Smell the Digital Roses

Assault on suburban living?

2008-06-24T18:27:00.003-05:00

Are we going to see a move back to city living, reversing the trend towards suburban and country living? The rising costs to fuel cars and heat/cool homes is making people think twice about the length of their commutes and what it takes to maintain their large homes. The New York Times just published an article on this topic called, "Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise."

The house we're going to purchase in Milwaukee is a baseball's throw from the University of Wisconsin campus where we'll be working. It's also two short blocks from a bus stop, and within walking distance of many amenities such as grocery stores, drug stores, restaurants, coffee shops, a hardware store, hair stylist... well, you get the picture.

Neither of us is an "eco-freak" or "treehugger" in any sense of the word. Our choice of location is based on pure economics. Parking is a known problem and expensive on the UWM campus. If we can avoid having to pay parking fees for both cars, it saves us money. Additionally, by not driving to work every day we save wear and tear on our cars, reducing our potential maintenance costs. The same applies for not having to drive to Walgreens to pick up a prescription, or to the grocery store to get the last-minute forgotten food item, or many other routine errands.

I suppose telecommuting or telework would work for some people, but not for the kind of jobs we have. Until electronic communication can be a complete substitute for face-to-face communication - and not just in a technical sense, but widely socially acceptable as well - our physical presence is still needed for us to do our jobs well.

In many ways, this reminds me of recent articles about the growing trend in "green" data centers. Most people in the industry admit that organizations aren't creating green data centers to be good citizens (though the PR doesn't hurt), but doing it because it will save money for organizations in the long term.

Imagine if it became criminal to live more than a certain distance from your workplace. I can't imagine this happening, but who knows what the society's future will bring? One thing's for sure - suburban living is coming under assault.

Security/privacy paranoia

2008-06-24T13:46:00.005-05:00

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I spent some time yesterday passwording and encrypting the system/data drive on my laptop. My USB key is already set up with a password and encryption, as is my USB hard drive (Western Digital My Passport drive) that I use for backups.

The product I used for the laptop is TrueCrypt, which is open source. It provides different encryption schemes, but after running the performance test I stuck with its default AES-256 encryption algorithm. I was concerned about performance, because Ariel (my Fujitsu Lifebook U810) has a pretty wimpy processor - the price one pays for having a teeny-tiny laptop. I don't think running TrueCrypt has made a noticeable change in the laptop's performance, but then again, I'm not sure I'd notice because it's a bit pokey as it is.

One wonders if all of the effort put into this paranoia about security/privacy is worth the time and effort.

Chumby's Here!

2008-05-10T07:40:00.003-05:00

Well, despite my spouse's skepticism when I ordered my newest gadget, even he has to admit that the Chumby is pretty cool. It's in our kitchen so that we can read news and whatnot over coffee in the morning. He likes the idea of listening to The New York Times podcasts while reading the screen for other items at the same time. He even said that the speakers were remarkably good for a device like this.

It was pretty simple to set up the Chumby on our wireless network. Fortunately I had the hex key for our wireless handy. I still haven't gotten in and played with the hacks I found online at the Chumby Tricks wiki, such as enabling the sshd and the NFS client, but I will when I have time. So far, we're really liking this device!

Chumby Lust

2008-05-04T16:17:00.001-05:00

I am definitely on a gadget kick right now. After much discussion on Twitter with my friends and colleagues, I broke down and bought a Chumby. The UPS tracker says it's been shipped from its location in China and is scheduled to be delivered on May 12th. I can't wait!

Gadget Lust and the Kindle

2008-05-04T15:59:00.005-05:00

Yes, I broke down and bought a Kindle. I've read and heard all of the reasons that I shouldn't own one, including: DRM, it's ugly, it's expensive, the selection of books is limited, you're locked into Amazon.

