Tag Archives: cell phones

Sunday morning at home

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Michele isn’t feeling well this a.m. so we won’t be going to church.  Keegan stayed overnight at a friend’s house to work on a big school project, so things around here are a bit more quiet than usual.  Today is my beautiful wife’s birthday! so that makes it an extra special day.

I’ve been watching a lot of football lately.  Keegan’s team plays every Friday night and sometimes on Saturday morning as well.  Unfortunately his team lost for the first time this past Friday, to Vernon Hills.  On Saturday his team played Vernon Hills again, and lost again, but it was great to watch the game because Keegan got to play for awhile and he got in at least one good tackle.  (The position he plays is defensive tackle.)  Yesterday afternoon while Michele and Brinley went to get groceries, I watched quite a bit of college football while Tristan and Cohen built a fort and played with knight costumes.  Those who know me well would understand how unusual it is for me to be watching football!  But you know what? I’m kinda getting into it.  I was thrilled that Illinois beat Penn State, but disappointed that Michigan State didn’t beat Wisconsin.

In other news, a good friend of mine lost her job Friday due at least in part to blogging at work.  She was apparently accused of writing negative things about her job and her co-workers, neither of which is true.  It really makes me wonder about the whole blogging at work thing.  Personally I do not have a problem with this at all, viewing it as something akin to using the telephone sometimes for a personal call, or writing a personal email while at work.  Of course, there is always the possibility for abuse, but then, there always has been.  By that I mean, the introduction of Internet access, blogs, or any other computer-related technology provided to staff did not usher in a new era of possibility for abuse or performance issues.  Think of the telephone.  Persons can abuse their telephone privileges as much or more than their Internet privileges, and the telephone predates computers and Internet access by a long shot.  What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t really anything new here, first of all; and second of all, abuse of work equipment — whether it is the telephone, the copier, or the company’s Internet access — is a performance issue.  If staff members aren’t getting work done in a reasonable amount of time, then their manager needs to look at how they are spending their time, including time spent talking on the telephone for personal reasons, or time spent browsing on the Internet, or time spent posting to a blog or commenting on other blogs.  And it is important to state that how they are spending their time in these ways is only part of the overall picture the manager needs to understand in order to figure out why staff members are not productive.  Put another way (and setting aside potential for really negative things, things that other staff might deem offensive), if my staff are getting their work done in a timely fashion or even ahead of schedule, I have no problem with them spending some work time doing personal stuff.  Folks, this is just common sense management practice.

It really galls me that so many corporations think they can truly control every aspect of what their employees do during a work day, particularly when it comes to computer and Internet use.  It galls me because as I’ve already tried to point out, this is a local, individual management issue.  But it galls me even more because work environments will never succeed in shutting down or blocking personal activity.  And I think it is extremely COUNTER productive for them to even try to do so.  This is particularly the case in this time of instant messaging, personal cell phones, email, blogs, and more.  I fully understand and support monitoring of personal activity when it becomes a performance issue, and the potential need for reprimands or other strictures for the few cases where this privilege is abused.  But even then, there needs to be a step by step process whereby a warning is issued and the staff member is given an opportunity to improve, followed by progressively stronger measures culminating, finally, with termination.

I don’t know the whole detail of my friend’s situation but I do know that her employer made claims about what she was doing and writing that were simply false, and it seems as if her dismissal came without prior warning.  This is the sign of extremely poor management.

Some things old, some things new

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I’ve been thinking for a while now about writing down some of the things I knew or experienced when I was younger in comparison to what my kids experience or will experience.

Here is what I could think of (there are lots more that could be added):

Kiwi fruit — I can remember when we had never seen or heard of kiwi fruit. Sometime in the 1970s I remember my mother ordered a box of kiwi fruit, probably from California. It was somewhat of an “event” to open the box and have a taste of this new kind of fruit. My kids have never known a time without this delicious and healthy fruit.

Gas costing less than $1 a gallon — Yes, I can remember when we thought it was outrageous when gas prices rose above $1 per gallon. Those were the days. Recently gas prices have hovered around the $3 range, and higher.

