"Let X = X"

Teching The Pond

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:09:15 GMT

Just now leaving a day trip to Walden Pond with my daughter's youth group. The pond, which some communities would even call a lake, is still a scene of natural beauty, albeit preserved for the tourist trade. It's still possible to feel a reverent peace and nourishing stillness at the site of Thoreau's cabin.

Yet the distance from his quest to distill life to the essence was only magnified by my intrusive modern habits. While I hiked to the memorial on the other side of the pond, my daughter chose to swim there with some friends... a pretty far way. I was so proud that she made it with confidence that I texted my wife right away. Then, because my phone was at hand, I checked and noticed a critical email from my customer. After hiking back to the picnic area at our starting point, naturally I took time to tap out a response and loop in some colleagues on the issue.

Shortly after, I felt I'd almost missed the point of coming to Walden. That I'd even let myself down to a degree. Couldn't I even shut out the flow of information and intrusions for a mere two hours to meditate on this humanist landmark, when Thoreau had done it for two years? I told myself I needed the phone on to keep in contact with the other chaperones of our large group... a safety issue. But I realized that without an effort of will, I would have had my safety blanket with me and on. (hmmm, two sentences saying device=safety).

Is this a bad thing? From one perspective, it's no more than a pocket-notebook to work out one's thoughts. But from another view, it's a chain to the unending bustle of life. I think I need some guidelines to manage this second aspect, to preserve that part of sanity that depends on solitude.

Mark Arend
This message sent from a Windows Mobile device.

Distracted by the usefulness of Social Networking

Sat, 31 May 2008 11:55:01 GMT

Why do I, and apparently so many others, find social networking sites and technologies so damned compelling? What is it about Web 2.0 that makes the internet seem more vital and even fun again? How do hours pass when making a quick check on one's alerts?

I'm fascinated with connecting all these services to make my information accessible and useful. I SMS to Twitter; it becomes my FaceBook status and FriendFeed post for commentary. I email photos to Flicker; they alert my contacts there but also appear on my FaceBook profile for other friends to see. And with Google Reader, my old habit of reading blogs looks as dead as the wet Sunday paper in my neighbor's driveway... I can easily skim new articles, save some to browse and search later by my own tags, and share the ones I like with my community of interest by clicking a single link. And I can do all of these things FROM MY PHONE!!

That makes many of my info-based tasks a lighter-weight experience; I'm even more untethered and at the same time able to focus on each nugget of info. I'm encouraged to participate more yet not ramble on in dissertation style (new rules of Haiku: 140 characters; say something useful AND something witty).

But it does distract heavily from life and other mundane work tasks. A frequent urge to return to the conversation can easily sidetrack my daily schedule. I think we're on a chaotic part of the learning curve, and people infatuated with the subject will naturally spend too much time here. But after a while, fewer, more useful patterns will emerge to streamline these new processes, the number of sites will reduce and not be so bewildering to evaluate, and the bloom will be off the rose.

I look forward to that sad day so I can get my Life 1.0 back!

Mark Arend
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Zune Home Kit good. Zune Car Kit bad.

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:17:36 GMT

The Zune Home Kit is excellent... charge while listening or viewing your content on the TV! Comes with another remote control--like I need one of those--but it looks and works like a little mini-Zune. I like it because I don't have a music system in my bedroom, but of course there's a TV, and it has decent stereo sound. Finally, acceptable tunage in the boudoir! (DirectTV's music channels up in the 800's are as insipid and underwhelming as commercial radio). Now to make a loooove mix or two. Dad, eeew!

The Zune Car Kit is awful... shun it! There are plenty of blog sites that rant about the FCC severely limiting the power of in-car FM transmitters, and the Zune Car Kit is no exception. Number one, it's been impossible for me to find a station that receives the signal without bleed-over from a real radio station. There's always static or even overlapping talk/music breaking through the Zune's transmissions. Sometimes I can find a relatively clear spot, but only by holding the Zune or the transmitter a certain way. But the static always comes back, in city or country. It's intolerable. Since I'm past my 30-day return period, I might look at modding the transmitter to put a little antenna on it. But then there's the second drawback: even at its best performance with no static or cross-talk, the frequency range is limited by FM modulation. The clearest sound I've heard via the Car Kit is still far worse than listening to the Zune using direct wired speakers. Don't go down this path!

Technorati Tags: Gadgets,Zune

Anytime, Anywhere?