Until we have a better way to ensure artists (in this case, authors) are properly compensated for their work, I'm not terribly bothered by the DRM used here. There's a risk that I could be left high and dry by it if Amazon decides to abandon the proprietary AZW format, but the same could be said of the other ebook formats I own. Of course, Amazon's agreement keeps me from lending an ebook to another person unless s/he has a Kindle linked to the same account, but given how many books I lend and never get back, perhaps this isn't such a drawback after all.

I admit the Kindle is fugly, but not nearly as bad as it seems in the photos. The e-ink display is incredible. As someone who has read a lot of ebooks on PDAs and laptops, the e-ink display is a blessing - no eyestrain as one gets with a backlit screen.

The $399 cost is pretty high, but I've downloaded plenty of free books from sites such as manybooks.net. I've also purchased books via the Kindle from Amazon that were significantly less expensive than their tree-book counterparts (often $9.99 rather than $15.00 - 25.00).

Granted, not every book that I want to read is available in Kindle format... yet. However, a significant number of books on my Amazon recommended and wish lists are available in Kindle format. Given that Amazon already owns me insofar that it knows what I like and can recommend more items that I know I'd like, I'm not terribly bothered by buying into the giant Amazon money-grubbing conglomerate.

The coolest things about the Kindle are:

I can carry many, many books (potentially hundreds) in a 10.3 ounce form factor.
The search function will search through all of the material I have on the Kindle. This makes it easy to find something if I only vaguely recall what I'm looking for.
1-Click, for all of its evilness, makes finding, buying, and downloading a book I want fast and easy on the Kindle. Instant gratification!
The Kindle makes it easy for me to read at pretty much any time in any place.

So far I'm loving the Kindle and looking forward to using it every day.

Earthquake in Illinois!

2008-04-18T05:32:00.002-05:00

We had an earthquake in Illinois early this morning. Twitter has been all a twitter about it all morning. It certainly trumped conventional news outlets in terms of timely reporting, though not substantive reporting, mind you.

Evernote Beta

2008-04-14T19:31:00.004-05:00

Got the Evernote beta. It looks really cool. What really makes it is the ability to upload your notes to the web. Although I really like OneNote 2007, the one stickler is that I have to maintain a central file share on which all my instances of OneNote can synch, or I'll end up having to transfer my notes from machine to machine using a USB key.

Evernote also has a mobile version, and can also run on a Mac. I don't have a Mac, but I'll bet they're happy. I do have my Treo, and have installed Evernote mobile on it.

Now to start using the beta. Let's see how it stands up to OneNote 2007. More to come...

Crowdsourcing Help Desk Support and Twittering

2008-04-08T20:32:00.005-05:00

The crowdsourcing effort is coming along. We're in the home stretch of completing the proposal to EDUCAUSE. We just need to add the currently participating institutions, and it should be ready to send to Cynthia Golden at EDUCAUSE. I think the group is starting to gel and collecting momentum. I still have my fingers crossed that this will result in something great!

On another note, I've been playing a bit too much with Twitter these past couple of days. I'd signed up a while ago, but hadn't posted any tweets until the other day; I was busy following other people instead. I've been allowing the public timeline to run in a sidebar in Firefox using Twitbin. I assume sooner or later I'm going to get bored of the banality of it all, but so far it's been fascinating seeing bits and pieces of other peoples' lives in bit-sized pieces of 140 characters or less.

Why Performance Evaluations Don't Feel "Right"

2008-04-06T13:02:00.002-05:00

I'm currently working on performance evaluations for my direct reports. Mind you, I'm not complaining, as annual performance evaluations are part of my job and a "touchstone" by which we can gauge progress. That said, the whole concept of annual performance evaluations just doesn't feel right to me.

For one thing, updating an employee only once a year about how s/he is doing seems to be too large a gap. As I'm someone who continuously lets people know when they've done something that pleases (or displeases) me, the annual performance evaluation is hopefully just a formalism. Nothing that comes up on a performance evaluation should be a surprise to the person being evaluated. If this isn't so, then the manager/supervisor is doing something wrong. Period.

