The ‘Blackberry’ Transformation

This is my first time blogging about something other than my life or something that’s going on in my head.  I like writing about my thoughts and all that jazz, but what I did today deserves to be thrown in the mix.  If you’re reading this and you’ve never read my blog, don’t expect other “techie” or useful entries; because all you’ll find are thoughts on anything and everything.  But hey, this could be a new beginning.

Recently, I decided to add the $15 unlimited data package to my PCS Vision Phone.  I wasn’t happy with just checking scores on My Yahoo! and Google can only put out so many mobile applications.  What I really wanted to do was to find a way to help make this phone even MORE of a communication device, outside of standard text messages and voice chats.  So I set out to find free applications and tools that would help me in this endeavor. 

Before any of this began, I had to find a replacement browser, as the browser on my phone took way too long to do everything.  A friend mentioned Opera Mini and how helpful it was for him and his phone.  The browser couldn’t override my current browser and is therefore accessed as a data application on my phone.  The Opera Mini browser opens 75% faster than my browser and makes, well… browsing so much more simple than the default version.  There are no limits on bookmarks, and moving forward and backwards is smoother and quicker (plus it’s easier on the eyes). 

Now on to the communication side of things.  Google Calendars is a great tool to begin with, but I wanted there to be a mobile only version of this tool that would give me the same reminders I get on my PC/Mac, and that wasn’t happening.  I jumped into the Settings page of Google Calendars and clicked on over to the Mobile Settings tab.  By filling out this simple form and verifying my phone, I am now able to receive daily text messages with my itinerary, and reminders of upcoming events.  The advantage to this is also buffed by the fact that a meeting request can be sent from Outlook and received in Gmail, so I am able to easily add in these “lunch meetings” to my GCalendar and get a reminder as needed.  To add to this, I added a filter on my text messages to move all of these reminders to my ‘GCal Events’ folder on my phone so that I could scroll through them easily without having to skip over the 500 text messages from my friends about their varying farts and floaters.

After having set this up, I realized that I have a lot of stuff in my Outlook Calendar, and I didn’t feel like forwarding them to my personal GCalendar.  I set out to find a tool that would do exactly what Google does, but in the Outlook realm.  Enter OMM, or Outlook Mobile Manager.  This tool is a bolt on from Microsoft themselves and it actually performs decently well.  After installing this tool, I simply entered my mobile information (you can refer to this page to find your service providers text message “email” format) and set up OMM to send me only the high priority emails (as text messages) and calendar reminders.  Now when I step away from my computer for lunch or for a quick afternoon workout, I can receive urgent notifications and text message reminders for upcoming meetings. 

And just like that, my little phone became a much cheaper and less time-consuming version of a Blackberry.  I’m not required to answer the phone or respond to emails like most corporate Blackberry owners are, and these tools give me the freedom to stay in touch on the personal and professional side without the burden of a required response and weekend phone calls to the boss.

The Lost Cause

I was recently perusing some articles and comments on our favorite news site Digg. I read a great article that was written by Ben Stein. The article addressed some tips on how to have a successful business conversation. The tips were very generic for those of us who engage in these conversations each and every day, but for those who have not been exposed to the business environment, this could really be a big help.

After I read the article, I decided to read some comments to see how people were reacting. Many of them were calling the article “common sense,” however, there was one person who’s comment struck me.

“wow I am 17 and I can have a better business conversation with some one and I would most likely have more sales then if i followed what that article says.
I own a business yes I’m young yet I still find that if you want to have a good conversation you should get down to the point of what you needs to be said in any business sense time is money and I don’t have time to go and research some one just to make a sale if they were going to spend a lot on my service then I would spend time finding out what I would need to know about them to make that sale. But many people just want what they want and don’t really care about the rest and i make enough to sustain my self pay for a car and invest. And I find that if you really are dieing to have a business conversation no tips are going to help you you need to know what you are talking about and thats it. You could read with all the tips in the world about how to have a business conversation but if you don’t know what you need to know then I am not going to really care on what you say. Now you see why i said you should get to the point you most likely would not have read this so remember always try and keep it as short as possible.”

I had to reread this comment a number of times in an attempt to figure out what this person was trying to say. My curse in life is that when I encounter an error, much like a shitty PC, I am unable to continue my process. The struggle in my head to read this was insurmountable and I felt like my skull was going to tear into 5 parts. Why 5 parts? I have no idea, 5 just sounded like a solid number of parts at the time. Anyways, after reading this person’s comment, it brought me to think about the status of kids his age.

