Email?  Where!?
Everyone was supposed to send their updates prior to the meeting, but there’s always someone who comes unprepared and emails their information to the presenter in the middle of the meeting, forcing the presenter to open their email client in front of the entire audience to retrieve the update.  Watch your crowd when this happens … all eyes are on the screen.  People could be completely sidetracked, playing Angry Birds or whatever, and suddenly there’s dead silence and all eyes forward, just in case something they aren’t supposed to see appears when you switch to Outlook.  This isn’t malicious behavior; we all do it.  I’d love to exploit it by hiding important information I need everyone to see.  “Confidential: Tests are failing, fix your code!”

Not my email!
This causes, of course, the behavior where a presenter will do anything he or she can to avoid opening up email.  “Oh, instead of sending me that, could you put it on a share somewhere?  Like, and read me the hyperlink instead of mailing it to me?”

The grooming session
They’re about to present, so they prepare their system.  Close that Facebook tab, and replace it with one to the support forums.  Close the personal email, open one to the intranet site. Maybe make sure the desktop has an IDE open.  Open up some emails that make them look important, leave them sitting in the background.  “What, oh, yeah, didn’t mean to leave that up there. Let me close it slowly enough that you can read this….”

Just don’t care
Then again, some people just don’t care.  They are confident enough to present from within their browser and show their 15 tabs, to ESPN, Craigslist, LinkedIn, their brokerage, and more.  You gonna call them out?  When you work for them?

The paranoid
“Just share your desktop!” come the calls, as the paranoid presenter shares one window at a time, to avoid sharing any more information than necessary.  Meanwhile, dozens of people across multiple geographies have to remind the presenter every few minutes that the latest application they opened isn’t being shared and nobody can see it.

Any stories to add?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Presenting Perils

In real life, this is a problem, and one which is solved by the fact that my wife has no sense of nostalgia and will throw my garbage away behind my back.  I pretend not to notice and we move on peacefully.

In the digital world, though, it has amusing results.  In a fit of nostalgia, I recently stumbled onto the oldest archived version of my first “web page,” from 1995.  In it, I mention someone as a good friend.  Fifteen years later, I cannot remember who this person was.  There’s something sad about that, don’t you think?  The Internet never forgets, though.  I’ve found much older stuff out there, archived on weird mailing lists or whatever, stuff I have trouble believing came from my keyboard but obviously did.

I also have carried the same text files from computer to computer since the first PC-compatible machine I ever got, in the late 80s.  Since I was an awkward teenager in the late 80s, you know what this means?  I still have all the awful stuff I wrote as a misunderstood loner in high school.  Lyrics to heavy metal songs that never got set to music.  Nasty unsent letters.  Poems that would delete themselves if they could, they’re so bad.  The beginning of a horror novel which thankfully never got finished.

Yup.  It’s all there.

And I back it up nightly on Mozy too.

My name is Dave, and I’m a digital packrat.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Digital Packrat

Facebook is a loose social network; a “friend” on Facebook might translate to someone you’d barely recognize in real life. I don’t care that my college roommate’s sister is anemic or that my stepcousin’s boyfriend gets nervous around old people.

Ashley Stockett on twitter says

It’s like those email forwards that started circa 1996…”what’s your fav. brand of toothpaste…”

I’m trying to figure out where all the hate is coming from.  When these things went around via email back in the day, it was clearly a massive waste of resources.  The endless chain of forwards basically made sure you never really got to read the lists written by the people you cared about, and you often got emailed from multiple people with subtle variations, etc.  So don’t get me wrong, I always have hated and still do hate meaningless chain emails.  I don’t really like the “tag” mechanism on Facebook for trying to pressure people into writing their own lists (I used “tag” to notify people I mentioned them in my list).  But the activity itself?  It’s awesome.  And here’s why.

