Curses. Foiled again.
April 9, 2007
Interesting statement from Adobe about its licensing practices:
…during the subsequent three months, we have learned that ALM [Adobe's e-licensing management system] requires a greater level of administrator resources than many of our customers have available to them. In some instances, there have also been difficulties in managing certain customer workflows and requirements. As a result, we have decided to disable the ALM technology in Acrobat 8…
So I’m thinking one of two scenarios: IT departments weren’t paying attention to what their creatives were ordering…or Adobe didn’t think to mention that there was a whole new licensing scheme that might overload the usually-strapped IT resource pool (especially at small-to-medium companies where IT departments might be one guy and a lot of contractors).
Ooops.
SHOW the love, baby
April 7, 2007
I’m in the process of rebuilding cynthiamorgan.com to give me a business site as well as a fun site (more on that later)…and while wrestling with setup on a new hosting service last night I kept a marathon Food Network session going on background TV. (i.e., television that functions as subliminal entertainment while you do something more worthwhile)
What I mostly (didn’t) watch was Rachel Ray, the perky princess of postprandial paradise, running around spending 40 bucks on a day’s worth of eats. And (not) watching her, I suddenly realized why I don’t much care for her show. It’s not because of the perkiness or the fact that she’s more overexposed than a nudist in a Minnesota winter:
She’s not really a foodie.
Wildwood
April 6, 2007
- Wildwood website
- Location: NW 21st (Restaurant Row)
- Cost to fill up two people: $60 dinner, about $35 lunch
One of the nice things about living in glassland is that, unlike Seattle or San Francisco, Portland area restaurants can get away with earth consciousness and local ingredients and all that Alice Waters-style stuff without sounding pretentious.
Wildwood manages to be quintessential Portland, including a great nod to the arts (there’s a glass wall by Liz Mapelli at the reception desk), and really horrible parking. It’s also pricey–lunch is just as good, not as crowded and noisy (usually) and cheaper.
When Wildwood is on, the food’s very good. It’s not always on, unfortunately–I’ve learned to stay away from anything that looks like a heavy or carb-rich sauce there, and concentrate on whatever’s on the menu that’s as close to its natural state as possible. Grilled meat or fish, cheeses, fresh vegetables, that’s the ticket at Wildwood.
I’m also a creme brulee nut, as I’ve said, and the ones at Wildwood are uniformly excellent (ESPECIALLY if they contain raspberries). But by far the best dish I’ve had there was the simplest, and not on the menu: A co-worker and I didn’t feel like bread–long story–and asked if we could have some carrot sticks or celery or something instead.
The lunch chef put on his thinking toque, lightly steamed some fresh veggies and sent them out with a lemony vinaigrette. It was, simply, the best vegetable dish I’ve had in the last ten years. We nearly licked the plate clean. I ask for that dish every time I go back, and nobody has any idea what I’m talking about.
All in all, it’s a nice place for lunch. And maybe if everyone asks, they’ll put those veggies on the menu.
New Seasons Market
April 6, 2007
-
Location: All over
-
Price to fill up two people: About $10-$15
OK, it’s a grocery store, not a restaurant…but it’s still one of the best values I’ve found for lunch and not a bad choice for dinner, either. This is a sustainable/organic/whatever market, all grown up and really nice people, and they bake their own bread and cook their own deli food (mostly). Really nice sandwiches, good desserts, the ubiquitous northwestern coffee-and-buns, decent salad bar and hot-pot, plus a gelato stand. What more do you want?
For sandwiches, order whatever cooked meat is written up on the blackboard, on their sourdough or rye with the basil-pesto mayonnaise. Really nice. Unlike most grocery delis, these folks understand that folks like to sit down–comfortably–to eat, and supply comfortable chairs, tables, dishes, etc. Depending on the store, they may also turn the “restaurant” into an art gallery or community center for meetings, and some of the meetings are fascinating entertainment (there was the time the breastfeeding activists rehearsed a demonstration for an airlines…).
Tip: If you are on the Web before you head over there, visit their website, order your food, and it’ll be ready when you get there. Saves time–the counterfolk are nice but NOT speedy.
Phone it in
April 5, 2007
So I’m at Verizon yesterday, getting my broken Treo 700W swapped out for a new one, and the techs and I got into a spirited debate over phone features.
