Tag Archives: internet

Telework…

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Not long ago We received the following message from our Operations office: The facility will remain closed today. By direction of the Uberboss, no one will report to work. Personnel can work from home. Please check Facebook in the morning to find out if we will be open tomorrow.

This is fine, except for two issues. The first and easiest to address is that I’m pretty sure 60% of the people in this office don’t know Facebook from Foosball. It works fine for those of us who aren’t horrified by the very thought of the internet, but for the rest, well, I guess they’ll figure it out when they show up and the lights are off.

The second issue is more telling. Feeling cheeky (imagine that), I asked simply, if “personnel can work from home” means we are authorized to telework. No, came the response from the Uberboss, it means you’re authorized to work from “an alternate workplace. We don’t telework. I don’t believe in telework.” So, yeah, we’re authorized to work from home – as long as we don’t call it telework, apparently. This would be more reassuring if it wasn’t coming from the guy who thinks you need to have paper on your desk to actually qualify as doing work.

Why on earth someone would think that an information age employee needs to be physically located in an office during pre-determined hours is simply beyond me. We don’t create physical products. Our office isn’t open to customers – We’re behind a locked door, behind a security guard, behind a fence toped with razor wire for God’s sake. It’s not like a customer is going to accidentally wander in and discover that none of the project managers were actually there. The fact is we don’t telework because then the Uberboss can’t see us and would actually have to rely on managerial skill to make sure projects were being finished well and on time. Easier to just wander by, ask why there isn’t paperwork on your desk, tell you do do something random and unrelated to your primary function, and wander off to annoy the next employee.

At least I’ll never have to wonder what it’s like living in the 19th century. From where I’m sitting it seems to be filled with a whole bunch of stupid.

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.

To blog or not to blog…

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I was asked this morning for some insight into the mechanics of starting a blog. I wouldn’t say any of this is definitive, but if anyone out there is thinking about taking a stab at becoming an unpaid and overworked writer, here are some initial bits to ponder.

The first real decision you’re going to face is picking your platform. There are a million of them, but the two biggest are http://www.wordpress.com and http://www.blogger.com. I’ve used both and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For pure ease of use, I’d recommend starting out with Blogger. It’s easy to use and doesn’t have too many bells and whistles to make things confusing at the start. If you decide you want to go at it in a big way, you can always export your work there to another platform. Usually the web address for a Blogger blog is something like http://www.myblog.blogspot.com. Again, if you really get into it and want to manage the minutia of your site, you can purchase your own domain later. For instance, my blog started out on MySpace (God forbid), migrated to Blogger, migrated to WordPress, and finally now lives at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. The important thing though, is the writing at first, so in my opinion it’s better to focus on that and let the tech people focus on doing all the behind the scenes stuff.

As far as anonymity goes, is anything really private on the internet? The easiest way to preserve some semblance of privacy, of course, is to set up an email account with Google under a pen name and then register your Blogger blog using that name and email address. There are still ways you can be found out, but it’s a nice basic level of discretion for most purposes. As you move into hosting your own domain name, there are more sophisticated methods of safeguarding your identity. You’ll find though, that the real issue with security to the average blogger is self policing what you write. Stay away from events that can be traced back to only a small number of people and if you must write about those, change enough of the details, names, etc. to make it a bit more general. The bottom line with security is that once it’s on the internet, there is always the possibility of someone finding out that it’s you regardless of how many layers of security you put in place, so write with that in mind.

Choosing a name can be a madding experience, if you think of something smart and witty, there’s a fair chance someone beat you to it. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. At the entry level, the chance of your two groups of readers ever intersecting is pretty slim. A good rule of thumb when it comes to branding is that easy is better – you want to pick something that people will remember. There are a laundry list of sites out there that have great advice about website and blog branding and the good news is that it’s something you can change over time if you find you aren’t thrilled with the name you started out with. Bounce ideas off people you trust to give you a sense of whether the names you like make sense to a broader audience.

I’m no authority on any of this and lord knows there are many, many blogs that are put together better than this one, but for the casual writer, this should help get you started. Reading a lot of other blogs, taking copious notes, and writing more than you ever thought you would are what will keep you fresh and open your eyes to new ideas.

Busiest. Day. Ever.

