Disruptive Tech, Again

I had a couple of people come up to me after the page about disruptive technologies and offer up their own examples. Mine were more personal–I have a box of once-expensive cables to hook up peripherals I no longer own to computers I no longer own, either. But all you have to do is look around to see other examples.
The United States Postal Service is in trouble. This was one of Ben Franklin's ideas, for crying out loud, but its usefulness may be coming to an end. My mother loves to talk of a time when she could count on twice-a-day service. As she put it, you could invite someone to dinner that night in the morning mail, and receive word back that afternoon that they were planning on attending. Pretty cool, huh? And this cost a nickel or less.

But it was a time before e-mail. It was a time before "everyone" had a telephone, too. It was the only way we had to do these kinds of things, so it's the way things worked. And generations depended on a system like this. It was a part of their daily life that I suspect went largely unexamined and unquestioned. Of course we people handling paper and bringing it to our homes. How do you communicate with faraway others?

In hindsight, mistakes are always more easily seen. Geeze, maybe first class postage did get kind of out of hand there at the end. Maybe second class postage and third class postage should have been more spendy—that would have cut down on the tonnage of catalogs and sales flyers and saved a forest or two, perhaps. With less "Junk Mail" clogging the system, there would have been less wear-and-tear on all of the equipment, including the letter carriers.

Maybe having to go to a box down the street, instead of to your very own door makes "The Mail" a little less personal and a little less precious. It was a matter of architecture. The Mail was so dependable, so ordinary and so necessary that we put little slots in front doors to keep from having to open a door and retrieve the daily delivery. In an age of increasing precision and accuracy (thanks in large part to computers), can we accept something like approximate mail delivery? A nickel used to bring a handwritten note from your grandmother from Ohio all of the way to your very own front door. Now, fifty cents gets your electric bill only as close as your neighbor's driveway? Really? That's the best we can do?

Netflix put a serious hurt on the mom-and-pop video rental business, and on local cable-TV and satellite franchises. Now, Netflix itself is in danger of becoming redundant as various concerns struggle with the problems of squirting movies and TV shows into our homes. It may be that the electronic side of their business, the "Net" part, eventually takes over everything. Or it may be that someone else will get it right, or get it righter, or offer it cheaper. Maybe one day we'll all watch TV piecemeal via some kind of a super-service like Apple's iTunes. I love HBO, but don't care much for boxing, so if I can get all of HBO's movies and original programming for $9 instead of the $12 my cable company charges, I'll probably go that route.

Economics plays a role in these decisions, but ultimately it seems like the best technologies eventually make it, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. If your costs are lower this way than that, or if speeds are faster here than there or if your technology is massively cheaper than someone else's, then you're going to win. If not, then there doesn't seem to be much that you can do, except try to hang on.

In the 1980s we heard magical stories of wizards working on ways to get data from the same wire that gave us Skin-a-max. It was hugely expensive at the time, and not particularly fast by today's standards, but everyone saw it coming. Same with DSL on the phone lines. Where once we had two phone lines, so we could be online and still order pizza at the same time, now you can carry on all kinds of up- and downloading activity while, well, ordering pizza.

There are a lot of dial-up plans available, offering cheap internet access. But time is money, here, too. I know a lot of cheap people, but I don't know anyone with dial-up internet, any more.

Who is In Charge?

Who's In Charge, Here?

It's not always clear. And the results of uncertainty are sometimes terrible.

Consider for a moment, the case of the Royal Mail Ship TITANIC. The pride of the White Star Line, the ocean liner famously met her fate on the flat-calm moonless morning of April 15th, 1912. Back then, trans-oceanic travel was a severely big deal. Rich clientele would book passage with favorite ships and also with favorite captains. White Star badgered Captain EJ Smith away from retirement for one last turn of the wheel, aboard the giant steamship's maiden voyage.

This was fine, as far as it went. But leading lights of White Star would also share the journey, including Joseph (J Bruce) Ismay, the chairman of the line. These gentlemen had different goals for the journey than perhaps those of Captain Smith.

Flash ahead to that last evening, the weather reports and ice reports and wouldn't it be grand to arrive early in New York and surprise all of the newspapers? It would be easier to sell tickets for a grand ship like TITANIC if it could be seen as opulent and fast, though speed was never a design consideration. A more prudent option may have been to throttle back while traversing the icy area, or to take a more southerly route. Or at least to post more lookouts, and make sure they had the proper optics for their duty.

The White Star brass knew Captain Smith was experienced. They knew he would not place their new ship at undue risk. But while Smith was the boss of the boat, his boss was also aboard. And his boss would like to get to New York ahead of expectation. Smith knew his authority was unchallenged—he was doing this last run as a favor and there was nothing White Star could do to harm him or his retirement. And Ismay knew Smith wouldn't run the ship any faster than was prudent, given prevailing conditions.

The upshot of the whole thing is the majestic ship pointed at a dark mass and unable to steer clear of it without brushing against it for half the length of the ship, popping rivets and bending panels allowing water in. They say that given the weight of the water needed and the time it took, the "Gash" the press talked about amounted to just twelve square feet, spread out over hundreds of feet of the ship's length. A pantry door left open to the sea 2' by 6' for a couple of hours and it was all over.

More recently, consider the case of young Jessica Dubroff. Jessica was only seven years old, in 1996, when she was attempting to become "the youngest person to cross the country in an airplane". This was in its entirety a media stunt. To be a student pilot, you have to be at least sixteen years old. Jessica was not. So Jessica was in no way the pilot, or even a pilot aboard the airplane. For the trip to be legal, though, someone would have to be a pilot, and for Jessica to have any legitimate place, that someone would have to be a certified flight instructor. Enter Joe Reid. For all government and insurance purposes, Reid would be pilot in command for the entire trip. Reid was fifty-two years old, a stockbroker, and the registered owner of the Cessna used for the "record". Her father would also accompany her on the trip.

There had been a few kids who rode along on flights like this over the years. Nobody remembers because they weren't really records, but still, the trend was younger and younger children. Jessica's trip was designed for media coverage. ABC even gave her a camera to record her journey. She was given several minutes of national TV news coverage, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and some huge percentage of the country was at least somewhat aware of the little girl that they thought was trying to set a record by flying across the country.

The left California with a big farewell. They traveled west-to-east and finished up the day on TV again. It was all very scripted. Look at how far she's come! What a challenge, yadda-yadda-yadda. A fifty-two year old pilot had flown from Half Moon Bay to Cheyenne, with a little girl at his side, her dad in the back, and somehow it was news.

The next morning the three of them went to the airport. Forecast weather had arrived—a big storm. Normally, pilots wait out weather like this, but it was highly localized over the neighborhood and they had a media schedule to adhere to. They had to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, in time for interviews and editing and getting the taped piece to NewYork for the evening news. So while airliners waited for the weather to clear, Reid took off, nearly a hundred pounds overweight.

They took off, and bobbled under, into and out of clouds as they swung around to the east, going slower and slower. Finally, the aircraft stalled and crashed in someone's front yard. But here again, who was in charge?

Technically, legally, it was Reid. But Reid was being paid as an instructor and/or a charter pilot. And he was being paid by the guy in the back seat, who may or may not have known how dangerous their situation really was. Dad might have thought, people drive through this kind of weather all the time, right? So, let's go. We've got reporters to meet. And if it gets too bad, we can always come back and wait it out. And he's thinking Reid is an experienced pilot and he wouldn't get us into anything he couldn't get us out of.

