JC - Technology and Stuff

So, I read what appeared to be an exciting little article on a blog on Friday about an application called Meetways that allowed you to put in two addresses and it would then work out where you could meet half-way between you both. In theory this sounds wonderful. You can specify coffee shops, pizza restaurants, banks, and a whole lot more besides.

I have a friend who I meet from time to time and we are always trying to find such a place so I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to try it. Normally one of us ends up having to more driving than the other. I live on the Eastside of Lake Washington and he lives more towards downtown Seattle. The challenge is that halfway is the middle of Lake Washington, not an ideal place to meet for coffee! Anyway, I input both addresses and I got the map result below. Hmmm. What’s most interesting is that the first choice to meet for coffee is in Leavenworth, WA. That’s a two hour drive from where I live and I can drive to his house in about 40 minutes!! The next choices were all in downtown Seattle; again not at all good choices.

The article I read seemed to do better, but I don’t think they lived in a city that had a body of water around it. My advice: ‘go back to the drawing board Meetways people’. I can find closer places to meet using my own knowledge!

Today is the anniversary of the day I moved from England to come live in the USA. Thirteen years. That’s more than a quarter of my life. In fact it’s nearly 50% of my working life. I first moved here in October 1995, at a time of global uncertainty, towards the end of a small global recession that took place in the early to mid 1990s. At the time I was living with the woman who later became my second wife and who is the mother of my two youngest children, trying to eek out a living running my own small business selling computer add-ons, life insurance, investments, and generally anything that would keep me in gainful employment. Times were indeed different from the heady days of the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was traveling back and forth to Taiwan on almost a monthly basis, buying PC parts, designing new laptop computers and generally living what would be called the ‘American Dream’ (although of course I was English and lived in England!). So, when a long time friend of mine suggested that I should move to the USA to start a new career I was suitably excited.

The actual immigration process was long and drawn out and involved a lot of paperwork, form filling and interviewing. It also involved me getting married to my then girlfriend as this was the only way we could both come here to live. That’s not to say this wasn’t something that would have happened anyway, just that it now became another checkpoint on the road to leaving England. As I alluded to above, the process was long and although I first applied for a job in March of 1995, it was October before everything was finally approved. Then it was a case of sort everything out in less than two weeks (including leaving the apartment, selling the car, disposing of furniture that was superfluous, getting the rest of the furniture into storage, and a million other tasks besides). To further complicate matters my wife was pregnant with our son and was unable to travel on that initial journey. So on the 10th October 1995, which is also the birthday of my eldest son who is 24 today, I left with my friend to embark on an adventure that many before me and since have also taken. We flew from London to Orlando and then drove on to Tampa where my friend was living and working and where the company that I was to work for was based. Except that by the time I arrived at the office there were no current contract positions open. It was an unnerving couple of weeks, away from my family, in a foreign country, doing all the things I needed to get sorted (Social Security Number, driving license, etc.), and every day enquiring as to when I could actually start my employment. Eventually I secured my contracting position in Hoover, Alabama, at BellSouth Telecommunications.

I left Tampa to drive to sunny Alabama a few weeks after I had arrived and my friend gave me a piece of advice that has stayed with me all this time. He too was not an American and so he had also had to learn how to survive and flourish in a foreign country. He basically told me two things. Number one, ‘you’ll either go back to England within a year or you’ll stay forever’. And number two, ‘America runs on networking, who you know, not how good you are’. These both proved to be very true pieces of advice. As I left Tampa, which was the only place I had ever been to in America, I was trepidatious of what was going to befall me. I had an 800 mile journey ahead of me across States I had never visited before, to a city I had never heard of. Indeed I had to look on my newly purchased driving map to see exactly where Alabama was. The only thing I knew about Alabama was that it was mentioned in the song ‘Oh Susanna’:

“Oh! Susanna, don’t you cry for me;
I come from Alabama,
with my banjo on my knee.”

I know, I had a very serious American geography problem!

Nonetheless, I duly arrived at my destination and was welcomed by my new manager, and began the task of settling into my rented ‘extended stay’ accommodation. What did I know of such things? Monday morning I drove to the BellSouth offices and reported for duty as a Visual Basic programmer on a small team that was looking to convert some legacy systems to a client server environment. Those early weeks hold some great stories and memorable experiences, but they are probably best left for another day.

In the melee of life that followed, my wife gave birth to our son in England, I went apartment hunting for our family, I bought a car and returned my friend’s borrowed car to him in Tampa, I made new friends, I tried to work out how to fit into American life, and much more besides. Christmas came and went and then finally in the very early New Year of 1996 my family moved out to live with me.

