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• Doug 4:18 am on February 19, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Tinderbox

  In the spirit of my recent request for more descriptions of how others are using Tinderbox, Jon Buscall describes some of his techniques:

  Once you start to use Tinderbox you realise that you can simply drag everything into this nifty program, set attributes to categorize your information and set up agents to organize your work into subject or date related fields or anything that you care to use.

  By creating a container for each separate lesson in Tbox, I get a quick overview of what I need to do each time I come to teach a lesson. Moreover, because I often take my laptop into the classroom, using Map View allows me to use the notes within a lesson as “overheads”. Unlike PowerPoint or KeyNote, (fine presentation software apps in themselves), it’s very easy to write a Tbox note “live” in the classroom. This is particularly important in Creative Writing when generating in-class writing or teaching paragraphing, punctuation, and so on. And because you can create dynamic links between notes or wiki-style links, it’s incredibly easy to navigate through a complex Map even in the high-pressure terrain of the classroom.

  Cool! Not just content management, but actually using Tinderbox as a presentation tool! I’ve never considered the possibilities of using Tinderbox this way, but it makes perfect sense.

   

• Doug 3:10 am on February 19, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Mobile, Technology, Tinderbox

  Zengobi Curio. Looks interesting, though my primary interest in it is in copping ideas from it and applying them to Tinderbox.

  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/goodbyeatt.html
  Mon, 26 Jul 2004 21:09:48 -0500
  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/goodbyeatt.html

  Mobile

  Technology

  demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)

  Wired News: Cingular to AT&T: I Got You, Babe: Cingular Wireless won the bidding war to acquire AT&T Wireless Services for nearly $41 billion in cash, a deal that would create the nation’s largest cell phone company.
  The merger between the second and third largest U.S. wireless companies was announced

  Wired News: Cingular to AT&T: I Got You, Babe: Cingular Wireless won the bidding war to acquire AT&T Wireless Services for nearly $41 billion in cash, a deal that would create the nation’s largest cell phone company.

  The merger between the second and third largest U.S. wireless companies was announced Tuesday as Britain’s Vodafone Group PLC withdrew from the contest after four days of rising bids.

  Well, suck. As a customer, I found AT&T Wireless to be lacking in some areas, but they were a definite improvement over Cingular, my wireless provider two phones ago. I uniformly found Cingular store sales people to be ignorant, apathetic, and unhelpful. After I’d had the same phone from them for two years and my contract was about to expire, I walked into a Cingular store and told them I’d re-up, but that I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest phone. The idiot behind the counter looked at my battered and scarred Nokia, and told me that I already had the most advanced phone they carried. He then offered to sell me a new face plate so that my old phone would “look new.” I left the store, drove up the street to Verizon, and signed up with them. Their service and coverage sucked, too.

  Unfortunately, I succumbed to an AT&T Wireless promotion last week to sign up for another year of service with them. Had I known that they’d soon become Cingular, there’s no way I’d have done that. I wonder if I can weasel out of it? The way I see it, they broke the contract first, by selling out to a company I loathe.

   

• Doug 10:11 pm on February 18, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Outliners, Tinderbox

  Mark Bernstein: Feb0401:

  bq. Knowledge workers frequently need to handle information that isn’t routine and that doesn’t fit established categories. Some of this information is glamorous:

  bq. “While you were out: Hey, boss — Comcast called, they want to buy the company.”

  bq. but most is mundane. You print out the e-ticket receipt for next month’s Chicago trip: now where do you put it? How hard will it be to find next month?

  bq. The ideal, of course, is to have a comprehensive filing system and to use it religiously and systematically. In practice, though, finding things notoriously depends on remembering where you put them. As Engelbart famously observed, the whole point of software is prosthetic: finding ways to help people do things they at which they don’t naturally excel. If you always remember where you put things, good files are easy but good piles will do fine, too. If you don’t, you’ll file those tickets away and next month you’ll spend hours trying to remember where you filed them.

  bq. The Daybook is a very simple Tinderbox application that contains a fresh entry each day. It’s kept in reverse chronological order, like a weblog. But the Daybook is meant to be private — shared with your assistants, perhaps with your workgroup, but chiefly a personal note space. — shared with your assistants, perhaps with your workgroup, but chiefly a personal note space.

  Dirty confession time: I use a Daybook exactly as Mark describes in this post - but the tool I use for keeping my Daybook is a Moleskine notebook.