Another reason that the annual performance evaluation doesn't feel right is inherit to its existence, i.e., formalizing feedback to an employee. I find having to use formal language to describe how an employee is doing right or less-than-right very stilted and confining. I'm bothered by the "rating" system that is also inherent to performance evaluations. Although I realize that the ratings are needed to allow people to know where they stand, it feels too much like the old days of being in school and having grade report anxiety.

I'm having some difficulty completing performance evaluations this year, even though there are considerably less for me to do than last time this year. I've thought a bit about this, and realized that it's harder this year because of the instability and uncertainty going on in our organization at this time. The current goings-on in our organization have had sufficient influence on everyone that I don't believe that any of us has been performing our best, or even acting like ourselves, for the last several months. I can only hope that things will pick up as plans for our organization solidify.

Twittering

2008-04-06T09:14:00.003-05:00

I just set up a feed to my Twitter account from my Gtalk account. This makes things a lot easier, as I don't have to deal with a separate Twitter client, just my IM client. I'm now following a couple of new feeds (googlenews and WSJ) to see how following these through Twitter compares to using an RSS aggregator.

The Crowd Grows...

2008-03-30T18:09:00.002-05:00

At our last crowdsourcing con call, we started to narrow in on what we wanted to do. The idea is to create an inter-institutional Help Desk support knowledge base that allows customers to submit answers to questions that other customers have. Ideally the knowledge base would support the ability to rank an answer (and its author) so that over time the best answers and best contributors would be acknowledged.

I can imagine that commercial providers of Help Desk solutions, such as RightAnswers, will (rightly) consider this competition for their services, particularly since RightAnswers sells to the higher education market.

Dewitt and I had a con call with Cynthia Golden, Vice President, EDUCAUSE. We wanted to put out "feelers" on whether EDUCAUSE would be interested in backing or helping this crowdsourcing initiative. Of course, Cynthia couldn't speak officially for EDUCAUSE, but she personally thought it was a cool idea and said that she would introduce it to the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors and during the current EDUCAUSE strategic planning process.

Interesting times...

Midwest EDUCAUSE

2008-03-20T10:20:00.005-05:00

Well, we're back from the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference - I really enjoyed it! I was on the Program Committee for the conference this year, and was track lead for the Infrastructure Track. It was a different (and enriching and great and fun) experience to see the results of the Program Committee's work. The EDUCAUSE staff was incredible; they clearly have their conference planning down to a science. Every time I saw Lida Larsen during the conference, she seemed to be cool as a cucumber - she truly amazes me!

Both keynote speakers, Susan Metros and Brad Wheeler, gave great talks. Susan challenged us to connect with today's generation, and Brad Wheeler showed us how to lead ahead of the curves by showing us some "curve bender" examples in higher ed.

As last count, there were 533 full registrations for the conference this year, compared to 461 last year. Since the goal of the regional conferences is to keep them small and relatively intimate, EDUCAUSE may have to cap registrations at future conferences. I guess this is a good problem to have - clearly EDUCAUSE is recognized as an important organization to those in higher ed IT, and its conferences are considered to be extremely useful.

Of the track sessions I attended, the one that resonated with me the most was given by Chris McCoy, Director of Engineering Computing at Iowa State University. The name of his presentation was "A Place for Everyone: Understanding IT Culture Using S-Curves." Although Chris didn't really present new information or have answers for the issues he raised, his presentation of the difference between the unit IT and central IT cultures was novel, interesting, and illustrative in a way that would resonate with many people.

On an amusing (maybe) note, I attended the Corporate and Campus Solutions session by Western Michigan University and Sun Microsystems about collaboration using electronic messaging. Dave Pickens, Chief Architect at Sun, asked the audience how many had fewer than 5 email addresses and the majority of hands went up. When Dave asked how many people had 5 or more email addresses, it seemed that he and I were the only ones who raised our hands. Wow, I feel young... Dave pointed out that the current generation has multiple email addresses and also considers services like Facebook and MySpace to be "email addresses."