Many of us in our ‘twenty-somethings’ will make comments as to how quickly kids are growing up these days. Kids are getting involved in relationships at earlier ages, having sex earlier and becoming delusional long before their 75th birthday. The one thing that strikes me the most about kids these days in their complete lack of respect for education. Currently, these children are inundated with thoughts of being a rap star, basketball player or lottery winner. Nobody wants to work for a living anymore, they all just want life handed to them.

Before I blame the kids for this, I have to draw attention to the faulty parenting. These kids are being raised by the “Flower Children” of the 70’s and their parenting skills are increasingly liberal and “hippy-like.” The parents are so worried that their children won’t want to be friends with them, that the parents allow their children to walk all over them. I remember nearly shitting my pants when the word “damn” slipped from my mouth. Now I hear kids calling each other “faggots” and “assholes” in front of their family – and nobody seems to flinch.

The other side of this rusty coin is the public education system. Teachers are no longer challenging their students in the ways we were challenged because there is no reward system in place. I remember getting a “C” on a test and thinking “Oh shit, I’m going to never get into college now.” Today, kids spend all of their time focusing on their athletics. Coaches have their athlete-students practicing twice a day with a 1-hour session of homework in the library. Each and every one of these kids thinks they are going to be professional athletes or at least get a scholarship to a great school where they can keep playing.

And that is exactly the problem we have today. Kids are still playing when they should be growing up. High Schoolers come home from football practice at 7pm and go to their room to play Madden 2007 on their XBox 360, and they do their homework in homeroom the next morning. Then when it comes time to graduate and their D1 school rejects them because they have poor grades, they wonder what happened and how they failed. But instead of going to a lower tier school, they avoid college all together.

My concerns are not for these kids, because they won’t amount to shit in this world. My concern is for the kids that are considered bright and successful; especially when compared to these brain-dead fucks. The SAT’s are not based on how many questions you answered correctly; being a standardized test, you’re grade is derived by how well you did compared to the best of the best. If the best score during a SAT period is the girl who got 25 questions wrong, then that person is given a perfect score and all other scores are then based off of that. A 1200 on your SAT’s used to be an acceptable number, nowadays, kids are getting 1200’s on their SAT’s and they still forget to write their name on the damn cover!

How do you respond to children at their age? What do you say to someone who still reads at an 8th grade level, but is about to graduate High School?

I don’t know how to handle these sensitive situations because I fear that I am too brutally honest. I would tell these kids to go to Junior College for two years, get an Associates Degree, and then apply to a 4 year school and transfer in to finish your Bachelor’s. It’s not the degree and the 4 years of school that will make them intelligent; it’s the responsibility and exercises in adulthood during those 4 years that will make them wise.

The Big Switch: A tale of PC to Mac

We’ve all seen the Mac vs PC ads on TV over the past year or so. These silly commercials pit Justin Long against John Hodgman in a battle of who’s who. Most of us who are watching these commercials can sympathize with “PC” because we know how frustrating it can be to encounter a foreign error with no apparent solution. But above all, we know all too well, how frustrating it can be to encounter an error only once in a while, whilst performing the exact same operation. I know that I have found myself with my foot in my mouth after calling my MIS guys.

Me: “I keep getting this error when I open Excel and it won’t let me save my work.”
MIS: “Have you tried restarting your machine?”
Me: “No, not yet – why would that do anything to fix an error?”
MIS: “First let’s restart your machine and then we’ll see what we can do.”
Me: “Sounds good.”
Machine reboots.
Me: “Weird.”
MIS: “What?”
Me: “The error is gone.”
MIS: “Do you need anything else while I am on the line?”
Me: “No, I’m all set thanks.”

4 hours later.

Me: “I’m getting the same error again!”
MIS: “Did you restart your machine?”
Me: “Yes, but I’m still getting it.”
MIS: “Okay, let me see what I can do.”
15 minutes later
MIS: “Looks like I’ll have to reinstall your Microsoft Office Suite, I’ll need your machine for about an hour or so. Then I’ll have to set up your Outlook again and re-import your archived emails.”

2 hours later

Me: “I can’t believe I am getting the same damn error! We just reinstalled Microsoft Office!”
MIS: “I’ll have to run some diagnostics on your machine. Do you know if anyone else is experiencing the same error?”
Me: “It doesn’t appear so.”
MIS: “FedEx your machine to blah blah blah and I’ll take a look at it.”

1 week later

MIS: “We backed up your entire machine and reformatted the hard drive. We reinstalled XP SP2 and I reinstalled all of your software. After I transfer all of your files back to your machine, you should be all set.”
Me: “So what was the issue?”
MIS: “I have no idea.”