If you don’t want to read about your “college roommate’s sister” you don’t have to pay attention to the notes she creates.  You probably don’t care about anything she’s doing on Facebook, so it seems more likely that your problem is with having her as a friend, not in that she happened to publish a document that you don’t care to read.

See, that’s the beauty of it.  I don’t get emails and pushy requests from dozens of different people who have my address.  I write my list, I read the lists of others who are interesting to me, and that’s it.  Heck, I can even use Facebook privacy settings to control who can read my note, down to the individual level if desired.  And what payoff is there?

Relationships deepen.  For example, I learned that an extended family member, who is about to enter college and made some statements that really hit home with me and reminded me of some things I felt when I was his age.  I was able to make contact, share some experiences, and deepen a family connection I never would have had time to deepen until we connected to each other via Facebook.

To the haters I say this: if you’re annoyed by the “25 Things” meme, and other memes like it, it’s possible, to quote another meme, that “you’re doing it wrong.”

(I do feel compelled to add that I understand several reasons people dislike this meme.  One is that it gives Facebook more information about you, gives their advertisers more information about you, than you might want to give.  Another is that if your or a friend’s account is hacked your personal information is now available, perhaps leading to real world problems depending on what information you share. Use Facebook responsibly, please. I’m not advocating recklessness, just having a little fun.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: In defense of #25Things

I recently was reminded of a Rush song from 1981 called The Camera Eye.  It’s an interesting song because it’s the last song the band wrote which is longer than ten minutes, and it hasn’t been performed live in concert in over 25 years (so was “retired” from concert play only two years after its release).  As such it has a special place in the heart of hardcore Rush fans (ahem).

I was thinking of the song at work and realized I wanted to hear it.  I loaded up my media player, typed “Camera” into the search box, and picked which version of the song I wanted to hear (the studio version, or a bootleg recording from the Chicago Amphitheater, from March 1981).  I picked the bootleg version, the song began, and I smiled as I went about my afternoon work.

There are a few things which are completely astounding about this experience, which I realize I take for granted.

The most obvious is that I have all my music at my fingertips.  At home, at work, and on the go if I choose, I have every piece of music I’ve ever bought the bits for, as well as some rare tracks like this one which are only found online.  Something else?  Rapid search.  I mean, you could carry a box of a thousand CDs around with you, but finding the single track you might want in a split-second like that?  Good luck.  Finally, it’s the fact that I was listening to a bootleg recording someone grabbed in 1981 that somehow found its way to my USB drive 27 years later.  It used to be that owning a rare track like that was the mark of being a truly hardcore fan.  But in the digital world, rarity is an outdated concept.

I paused for a moment as I realized just how different the world I take for granted in 2008 was from the world I lived in as a child.  In the 70s and early 80s, the experience I just described to you would have sounded like science fiction.

So, as a new dad, the logical question to follow up with was this: what will my daughter take for granted that I can’t imagine today?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: The Camera Eye

(I occasionally use this blog to talk about non-professional topics.  I confine these posts to Fridays, hence the term ).

This summer, I was re-introduced to the hobby of geocaching.  I had read about geocaching many times over the years, but nobody I knew had gotten into it, so I ignored it.  When a few family members started getting into it, I took another look.

First off, for those unfamiliar with the hobby, geocaching is basically a game in which participants retrieve coordinates and/or hints from a common web site, travel to those coordinates using GPS receivers (GPSr), and find “caches” hidden by other players of the game.  Upon finding the cache, finders sign a logbook and report their success.  Caches are hidden on urban street corners and mountain peaks, and everything in-between.

So what makes this hobby fun for geeks like me?  A few things….

