Happy 8th Birthday, Cassie

[caption id="attachment_4006" align="aligncenter" width="224"] Cassie prepares Monster High for the next week's classes[/caption]

Better than OK

According to people who know such things, the phrase "We are OK." was the most common phrase in Facebook posts during and shortly after Post-Tropical Cyclone mega-Frankenstorm Sandy. We are and then some.
As we mentioned on Facebook, the storm blew over a 50-foot, 100-year-old spruce tree onto our house, slicing off the chimney top which tumbled down to the roof of our family room. The sound caused my wife, Sandra, to jump up just as pieces of the ceiling came crashing down. It took a few minutes to figure out what has happened, by which time power went out town-wide.

Son Mike, a building contractor, lives a couple miles away and showed up quickly. His quick assessment, with the storm still strong, was we couldn't be sure that the house was safe. Water was coming in around the stub of the chimney and the family roof was sagging. We' couldn't be sure if any electrical wires were damaged.  After an hour of muddled thinking, we decided to spend the night with Mike's family.

There we were greeted and comforted. We listened Miss Cassie read her report on E. B. White's Stuart Little. Her report was a retelling of the story from the perspective of Snowbell, the family cat. Power came back to the town earlier than expected. Mike and Lynn gave up their bed to us. We were up early and returned home at first light.
The day passed quickly. The tree company that Mike called was on the scene with three trucks by 8 and the tree was gone by 10. A mason inspected the chimney. Mike and a framer friend cleared away the old chimney and patched the hole. The insurance inspectors were on the scene by 4. At 6, we were back at Mike and Lynn's for a birthday party for Cassie and me.

Back home, we have heat from the wood stove. (The furnace will be off until the chimney is repaired.) We are moving onto the new normal that, for a time, has a torn ceiling and a silent furnace. The house, for the first time in more than a century, is open to the east.

More importantly, we are energized with the fresh expressions of love and friendship and competence. We settled in long enough to watch the TV news of the fires and flooding in New York and the concomitant need for  heroics and compassion and money.

A while ago, after a rough personal episode, I remarked to one of my doctors that I was eager to get back to normal.

"There is no normal," he said. "There just is."

Charter says, "Go online if you have trouble going online."

Our ISP, Charter, has an app that offers a Frequently Asked Questions section, wherein you get this helpful tip:



Not only that, but the web address isn't clickable.

Living and working in a tech news bubble

While the tech press is all tangled up with the upcoming Microsoft, Apple, and Google product announcements, it's time for for a marketing reality check. What are consumers generally hearing about these new products?

It turns out that the mainstream media isn't covering this and so, we can assume, most folks aren’t receiving much reason to get excited. Local newspapers and television stations and even a few national channels give only passing mention to topics such as the Microsoft Surface tablet, iPad Mini, or Nexus 7, or Windows 8.

I chose several Boston-area television and newspaper web sites along with a couple of national resources: WBZ (CBS), WCVB (ABC), and WHDH (NBC), Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram (a nearby, mid-sized daily), CNN, PBS, and Fox News. For each site, I searched for articles with certain keywords in the title.

Note: I would have used Bing on IE for searching in an effort to replicate what a typical non-technical user might use. Bing, however, doesn’t support date-filtering of its search queries.

The Microsoft Surface tablet is a hot new product second only to Windows 8 in terms of company impact. The people who are cover Microsoft and Windows products for a living are having a hard time understanding, let alone explaining the difference between a Windows 8 tablet and a Windows RT tablet, both due for the release this week. The average news consumer is troubled by a surfeit of news to confuse. On average, people have been offered one story about the Surface in the past month. Most sites, in fact, hadn’t reported on the Surface after the June announcement and the recent scheduling of the product release.

The Nexus 7 is a fun product that's receiving a lot of good coverage in the trades. In our local media survey, however, only one site, the Boston Globe, had a story about Google’s breakout tablet.

Apple has an announcement scheduled for October 23. Most people who speculate about such things expect that we’ll learn about a 7-or-so-inch iPad that’s generally been called the iPad Mini.

Meanwhile, all of the chatter about the iPhone 5 hasn’t made clear just what Apple released. I sat with a person recently while an ad for the refreshed iPod line showed up on TV. Seeing the brightly colored bouncing devices, she asked, "Is that the new iPhone?"

Microsoft is betting the company on its radical redesign of the user interface in Windows 8. While the tech press has been covering each of the nooks and crannies, Windows 8 has received scant coverage in our press pool. We found an average of fewer than four stories in the last month. During the same period, the sites averaged more than 27 stories about Big Bird. CNN and the Boston Globe provided peak coverage while PBS, home of our faithful feathered friend, posted just one. After the spike following the October 3 debate, Big Bird’s gone back to quieter corners while Windows 8 coverage continues its slow climb.

