In the time it takes me to boot up Windows and check my Outlook mail, I can:
Boot Ubuntu Launch chrome and check my personal email Close chrome Play two rounds of Tetravex Shut down the computer
This is just on average, mind you. Sometimes I can only play one round of Tetravex and sometimes I can make breakfast instead.
Jotting down some quick thoughts between work meetings, here.
I’m thinking about next steps for Chapbook. It is still running on Herokugarden, as the instructions to port to the new platform were not successful. I may try again after this upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 (super, super beta) because I believe it’s primarily a security certificate issue.
Following that, I think I’ve made up my mind that I will remove OpenID authentication and go to traditional user accounts. Even with the marvelousness that is Clickpass, my analytics show that basically no one follows through with the completion of the process. This is a known issue: OpenID is great for uber-nerds, but not for actual humans. Or, for that matter, even some uber-nerds.
Beyond that, I may actually try to write more often there in lieu of blogging. I don’t have enough blogging time and energy to do this and my work blog, and there’s often channel conflict that results in less blogging in either place as I’m paralyzed by indecision. Also, I think that if I want to be known for something personally, not professionally, I’d rather it be for my poetry than my blogging. Most of my thoughts can also be compacted enough for Twitter.
If you have specific reasons why you disagree with anything above, please chime in. If you have specific thoughts or desires re: Chapbook, let me know. Also, if you would have used it, but for OpenID, please definitely let me know.
Note to Gary: I will take very good care of our accounts and make sure they link up to the existing content! I promise!
I don’t like email.
You may have heard of ambitions like “Inbox Zero” and seen books like Inbox Detox floating around. You may be used to seeing this:
Inbox (627)
You may go to work every other day with the primary goal (stated or not) of simply surviving your inbox. A curious state of affairs.
Noise
Corporate email in particular is full of noise. Customer satisfaction issues, more often than you might think, can be traced to the technically proper but disastrous use of email. For example, picture yourself in a serious email chain with like 23 people included. Often, little breakout discussions from the main thread occur by replying to a subset. Someone might change a subject line, starting a whole new sub-thread. Tracking all this and rolling it back up is time-consuming, not easy to do, and sometimes requires editing inappropriate comments out of sub-threads. So it usually just doesn’t happen.
Now, let’s assume that one of these sub-threads involved a decision about how to handle a customer requirement. That thread comes to a conclusion and everyone likes the approach, so that’s that. But everyone else in the main thread (or other sub-threads) may have their own conclusion or be unaware of the conclusion. Any number of these situations can lead to conflicting messages to customers or conflicting expectations about what will occur next, when it will occur and who will follow-up.
All because of a subject-line change. Should the specific characters used in the subject line really have this much impact? No. As my boss would say, “eh, not so much.”
Outlook
Many business use Outlook for their employee email at a certain scale. Many run Windows, the IT guys use Active Directory to manage that, and therefore it fits right in. And then it becomes the primary communication vehicle for the entire company.
Outlook stores things in these cool little .pst files. You may have found them. This is a stretch, but you may have actually backed them up once or twice. This is really a stretch, but your IT guys may auto-back them up for you to the network.
If you’ve used Outlook for a long time and you’re a busy person, your .pst files are probably approaching a terabyte in size. This probably means that Outlook takes 3 days to launch, 3 days to shut down and sometimes it fails to shut down correctly as well. It also spins your disk a lot, even though you need to move threads around and handle messages at near warp speed to keep up with the influx of new items.
So you are paying a productivity price for local disk storage of an immense wealth of company IP, historical discussions of note and records of important decisions. And that’s very, very risky.
Microsoft has recognized that Outlook has started to become a distributed corporate database. I think advances in the file system and the new search approach are at least a response in part to this phenomena. The big question is whether Outlook Pro (not Express) will start to move more and more towards a communication platform than a ‘roid-raging email client.
These guys turned down a huge buyout from Microsoft. So, clearly they are swinging for the fence. Or insane. Or both. I’m leaning towards the fence thing.
Xobni attempts to improve the utility of Outlook by adding analytics and incorporating other outside channels of communication (like Facebook and Twitter) in to Outlook based on your contact’s identity.
I am a huge fan of this tool. It improves the utility of Outlook in important ways for me. But, it does not solve all the other problems I’m trying to outline here. It’s an improvement to email, but it’s still email. [Insert swearing here]. And it’s still Outlook, so it’s still kind of dangerous.
MOC
Eventually, people began to notice that they were using email to chat. That was really inefficient. So, projects like Jabber and Microsoft Office Communicator came about to try to provide business-friendly chat. A lot of large companies that run on Active Directory and Outlook use MOC. The result of this trend has been that people now use email and chat programs to chat. And since many of these chat services don’t auto-archive conversations, it has the effect of replicating many of the problems of email being used for non-repudiated records of business activity, but without the actual recording. And it’s not durable like email such that it’s very conducive to asynchronous responses.
