Marking time still…

Just keeping this spot warm…been too busy with new duties to keep up with reading blogs, much less writing in one :-P.

Changes

Well, today is my last day in the office working for Agilent Technologies. Even though I will be starting with HP doing much the same work (although for a broader array of clients), I am surprised by the sense of loss that I feel in leaving.

Keeping this blog warm

Nothing substantive today, but just wanted to keep a new post going from time to time.

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Thinking about Outcomes

It’s interesting how themes keep coming up again and again. One that keeps popping up for me is the importance of considering outcomes for any activity, project, action or even life.
One of my professors at Fuller Seminary consistently challenged everyone to "finish well" and "begin with the end in mind".
In What’s the Perfect Outcome, Jeffrey Phillips riffs on the theme as does David Allen in Outcome thinking rocks. Of course planning and thinking of the desired outcome ("What does success look like for this project?" and "What does complete mean for this project?") is a critical part of the whole GTD workflow as well.
One of the strongest calls for the importance of outcome thinking is in the book Start with No! by Jim Camp. I’ll have a review and a mind map of the book up next week.

Don’t neuter the Net

Oliver Rist provides some additional ammunition for network neutrality (not the same as network castration) in his InfoWorld column: Don’t neuter the Net. He highlights the new legislation introduced by Oregon senator Ron Wyden with the spectre of what might happen if network neutrality is not preserved:

consider what your outsourced Exchange hosting costs suddenly become when Verizon gets to crank up the hosting provider rates — with no cap. Or your outsourced spam filtering. Or your Web hosting. Or that off-site Internet-based backup solution you’re using for disaster recovery. Or your branch office VPN costs. Or that neat little Web-based team collaboration and wiki service

For more info on the bill introduced by Senator Wyden, see details from the Library of Congress S.2360.

Test mobile submission & typepad observations

Me! playing with my new phone cam. This is a quick test to see how things work when sending email into my blog.

It’s interesting that typepad ignores my default "draft" setting when getting an email submission.

Also, text wrapping settings in the original HTML email are also not applied apparently, but more testing will need to be done.

I notice that the interface for typepad refuses to use 24hr time formats even though I’ve specified that everywhere I can find in the interface.  Might have to look into wordpress to see if that works "better".

The Interactive Desktop?

Take a look at the video here:

Vic Divecha’s Tech Blog has some interesting comment threads about this "next generation" input/output device coming out of Jeff Han’s lab at NYU. The comments are interesting in the back-and-forth from "what’s it for" to "gee, I could really use that".

O’Reilly radar has a good writeup too.

The new death march or walking to work?

Walking on the job, while working on a computer or on a teleconference…a NEAT 😉 concept (see below), but can you imagine it being implemented in a cubicle farm? (Update: I just ran across Brain Death by Dull Cubicle which casts an interesting counter-point.)

This article about Dr. James Levine has more details (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/life_work_dc):

. . .based on a theory nicknamed NEAT, or
non-exercise activity thermogenesis, founded on the idea that
people burn energy on mundane, day-to-day tasks and movements.

Using NEAT, Levine has designed offices to keep workers on
the move, with treadmills outfitted with desks, computers and
telephones, and office walking tracks, marked by lines on the
floor, so colleagues can walk while they hold meetings.

. . .

One fresh convert to walking while working. . .estimates he has walked about 120 miles on the job since [January 2006].

"People do look at you weird or funny," he said. "It takes
a little effort to do it, so a lot of people just aren’t going
to going to bother.

Another advocate is Dr. Joseph Stirt, an anesthesiologist
in Charlottesville, Virginia, who estimates he spends eight to
12 hours a day working and walking on his treadmill in his home
office.

"You will become addicted," he said. "When I turn the
treadmill off at night, it’s so unpleasant. Sitting in a chair,
working, is so unpleasant, you might as well be dead."

If you want more info, here are some links to Mayo about the study Levine did, and about his redesigned office. Here is the link to his research lab. It’s interesting some of the "tools" that they used:

Custom-made, data-logging undergarments that all participants wore 24
hours a day, exchanging a new pair every morning at the hospital at
breakfast. The bottoms look like bicycle shorts and the women’s tops
look like sports bras. The men’s tops look like undershirts…Jet fighter control panel motion sensing technology embedded in the
special underwear to monitor every tilt and wiggle of the participants.

Shades of the "company of the future" shown in the movie GATTACCA with the monitored company gym activites?

Email – Can you trust it?

Could be interesting for implications with respect to long archive lifetimes for email – and its value (or not) as legal evidence:

Wired News:

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That’s how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.