Gear

Geeks love gear.  We love to research, compare, buy, trade, review, and basically obsess over gear.  This is a hobby that requires a piece of high-tech gear, a GPSr, even to participate.  But the periphery is loaded with gear as well.  If you’re doing wilderness caches, you will want hiking gear (boots, backpacks, walking sticks, and more).  Some caches require specialized equipment to reach — so you could possibly get into kayaking, climbing, and even SCUBA — so there’s the ability to get into other gear.  Maybe you want a mountain bike for caches hidden on bike trails?  An off-road stroller for taking the baby caching?  A jeep?  Snowshoes?  Cross-country skis?  And never mind the non-GPSr high-tech gear, like PDAs for paperless caching, and consumables like bug spray and sunscreen.

You want gear?  Geocaching has gear.  Yet, you can get into it with nothing more than a $100 GPSr.

Cool software

Just like gear, caching is loaded with software.  The site itself is a cool repository of locations which mashes up with Google Earth and Google Maps.  Users can create complex queries against the database, and load the results into a variety of desktop software for processing, sorting, filtering, and loading onto their GPSr units.  And of course there is PDA software as well.  And GPSr software.  And so on!

Stats

If there’s something geeks love more than gear, it’s stats.  Whether their chosen poison is sports or D&D, geeks are all about tracking, playing with, bragging about, and manipulating statistics.  And the folks in the geocaching scene have not forgotten this.  Caches are rated for difficulty and terrain, and are made up of a variety of types.  All actions you take on a cache (logging it as discovered, logging a failed cache attempt, adding a note) result in database records which are associated with your own account and the cache record.  You can download all that info and run stats on it, and publish the stats as bragging rights.  When you see people sporting scatter graphs in their profiles, you can be sure you’re dealing with geeks.  Heck, we even have stats about our stats!

In addition, a complex system exists for passing around tagged items which cachers find and rehide as they go from cache to cache.  Cachers like to hide these items with specific objectives: “I want this stuffed armadillo to get to Texas, please move it in that direction when you find it,” for example.  Stats on how many of these tagged items you have seen, have hidden, or own are all available.  Want to see a map showing the route a tagged item has traveled?  You can do it.

Puzzles

Geeks love to solve (and come up with) puzzles.  There are two big kinds of puzzles in geocaching.  Obviously the caches themselves are hidden (otherwise people would just steal them), so there’s a fair amount of problem-solving involved in finding a cache even once you know exactly (well, within 15 feet, let’s say) where it is.  Some cache containers are camouflaged, others very tiny, and some are just in tricky places to get to.  But there are also puzzle caches, where even the coordinates are only available after successfully solving a challenge.  Some are simple ROT-13 decodes, others are complex ciphers, some are hidden in weird ways in image files or filler text.  Either way, the community is pretty good about keeping spoilers out of sight, so there are always challenging puzzles to be solved.  And of course some of the puzzles involve going out into the field — it’s not just putting clues together, it’s going to a location, reading a sign, going to a different location, finding something, and so on. Getting the coordinates can take hours, even multiple days.  Granted, most caches aren’t that complex, but they are out there.

Community

While people often think of geeks as antisocial, we’re big on online communities, and there’s a huge online community around geocaching.  Since the hobby requires access to the centralized cache database, and all activity is associated with a profile, everyone who participates has an account and a current profile associated with it.  You can maintain lists of friends, share bookmarks of favorite caches with commentary, and chat in moderated forums.  Sounds pretty geeky to me!

Exercise

Of course, none of this works if you stay inside all day and geek out on geocaching.  At some point you have to go out and, well, geocache.  Fortunately, you don’t need to be in super shape to cache, although the more challenging hides certainly will test your endurance if you go after them.  Still, it’s good exercise and it’s family-friendly.

As I’ve said before, I’m a geek at heart with tons of indoor hobbies, struggling to stick with outdoor activities.  An outdoor hobby that lets me fully realize my inner geek at the same time?  I think I’ve found a winner.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Geocaching for Geeks

It certainly made me aware how much music I’ve listened to at different points in my life.

