JC - Technology and Stuff

The ultimate phone is coming!!!

It must be getting close to launch now judging by the ever-increasing number of pictures and reviews that are getting posted all around the Internet. I don’t normally just comment on other people’s blog posts or news feeds, but this is one exciting little post from Engadget.com and I couldn’t resist it!

So, here’s a photo and let’s hope there are no serious delays and I can get my hands on one in the next couple of months…

Well I’m not a big believer in all the advertising that lives on the Internet; generally I don’t click through ads and I have Adblock Plus installed on my Firefox browser. But today I did add a little advertising / sponsorship logo to all my sites - a big change from where I’ve been before.

1&1, my web hosting company sent me a little email informing me they would pay me commissions on any hosting contracts that were generated from my ad and so I thought ‘what have I got to lose?’ I’m going to try it for a year and if it generates nothing then I can simply remove it and nothing is lost. After all, I have full control over my websites - I pay for everything and therefore I don’t have to display any sponsorship or logos that I don’t want to.

I’ll report back every few months whether it’s worth a ‘little guy like me’ to put up sponsorship on his site or not.

PS. It goes without saying that I actually endorse 1&1. They have been my hosting company for more than 4 years now and I have never reconsidered switching to anybody else. I manage a half dozen domains through them and even when I’ve switched packages from time to time (I started on MS servers and I now use Linux) everything has been completely flawless.

So, I’ve been using a few Social Networking sites for a while now and I thought it was about time that I blogged a little about my own perspective on them. To start, let me list the websites I have been using:

• Linkedin
• Plaxo
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Hi5
• FriendsReunited

I have to say first off that Hi5 is really not a site I’ve come to terms with or that I like. Score out of 10 is a 1 and I think very soon I’ll be waving a big goodbye to it.

Secondly, FriendsReunited is an English site and I use it solely to track some of the people I went to school with and for when I worked in the UK. I’ve not exploited all the things it can do and so it’s not fair for me to include it in this post. Needless to say, I’m not getting rid of it any time soon.

Plaxo and LinkedIn I have written a little about before and to me it appears that while LinkedIn has been around for a while and has a larger user base, Plaxo is gaining in popularity and has a slightly more casual feel to it than LinkedIn. From a professional viewpoint LinkedIn is definitely the website of choice, although it is a little staid in its approach and flexibility. But maybe that’s why more business people choose to use it; they are a little more staid themselves From my point of view Plaxo bridges a gap somewhere between LinkedIn and Facebook in terms of seriousness, flexibility and features.

Then there’s Facebook, an odd application that has taken me a while to get used to and embrace. I think that’s because I’m a serious business person (my category description – not me personally) who is in a different age group than most of the users of Facebook! Well, I don’t think that’s entirely the whole truth but when I frequently search for contacts that use Facebook, I rarely find new users. To put all this in some kind of perspective I currently have roughly the following contacts on each application (and this is only me and by no means representative of other people’s experience):

• Address Book – 550 (100%)
• LinkedIn – 184 (33%)
• Plaxo – 53 (10%)
• Facebook – 39 (7%)
• Twitter - ?

Again to further put this into perspective, I’ve only been using Facebook for about a month and about 90% of my Plaxo connections have joined in the last 8 weeks or so. So, maybe in another 3 months the distribution may be a little different (I’ll put a note in my ToDo to check that again). Lastly, I have a ‘?’ for Twitter as I have no real way of knowing exactly who uses Twitter and for what. Such is the nature of the application. Even so, that does not concern me as I use Twitter for my own purposes anyway.

So, what do I like and dislike? This is the part of the post that’s a little subjective and definitely my opinion and not someone else’s.

NOT Social Networking

• I like seeing a different side of my work colleagues on Facebook.
• I like being able to check up on colleagues I haven’t heard from for a while by seeing where they are on LinkedIn
• I hate having to use Plaxo as some kind of go-between application for LinkedIn and Facebook
• I like that Plaxo automatically synchronizes to my Google and Yahoo! Address books (and if I paid for premium services I could actually get rid of all my duplicates).
• I hate that LinkedIn and Facebook don’t synchronize
• I like the lively applications that are available on Facebook
• I like the full profiling capabilities on LinkedIn
• I hate the limited features and add-ons for LinkedIn
• I like that Facebook can be used to meet new people (whereas LinkedIn and Plaxo really aren’t designed for that)
• I like that Facebook and Plaxo can aggregate news / blog feeds and display them in your status updates for all to see