And Reid is thinking we have to make time, we have to make time. And it's not really-really bad. Let's go up and take a look—it's a small storm and we'll probably be out of it before we have the chance to make too many mistakes, anyway. And little Jessica likely had no idea at all the risks involved.

There are hundreds of sayings in Aviation. Little homilies and platitudes we use to remember important lessons. One of my favorite's says "Pilots who crash in bad weather are almost always buried on nice days". There is no wait that's too long, too inconvenient, when it comes to flying and weather.

Bah-Dee-Yah!

The great wheel has turned, again. It is now September, the month of Back To School and the month of Football and the month of cooler and drier. It's the month of my birthday and the month when everyone is on the lookout for that first Christmas signage in stores. It's the month of long sleeved shirts and the first sweaters of the season. The soundtrack is the Indigo Girls' All That We Let In. It is the month in which we say "Bah-Dee-Yah!"

It's a good time to take a quick look back, and see if anything is gaining on you. We have a third of a year left. If there are things you were supposed to get done you have 120 days, the work of which is easier than if it were only ninety, or thirty.

Going back the other way, 240 days ago my world was much different. Since then, I have given up teaching HTML and Dreamweaver and Templates, pretty much. From here on out, it will be the UNL installation of Drupal, the UNLcms. I'll also pick up a few other technologies. We've recently put in a new "clicker" system for the classroom. And we are about to switch e-mail systems. There will probably be some opportunities for me, there.

Oh, there'll be much to do with the UNLcms. I've done a bunch of short videos, explaining how to log in, how to create a basic page, how to add images and so on. But I have also scheduled eighteen classes in thirteen weeks, for those who want the hands-on experience, or just want to spend a couple of hours with me. And I suspect that in short order I will be working on a more intermediate course, and an advanced session, too. And then maybe a Best Practices or a Quick Tips session. So there is lots to do.

But yeah, things have changed. Maybe now I don't want to be championing Dreamweaver and HTML and CSS books in my recommendations over there on the right. Maybe I can donate some of the technical books in my library, both here at work and at home.

I was lucky to be born into a service family. My mother and my father were both Marines. We got transferred around a lot, when I was a little guy. I saw the whole country on 25¢ gasoline. September wasn't always such a great time for me, as no matter where I went or what I did, I was always The New Guy. One year I went off to school in new blue jeans, and the kids wanted to know if I was poor. The next year, clear across the country, I started school in dressier pants and all of the kids wanted to know if I was rich! But I have lived on both coasts, in the middle and seen the rest and I can tell you this much: I love it, here. When I was a SysOp for GE and Microsoft and when I was a freelance writer, I could have lived anywhere I had a telephone and a daily FedEx route. I chose to live here. There is nothing in life so great as an eastern Nebraska autumn.

So now let's take a moment and cross off a few things from our ToDo lists. And sure, let's add back a couple of the things we've been meaning to do, but haven't quite gotten around to, yet.

I'm going to commit to passing the Math Placement Exam, and getting back into school, again. I need to get a downspout replaced, a driveway settled and start saving in earnest for a new roof. I'm going to learn all I can about iClickers and Microsoft 365. And continue to learn about Drupal and the UNLcms. I want to learn more about teaching. I would like to do a better job of that, too. And I hope to be able to take a break from it all now and again, and enjoy a nice drive in the country—maybe take my Sweetie to Nebraska City for the apples in a few weeks. Maybe go into Omaha for some comedy. Maybe this is finally the time I decide to do something serious about my weight.

Yesterday, I received a plaque from work, in appreciation of fifteen years of dedicated service. It does not seem like fifteen years, to me. Seven? Eight? Ten, maybe? Sure. But not fifteen. I'm looking forward to a few more turns of the wheel, ahead.

Disruptive Technologies

We bought a home a year ago and are still moving in. Still wading through the boxes. But every box we open and deal with is its own little triumph Many recent boxes have me thinking about how disruptive technology is.

I've been in this game for years. My first wife managed a RadioShack store when the TRS80 was big news. I had a friend who built his own computer from HeathKit.

As a mainframe computer operator, I used to chat with kids in Europe over a precursor to the modern internet. We'd discuss politics, movies and Formula One autoracing. We sent e-mail to one another. We joined lists of like-minded fans of various movies, computers and technologies. I was on one for Macintosh programmers, for a while. Every day I'd get a digest of all the tips and troubles people had discovered, all over the world, learning to program Macs.

I wanted two things out of owning a computer: I wanted to hook up with people who were earning a living writing, and I wanted access to stock market information. I had no idea what I was looking for, in particular. I just knew if I could download a years' worth of trading data, it might be useful, somehow, in predicting what prices would be tomorrow. The GEnie Writers' RoundTable turned out to be far more valuable, leading to a freelance writing career that spanned almost fifteen years, and an online career that spanned more than a dozen.

I don't remember my first electronic mail. I'm pretty sure it was at HDR in Omaha, running a Control Data CYBER 170. I do remember thinking it was pretty cool, though. Press a button here and *Whoosh!* your thoughts spilled out on someone else's screen a mile or more away. Flash ahead thirty years and the post office is running all kinds of modeling simulations that all point to closing post offices, restricting mail delivery to only part of the week, or both.

I found an old tax return, last week. I'd paid seventeen dollars to have it prepared. Then, somewhere along the way, I started doing it myself on my Macintosh. I prepared and filed our taxes every year for years, until we bought this house. I have copies of all of those returns printed out and sleeping in file cabinets somewhere. I also have copies on floppy disks I cannot read. I don't have a computer that uses 3½″ floppies any more. My tax program, MacInTax, was sold to Intuit somewhere in the middle, there. I switched to Windows computers for a while, and TurboTax, then switched back to the H&R Block program because I was mad at Intuit by then. I can't read any of them, now. And I don't know anyone who could help with that, either.

I have fabulous boxes perfectly designed to store 3½″ floppies, and CD-ROMs, too. Interlocking, heavy-duty plastic drawers and really nice little wooden rolltop boxes. I mean I had a ton of these, back in the day, and apparently I thought this was how we would keep and store data forever, or something.

I have boxes of incredibly complex hardware. How do you hook up a Macintosh printer to a Windows computer, or vice-versa? I've got a pig-tail, somewhere, I'm sure, with the right plug at both ends. Some of these come with stories.

I have nothing to connect these to. I have no hardware that requires or even accepts SCSI, now. I have dozens of cables to hook up alternatives to travel Macs in the era before the Macintosh Portable shipped. I bought a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop and Microsoft Works, as close as I could get to the Macintosh experience. I had a terrific translation program I did a review on (and kept) that would translate between five or six MS-DOS and Windows programs and four or five Mac versions of word processors, spreadsheets and several other formats. Now it's just spaghetti. Colored wires in a box. Lots of colored wires in lots of boxes.

I remember thinking when I bought most of them that this would be the last thing I would need, for a while. As if I actually thought I was through spending technodollars.

Well, before the Next Big Thing arrives, I need to throw this (now) crap away and get the boxes out of my life. Right now, I need the room more than I need the stories and the wires.

