The siren call of new technology

Marked Channel to the White Oak River

 

Figuring out the right path to take in the world of technology is not as easy as following this marked channel to the river.

Right now is the perfect storm for technology users and addicts.  Apple has announced a new operating system and hardware for the holiday season.  Microsoft has also come running to the party with Windows 7.  Intel has helped with its I5 and I7 processors.

Best Buy is even offering a PC Makeover for $1199.99.  It includes desktop, laptop, and netbook with wireless network and setup for one price.

It is hard to believe that you could get three computers for that price, but I suspect you get what you pay for.  I have had great luck with my HP hardware, but I know others who have not.

Of course Apple barely offers one of their new iMacs for the price of $1199.

Having lived and worked in the technology industry most of my life since 1982, the natural response is to want to get my hands on some of this new stuff.

My newest computer is a HP laptop that has Vista and is two years old.  My newest Mac is a three and one half years old white MacBook running Snow Leopard.  My desktop G5 Mac was a previous year’s model when I bought it in December 2004.

Surprisingly I have gotten along just fine.  I did add Snow Leopard recently, but it only cost $29.  I do have a 2004 vintage Dell Dimension that I just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu.  It is likely my fastest system.

I suspect that I am getting to the point of upgrading to a new Mac. I have taken the hard drive size about as far as I want to go.  I certainly need more memory in my Mac desktop unit if for no other reason than my iPhoto libraries seem to get bigger even when I start new ones.  However, I am a little reluctant to put a lot more money in a system that is getting a little long in the tooth.

Whatever I do, I am in no rush.  My wife actually needs a system before I do since her Mac laptop is almost seven years old.

How did I get beyond the need to upgrade whenever something new is announced?  The simple answer is pretty easy, money.  While you are working for a computer manufacturer new systems are a status symbol and rarely cost your wallet anything.

When you are out on your own, a new system has to be justified by the results that it will deliver.  In my case, I doubt that a new system will bring me greater productivity.  It will allow me to standardize my laptop and desktop operating systems.

While that is not a big deal right now, my guess is that a year or two from now, it will be a big deal.

The other thing that has helped me resist all this new technology is that I have yet to see the killer application which requires new technology. Internet based applications have brought me more functionality than computer based ones.

I continue to be able to do my computing tasks on whatever computer is put in front of me.  That includes the ancient Windows XP Dells that are at our real estate office.  While I would likely not do photo work or website work on them unless I was desperate, my other work could survive.

Certainly if my main desktop is a Mac that is likely six years old technologically, I would question the need for new hardware for any other reason than mechanical reliability.

Actually if I could get better bandwidth for my Internet connection I would trade it for at least another year on my old hardware.

So how do you feel about that choice?  Would you give up buying new hardware for a year, if you could get faster Internet?

While I have a good solid cable connection, I work with enough large files that I could use some extra bandwidth if it were available here on the Crystal Coast.  I would like to see Internet sites almost jump into my lap.

When I go to work at our office where we have DSL, I almost die while waiting for pages to load.

In my situation new hardware would be nice, but more Internet speed would speed my work and be even nicer.

Of course I would trade both faster Internet and new computers for another day of great fishing like we had recently out in the ocean off of Bogue Inlet.

Not seeing the water for the trees

Computers are a little more complex than some things, and often computer people in response to this are a little more hard headed.  Much of the figuring out how to fix a computer problem is done through trial and error by people who probably do not understand the issues.

Sometimes people are so wedded to their hardware and software, that they cannot see the problem is exactly their hardware and software.

I recently did a website for someone and enabled the email that came with the site.  When I do something like a website, I usually check it for compatibility in XP, Vista, Linux, and MacOS X.  Except on Linux I will do multiple browser checks.

All of this means  that I have a variety of flavors of computers around our house.  I also get the rare “privilege” of working on an ancient Dell system running XP.  I have a much newer Dell running XP at home, an HP laptop running Vista, a MacBook running Leopard, a Zonbu running Linux, and a dual G5 Mac running Leopard.

I just loaned out a five year old Dell laptop which had XP and Ubuntu running on it.  This fall I will probably get a new laptop with Windows 7 and add Ubuntu to my older HP.

With all this computer stuff, it is pretty easy to run tests and to know what is working and what is not working.