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:18:53 GMT

Bill Gates published an article about a week after I joined Microsoft, back at the close of the last century: Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere The next step for technology is universal access. He mentions convergence in the opening sentence. But that's not why I searched for this article... I searched for "Anywhere, Anytime" because I wanted to follow-up on the Zen comment in my convergence post. Hmm, getting a little dizzy here.

Proposition: I think "Anytime, Anywhere" is a flawed idea. I think that part of what feeds our souls is a variety of daily place and circumstance, allowing us to more easily process the world's stimuli by its differences.

Ok, that's a bit highbrow, let's take the other extreme. More concretely: I think my stress level has increased significantly since I got the ability to deal with email anywhere, anytime. I'm no longer able to go an entire vacation, or weekend, or even evening, without checking my phone, or at least listening for its distinctive email sound. If the phone is misplaced, I'm not at ease. I put it in my pocket when I go into the back yard! I know this is stupid, and is subtly maintaining a barrier to the natural world. And sometimes I don't do it. But it's a habit and I'll do it unless I consciously try not to.

Most professionals I know in the software/IT business have the ability to do literally all of their work from their laptop and phone. So, if we're in a car, an airport, a hotel or our own bedroom... the possibility exists that we can be checking on a server job, finishing tomorrow's handouts, or just trying to keep ahead of our constant email flood. Now we have blogs to read and podcasts to learn from!

So the onus is completely on us: to understand the necessity of rest to maintain productive work habits, to account for this when planning and promising, and to be firm when asked to go further. It's not easy, and it's not usually a significant part of many professional's training. I work with dozens of companies as a software consultant, and across the board the story's the same: everyone pays lip service to the honored "work/life balance" but few achieve it.

Devices that do it all

And what about making devices general purpose so they can do so much more? The underlying promise is this: we can have whatever we want. In marketing-speak, anything, anytime, anywhere. And of course a software platform company will pursue this as a strategy, because it's the platform that enables it... new functions are only a download away.

A technical problem

Theoretically, this ideas has a lot going for it. But as we software developers know from long experience, practicality always has a way of constraining theory. Much has been said about Moore's law, the salvation of CPU-hungry programs, continually layered one on the other. But that salvation is always just out of reach... the same argument is argued repeatedly, and the software always wants for more. True, there are many good systems built that deliver the promise. But as time goes by, the software moves ahead and the hardware does not. Worse, this is especially true for home users. New software is adopted at an accelerated rate, with little of the governance so important to enterprise stability.

What does that mean for us? That a good part of the time, we live and work with poor performance, instability, and more or less constant frustration. I used to reboot my phone at least once a day, typically just at the time when I want to make a call. I eventually fixed it by deleting about 1/4 of my synchronized contacts (about a thousand accumulated over the years). But I lived with it for too long before figuring it out, and now I don't have those contacts available.

And another thing. When the device fails, then all of the functions are gone. I learned this years ago with my combination TV-VCR and VCR-DVD and cassette-LP. More recently, I tried using my phone as an MP3 player, but pausing to answer the phone is often unsuccessful... can't get the functions to respond fast enough. Plus, it just uses up power I want in reserve for unexpectedly long phone calls.

A spiritual problem, with your help

Recently, I've begun to think there's something deeper than all of this. I think it has to do with the "personality" of individual tools and our relationship to them. I have a really strong feeling about this but I don't know if I can do the topic justice. Maybe if there's anyone out there actually reading this fragmented diatribe, they'll help express this somewhat coherently.

I know Zen Buddhism explores this topic, or a similar one, in detail. Pursuing mindfulness of ourselves in the world, we are encouraged to recognize and respect our relationship to the current moment, including all of the people, objects and sensations it entails. For tools having one or few primary purposes, this relationship is direct, and intimate. Stirring soup with a spoon, or hammering a nail, or sewing with needle and thread, or any of ten thousand other mundane acts, can each serve as a moment of meditation and presence.

What happens when the multiplicity of a tool's purpose grows so vast that each use requires we remember a series of steps... even when the steps become rote? I don't know how easy it would be to examine this analytically. But it's experiences and feelings that prompted me to consider this in the first place. I like having different devices specialized to different purposes. I think the example of how frustrating "universal remotes" may be a ready example. (I've just heard that Logitech is supposed to have the holy grail of universals in its Harmony line). But honestly, when I get a device with too many features, then too many features go unused.

So what?

