A week at home – technical analysis

So I had an operation earlier this week and under doctor’s orders I stayed home. In this case the doctor gave me worst case scenarios about what the recovery from a simple day surgery would be. It sounded like one of those drug commercials where they tell you everything that could go wrong. Well for the most part he was right, I felt like crap for a couple of days and still feel it when I try acting out my normal quick start and stop pace.

During that week, I did a bunch of sedentary things. For example, I continued to explore OSX lion user features on my Air, played angry birds on my iPhone, downloaded a couple of apps to both. I did homework for the classes that I had to skip assiduously taking notes with my new echo pen. I monitored our Friday release using our corp IM tool. I continued my love affair with reading on my Kindle DX. Most days it was my subscriptions to Reuters and Atlantic magazine. However, this week I also started to play with a thing called Instapaper, where I create my own set of reading gets loaded directly to the kindle from web pages that I tell it to copy down.

Oh yeah I also watch Zuckerberg try to be Jobs and I was underwhelmed by Timeline. Oooo you have every transaction I’ve done in a database and you’re going to allow me to go back based on time and see things rather than scrolling! Awesome, I might go give up my horse and drive a car too! The open graph stuff was somewhat interesting, but I yawn. And Serendipity is when you don’t expect something and it was lucky and pleasant, not stalk people looking for their music and play it. That’s just stalking.

I also read a book, yes a real book. A colleague gave me a book on my departure from Intuit called “The Art of Choosing”. The coincidence of taking my 2 marketing classes this semester (Strategic Marketing and Marketing Research) and a book about how humans make choices was interesting. By the way, thank you for the book, Depankar, it was excellent.

The one area that disappointed me this week was that I was supposed to get my new 27″ Thunderbolt display yesterday, but UPS informed me that there was “an exception”. My reaction was to want them to employ an exception handler and deliver my new display immediately, but they didn’t and now I have to wait for them to bring it at some time next week. Sigh. I was really looking forward to it. I bought a new desk and set up in a new place in the house that’s perfect for me to do work and hide the work in between study sessions. Of course the display would be showing, but I’d put up pictures on it so that it appeared to be a giant montage of my life (or something).

Anyway, in the process of sitting there, I wrote another episode in our ongoing story of the USS Washington. There’s time travel involved. And then this morning I suddenly figured out what had been eluding me for several weeks on book 2 of the Urtaru series. I had been taking the tack of a terrorist/freedom fighter route for the main character’s dilemma. But technology, the discovery this week of neutrinos that move faster than c (meaning possibly moving back and forth in time) and my own fascination with the possibilities of time travel all coalesced into “the secret” the that second of 3 would be telling the 3rd of three. It all suddenly made sense. How could the child know something about his father that he was bound to keep secret. I’m going to avoid the machine as enemy terminator stuff, and focus on the human psychology of getting a message from the past (or sending one to the future) that might change the course of events.

Anyway, that’s my week.

Features designed by geeks…

So I have a kindle (as you may know).  I love my kindle, but there are some days that this product reminds me of the latter days of the Palm handhelds (not the phones…think back before they bought handspring).

So Amazon comes out with a new set of features 2 of which I had waited for

1. Pan and Zoom on PDF files
2. Sharing (aka social media sharing)

So for Pan and Zoom, they did a good job given the hardware constraints.  you kind of use the same key to adjust the size that you do for the fonts, and then you pan with the joystick.  Works pretty well.  But this is a feature, while necessary, completely fails the easy to use test except for the people who design things like this.  You have to go to 2 different places on the keyboard and use the toggle to do several things.

I guess my main gripe is really the toggle. It’s such a goofy and inexact way of (probably) getting around violating someone’s patent on a touchpad for the product.  However, like I said, the feature allows you to do pan and zoom on pdf, so I figured it out and I’ll use it.

For the other feature, clip and share (or whatever they call it), from a kindle hw use model they nailed it correctly.  You use an existing known feature (highlighting) and then you give the user a choice (near the bottom of the screen) to share it.  The setup for facebook and twitter was easy but slightly slow because you have to do it on the awkward keyboard on the kindle.   Once you are done you go to the thing you are reading, and in this case it was the Atlantic Monthly Magazine which I subscribed to on the Kindle, and you highlight something.