The results for Windows phone, including the much anticipated Windows Phone 8 release, were too small to measure.

If you search the web for these products, you’ll find lots of coverage. Google news search provides a much higher return on tech news, so it’s not surprising that these terms are more visible in Google news sites. Most folks, however, aren’t searching for news about gadgets and software. Google Hot Trends shows the current topics in high demand. People are interested in sports, celebrities, and a few disasters and tragedies. Their lives are uncluttered by commentary about tech in general and new product releases, unless it’s something from Apple. Watch the trends in the days after Apple’s announcement.

For those of us in the tech marketing trades, it’s good to spend an afternoon with people who don’t give a damn about this stuff. It’s good to remember that, for people are buying these products, technology is a tool and not a goal.

 

What Glassdoor thinks that I do for a living

Received the latest list of job prospects from Glassdoor. Apparently, someone believes that I'd be any kind of useful in the delivery room because I'm so savy and all.

Point-counterpoint: Users

Square CEO Jack Dorsey says that his company and the rest of us should stop referring to computer-products customers as users.

We don't have users, we have customers we earn. They deserve our utmost respect, focus, and service. Because that’s who we are.

His full blog post is here.

Dave Winer, inventor of many things, particularly RSS, says that user is the right word.

The answer is to love those users so much that they don't mind being called users. That's an art a lot of tech companies have yet to master.

Scott Adams says,

Point-counterpoint: Multivitamins

Many folks were excited at the news that a long cycle, double-blind study showed that multivitamins reduced cancer incidence in men. Overall, researchers found an eight percent reduction in cancer incidence, with some cancers reduced even more than that. The vitamins had no significant effect on prostate cancer. The multivitamin was Centrum Silver.

Consumer Reports jumped in a few hours later with a cautionary message.

"The only end point that reached statistical significance, and that barely, was in the occurrence of cancer in general," says Marvin Lipman, M.D., Consumer Reports' Chief Medical Adviser. "The use of multivitamins did not affect site-specific cancers, such as colon cancer, nor did their use decrease the death rate from cancer," he says. "This study would not persuade me to tell my patients to take multivitamins."

There is an apparent difference of opinion about the affect on site-specific cancers. Further, CR found that some people had other health problems resulting from multivitamin usage. One study showed an increased risk for women of breast cancer.

What have the ants ever done to him?

The Gardner News: modern offer, modern rejection

The Gardner News is enthusiastic about these new mobile webby things. They include a QR code in the paper from time to time.

Each time that I use my trusty Google Googles to scan the code, however, I get this.

[caption id="attachment_3939" align="alignnone" width="168"] Click to enbiggen[/caption]

It's been temporarily for the many months that I've tried it.

What the small road tells us

Already the camp road is covered with needles and leaves. There are pine needles and yellow leaves from birches and the early maples. Near the water, the maples are orange and bright red.

It was a great season at the camp, four months of that second cup of coffee on the front porch, brought indoors by the cool of early fall. We had lots of time to ourselves and big gatherings in celebration of milestone birthdays.

The heron, great big improbable bird, greeted us in the spring, went away, and bid us farewell in the fall. An eagle surveyed the cove.

We worked, real for-pay work, but we could take a swim when it was hot. It was a full summer. We took one weekend off and acted as if we were vacationers in town, doing touristy things and toured the lake by kayak and canoe.

A friend used to remind me that biblical storytellers would say that an event came to pass, not that it came to stay.  A few years ago, some of you might remember, we started to live at the camp. The death of my wife's father and chronic illness of her mother flipped those plans onto another path. With the resilient support of her family and caretakers, Sandra's mother is doing pretty well.

We have a few ideas for next year, but we're not through with our ideas for this year yet. I have a good array of work ahead. I have friends I've not seen recently; it's easy to let people get away.

We have clusters of birthdays, holidays, and birthdays again. Laid out on a calendar, it looks crowded, but each one is special and worthy. Each birthday forces a hard question: how well do we know what's important to the person having the birthday? With little kids, it's easy because they'll tell you directly. As people grow, however, they might not even know themselves and so we have to try to help.

We worked hard to put things out of reach of mice and squirrels who will come in from the cold. We brought home the obviously edible stuff and packed everything made of cloth or paper in bins. The acorn crop was a bit better than average, so we can look forward to a cold winter.

My father said each fall the wet leaves are slipperier than snow. We drive carefully on the road covered with needles and leaves.

Dept. of Superheroes

While getting ready for the school bus yesterday, Miss Cassie mentioned that a kid at school got a bit confused one day and put his jacket on, over his backpack. The kids called him Jacket-Over-Backpack Man.

Sleep easily, suburbanites. Jacket-Over-Backpack Man has your, um, back.

We can be grateful that we don't have to rely on Arm Fall Off Boy.

