Category: off topic

I admit it, I’m a Crackberry addict. I have been for years, since I bought my old 957 and started having access to my email wherever I went in North America (well, almost everywhere: since it ran over the digital pager networks, there were some large holes in rural areas). After more than four years, I decided that there wasn’t room in my handbag for my old Nokia phone and my 957 — and they were both starting to be an embarrassment in front of my geeky friends — so I combined functionality and went for the Blackberry 7290. It’s a GSM/GPRS phone/email/PDA all-in-one device that is supposed to work almost anywhere, although I haven’t travelled outside of North America since I bought it, but it’s certainly worked everywhere that I’ve been, including many places where the older technology didn’t work. I really like how everything is integrated: I get an email from someone, and as long as they’re in my address book (which I synch with my Outlook address book), I can call them directly from the email. Or email them back. Or SMS them. All without looking them up in the address book as a separate operation.

The down side: the screen is smaller than the old 957, although the good resolution and colour makes up for that somewhat. However, I did have to bump the font size in order to hold off the bifocals for another year. There are a few functions that I’d like to be more convenient, for example, call forwarding (which I do whenever I’m in my office) requires way too much navigation.

Buying a new computer naturally made me think about buying a new computer bag to put it in, even though I don’t do the amount of travel that I used to do. My old Kensington backpack-style bag has travelled a few hundred thousand miles with me and is showing its age; plus, I wanted to lend out my (still usable) older laptop and it was more convenient to put everthing in the old bag.

Originally designed and made in Australia, although now manufactured in China, I’ve heard good things about Crumpler bags and liked what I saw on their website so went searching for their computer bags in Toronto. I thought that my new laptop would fit in the smaller “Breakfast Buffet” bag, but it was just a bit too tight due to the thickness of the machine, and didn’t leave enough room for the paperwork that I inevitably end up carrying along: the Luncheon bag is a few inches larger and gave me the room that I needed for everything. The bag appears to be pretty much indestructible, although time will tell, and definitely fashionable. I bought the olive green one with an electric orange interior (I figured that the orange exterior wasn’t quite corporate enough), and I can’t imagine that I’ll see very many the same in my travels, which means that no one is going to pick up my bag by mistake. I had to venture into foreign territory to find it: Carbon Computing, a store that caters to those of the Apple persuasion. A very different experience from the usual PC store, where the (invariably male) sales clerk wants to talk about bus speeds regardless of what you’re buying; I was helped by a waif-like young woman whose regular job is in the arts, and she waxed poetic about the bags and how much she loves hers, even though she puts an iMac in it.

The down side: there’s no outside pocket for holding boarding passes and the like while dashing through airports, requiring me to open the front flap completely and dig inside for things that won’t fit in my tiny handbag. That front flap has the stickiest Velcro on it that I have ever seen — I think that you could stick yourself to the ceiling with a small patch of this stuff — so opening the bag is a noisy and slightly energetic activity.

Also on the down side: that Velcro is quite rough, and I managed to abrade one knuckle while digging into an inside pocket that also fastens shut with Velcro.

I adore this machine. I come from the good old days of presentations done on overhead projectors with transparencies, and there was never a time when my transparencies weren’t covered with ink by the time that I finished a presentation. Then, along came PowerPoint and I was forced to gesture wildly at the screen instead, which is amazingly unsatisfactory. The tc4200 works like a regular laptop, but the screen swivels around and folds down flat, covering the keyboard, allowing me to write directly on the screen with the provided stylus. Now, I do my presentations on the tablet and am able to write and highlight all over the slides again. I’ve used this for several days of training plus some casual presentations that I’ve done in the past few months, and it works like a charm. I’ve had several favourable comments and envious glances about it from the attendees, as well. It’s also great for curling up in an easy chair and poking through my feeds in the web version of Bloglines, which is mostly a point-and-click activity that can easily be done with the stylus. The handwriting recognition is quite good, although my typing speed is fast enough that I don’t use that a lot — I’d rather convert back to keyboard mode and do 60 wpm.

The down side: it runs XP, which is a pig compared to Windows 2000, my previous operating system. On my old machine, which was less than half the speed, the same amount of memory (0.5GB) was plenty for Windows 2000, but I had to drop another 1GB into this for a total of 1.5GB before XP started behaving tolerably when I’m running multiple applications simultaneously. As far as I know, Windows 2000 doesn’t support tablets so I’m stuck with XP, and now I’m mostly used to the user interface, so I guess that I’ll just have to live with the crappy multitasking.