I also found the talk by James Phelps, Senior IT Architect at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about enterprise architecture to be very enlightening and informative. His talk only really highlighted that we don't have an enterprise architect here.

I thought it was cool to touch base with my colleagues, Beth Schaefer (who is heading to Frye this year!) and Bruce Maas, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I also had the pleasure and honor of having a few minutes to speak to Diana Oblinger, the new EDUCAUSE president.

A funny point during the conference was at the closing keynote by Brad Wheeler. My husband said, "Another Indiana University presentation - why were there so many at this conference?" I replied, "Because Indiana does it right." Immediately, the heads of the 4 people sitting in front of us swiveled around and one of them said, "Could you say that again?" It turns out that they were all from Indiana University! We had a nice chat with them, as they also knew the people that I've met from Indiana, such as Rob Lowden and Dennis Cromwell.

All in all, we had a great time, and it was nice to get away for a few days!

Prepping for the Midwest EDUCAUSE

2008-03-15T19:49:00.005-05:00

We're leaving Monday for the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference, so I'm in the middle of prepping things for the trip. I popped by the office today to get my mobile gear, because I'd forgotten to take it home when I left Friday.

I've got a couple of useful Zip-Linq retractable cables - one power cord for my laptop, and one CAT5e cable. The retractable nature of the cables makes them a cinch to pack, and I don't get tangles.

I'm of course bringing Ariel, my Fujitsu Lifebook U810, and Puck, my Treo 700wx.

Right now, I'm busy backing up Ariel to my Xdrive account so that I'll have important files sitting somewhere in the "cloud" in case I have problems.

On an unrelated note, I've been moving my vacation photos and the photos that I took at various health physics conferences from my CITES Netfiles account to Flickr. I figured it was time to get with the times, and also time to do some clean-up in my NetFiles account.

I can't wait to head up to Chicago on Monday!

Crowdsourcing and Higher Ed

2008-03-11T18:17:00.003-05:00

Well, we (Fryers and some people who were volunteered) held a phone conference to begin talking about what we could do in the area of crowdsourcing in higher ed IT. Dewitt suggested a couple of ideas that sounded interesting.

One was the idea of utilizing the collective knowledge of students to assist with help desk functions much like some companies have set up customer support forums in which customers help each other with problems. The question of "what's in it for me" came up - after all, people generally have to have a reason to want to participate. Dewitt suggested a ranking system for quality of the help provided that might include incentives when enough points are earned by an individual. I suspect that ego helps here - people like to show off that they are knowledgeable. Whether both of these together might be enough to build a sustainable model, I really couldn't say, but perhaps it's worth a shot.

Another idea was to write a document as a "crowd" effort on a subject of immediate interest to higher ed, such as emergency notification. This is also an interesting idea, though it would likely mean that someone would have to write the "seed" document that others would build upon. My experiences with past collaborative writing efforts is that it's difficult, if not impossible, to start de novo. Generally, someone has to write something, even if it's a "straw man," for others to build upon (or take shots at, depending how you look at it).

Either way, I think the idea of crowdsourcing something is very intriguing and holds promise. I certainly hopes this all leads to something. Even if it doesn't, I think I will be better for having heard the thoughts of my fellow Fryers as we discuss it.

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference - One Week!

2008-03-10T07:45:00.004-05:00

I'm really looking forward to the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference that starts next Monday. It's in Chicago, and it will be nice to get away, even if it's only for a few days. I'm on the conference program committee this year, and it's been a really good experience so far. It's been really fascinating to see the "behind the scenes" process of how the tracks are established and how the presentations are chosen. The EDUCAUSE staff have been wonderfully professional and organized, particularly Lida. Lida really keeps everything in order and acts as a gentle goad when things need to be done.