Some other personal observations are that I still exist in a world where a lot of my friends are not really into all this social networking stuff. I guess I’m from a pioneering age of PCs (the early 1980s) and most people my age and older use the Internet, use email for some things, have a few digital photos on their home PC, have a couple of CD compilations they’ve put together and avidly download movies to watch on a regular basis. And that’s about it. Just my opinion. If you knock 5-10 years off me the picture is very different. Another 5-10 years and it’s different again. The bottom line is that social networking means completely different things to different people. Sometimes it feels like I am using something that wasn’t designed for my age group – and I’m not even old! I guess a lot of people in their mid to late 40s (and older) have a routine that they’re in. They are very comfortable doing the things they do and don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. Sitting on the patio in the evenings; spending time in the garden; checking up on the upcoming grandchildren; phoning their friends; watching their evening TV series. It’s an easy thing to get into habits. Sure they wonder from time to time about how Joey from school maybe doing, or whether Sue from their last job finally got that promotion, but they never actually stop to do something about it. Habits are hard to break. Conversely the younger generation of people has grown up using these kinds of tools. They think nothing of Skypeing friends across the world; Twittering the fact they are in town for all to see; posting their latest crazy party photos to Flickr; and many more things besides.

So, that’s where my mind is at and I have no real conclusions. I generally like the experiences I have had with social networking sites, but there’s still some evolution that needs to take place in my opinion. There are still ‘holes’ in the complete experience and still things that don’t fit well. I really hate having to be on all these different sites for a slightly different experience. One day there will be something that aggregates them all together and grants me that mega-portal access I desire. By then I’ll be old and wrinkled and probably incapable of typing, but maybe by then speech input and true touch screen functionality will finally be an option. Who knows?

Anyway, I’m off to check on a few ‘peeps’ now and I’ll continue recording my experiences as the year progresses. Later…

From time to time I write blog posts ‘just because’. This post is one of those. This last weekend we traveled to Leavenworth, WA for a small mini-vacation. I had been so looking forward to going there: - a small piece of Bavaria snuggled in the Cascade mountains of Washington. (Or something like that I’m sure is in the official marketing).

Well, I have one word to describe Leavenworth: - TIRED. A town that was mass-marketed to the public 40 years ago, and should have had a makeover 20 years ago! And I mean that. If you look behind the facade, everything is dirty and in need of a redecoration. Our hotel was described as having ‘an awesome breakfast’. If awesome indicates one choice of bread (wheat, sliced), a couple of sugary instant cereal choices, pre-frozen and reheated omlettes, reheated frozen ready-cooked sausages, some re-hydrated scrambled eggs, then I guess awesome is accurate. To make things better, on day 2 of our vacation they didn’t have any sausages as ‘they won’t be delivered until tomorrow’. Aaaarrrggghhhh!

The town lives for its skiing season and Oktoberfest so I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on the place considering it was the middle of summer. But…. There’s more.

When we ordered a pizza from the pizza restaurant (which looked like it had recently changed hands in a hurry and was being manned by students interning before getting jobs in Burger King), no real consideration was given to cleanliness or customer service. Still, $21 for a 14″ piece of cardboard dough covered in a couple of slices of pepperoni and a bonding layer of melted cheese seems like a bargain. Of course we could have eaten at the restaurant across the street where we ate the night before and paid over $10 a burger for something that would have been on the dollar menu at MacD’s. (Hmm, maybe the interns had been practicing there too), but we wanted a change. The highlight meal of our vacation was actually not in a restaurant but at a German sausage stall (it had some posh name but I can’t remember what it was). We actually had 3 beef franks and a big bratwurst with all the toppings all for just over $20 and they were all tasty. A small victory.

I guess the shops themselves weren’t too bad when you consider they were geared up for the tourists. Everything was expectedly a little expensive but offered good tourist fare. My main source of complaint were the hotels and restaurants. Apart from the quality and cleanliness (or lack thereof), the problem was the price. Everything was needlessly expensive. Either the prices are expensive because no one ever goes there and they need to make the money, or they’re expensive because they think they can get away with it. Whichever it is someone is making a lot of money because nothing is going back into the upkeep of the place. Shame. It could be such a nice town. Of course, this is just my opinion. I rarely ever write negative reviews about vacations but this time I really felt I needed to. Leavenworth just wasn’t what it was purported to be.

Anyway, rant over, I’ll move onto other topics tomorrow.

PS. I forgot the ‘heated’ indoor pool in the hotel. I hadn’t realized that heated just meant there was no ice on the surface. Honestly, it was warmer in the street!

So, my mailbox contained a little package today: Windows Home Server 120-Day Evaluation. Manufactured in Puerto Rico. Maybe that explains the delay!

So I guess I have my weekend worked out for me now although it’s actually going to be at least Tuesday next week before I get around to loading this on my server and trying it out…

I’ll let you know what I think of the software…

A few years ago I loaded up the Yahoo! Toolbar and devoted my PC life to it. That is to say I used it on every PC I owned and loaded it on every PC I visited. I came to rely very heavily on the Yahoo! Toolbar over the years! Then one day I looked at what I was using and realized it had become a pain to keep updating and it wasn’t really offering me anything special. And the worst thing about it was that it was taking up valuable screen real estate. One less line to view loaded Internet pages. It was time to move on.