So after I created this website for the gentleman, he brings out his Dell laptop which takes five or six minutes to boot and can barely launch an application.  It is clearly a sick machine, and I told him so.  It is also using old versions of software.  In my mind, it is one of those systems where the only hope is to reformat the drive and start over.

Clearly he is incapable of doing it, and I certainly do not want to tackle it because I am pretty sure he would expect me to throw it in with what I am charging him to build his website.

During one of the many times we are waiting for his system to do something, I configured the Ubuntu laptop to get his mail.  I also showed him how it will boot in less than one minute.  Though he is impressed, he has no interest in giving up what he already knows.

I get the email working on his system when using an ethernet cable to my network.  I run an Airport wireless network so I was not interested in digging out a Windows wireless key.  His website is working fine, and I think that I am done with him.  He quickly cuts off any conversation of a maintenance agreement for his website, but I know how to handle that when the phone rings.

About a week later, he calls me and says he is having trouble sending messages using his wireless at the local library.  I invite him by our real estate office and again hook him to a network with an ethernet cable and his mail works fine in spite of the clunky software and hardware.

The mail I configured for him is POP and uses an external STMP server which is far better than an ISP STMP server if you travel at all.  I actually have a third party run a monitoring report on my server from the same company.  Most of the time it comes back with 100% uptime and no problems.  Since it is Linux, that is what I expect anyway.

I prefer IMAP email but I would have had to get my client email from a different provider, and he did not want to spend the extra money.  Considering his very small volume of email, it made little sense.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I get an email from his daughter-in-law asking for my help in configuring his email as a forward only account.  She has determined that it is best to leave him on his ISP mail even though he regularly travels to another place where he does not have that ISP.  She has already logged into his email accout and set it to auto forward his emails.

Without getting too deep into the details, her diagnosis of the problem was that he would be better off without the external SMTP which in her mind was preventing him from sending mail.

Since I had tried his mail from two networks with wired ethernet connections and seen zero problems, my first suspicion would have been his wireless card and/or Windows XP and the Outlook Express that he was using.  To be honest his system was in such bad shape that telling what was working and not working would be a great challenge.  However, of all the possibilities, the external SMTP server is probably the least likely.

However, the lady who wanted my help was so wedded to Microsoft and Outlook, that the SMTP server was the only problem that she could see.  She ended up creating a solution that did not even solve the problem because when her father-in-law traveled, he would be faced with having to do ISP webmail to send his mail  unless they operate with a totally unsecured SMTP server which would be scary.

I spent nearly an hour composing my response to her.  I am sure she spent hours on the computer.

At this stage in the computer revolution, it would make far more sense to buy a new computer with reliable wireless connection.  It would cost less than $600.

I am certainly not spending any more free time on the problem.   I even told the lady that I had personally switched to Thunderbird because Outlook was unresponsive so often on Vista.

That might be a clue the problem is a lot closer to home than a remote SMTP server.

An even better solution would be to buy a Mac even an old one.  I have a ten year old desktop at home that works fine.  My wife is even using a Mac laptop that is s six years old.  Her home iMac is hooked by wireless card to our network.  The iMac would be close to six years old.

I have a hard time relating to a solution which configured POP email so that you had to manually go and remove the mail from the server while it was forwarding it to a computer which could have received the email and be set to automatically remove it from the server.

I think that I need to go sit by the water and let my head rest.

Social media, so close but so far

Early Spring Long Leaf Pine

Social media seems to present the opportunity to stay in better touch with so many more people. Yet is the contact  from social media the type that we need to sustain real social interaction?

Back in the seventies when I still wrote letters, it was clearly an effort to compose an interesting letter and go to the trouble to get it in the mail.

Yet it was worthwhile at the time.  Long distance phone calls were expensive, and computers for the home did not exist. It was even more fun getting a letter back from someone.  The letters represented a great deal of thought.

Today you can connect on Facebook, AIM, GoogleTalk, Twitter, and plenty of other places.  Making the contact is easy. The conversations are usually short and often done while multi-tasking.  The contact might mean little more than some random electrons have passed in the night.

Today’s social interaction is so easy to initiate electronically that the actual value of the contact may well be very little.  There is not a lot of effort involved in responding to many people.  You sometimes see this in people who seemed to be compelled to comment on something even if the thought they leave is worthless.  They are typically more interested in volume of comments than in quality.