Just Like in the Brochure…

I am so proud of our crew of WebFolk at UNL. Today is our first day in the Big-10 and to celebrate, we shined-up our Template design again. This was much more of an evolutionary change than we have seen previously.

Up to now, changes have been incredibly minor after really radical updates. Most people don't even notice the difference between how the page looked a month ago and how it looks today, and then every three years or so it gets really updated.

The change this time was an update to our navigation.

Navigation on UNL Web pages has been a challenge. We started with just a column of links, for years. The design updated, but the page itself was just a column of links. Then we went with the "UNL Today" model, where things started changing every day, and sometimes several times per day. That was when people really started paying attention to the page, as you can imagine. And that was when the navigation changed to an horizontal orientation.

This served us well until politics and technology caught up with us. And then we rolled out an ingenious biplane horizontal navigation scheme that was a wonder to behold. It was Hell to try to teach, because it was hard to understand, but yeah, depending upon where your mouse had been in the upper deck, you saw other links in the area just below it. Worked in all browsers and was really an inspired bit of programming on someone's part. But, it was very hard to teach people how to deal with navigation that changed like that. And it wasn't a proud moment in accessibility, either. So when the template changed again, the navigation waterfalled down the left side of the page, in what became the first column. When navigation ended, we had a brief word from our sponsor—a rotating image of postage-stamp -sized news or local-interest pieces. And then came the related links.

This was much easier to teach, and much easier to use. Since the page itself scrolled vertically, you could literally have as many menu options as you wanted or needed, and, sadly, there were a few sites that went that route. But there were also sites that didn't have a great many links and those sites looked… odd.

You had, at the top, navigation in the first column and then text and images that you really wanted on the right. But if you had scrolled down a ways and run out of navigation, alerts and related links, you had this huge area of white space in that first column. Images that cried-out to be displayed full-width were constrained within those other columns that were open to editing by the developer. The navigation had to move, again.

We ended up with it on top of the page. Now, it was up and out of the way of all of the content, and the use of digital cameras and HD-video went up dramatically. But the way we'd implemented it was kind of clunky. For most people, navigation is a modal operation. That is, while they are "navigating" they aren't really concerned with anything else. So all of the links went into a giant shelf that popped-down when it was needed. How did we know it was needed? It detected that you had moved your mouse over any of the navigation links in the navigation block. Kewl. Except that we had quite a few pages where you needed to log in (above the nav) and then needed to work with data in forms on the page (below the nav). Crossing the navigation revealed… all of the linkage. We fine-tuned it a little by putting in a timer so that it didn't reveal all of the links unless you had actually stopped moving your mouse for a little more than half a second and that improved things, but it was still kind of clunky.

Last night, the school joined the Big-10 conference, and we celebrated by rolling out a New&Improved navigation. The links themselves were marked-up in countless pages, so we couldn't change that. All we could do was adjust the Cascading StyleSheet and the behavior it used on the navigation area. And that change rolled out last night.

And it went almost perfectly. I have received, as of lunch on the first day, exactly one telephone call about it, and no e-mails. It was fairly easy to walk the user through fixing the problems she was having, having mostly to do with page validation, after all. The whole thing was surprisingly pain-free.

And all it took was a little careful attention to the rules. Huh! Who'd a thunk it?

Rules Shouldn't Get In The Way

Rules is rules. I appreciate that we would all be nowhere if there weren't any rules. But sometimes rules get in the way of doing meaningful work, and that's when someone, somewhere, should step up instead of just going along because "things have always been this way".

This week, I've been dealing with rules that don't make sense, and with people lying to me about them.

I have been a long time customer of Time-Warner Cable, here in Lincoln. I used to say that my cable-TV money was some of the best money I spent every month. For about the price of a single evening out, I got incredible news and entertainment pumped into my home, without problems. Then they went digital. Lincoln was their beta test site for the new software and we had troubles with the tuner, the connection, and several other issues. And then we moved.

At the new house, we had Time-Warner come in and set things up. They messed up initially, not delivering a HDTV box when said we were switching from old-TV to HDTV, but after that, things ran pretty well. Occasionally there would be a catch or a hiccup in a DVR'd selection, but for the most part things ran fine. We had two boxes, for upstairs and downstairs TVs, two DVRs, a couple of the tiers they insist they have to offer and a couple of remotes, plus high-speed internet. It all worked much better than in our old apartment and I thought we'd put all of the trouble behind us.

At a local street fair, Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln had a booth, and Paul was glad to meet us and ask us if we had service. I announced that we did, we had two boxes of digital HDTV, with DVR and a couple of tiers and HBO and Showtime, plus their RoadRunner internet. His cohort gave us a couple of free Movie On Demand coupons and Paul asked why we didn't have our telephone bundled, too? He went on to explain that for a limited time, he could tune us up with telephone, TV, DVR, remotes, tiers AND internet for about $120 a month. I was interested, because we'd been paying about $185, without the telephone. In fact, we'd just gotten a $175 telephone bill. He was now offering to bundle everything together for less than we paid for either the phone or the TVs and internet. Sweet! "Why wouldn't a guy go along with a deal like that?" I asked, rhetorically, setting up an appointment with Paul.

A couple of days later, he was at our door with a contract. Two years. Yadda-yadda-yadda, $120-something dollars, with taxes and fees and so on it was still comfortably less than we had been paying to either the phone company or to Time-Warner Cable, before. So we were in! He called in and got an appointment to have the guy come out on Wednesday, the 29th.

The next day, Kathie and I each took the afternoon of Wednesday the 29th off as vacation.

Saturday, we got a call from the Time-Warner cable installation technician. He said they could not switch service over until a lock on our account had been lifted. He said to call Windstream and ask them to un-lock our account. And this I did, this morning.

Now, the Time-Warner Cable guy did not say that we would not get our service installed on Wednesday. He did not say that, because of this problem we would have to go back into the queue for another appointment. He did not even say that we should call back to confirm the release of the lock on the old landline account. As far as I knew, everything was still on track for him to come out on Wednesday and install our new telephone service. But I decided to make sure, and so I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln to let them know the lock would indeed be lifted by the time of the scheduled appointment.

I was comforted, after negotiating their silly voicemail system, with the news that I had an appointment already scheduled, for Wednesday, the 29th. Was this the appointment I was calling about? Sure! I pressed various keys at various times and eventually got to talk to Sarah. Sarah was happy I was joining the ranks of the Time-Warner Cable telephone customers and happy that my lock had been lifted, but regretfully informed me that it would take another week to get my service switched over. This was just a minute and a half after the robot told me I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday the 29th.

"Oh, no", I said. "We have an appointment for Wednesday. My wife and I have both taken off of work to be here for the guy". But Sarah would not be moved. No, July the 6th was the soonest they could get there. Why? "It takes a week to get the information from Windstream to the installers". But the information is already winding its way to the installers—in fact, one called me on Saturday and knew everything about me and the job coming up, including the lock on the Windstream account. "Right. Those locks take a week to get lifted" said Sarah. "I was promised it was to be lifted by 7pm tonight I told her.

"Oh. Uh. Hmmm. Did they give you a confirmation number?" It sounded like she had me, there. Uh, no, they did not.

