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Naming an epoch using the superlative prefix of “post” — as in post-industrial, or post-modern, or the particularly unsatisfying post-millennial — is the one true indicator that we haven’t a clue. When I hear it, I tend to silently grumble the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Wisely or foolishly, I think of this particular moment as a “time in between” – we’re no longer where we were and not yet where we’re going — both an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom.
It’s a time of great shifts; the rules of the great game are changing and the players are all different. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the same game. The world may be “flat,” as Tom Friedman says, but it’s also very very bumpy.
Ok, “ho-hum,” you say. It’s no news to you that the forces of globalization, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications, and unparalleled technological innovation are tearing markets apart, changing global dynamics, and redefining almost every aspect of our lives — but, what may be news is that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” There’s a revolution brewing in this epoch of incredulity. Continue reading The Epoch of Incredulity
I think I was eight when I read my first “real” book — of course, that’s not counting comics, Willy Waddle, or books designed to be chewed. The book was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a proper book; a marvelous story for a boy who spent his days poking at squiggly-wiggly things in the tide pools of Cadboro Bay. I’m sure I still have it somewhere.
I love books — the look and feel, even the smell. They’re almost perfect: relatively portable, random-access, and — treated properly — they’ll last a hell of a long time. If you get tired of them, you can give them away, sell them on eBay, take them to a used-book store, or burn them for kindling, al la Fahrenheit 451… They look grand on bookshelves. They’re almost perfect. The do have a few draw backs:
- Books (and paper) are heavy — especially those damn 4-inch thick computer books.
- Books are not very portable — small quantities are fine, but if you try to take ten or so on vacation with you, it’s a literal drag. Despite their catchy name, Few “Pocket Books” will actually fit in a pocket — or if they do, you look kind of stupid.
- Paper takes up a lot of space — especially those damn user guides, administrator guides, and installation manuals I print and bind in 3-ring notebooks.
- Printed materials tend to “expire” — Today’s newspaper is worth about a dollar, yesterday’s is suitable for wrapping fish. (Of course, tomorrow’s newspaper, if you had it today, would be worth a fortune.)
- Repurposing is difficult — Transmutation costs are outrageous, either lead to gold, or paper to digital. Screw OCR, it’s not good enough, ever.
- Paper is expensive — There a “tree-cost” and an environmental cost. The manufacture and bleaching of paper is horrendous. Stand downwind of a pulp mill and breath deep. You’ll know what I mean.
- The print publishing process is arcane — the economies discourage risk and tend to favor existing authors and large publishers, to the determent of the small publisher or aspiring writers.
In late 2007, Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle. I’m not sure he’ll be remembered in the same breath as Herr Hoffmann Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (whew). At least his name is shorter. The Kindle is, nevertheless, revolutionary. Continue reading Digital Pulp Fiction
A few days ago, a reader of this humble blog asked if I knew a way to embed “Skype Presence” in a SharePoint Web Part.
I didn’t. But, I was intrigued. (That’s a bad sign… as it usually means I’m going to stay up until the wee hours.)
It turns out to be pretty easy-breezy, with a few caveats. I’ll explain those below. It’s easy because lots of stuff today is “widgetized.” A few minutes on the Skype site turned up some Skype web-widgets—– basically HTML code one can embed on a blog or web page — that gave me what I needed: HTML that would display Skype “presence” by Skype name (what I call a SkypeID).
Realize, I’m no code slinger, but it looked to me that one could simply modify the HTML, adding in different Skype names, and then stack it up in a CEWP. So that’s what I did. Continue reading Skype Me, Dr. Memory!
I woke up when I heard the snap, crackle, pop. A tree had fallen in the woods and I had heard it. Whatever the philosophical implications, the actual effect was that my power went out.
“Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. It was early morning, Sunday, December 23. The winds were howling — gusts to 90 mph, or so the weather channel had predicted the evening before. Trees were snapping and cracking like Rice Krispies. “Damn,” I muttered, shaking off a sense of déjà vu. The earlier the hour, the more limited my vocabulary. “Damn,” I muttered.
I glanced at the clock. Now on battery — having achieved true cosmic Zen harmony with its VCR brethren — it was happily flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. “Damn,” I muttered, switching my gaze to my backup alarm clock. It read 7:30 am.
It’s was a Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve, and I was without electricity. I thought to myself: “now, you couldn’t pick a better day to challenge the fading infrastructure of a once-great industrial state.” I then told myself to shut-up and stop being so pedantic — fading infrastructure, indeed. “Damn.” Continue reading Blogging by Candlelight
[The exciting sequel to "The Cuneiform Code"]
Having established the elements, theories, and principles, what I really wanted was pretty simple. I know what I wanted to keep (element one); I had a place to keep it (element two); and what I thought was a simple way to find it all again (element three).