  It isn’t that Tinderbox isn’t a superb, indeed superior tool for keeping a Daybook, it is. In fact, the very first application I ever used Tinderbox for was keeping a Daybook, and it excelled at doing so. Not only was a quick method for recording notes of what I’d done during the day, Tinderbox’s search functions and agents were perfect for finding stuff months later. More than once during my time as EVP Operations and General Manager of iRobotics, my Tinderbox Daybook saved my butt and the company’s, as I was able to quickly retrieve relevant information about past customer and vendor interactions during rather heated phone calls.

  Unfortunately, I’m no longer tethered to a desk these days. I most commonly need to access the information in my Daybook while I’m in the car, driving between appointments, or while standing in some stranger’s home while showing it to clients. Neither situation is terribly conducive to pulling out my PowerBook and adding a note or running a quick search in Tinderbox. I need something more portable, less obtrusive, and instantly available.

  So, despite that it would undoubtedly be more efficient from an information retrieval perspective to keep my Daybook in Tinderbox, I’ve fallen back on an analog solution for the present. Finding information isn’t as easy, but it is something I can manage with my phone cradled between shoulder and ear, talking to a listing agent on the one hand while an anxious home buyer fires questions at me on the other.

  Ideally, I’d take the time every evening to enter all the notes stored in my Moleskine into Tinderbox every evening, to have them available in both places. Certainly, having my notes available in Tinderbox after I have a few years, rather than a few months worth of notes accumulated is a potential life-saver. Unfortunately, such double entry takes time, the one thing I don’t have right now.

  This isn’t a fault in Tinderbox, of course, but rather a lack of appropriate hardware that will run Tinderbox and meet my needs. I want an Apple designed handheld, about the same size as my Moleskine, with “instant-on” capabilities, stellar handwriting recognition, and the ability to run Tinderbox, iCal, and Address Book (or their hand-held equivalents). Oh, and Bluetooth, so I can sync it with my phone and notebook easily. Someone get Jonathon Ives on that right away, would ya?

   

• Doug 5:44 pm on February 15, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Family, Work

  Please excuse the extended hiatus of the past couple of weeks. There simply hasn’t been the time or energy to do any blogging, at all. I’ve seldom been home any night during the past couple of weeks before about 8:00 PM, and often later. I’ve shown 18 homes, written two offers (and negotiated one to the pending stage), done two listing presentations, and held four Open Houses in the past fourteen days. What little time away from the business I do have goes to my family. Blogging and other online activities lose out.

  Expect further spotty blogging throughout the Spring. It’s only mid-February, and our season doesn’t really start cranking up until next month. Everything I’ve described above has happened during a period of snow, ice, and below normal temperatures. I’m going to be toast when the weather warms up.

  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/irelandoneyearago.html
  Mon, 9 Aug 2004 22:05:51 -0500
  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/irelandoneyearago.html

  Work

  Family

  demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)

  One year ago at this time, Terri and I were somewhere over the Atlantic, flying back from a stay at Ashford Castle. This year, I’m sitting in a home I’ve already held open a half-a-dozen times, hoping someone wanders through that wants to buy it. A year ago, I could

  One year ago at this time, Terri and I were somewhere over the Atlantic, flying back from a stay at Ashford Castle. This year, I’m sitting in a home I’ve already held open a half-a-dozen times, hoping someone wanders through that wants to buy it. A year ago, I could afford to take my wife to Ireland for a weekend. This year, I’m saving pennies so I can afford to buy a fax machine for home so I don’t have to make the 20 minute drive into the office every time I have to send or receive a document outside of normal office hours.

  You betcha, George, the economy sure is humming along.

  As much as I prefer my new career over the stress and angst of the old one, all-in-all, I’d rather be in Ireland.

   

• Doug 1:18 pm on February 3, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Apple, Media, Outliners, Politics, Technology

  inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for ‘$6 month for nothing?’: I’m intrigued by the idea of taxing people $6/month so that music downloading would be otherwise free and unrestricted.

  The big drawback is that I don’t want to download any non-free music, and I’d resent paying the $6 for something I don’t want. I’m not sure that fogeys like me really want to subsidize the music habits of teenagers.

  It sounds like a way for the music labels (which produce a nearly uniformly boring product) to be ensured of making a profit and getting my money. They have no interest in creating something I personally would like—and they’d have even less reason to try, since they’d be getting my money anyway.