We hung up and I called Windstream back. They gave me the confirmation again that the lock would be lifted by 7pm tonight. And they gave me a confirmation number: C73032. I called Time-Warner Cable in Lincoln back and, once again, was told by the robot that I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday, the 29th in the afternoon. Was this the appointment I was calling about?" It sure was. Back with a live serviceperson again, I waited for Sarah to finish a call and proudly gave her my new confirmation number. "Okay, so let's set this up then for the afternoon of... July 6th?" "Uh, no. It's already scheduled for the afternoon of the 29th—I just heard about it again on the way back in here." She wouldn't let go of the whole "It takes seven days" thing. Finally I asked to speak with her supervisor. I was put on hold, listening to Muzak and drumming my fingers while, I was sure, she prepped her boss about the unreasonable *&^%$#@! who wanted his phone installed on Wednesday.

A short time later, a sleepy-voiced Tom picked up the phone and asked what the problem was. I explained. We'd had a lock put on our phone service back in the 1980s to prevent people from switching our long distance service. We'd met Paul at Celebrate Lincoln and he convinced us to bundle telephone service with our TV and internet. A technician called Saturday, saying he couldn't make the switch without the lock being lifted. He didn't say the whole deal was off. He didn't say we would have to reschedule. He said call Windstream and have the lock lifted and this we did. I said that I had an appointment for Wednesday afternoon and had already taken vacation to be there for the guy. He said, "Yeah, that's going to take seven days". I asked why? He said they had to confirm the lock was gone and it took Windstream about a week to do those. I told him the Windstream rep told me it would be done by 7pm. Uh, it takes us a while to get the paperwork to the installers, too. The installers already have the paperwork.

Well, we would need a new appointment. Now he just said "That's just the way things are". Well, what happens to my old appointment? Who is going to get their phone on Wednesday the 29th, now that we're not? He didn't know. Why can't we get our old appointment back? If it's still in the system, then that time can't have been free'd up. Who better to lay claim to a newly-free'd appointment time than the people who were supposed to have it to begin with?

Tom sighed, heavily (always appreciated, from a customer service standpoint). He then told me, and this is the kicker: He told me that the earliest time he could get us was now Thursday, the 30th. He wanted me to take another half-day off, the very next day after our already-scheduled appointment, to have the agreed-upon work done. Suddenly, magically, wonderfully, no more seven-day waiting period. He was moving us straight to the head of the line, almost. Because he and I both knew that nobody was in our old appointment time, yet.

I pointed out that I had never been to Macy's. Never even to their Web site. But I could go online and order a freezer and it would be at my door by 10am the next morning and we don't even have a Macy's in town. It being, after all, 2011. He said yeah, but this was different. I said I wasn't after anything other than the deal I'd signed-up for.

I was so pissed-off at Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln that I told him to forget the whole damned thing. The longer I thought about this, the more convinced I was that what we really needed was to drop everything and sign up for the Quit Cable deal offered through Windstream. If we got fewer channels, so be it. We're fat and we spend too much time watching TV, anyway.

Twenty-five or thirty years of goodwill, shot to Hell. All because I wanted to confirm the work would be done on Wednesday, even though nobody had asked me to do that. And when he finally caved, he only caved as far as getting it all done the day after our appointment. It turns out it doesn't take seven days, after all.

I hate stupid rules. I hate being lied to. And I really don't care much for Time-Warner Cable of Lincoln, either. I have Wednesday the 29th off. If a guy does not come and switch our telephone service over, as agreed upon, I'll let our city councilman, Jonathan Cook, know about one more citizen who wants to see some competition for our local Cable-TV dollar. And I hope I have the strength to start quitting Time-Warner Cable.

It's the end of the World

…as we know it.

First, the Earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. Then Man. And then Gutenberg and then newspapers, advertising and, finally the Web.

And we built Web pages. Each page featured a navigation area, a part of the page devoted to getting us to other pages. And headers and footers. And content, even with images. And it was pretty good.

And browsers got better. And access got cheaper. And standards got more rigid and more and more people got online to check this out. Fortunes were made. Not by me, or anybody you know, but fortunes were made. And lost.

And then there were internet appliances all over. You could call up Web pages on your cell phone, on a tablet, from your game system or your car. That InterWeb thing was well and truly taking over. And responding to all of these changes, the developers of Dreamweaver did their best to keep up. Bugs were fixed. Features were added, massaged and deleted over the years.

Templating was added. Code hints. Invalid markup was highlighted. There were improvements to both the Design View and the Code View. Various workspace layouts were developed, and you could even make your own. Dreamweaver became, not just a great way to build Web pages, but Web sites as site management features were added. But still, the focus was on the pages and sites—not the content.

It's a subtle but important difference. People don't buy nails because they own hammers. They buy nails because they have two things they want to be joined together. Last year, Lowe's sold a skillion drill bits. Not because people wanted drill bits, but because they wanted holes. And that's how we ended up looking at a new CMS—a Content Management System.

We are past the point where it should take an army of skilled technicians to post a simple memo online. We shouldn't have to depend upon a few high priests of technology to get material uploaded. The democratization of the Web is nigh. We can use the technology to make itself easier. That leads us to the UNLcms.

Using Drupal, and the Dreamweaver Template model, we can create pages at the push of a button. We can carve up the content area with columns. We can insert images and make links and do a great job of building compliant pages without spending an inordinate amount of time and money (the same thing, often) learning an interfacing program. We needed the program because HTML and CSS was hard. But then the program became hard, too. Templates helped, but there's never been anything really easy about any of this.

Now we can build pages with a Web browser. We're not even tied to a single computer. We can add administrative users to cover vacations and delete them when they return. Right now, today, it doesn't do as much as Dreamweaver and the Templates but it's catching up, fast. I have seen it improve every week for more than a year, now. I look at it sort of like a parent watching a baby learn to roll over, and then sit up, and thinking of a day when the kid will be riding a bike and going off to school and choosing a career and so on. I don't really see the program as it is now—I see what it is becoming, what's possible.

And I love what I see, now.

There's a scene in the movie Other People's Money where Danny deVito talks about buggy whips, and how technology has made entire industries redundant. We don't teach people how to shoe horses, any more. We don't teach folks how to operate slide rules as much as we did just a generation ago. That's what we're up against, here.

I can talk about the differences between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms for a couple of hours. Document-centric modeling, updating Web pages from cell phones, not just Macintosh and Windows PCs. But the biggest difference I see between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms is that the UNLcms has a future.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

For the last few years, I've tried to teach myself to say "This used to be my dad's birthday". I'm done with that, now. This is the day my dad was born, regardless of whether or not he's still here. Dad was a countdown baby, "Five... Four... Three... Two..." (5/4/1932). He would have been seventy-nine years old, today.

I thought I was a pretty normal kid, growing up. Dad would, from time to time, try to teach me some goofy lesson about patriotism, about getting involved in my community, about civic responsibility. I was much more interested in trying to learn the opening solo of "Reelin' In The Years" and how to convince girls to go with me out to the airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to vote. It's also good to drive a new Camaro. Yesterday was Election Day here in Lincoln. Dad would have been proud of me, for voting.

The way I have dealt with the grief over dad's death is probably a measure of how important he was to me in life. I had no idea. Everyone else who lost a father seemed to be coping so much better so much quicker. I am still about nineteen seconds away from crying—sobbing—if I'm not careful. Friends I grew up with were back at work within a few days, continuing their educations, their careers, their families, their plans. I seemed to hit a wall there, for a long time.

