, and given that I’m tapping this post out one handed, balancing my iPad on my knee over a concrete floor while holding a steaming cup of coffee with my left hand, I decided the better part of valour was probably holding the freebie in reserve until something apocalyptic happens.

But for the record that one dead pixel is super annoying.

Taking a test drive…

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I promised an unboxing, but was a little too quick getting things unwrapped to keep much of a record. For the moment you’ll have to be satisfied with riding along as I take the new toy out for a test drive. The first thing you notice out of the box is just how good it feels in the hand. The tapered edges are much more comfortable than the vertical edges on version one. It’s definitely a slimmer form factor. I didn’t expect it to be as noticeable as it is, but it makes quite a difference.

After the mandatory registration with iTunes and really getting a chance to put iPad 2 through it’s paces, I’ve got to say that it handles remarkably well. Web browsing is very, very quick and switching apps doesn’t lag at all. I haven’t thrown too much stress at it yet, but I’m expecting great things based on first impressions.

For an afternoon launch, the line wasn’t bad – assuming you got there early enough. I ended up waiting just over three hours from getting in line to walking out of the store… Which brings up the only negative experience of the day. Stockage of the 18 different versions was a bit of an issue. By the time I made it into the store, the AT&T 16 and 32 GB models in black and white were sold out, leaving the only AT&T option as the 64GB version. Since the card I got while in line guaranteed only an AT&T enabled version, it was either hand over an extra $200 and take delivery of four times more storage than I planned on or walk out empty handed. Since I had an AT&T card, I couldn’t just switch off to one of the Verizon versions that were still in stock. This is an issue Apple could have prevented if they would have taken online reservations as they have for previous product launches. Of course it’s not necessarily in Apple’s interest to do that. I forked over an extra $200. I wonder how many others did too. I can’t image many who sat in line for hours were going to be thwarted by another two bills. Now if I were one of the people who was still several hundred people deep in the line when I left, I might be feeling a little different about how things turned out.

All things being equal, I’m well pleased. There are still plenty of things I need to put through their paces, but I’m pretty sure our friends from Cupertino hit another home run.

Live from Saddle Creek…

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11:30 CST – A ground level reconnaissance pass reveals approximately 20 holding a place in line. Holding fast on the plan to arrive at 2:00 for my own spot. Regular updates will follow.

2:15 – it’s a line, but not the worst I’ve seen for a product launch. Lots of milling around for the next few hours. Check back!

2:25 – Thanks for the free Starbucks, Apple. Well played.

2:36 – according to the nice Apple store guy who just came by, I’m #74 in line. It’s a pretty stringy line, but very surprised I’m under the 100 mark.

3:35 – Hour and a half to go! It’s, ah, warmed up out here quite a bit. And concrete is not comfortable for sitting. You’d think that’s something I’d remember from year to year. Fortunately there are two very attractive, yet sadly very married, young ladies in line in front of me for good conversation. It doesn’t make the concrete any softer, but it certainly passes the time.

4:20 – Quite a line behind me at this point. Actually more of a clump.

4:40 – counting down now. 20 minutes till go time. Reports from the east coast sound positive for the device and a quick sales process.

4:50 – Obligatory cheering Apple employees.

5:00 – open for business!

5:10 – official ticket passing out. Size not specified, but guaranteed not to be out of stock completely. This is a good, good thing.

5:15 – made it to the velvet rope. I feel very VIP.

5:20 – front of the line. Check back for the unboxing results.

Stand to the right…

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Since there were no pre-orders or reservations for the iPad 2, there’s really no difference between standing on the right or left this time around. All the early adopters and true believers are going to be lumped together with the casual buyers tomorrow. Probably a good move if your goal is to generate nice lines at 5:00 in time zones across America… conveniently scheduled to coincide with the evening local and network news cycles. Needless publicity stunt or not, I’ll be there tomorrow – in one of those rare moments when my desire for new and shiny overcomes my natural aversion to large groups of people.

I’ve got my product all picked out – 16GB, wifi, 3G over AT&T (seriously, they’re good for data… actual phone calls, of course, still suck). A spur of the moment panic about “what if” storage needs could bump that up to 32GB at the moment of truth, though. I mean who wants to be caught without enough storage for a crapload of TV episodes, songs, and apps, and the occasional movie, right? Although the new ability to stream media around the house may make the larger sizes redundant for all but the most serious power users.

Hopefully by this time tomorrow I’ll be home fondling my newest piece of kit. If you want the scoop, check back here in around 2:00 CST tomorrow when I’ll be blogging live and in person from the Apple Store in Memphis. Geeky? You bet. Fortunately, I’m pretty OK with that. See you in line!