So what's the point? From a semi-related gathering of observations, I guess the common thread is to ask where is the humanity in the design of products that we bring into our lives? Because in some subtle way at least, these products will affect our spirits.

Technorati Tags: Devices,Design

Convergence

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:53:52 GMT

This word was huge in the mid to late 90's... nearly every article on the rapidly expanding Internet seemed to mention it. In this word lay many promises of technology realized: when websites can talk to your bank and your phone can talk to your thermostat and your refrigerator calls the grocery store with a list of things you're running low on. I was pretty excited about this in the beginning, until they got to the refrigerator part.

Reminded me of all those glorious predictions of the future so popular in the 50's (before my time) and 60's (um, not before my time). But you've seen these old ads, right? The housewife in dress and pearls, smiling over her stove or dishwasher or fridge or whatever appliance is making her life so much easier. But what really happened? Modern conveniences, in the long run, had the effect of speeding up our lives. And with them came the headache of buying, owning and maintaining them. They made immediate tasks simpler, but it came at the cost of hidden complexities and obligations.

Well, this is really getting far into Zen territory, where I love to go, but that's not the point of this posting. Remind me to come back.

The point is, I see more real, useful convergence right now than at any time promised in the past.

Websites talk to each other and work with each other like crazy. No one predicted how successfully people would use MySpace, YouTube, Flicker, Photobucket, TypePad, Technorati, Google Maps, and on and on. Oh, yes, and Windows Live Spaces!
Technologies like RSS and mashups are truly useful ways of combining information on the web to create something that wasn't specifically designed into any of the components.
I've been getting my email, calendar and contacts synchronized to my phone for years, and that has been a lifeline of efficiency, far past the similar yet cumbersome PDAs of the early 2000's, which to me were always much more trouble than they were worth.
I can take a picture with my phone and email it to this website, where it will appear on the home page straightaway (check out Phonepix in the upper right corner). I love that! And, no, it doesn't improve my productivity, but I can imagine it would for some professions: realtors, inspectors, buyers, etc.

Another surprisingly cool thing is that this page shows a recent history of what I've been listening to on my Zune. I don't know why that fascinates me so much, but I remember years ago in college when we played all that vinyl, we rigged a little shelf on the wall above the turntable where we'd put the currently playing album jacket to share our musical tastes with friends. This is the same thing... but it just does it for me automatically and there are (potentially) more friends out here than there were in my dorm room. (Although some of my roommates did like to party... ahem!)

And speaking of vinyl, Wendy bought me a great Christmas present this year: a turntable with digitizing software. I spent the whole vacation ripping the albums I love but haven't heard in so many years; got 70 done out of about 200. Then I got a Zune, and I immediately synched every one of these (and all our CDs which we had ripped some time ago). With playlists, I enjoy this music even more than I ever did, to hear those long forgotten favorites. I know, I rail against playlists in a posting below. But these are mine and I can edit them whenever they get stale.

And this kinda blows my mind a little: the albums that I bought 25 years ago and spun in my dorms and apartments... after ripping to my home server and synching to my Zune, appear like magic in the little display above as artistically as when I'd flip through the stacks in the record stores on South Street... even more so, since I can scroll them back and forth, with a little glow appearing and the artist's name. More information is just a click away, and the chance to share with new friends. I guess I'm just easily amused. Or old. My daughter says: duh, dad.

So anyway, I'm going to enjoy this now, and keep my eye open for when the tide might start to turn, when that undertow of ownership, dependency and obligation might become a stronger force and starts to pull us out past the shallows where we love to splash.

Technorati Tags: Convergence,technology

Podcasts + Zune = Remedy for crap radio (that goes for you, too, satellite & HD!)

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:08:01 GMT

I used to shun podcasts as being mostly useless, for a couple reasons. Number one, they come over the computer. Now, that's where I spend most of my day, maybe 8 - 12 hours. But I just don't find it convenient to control the media player while I'm working... or rebooting. Or I'm at a customer where they block entertainment/streaming websites. Or I'm not even on the computer. Number two, the podcasts I heard when I first looked, years ago, were mostly news, or training or audio blogs about whatever... boring! Besides, I couldn't concentrate on them while working anyway.

Now forget these reasons... there are tons of free podcasts... they're interesting and entertaining... and I can sync them to my new Zune and listen to them anywhere! Even when I'm working on the computer I plug my speakers into the Zune and play from there... much easier to reach over and push the pause button than it is to bring the media player to the foreground, especially if the computer is maxed out on some other intensive process and I have to wait for things to happen.