Update - A Long Time Coming...

2008-03-09T08:35:00.005-05:00

Well, it's been a long time since I've updated this blog and I figured it was about time to pick up writing again.

I finally had time to check on something that a lot of book lovers have been talking about: LibraryThing - it's a site that lets you catalog your book collection. There's even a bulk upload feature for the first time you populate your site that lets you import a list of books by ISBN from a text file or from a URL. I followed their tips for importing books from my Amazon "ordered" list. However, that list is just a small fraction of the total number of books I have. I'm really fighting the urge to start pulling books off my bookshelves in order to start inventorying my entire collection.

What's neat about LibraryThing is that it's a social networking site as well. You can review books and view other peoples' reviews. There's a feature that lets you look at the "cloud" of books that have been entered, and features to connect with people of similar interests. I can't wait to enter more of my collection into the site to create a better representation of the books I own.

On another note, Dewitt Latimer (Deputy CIO at Notre Dame University) posted a mysterious message to the Frye Leadership Institute mailing list asking for responses from people who have read "The Wisdom of Crowds," "Wikinomics," "WE Are Smarter than Me," or have been involved with the website wearesmarterthanme.org, all of which are involved in the idea of crowdsourcing. I've read the first two books and am working on the third. Whatever Dewitt has in mind, he is being awfully secretive about it - the group of people who responded will be meeting virtually next week.

eBook-a-rama-thon

2007-12-10T21:12:00.000-06:00

I went on an ebook marathon over the weekend and read four ebooks: "Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy" by Inga Saffron; "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife," and "The Amber Spyglass" by Philip Pullman. Admittedly, the latter three are really children's books, but I was curious as to what all of the controversy about the Golden Compass movie was all about.

It sure looks like I'm on an odd trend in food-related books, given that I'd already read "Salt" and "Cod: The Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" by Mark Kurlansky recently. I think I enjoyed Kurlansky's books a bit more than "Caviar." Kurlansky's books were of more of a historical bent, whereas "Caviar" was a mix of history and the author's own experiences. However, the author did do a good job of covering the history of caviar and its role in Eastern Europe/Russia. The author's message about the how the caviar-producing sturgeons are endangered comes across pretty clearly, though didn't really offer any answers to the problem.

The three books by Philip Pullman, collectively referred to as the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, were quite good and engrossing (explaining why I polished them all off in one day). I think I can see why the Catholic Church might be disturbed about it, because every quasi-religious figure throughout the trilogy is characterized as evil. However, one could also say that the descriptions are general enough of the ruling group (the Magisterium) that it's amusing that any particular group would see enough of themselves fitting the generalities as described. All in all, I thought the books were quite good, though probably for a slightly older child (maybe pre-teen through early teen).

The other side of the coin...

2007-12-10T20:37:00.001-06:00

Well, I've seen the other side of the Vista coin. The machine at home on which I installed it is a quad-core system with about 3-1/2 gigs of RAM - Vista flies on this machine, even with Aero enabled.

However, I got a taste today of what Vista is like on a severely underpowered system. I tried installing Vista as a VMware guest using the VMware Workstation product on a Linux host. I allocated the virtual machine 1GB of RAM, and it literally took the entire day to install.

To be fair, the odds were stacked against the installation. Giving Vista anything less than 2GB of RAM is not a good idea, and the fact that this was being installed as a VM probably didn't help. Also, disk I/O activity (this is the first office workstation in which I've not purchased SCSI drives) just about brought the entire system to its knees.

When I left work, I had just started the update process (34 updates). We'll see if it's even done by tomorrow morning when I get back to work.

Live and learn - now I know what Vista is like in an underpowered environment, and it's not pretty.

What's all of the brouhaha about Vista?

