How the ‘Others’ Keep Our Spirit Alive

I’m not sure of the ‘alive’ part in the title… still working on what is ‘alive’.

When the ‘Others’ discovered us, it was too late to move anyone off to another planet before the catastrophy. So, our feelings, thoughts, passions… and DNA where put into a place to continue to live and advance. What we would think of being in a computer program. Everyone continues about their daily lives and making an impact on the whole but there is no real moving parts of the ‘humans’ moving around a planet in space. Here we continue till a new home is found that is suitable to maintain our life functions.

A few questions come to mind. If this message is still here in the morning, is that because the ‘program’ allows us to figure out the truth or because it missed this small thread of reality thought? If we destroy ourselves through war or excesses, do the ‘Others’ let us die because we would have on our own planet thus ending the program or will they reboot us? When the planet was ending it’s life (Astroid impact? Sun expansion?) did they get to earth in time to take actual samples for the program or are we data via being watched from very far away? If from far far away, is our existence for the program based only on stray TV/Radio waves being picked up or actual human ‘being’ structure?

How do we prove or disprove any of this? Since we are being kept ‘alive’ to move forward with our lives, when a suitable planet is found will the ‘Others’ create the world where we left off? Where the program is at that point? Or start over with no history but as we were when it was just a planet of no technology?

While we think this through… who is going to pick this up to be a best seller or make a movie from it?

My Accountant Reminds Me What is Important

Not sure where he got this, I’m sure it is all over the Internet. But, the timing is fitting for us rolling into 2010:

Old Farmer’s Advice:

Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.

Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.

Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.

A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.

Words that soak into your ears are whispered….not yelled.

Meanness doesn’t just happen overnight.

Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads.

Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.

It doesn’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.

You cannot unsay a cruel word.

Every path has a few puddles.

When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.

The best sermons are lived, not preached.

Most of the stuff people worry about isn’t going to happen anyway.

Don’t judge folks by their relatives.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll enjoy it a second time.

Don’t interfere with something that isn’t bothering you none.

Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a Rain dance.

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.

The biggest troublemaker you’ll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin’.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Letting the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.

If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.

Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.

Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.

Rethinking User Interfaces with Augmented Reality

A few years ago, a Apple OS technician mentioned that we needed to rethink the way we think about organizing our electronic lives. The talk wasn’t about Cloud Computing centrally located mass storage, it was about how we interact with the information. There is so much info available to us, we need to think about how we find and access that info.

The speech had spoken to stepping ‘through’ windows and folders rather than opening. This immediately made me think of a software add-on from Aaron back in the Mac OS 8 days. It allowed us to tap and hold on a folder that would open on top of the current folder like we were stepping through the folders – deeper and deeper, each opening allowed access to open a folder the next level down. Releasing the mouse left that folder open. File movement was also possible using this method by click, drag, hold over a folder. Drilling down to the final location.

The phrase I used ‘Drilling down’ makes me think that this is not the future of reaching ‘through’ our file management. It has been said that most of the old file folder thinkers might have a issue jumping into this sort of information management – so maybe I’m just not getting it yet.

Apple’s new Snow Leopard has introduced a new way of better managing open windows and app screen. You can now have many open files (Word, Web sites, images…) and hide them down in the ‘Doc’ inside of the application’s icon. Clicking on the Application now presents you with all of the files as images side by side on the screen to jump to easily. This takes us away from always having to select your Web browser and you get many browser windows show on the screen, one on top of the other that requires you to cycle through to get to the page you needed to reference.

Microsoft is attempting a different direction where there is no folders within folders. Instead, all files are stored in a giant area and you access via search and keywords. Having played for years with finding files from text within them or doing a good enough job of keywording for later reference has been a big ‘fail’ for me. I still use a pad and pen a lot, each of those pages are scanned and dated for later reference. My handwriting, or actually printing, isn’t clean enough for OCR. As well I use a lot of arrows and quick scribbled pictures to remember better. These do not allow a program to automatically know I’m looking for that page later. Instead, I have to keyword the page… will I ever get all the keywords each of those pages are important to? Nah. As well, info on a page may be thought of differently later as the conversation changes and it important in a different way.

Finally, we have a ‘name’ to one rethink of data display: Augmented Reality (Wikipedia says: “A term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality”).