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Just taking a few moments this morning to thank all of you who read Get Off My Lawn for making yesterday, the most active day ever on the site – You almost doubled its previous best day (which was last years launch day for the iPhone 4 – so, yes, I’m seeing the pattern here).

I started blogging as a way to vent off the ideas rattling around in my head that were too impolite to say out loud. Over time, it’s become my personal soap box to opine about any topic that’s caught my interest. Surprisingly, you’ve stuck with me even without any overarching rhyme or reason for what topics are taken up around here. All I can say to each of you, is thank you for being interested. I’d blog even if nobody was reading, but you guys make it much, much more interesting.

We know you have choices in reading curmudgeonly rants and Get Off My Lawn appreciates your business.

Doing it on webcam…

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I work for a guy who likes to think his time as a system administrator in the late 1990s qualifies him as an authority on issues of office technology. If those of us with a passing awareness of tech, this is a very bad situation. It means we’re in a position of being forced to agree with ideas and recommendations that are not only expensive, but also doomed to sink into the befuddled mire of advanced middle-age angst over technology that is one of the defining characteristics of our “leadership cadre.”

Two years ago, we were instructed to buy two dozen webcams and run a test with our agency’s behind-the-firewall proprietary knockoff version of Skype. The test was, as I described it at the time, less than successful and we recommended shelving the project. Most of our test bunnies couldn’t figure out how to plug in their cameras and of the ones that did, only a handful managed to actually use them. I’m pretty sure they just ate the microphones we sent them. To be fair, I should point out that this failure wasn’t completely the fault of the doddering soon-to-be retirees. The network infrastructure in our building was something less than robust enough to handle the “load” of several simultaneous streaming audio/video connections. It was sort of fun to say something, run to the office across the hall and see yourself “in real time,” but we decided that wasn’t going to be a real plus-up to our collective productivity. After the abysmal initial test, I assumed the idea was left to die quietly in desk drawers and file cabinets around the country. As is so often the case, I was wrong.

I discovered last week that we ordered 50 more webcams to be issued to all of our field offices to “improve communication” and “facilitate meeting online,” since the organization doesn’t have money for our traditional cross-country boondoggles these days. Now, if I had even the slightest notion that any of these devices was actually going to be used, I’m all for outfitting every computer in the office. It would be great to have one official feature on my work computer that I’ve been using for free from Google for years. My concern is only that we already find it nearly impossible to get our “leaders” to pick up the 100 year old pice of tech that’s already on their desk and talk to one another or call in for a teleconference. I have no idea what makes us think we’ll be able to get them to use “magic” to talk across the intertubes?

Then again, it might be fun to watch them try.

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.

The unknown unknowns…

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I like to think of myself as someone who stays relatively close to the front of the tech curve, but it seems I’m in for a bit of an education as I try to drag this little blog o’ mine screaming into the second decade of the 21st century. I started off the post-dinner education by doing a simple search for something like “blog tag best practices” (Yes, I’m well aware I’m that much of a dork). That led me to Technorati and blogmarking, which led me back to WordPress, which led me to linking the blog to Facebook and Twitter, which led me and so on and so forth. This particular post isn’t so much informative or documentary as it is a test to see if I actually configured everything correctly. If you’re seeing this as a result of Facebook or Twitter, I suppose I’m on the right track. I’m not further along on my great quest to manage my tags or make the look and feel of the site more cohesive, but I’m one step closer to success in my other current crusade to making all my social media integrated. I’m apparently still way out in left field somewhere, but with a little self-education, I hope I’m getting closer to at least learning a bit more about the unknown unknowns. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time, blogging was as simple as tossing some words on an e-form and hitting the “publish” button.

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.

Chaos Theory?

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I can tell by the gently worded reminder from WordPress that it’s time to renew my domain mapping fee, that this little endeavor is slipping towards its one year anniversary. It’s been said that time flies when you’re having fun. Apparently it also flies when you spend most of you free time plotting ways to extract yourself from situations less than good. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been a good year overall. Me and mine all remain on the correct side of the dirt, so really, everything else is just gravy. Still, though, it doesn’t feel like a year since I started poking around at this thing. I’ve been toying around with the idea of a facelift for the site. Maybe revamping the tags, lists, and sidebars. I wish I had spent a little more time learning the controls before diving right into with a new host. There are alot of the layout that I’m not quite pleased with, but just haven’t taken the time to make right.

