Tag Archives: computer

Lion…

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Like a moth to the flame, I am drawn to yet another newly released Apple product. Thank god a $29.99 download from the App Store won’t break the bank like a new laptop… although the Air updates that they released today look pretty sweet too. Other than blogging, I don’t do enough work on the computer these days to justify any kind of upgrade. Maybe I’ll convince myself next year to spring for a new laptop and ditch the current giant monitor/laptop arrangement… though by then, I’ll be doing even less on the computer than I do now.

At the moment, I’ll be happy just to finish downloading Lion and taking it out for a test drive. I’ll report back if it completely bugs out on me. Otherwise, you can assume it’s another Apple effort that just works.

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.

Meetings…

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It’s not an official duty day without attending at least one meeting. It is, therefore, imperative that we have an effective and efficient means of coordinating who should attend and when they should arrive. If only there was a widely available and heavily used computer program that would make that possible. Oh, yeah… Outlook does that. In theory. What setting up meetings in outlook really does for us, though, is generate mass confusion surrounding any meeting that we might ever attempt to schedule. In fairness, I suppose it’s not so much an Outlook error as it is operator incompetence.

Scheduling a major meeting at our “organization” (i.e. any aggregation of more than four people) involves a process that looks something like this:

Step 1: Set up a meeting request in Outlook

Step 2: Change the time and/or date of this meeting at least three times

Step 3: Receive one or more cancelation notices

Step 4: Get three follow-up meeting requests either the same or slightly
different than the first

Step 5: Receive a reminder email from the meeting organizer two days before the meeting

Step 6: Receive a reminder phone call from the meeting organizer one dat before the meeting

Step 7: 15 minutes before the meeting receive 1-3 automatic reminders from Outlook depending on how many of the original meeting requests the organizer remembered to cancel.

Step 8: Arrive at the appointed conference room to find it empty and the lights off

Step 9: Consider the misguided series of steps that led you to your current career.

If you’re lucky, the no one else will figure out when or where the meeting is actually supposed to take place either and you’ll at least have a nice quiet conference room to hide in for a while. Quiet weeping is optional at your discretion.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Broken…

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I get to the office early most mornings. It’s usually a good chance to catch up before everyone else starts wandering in. One of the challenges is that pretty much no one with any passing relationship to authority is around in the event an employee is feeling lonely and wants to talk. So more often than not, I’m the lucky manager who gets the early morning conversations. This morning was one of those times.

Jeff: Good Morning *seeing “employee” walking over to my desk*

Employee: My computer works now, but none of my files are there. I think it’s broken. *looking at me plaintively*

Jeff: Ummm… Did you call IT?

Employee: Uh. No. I thought you’d know how to fix it. They got it working yesterday but now my files are gone.

Jeff: So you want me to fix something they broke yesterday?

Employee: *looking at me blankly*

Jeff: You’d better call IT since they know what they did to it yesterday.

Employee: They won’t be in for another 20 minutes.

Jeff: Patience is a virtue, I’m told.

I’m not the friggin’ laptop whisperer over here. Put in your help request and wait like everyone else does. My using illicit passwords to go in and tinker around with your settings is pretty much guaranteed to only cause more trouble. If not more trouble for you, then certainly more trouble for me… and that’s a no go at this station.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Hard copy…

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With very few exceptions, all of our documents live on one of several network drives available to every employee in the building. I theory that means if ask where something is, I should be able to say “it’s on the Q-drive in the folder titled Big Expensive Project.” Thus armed, a reasonable person could be expected to go forth and find the file they need. Of course our people aren’t necessarily reasonable… and the concept of a networked drive Dot Matrix.jpgmight as well be a blueprint for a time machine.

I’ve been using a tablet to tote all of my paperwork for the better part of the last year. It’s great. I make changes in a meeting, at my desk, or sitting on the can and whatever I’m working on propagates through the network to my laptop, my desktop, and even my phone. With the exception of a very few things that require, for some inexplicable reason, a manual signature, I don’t need paper. And I don’t want it. Paper is going to get lost. My electronic files are going to get backed up once an hour and then stored off site at the end of the day.

You can, perhaps, understand my level of frustration when an employee, let’s call him Mr. Turtle, comes to me with a hand illustrated packet that explains one of the new concepts we want to put in place. Seriously. He had hand drawn graphs and had cut sections out of other documents with scissors and taped them into his “presentation.” Literally. Cut. And. Paste. I’m a pretty smart guy, but I have no idea where to even start dealing with that level of ineptitude from a long-serving “professional” member of the staff.

It’s possible that I’m going to have to pummel the next person who comes to me wanting hard copy of something with a ream of 11×17 paper to drive home the point that this isn’t 1870. Everybody doesn’t need a dead tree edition of everything. Actually, almost no one needs a hard copy of anything any more. Of course that would mean that they’d have to figure out how to use the glowing box on their desk for more than a place to stick Post-It notes.

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

Traveling lite…

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I spent twelve days on the road over the last two weeks and it seems like a good point to make some observations on living with the iPad now that it’s had time to become a regular part of my routine. The short version is that it holds up remarkably well – Perhaps even better than expected. While I was on the road, I shifting seamlessly between the iPhone and iPad. I had even packed my MacBook Pro, but didn’t ever have cause to turn it on. For someone whose sense of wellbeing is almost defined by having a connection, that’s saying something.