While I am certain that you can build some strong ties with social media, I just have not seen it happen very often.  Very few people that I have met online has matured and made it past casual friendship.

The contacts that you make online can be very tenuous unless there is a previous relationship behind them.  As someone who uses online advertising a lot, I know well that many of the people who contact you online will never end up doing business with you.  It is far too easy for them to slide into the woodwork.

Someone who walks into your office, shakes your hand, and exchanges contact information with you is far more likely to end up a client.

This does not mean we should all give up on social networking.  We just need to appreciate it for its ability to be instantaneous and easy.

If it is desirable to move an online relationship to something greater, emails and phone calls are a good place to start.  If you really want to surprise someone, send them something in the mail.  Being a Realtor®, I often send people packages of maps and local magazines.  They rarely forget getting the package.

The trailing edge instead of the bleeding edge

Gulls on the wing

For years I led a team from Apple that sold computers to the federal government.  I left Apple in 2004.  The few years before that were very challenging when dealing with the government and computers.

Many of the IT people we had to deal with had gone from being talented IT professionals to political appointees who knew little about their jobs.

Some organizations like the Navy decided that private contractors knew more about computers than the Navy did.  They outsourced their computer decision making.  I can still remember some Navy folks saying that they ended up with the green metal desk version of computers.

We had lots of experience with NASA where extensive use of contractors for supplying computers resulted in scientists usually getting far from the best computers.  The only Macs that they often got were ones which were being discounted because new models were about to be introduced.

I am hoping that the change in government also means a change in technology policy.  I read today about some of President Obama’s staff feeling like they had dropped into a computer time warp.

From experience I know that computer security is a challenge, but I also know some of the security that is implemented is false security.  Many security threats come from within, and I have always believed that the excuse of security is a poor reason for implementing bad technology choices.

If we are to succeed with the many challenges that we face, technology has got to be part of the solution not part of the problem.

I remain convinced that intelligently implemented new technologies can have a huge impact on the efficiency of our government.

I am looking forward to seeing if the new government makes some progress in this area.

Computers watching computers

Waves along the beach

With tropical storm Hannah perhaps becoming a hurricane before making landfall between Mytle beach and Wilmington, all eyes in Eastern North Carolina have been following the weather.

Those with access to a televsion have probably watched The Weather Channel.

Many people in offices must rely on their computers which are signed into a variety of sites from the Weatherunderground to Accuweather and Weather Channel website.

I kept checking the computer when I was at the office Friday morning.  We did have a few minutes of nasty rain before things cleared off early in the afternoon.

It was nice enough that securing our boat and outdoor furniture was a very pleasant job on Friday just hours before the Hanna landfall.

The brief bout of super humid air that passed through the area on Friday morning had disappeared.  At dusk we could only discern clouds to the west and south of our area.  There was no wind and no rain.

We decided to go over to the beach for dinner.  We noticed on the way over that Food Lion in Emerald Isle had closed.  In the restaurant we found out that the grocery store had closed at 3 pm. That was twelve hours before Hannah was scheduled to make landfall in South Carolina close to 100 miles away.

Perhaps they were worried about the wind becoming strong enough to close the bridge to the mainland, and employees being stranded on the island.  Anyway after dinner, I went back to checking the weather sites to see if I could find really detailed information.  It turned out that there was very little new information on the computer sites.  I resorted to calling a friend who lives on the SC/Ga. border.

According to him his area had also seen very little active wether so far.  I wished that I had kep the phone number of our friend near Myrtle Beach. In the end we went to bed not really knowing what to expect in the morning.

During the night we heard both wind and rain.  I got around 7:30 am only to find the power off.  It didn’t take long to figure out that the power had not been off for long since the coffee was still hot.

Not wanting to give up a good cup of coffee, I poured myself a cup and enjoyed that before venturing outside.  There I found a pretty good storm surge, but no worse than we had expected.  Our rain gauge only showed one half inch of rain.  That added to what we got Friday morning gave us a total of one inch of rain from Hanna.

There were a few pieces of pine limbs in the yard and my tomato plants seemed to have taken a beating, but we actually came through the storm in good shape.  By the time I went back inside the power came back on and things were back to normal.  Even the excess water behind the house disappeared quickly.