Doors left unlocked — Throughout the entire time I was growing up, my parents never locked the doors to our house, at least to my knowledge. This included times when we went somewhere on a trip and were gone for days. We thought nothing of it. The same was true of car doors. Oftentimes, we left the keys in the car AND the doors unlocked. I wouldn’t dream of doing such things nowadays. ‘Course a lot of that had to do with the area where we grew up, which was in a small, rural farming community. Even so, I know that those of my family who still live there definitely do not practice leaving their doors unlocked any more.

TV — Except for a one brief section of time (funny enough, this was during the Watergate hearings–I remember that because I thought, how boring can TV get?!), we were raised without a TV. My children take TV for granted. Our equivalent, as I think I’ve mentioned before, was Super 8 mm movies rented from nearby public libraries.

Small electronics and gadgets — My father was a traveling salesman and he had a lot of office-type stuff in a room in the basement of our house. One of the things he had was a portable calculator with a neat green LED display. I thought that was incredibly cool, that you could use a calculator without it having to be plugged in! The thing was probably at least eight inches long and four or five inches wide, and perhaps an inch and a half thick at least. But it was portable! Hi tech. Then there was an automated answering machine. The unit was huge, I recall. Again, though, we thought we were pretty hi tech. All of this pales in comparison to all of the electronic gadgets we use these days. There was no such thing as cell phones, VCRs, DVDs, or CDs, either.

Music players — My parents had a pretty large collection of records, as well as 8 track tapes. It’s highly unlikely that my kids will ever see one of these things.

Contact lenses — When I was little, noone had ever heard of or seen contact lenses. If your eyesight was poor, you wore glasses or went without and squinted a lot.

Personal computers — Personal computers just didn’t exist until the early to mid 1980s. I can well recall the first time I ever saw one, an Apple Macintosh II. I also remember the excitement of seeing the first personal computer with a GUI and a mouse, which was also an Apple Mac. My, how things have changed in this area!

Cell phones — The only thing approaching a cell phone that we ever had when I was growing up was a CB radio. Like 8 track tapes and records, I doubt my kids will ever know what CB radios are, although I know they are still used in places.

Pet rocks and mood rings — Need I say more?

“Big box” stores — I grew up in the pre-”big box” store era. There was no such thing as Wal-Mart, let alone Super Wal-Mart. Meijers wasn’t even dreamt of, let alone other types of big box retailers popular these days, like Borders, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and the like. All of our groceries were bought at small, local, regular grocery stores. When we needed tools or stuff like that, we went to the local hardware stores (there were two of them in our little town). The dizzying array of choices for things to buy; the one-stop-shopping places that enable you to get everything from groceries to clothes to toys, all under one roof; these things didn’t exist.

Microwave ovens — We managed to live for years without a microwave, believe it or not ;-) The day my father brought home a microwave oven as a gift for my mother was a memorable one. I think he got it for her on Valentine’s Day. If so, that was the only time I ever remember him giving my mother a present on Valentine’s Day.

Sears Tower — I remember a day when the Sears Tower didn’t exist.

Seat belts and child safety seats — As a family, we traveled many thousands of miles by car when I was growing up.  Nine people in a station wagon.  And we didn’t use seat belts, nor did we have anything like the child safety seats that are so prevalent these days.  Angels must have been pretty busy watching over us!  I find it hard to imagine driving around these days, with my own four kids, and not using seat belts and safety seats.

Now I know more about the iPhone

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Last night I watched the 20 minute introductory movie for the iPhone. Pretty interesting! (Although the presenter was, to me, a little freaky. Just personal opinion.) The amount of hype and attention given to the iPhone is overwhelming and threatens to actually turn me off of it. Nevertheless I was impressed by what I saw of the iPhone’s capabilities. Things I particularly like are the auto-switching from portrait to landscape mode that it makes when the user simply turns the phone; the YouTube app; cover flow for flipping through iTunes albums; Safari web browsing; Google Maps functionality taken to a whole new level; and the highly intuitive and useful phone capabilities such as the way to set up conference calls. Yes, this thing has many different capabilities but it is a phone, first and foremost. And I think that really, the “killer app” for this phone is its phone capabilities. (Duh.)

When I first heard about the iPhone and blogged about it earlier this year, I wondered mainly about how easy it would be to use it for inputting text. The movie shows more detail about this aspect but frankly, it doesn’t appear to be any easier to input text than I had originally thought. Apple claims that users who stick with the virtual keyboard will be highly proficient in typing with it in about a week, more so than with any other phone/keyboard device. Somehow that seems doubtful to me.