My generation…

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One of the most shocking moments of my early career was realizing the level of discomfort most of my fellow employees felt when dealing with issues of technology. On the outside, I made the (unfortunate) assumption that government was full of code breakers, supercomputers sending men to the moon, and software that could track anyone, anywhere. I suppose those tasty bits of tech may exist somewhere, but the most advanced piece of hardware that anyone in my agency has is their Blackberry (already two or three generations out of date). It’s fair to say I was shocked and appalled at the number of people in government who just don’t get the role technology is going to play over the coming decades.

We’re in the leading edge of that future now. Utilities like Facebook and Twitter may have a toy-like simplicity – I’ve heard my own leaders dismiss them as “for the kids” and nothing more than a drain on productivity – but as more traffic is driven to the web, as electronic communication in its many forms continues its rise, the fact is that this is going to largely be the way people communicate in the future. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you received an actual letter from someone under 40?

The age of instant communication and access to the sum total of all human knowledge is going to level the bureaucracy, whether the bureaucracy accepts it or not. It’s happening already – those with a little bit of savvy are using basic tools like Dropbox, Google Chat, or SharePoint to circumvent the cumbersome “authorized” communications channels that stovepipe information to “collaborate in a matrixed environment.” Instead of sending a request for information up the chain-of-command and waiting for the answer to come back down from on high, we’re reaching out directly to the person with the information we need. That person may sit a few desks away or not even be on the same continent. The beauty of the age is that location doesn’t matter. The future is going to look like the cloud, not like a hierarchical org chart.

There’s more information stored electronically than we could ever hope to archive in the biggest file room. Electrons and knowing how to use them are what’s going to be left when we as an organization realize that the old forms are no longer viable. Information has always been power. Managing and controlling the flow of electronic information is going to be the “institutional knowledge” of our time. I don’t think command-and-control model of management will ever go away, this is government after all, but we few, we happy few who know how to make the electrons hum are going to be the voices of power behind that throne… if only because the king doesn’t know how to turn on his computer.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

In the cloud…

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I’ve been working on it for a while now, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve finally managed to merge almost all of my communications tools into the Google Apps environment. That means that with the exception of the WordPress platform that actually hosts the blog, I can manage every aspect of http://www.jeffreytharp.com from my Google dashboard. Sure, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but remember, I’m not a gearhead when it comes to tech. For the most part, I can’t tell you why things work, but I’m pretty good at telling when things work well and picking apart where they need to work better. With this last update of the apps dashboard, I was finally able to sync the iPhone with my hosted email/address book without using a clunky and inelegant work around that involved regularly porting my actual address book to a dummy Gmail address I had to set up just for OTA syncing. Now that they’ve fixed the glitch, I’m pleased with the near 100% integration and the ability to essentially run my life and my public voice from a single point of contact. Maybe someday I’ll take another look at Blogger and see if I can round out my reliance on the Google universe. But for the time being, I’m happy with WordPress and it seems like the place to stay until I find some strongly compelling reason to relocate. Maybe I can convince myself to take on the reorganization and facelift in the near future and close out this latest round of productivity. Until then, you can find me in the cloud.

Taking the long way around…

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I’m not sure I’m happy with my relationship with the new doctor. I liked my old doc. I told her what the problem was and what I wanted to happen and then *poof* it happened. This new guy and I seem to be talking past one another. I’m telling him what the problem is and then he wants to figure out what the root cause is before treating the symptoms. That’s great and all, but really, all I wanted out of today was to improve my life through chemistry and get an actual full night’s sleep. No such luck from Dr. Let’s-run-some-tests. Instead of something to make me sleep, all I have to show for today is a $23 co-pay, what seemed to be an awful lot of drawn blood being sent off for testing, and a possible diagnosis of a syndrome whose only appreciable symptom seems to be extreme dry mouth. So as far as I can tell, the logic here is: Dry mouth triggers increased drinking, which causes increased kidney function, which triggers frequent nighttime visits to the water closet, which means waking up at all times of the night and results in a very, very sleepy Jeff. Sure, all this is possible, but really all I’m interested in is getting to sleep. The rest is in the nice-to-fix category, but not really my big issue at the moment. If someone want’s to sneak up behind me and hit me in the head with something hard and knock me out for a few hours, I’d consider it a huge favor and an early Christmas present.

On the up side, while the doc was trying to look up drug interactions on his medical palm pilot, I beat him to it with my iPad. I don’t think he was as impressed as he probably should have been. I mean, I wasn’t even able to use their wifi and I still beat him to it. With the rest of the visit being what it was, I’m going to take that as a small victory. That’s probably why he’s not going to do anything other than look at test results until after we meet again after the first of the year. Pyrrhic victory, much?