So far, I'm devouring just the free podcasts available through the Zune marketplace, and there are a ton. I don't know how many they have overall but I haven't even finished looking through them all yet.

I used to have Sirius radio, and I really liked it. All those new channels were finally an antidote to commercial radio's endless repetitions of the same playlists that I heard when I was in high school... thirty years ago! I mean, how much Stevie Nicks and Bad Company do we really want to hear now??? So, Sirius was great for me... when I was in my car, anyway. Then I noticed that, like cable TV, I ended up with just a few favorite channels and hundreds more that I continuously skipped over. And then even the playlists on those few became familiar and repetitious. When it came time to renew my subscription, I decided the monthly payment wasn't worth it.

But now, I have dozens of podcasts queued up to bring me new music from the genres that I crave outside the mainstream: Alternative, Trance, World, and Jazz. And many of the "DJs" give very detailed information about the music and the artists... something I always wanted but never heard from radio stations of any kind. This is a great way to keep abreast of the current music scene; I love to hear tracks from musicians that were released this month, or even coming out next month!

And music's not all... I can listen to fitness shows, comedy shows (I know, Sirius had comedy channels... two: a dirty one—funny—and a clean one—not), discussions of spirituality and travel, science news, and everything finally in my own weird spheres of interest. I'm getting some much-needed groundings through regular Buddhist teachings, and even starting to learn Italian! Some podcasts are 1 to 2 hours long, some 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes. I can pick something to match my mood and my timeframe. I can listen to it anywhere, whether I'm slaving away in front of the LCD screen or, better, on a long drive somewhere wishing there was something good on the radio. And I can P A U S E.

Listening to some great trance programs right now (Matt Darey Nocturnal). Great music for an energy-charged yet smooth-flowing atmosphere, useful for working or working out... getting in the zone.

Sick of radio? Get a personal media player like a Zune, iPod or Zen and explore the incredibly fresh world of podcasts!

Sorry if this reads like a Microsoft ad. Yes, I do work for the company (go ahead, just dump all that computer angst on me now!) but I'm a software consultant not a marketing or sales guy and if you love your iPod that's just peachy; I just don't own one myself.

Technorati Tags: Podcasts,Zune,satellite+radio

Tom Waits

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:38:29 GMT

I really like Tom Waits... can you tell? There was a couple months last year where that's all I listened to. Now I've got a Zune and discovered podcasts that are actually interesting, including lots of new music. But the first music I actually bought for download was Tom. You like him already? You gotta get Alice... it's so great. Not sure about Tom but want to try? Start with something a bit earlier: Heartattack and Vine, or Swordfish Trombones, or Rain Dogs are good.

Geek Notes

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:16:11 GMT

So, I have a geeky blog that I update more regularly... cause it's part of my job! Please visit me at http://blogs.msdn.com/markarend if you need any info on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007... or see the RSS feed below! Otherwise, I might get to put some personal ideas here... plenty to say, no time to say it!

Blog Shmog

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 02:05:50 GMT

Hey, what was your first thought when you heard about blogs? Mine was "You're kidding... another way to receive largely unedited streams of personal opinions and rants? How will I ever find value in that?" But I may have to change my mind. Some blogs are extremely absorbing. Of course, I only realize this after 45 minutes have gone by when all I was looking for was a quick reference to... oh, I forgot. See?

Photo Album: Phonepix

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:33:04 GMT

Phonepix

I need more bumper stickers

Seattle pig

Carolina beach novelties

I fart in your general direction... dog!

I live in the south!

Ooooom

Could be profound

Blood smoke stranger fire

Kids love it

Little shaver

More Photos...

Photo Album: Blog Images

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:17:35 GMT

Blog Images

Photo Album: Blog Images

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:12:33 GMT

Blog Images

MSDN blog icon

Photo Album: Featured Pix

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:31:48 GMT

Featured Pix

Lunar eclipse from Charlotte, Feb 21

Mark at the Bloemenmarkt

Wendy on Amsterdam street

Thousands of bikes parked - they know how to commute in Holland!

Wendy outside the Louvre

Wendy & Shea in Montana

Don't be so stubborn

Come in and sit a spell (Kalispell, MT)

Art imitates Steven Colbert... now that's American!

Music List: Tom Waits Sampler

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:31:20 GMT

Tom Waits Sampler