On the more nuts and bolts level, battery life continues to exceed expectations and will last all day under all by the heaviest use. High portability meant that more often than not, it was riding shotgun in the truck when I went anywhere and was subject to not-quite-extreme heat when left there for a few hours at a time. I’m not exactly hard on equipment, but it’s held up to everything I’ve asked it to do and probably has oomph to spare.

The only complaint I have after a few months use is, not surprisingly, the fingerprints. Given a little OCD, they could drive a guy just short of ’round the bend. Keeping a screen wipe within reach is strongly advised. Even at that, the prints don’t really detract all that much from the screen… unless you’ve already made up your mind that it’s going to bother you. I still wouldn’t want to rely solely on a tablet for text heavy blogging or major productivity, but for knocking around the interwebs, occasional forum posts, and keeping your library with you everywhere, it’s hard to beat.

A message to Comcast…

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Dear Comcast,

We’ve had a long history. I’d love to say that we’ve stayed together because of your amazing products or first class customer service, but we both know it’s only because you’re effectively the only game in town in terms of “high speed” interment service.

All I wanted to do today was swap out my older-than-dirt cable modem for a brand spanking new model. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme, just trading one piece of hardware for another. Like everything else in the universe, I assumed that this would just be a plug and play experience… But you know better don’t you? You know how important it is that I call you and wade through your “automated customer support” menu before sitting on hold for 25 minutes waiting for a real person to come on the line so they could tell me that I needed to be transferred to someone in your “internet department.” The best part was then spending another 15 minutes on hold so I could manually provide a serial number to you.

This is the year 2010. Are you seriously going to tell me that somewhere deep in the bowls of the Comcast corporation there isn’t a computer that could have remotely interrogated my shiny new modem, figured out where it was on the planet, and tied it to my account? I mean it’s not like I’m standing up a supercomputer or a server farm over here. All I really want to do is be able to connect my MacBook Pro to washingtonpost.com and Facebook. Just seems like something we could have made happen without going through an hour long process. Of course you know better than I do, as technology is new and frightening.

I’m glad we’ve had this time together, because it’s reminded me just how much I’m looking forward to kicking you all the way to the curb as soon as I have half a chance. Have a great weekend.

Your friend,

Jeff

Techno-fail…

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I’ve been noticing more and more in the last six months that I’m getting alot of lag in downloads and even in regular web surfing. Gaming? Fuggidaboudid. It was one of those things I’ve been meaning to get into, but hadn’t quite found the time to attack. Status: Annoying, but not critical. Until a few days ago when I was downloading two patches and trying to read the Post. That’s when Safari actually stalled out. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Stalled out and stayed that way for the better part of five minutes. In internet time, that’s effectively forever.

Knowing that there was an issue somewhere, I started running through the normal tech support stuff. Ran the diagnostics, cleaned up files, rechecked and cleaned connections, ran speed tests, visually inspected the hardware… and that’s when it hit me. Sitting quietly in the back of the “TV nook” was my cable modem; the same cable modem I bought when I was living in Virginia in 2003. Yeah, 2003. Somehow in my grand plan for tech replacement, I missed the modem completely. Probably because it’s one of those ultra-reliable always-on kind of things that I’ve never needed to think about, at least until it started choking the rest of my tech.

I think I can safely say that when it comes to the widgets connecting your house to the interwebs, seven years and two generations has been a bit too long to wait between upgrades. A trip to BestBuy seems to be in order today.

Catharsis…

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Sometimes it’s important to revisit the lessons of the past. I learned a long time ago that killing zombies was a truly cathartic exercise. “Zombies” is mostly a catch all phrase for anything that falls into my field of fire in World of Warcraft. For the better part of a year, I played at least an hour every weekday – some days a little longer, some days a little less. Through it all, shooting fire from my digital fingertips at my undead enemies, gave me a venue to get it out of my system. I got away from it mostly because it became more of a time commitment than I was willing to keep up with. In the interests of not losing my mind completely, it’s probably something I should get back to. Then again, I’ve been kicking around the idea of picking up an xbox and expanding my gaming horizons a bit. With everything else around here that needs kept up with, I’m not sure either of those is actually a good idea. Having a slight compulsion towards neat and tidy makes sitting around playing games feel like something I shouldn’t have time for, but the benefit of not stapling people to their cubicle walls may make it the lesser of all possible evils.

Going without…

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It occurred to me last night that although I’ve been using the iPad a lot over the last month, vie never really put it through a real stress test to see if it can stand up to being the only computer I have with me on a trip. Some of that is a factor of all of my recent travel being work related and needing my work files with me for the trip. But this week I have the perfect opportunity to run the iPad in real world travel conditions and see how it holds up. I’ll get to assess it’s utility as not just a media player, but also as a primary tool for blogging, email, and forum participation; basically this is my chance to find out how it performs as a laptop replacement.

I know that being without a traditional computer for five days sounds like some people’s version of a perfect week, but it fills me with a certain amount of concern simply because I can’t point to the last time I traveled without a full blown computer (or two) along for the ride. I’ve probably lost most of the readers by now, but I’ll be taking plenty of notes and report back on my observations and experience. It might even be helpful for some of you who are not obsessive early adopters.

Since I regularly go a day or two without even turning on my laptop, this test seems like an easy win for the iPad, particularly since the heavy duty writing and photo editing will take place when i get back to Memphis. Knowing that, though, I think I should be able to prove to myself that this little device can actually free up a lot of space in my usually ridiculously heavy electronics kit bag.

Written on iPad.