2007-12-09T19:50:00.001-06:00

I just installed Microsoft Vista on the second hard drive of my desktop system at home. I guess I just don't see what all of the negative press about it is. So far I've been able to get my normal apps to run on it (including an old ssh client and the Oracle Calendar client). Granted, I don' t game, and from what I hear, it's usually computer games that are the issue with Vista.

The gadgets in the Sidebar just sort of seem to be in the way. I'm one of those people who has a minimalist desktop (so far the only icon I've left on the desktop is the Recycle Bin, and even that's gone on Ariel (the U810 running XP Pro). I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of eye candy on my computer - it just seems like a waste of processor cycles to me.

The importance of being fish

2007-12-02T18:19:00.000-06:00

An ebook I recently finished was "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" by Mark Kurlansky. A few weeks ago, I read Kurlansky's more recent book, "Salt," and liked it enough to want to read other books by the same author.

It seems a little odd to make a single food item the subject of an entire book, but both the lowly cod fish and the edible mineral salt have played important roles in both European and American history. Both food stuffs were vital to survival: salt, because of its preservative properties; cod because of salt cod could be stored for long periods of time. The difference between the two is that cod was once extremely abundant in the waters off of many coasts and is now scarce, while salt was once precious and difficult to obtain and is now nearly ubiquitous in American society.

Kurlansky's historical details of both food items are deep, yet satisfyingly vivid. What could be very dull subjects (how interesting can salt or fish be anyway?) are brought to life through Kurlansky's ability to tie the food into the life and times of people.

If you enjoy history, and are interested in how a single item can influence societies, then either of Kurlansky's books are for you.

The bane of my existence

2007-12-02T07:06:00.000-06:00

When I was a UNIX system administrator, I used to say that setting up printers was the bane of my existence. Data backups are second on that list.

At work we have an IT professional who runs our central backup system, which is based on Tivoli Storage Manager. All I have to do to get my workstation backed up is install the backup client software, tell it what I want to backup (or not, as the case may be), and just make sure that the daemon for the software keeps running. I love that someone else takes care of backups!

That's just at work, unfortunately. Even through I use Ariel (the U810) for work, it's my machine and I'm responsible for backing up anything on it. I try not to keep work-related material on it for any length of time because of the potential liability of losing it. Therefore, all I'm really worried about are the personal files I've saved on it, such as ebooks that I've bought and my music.

I've been meaning to buy a portable hard drive to do a full backup, but haven't gotten around to it ("A Round Tuit") yet. For now, I'm taking advantage of the 5 gigs of free storage at XDrive, and it's pretty convenient. It's an online file storage service that also lets you share your files with others through the web. We have a web file storage service on campus, based on software from Xythos but it only has 500 megs of storage - not nearly enough for what I need. Besides, I'm generally using it for work-related things, and I'd rather not mix work and personal material more than I already am.

You can access XDrive though a web interface to upload and download files, and you can also install a program on your machine in order to automate backups and mount your XDrive so that it acts much like a local drive on your machine. So far it seems to work fine, and is a good way to backup files off-site.

We've finally joined the modern age!

2007-12-01T07:20:00.001-06:00

While out on the town last night, one of our friends noticed the "EV" indicator on his cell phone - we finally have EV-DO here in the middle of the corn fields!

What's really embarrassing is that I'd just been running Ariel (yes, on a table at the bar - UMPCs let you compute anywhere!) tethered via Bluetooth to my Treo 700wx using PdaNet and hadn't even noticed.

On another note, I have to say that I'm tempted by the deals TigerDirect has on the OQO Model 2 right now. I love Ariel (the Fujitsu Lifebook U810), and I loved Sycorax (Toshiba Libretto U105) before that, but as you can probably tell my machines keep getting smaller and smaller... and the OQO would be next in the "shrinking" line-up.

Must have will power... must have will power...

eReading in bed

2007-11-28T20:52:00.000-06:00

Although I like reading ebooks in bed on my Fujitsu Lifebook U810 (Ariel), I have to admit to some concern about doing so.