Element One — Know what you want to keep:
What I wanted to keep were all the bits and pieces of information that are crucial to a sane IT operation. Here’s the dirty secret. There is a vast amount of stuff — facts, figures, incantations, mystical folklore, secret handshakes, twiddles and tweaks — that IT folks have to remember to keep tens or hundreds or thousands of computers happy and healthy. There’s even more to remember if you want to keep a vast army of squeaky users happy and healthy too. To most folks IT stuff is voodoo. I needed a simple system to remember all the voodoo, Papa Legba be dammed. What I wanted was a simple system to track all these assorted permutations, combinations, and incantations. Continue reading Cracking the Cuneiform Code — The KM Supremacy (2 of 2)
In theory, knowledge management is easy. Then again, in theory, lots of things are easy. In practice, things are never quite as easy as they sound. Nevertheless, lightly armed, I set out to put a few of my theories into practice.
There are three essential theoretical elements to effective knowledge management. I call these “Gavin’s Three Essential Theoretical Elements To Effective Knowledge Management.” Unfortunately, “GTETETEKM” does not lend itself to a memorable mnemonic, so let’s just call these the “KM-3.” Continue reading The Cuneiform Code (1 of 2)
It was many years later that I was to remember that day in Seattle. How I had ended up where I was, standing next to who I was, was beyond me. But, there I was — I was at the “top of the WAC” – the Washington Athletic Club — staring out the windows at what seemed to me at the time to be a giant abstract tableau. It was the end of November 1999 and I was looking at Seattle, laid out like a giant game of “Go.” The WTO was about to go into full swing — in what was to be known as the “battle for Seattle.”
From those windows high atop the WAC, I could see the various pieces on the board, see the planned movements and strategies as the police set up barricades and as people in the streets ebbed and flowed in response. It was easy to imagine reaching down and flipping a white stone to black, and thus changing the game. The game of “Go” is that way — the placement of single piece — a single move — can change the outcome of the game.
Seattle holds many fond memories for me, but that day bordered on the surreal. That day, beside me were some of the major pieces in the game, including James Wolfensohn. All in all, in the room were more than a dozen representatives of Globalization, with a capital Gee. I felt like Zelig. I kept thinking to myself that, properly, I should be down in the streets, relishing the scent of teargas in the morning. We were talking about the synergies of philanthropy, technology, and collaboration; I was imagining teargas. Continue reading Between Time and Timbuktu: Reflections on Globalization and the Electric Touareg
The retail release of Windows Home Server (WHS) hit the web- shops in early October. My copy arrived as fast as a flying monkey. The retail price was, as promised, less than $200 ($179 from NewEgg to be exact — a sweet deal considering what you’re getting).
It’s an “OEM” version, by the way; there’s no “consumer” version. It seems that most folks are expected to buy it pre-installed on a preconfigured “home server.” The OEM version in my grubby mitts is supposedly for “system builders,” folks that are going to bundle it with some hardware and sell it as retail turn-key system. Sure… That’s me. I am now officially a system builder. Wahoo! (ahem)
So far, the only downside to all this is, according to the shrink-wrap license, I’m my own end-user support. Apparently, the “system builder” is responsible for end-user support.
I bought it, I built it, and I sold it to myself. I must say, it was a great sales experience. I was very attentive to my needs and I seemed to know just what I wanted. Then again, when and if it comes to needing some support, I suppose I could just put myself on hold for an hour or two, ask a bunch of incomprehensible questions, cop an attitude, and then blame it on the “drivers.” That’s easy enough. “Have you tried rebooting, sir?” I’ll ask myself. Continue reading Son of Fronkensteen
Her name was Jane. We met, quite unexpectedly, at Zaventem Airport in Brussels. At the Avis counter. It was such a random thing, but when I saw her I knew — no hesitation — whatever the cost, I just knew. Some things are just meant to be. With Jane, it was meant to be. Jane. I can still hear her voice.
We travelled together, she and I, bisecting France; from Brussels to Aix-en-Provence and back again. In hindsight, I couldn’t of done it without her. How I ever planned to survive, travelling those weeks without her is beyond me. I’d have been lost without her, lost. Continue reading My Secret Summer Romance
I think it was Alan Kay who once said (and I’m paraphrasing here): the personal computer won’t really be personal until you can wear it on your T-shirt. I think of that quote every time I see an IPod commercial.
I find it phenomenal how much of what defines this connected age actually is actually pretty “personal.” I used to say that the internet revolution was all about having a “one-to-one personal conversation with hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people.” But, I’m not sure I really groked just what I meant, just how essentially personal much of this communications and information revolution really is.
Technology Gets Personal
The fact is many of today’s really revolutionary technologies, and all those related gizmos and gadgets, don’t easily lend themselves to the needs of an organization. They are personal; either they don’t scale, or they don’t scale well. They’re not designed to. They are designed for the individual, for the consumer market, not for the organization. Continue reading Adventures in Telephony — Scaling Skype
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