I guess in the end, the computers checking other computer sites were as effective as any other means in figuring out what might happen.  At least with computers, I could avoid most of the weather channel hype.

I was pleased when the power came back on that I could send pictures of the storm to my friends.

Certainly people responding to other people are the best way to figure out what is happening.  By the end of the day, I knew that the rain from Hanna didn’t make it past the Yadkin River, but that parts of the DC area got flooded while my friend in NJ got a good soaking from Hanna.  Tomorrow I should find out what Hanna has in store for Nova Scotia.

It is nice to be connected even if it is with computers.

The tenuous lines to civilization

We work hard at subduing mother nature. This new shopping center off Keagy Road in Roanoke, Va. is a good example of leveling off mountain tops and filling in valleys.

While we can make the landscape look like whatever we want, Sunday’s storms and wind whipped fires in the Roanoke area proved that we are still pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Today is Tuesday and some people in the Roanoke area will be without power until Friday because of what the high winds did to trees in the area.

It is interesting how as we crowd ourselves together in smaller and smaller spaces that we become more dependent on someone else.

When we lived in the wilds of New Brunswick, we heated with wood, grew our own food, had a spring for our water, and could actually have done okay without the power grid for a week or two since we also had a small generator.

During the wind storm on Sunday, our cable modem connection went down. It was almost as isolating as being in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.

When a blizzard would hit in Canada, we still managed to get around because we were prepared for it. In a worst case scenario, I could put my snowshoes on and go visiting.

There is nothing one individual can do to prevent infrastructure disaster in today’s world. It is a little unnerving to be so dependent on so many other people.

The other challenge is the anonymity of your problem in a large community. I can remember the power going out for a week during an early September snowstorm on the coast of Nova Scotia. We were in small community.  People quickly started figuring out how to help each other.  One neighbor modified a chain saw so it would run our water pumps.  Another put a generator on a trailer and went around running people’s freezers for an hour or two.

Small communities quickly turn to helping each other. I wonder how many people in Roanoke are without power and cold while their neighbors are warm in well electrified homes.

I may just have to head back down to the coast, at least it is a small neighborhood, and I like to believe it would be easier to pull together in a disaster. One of the mayors of the area runs a small farm not far from me.  Somehow that is comforting.

Still we are lucky on the Southern Outer Banks, the worst we have had to deal with is fog.   I hope it stays that way at least until warm weather.

The anonymity of technology

When I used to drive between college in Boston and my home in Mount Airy, NC in the late sixties and early seventies, I could tell where I was by the radio station.

You could pick up some local news and weather. Today real local radio stations are hard to find. We get our weather from looking at one of the gadgets in the car.

Radio in our case is XM, though it might not be much longer given how poorly the new antenna is performing.

Still technology, google maps, Accuweather long range forecasts, and satellite radio have created a cocoon for us as we travel.

When you throw in chain restaurants and pay at the pump, it is little wonder that it is hard to tell one place from another.

I can still remember one fateful evening on the way back to Boston in the old days. The belt driving the fan on my Jaguar XK-E broke on the Interstate highway. This was well before cell phones. I waited for the engine to cool and drove a mile or so a couple of times.

That got me to a local filling station which was still open on a Friday night. Unfortunately he didn’t have a fan belt to fit my car. He gave me a ride to the local hotel in Hagerstown and said he would pick me up in the morning.

Good to his word, he showed up the next morning, and we found out that the closest thing in town was a belt for a washing machine. I bought three, and he quickly installed one, and I was back on the road.

No Onstar, no cell phone, no triple AAA, and no advance computer registration at the hotel. Laptops had not been invented. Being wireless meant someone ripped your wires out. How did I manage to survive?

I wonder if the lack of interaction with the local world as we fly by in our technology aided cocoons has made for more or less understanding of our neighbors?

River and mind fog

Today, December 29, the air temperatures on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast are so warm that fog is forming over some of the rivers.

Sometimes I think we live in a fog of technology. While the river fog will go away when the weather changes, I think we have to work at losing the technology fog.

Almost every home has a computer, and lots of people depend on email to do their jobs and to stay in touch with friends.

Most people, not including my wife, use a cell phone with a camera phone.

