Picture My World

Twitter got me my job.

When I first discovered Twitter, I was very skeptical. Who cares about what I’m doing now, let alone what other people are doing? The public timeline is a mess and filled with too many “going to bed” posts. However, I started to warm to Twitter when I started following people I knew or had only met briefly at conferences. Many of them are interesting and smart and there’s the occasional link or discussion of interest. It’s also a great tool for a procrastinator like me looking for a diversion. (OK, maybe I should do something about that.)

Last month I was looking around for a new job. (Side note: After 13 years at Creo/Kodak, some people thought I would be there forever. Why is that?) I was updating my resume for an interview in Vancouver and twittered:

to which Matthew, whom I had met only once at a UPA conference a couple years ago, replied:

If not for what happened next, I would still be cursing Matthew for such useless advice.

And the roller coaster ride started.

One stupid message about fonts and we’re moving to Boston. It’s amazing.

PS: If you want to follow me on twitter, go to http://twitter.com/jzip.

This YouTube video makes it clear why camera lenses are so expensive.  (ht to daring fireball)

We are kicking the TV out of our house. It’s not that it’s done something wrong — instead, it’s simply time to give it to someone who can take better care of it. We’ve been neglecting the poor thing for too long and it deserves better.

Neither my wife nor I watch much TV although we have been briefly addicted to various shows. I have a current addiction to Battlestar Galactica and my wife was recently watching Desperate Housewives. What we find, though, is that once we miss a few shows (easy when kids are in the mix), we don’t miss them. TV is probably one of the easiest addictions to kick – just turn the thing off.

It will be nice to rid the living room of the box. Have you noticed just how the TV or “home entertainment system” dominates the room? If you have enough space for a dedicated entertainment room, perhaps that’s fine for you. We just have one room big enough for guests and a 27″ TV. We’d like to shift the focus back to people.

We are not banning all video entertainment from our home. We just signed up with Zip.ca (Netflix for Canadians) and will watch the movies on our computers. The subscription offsets the cancelled cable charge, so in the end we are entertainment neutral, I guess.

If you got rid of your TV would you miss it? For how long?

Growing up, Sony was it.  They made the Walkman and good TVs.  Later in my life, I started to hear rumblings that Sony quality really wasn’t all that good.  More recently in my life, I’ve experienced poor quality first hand with a defective laptop, defective desktop computer (neither of them mine, thank God), a defective digital camera (covered under a recall, I hope), and two short-lived DVD players (kicking myself).So, now I’m looking for a replacement DVD player on the inexpensive side.  I’ve looked at online reviews at places like epinions.com and LG, Toshiba, and others are not getting good reviews.  However, one company is getting good reviews and that’s Panasonic.  I found the same thing when looking for a microwave a few months ago.Is Panasonic the way to go for my future gadget needs?

It seems everyone at the conference has a Blackberry.  I don’t recall so many of these thumb-damaging machines at the conference last year.  What’s going on?

I lost my cell phone a while ago. It was a recent-model Nokia and I replaced it with another recent-model Nokia slightly different than the lost one.

I was quite surprised to find many small differences in the interface. Many of the menus were subtly different for no apparent reason. In some cases, the phone was worse, in other cases, better.

In my old phone, if I wanted to change the current ring profile (for example, to switch to silent or vibrate-only), I could hit the power button and I’d get a menu that included all the profiles.  In my new phone, the power button doesn’t do anything like that.  There’s a “Go to” menu mapped to the left soft-key that allows me to pick either the “normal” or “silent” profile (among a million other options) but doesn’t reveal the other ring profiles.  If I want to switch to “meeting” or “vibrate”, I need to navigate many levels into the main menu.

On the other hand, the new phone has dedicated volume buttons on the side, which the other phone lacked.  I always wondered how Nokia missed those — aren’t they mandatory for a mobile phone?

So, what’s up, Nokia? Is this an example of the constant iteration and tweaking you do on your handsets? Did you make these subtle changes for a good reason or just because different teams designed the two phones?

Now for a lighter topic.

I just got a new LCD monitor at work. It’s big and beautiful, but do you know what its biggest problem is? There’s not enough room around the screen for post-it notes!

What are office workers around the world going to do?

One of my daughter’s favorite library books the last few weeks is The Gardener by Sarah Stewart. It’s a touching story about a little girl who goes to live with her uncle during the depression.

I found this book on chapters.indigo.ca and was taken aback by one of the recommended books.

“If you liked The Gardener, then you’ll love Still as Death!”

I can see how the site got confused. I mean any book by Sarah Stewart someone has got to be good, right?

Hey, business people!  If you offer an email contact address on your web site, you should actually respond to emails from your customers.

That means you, Kerrisdale Cameras (no response to a simple question after  4 days).

I have 5 instant messenger accounts (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Google, and Skype).

I have 6 different email accounts (more if you count aliases).

I have 3 phone numbers.

Crazy.

I have been waiting for this service for a long time. A (free) synchronized news reader service. I’ve always liked Bloglines, but have been frustrated by it because it doesn’t sync with my desktop news reader (NetNewsWire) that I prefer to use if I’m at my primary computer.

NewsGator also syncs the read/unread state of each individual post. It’s brilliant and with NetNewsWire, synchronizing happens seamlessly.

It syncs with NewsGator’s other products (some of which are for Windows).

*** This is not a Rogers web site.  Stop posting your contact information in the comments.  ***

Our latest phone bill had a URL to redeem a free gift for one of our Rogers services. I went to a page that offered a free ring tune. I never buy these things and thought it’d be fun.