I realize that the designers probably couldn't have done anything about this, but am I the only one who doesn't like having laptop air vents located on the bottom of the laptop? Not only can one risk lap burns from machines that run hot, but I keep worrying that I'll block the vents when I'm reading in bed because of the blankets, sheets, and whatnot. The Toshiba Libretto U105 had vents on each side of the machine rather than the bottom - kudos to Toshiba for thinking of this! That said, the Libretto was thick enough to do this; the Fujitsu isn't.

The other potential hazard of reading in bed is the weight of the machine. Ariel is about 1.5 pounds or so. I remember the days when I'd be dropping off to sleep in bed while reading only to be rudely awakened by the book (often hardcover) crashing onto my face. Ouch. Don't try this with a laptop, even if it's tiny like mine.

What I do like about using Ariel for reading in bed is that I can put him into tablet mode and shift the screen into a vertical orientation for reading. I prefer to have the battery on the left, and can easily hold it on that side for reading. With my hand in that position, I can easily reach the scroll down button or the mouse button to turn the page. Alternatively, I can use my right hand (which is usually supporting the right side of the machine) to tap on the screen in order to turn the page.

Admittedly, a pound and a half is still a bit heavy for reading in bed. I prop my elbows on the mattress as a brace, and it seems to work pretty well.

But you can forget holding the machine above your head while reading in bed. That's just asking for a rude awakening!

I've met the enemy, and it's not so bad

2007-11-27T20:04:00.001-06:00

I have a background as a UNIX sysadmin, so as stereotypes go I should really hate Microsoft, its products, and basically everything it stands for. Obviously I really couldn't since a few years ago I not only managed the UNIX/Linux sysadmins, but also managed the Windows sysadmins. Now I oversee the managers of these folks, and I really can't have a pro- or anti- OS bias.

Well, it's obviously the end of the world, as I've found myself crazy about a Microsoft product, OneNote 2007.

Not only do I love OneNote 2007, but its added strength is (yipes!) its integration with other Microsoft products, such as Outlook. I'm obviously a lost case!

I have three installations of OneNote: office desktop computer (WinXP Pro installed in a VMware workstation virtual machine that runs on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 host named Caliban), Ariel (the Fujitsu Lifebook U810), and my home system (Lestat). Both Ariel and Lestat are running Win XP Pro natively. One of the things that's great about this setup is that all three installations synchronize with a Samba share running on Caliban. I configured all three to point to the location through the File -> Notebook Properties menu choice, and then clicking on the Change Location button and pointing to the UNC for the Samba share. Voila! This allows me to work on Ariel without having to be on the network (pretty hard these days since I can Bluetooth tether Ariel to my Treo for use as a cellular modem) with the knowledge that my changes will be synchronized back to the Samba share (and other two OneNote instances) once I get back onto the network.

Another cool feature of OneNote is the "side note" feature. I configured OneNote so that it displays an icon on the Windows Task List. When I just need to jot something down, I can right-click on the OneNote Task List icon, choose "Create New Side Note," and I can just type or write what I want, and it'll appear in the Unfiled Notes section of OneNote, even if OneNote isn't currently running. (I can also bring up the side note window by double-clicking on the OneNote Task List icon, or by pressing the Windows key + N.) Neat!

Yet another cool feature of OneNote, if one has a Windows Mobile device, is OneNote Mobile. You can install OneNote Mobile by going into OneNote, and choose Tools -> Options -> OneNote Mobile, then click on the Install OneNote Mobile button. Assuming you have Activesync already set up on the system, it will install OneNote Mobile on your device at the next sync. I will say that OneNote Mobile is pretty limited in what it can do, but it's good for jotting down quick notes when you're not near a computer but want the notes to be incorporated into OneNote. The next time you sync your mobile device with your computer, the information you have on your device will appear in a tab called "OneNote Mobile." This is just the thing for the so-called "Road Warrior" who constantly takes notes and needs them to synchronize back to a more central location.