While the general idea of interactive TV shows where your watching a sporting event and you can click on the players for more info/stats isn’t quite there yet. One place multiple companies have jumped onto is navigation. When GPS units were first introduced, they were electronic paper maps, flat. Then they started to change a bit to become more 3D so it looked like you were traveling down a road. The latest versions have the road and signs you expect to see with a moving arrow just ahead of you so you know where and when to take the path the device recommends. These images are still lower resolution artist creations, you can imagine Google’s Street View group is working hard to get their real images into one of the mobile GPS directions app providers.

Getting back to providing information in our new 3D world – one developer has created an Augmented Reality iPhone app.. With RobotVision, you are looking at the world through the devices camera so you see the real world, not a drawing or previously photographed version. RobotVision overlays information on the screen. Currently, you can choose to see a variety of different business types. Stand on the street corner and turn around 360 degrees to see what is down the road from where you stand. There is also the feature of seeing what Twitter person or Flickr images uploaded in the area are. Just tap to get more info… let your imagination really go with this. Tie your computer’s UI to where you are, previously created docs in the area or from words found within the documents. You wont be searching at all, everything is presented to you as an option – basically assisting you with more info before you thought to look for it.

someone is selling – someone is buying

In every situation, someone is making a sale. Even when it’s a mutually agreeable solution – at a point in the negotiation, someone is selling.

I was reminded of this as I ate breakfast this morning. My puppy sat and stared at me. She always asks for the sale. She is always ready for me to speak first. Since, who speaks first looses the advantage. A lot of classes will say that whomever speaks first ‘looses’. I don’t believe they have lost, but they have lost the upper hand.

In the case of my pup, she introduces her request for me to give her what she wants by sitting close and staring me down. She will push just a little by scooting forward just a bit or licking her lips. If she whines, she has lost the advantage because she has forced my hand to correct her. If she just stays on me with her poor puppy look (lowering the ears and tipping the head is a pretty good emotional play she can use without speaking) she might get me to do something.

I can tell her to go away. She will look down for a bit, maybe even walk away. But, she wont give up. No, this isn’t because we have fed her from the table before. It is because she wants something and is motivated to force an action out of us. She is hoping that we will go with what she wants. If we push her away, we have spoken and she has an objection to handle. She may react with a come back sad look or like I said before, she will round the table and come back at another attempt. She knows her options in advance.

In a puppy’s case, she may not have a full plan in mind but she has it in her head what she may do to get to where she wants to be in the end. Lessons learned… go in knowing what you want to be in the end. Plan on a lesser, what your willing to give up, throw always, in case things get tough. Plan, even if for a few minutes in the shower or the elevator… think who your selling to and why they may object to joining you in being a happy client. Maybe have someone else through objections at you. To make a sale, you must be able to handle every objection as smoothly and thoughtfully as possible.

With a plan in your head, you can access your pitch quickly without hesitation. Allowing a short elevator ride with someone that you just met and appear to need what you have becomes a possible sale. You have seconds to handle objections, know what they may be going in. Lowering your ears is handling the objection, whining looses the sale.

TigerDirect

Purses and MP3s get different levels of support

My wife loves a good purse.

When I first met my wife, she loved the years she got out of a quality purse like I did out of a great pair of boots. In those days, Coach was not all that… they weren’t capitalizing on their logo (like Louis Vuitton does) as they offered plain leather bags. Very nice mind you, but nothing to make a women think she would get any bag envy when she went to office or dinner. Their bags were all about quality construction.

A bag my wife purchases a few months ago was a medium sized pink bag. The leather was shiny that I at first thought was plastic but found to be a leather treatment. The now usual ‘C’s rise out of the surface everywhere without any special coloring to make them stand out.

A month ago, she was noticed that there was a dark discoloring along one side near the bottom edge. The look is very much like light ink. Did this come from the drawer in her desk? Did it come from the floor mats in her Audi? Nah, most likely from the side of the foot area in my Volvo. No matter how we shield the bag though, the color stain continues to grow.