Wireless networks are everywhere, and few homes are without an all in one printer/scanner/copier.

Then there are the digital cameras and movie cameras. We have HD televisions with HDMI inputs so I suppose the next thing is a Blue Ray or HD DVD.

We were in Best Buy the other day and actually stopped for a couple of minutes to look at a comparison between Blue Ray and regular DVD. I will admit to the Blue Ray images being stunning.

What I can do with the technology that we already have in the home and that which is accessible on the web like geotagging and Google Earth is astonishing.

While I cannot yet send an image that rivals Blue Ray, I can send some very stunning images.

Someone sent me some fantastic images that are going around the web. While my images might not be quite in the same class, they aren’t bad. I think a lot of people can say that these days.

We have such good tools today, that anyone can be an expert, by capturing an image, balancing the color a little, and easily sending it by email or MMS.

Not only can you send it to someone, but likely they will be able to get it even if they are traveling. There is so much content, some of it very high quality, and delivered very quickly that we are in an information fog.

There are people who have trouble processing it all. And above all it is harder and harder to get information to stand out.
It is easy to lose track of what you want to focus on because there is so much information. Sometimes it is more than you want or need to know.

There are times you have to back away from the technology and what it delivers until you can see through the fog.

Too much information can take away your decision making ability. Maybe I am old school, but once in a while you have to go with a gut feeling and not let yourself get overwhelmed with instantaneous high tech data.  Once in a while, all this high tech stuff lets you turn something not so appealing into something not exactly as good as it looks.

Maybe it helps to go back to a basic computer that does not overwhelm you with its possibilities. I am trying that with a new Zonbu computer.

Invisible digital ink

Email is what I live by in my real estate business.  Most of my clients contact me by email before I actually meet them.

It works fine for the real estate world, but a package of letters returned to me by a friend got me to thinking if we are someday going to regret all the email.

The letter were written in the early seventies to a college friend when I first moved to Canada.  It is interesting to look at them and glance through my thoughts.  They tell a lot about me and what was important to me then.

I only have one friend to whom I still write letters.  Even those letters are typed on a computer.  Most of my communications with friends are instant messages or emails.  We often do instant messages instead of phone calls.  While they are quick and easy, they have little permanence.  Without a lot of work, when the computer is gone the messages are gone.

I used to try to keep CD and then DVD backups of my email.  Unfortunately the volume of mail has grown faster than the storage medium.  Of course I use IMAP for much of my email so it hangs around for a few years, but still eventually it will go.

I have a lot of information on the web in my blogs.  I guess they have some degree of permanence as long as I pay the bills.  I have actually done backups of the information and even backed up a couple of my important websites.

Yet in spite of that I feel that we are on the edge of losing a lot of information.  Maybe there is so much of it that there isn’t enough storage space to store it all.

Even if you could store who would take the time to read through an average person’s email?  Maybe a relative, but they would have to have more time than brains.

Maybe this new age of email and instant messaging means that whatever doesn’t make it into a book will have to be learned over.

Then again maybe technology will rescue us with a way to digest all our emails and dig out some great thoughts that might have been lost to the world without some machine help.

The machines that own us

They say that machines are supposed to work for us.

For a long time I have been skeptical of that.

When I bought my first tractor back in 1971, a very intelligent Uncle of mine said that to really pay for it, I would have to run it day and night.

Well I haven’t yet figured out how to work without a little sleep so I still can’t do that. Perhaps it’s good that I no longer own tractors.

Now I just have to run computers day and night to make them pay for themselves. Still when you have a machine worth a few hundred thousand dollars, it just blows my mind to see that it is only one man and the machine. While this combine was grabbing corn and shelling it (the work of many people), there was another tractor with an auger wagon almost full of corn.

I’m sure the combine driver would finish a load and head home for lunch and come back with an empty wagon. It seems so weird that one person with machinery can do so much work.

I saw another example which I had been waiting to see.

We went over to Beaufort, NC to have a look at Blackbeard’s cannon which had just been raised to the surface after nearly three hundred years under water.

There were some reporters from local television stations setting up to do stories. At least one of them happen to be reporter and crew in one person. She got the camera running and started talking in front of it. She checked the film she had done and then interviewed someone with a camera crew.

I am not so sure, but the machines might be winning.