I still have moments. The phone will ring and, for no reason at all, I find myself thinking, "Oh, that'll be Dad! I have to tell him about…". I find myself at Sears, looking at a long row of lawn mowers and thinking to myself, "What in Hell do I know about lawn mowers? I should talk to dad about…". I drive a 1995 Honda with 160,000 miles on it, and sleep under a roof with twenty years on it. How do I decide which one to replace, first? And how do I pay for it? And what do I do about the other one? Dad would know.

House advice, career advice, car advice, fashion advice. How to deal with family and friends and church obligations. How to get a dog. When I was twelve or fifteen, I didn't want any advice. Now, I would give anything to have him lecture me for just an hour.

When I was very small, Dad was super-human. He was a young, fit, Marine. He drove a sports car and had a wife and a dog and a house and… me. As I got older, he became more real. There was a time Dad was never wrong about anything. There was a time when he knew more about everything than I did. But gradually, he became less a Super man and more just a regular guy. We developed different interests. He loved to go fishing. I loved learning the guitar. I liked The Association and The Monkees, he liked Johnny Cash and Floyd Cramer. I found myself depending upon him less and less, as is the natural order of these things.

I feel cheated, somehow. It's funny. I've said this before, but I was much better prepared to lose him when he went to VietNam. Twice. When he came back, he became just "Dad" and on some level it's like I expected he would be with me forever. In VietNam, dad had occasion to ride around in helicopters and transport planes that were used to apply Agent Orange, to defoliate the jungle and make trails and personnel easier to find. They would go out on a spraying mission and come back, take the tanks and booms off of the aircraft, and then Dad would get in and fly to some other base with a bunch of mail, groceries and other supplies. They'd put all of that stuff back on and go back out spraying again and then send one of them back out to get him. He developed a lung condition. He died at seventy-three. He would probably be dead by now, if it weren't for that. But it's still hard. Somehow, I don't see it as an extra thirty-five years. I see it as a lost four, or five, or seven.

Dad would tell me it's fine to honor fallen heroes, but that it's up to us to make our own lives. Dad would tell me to get my nose back inside a Drupal book, because a whole lot of people are going to be depending upon me to know this stuff, soon. Dad would, as usual, be right. So I'm going to spend the rest of this day reading-up on Drupal, in his honor.

Happy birthday, Dad.

A Death in the Family

The tide may be going out on the Desktop Computer, folks. They are bringing back the old Commodore 64. When people start longing for the nostalgia of a bygone era with slow computers, bad graphics and lousy sound, you have to make a pretty compelling case to get people to turn loose of $1500 or so for a new state-of-the-art appliance that is becoming less and less a part of everyone's life. And nobody, not even Apple, seems to be able to do that, now.

I blame the cell phone industry. Whoever it was that first included a little calculator in their cell phone sent us down this path and today we are awash in mobile alternatives to the big, clunky, desktop computer. If a cell phone can do more than just connect you to the pizza delivery guy, if you can do math on it, then why hand over a bag of cash for a desktop computer to do those things? So the value of a desktop computer is decremented by whatever value you assign to the little calculator app. Add in calendaring, Web browsing and Angry Birds, and why would anyone want a desktop computer? Why, indeed.

Flash ahead a few years and desktop computers haven't changed, much. Oh, they're faster. They're always faster. And they have a little more memory than the last one you bought, sure. But when you're at your word processor, trying to decide whether to use "Start" or "Initiate" you aren't taxing your processor. You could make that decision comfortably with an old '286 or a MacPlus. Screens are nicer, bigger and with richer colors, but the screen on my six year old iMac is big, with nice color, too. And it still boots up, every day.

I can browse the Web (to some extent), on my iPhone. I can browse the Web on my iPad, too. I can get my e-mail on either machine. I can do my banking with either one, too. In fact, as far as day-to-day activity goes, I can do everything I would ever want, except take a day off, with my mobile devices (The software vendor behind the accounting for vacation and sick leave here does not work with the best standards-compliant software.).

Today's Apple iPhone, iPad and their contemporaries from other manufacturers can be loaded up with a month's worth of music, video, books, magazines, movies, television programming and podcasts. You can get the weather, including radar imaging for your location, which of course the hardware already knows about, probably. Press a button and find the nearest shoe store, or coffee house. Check in with friends on Facebook. With content management systems like Drupal, you can even work on Web pages with severely clever features, using only a Web browser.

The value proposition is weakening on the desktop. I'll need one to run my income taxes, next year. It is nice to see photographs in big, wide-screen detail and I do enjoy an hour or two of Civilization now and again. But I could see the "Home computer" becoming little more than a wireless router in many homes, practically unseen. A Mac Mini, up in some closet, somewhere, constantly monitoring the temperature, turning off unused household lights, keeping track of how old the milk is in the fridge, and watching out for and snagging old episodes of TV shows to record for later viewing.

The guy that built that first wheel really started something. We can't get enough Wheels. The guy that built the first telegraph started something, too, but now even Western Union is just a money-transfer store. Fewer and fewer homes have land-line telephones these days—there's a machine that came and went in about a century and a half. Could it be that the desktop PCs time was only half a century or so?

We'll see.

Spring Cleaning

It's fashionable to engage in the restoration of our various environments at home, at work and even in our cars, this time of year. We are encouraged to clean this and shine that and throw those away. Massive benefits accrue to those who do, including the Finding Of Lost Stuff and the Efficiencies of Not Searching for Things. People report fewer headaches, reduced lethargy and even lottery winnings after this cleaning is done.

Nobody talks about our computers.

If you have had your computer for more than a month, it is probably full of junk. If you have visited more than a dozen Web sites or ever upgraded software, your computer is almost certainly a museum of abandoned files.

This is a good time to go through your computer and see what can be tossed. Every computer manufacturer includes stuff you never use and never will and many publishers do, too.

If you are running NumberCruncher v5 you can be reasonably certain throwing away updaters for NumberCruncher v3.2 and v4 won't hurt you or your computer. It's popular now to send e-mails with links to little stubs of software that then go and get the real item, and start things working. I tend to keep these e-mails, but throw away the little stubs, which are easy for me to find because I always download everything to my Desktop folder. If you're unsure, it is probably a better idea to leave a file where it is and lose the small amount of space it is claiming, than to delete the file and discover it really was necessary, somehow.

I have a Macintosh, and a lot of this stuff is just simpler and easier on a Mac than on other computers, but the general theory is the same. If you install, say, Office, and you know you won't ever be using some component of it, you can reclaim a lot of disk space and make finding things in the future much easier if you can uninstall it or delete it. I don't have much need for Microsoft Messenger, for example. I don't remember being asked about it during installation, but it landed in my Applications folder, briefly. I am pretty much an AIM guy, and rely less and less on that.

Those little stubs of programs? They often mount virtual disk resources used to update or upgrade software. Once you have updated everything, you can un-mount the disk and throw it away. There are any number of README.txt or LICENSE.txt files on a typical hard drive. Trust me. Nobody from Adobe is ever going to knock on your door and ask to see your computer. You can nuke those, too.

