Column 2

Don’t forget: way too many BPM implementations end up as legacy systems.

I’ve been running a mobile device experiment for the past six weeks: since my Blackberry three-year contract ran out, I switched to using a standard mobile phone (with a greatly reduced monthly fee) plus an iPod Touch. I was lucky enough to score a free iPod Touch — BEA’s last marketing blowout at their conference before being absorbed by Oracle was to give one to every attendee — so this experiment costs me nothing to try out. Those who know me were aghast at seeing me without the trusty Blackberry at my side, where it has been for the past eight years, but I wanted to try out this combo for a couple of reasons.

First, there are so many new devices out lately and a number of new ones on the rise, that I want to reassess my Blackberry bigotry. Specifically, I’m thinking about switching to an iPhone and need to be sure that the non-phone functionality of the iPhone works for me (for those of you unfamiliar with the iPod Touch, is pretty much exactly like an iPhone except no phone, no camera, and no paid plan required from your mobile carrier since it only connects via wifi).

Second, Canada is about to see a rash of new entrants into the mobile carrier space in early spring of 2009, and I didn’t want to be locked into another contract with Rogers when those options became available. That means that I’ll likely stick with this configuration until I know what the new offerings will be: data plans have certainly come down in price here, but I’m also looking for a carrier that will provide me with better-priced US roaming, which is currently about $2/minute with Rogers.

Results so far:

Voice: I continue to use almost none of my voice minutes on the mobile phone, except for a couple of calls when I’m traveling. I’m just not big on talking on the phone.

Texting: I still do some text messaging from my regular mobile phone, but using a standard phone keyboard — even with predictive typing — is so much slower than the Blackberry that I’ve reduced that quite a bit.

Connectivity: Since the iPod Touch connects to any wifi that’s around, I use it around my home/office, at conferences where there’s wifi, and now in every Starbucks in Toronto where I can use my Bell Internet account (or a Starbucks card) to login to the Bell hotspot. A number of airports also have free wifi, allowing me to step off the plane, search for wifi, connect and check my email without breaking stride. Although I don’t have the uninterrupted service that I enjoyed with the Blackberry (which would, of course, be replicated on a full iPhone), I am finding that this is sufficient for most of my needs.

Typing: The touch keyboard on the iPod Touch (same as the iPhone) sucks when compared to the Blackberry: I can touch-type with my thumbs on a Blackberry, making it a very real email composition platform; on the iPod, I’m much more likely to send only a brief reply, if anything at all, and wait to get to my laptop before sending any substantial messages.

Reading email: The email reading experience is great on the iPod, certainly much better than the older Blackberry that I had. I use both Gmail and Google Apps mail, and the IMAP client works well with both, meaning that everything that I do on the iPod is reflected in my email online, and therefore in my desktop IMAP client. [The IMAP client on the Blackberry was always slow and a bit flaky for me, meaning that I used to do POP email there, then have to replicate what I did back on my desktop since I used the Blackberry Internet service, not a corporate server. Obviously, if you're on a corporate Blackberry server, that experience will differ.]

Surfing: Amazingly good on the small screen, since zooming and rotating are a breeze. No Flash support, which is a bit of a hassle on some sites, but otherwise fairly widespread support. Many sites (including this blog) offer an iPhone-optimized version of their site that auto-detects that you’re on the platform and switches over.

Feed reading: Excellent with Google Reader; since I use Google Reader from my laptop as well, that means that everything read anywhere stays synced up.

Applications: I never found a lot of Blackberry applications that really worked for me, and with no central clearinghouse for them, they were hard to find. The iPod Touch, on the other hand, can run most of the applications available for the iPhone, allowing me to test out the full experience. No VOIP calling, of course, but plenty of useful stuff:

• Red Rocket, one of only two paid applications that I use, which has all of the Toronto transit maps, routes and schedules. Very handy when I’m waiting at a streetcar stop wondering whether to wait for the next car or hail a taxi.
• SplashID, the other paid app, which holds confidential information such as credit card numbers and PINs in a secure encrypted format.
• Files lite, the free (but completely adequate) version of a file transfer/storage application that allows me to copy files from my PC to the iPod in a variety of formats: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc. More than storage, I can actually view the files on the iPod, making this a great place for a quick reference library.
• Instapaper (again, the free version), which allows me to bookmark web pages either on the iPod or my PC, then sync them up to the iPod for offline viewing. Good if I want to review something on a plane or when I’m away from wifi access, but don’t want to print it. The rendering of the page isn’t perfect, but everything that I’ve tried is completely readable.
• Stanza e-book reader, with a large selection of freely downloadable books, and a desktop application so that you can covert your own files into e-book format for transferring to and reading on the iPod. The reader is quite usable: the text is large enough, and although there’s not a lot of text on each page, flipping to the next page is so fast that it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Battery life: Not great, but then I’m using it for a lot of internet access so hard to compare with the Blackberry where I did less surfing since it wasn’t required for reading email. With a Blackberry, you have the option of carrying an extra charged battery and swapping it out, and it also holds a charge for several days if you’re not talking much.