So that was thirteen years ago. So many things have changed in that time. And so many things haven’t changed. We are in a recession once again and the global economy is in a little turmoil. I am now what I consider to be ‘an American’ and view the world through slightly different eyes than I did when I first laid eyes on the flatness that was Florida. I managed to stay more than a year. I also remembered that networking gets you jobs and keeps you in employment, and I have lived several lifetimes worth of experiences in the thirteen years I have called this country my home. During the next few months I will be retelling some of the experiences that are my life; a troublesome Englishman living in the USA.

This weekend I was trying to get some photos of my wife’s Christmas Ornaments sorted and posted to her new upcoming website (http://beadsnballs.com). It always proves to be a long, fairly complicated and repetitive process.

First I have to take the photos of the ornaments and upload them to my PC. I copy them to a source folder so that whatever I do to them later I have the originals. Then I open up Picasa as that seems to be the only free graphics program I have that will enable me to make simple 6″x4″ crops of the pictures easily. Then I have to save the pictures one at a time to another directory. When that’s done it’s time to open up IrfanView (another free graphics program). IrfanView will let me do a batch resize of several photos at once. I wanted to be able to make all the photos 600×400 pixels and so I can do this in two steps. First I identify the photos to resize and what size to make them. IrfanView puts the resized photos in a temporary folder and I have to copy them to the folder where I want them. So now I have what I need and all that needs to be done is to upload them to the website. This entails adding them all to a zip file so that the photo manager can more easily handle them and then they are good to go.

From end to end it’s about a 45 minute process once the photos are taken, providing there’s only 30 or so photos. But still, that’s a fair while. If I could find an application that would do it all for me in one simple go then that would be wonderful. There has to be something out there.

These are the sorts of tasks I don’t like doing and the sorts of tasks that computers should be better at doing. There are still some opportunities for technology improvements available to us all.

Yesterday we lost power for a couple of hours when we had a wind storm come through. It happened late in the afternoon just when the sun was starting to drift below the trees. As I sat in the ever dimming silence I reflected on just what I could do. Watch TV, no. Watch a movie, no. Surf the net, no. Pay bills online, no. Check the weather, no. Check the traffic, no. Phone someone using my @Home phone, no. Read a book, not without candles. Heat up a snack, no. Hmm. We so rely on power as the center of everything we do nowadays.

Within a few minutes I was impatient waiting for the power to come back on. But it didn’t. I suddenly realized that without power I have very little I can do. Sure, I could have got into my car and driven somewhere where there was power, but I was also waiting for my wife to get home from work. She had to park outside our apartment and not in the garage as that too required power to open. At least the apartment complex had some emergency hallway lighting in place so you could actually see where you were going on the trip from entering the complex to getting to your apartment (even if you couldn’t quite see where the key for the door went!). So, we decided to go out somewhere after all. We had no idea when the power would be restored.

We got home a few hours later and the power was back. Then I had to reboot all the PCs, reset all the clocks, check everythnig else electrical, etc. We had already come home to an apartment that had two lights on and the TV blaring! Oh, I so love technology…

I’ve seen a lot of hype about online money management programs that will take your bank accounts and show you what you have in them. You know what I’m talking about; they’re online versions of Quicken or Microsoft Money. Well, I have to say I would love to switch to an online version of one of these money management programs but for me there is one tool that makes it impossible for me to do this.

I want a money management program that not only manages my bank accounts and helps me see my balances, but also one that will allow me to input all my recuring bills and pay checks and show me what I have in the future. In Microsoft Money this is called ‘cash flow’. To me this is the must have, most important feature of a money management application. After all I don’t really care about what I had in the bank 6 months ago, nor exactly how much is on my credit card statement (I can see that after all). What I care about is how quickly my credit card will be paid down, or when I’ll be able to save the $2,000 I need for something in the house, or will I have enough money in the bank at Christmas to buy presents. Or even how much money I hope to have in my 401K by the time I retire. You can do all this with Mocrosoft Money. In fact I’ll go as far to say that I have not found any other program that has this one feature; a feature so important to me that nothing else really matters. The rest is a given.

Some examples screen shots follow to show you the sort of information that is available:

The possibilities for tailoring these screens are endless, all you need to do is either use the budget feature or the recurring transaction feature. This means you can even predict in advance costs of car maintenance, when you have to pay tax bills, do vacation planning, add in a bonus or two, move money from one account to another. Like I said, endless possibilities. Now when an online money management application has this feature THEN I might start to be interested. In the meantime, just leave me with Microsoft Money - my future is under my own control.