As a Web guy, I am constantly building low-feature pages to test this or that concept. If I'm building a page with complicated navigation, for instance, it can be frustrating and distracting to build the navigation in a "real" page with content and so on. I will very often create a new, blank page, save it as bogus.html or something like that, then start hammering away on the nav. When I get the navigation working, I just copy or clip it out of the "bogus" page and paste it into a real page. That leaves me with, over the course of a year, potentially dozens of Web pages named bogus.html, in all of the directories I work in. These take up time and space—and if you work in a Dreamweaver environment, they take up space at least twice, locally on your own computer and remotely, on the Web server.

I have also abandoned whole programs. You know, at one time I thought maybe I would take the time to sit down and learn DigitSlinger. But it turns out I'm more of a NumberCruncher guy, working in a definite NumberCruncher environment. The folks who report to me and the folks I report to are all NumberCruncher users. Why do I want to spend the time and effort to learn new commands and keyboard shortcuts and various Save As… methods to get meaningful reports that everyone can use? It's easier to just join the crowd and put those hours (and dollars) to better use.

So, throw open the actual windows, and take a long, deep breath of pollen, and let's clean up our computers, this week. But first: Remember to make a complete backup of everything, Just In Case.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

And sometimes, you are better for it.

Do you remember "Datsun" cars? They are called "Nissan" now, but in the early days they were not convinced they were going to be successful. In fact, there is evidence to support the theory that the whole USA beachhead was put in place to bring shame and disgrace to a Nissan executive, Yutaka Katayama, to force him out of the company.

Let's put a minimal framework in place. Let's get the bare minimum of service and support. And let's call the whole operation "Datsun" so when we get our act together and go back to the American market in a few years, nobody will have a bad taste in their mouth over the name of the company. The idea was that in several years they would bring all new models, and new executives and a new will to succeed to the market. Few would associate Datsun with Nissan and 'Mister K' would have long since resigned, in disgrace.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. Datsun hit the USA at a time when people were ready for such cars. Our family had one and loved it—a little 510 sedan. Mom liked it because she could see every corner from the driver's seat, it handled well, got terrific gas mileage and didn't break down.

Mister K put in an order for little trucks. Nissan balked, but eventually sent some over. Mister K chided the factory and told them that he wanted the next batch to have carpeting, radios and other sedan-like "luxury" features. The factory wrote back and told Mister K he was nuts. The people in southern California were misusing their little trucks! These were working vehicles, not family transport! But Mister K had launched the little truck craze and Nissan had to swallow hard and work harder to get back out in front of it all, again. One by one, Mister K went from success to success and by the late 1970s, the cars started to be badged "Datsun by Nissan" and a short while later, the Datsun name, with all of its goodwill, was gone.

Sometimes things don't work out the way we have them planned. And that's not always bad. Sometimes it's terrific. Mister K retired a hero to Nissan and to thousands of American fans.

I had a situation like this, this last. Up until today, my training consisted of booking a classroom and making a dozen or so seats available. Folks juggle their schedules so they have a Tuesday morning free, or a late Wednesday afternoon, or whatever it works out to be, and they travel from wherever they work on campus to the classroom. We wait patiently for a few minutes for any last-minute stragglers who might be struggling with parking or walking all of the way to the West coast of UNL. And then we begin a face-to-face, hands-on training that walks people through the subject. There are opportunities to ask (a few) questions. For the most part, we spend the next two hours listening to me rattle on about whatever the subject is, then waiting for one or two of the students to complete an exercise before moving on.

I thought maybe, in the twenty-first century, there might be a better way to learn this. So I set about the task of building a bunch of videos. These each explained how to do one or two things, on more of a "molecular" level. I literally made videos explaining how to log into the system, and how to log out. There's one on how to edit the page footer. Click on the link and How To Edit The Footer is all you learn. The whole thing takes just a moment or two.

So, from the comfort and convenience of your own office or cubicle, you could learn only as much as you cared. As much as you had time for. As much as you wanted to learn, today. You could come back tomorrow and watch the same videos, or pick new ones. So there would be no waiting for two weeks until training you wanted was offered again. There would be no need to clear the decks of any other engagements and meetings on that day, so you would be able to commit a couple of hours or more to getting over here and going through it all.

I thought I would get the Nobel Training Prize for coming up with that. And I actually have gotten good feedback from it, and suggestions for more little movies. But there are a lot of people who need to actually sit and do something, to learn it. Some people can read something and they know it. Others can hear something and they absorb it best that way. Others have to actually do it, for something to sink in.

I had made no provision for those folks. I'm working on stand-up training, now. Things don't always work out the way we would like for them to. But sometimes, the result is even better than we had originally imagined.

Visit Your Own Site

When was the last time you visited your own Web site?

I don't mean when was the last time you updated a page, checked it over to make sure it validated and everything was spelled correctly. I mean when was the last time you came to your Web presence the way one of your own users might—especially a new user?

It's a good practice, and it probably should be done several times a year, but at least once per year would be an improvement for many of us. Do you have pages up that explain how your organization is planning to overcome any Y2K issues? Do you have directories filled with How To Use The Exciting New 2003 Version of the E-Mail Software? There is an awful lot of junk, online.

Cleaning it out will help you in several ways. First, it will make maintaining the rest of your site easier, because you won't have to wade through all of the distractions to find things you really want. Secondly, neither will your users. Looking things over and deleting the old stuff makes moving and updating your site structure much easier and that could be real important, real fast, if your site is one that is moving to the new UNL CMS project. Why convert a bunch of pages that are outdated and in the way, anyway?

Some of this is born of inertia. Some of it is just bad habit. In the Olden Days, I would often build a new, simple page with only the element I was working on present. That is, if I was trying to hammer out a new navigation scheme, or tweaking a table of data, I would build a Web page that contained only the new navigation, or only the new table. It was easier to me, it was less distracting. I would grind away at whatever it was and when things were working I would clip out just the relevant markup and paste it into the real page, and move on. Often as not, I would leave that stub, that experimental page, up on the server where it was unnoticed, unlinked and unloved. When I first stumbled across this method, I would name the page new -whatever the real page was. So, index.html became newindex.html. But some time later, I would find it really difficult to delete some of these stubby pages. What if I had linked to one of them, somewhere? About that time, I started naming these experimental pages bogus.html or trashthis.html. But even then, not all of them got deleted, I'm sure.

Web pages are simple text files, of course. Even the biggest are pretty small in the context of modern computing. But images are another thing. I stumbled upon a directory the other day that held about seven different versions of essentially the same image. One was 800x600 pixels. The next was slightly smaller, the next was the same smaller size, but saved at a lower quality, so the colors weren't as vibrant and the file size was much smaller. The rest were all variations on that theme—suck out some more color and trim the edges. This was really wasteful because image files (and movies) can be huge. Some folks do a better job at all of this than others, of course. But I'd bet that the average Web site may hold as much as 20% junk.

Take a look at your Web site. Look in front and behind the curtain. That is, tour your site with a Web browser and make note of links that are broken, links to pages announcing "News" that is now really History. Look for ways you can clean up the content on the page, as well. And then take a look at the file structure of your site. Look for unlinked files, duplicate files (especially images) and Things You Can Do WithOut.

When the time comes to update your site in any meaningful way, you'll be glad to have to do the work on fewer pages and files.

Priorities

They tell you, "If your house needs painting, and it's on fire, put the fire out, first". And this is supposed to teach you how to prioritize things. Folks nod and stroke their chins and move on as if they've just learned something.

