The problem with being an early adopter of any technology is that when the long march towards launch day finally ends, there are precious few accessories available. It seems that even the manufacturer has trouble make sure the product and its “corporate” accessories manage to ship at the same time. Want a case for that nice new $500 toy? Yeah… that’s gonna be a few weeks. Sure, you can pick up an extra charger or some really cheap-looking “sleeves” obviously designed for other devices, but none of the really good stuff ever seems to be ready for the big debut. It’s not an insurmountable issue given the number of sleeves and cases laying around this place from electronics past… Just one of the small things you keep hoping the manufacturer would get right this time. I suppose there will be plenty of time to fully accessorize over the summer when production is really rolling. Once iPad is here, I’ll have a few weeks of tireless fiddling to figure out what my usage patterns are and what type of accessories I really need versus the ones that would just end up looking good in a drawer collecting dust.
Tag Archives: technology
Wired…
Saturday morning is usually my time to attempt to bring order out of chaos here at the house… laundry, cleaning, etc. While I’m not quite a neat freak, I do tend towards a touch of OCD about where things are and how they are organized. It’s not so much that everything has a place and it must be in it as much as it’s just a deep-seated desire for everything to have a place when I’m done with it. For the most part that’s easy enough to manage… until I come to the kitchen counter. The coffee pot, toaster oven, microwave, and liquor all have their place; no problems there. My current OCD-driven mission is to find a good way to manage all the various charging equipment that keeps me tethered to the electronic universe.
Without accounting for any future additions, my “must charge” arsenal includes charging cables for the following: iPhone, bluetooth, BlackBerry, e-cigs, and camera batteries. The result, as expected, is something worse than the spaghetti behind the average television set strewn across a goodly sized chunk of my kitchen counter. I’ve looked at several “charging station” options but all of the ones I’ve seen in the flesh feel a little shoddy; mainly pressboard and plastic. I love the concept, but so far hate the execution, which is why I’ve resisted the temptation to order some of what I’ve seen online. The simple solution would be having a power strip sitting full-time on the counter and that just looks, well, bad to me.
I know some of you out there reading are bigger technophiles than I am, so my question: What is your solution to make charging multiple devices slightly less tacky?
Go, Go, Gadget…
I’m a gadget guy and have been since I got my first cell phone way back in 1998 (the pager before that, not so much of a big deal – but it was a pretty shade of blue). Now it’s computers, flat-screen TVs, phones, e-cigs, Blu-Ray, and a whole laundry list of other neat new toys that keep my attention. I love these things not necessarily because they are new and shiny, but because they tend to make my life better than whatever they replaced. Although I’m not the youngest person in the room at most meetings now, I’m still well below the average in or office and one of the issues that has come to the forefront this week is just how uncomfortable (read: incompetent or incapable) our “more seasoned” employees are at using even the most basic technology… Our intranet is a great example. I don’t know if I could count on two hands the number of times I’ve heard “it’s too complicated” or “it’s too confusing” or “I can’t find anything”… and I haven’t even been in the meetings.
My current terror-inducing thought is that at some point in my career, I’m going to turn into those people; the ones who can’t seen to find the search function to find something on a website or how to get tethering to work with my cell phone. There’s no way of predicting what the new great technology will be in 20 or 30 years when I’m riding into the sunset of my career, but I know I want to be able to use it effectively. Seriously, how can you actually work without being able to navigate a pretty straightforward website that’s basically being run like a big old external hard drive… We’re not talking about any kind of advanced technology here; other than the laptops it’s running on, everything we’ve got is 10 years old.
If there is any righteousness in the universe, any goodness at all, I’ll be spared that fate. Or I’ll at least be open to learning instead of just complaining after the fact. If I’m not, then I hope some up and coming Young Turk has the courage to put me out to pasture before I become a holdover from a bygone era.
Doing without…
Last Wednesday for about six hours my employer joined the ranks of such forward-looking leaders in information technology as Iran and China and blocked network access to Google. Have you tried looking up information without Google in the past few years? It’s not pretty… I don’t care how awesome Microsoft says Bing works, I couldn’t find a damn thing using it. After satisfying myself that the issue wasn’t with Google (i.e. scouring places like CNet and BoyGeniusReport for rants about their epic fail) I called our vaunted Enterprise Service Desk (ESD). The conversation went something like this:
- Jeff: I’m having trouble getting to Google on my PC, but I can get to it from my Blackberry.
- ESD: Oh, that’s a problem with Google.
- Jeff: Ummm… No. I’m using Google on my phone right now.
- ESD: Oh… Hummm… Yeah… It’s a problem with Google.
- Jeff: Thanks.
- ESD: Does that resolve your help ticket?
- Jeff: *Click*
As it turns out, the disruption wasn’t a problem with Google (I’m shocked, shocked I tell you). Apparently our network operations office decided to start blocking the definitive name in web searching after two individuals “got a virus from Google.” I’m pretty sure they meant they got a virus from something they found using Google. I didn’t have the patience to ask, although it seems like it would be an important distinction to make if you were in charge of network ops. The good news is that the Great Firewall is down now and we can once again use google as a verb.
If an optimist is someone who expects the best and a pessimist is someone who expects the worst, what is the proper term for someone who has no expectations at all? I’m pretty sure having expectations was where I went wrong in this scenario.
Newfangled technology…
After extensive deliberation, some would even say argument, with the Tennessee Department of Safety Driver’s License facility, I learned this morning that for purposes of residence verification, electronic bank statements do not meet the official definition of “bank statements.” Just as a point of clarification, it’s not as though I put my statement on a CD and took it to them. I printed the statement to show that I was, in fact, domiciled in the state. Apparently once it is actually printed out, my e-statement became defined as a “photocopy.” Who knew?
The whole idea behind getting electronic statements is so that you only need to print them when and if they are needed. It saves me filing space, it saves the bank postage, and even the environment wins, right? Looking at the fine examples of state employees running the desk at the facility, I didn’t particularly feel like getting into an argument over the finer points of what, by definition, constitutes a bank statement. It wasn’t a crowd that look to be up for a debate of the finer points of… well… anything, really. Sometimes you just need to know when you’ve made a bad investment and cut your losses. Today, the better part of valor was to roll my eyes, sigh heavily, and walk away muttering something about being surrounded by idiots.
This is 2007, folks. We landed a damned man on the moon almost forty years ago. We’ve had home computers for 25 years. Email has been around for about 15. I’ve been getting electronic statements for virtually everything for at least five years. Can someone tell me why I can’t just walk up to some kind of biometric scanner, swipe my USA Identacard, scan my eyball, and have my information validated? It boggles my mind that we still insist on making these transactions on paper. Completely inefficient and bloody inconvenient. We’ll never have to worry about the Brave New World because the bleeding government will never figure out how to use the machines properly in the first place.
Bloody Hell. I really am surrounded by idiots… Present company excepted, of course.
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