  I was getting all geared up for a rant on this myself, but Brent saved me the trouble. This is simply a staggeringly bad idea. Right now, I neither download illegal music now spend anything approaching $6.00 a month buying music. Since the iTunes Music Store opened, I’ve spent around $3.00 total buying music. I haven’t bought a CD in a couple of years.

  Very little of the music being produced today appeals to me - but that’s not the core of my objection. My problem is that I should be allowed to determine how my money is spent, not the government and not the record companies. I, like Brent, am in the process of starting a new business. $6.00 a month doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot to me. Given a choice, I wouldn’t spend it. Now some jackass comes up with the thought that I ought to pay for the 16 year old up the street getting all the free music she can eat. Excuse me, that money belongs to my kids.

  Stay the fuck out of my pockets, please.

  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/morebreastsnotless.html
  Mon, 2 Feb 2004 23:00:43 -0500
  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/morebreastsnotless.html

  Media

  Politics

  demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)

  Scripting News: 2/2/2004: For the record, I missed Janet Jackson’s breast because I was writing something at halftime yesterday. Women’s breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that all women bare their breasts if they want to when they’re on television. It should be a choice thing.

  Scripting News: 2/2/2004: For the record, I missed Janet Jackson’s breast because I was writing something at halftime yesterday. Women’s breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that all women bare their breasts if they want to when they’re on television. It should be a choice thing. I’m pro-choice. It might be more comfortable. It’s unbelievable that Michael Powell is having a hissy fit over this. More breasts, not less. That’s my opinion.

  I missed it too, but I think I largely have to agree with Dave on this one. I could, however, do with less stupid celebrity antics designed to sell more bad music.

  Actually, I’m sort of pleased there’s such an uproar about this. It’s a bit like the whole Clinton blow-job scandal - if this is what the country is getting all stirred up about, maybe there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. I long for the days when our biggest worry was a jizz stain on a chubby intern’s dress.

  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/macupdates.html
  Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:41:28 -0500
  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/macupdates.html

  Apple

  Technology

  Outliners

  demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)

  A host of interesting and useful Mac software news on the wire today:
  Ranchero have updated their excellent Net News Wire and Net News Wire Lite RSS aggregators.
  Apple has released updates to Safari and Java. Unfortunately, through no fault of Apple’s, Safari still doesn’t work with the two primary

  A host of interesting and useful Mac software news on the wire today:

  Ranchero have updated their excellent Net News Wire and Net News Wire Lite RSS aggregators.

  Apple has released updates to Safari and Java. Unfortunately, through no fault of Apple’s, Safari still doesn’t work with the two primary web applications I need for work.

  Another excellent article in the About This Particular Outliner series, this time looking at outliner UI elements. Tinderbox receives high marks.

  On the personal front, my technology (combined with an incipient head cold) let me down this morning. I missed a breakfast meeting because I don’t have a decent, dependable calendaring system in place.

  Prior to a few months ago, I had a decent system using Apple’s iCal and iSync in conjunction with my Nokia 3650 phone to keep track of appointments. When I became a REALTOR® I started using a web application called Top Producer to handle my schedule, primarily because it’s the most common real estate CRM application around.

  Top Producer is decent software, overall. It does a good job with the real estate and customer relationship related aspects of my job, and not too bad a job of schedule management. Unfortunately, a) it’s a web-based Java application, and b) it only runs on Windows. I use VirtualPC to run it on my Mac, which, when combined with a) and b) above, means that it takes around five minutes to get the damn thing fired up to check my schedule. That’s not a big deal when I’m in the office, where I keep it running, but it sucks at home or on an appointment when I want to check my schedule on the fly.

  To add insult to injury, Top Producer won’t export calendar entries in vCal format, so I can’t easily get entries into iCal, where they’d be easy to check and sync with my phone. All this amounts to me not being sure half the time what my schedule is, and not easily able to check it.

  The inelegant (and hopefully temporary) solution is double entry of my calendar information in both Top Producer and iCal. I need to maintain the information in Top Producer to keep complete records of activity associated with my clients and leads, and in iCal to have easy access to my schedule when I don’t have Top Producer running, and from my phone’s calendar function.