I have a problem with this kind of thing. I always have. In Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon there is a story of a kid who saved his money all year and gave it to a friend who would travel to far-off lands and buy jewels. The guy brought back a few chips of colored glass and the kid lost his money. A few pages later, another guy is stuck outside the walls of the city at night, when a shepherd approaches him and makes a fast deal to sell his flock, which nobody can see because it's so dark. It sounds like a lot of sheep, there are sheep-noises coming from over here and over there and the shepherd seems like a nice enough guy and so the kid makes the deal. When the sun rises, he marches the herd into the city and sells the whole lot at a tremendous profit. I have never been able to figure out what we're supposed to learn from this. The first deal could easily have gone well and the second could easily have yielded five or ten widely spaced, noisy sheep.

At home, we're fresh back from the Home Show, with hundreds of vendors vying for our tiny fistfuls of dollars. What to do? We just bought the damned house last summer, and now we're thinking of changing things? Here's something: It's wearing it's third roof, and this one is nearing the end of its life. The water heater is giving up before the second shower is done. But we wish the bathroom was a little more up to date. We wish it had a dishwasher. We wish the driveway and the patio didn't drain into the basement. We wish the hardwood floors were a little fresher. There are unpleasantries in the yard. I am scared to death I will write a check to have something done, then immediately discover we now need a new water heater, or that new roof. Or something else we weren't even really aware of. It happens.

Prioritizing work is a gift. There are some things you just can't quantify. It's the old "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts" deal working again. Lately, I've been working on creating little videos, tiny little movies showing how to do simple little molecular tasks. Instead of coming to a two-hour session with me going over forty-'leven things the new software can do, you can now download as much or as little help as you need. There's a movie showing how to log into the system. If you have questions about how to log in, they are answered here. Nothing else is, but you will definitely learn how to log in. There's a How To Log Off video, too.

It's been difficult at times, because the system I'm teaching is growing and evolving, at the same time. So it's like trying to a hit a moving target. Sometimes I have found myself half way through an issue, only to find that the developers are tuning-up that part of the machine and things won't work Friday the way they did when I made the movie on Tuesday. At other times, I've stumbled upon things that don't quite work as advertised, only to be met with "Oh yeah, that doesn't work, yet" from the crew. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe it'll take a month. Maybe it won't be available until Version 2.00. There is definitely an air of plate-spinning at work, here.

But I am confident that this way is going to be a better tool. Sure, it's hard to schedule a training session that runs two hours and is only offered two or three times per month. And what do you do until that day and time rolls around? But everyone has two or three minutes in their day they could use to learn how to build tables in their pages. And why should they have to wade through twenty minutes of working with images, when all they really want to learn is how to build tables?

Some day this summer I'll look back on all of this and laugh.

Or, cry.

Technology Often... Works.

Technology is great, except when it stops working.

I've had some experience with this, recently. It's been an interesting exercise in deductive reasoning, and deduct-from-your-checking-account spending.

At work, I connect to the Internet via a network. The speeds are unbelievable, usually. Since I moved to this office last summer, I have had no problems with my MacBook Pro, hooked up to an Apple LED Cinema Display, so it mostly acts as a desktop computer. But I can un-hook a couple of cables and pack it off to meetings quickly and easily. While I'm there, I depend upon Apple's AirPort WiFi to connect to the UNL WiFi network. And again, since I got this machine I have never had any trouble doing so.

Last week, something changed. My hardwired Ethernet wasn't working at all. Now, you might think, as I did, that, absent any wired networking, the WiFi would take over and I'd still be "online" but at a slightly lower speed. But that wasn't the case. When I unplug everything and take the machine to a meeting, WiFi works. But as long as it was cabled-up, it thought the wire ought to take care of things.

I did, too.

It took at least six people and six days to fix this problem. Along the way I was comforted, some, by the knowledge that it wasn't just me that was having the problem. Also, along the way, I discovered a bunch of things I was supposed to have done last summer never got quite finished. I had moved the money-accounting paperwork from my old cubicle to my new office. But I had not moved the network-accounting paperwork over. There were other issues, too.

At home, we awoke Tuesday morning to no Internet. Ours comes through our cable-TV folks, and the machinery was all downstairs. So, I went downstairs and turned everything off, then turned it all back on, one unit at a time... First the cable modem... then the AirPort WiFi hub, then I came back upstairs and started the iMac. This is usually all we've needed to do, but no matter how many times I did it, nothing ever seemed to improve. The telephone guy said he could "see" my cable modem and he could see that it could see the AirPort machinery.

Some weeks back, I'd purchased an Apple TimeCapsule backup machine and it featured Apple's AirPort wireless, too. I bought it so I could literally plug it in anywhere, but if you do the math, it can function as a base station, too. So, over the weekend, I plugged it in (upstairs, this time) and tuned it up to act like WiFi as well as backup. That solved my problem and so now I have Internet at home and at work, just like a month ago.

But it was an awkward week or so, there. It amazes me, how quickly new technology becomes necessary, and how difficult it is, to back down to previous technology. What was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, is barely workable, today. I have no idea where I might even buy a modem, today, if it came to that. I'm glad it didn't.

I saw a news story this week saying there is one, one new car available today as a 2011 model, that comes with a Cassette interface in the radio. Kind of ironically, at least it seems to me, it's a new Lexus. The times they are a changin', huh? One day there will be an even better/cheaper/faster way to network our machinery. And one day we will celebrate, with a sense of nostalgia, the last album to be released on CD.

From the Time Marches On desk: Today is my mother's birthday. This morning, my sister Amy stood, with her store-bought foot. What a present for mom, but mom couldn't quite enjoy it because she was in the emergency room. They've put her in a room at least for overnight, and we'll know more tomorrow, probably. But the wheel keeps turning.

Not-So New Year

So, how's that whole New Year thing working out for you?

Mine hasn't been so good.

I'm preparing a series of training videos that explain how to use the new Content Management System we are going to be rolling out, soon. I've got a couple dozen done so far, showing how to log in and how to log out. How to create a page and how to delete one. How to edit your page navigation and the various page elements like footers and related links and so on.

The thing is, in order to explain how any of this works, I have to know, myself. So, I'm busy learning the In's and Out's of this new beast, while at the same time keeping an eye on how to distill some of this new-found knowledge in two- and three-minute chunks.

I haven't done anything like this, before. The closest was my radio career, when, after my air shift was done I had to report to Production, and spend however much time was needed to create any new commercials that needed to be done. But even then, I never had to synchronize my audio with anyone's video, before. Play a few records, put them away, walk down the hall and speak glowingly for thirty seconds exactly about Johnson Lawn and Garden. Boom-boom... Boom!

This has been a whole lot of fun, and I think it will eventually be a really good way to pick up how this all works. Instead of having to juggle your schedule to find two hours to come and listen to me talk about it, you can get started right away, catching the how to log on/how to log off series and working your way from there. Later on, if you can't remember how to edit page footers, you don't need to schedule another two-hour session and wait for a week or two... you can just revisit the little movie about page footers and get on with things. Over time, I expect our initial two dozen or thirty movies to expand into three-dozen, or four-dozen or even more. Each one devoted to just a single, molecular aspect of how the greater system works.