How come, I asked, I can’t have multiple mobile phones for the same phone number? I use my mobile as my business line, so it sits on my desk charging when I’m in the office. I’d like a purse phone and maybe even a carphone, all on the same line ’cause right now if I forget that phone and it stays on the desk, so does my business. Rather than taking the phone everywhere, I need multiple phones that I know will be there.
It’s what I (blush) do with TV. If the TV is in one room, you sit there watching TV and wasting a lot of time. If there’s a TV in every room, all tuned to the same channel, you can go from room to room, getting stuff done AND not missing the news. People do that all the time for landlines–there must be 8 phones in my house, all tied to the same number. (and yeah, I’m a gadget freak)
Patiently sat through the technical explanation of why this can’t be done with mobile phones–the unique NAMs, all that, I get it. Then I suggested that maybe mobile phone companies like Verizon need to rethink the whole model.
Right now the entire mobile phone network is device-dependent, SINGLE device-dependent. Why not make it device-independent? Use presence detection technologies to activate the closest communications device..and move with the customer?
I know Qwest or AT&T did something like this several years ago–you tell all your phones and pagers and such where you would be and when someone called, the network would ring through all your choices in order until it found you. Trouble was, most callers aren’t conditioned to wait through 10 or 12 rings while you’re located.
What I want is a bit different: I get in the car, the mobile handset registers my presence, notifies the network to ring the car phone, and I can dial out without problem. I enter my office, the network gets a second alert and moves me automagically to the office phone.
Maybe I carry a token, maybe my Bluetooth headset’s registration kicks off the process, who knows? I already carry two flashdrives on my keychain, one for business info, one for play; one more won’t hurt.
That was supposedly the promise of Bluetooth, right? We’ve got GPS that’s beginning to help us market geographically, we’ve got presence detection in tools like IM…I think most of the components are there, they’re just not well-integrated into a massive infrastructure. If we’re really going to have unified communications (we are, right? I’m getting tired of all promise and no meat…) this is an integral piece of it.
I don’t think it will be Verizon doing it–they tend to be extremely conservative–but certainly there are experimental versions of this in Asia. They’ve got a smartcard model in Europe (and parts of Asia) that does this in a more manual way already.
All kindsa scary scenarios around Big Brother knowing exactly where you live and what you’re doing, of course..but that’s already a problem, especially since Homeland Security. There are days when I think personal privacy is a thing of the past anyway–might as well get comfortable living in a virtual fishbowl.
So…who’s gonna fix my phone(s)?
I hate technology (mostly kidding)
April 4, 2007
Trevelyan, my Treo 700W mobile phone, let me down yesterday and Verizon says I need a new one.
On Monday evening, I left an all-afternoon meeting to find (as usual) several urgent calls that needed returning. Made the first without incident, looked at the traffic on I-5 and decided to wait it out by having dinner in a nearby restaurant, finishing up my phone calls and reading the new issue of HOW.
Just as they were setting a water glass at my table, the phone announced that Mom was calling.
“Hello?” Nothing.
“Hello?” Nada.
The call was active, I just couldn’t hear it. Turned out Mom could hear me perfectly, so she called back three more times. Same thing each time. On the last call I had the wisdom to say “you know, I think there’s something wrong with the phone. I’ll call you as soon as I get to a landline.”
Back in the car, plugged in the headset and everything worked fine. Unplugged–nothing. Drat. I figured I’d use the headset until the weekend, then head over to Verizon and get it fixed.
Next morning, first two calls went fine. Third call–nothing. I switched headsets, still nothing. That did it–I was at Verizon about 15 minutes later (tip: going there late morning Tuesday is a good idea ’cause it’s the first time I didn’t wait in line for a half hour to see a tech). Very nice tech explained that audio out appeared to be dead except for the speakerphone (which died soon after he said that), and I needed a new phone.
I can’t complain about Verizon service; when I mentioned that this was my business phone and a couple of clients called while he was working on the phone he wrangled an overnight delivery of a new phone, free of charge.
So as soon as it arrives this morning I’m grabbing it up and heading to Verizon to have everything set up on the new phone. In the meantime I’ve forwarded calls to my home phone but suspect it’s not working, either because I haven’t gotten any calls…most unusual for my business.
Biggest problem with that is that I’ve lost any data on the phone that wasn’t backed up to my Windows machine, and from what I’ve seen so far that’s a fair amount. Drat.