Another interesting aspect to the infomercial was the complete absence of any demo of the phone’s built-in camera. This isn’t a big deal at all for me; I think the marriage of most cell phones with cameras is a bad idea.

Finally, I still have a major concern about the limited built-in memory (max of 8 Gb).

But why am I bothering to write about something that I probably won’t be able to afford for a very long time, and would find hard to justify spending the money on? Well, because I think it is a very cool product and I am really hoping that it lives up to, and exceeds, all of the hype.

My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 6th through June 11th

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These are my links for June 6th through June 11th:

  • COinS Generator – “This tool will take bibliographic metadata for a citation and produce a “COinS”, i.e. a snippet of HTML that can be placed on a webpage and processed by web tools.”
  • Scopus – A multidisciplinary database of citations to articles in the life, health, physical, and social sciences.
  • Bolinfest Changeblog » Your Page Here (an iGoogle gadget) – A nifty and easy-to-use way to incorporate other content as tabs into iGoogle. I’m experimenting with using this for Google Reader, Facebook, and Meebo.
  • FML – A personal blog about family, libraries, and technology
  • TagsAhoy: All your tags in one place – Love this idea; not sure, though if it’ll prove useful or not. Not because of the site’s functionality but because of my lackadaisical approach to tagging my own stuff.
  • nuTsie – A cool new beta service allowing users to stream their iTunes libraries to their cell phones. I sure hope this works with Blackberry devices — I’m going to give it a try.

Another perspective on haves and have nots

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A lot has been written in other blogs, in conference reports, in articles and elsewhere about the growing technology gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.”  It definitely exists; what is debatable is how rapidly the gap is increasing.  I was interested to note on a TV monitor in my company’s cafeteria a brief report about a recent Pew study that estimated that 15% of the U.S. population has neither a cell phone nor a computer, and that prompted me to write this entry.

I am a pretty tech-savvy person.  I have probably wasted more time and money on techie things than is healthy for me (although, I would argue, the time and money weren’t all wasted).  I have had high speed Internet connectivity at home since 2001 and used dial up connectivity for at least ten years before that.  I have used a cell phone since the early 90s.  My work has centered on networked connectivity for at least that long, and I use a computer on average about eight hours a day and probably longer, not just at work but at home as well.  I haven’t had a print newspaper subscription since the early 90s, relying instead on the Internet to deliver the news and information I needed.

In spite of my techie orientation and experience, I, too, experience this technology gap at times.  For instance, when I first heard about Twitter from Steven Cohen several weeks ago, I was intrigued and signed up for the service just to dabble with it and understand what it can do.  But it really didn’t “click” with me much; I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was with it and why so many people were so enthusiastic about it.  That is, until I bought a Blackberry along with its QWERTY keyboard and constant wireless connectivity.  I used my Blackberry to post to Twitter quite a bit to report to friends and family about the trip to Mayo Clinic with my wife.  Twitter didn’t make much sense to me until I had the right equipment, something that I had at hand at all times, which I could pull out and quickly type in a brief statement here and there.  This may seem a minor example of a technological gap, and it is.  But my point is that even among the technorati, so much of what is gushed over and around which enthusiastic user communities are founded, is based on access to equipment (hardware, but software as well) that relatively few people, even today, can afford, or can use, e.g. because of lack of service, low bandwidth, or whatever.  The Pew report mentioned above highlights this reality.

I’m lucky.  I can usually afford technology.  I live in a high population area with a ton of service options that provide high performance and relatively low cost.  When we lived in rural east central Indiana for three years, however, it was a far different story.  I couldn’t get good cell reception so I stopped using a cell phone, for instance.  And although we had high speed cable Internet at home, it was pricey.  I mentioned that I now have a Blackberry.  I wouldn’t be able to afford that at all if it weren’t for the fact that I work for a large company and as a side benefit am able to receive significant discounts on cell phones and services.  Without those discounts, I would not have a Blackberry at all.