In summary, I find the phone/iPod combo pretty useful, especially considering that most of my travel is done for the year so I’ll be around my office (where there’s wifi) or at clients in downtown Toronto (where there’s Starbucks wifi on every street corner); I can certainly last out for a few months with this combo to break the Crackberry addiction and consider some alternatives. The keyboard is certainly a huge deterrent to moving to the iPhone (if it weren’t, I would have been tempted to switch already), as well as the battery life issue.

Those of you who have known me a while will be shocked to hear that I have abandoned my Blackberry: that trusty family of devices that has served me since 2000. My 3-year contract was finally up, and after a few months using the wifi on the iPod Touch that I scored at the last BEA conference, I decided to go with a phone plus the iPod for a few months while I figure out what I want.

Consider that I’m either in training for an iPhone, or for a Blackberry Bold, although after trying to type on the iPod in the back of a taxi earlier this week, I’m thinking that a tactile keyboard is more my style.

Okay, I (heart) one geek in particular, who builds HD OTA antennas out of teaspoons and tape measures, and discusses λ/2 with me as if I remember anything from those long-ago electronics courses. Given the chance to review I Love Geeks: The Official Handbook, I couldn’t resist — although I am very geeky myself, I’m a software geek, and sometimes the mindset of my in-house electrical engineer remains opaque to me. And Friday of a crushingly busy work week seemed a good time for a break for myself and my readers.

The first chapter discusses the evolution of geeks, how the terms “geek” and “nerd” have become mostly interchangeable (not sure that I agree with that — I’m a self-declared geek but would bristle at being called a nerd), and even the etymology of the word “nerd”: it was first used by Dr. Seuss in his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, although his use doesn’t appear to be related to the current usage. There’s some discussion of the psychology of a developing geek, and some behaviors to expect from them, both the good and the weird.

The next six chapters each focus on a particular variety of geek: gamers, comic book and graphic novel, manga and anime, film and television, sports, and science fiction and fantasy. Each chapter is a great introduction to that world, giving you a quick background and some key facts: a valuable reference if you want to get into it yourself, or just not sound too clued out when you ask about it.

Some of these — film and television, sports — definitely don’t fall into my definition of geekdom, which has a much more technical direction that the author’s view. In the final chapter, she explains why she hasn’t address that directly:

Wait, what? We’re done? But… but… what about computers and programming? Biochemistry? Physics” Math You know, the actual building blocks of nerd-dom?

Well, here’s the thing: those interests — or rather, fields of study — aren’t so nerdy anymore. The people who study them, on the other hand, probably are, but it’s a sure bet that their interests fall into one of the categories I’ve examined in this book.

I disagree, and think that the book could have included a chapter on the engineering geek who spends his free time tinkering with electronics, a copy of Make magazine at his side, or learning a new RIA programming language just for fun.

I know that my readership is mostly male and mostly geeky, but this would make a great little gift for that woman in your life you often looks at you with a slight frown, one raised eyebrow, and her hand on the 9-1-1 speed dial button. Or, if you have kids who are into anime or video games and you’d like some insight into their world, there’s a chapter in here for you. It’s due out in January, a little late for Christmas but just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, Adams Media, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

Off topic for Column 2, but hey, it’s Friday.

For those of you who have never seen Canadian government at work, it can be pretty entertaining sometimes, and never more than when there’s a lively debate going on during Question Period. Our big debate now is the newly-introduced copyright bill, which blatantly panders to the U.S. media industry; not surprisingly, a lot of us have pretty serious problems with it, and have been talking to our government representatives. Jim Prentice, the Industry Minister who presented the bill, either doesn’t really understand it or just isn’t very good at speaking about it:

The best source for information about what’s happening with the bill is Michael Geist’s site, a law professor who has analyzed the proposed bill in great detail and blogs about what it would mean to the average person, but you’ll also find a lot by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, who is Canadian and very vocal against any government interfering in its citizens rights. We’re also starting to see independent artists speak out against this, who feel that this prevents people from easily discovering them, and know that most of the money collected from lawsuits just goes to the lawyers anyway.

If you’re Canadian and care about this issue, join the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group and take the time to send your MP a letter, using the Copyright for Canadians template if you can’t think of what to write yourself. This isn’t just a techie issue, as both Geist and Doctorow explain: it criminalizes day-to-day activities of anyone who makes a backup copy of their DVDs as a guard against damage, or scan and email their kids’ class photo to their relatives, or rip your music CDs for your iPod if the CD has any sort of copy protection on it.