Oh well. This makes my iPhone lust even lustier. Given Apple’s penchant for late delivery, though, Trevelyan must continue in the lead communications role until at least late summer. If I’m smart, I won’t buy until the second edition, which probably puts this in the 2008 timeframe. Better for my wallet and an excellent exercise in self-discipline.
Besides, Verizon has arguably the best coverage in glassland, and iPhone is a Cingular product. Figuring that out will be a pain.
But April is definitely shaping up to be a techskunking month. The phone’s not working, Barney BigBoy, my primary Windows machine (an overmuscled Dell) and principal graphics/Web dev machine is doing funky things. There’s a whine in the disk drive that sounds ominous (and he’s on his second hard disk), I started a Windows update that failed halfway through and appears to have broken something because applications won’t start and a hard reboot doesn’t appear to have fixed things.
So…time to shut the old boy down and do his 36,000 mile tune-up, i.e., make sure the backup is current, strip the OS down to its underwear and rebuild (and if I’m really, really masochistic, upgrade to Microsoft Vista at the same time), check his innards to make sure there’s not matted cat hair in the fan and his cables are secure, and then slowly, painfully rebuild his application set, restore the data, and start over.
I don’t care what anyone says about the reliability of Windows, this is a yearly task and probably will be until Windows Vista II comes out. BigBoy’s about three months overdue for it. A tune-up takes about 12 hours, time I don’t have right now, so I’ll see if I can eke him out until I have more time.
Meanwhile, FreddieMac, my MacBook Pro, is happily plugging along, working just fine. The only real trouble I’ve ever had with her is when she had the fight with my cordless handset. I hate to admit it, but Freddie may be a better Windows machine than a Windows machine.
I am kinda faced with a dilemma. Right now BigBoy is my graphics and Web machine, mostly to save Freddie’s hard drive space. Plus, the Adobe CS2 suite (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) doesn’t run natively on Freddie and trying to get it work consistently in Parallels was a bit of a pain. But now CS3, the new version, is coming out with native support for the Core2Duo processor, which means Freddie will run it very fast.
So….lots to think about. In the meantime, the phone has arrived and it’s off to Verizonland to get my communications back in order.
Ta…
Windwoman
April 3, 2007
The wind pounced on the old woman huddled tightly in her sari, as she guarded her eyes against the blowing sands. It tore free the bright fabric and spun it to the skies, a mad scarlet tangle that leapt and whipped and taunted. Silently, she waited for the wind to grow bored, to spend its rage against the silk and leave her in peace.
PowerPointers
April 2, 2007
Did PowerPoint kill the astronauts? Scary thought.
Edward Tufte, “visual display of information” guru, certainly thinks so. I just finished reading his essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, and he all but accused the software of murder.
Tufte contends that PowerPoint presentations filter and “good news-ize” complex information to the point that it misleads. It was this, he says, that caused NASA leaders to assume that broken-off insulation caused no significant damage to the space shuttle Columbia. In fact the insulation had caused critical damage, and the Columbia burned up on re-entry, killing all seven crew members.
Tufte’s main point is that some data–especially technical data–simply doesn’t lend itself to six bullet points on a slide. In those cases, PowerPoint summations can be dangerous. Businesses that rely on PowerPoint to deliver critical information, he says, aren’t doing much more than guesstimating. Pretty nasty conclusion, especially given the fact that 95 percent of businesspeople I’ve worked with pretty much live in PowerPoint.
When I first started working for a big multinational, I was astonished at how many software tools these guys didn’t use. PointPoint was the way they wrote reports, calculated budgets, viewed charts and images, communicated decisions…basically if you couldn’t do it in Outlook, you did it in PowerPoint.
Tufte recommends tossing PowerPoint out on its digital ear and forcing employees to talk to people, write text reports, fill in spreadsheets, etc. Not a bad idea, but there’s a lot of corporate inertia to overcome in making that happen.
I’ve spent a lot of time (blush) teaching engineers how to make better PowerPoint slides with that six-lines-to-a-slide-no-clip-art stuff. Obviously my time would have been better spent teaching them how to communicate effectively without slides…but take a slideshow away from an engineer and you have one nakedly uncomfortable engineer up there on the podium. So we did the best we could.
But that’s not PowerPoint’s fault. That’s the fault of overworked employees taking the easy road. It’s the fault of managers allowing employees to get away with it, and it’s the fault of senior managers for structuring organizations so that no one has time to really understand the data flowing through the business.
Or to paraphrase the NRA: PowerPoint doesn’t kill people, PEOPLE kill….