Another point about the “haves” vs. “have nots” when it comes to technology, is that not everything shiny and new is highly adoptable.  Take RSS vs. email as an example.  This blog was set up to mainly communicate with family and friends, and I estimate that only a very small percentage of that target audience a.) knows what on earth RSS is, and b.) cares to make use of it in any way.  Instead, anecdotal evidence has shown me that it is far more likely that family and friends will simply go to this website to check to see if I have written anything new.  A large portion of my target audience doesn’t even remember to do that.  By way of contrast, when I communicate with my target audience via email, it’s an entirely different story.  I am able to regularly communicate with family and friends via email, and that is much more accessible and usable to them, than RSS will likely ever be.  Another example of a technology gap is with the use of instant messaging services.  I love using IM and now I am logged on to at least four different services almost every day.  In spite of that, only a very tiny fraction of family and friends regularly uses IM, preferring email instead.  I’d love to use IM more regularly to keep in more constant communication with them, but hardly any of them uses it.

I’m certain that I haven’t made any revelatory points here but this issue is something I have been mulling over for a while.  Call it the frustration of a technogeek when the people with whom he most wants to communicate don’t use the tools he loves to use for that purpose :-)   Let’s not even talk about stuff like MySpace or even Second Life, which are really foreign planets.

iPhone: iWant1

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Many people have said that handheld computing is going to be huge; that cell phones or so-called “smart” phones will become increasingly powerful and feature-rich. But I have been much less than impressed with what I have seen thus far. That is, until I read about the iPhone introduced earlier this week by Apple. I know, I know, dismiss me as yet another delusional-Apple-can-do-know-wrong sycophant. This device, at least on first impressions, fits almost exactly with what I have wanted to see in terms of possibilities for “smart” phones. More than that, it pushes the boundaries of possibility for what this kind of device can do and how it can do it.

I have a Motorola cell phone and I used Cingular as my carrier. Aside from using it as a phone, the features that I use the most heavily include SMS to query Google for information that I need while travelling or going somewhere to shop, eat, etc. Thanks to Google, who designed a nifty Java-based email client that I think makes the best of a difficult situation, I also use my cell phone to check my email. I do not use my phone to compose or send emails, though, because I just find it almost useless to type using the standard cellphone keys. I may send my wife a photo that I took using the built-in camera, but that is a feature that is very rarely used (as is the video capability).

So what would I like to have? Well, basically a full-featured mini-computer in my hand. One that I can use to do a variety of things, and do them easily and without hassle. On paper, iPhone fits the bill. I am amazed by the simplicity of the packaging, and what I can see of how it is shaped, how it fits into the hand, etc. Of course I am also amazed by its many interesting features. I especially like the 3.5″ screen. So yes, iPhone: iWant1. I see some negatives, though. First, to me the price point puts it beyond my reach. Second, I think the visual keyboard looks difficult to use for easy, efficient typing. Third, I am already a Cingular customer and I know how slow the connection speed is with that carrier. Of all of the negatives, I think the biggest one is the visual keyboard, because if I can’t type easily and quickly with minimal need for corrections, then the device is useless for composing email, and I really, really, rely upon that capability. David Pogue of the New York Times mentions this in his review, and states something about those who use Blackberry might want to stick with them. But frankly, Blackberry’s thumb keys don’t interest me at all, either.

Will I or should I plan to some day buy an iPhone? I will just have to W8tNC.

Finally getting to investigate some much-hyped services

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I’ve finally dipped my toes into a couple of much-hyped social web services: MySpace, and Skype. Actually I’ve had a MySpace account for several months but haven’t really used it because, frankly, I have little use for what seems like a service that recreates the high school cliques experience in an online format. Now that I have managed to configure my account in a way that’s more to my liking, plus now that I’ve found that not everyone using this service is a party-animal-obsessed teenager or college student, I may make more use of it. We’ll see.

I’m much more impressed with Skype. I know, I know, that’s been around for forever. I just hadn’t investigated it before. Even I can get techno-overload, you know ;-) Anyway, after a student in my class mentioned that he uses it, I decided to give it a try. As I already stated, it is impressive. I’ve managed to call land line phones with little problem and have also used it to talk with my brother, Dan. It’s far from perfect in terms of sound quality and clarity but hey, it’s free! I am particularly thinking of using it to talk with my sister and her family in New Zealand. Using Skype, that phone conversation would only cost $.02 per minute, which is incredible. When we move to our new house (hopefully next week some time — we were supposed to have moved already by now but that’s a long story for another time…) we may not request land line phone service. Instead we may rely on our cell phones plus Skype.

If you read this blog and use either or both of these services, contact me and I’d be happy to add you into my list of contacts!