First, I had to choose my phone type. I knew it was a Sony Ericsson, but what model was it? J300, T236, T237, W600i, or one of 5 others? Luckily for me, I remembered the phone had a status page that reported its model number (it’s nowhere on the phone’s case).

That hurdle jumped, I selected the ring tune and it said it would send it to my phone. I quickly got a message on the phone and selected “Load” only to be greeted with:

Unauthorized
We’re sorry, you are unauthorized to view this page (ip=205.205.50.3-0)

Thanks, guys. Another customer experience shot to hell.

*** This is not a Rogers web site.  Stop posting your contact information in the comments.  ***

It’s nice to see usability mentioned in the mainstream press. CNN’s article Making Cell Phones Simple is Hard is pretty good and I’m glad carriers are putting effort into making the phones easier to use.

One paragraph at the end doesn’t ring true (pardon the pun):

Charles Golvin of Forrester Research said a recent survey indicated few cellular customers choose a phone based on its usability, typically because they either don’t think there’s anything better or, like Bales in Kansas City, don’t think they need those services [voice recognition].

Even if some carriers or cell phone manufacturers start to offer more usable phones, how will this change? Consumers don’t get a chance to try before they buy. Demo phones aren’t live and the best you can do is determine if the phone is too small for your hand or not. I’m not even aware of cell phone reviews unless it’s a PDA-type device like a Blackberry or Treo. If there are reviews, I doubt the average Joe, who needs usability, is reading them.

The other complicating factor is the divide between carriers and cell phone makers. Usability is really only in the carrier’s interest as they must field the support calls and accept returned phones. The article seems to imply that they are working on making their network services better, but it’s unclear how they can directly improve the phone’s design.  Perhaps their influence is growing as usability goes main stream.
In related news, some small cell phone manufacturer is trying to improve phone usability by, get this, stripping away all the fluff.  Imagine that, a phone that’s just a phone.  (Hat tip to Mark Hurst at Good Experience for that link.)

It’s been a tough week. I don’t think it’s appropriate to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that some tough medical decisions were made and I hope Kim’s grandfather is on a path to recovery. I will have to write more about him later as he’s had quite a distinguished career. He’s a metallurgical engineer and has worked on projects ranging from aircraft design for Douglas to the [Apollo program](http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/apollo/apollo.htm) to [cold fusion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion).

As a reward to myself, I bought an [Apple MacBook](http://www.apple.com/macbook/). So far, so good. It’s great. The screen is vibrant and the reflective coating is more than tolerable. Since this is just a toy, I went for the white 1.83 GHz model with the base configuration. We are now officially a dual-OS household. Once I download [Bootcamp](http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/), we’ll be a dual-boot household, too!

It feels a little silly to take pleasure in such a material thing, but after thinking hard about the meaning of life it’s a welcome change.

I’m very excited about the new Apple MacBooks. They look great and the price is good, too. However, I must admit the first look at its keyboard dredged up memories of IBM’s chicklet keyboard that shipped with the PCjr. I can still remember trying to type on the stupid thing. I think it was the first (and last) keyboard specifically designed for hunt-and-peck typists. Scott should remember this well as he actually had one of these things as a kid.

The good news is that the early reviews of the keyboard are mostly positive and it doesn’t appear to be the ergonomic disaster IBM unleashed on the market.

I had no idea Firefox Flicks existed until I stumbled on it today.  You can find almost 300 fan-created ads for Firefox (a web browser for those of you who haven’t heard of it).  Most of them appear to be dreadful.
Isn’t it amazing how communities will spring up around the oddest things?

What’s the strangest community you’ve ever joined?

Merlin at 43 Folders points out the space pen myth. It turns out NASA didn’t spend a ton of money to develop the space pen while the Soviets saved the money and used a simple pencil instead (while slapping their heads and crying, “Ha, ha! You foolish capitalistic pigs!”).

A certain engineer who shall remain nameless told this story to our engineering class. It’s a little disappointing that the example is fabricated. It’s not even that funny (in the ha-ha-stupid-engineer way) if there really are hazards from broken lead in space, which is one of the benefits of using the pen.

Can someone please explain why I get both a message icon and a text message on my cell phone to tell me I have voice mail?

(And this happens on two different brands of phone each using a different provider.)

I’m sure there’s some logic behind this behaviour — I just can’t figure it out.

Guy Kawasaki posts another brilliant top-10 list. #9 really resonates:

“Our beta sites loved the software.” In twenty five years of working in technology, I’ve never heard a company report that its beta sites didn’t like its software. There are three reasons for this: first, many beta sites are so honored to get pre-release software that they don’t want say anything negative. Second, most beta sites haven’t used the software very much. Third, most beta sites don’t want to seem cruel by criticizing a company’s new product. Doing so is as socially unacceptable as telling someone that his baby is ugly.

Although, to counter Guy’s experience, I was involved with a project that got tossed out of the first beta site. We had missed a requirement so badly that it was unusable (not just hard to use — impossible to use) and we couldn’t fix it in time. That was a learning experience (include a domain expert as part of the team). Luckily, the team recovered and the product stuck with the later sites.

I hate stories like this: ‘Kosher’ Phone Merges Technology, Faith. For a religion that supposedly believes and teaches in free will, why do we need a phone that blocks sex line numbers and the like?  The story is about the ultra-orthodox, though, who always take things a little too far in my opinion.  Unfortunately, the craziness reflects on all Jews.
On the other hand, I know many people that would love it if their cell phone simply made phone calls! There’s got to be an untapped market there.