In which a stick becomes a root

Sandra has been in California for a few days, celebrating her friend-since-childhood Janet's birthday. She returns this evening.

On Saturday, I took care of my errands early with a trip to the dump and then the grocery store. I settled in for a couple of days of being alone.

The productivity folks suggest that you add a time estimate to the items on your to-do list. That way, it's easy to pick off short tasks and feel productive, even if you're a bit unfocused. My list was a mix of big and little things - paperwork for a couple of nonprofits, cut down a small tree that is growing too close to the utility pole, pay the bills, split firewood, and on like that.

Most of the things I was able to dispatch with ease. The firewood is like that. Some of the wood has been lying on the ground for a couple of years. (I thought I would be getting to it that summer, but those plans were overcome by other events.) Surprisingly, the bark protected most of the wood, leaving it damp but still solid. It split easily. In 20 minutes, I had enough for a day's burning.

Other chores went walkabout. I had some forms that were worth about 15 minutes. They took two hours and are still not done. They are state forms. Something happens to arithmetic when it enters that world. Numbers that should add up nicely produce random results.

It's easy to get discouraged and weary when you spent a long time on a simple task. You can walk away and do something else, which I did plenty of times. At day's end, though, in spite of many tasks crossed off the list, that remaining undone lump stands proud and defiant.

While walking around the yard, I bent down to pick up a stick. It was a root. I tugged on it, tearing up the ground for a couple of feet. The first set of clippers that I found was dull and couldn't cut the sinew. The next set was sharp enough. I cut it cleanly, repacked the tear in the ground, and went about my day. The root will grown back next year.

Happy 13th Birthday, Lily

[caption id="attachment_3896" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Seen here this summer with Rocco and guest, Thompson.[/caption]

When English usage rules fail

The standard usage rule of placing punctuation inside quotation marks causes an unnecessary problem for new application developers. Grammar Girl notes that British writers can decide on the inside/outside usage based on context. American writers must put punctuation inside the quotation marks, even if it causes problems in technical writing.

For reasons that might become apparent at a later date, I decided to try my hand at Android application development. Using the guidance provided on the Android development site, I dutifully downloaded and configured Eclipse and the Android development kit. If you're not one who does this often, the setup can be tricky, so it's good to follow the instructions exactly.

When I reached the step of creating my first application, I followed the steps on the Creating an Android Project page.



If I use My First App. as the name of, um, my first app, the form doesn't regard it as a valid name. Note that the dialog box doesn't let me proceed; the Next button is grayed out.



If I remove the period that is inside the quotation mark and name my application My First Application, I can move on to the next step.

Well, that was fun

I was tinkering with the DNS settings on this blog and the gears threw a few teeth. We should be quiet again for a while.
Thanks for your patience.

Are you ready to turn over your school's...

Are you ready to turn over your school's tech support to the kids? Some schools have already done so.

Educational IT - Karl Hakkarainen - The Help-Yourself (& Others) Help Desk

Along with the bring-your-own-device trend, savvy IT departments are harnessing the independence of their users to solve their own IT and training issues.

As innovative as this sounds,developing...

As innovative as this sounds,developing water-intensive products in New Mexico seems wrong-headed.

First portion of huge algae farm in New Mexico is done

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Paul Ryan is so confident that he and Mitt...

Paul Ryan is so confident that he and Mitt Romney will win that he is also running for his current congressional seat.

As he seeks bigger job, Ryan runs to keep old one - The Boston Globe

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Various forces align against Uber's pay-...

Various forces align against Uber's pay-by-app expansion.

Digital Draw - Karl Hakkarainen - The Battle for the Backseat

Taxi-hailing app Uber has run into a legal roadblock in the Big Apple with seat-back digital advertisers.

Learning by getting it wrong

While writing a blog for another site, I wanted to use the metaphor of the old Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd) battery memory effect problem. For those of you who remember the early portable devices, such as Sony's Discman, they used NiCd batteries. We were warned through the documentation and our friends that we should always completely drain the battery before recharging. Otherwise, the battery would lose its ability to charge fully and develop a memory for a certain charge level, sometimes called a set point.

I wanted to allude to the fact that people can develop this set point as well, losing the ability to learn only so much, which was far less than what their original capacity would indicate.

Upon further research, I learned that the memory effect wasn't really there. It was mostly about the behavior of cheap chargers and the perception, not the fact, that the battery wasn't fully charged. The explanation is nicely summed up in Dan's Quick Guide to Memory Effect, You Idiots.

The metaphor works even better. People can learn, even when their brains appear to be over-full or when they appear to be not fully open to change. It may look as though they aren't learning and can't use the knowledge. Our perceptions of the way that others learn is, in part, what's faulty, as well as the charging (educational) system.

NiCd batteries are hazardous waste. I don't know where that fits into the metaphor.