Internal thoughts: Did they just reformat my entire hard drive because they couldn’t figure out why I was getting a silly error in Excel?

The oddity of the whole situation is that, all too often, things sometimes simply don’t make sense. This applies in the case of the PC because we spend a large portion of our lives in front of a PC. How many times have you been driving your car, you hear an odd noise, and suddenly it goes away? Instead of getting angry at Subaru, Mazda, Audi, Toyota or Ford, we just get happy that the problem “goes away.” Why is it that we are so quick to blame th PC every time a PC error occurs? I think the biggest reason for this scapegoat is that we have an expectation of perfection with a PC. We expect our PC to run exactly how we command it to run; any deviation from normalcy is unacceptable.

Then we have Mac. Fun, flashy, different and white. We can take our pretty new machine home, plug her in and she’s ready to play. But what happens in 10 years when a larger portion of society uses Mac, and we encounter PC-like errors? Could it ever happen? When will it happen? How will we all react? I’m not answer that, I’d rather just enjoi the here and now!

So anyways… Kelly and I picked up a Mac at the store the other day and brought the little tike home. We pulled him right off the shelves and after all discounts applied (ahem), we saved about $300 +. Without even realizing all of the peripherals we use, I began to disassemble the PC (which had all of our data backed up on an external HDD). As I began unplugging USB after USB after USB, I started to wonder… will this stuff work on our Mac?

I took a moment and halted the breakdown. I plugged in the Mac’s one power cord (iMac has an all-in-one glory!), plugged in the USB keyboard, then plugged in the Mighty Mouse into one of the two USB ports on the back of the keyboard. I pressed the power button and a minute later I was looking at the desktop.

At first I was a bit hesitant and didn’t know what to expect. As I scanned the screen for something similar to “My Computer” I received a pop-up alert. I was unable to connect to the preferred network and Mac suggested I connect to another one. Upon seeing this I realized that I was about to enter a whole new realm of computing. I clicked “No” and a window opened asking which network I wanted to connect to. I selected my wireless network, entered the key and was online in the next 5 seconds. An internet browsing window opened to the Apple homepage and I immediately went to Google. I started typing in model numbers of my external HDD, photo printer, printer, 9-1 memory card reader, USB 2.0 4-port extension and bluetooth headset charger. I wasn’t able to find any information on whether or not they were compatible, only my external HDD offered information on compatibility, and it was!

At that point I figured I’d just plug everything in and see what happened. I started by plugging in the USB 2.0 4-port extension that is built into my desk. I figured this would be the easiest way to quickly plug in digital cameras, bluetooth headset chargers and other small devices. I then plugged in the 9-1 memory card reader, photo printer, and printer. By the time everything was plugged in, I turned my monitor around only to see a number of pop-up alerts. Mac had detected all of the peripherals. The memory card reader window was open and my pictures were displayed that were on the card. The printer was making some noise and a printer screen was showing me the model number and asking if I wanted it installed. The photo printer was all set, even though it doesn’t require a USB connection since it can take the memory card directly.

Wow.

So now what? I am so used to installing drivers, patches, security updates, codecs, converters, zip programs, flash, java, spam blockers, pop-up blockers, adware blockers, virus protection AAAAND uninstalling the 6-month subscription to AOL and all the other ridiculous “pre-packaged” software trials.

So what did I do then? I checked my email, signed onto iChat, and then went and watched some TV. I sat there watching ESPN for a few moments before I realized that I had just made a major change. But there was no anxiety or fear; I was simply calm. I got back up, went over the Mac, downloaded Microsoft Office for Mac (which includes PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Entourage – thank GOD I didn’t have to download Access, Frontpage and all of those useless help files that suggest I contact Microsoft). The download and install was easy, no install wizards to click on, just a single button. Being so surprised by the ease of the install, I decided to get Adobe Photoshop CS2. The download and install were equally easy and relaxing.

It was at that point that I realized something else. The file size for CS2 on my PC was over 500mb, and on this Mac, it was barely 200mb. I was concerned because I thought I was going to lose a ton of functionality. I jumped on and started editing some photos to see if I was going to lose my mind as well as alteration options. Another surprise, I didn’t lose anything (that’s not true, my gray hairs are starting to turn brown again – so I’m losing gray hair).

All in all, the switch to Mac was incredibly painless. I haven’t encountered an issue that requires me to be on a PC and I don’t find myself troubleshooting absurd errors; like my wireless device dropping off and on randomly. I may still be a newbie when it comes to Mac, but I can see myself enjoiing this transition and I don’t see any regret coming my way.