As I mentioned earlier (and what pains me so much as a former UNIX sysadmin) is that one of OneNote's strengths is in its integration with other Microsoft products (and isn't this part of Microsoft's strategy to conquer?). For example, the integration with Outlook allows you to do things such as highlight a meeting in the calendar, click the "Send to OneNote" button, and presto! a new page for that meeting appears in the OneNote notebook with meeting title, date, attendees, and other meeting information included. Another thing you can do is send email messages to OneNote pages - very convenient when you're using email as supplementary documentation for something you're working on. There are other integration features, but the two I've mentioned are the ones I use regularly.

Another cool feature of OneNote is the ability to snip anything on the screen, a web page, etc., and incorporate it into a OneNote page... then the ability to resize the snippet, annotate it, or whatever you fancy.

I now use OneNote to take notes for every meeting I attend. Since I prefer typing to inking, I've not really taken full advantage of the fact that OneNote pretty much OCRs everything - handwritten notes, text in scanned items, etc. You can just leave your handwritten notes as is without converting to text, or you can scan in business cards, and OneNote will actually find things in the handwritten notes and scans with its excellent search engine. I do like that I can mix inking and typed notes on the same page (something that a worthy competitor, Evernote, can't do), as many of our meetings involve trips to the whiteboard and diagramming - I can just draw the diagrams right on the same page that I've typed the accompanying explanation. (It's just too bad that I have zero talent as an artist!)

Not all of my colleagues run OneNote 2007 (the most notable one being my boss), so it's very handy that I can email OneNote pages to these people in PDF format. However, I've found that if I send OneNote as an attachment to my boss, he gets two attachments - one is in OneNote 2007 format which is useless to him, but the other is in a Microsoft HTML-ish format which he can read in Thunderbird or the webmail client he uses at home.

I know that I'm missing out on all of the neat collaboration features in OneNote 2007 - I'm dying to try these out, but I need to find another OneNote 2007 user with whom to collaborate! There's some really cool looking features that allow real-time editing by more than one person over the network, and group editing asynchronously.

As you can tell, I really think highly of this product. It allows me to take notes on both my laptop and my Treo, yet gives me the ability to synchronize against a "home base" and continue working on the notes when I get to a desktop machine.

Kindling is something you use to light fires...

2007-11-26T20:21:00.000-06:00

I guess I'm just not a true gadget-o-phile because I just don't have any real desire to get an Amazon Kindle.

Yes, it's appealing to have a very lightweight, small device that can download ebooks over-the-air... oh hey, don't I have something like that with my U810? I grant that Ariel (my U810) isn't as light as the Kindle, and if I'm not in range of wifi I'd have to use my Treo 700wx as a cellular modem for Ariel (tethered via Bluetooth using a great little application called PdaNet from June Fabrics) to download ebooks. However, ultimately I can perform the same tricks as the Kindle.

I know that there are plenty of people who love their Kindles, and more power to you if you have found your ideal way of reading ebooks. However, this just isn't the method for me for a number of reasons:

It's yet another gadget I'd have to carry around. I currently haul around Ariel, Puck (my Treo 700wx), and their necessary accoutrements. I used to carry a pager as well until I decided that I'd just have my pages sent through SMS on my Treo. Oh... and I keep wanting to pick up a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and... never mind, I'm getting off-topic.
Given the big buttons on the left and right edges of the Kindle, it sure seems like it would be odd to hold. The photos and video clips I've seen of people using it always seem to show it being held on the lower edge or somewhere around the keyboard. The last thing I want is to keep inadvertently turning pages while reading.

What I really want is for Amazon to allow other developers to create ebook readers for the proprietary Kindle format that could run on Palm OS, Windows Mobile, the various Windows PC variants, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux (if not other *nixes as well). I have my doubts as to whether Amazon would ever allow this, but we can dream, can't we?