On a recent visit to the mall, we dropped by the Coach store to see about a cleaner. The greater let us know pretty quickly that she has seen that issue and a cleaner wont take care of the problem. Another individual came out from behind the counter and asked what bag they had we would like to exchange the current bag for. What? We didn’t ask that! We didn’t come in yelling about quality products issues? Nothing, we just came in to see if they had something we could buy to clean the stain. Instead, the first thing out of the mouth was that they have seen the issue before and they would like to exchange for a new bag… choose.

My first question was to see why they wanted to cover up a issue. They weren’t. The color stain problem is because my wife carries her purse low against her jeans. Higher quality leather, lower slung purses and dark dye jeans come together with the purse loosing. Wow… no questions asked, Coach is only worried about my wife being happy with her purchase. A half hour of trying on different bags and transferring contents resulted in my wife telling all her friends that Coach cares. So many businesses just dive into the free give away, refund, or coupons. A refund from Coach would have sent the wrong message.

Mentioning the mall visit at the office, I was reminded of the many books from Starbucks exects that have touted the methods to help employees remember that they matter and that the customers should matter to the employees.

Continue reading Purses and MP3s get different levels of support

A Pre was in my hands on Launch Day

The title says it all… sort of.

I have a Palm Pre in my hands on the day they launched the new smartphone. What I might also mention is that I had to go to several Sprint stores and the one I finally got to play with was the demo unit that had no Internet access. Everyone was sold out and couldn’t give me a firm date (much like with any other new Smarthphone first day roll out) when the next shipment would come in. (Love the commercials, kudos to whomever came up with that concept)

This is not going to be a Pre vs (enter your fav smartphone here).
You may have noticed, I’ve owned and actually used; All hardware that was released with the Newton OS, just about every competitor to the Newton during that time, every Palm device (including all of the Sony hardware handhelds running the Palm OS), and several of the Treos. As well, many Sony, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola phones. And, of course, several MobileWindows and CE handhelds. Developing for many platforms to meet clients needs means that you have to have real hardware in your hands and use it daily to get to know what needs to be done to make it integral to the users daily processes. Currently I carry three devices; Curve for work, iPhone for personal, and a non-descript MobileWin device for a client’s product project.

The Pre is to the iPhone or Storm what the Radio Shack Zoomer was to the Newton. You like the idea of the device, you pick it up and are surprised how well it feels, the feature list is incredible, and then you start using it… darn!

The Pre feels better in my hand than I expected. The photos of it make it appear to be inexpensive feeling plastic… you know the stuff, smooth and jagged at the edges. I was happy to have a pretty solid Palm device in my hand.

It is narrower than I would expect and for that matter, overall the size is on the small size. It will go easily in a shirt pocket and not weight you down. The keyboard slider does adds some thickness like it does on all Smartphones using keyboards. It slid open smoothly, allowing the keyboard to be two thumb usable. The keys on the keyboard are ‘different’ in feel to a Treo or BlackBerry. They are fine, but being smaller buttons in a smaller area you end up with a keyboard that is easy to find the keys but gives you a cheaper experience when you click them.

The smaller overall size means that the screen is smaller too… which means the check boxes, text and screen buttons are small as well. I had never gotten a Treo after the 700 series as the screens got so small it was difficult for me to glance quickly at text (calendar, notes, todos, etc…).

The hour I had to play with the new Pre was enough to set particular emotional first impressions. The Pre felt very nice in your hand, it comes loaded with many apps to get started using the computing device right away, and the UI looks great… not usable without instructions, but it looks great. There in lies the crutch I had that caused me to sit the device down and walk away… to think about it. The UI was just enough not normal that it wasn’t quickly apparent what the pattern of usage was. Swiping your finger ‘backwards’ took you back to… well, it’s different depending on the screen. And using the hardware button took you back to the list of apps, usually. Then, selecting an icon and dragging it downward did… I don’t know, the app just disappeared (apologies to the next person to play with the demo device).

Tapping was the other variable. It wasn’t about alignment, it was about the level of pressure and duration of a finger tap to cause an action. We spent much of our time trying to understand the tap timing and level of push to make anything happen. While the UI is a issue I think needs some attention if it is expected that people will pick up the device and have a quick happy experience. The tapping is a learning process people are used to undertaking when exploring any screen or button pressure interaction.

What to do about that UI? Well, write our own launcher of course… where is that WebOS dev kit, we have app to make our millions on.