Also on the down side is the lack of a firewire port, and I haven’t been able to get my PCMCIA firewire card working properly with it: my Canon Elura 50 digital camcorder is not recognized, although the same card and camcorder work fine together on other machines. HP support claims that no one has tested a firewire card on this machine, so can’t even recommend a different card to buy. I’m suspecting that it has something to do with power to the PCMCIA slot, and that an externally-powered card might do the trick, which will require making a trip to a computer store with my laptop and camera to try said card before I buy. Troubleshooting three devices from different manufacturers is always a hassle, since none of the vendors will provide anything that resembles technical support.

In the spirit of blogging about something a big lighter over the holiday week, I’m going to talk about my latest gadgets and their quirks next week, possibly sprinkled with some of my usual BPM-related fare. Due to some long-overdue upgrades, the past few months have been one big gadget-buying spree for me, so there’s lots to talk about.

Also check out my new Squidoo BPM lens, and sign yourself up at my Frappr map.

Completely unrelated to BPM, EA, or anything else that I usually blog about, I have a great idea for one of those iPod silhouette ads for Canadian viewers (readers from Michigan, Wisconsin and Switzerland will also appreciate). This came to me last week after I received a video iPod as an early Christmas gift, then had to travel halfway across the city to see a client on the day of a 3-4″ snowfall. Picture a long parka with a snorkel hood (something like this, if you’re having trouble imagining it), with the white headset cables emerging from inside the hood, then trailing into an inside pocket of the coat where the iPod is, of course, out of sight so that it doesn’t freeze over. By now, you shouldn’t have to see the actual iPod to know what’s connected to those white cables.

This would be funnier if it weren’t quite so true.

Although I’m based in Toronto, many of my clients are elsewhere, and the past year I’ve seen mostly American clients. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the significant cultural differences across the N-S divide, I won’t bore you with the details, but you’re likely aware that we talk different. There are different expressions (such as the American use of “uh-huh” as a replacement for “you’re welcome”, and the quintessential Canadian “eh?”), but I tend to notice pronunciation. All of the Americans reading this probably flashed immediately to “oot and aboot”, but my focus, as usual, is on process.

Today, in a meeting of about 15 people at a client (in Toronto), I heard — about 1000 times, considering the subject matter — the Canadian “PRO-cess” rather than the American “PRAW-cess”. Music to my ears! 🙂

I look at James Kobielus’ blog once in a while to browse his insightful commentary on various technical subjects. I never expected poetry about content.

I’ve been snowed under with finishing the first version of “Making BPM Mean Business“, to be premiered next month at FileNet’s user conference in Las Vegas, as well as a few other presentations and some coursework for a client on enterprise architecture.

I’ve also been spending some time on my new technology acquisitions: an HP tablet PC and a new Blackberry, replacing some ancient stuff from Nokia, RIM and Compaq that steadfastly refuse to die. The new convertible tablet is great and will be very useful for the BPM course and other presentations: I miss the old days of transparencies when I could write on the slides, and being able to annotate in digital ink is the next best thing. I’ve taken it for a few test drives, but the two-day course will be the real challenge. The new Blackberry is a dream: phone and PDA in one, which reduces the electronic clutter to a minimum, and much better geographic coverage for email. Since I use it primarily for email, and only have the phone functionality because one must have a mobile these days, the PDA format (rather than the phone format that RIM also offers) works best for me. My only beef: the holster that comes with it looks like something that Batman would wear on his belt (not my style), and I need something without a clip to slip into my purse; the simple slipcover with the magnet in the right place to allow the device to register itself as “holstered” set me back $40.

I opened my mailbox today to find the current copy of the Economist (yes, I still enjoy a few publications on paper) with the cover story “How the internet killed the phone business” (paid subscription required to read article). It covers eBay’s purchase of Skype, of course, but starts with a great definition of disruptive technology:

The term “disruptive technology” is popular, but is widely misused. It refers not simply to a clever new technology, but to one that undermines an existing technology — and which therefore makes life very difficult for the many businesses which depend on the existing way of doing things.

A term originally coined in The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive technology (or what Clayton Christensen later renamed “disruptive innovation”) is becoming increasingly pervasive. What Skype is doing to the traditional phone companies is like what blogs are doing to advertising and PR firms, or what SOA is doing to large systems integrators: forcing them to change or die.

In all three of these examples, and many more, there will be no putting the genie back in the bottle. And except for the traditional companies who are being forced to reinvent themselves, who would want to go back when there are such obvious benefits for the consumer? These days, I make all my international calls via Skype at greatly reduced rates; I use this blog as a my primary marketing medium at practically zero cost and with the added benefit of it being a creative outlet; and I consistently recommend to clients that they consider SOA as a way to avoid spending millions of dollars on custom integration solutions.

Embrace the disruption: resistance is futile.

I always thought of J-Walk as a pretty geeky guy, until I saw his results on the Computer Geek test today, then took the test myself. My results:

I blame my score on the fact that I do daily backup. Oh, yeah, there’s the programming in multiple languages factor, too.

Updated to include the J-Walk link experiment.