1973: Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
1974: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Second Helping
1975: Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
1976: Boston, Boston
1977: Meat Loaf, Bat out of Hell
1978: Van Halen, Van Halen
1979: AC/DC, Highway to Hell

1980: Ozzy Osbourne, Bilizzard of Ozz
1981: Rush, Moving Pictures
1982: Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast
1983: Def Leppard, Pyromania
1984: Metallica, Ride the Lightning
1985: Weird Al Yankovic, Dare to be Stupid
1986: Slayer, Reign in Blood
1987: Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction
1988: Queensrÿche, Operation: Mindcrime
1989: Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever

1990: Depeche Mode, Violator
1991: Sepultura, Arise
1992: Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes
1993: Anthrax, Sound of White Noise
1994: Various, Pulp Fiction Soundtrack
1995: White Zombie, Astro Creep: 2000
1996: Beck, Odelay
1997: The Prodigy, The Fat of the Land
1998: Fatboy Slim, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
1999: Mr. Bungle, California

2000: U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind
2001: Cake, Comfort Eagle
2002: Norah Jones, Come Away with Me
2003: Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
2004: Danger Mouse, The Grey Album
2005: Dean Grey, American Edit
2006: RHCP, Stadium Arcadium
2007: Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero
2008: No entry yet; I’ve been too busy to keep up!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Internet Meme Time

Today I’m going to share some life skills lessons I learned from James T. Kirk and Magic: The Gathering.  Yes, really.

Kirk cheated. We all know this, right?  In Wrath of Khan, we learn of how Kirk cheated his way out of a no-win simulation scenario (designed to test character) by hacking the simulation to allow him to win.  Now, I hesitate to call this cheating, as the desired outcome is to test behavior, not results, so the results are irrelevant.  The behavior information gathered was important.  It’s a nice piece of storytelling and a part of why I like the movie so much.

The life lesson here isn’t necessarily that you should break the rules to win, it’s that you should be aware of the supposed rules so you’re able to force a change in the environment.  Then, you have to be willing to make that change and adapt to the result, a risky move but one that can pay off.

I really learned this lesson late in college, when I was hooked on the card game Magic: The Gathering.  On its surface it is a simple game involving cards which are played to cause various effects (dressed up as monsters, spells, magical artifacts, etc.).  Players build their own decks tailored to a specific strategy from their card supply, then take turns drawing and playing cards.

When you first learn the game, you spend most of your time trading back-and-forth hits with simple-to-understand monster cards or direct damage spells.  This is a fun way to play the game, and I was enjoying it quite a bit.  And then I met someone who used a card I never really liked: Wrath of God.  It wipes the board clean of creatures.  Every creature in play is destroyed.  What’s the fun in that?  You just went through a bunch of work to summon those creatures, and now they’re gone!?

There are plenty of cards like this in the game, cards which hurt everyone equally.  There are similar cards which change the rules in some way, making the game more difficult for everyone equally.  When you are first learning to play you ignore these cards.  They are complicated and don’t seem like fun.  Why would you want to make it so every time you play a card you take damage, for example?

Well, the real power in the game comes from using drastic game-changing cards like those and adapting to those changes quickly.  For example, if you create a strategy around starting fast but petering out quickly, you will lose against a balanced opponent … unless you supplement your strategy with a number of “reset button” style cards which keep the game artificially perpetually in the early stages.  Your opponent is ready to crush you in the end game, but you never let the end game arrive.

You can only be so competitive at this card game by being good at playing the “common” game.  At some point, you have to dedicate part of your strategy to disrupting your opponent.  Basically, what rules are you going to change, and how will your strategy be superior in that changed game?

These are valuable lessons for life. You can apply it them problem solving, personal advancement, and market competition.

You can advance pretty far by being good at what you do.  You can advance much further by changing the environment to suit your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Change the rules of the game, and make sure you can win the new game.

And people say you can’t learn anything by watching Star Trek and playing card games….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Changing the Rules

I look at my wallet now, and it makes a great symbol for how much life has changed since then.  And I don’t mean how much cash is in it.