Also, it frequently doesn’t work very well, dropping messages and entire conversations.
What’s also insidious, and subtle, is that now people have to think about whether they should email someone or try to chat with them based on things like “status” (very gameable) and what type of conversation they anticipate they might end up having.
Additionally, people receiving chat messages often feel like they must answer them, so their productivity decreases. But they feel like they can’t turn it off, because people will view them as unresponsive. Telecommuters often feel like it represents their physical presence in the workplace and that they will be forgotten if they are not visible—this can sometimes lead to excessive meetings and unnecessary email threads as a way to generate pseudo-face time.
So now the problem is in some ways much worse.
Enter Google Wave
I won’t duplicate all that has been written about Wave here, but this project is basically an attempt to evolve beyond the issues cited above and re-baseline personal and professional (but mostly professional) general internet-based communication. To which I say, even if it fails, bring it on. I will add my tears of laughter and joy as salty drops in the wave. It can’t get much worse.
If you want to take a peek, Ars Technica has a good rundown. Also, I’m sure micro-blogging could have been worked in to this post as well, but I didn’t have the time. If that offends you, tweet me. I’m just sitting here waiting for my invite to arrive.
Check out this article on one-way hash arguments.
The skinny: talking points for an against healthcare (or anything else political) tend to be like a one-way hash. It’s easy to state the point, it sounds intuitive, but it’s not obvious enough in its implication that it’s easy to refute. Conversely, to effectively disprove the argument, which is usually simple to do, is actually impractical to do because the counter-evidence takes up much more space or air time to get across and is harder to follow, even though it’s often factual or at least more intellectually honest.
We all know that sound bites are often full of these types of claims, but it’s interesting to see FactCheck really talk about the approach and give great examples of how it plays out when you analyze the point-counterpoint involved.
I also like the fact that they claim most of their job consists of taking simple arguments and making them more complicated. It’s true.
It seems a lot of Birthers are assuming that Obama is not releasing his documents now because he can’t. Perhaps, just maybe, it would be because:
1) He doesn’t have to. 2) Settling the debate would make the Birthers go away, despite the fact that their continued existence and noise level is a political advantage to the administration.
Read #2 again.
One sort of obvious phenomenon that I heard about while taking the recycling out (OMG, liberal!) is the trend that NRA memberships surge whenever there’s a perceived threat to gun ownership and decline whenever gun ownership seems safe. For example, when the Republicans took the House in ‘94, membership decreased. When Bush took office, it decreased. When Obama won the election, it soared.
Likewise, gun purchases spike in a significant wave along the same lines. People tend to buy up guns whenever they are scared that there’s about to be a ban or restrictions. Again, Obama, as an example.
Which means, ironically, that periodic gun control activism, liberal presidency, etc. can be financially lucrative, along with ongoing scare tactics, for both the gun lobby and gun makers. Funny how these things work out.
Gays are trying to force you to divorce. The government wants to weed you out of the population. Record income inequalities should help prevent class tension. Sugar tariffs and corn subsidies are the only thing standing between you and obesity.
My family sawed down whole orchards of apple trees in the fifties,sixties,and seventies-trees that produced damn good tasteing apples that were easy to store,easy to grow,and economical to produce.
We couldn’t sell them anymore,because all the women’s magazines were full of pictures of fairy tale apples.
So now we raise mostly the crappy kinds you refer too-and we have a hard time getting rid of the surplus from the few trees of the old time varieties we still raise for our own use.
I like to think of them as barbie doll apples-impossibly good looking,totally worthless eccept as eye candy.
According to BusinessWeek, the health insurance companies have already defeated meaningful health reform. Their strategy? Wow or buy the “Blue Dogs” and use them against the other Democrats. I’m not sure whether there’s any quality behind this article, but it claims that the insurance companies stand to actually increase profits (and with them, costs). I guess the overall strategy is to allow proponents to pass something neutered and bad, then show that it didn’t work, then claim that any reform is worse for you.
I hate to sound like a partisan hack, but our healthcare really is going to crush the country if we don’t figure out something meaningful. One particular issue I have is with this public option debate. I keep hearing this argument that if there’s no level playing field, the government will put the private industry out of business. That’s supposed to be an argument not to have a public option? Sounds to me like it’s just an argument to ensure a level playing field. Surely we can figure that out? If not, we’re just plain old screwed either way.
Bottom line is that congress is some combination of corrupt and inept. We need to elect more people who promise not to run for re-election (at least until we get citizen-funded elections) so they can spend the whole time they are there actually producing quality legislation and reading what other people produce. And we should probably do that within the next few cycles.