I travel a lot these days, and couldn’t do it without all of the great tools available:

• As I’ve written previously, if you’re applying for a Canadian passport, do yourself a huge favour and fill out the form online; that reduces the actual visit to the passport office from about 1.5 hours to about 15 minutes.
• If you cross the Canadian-US border frequently (or enter either country from elsewhere), get a NEXUS card so that you can use the automated kiosks instead of standing in immigration/customs lines; this reduces your time from 15-45 minutes standing in line to about a minute. The first time that I used the NEXUS kiosk, bypassing a line of about 1000 people at Toronto airport on a Monday morning, I almost wept with joy. Works at airports and land crossings.
• Use TripIt to organize and share your travel plans. TripIt is definitely the most useful online service that I’ve found in last year: you forward your air and hotel itineraries to it, and it auto-parses them into an online itinerary. I can share my trips with my other half, so that he knows where I’m staying and when to pick me up at the airport. There’s also a mobile retrieval to get any particular part of your itinerary emailed to you in short plain text in case you forget to print out the itinerary. They’ve also just started accepting itineraries from corporate booking services such as Orbitz.
• Dopplr is more of a travel social network, where you indicate when you’ll be where, and can see if your friends overlap in the same locations. TripIt is trying to do something similar, but since that’s not their main focus, they aren’t quite doing it so well, and don’t have the mindshare. Personally, I’d rather have all of this information in one place (TripIt) than use two services, but I’d need to have more of my social network using TripIt.
• SeatGuru and their related mobile site lets you get a good seat on any airplane, or at least avoid the ones that don’t recline and are beside the lavatory. Pick by carrier and craft, and it shows you seating plans of the plane with the good, bad and cautioned seats marked.
• FlightStats and their related mobile site lets you track any actual flight, sometimes more accurately than airline sites. However, it doesn’t always get updated in the case of cancellations.
• FlightAware is quite similar to FlightStats, and provides a map for a specific flight to tell you exactly where it is and when it will land. Great for checking on the inbound flight when you’re waiting to take the same plane outbound.
• Google maps on your mobile device can now use cell tower triangulation to give you an approximate real ground location even if your mobile doesn’t have onboard GPS: it sucks down your battery fast, but works as a low-res GPS in a pinch.
• Mobile airline sites — I’ve used Air Canada, United, US Air, Delta, WestJet, Northwest and American — allow you to check flight status and set up alerts for changes in status; some even allow you to check in for your flight via your mobile.

The best thing that you can do for yourself if you fly frequently is to use one airline (and its partners) in order to accumulate status, and get yourself to gold level status if you can. This may (depending on the airline) give you lounge access to get you out of the madding crowds in airports — a sanity-saver when there’s a massive weather delay — and get at least a desk and a plug, and sometimes free wifi, food and drink. Status sometimes gets you free upgrades to business class, as could a full-fare economy ticket if your company springs for the fully-flexible alternative. Gold status also allows you to board the aircraft during pre-boarding, which means that you can carry on the maximum allowable bag size, avoiding checking any bags. Don’t feel guilty when you cram that suitcase into the overhead bin: if you don’t use the space, someone else will.

I read a newspaper column last week (not surprisingly, on an airplane) in which the author was complaining about things that have been a fact of life for a while: taking shoes off at security, no liquids through security, no free food onboard. My advice: you know about these things in advance, so suck it up and learn to compensate. Wear slip-ons. Budget ahead to buy an overpriced bottle of water after security. Pack a lunch. If you must whine, at least whine about unpredictable events, not the ones that you know are going to happen.

Update: one thing that I forgot, is that if something goes seriously and unexpectedly wrong, don’t be afraid to complain, although try to do it nicely. A few weeks ago in Vegas, I spent one night in a $2500/night suite after starting out in a “non-smoking” room that smelled like an ashtray. They moved me out of the suite after one night, to a much nicer room than I started out in, but I’m quite sure that I’ll never actually pay that much for a night in a hotel room so was happy to have the experience.

Sometime after 7pm Eastern tonight, Google decided to do some maintenance on my kemsleydesign.com email account, which is hosted on Google. Some notice would have been nice, instead of getting errors through Outlook, then attempting to access the webmail to see this:

24 hours?? I guess this is how they get us to move from the free Google mail accounts for our domains to the paid ones.

I’ve reconfigured to reroute my email elsewhere, but if you sent me something between 7-8:30pm Eastern, it may be sitting in a bit bucket at Google.

Hope that everyone here in Canada had a great Canada Day weekend, and that everyone south of the border has a great 4th of July tomorrow.

Blogging will be light this week, since I expect that half of my readers are on vacation.