Change is inevitable and exciting.  If you had told my 16 year-old self what my 35 year-old self would have in his wallet, he would have called you crazy.

Cash.  Yes, I still carry cash.  I have this odd behavior where I hate to spend less than $5-ish on a credit card.  This means I usually pay for my breakfast in cash, and my lunch on a credit card.  Don’t ask; I don’t understand either.  And yes, the fact that I’d be willing to spend this much money just to avoid brown-bagging it would seem alien to my teenage self, but let’s not go into that.

Credit.  The willingness of banks in this country to hand out credit is something I would never have predicted in 1990.  I shudder to think of how much damage I could do to my life in a crazed shopping spree using just the plastic in my wallet.

Driver’s License.  No, I wasn’t driving in high school.  But that’s not it.  My first license had my social security number on it.  Everybody’s did.  Now you can’t, even if you want to, use that as your license number.  I would never have imagined the privacy concerns this technology boom would bring.

Health Insurance Cards (3).  Teenagers are immortal, right?  Why would you carry those things around with you?  I mean, when would you ever need that?  Hah.  Not only that, why would I need 3 different insurance providers?  (Now that I wish I could fix!)

Audio Meeting Quick Reference Card.  I carry in my wallet a card with phone and access numbers to a conference call I can use at any time.  Included is of course access numbers from other countries.  I don’t think my 1990 self could imagine why I’d be carrying a card with a phone number in India on it.

Employment Badge.  The only reason I’d have carried one of these around at 16 would be to get my employee discount on audio tapes at Caldor.  I certainly would have trouble picturing myself doing what I do for a living today, for who I do it today.

Corporate Credit Card.  Again, I hesitate to ponder the damage I could do to my life if I ever snapped .

AAA Card.  Ok, this one I could have pictured.  Our cars were always breaking down, back then.  I feel like I pay into AAA now strictly due to the terror I underwent back in those days every time the car I was in broke down, got stuck, wouldn’t start, and so on.

So … what’s in your wallet?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: What’s in your wallet?

The good news is that it’s because we’re due to have our first child in two weeks.

When this happens, I’ll be taking a couple weeks away from work to concentrate on being home with my family.  Given the circumstances, I may not have a lot to say that fits into this blog (then again, maybe I’ll be up all night and resort to blogging to pass the time ).

Even after this, my blogging schedule will likely change.  I plan to continue regular updates, but you will probably not see new posts every work day.  No promises I can’t keep, remember?  So I promise to update regularly.  I hope that’s good enough.

Have a great weekend everyone.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Dave Talks Home

Or not.  Either way, here’s your chance to find out.  This week, I made an effort to take note of interesting stories I stumbled across in my RSS reader.  The result fills up my Casual Friday post nicely this week!  Hope you enjoy something here.

• Wish you could use Google Earth in your browser?  Now you can.
• NASA blogger suspended.  Not as controversial as it sounds.
• NYC DOE employees told not to blog (and this one is a bit more controversial).
• The consumerist shares a funny story about trying to order the discontinued hamburger value meal at McDs.
• Weblogged talks about kids and oversharing online.
• Dr. Ari Juels at RSA says to rethink password expiration (and I agree).
• Some images from EMC World 2008.
• Comparing the size of the mobile internet to other types of media worldwide.
• Marginal Revolution gives a shoutout to Murakami, only Japanese novelist I’ve read.
• DD-WRT update on Lifehacker (still haven’t updated).
• Insulting Einstein?  Not really.
• Storage Anarchist’s EMC World wrapup.
• The challenges of corporate blogging.
• Designing for Evil.
• Glimpses of what The Road might look like (still haven’t read this).
• Euler, the first 101-word short story that made me laugh aloud.
• Hobbit movie chat highlights.
• Chuck Hollis on social media in enterprise.

Where would we be without RSS readers?  I have trouble remembering what that world was like.

See you Monday!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Weekly linkdump