I'm learning all kinds of things, this semester. I'm learning a lot about home ownership. This morning, I took the garbage out. Three steps from the garage, I was just hanging on, until the giant receptacle made it down hill to the sidewalk. I wrestled it over into the grassy/snowy area between the curb and the sidewalk and turned around. Two steps later, I was doing one of those cartoon motions where I'm okay from the belt up, but from there down everything is just a blur. I fell onto (mostly) my left hand and wrist. I spent a few minutes there on the ice, in front of maybe thirty cars, trucks and minivans and at least one StarTran bus, when an older gentleman approached on the sidewalk coming from the west.

He had seen me fall and immediately turned north on 38th Street and parked, got out and walked back to make sure I was alright! By the time he got to my house, I was up in a newborn-colt sort of way and making my way up the yard, walking on the traction-rich front lawn. He escorted me back up to the little sidewalk connecting the driveway to the front door. There, he turned, bade me farewell and encouraged me to be more careful.

This old man stopped on his way to work to help me get up and make sure I wasn't hurt. What a sweetheart, right?

I spent about an hour worrying if I'd ever play guitar again, the left hand being rather important in that endeavor, and wondering I'd broken anything. The whole thing took about as long and felt about as bad as when I'd broken my foot, on Hallowe'en. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Hmm... that's going to be—Boom! There I am, flat on the ground, and in front of traffic again, too.

At work, I've spent most of the last week restarting my computer. I can maintain a network connection for only between three and twenty minutes. It's like a giant arm goes across the entire network every, say, twenty minutes, pulling errant networkers offline. If I happen to come on right after it passes, I can get fifteen or twenty minutes of work done, and saved and uploaded. If not, well, so far today alone I have restarted sixteen times, and it's only 2:30pm.

How's your New Year, so far?

The Naming

Okay, something has to be done about product names in this country. It's getting out of hand. Maybe toward the end here we'll tie this into Web pages, somehow, but even if not, this is important.

When I was a kid, names meant something. You could focus your attention on a Mustang or a Nova and everyone knew what you meant. But we have so many names today that don't mean anything, or mean the wrong things, or mean something different than what's actually going on. It's stupid, it's wasteful and it has to be hurting our general productivity in some way.

Consider the iMac. The iMac is a model of Macintosh. And the Macintosh is a line of computers from Apple. But here's the thing, it's been more than twenty years since Apple offered a computer other than the Macintosh. In the 1980s, if you told someone you were buying "an Apple computer" they didn't know if you were getting an Apple II, a Lisa or a Macintosh. Apple was GM. Apple II and Lisa were Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Macintosh was Chevrolet. Within the Macintosh line there were several models. Macintosh II, Mac SE/30, Macintosh LC/II, etc., roughly corresponding to Camaro, Impala and Malibu, let's say. But today, every computer Apple builds is a Macintosh. So is it helpful, or necessary, to have to indicate Apple Macintosh iMac? Apple themselves noticed less and less of their income comes from Macintosh, in an era of telephones and iTunes and so on. They thought it over and dropped "Computer" from their name. Apple Computer is now just "Apple". It's a start.

A lot of model designations don't mean anything, any more. Again, there was a day when your grandpa could say he was going to buy a new Chevy and everyone knew what kind of car he would have in his driveway. When more and more models were developed, Chevelles and Corvairs and so on, you had to add those names to the first to convey the complete idea.

So it wasn't just a Cadillac, any more. It was a Cadillac El Dorado. But then these designations were fractured, as various trim levels were developed. This wasn't so bad at first. A full-sized Chevrolet could be a Biscayne, an Impala or a Caprice. So now we're up to three names to adequately describe the product. Pontiac Firebird TransAm. And then it all went to Hell.

This morning, on the way to work, I followed a Pontiac. On one side of the trunk lid it said "G6". On the other side, it said "GT". Well, which is it? What does "LE" mean to, say, anyone? And how does it differ from "GLE" or "SE" or "SEL"? And why should anyone care if your car has a V6 or a V8 engine, a 5-speed or an automatic transmission? Sport-tuned suspension? Is there a badge that indicates you bought too much of a radio, too? These started out innocently enough. European brands added "i" to model names to indicate fuel injection, but who is doing the bragging, here, BMW or the new car owner? In the Mercedes-Benz family, "SL" meant Sports Light. But American brands applied these letters to cars that weighed 5000 pounds.

Then marketers noticed something about those numbers and letters. People didn't bond with them the way they did real names.

And, as if it was a Good Thing, the alphabet started to appear all over. The focus wasn't on the minutia any more, it was back on the brand, where the marketers wanted it. You weren't supposed to love a DeVille, you were supposed to love a Cadillac. So today, Cadillac sells CTS and DTS and STS vehicles. Conjure up any images for you? Me, neither.

It's at work at Acura, too. Fancy a new TSX or ZDX or MDX or RDX in your driveway? Uh, no. I miss the old Acura Legend, Integra and Vigor. I knew what those were. This year, the Lincoln catalog is just as confusing. MKZ, MKS, MKX, MKT? I got nothin'.

Adam allegedly spent a while naming all of the animals. Despite similarities and differences, Africa and India both got "Elephant" while one has big ears and the other doesn't. We don't have a Elephant GL and an Elephant GLE.

I guess we can be glad of that.

The New Start

First things, first. I hope everyone will take a moment or two and update their footer.html documents to reflect the new year for copyright dates (and no, I still haven't done all of mine).

It happens every year.

I spend the first week of every year steeped in awe and wonder and just full of the sheer possibilities every new year affords. It's like being a school kid and heading off for that first day with all of those clean, empty pages in my notebooks. I could write stories in those pages. I could do homework. I could sketch out some new idea for a submarine or a jet fighter. I could write a tentative love letter to The Little Red-Haired Girl. I could do anything.

Of course, the reality is a little less lofty. But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, version 1.1, I think it's still a Good Idea to spend a few calories at the beginning and ending of any arbitrary period of time and decide what you expect out of it. Think about what actually got done. Think about the difference between the expectation and the reality. And to wonder a little about how to improve the situation in the next arbitrary time period, whether it's a day, a week, a month or a year.

Years ago, I learned HTML. And when HTML v3.2 gelled, I picked up on the changes, there. HTML v4.01 was a snap for me. And I remember thinking I could spend a few dollars and a few calories working-up JavaScript or I could work on Cascading StyleSheets and choosing CSS, because it seemed like everyone was saying JavaScript was on the way out. And for years, I was right. JavaScript was on its way to becoming Web Latin, our first popular "dead" language. And then AJAX happened. And then JQuery happened. And now I'm behind the curve, again. For the last several years, I have vowed that this next one would be the one where I, finally, learned JavaScript. I wouldn't put any money on a bet like that for 2011, though. It may happen, but I think my focus will be more on HTML5 and Adobe's CS5 suite and Drupal, with a smattering of iPad thrown in there, too.

Folks made fun of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he said "…as we know, there are known knowns; there are some things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." But if you parse it out, he was right.

And so this year, I want to focus on the things I know I do not know. Drupal and HTML5 both have a beginning and an end. You can start at <a> and learn all of the tags and how to use them and when you get done, you will have learned all of the unknowns in HTML5. Same with Drupal. That's not to say you'll know everything about how the pieces work together, or all of the best practices and theories behind the best deployment—everyone knows the alphabet, but not everyone can write like Stephen King or Tom Clancy. But you will have a good, complete foundation and you can work from there.

So what about you? What are you working on, this year?