Well, here’s where they goofed.  On Facebook (as you can see in the photo) , you get to see your personal comment, but there is no indication what article the clip was from (unless you type it in yourself).   You do see the Magazine.  However, the bulk of a text says Amazon Kindle twice in different ways, tells you that you’ve sent it to Facebook (well DUH!) and since you’ve got no indication what this is, I doubt anyone (but myself) has actually clicked on the link because they won’t know what this is.

On Twitter, it’s even worse.  Here given the 140 character limit, you’d think they wouldn’t waste space.  Every website that allows sharing, puts a little “wsj.com -” and then the title of the article and then a shortened url (bit.ly or whatever).  Not Amazon.  Look at the clip below from tweetdeck.  It says nothing!  it has just my text and an amazon URL and no indication what work the clipping was from.  OH, and an #Kindle hashtag.  you have no idea that this is an article from Atlantic.  All you know is that this is a link and that I have made an editorial comment.  I mean you could have put a hashtag for #Atlantic or something…

I don’t know, this feature doesn’t seem correct to me.  It looks like amazon has spent time trying to make sure that someone can get to the clip, they haven’t figured out how to tell someone WHY they should go.  Usually the why is Work & ArticleTitle and my editorial comment.

Anyway.  That’s my brain dump for this evening.

Modified my social network map…

What a tangled web we weave part II

In another post I started to map this out.  So last night, I started poking around each of my feeds to make sure that I got it right.  I don’t use utterli much so when I went over there I noticed that my feed from ping was going there.   I’m not seeing stuff from double pumping into twitter if I start at ping.fm so something smart is going on here.  As one comment pointed out in my original post on all the social networks I was looking at, I can see how the ping -> friendfeed as the two ends is pretty useful.  The only thing that is odd is that the thing that I was trying to avoid was double pumping any of the sites, and it looks like friendfeed gets a copy of at least 3 to 4 depending on where the content starts.   I suppose in that way, I can use FriendFeed as a diagnostic tool for the rest of the network.  If for some reason something isn’t getting through I can tell from there.  But the jury is still out.

Truly though, there has to be a winnowing of technologies here.   As I mentioned somewhere else, back in the day when Palm first added the IrDA to beam things to other devices (before bluetooth), I had a small 2 line 2-way skypage motorola pager.  It had a single toggle key to allow you to blip out <300 character messages which could go from one pager to another (via the 877 numbers) or to an email address, or call a phone number and have the message read to the person answering (that was cool).   In those days most people still didn’t bring laptops to meetings, but I had my palm and a keyboard.  Which was an oddity.  Then I found an app on the palm that talked to the pager via the IrDA and I was able to send email real time in meetings to people and not be staring into my pager (like people do now with blackberries).  Somebody would say, we need an email sent to so and so, and I’d say, “Give me a sec”  I’d type it in, pick the person’s name from my palm address book, and hit send, and lift up my pager to the top of the palm and zing the message went out.  This was actually not dissimilar to tweeting because I could send email to distributions also.  Just as I got this all debugged and working (I also used Lotus Organizer on top of Lotus Notes to sync my palm….I could draw a map like the above about how this was all connected) Moto and RIM started coming out with the pagers with the small thumb keyboards attached.   My marrying of technologies was no longer looked upon as cool, it was suddenly a contraption right out of Rube Goldberg.

I mention that story because, again, having all these social networks all pinging each other is quite cool.  But at some point it is technology for technologies sake and will be winnowed, or whittled down so that the web isn’t just a rat’s nest.  There really ought to be 1-3 front end content generators (for arguments sake, Google MSN/Yahoo WordPress) which talk through a couple of sieves (Twitter, Facebook, Some IM engine) and maybe have a couple of rss feed aggregators (Google, FF).  I’m not picking technologies I’m somewhat agnostic (or in this case omni-gnostic),  I’m just saying, there are too many things now and winnowing is inevitable.

I just added BLOG IT to my facebook account

and it was supposed to allow me to update this blog, but I’m evidently having the same trouble as everyone else. So here’s what I was going to say from facebook to be posted here:

So I just added BLOG IT to my facebook account so I could update my new blog on wordpress. I’ve already got Twitter updating my facebook and plaxo statuses. Got to see if I can do this also.

The audio equivalent of this is me pumping my music from my mac wirelessly to my apple TV which is hooked up to my AV system which has a set of Sharper Image 900Mhz outdoor speakers attached so I get my music library in the backyard instead of the one on my wife’s PC. Woo Hoo…

When it all works its way cool, and my friends don’t ask my how I do it, they just ask me WHY?