So with sorrow in my heart and a tug at the heartstrings that was my relationship with Yahoo! Toolbar, I said goodbye and hunted around for an alternative. I tried a few things temporarily, like storing some bookmarks on my home Google page, but nothing gave me that satisfaction and confidence that Yahoo! had.

Then one day I was hunting through all the most popular add-ons for Firefox (as I do from time to time) and I came across an add-on called Foxmarks. It was popular, boasted a lot and seemed worth a try. So I loaded it up, added some bookmarks to it and wrote a note to myself to add it to my Firefox browser at work the following day. All was sweetness and light. I had found myself a new companion. Now I could add a bookmark from either home or work and both sets of bookmarks would stay synced up. Furthermore, you could manage the whole bookmark set either from an option on the Firefox menu, or via the Foxmarks website. It was a simple solution to a not so simple problem.

Anyway, that was all about 3 months ago now, maybe longer. I can’t even remember life before Foxmarks any more. It just works. Use it…

oh, and in case you didn’t get the other message; if you’re not using Firefox yet - SWITCH OVER - it’s a complete no-brainer.

Enjoy…

So, the other thing that’s on my mind this evening is just exactly which phone I’m going to upgrade to in October? Previously I’d settled on the Blackberry Bold, but I’m now getting more and more tempted by the upcoming HTC Dream which of course will be the first Android / Google phone and will be marketed exclusively at first by T-Mobile.

I’ll keep updating this blog as I learn about new features and see upcoming reviews on the two phones.

It’s going to be an exciting couple of months (actually only 6 or 7 weeks).

The feature set looks great but it’s bound to be a little buggy at first and I have to ask myself whether I can put up with that. Also I’ll probably lose my T-Mobile corporate email and calendar features, not the biggest loss in the world, but a loss nonetheless. But, I would get a better browsing experience, a fun development platform, better videos and Google’s great GPS / maps application. No need to buy in-car GPS anymore.

July 10th. That’s how long I’ve been waiting for my trial version of Windows Home Server. It’s really not good enough. Just email after email apologizing for the delay. But NO software. I don’t understand. How can it take this long to find a version and ship it? 6 weeks so far apparently. But it’ll be even longer. Microsoft said it’ll let me know when it has stock again. I look every day, but no luck so far.

Why do I want Windows Home Server? Well I read it was pretty good at automatic backups and remote connection. Hmmm. But that was back in July.

Now I am using Windows Mesh (and I’ll write about that soon) and for the most part that serves both purposes. Maybe this is really a ploy by the sad software giant to push people away from loading new software and instead push them to the web for a solution.

UPDATE: My package arrived

I was talking to a colleague at work today about what kind of job is a good one to be in and requires a skill set that will always be in demand. It was an interesting conversation but we ended up talking about being a facilitator. Every company holds meetings every day and every company struggles in most of those meetings in the area of agenda control, goal setting and flow. The problem is a fairly straightforward one; usually the facilitator is someone who has a vested interest in the outcome of the meeting and has ’skin in the game’ so to speak. A good facilitator has no skin in the game and runs the meeting as an interested outsider, moving through the agenda towards a conclusion.

I consider myself a good facilitator. Indeed I facilitate meetings on a daily basis with different project teams that have different agendas and we generally get to a very good outcome by the end of the meeting. What is it that makes a good facilitator though? It’s a set of ‘soft skills‘ that doesn’t seem to be taught and varies enormously depending on the situation in hand. My colleague and I had a hard time just trying to verbalize the soft skills required.

I think that one of the reasons why people are generally not good facilitators is that they are not comfortable in the role of teacher, trainer and speaker. It’s tough to stand up in front of a group of people and talk about something. Yes, I know facilitators don’t exactly have to do this but they do have to have the confidence level that is demanded by these roles and also be able to understand other people’s body signals given in these roles. In order to control a meeting and lead it to its outcome you need to be able to read people and know when to jump in or let things go.

I run a trivia night (aka quiz night) once a week at a local Irish pub and I really believe that this has helped me become a better facilitator. Having to stand up in front of a crowd of 50+ people every weekand keep them entertained for an hour and a half is not the easiest task in the world, but it is one that has taught me many things.

I am sure many of you facilitate meetings on a regular basis, but what are you doing to become a better facilitator? How do you judge the reactions of the crowd? How do you stay removed from the minutia of the meeting and not have too much skin in the game? How do you ensure you are fair in your facilitation and get everyone’s involvement without belittling, ignoring or trampling on others? I would suggest the first step is to push your envelope a little and get out there and teach, train or speak some.

I’ll post some more thoughts on this subject soon.

Well I spent far too long this evening updating the look and feel of this blog. It’s like it’s a little pet that needs care and attention! Still, I guess that if I get it like I want to then everything will seem a lot better when I’m actually using it. So, 3 or 4 hours wasted spent doing this stuff. There’s got to be more to life