One of the biggest issues I’m currently having with blogging is what feels like a lack of focus. Sure, I’m writing whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, but aside from “work sucks, trying to change it” and “people suck, trying to avoid them” there isn’t much of a thread that unifies the whole. Categories and tags are haphazardly applied (when I remember to list them at all) and it feels a bit like every post is adding that much more chaos to the mix. Was that a long way of saying I’d like my place in the internet to be as well-ordered as my place in the real world? Probably. OCD clearly doesn’t make a distinction between the real world and the electronic one. In a perfect world, I’d have my message calendar all mapped out months in advance and know exactly when I wanted to write about which topics. Not a chance of that happening any time in the near future, so I’ll content myself with coming up with a way to make it all a little more coherent.

You may see some changes in the next couple of days/weeks or you might not. It mostly depends on whether the dust building up on every flat surface of the house or the disorganized musings of my curmudgeonly mind win the prize as most in need of a good going after. Of course it also depends on how much time Maggie gives me before trying to climb up on the desk… Like she’s doing now.

300…

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Under other circumstances, I’d trot out something pithy and do my best to make a big deal out of hitting my 300th post. In fairness, that’s not not just here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com, but also includes posts I had made over at Blogger. It doesn’t include the now archived posts from long ago Myspace blog. There were probably another 200 of those, but we’re sticking with the “serious” work I’ve down in the past couple of years for purposes of counting.

Actually, 300 doesn’t seem like that many until you really sit doen and think about what goes into writing even one of these short bits – It’s a minimum half hour and climbs north of an hour for one of the more epic rants, so lets say all told it’s taken something more than 150 hours. Still not impressed? Sit down at your trusty keyboard and write nonstop for six days and then tell me what 150 hours feels like. Sure, they’re not all award winners by any stretch, but it’s a pretty impressive record of what’s been going on and the things that have caught my attention over the last three or four years. It’s no Gutenberg Bible or anything, but I’m mighty proud of alot of what’s been said here. At some point we should get back into a grove where the content writes itself. We’ll reevaluate at post 600.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

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It feels like I’ve been blogging forever… It especially feels that way when I have to flail around looking for something new to write about. Looking at the data, though, I can see that I’ve been going at it at one place or another since 2005. I guess time files when you’re hostile and willing to share it with the world. In fairness, five years in internet time basically is forever, so I guess I should consider that some kind of milestone.

Some weeks and months have been better than others. My best ever single day = 58 unique views (this was the iPhone 4 release day incidentally). Best month ever (June 2010), 388 unique hits. The statistic that I’m most proud of isn’t a hit count per se. It’s simply the phase most often used in search engines that brings people to the blog: Teamwork Sucks. Given that October is the one year anniversary of that particular post, I take a perverse pride that it still has legs. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google “teamwork sucks” and you’ll find that I’m #7. It’s like I’ve really made a difference in the world. We’re going to disregard the fact that Google’s link doesn’t take you to the actual post… It’s the thought (and that fact that it gets you to the blog at all) that counts.

Since Get Off My Lawn seems to be something that is here to stay for the foreseeable future, there are a few changes that I’m hoping to get to in the near future. I want to get a little more focused in my writing… 21 categories and 131 tags is probably something that I can cut down with a little effort. Bringing a little structure and order to the back room of this operation strikes me as being a very good idea.

Location, Location, Location…

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Usually, I’m first on the boat when it comes to rolling out new and interesting tech. I’m still on the fence, though with Facebook’s new “location” service (and its cousin Foursquare). As much of a technophile as I am, I’m feeling a certain level of unease with the whole idea of mobile tracking. I mean I’m as much of a Facebook whore as anyone, but wow, that’s some serious self revelation.

Aside from the gee wiz factor, I just don’t know that I’m seeing that much utility here. Maybe if I were a 21 year old bar hopper, but as a typical suburbanite slob, I’m missing it. Tracking is pretty new on the mass consumer side of things and I know it’s been a real revolution in industry, so I’m guardedly optimistic that it will prove to be something just as powerful in the hands of the individual. Until then, I’m glad It’s an opt-in kind of thing.