bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

A Ten Second Type Nerd Test

Skim the snippets below and guess which OS each choice represents. One was rendered in Windows XP, another in Mac OSX, and the third with the new improved font-rendering in Ubuntu (Linux).

 

Now compare your snap impression with the fuller view in this posting at CrowdSpring. My own vote goes with "Artby Audrey" (i.e. Ubuntu is still far from the best, but it has gotten a whole lot better).

Texting Counts More Than Sex with (Some) Women

"One Third of All Women Pick Cells Over Sex" said the teaser on my Yahoo home page, so of course I clicked and read it. That's not all they reported. In addition to noting the cities in which roughly 1/3 of the females said they'd give up sex before they gave up their cell phones, this recent study reported that 80% of cell users spend up to 20% of their waking hours IM'ing, while more than a third of all respondents said they prefer texting to talking live. Some will see these stats as the death of civilization as we knew it. Draw your own conclusions; I merely convey the data. Rest of story is here.

Multi-Modal Reminders 2Go

For mobile minds on the move, portable reminders are often a must-have tool. But where to find such tools and how to use them in a cross-platform way (email and SMS) is not 1-click obvious.

My friend, CC, found this out when she wanted to help her kid at college remember to test her blood and take her meds before she risked an episode. Daughter was always a few steps short of overload, and so mobile it seemed there was no one good way to prompt her even if Mom was willing and able to set her own alarms and sit at her desk pressing "Send" 4x per day. (Yes, Mom could insist that her offspring manage the problem for herself, but failure is not an option here.)

Each tool she looked at had its limits, and only some of them would work if either Mom or kid was unplugged from the Net. When CC came up empty after several searches for multi-model cross-platform repeating auto-reminder tools, my own Internet Bloodhound kicked in.

Eyes On Your Chest or Brain on a Stick?

At a future tech event about 12 years ago, some speaker predicted within a decade Moore's Law would make it possible to pack your whole life on one digital card that fit in your pocket.

He didn't just mean all your papers and email, or even all music and photos. He literally meant your entire conscious experience, a continuous stream of everything seen or heard in real life or online, captured and carried in one device.

My first thought in that pre-Google era was how-in-heck would one organize such a sea of data? A card filled with my entire experience would be pretty darn useless if it was as big a moshpit as my desk. And even if I could filter for relevance, I can't imagine wanting to rewind that much.

Well, fast-forward us back to the future, but here is a story about a product that sounds spookily similar, arriving just as predicted, about a decade later.

Slow Dancing in the Fast Lane While Loving XP

I am an early adapter and a quick shifter -- except when I'm so the opposite. And changing my OS or my CPU has always been in the "aww, do I hafta?" column for me, although I do succumb eventually.

My slow-mo switching is not only about the cost, but also about the disruption of deeply-etched routines. I don't want to take time to burn in a bunch of new menus and moves. My eyes and hands already know what to do without thinking twice. So when it comes to my daily work life, I'd rather be extra-adept at an old routine, if it still gets a good job done, rather than learn a new one. It gives a nice illusion of maximum ease and maximum speed.

The mental sense of hunt and peck involved in a new OS or a new GUI puts all kinds of kinks in the seamless flow I get from my old faves. Just call me the Legacy Lady.

I am so hard-over about this, that when brainstorming drafts and sketches in "Back of the Napkin" mode, I still open my older versions of Word and PowerPoint. It is so much more faster and fluid for me than squinting at menus in their '07 equivalents.

In short, I am the kind of user I am sure they love to hate in Redmond.

Stages of Servitude

The 'toon in my "Gaping Void" widget today is too big a grin not to share before it scrolls. Every itinerant creative will enjoy. Click to see the strip full size: Three Stages of Slavery.

It only leaves us to muse what phases Four and Five might be?!

When My DVR Said Delete or Die

Fresh from the Things They Don't Tell You Until It's Too Late Department:  Last night I was forced to permit a complete delete of every one of the 50* shows waiting in line on my DVR (a VIP622 from Dish Network). What's worse, in the end, I had to pull the trigger personally.

The system appeared to give me no choice and no hope, no invitation to call for possible help. The only options were to click "Delete Now" or leave it locked up. Nonetheless I hopped online and then phoned Dish before I could bring myself to push that big orange button.

Now In the hope you will be spared the same wasted 90 minutes, I will give you both the short story and the long one, then hope some web spider finds it before this hits another customer.

Punchline first: If you see a blue screen of death like the one at left with the warning code 760 (click on image) whatever you have saved on your Dish DVR is probably toast. Hasta la bye bye.  But if you hope for a prayer of saving your shows, read on past the jump. Perhaps one of the tips to follow (including what "soft reboot" means) will do more for you than they did for me.

I just wish I could say I had as happy ending as did some of the folks who were giving me tips. Instead, around midnight, all my neighbors probably heard me say "aaaaaaaaaaargh!" This was not just because I could not stop the loss of saved shows (some of which were kept for work). I was also kicking myself almost as hard as I wanted to kick the DVR since I did not heed the warning signals soon enough.

What's Cool in the Clouds: CrowdSpring

With this post I am adding a new tag, "Cool Tools Web2". Cloud computing (where the software lives up on a server and you log in to get things done online) is spawning a zillion cool apps that do cool things simply, typically for free. Much of it is quite entrepreneurial too, since the ranks of the self-employed are swelling now like a mushroom cloud.

Over the next two weeks, I will be doing a series of posts reviewing Web2 sites I have sampled and like. A few don't seem quite ready for prime time, but are worth a look anyway since early adapters often gain an edge. But my first in line has been around awhile, and seems to be a hotbed of creativity. This one is less a tool and more a community, but it is very Web2 in offering great connections quickly.

CrowdSpring.com is a collaborative of artists and designers who compete for commissions from clients. Want a logo? Post a request, say what you will pay, and dozens of artists may sketch suggestions within a day. Pick your favorite, pay the tab, and everyone wins, including the perusing web surfer like me who just enjoys browsing some really nice graphics.

A bit of "web wow"

One of the loveliest web sites I have seen in a long time belongs to a high profile team of architects in NYC, the husband/wife duo of Diller & Scofidio (short bio here). Their projects are quite dazzling -- from converting old rail tracks to new linear parks in the sky to revamping a major music venue at Lincoln Center or placing a Swiss expo building inside a literal cloud -- and so is their web site, including the elegant ease with which you can browse the entire portfolio in either visual or verbal form. It's well worth the time to click around if you want to be inspired wtih stellar design both online and out in the world. Take your own tour here: dillerscofidio.com.

Calling All Coders

If you are wondering who in the tech set appears to have job security these days, it would appear to be the coders (Bangalore notwithstanding). According to Channel Insider [ci], the following skills are both well-paid and in high demand currently, right here at home:

1. PHP pundits (2,000+ openings posted in the last 90 days)

2. SQL savvy (demand has jumped 100% since last June)

3. HTML honchos (up to $500 per hour)

4. .NET specialists (up to $1k per project)

5. Java gurus (10 new job postings every day)

6. C programming (455 new postings in the last month, especially for iPhone apps)

7. MySQL (1200+ jobs posted in the last month)

8. CSS Specialists (969 current projects listed at ELance alone)

9. SEO expertise (15 new projects daily for those in the know)

Click here to jump to a [ci] slide show with detail.