  If the various software vendors involved in providing me with applications would implement their software according to standards, I wouldn’t have this problem. I’d be more productive. I wouldn’t have to play stupid double entry games. Instead, some vendors, in a misguided attempt to differentiate themselves or support what they perceive to be the dominant computing platform (you know, the one that just got hammered again by a world-wide e-mail virus) implement extensions to the standards that make these standards useless.

  I see cool concept pieces like this that tout interoperability and ubiquity of wireless, mobile computing systems and shake my head. That’d be neat, but there is no way we’ll see technology that works that easily as long as software companies insist on breaking the plumbing that ties it all together.

   

• Doug 3:47 am on February 3, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Apple, Work

  Can you make money? - At the recent OS X conference, the question came up at the Innovators presentation whether it was possible to make money developing OS X applications.

  Yes, it’s possible.

  But, before you start, here’s some advice…

  I was struck by the level-headedness and practicality of Brent’s advice. Frankly, more people in software development could benefit from developing these attitudes. Of particular note:

  5. Be realistic. Work matters.

  There’s no room for idealism of this sort: people should like your app, investors should provide funding.

  What matters is what actually happens. When you concentrate on the shoulds you’re not working.

  Come to think of it, with just a little modification, this is pretty decent advice for real estate agents, too.

   

• Doug 6:03 pm on February 1, 2004 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Space, Work, World

  

  Yahoo! News - NASA Workers, Families Mourn Columbia:

  “One year ago, at this very hour, the unthinkable occurred,” the director of Kennedy Space Center (news - web sites), Jim Kennedy, told the crowd of a few hundred who gathered on a gray, drizzly morning. Kennedy quietly cited the names of the seven Columbia astronauts, carved into the black granite memorial behind him.

  “They were our friends. They are our heroes. Their loss will not be in vain. We will come back bigger, better and stronger than ever before, and I can assure you that crew and their beloved families will never, ever be forgotten,” he said.

  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/selfemploymentmaymas.html
  Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:04:43 -0500
  http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/selfemploymentmaymas.html

  Work

  World

  demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)

  Yahoo! News - Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth: While outsourcing is not new, a rise in self-employed contractors could explain the slow rebound in employment as counted by the payrolls survey, which shows 2.3 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001.
  For the same

  Yahoo! News - Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth: While outsourcing is not new, a rise in self-employed contractors could explain the slow rebound in employment as counted by the payrolls survey, which shows 2.3 million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001.

  For the same period, a smaller study of households, based on the Current Population Survey, shows a 700,000 rise in employment — a seemingly contradictory sign that has fueled Republican skepticism about the accuracy of the bleaker payrolls data.

  According to the Current Population Survey, the number of self-employed Americans surged 3.9 percent in the last three years, far outstripping a 0.6 percent rise in overall employment.

  I have a tough time believing that self-employment completely explains the lack of recovery in the labor market. Even if there has been a substantial rise in the number of self-employed workers in the workforce, this article doesn’t discuss what the underlying causes of that increase might be - and I’d venture to guess that a significant number of the newly self-employed are self-employed because they couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. Remember those 300,000 unemployed people the Labor Department dropped from the ranks of the unemployed because they “gave up looking for work?” I’m guessing a bunch of those folks are busy marketing themselves as consultants and temp workers, and not just sitting at home on the couch, eating cheese curls and watching Jerry Springer. It’s disingenuous at best for the Bush Administration to try and claim credit for job creation through self-employment under those circumstances.

  Not that there isn’t an increase in the number of people choosing to become self-employed. There is, and I believe this trend will continue, regardless of the economic situation. Almost half of my close friends are self-employed or own their own businesses, and that’s not counting REALTORS® and mortgage brokers that I know. Many of the rest work for small businesses. Most are deeply alienated from large companies and the lifestyle we were all raised to believe represents the American Dream. The social compact has been broken, and it was broken by the companies. A lot of people are fed up, and choosing not to play by the old rules anymore.

  All of which suits companies just fine. They’d rather outsource everything they can, anyway. As the article states, it saves on benefit costs. What the self-employed need to understand is that they are often now competing directly with lower-cost labor from places like India, China, and Vietnam. It’s one thing to have to cope with outsourcing with the resources of a corporate entity behind you, it’s another to try and do that from a home office you set up in your own bedroom - in a house where the mortgage is costing you ten times what housing costs your competitors in Mumbai.

  Companies like Marty Morrow’s Quovix have figured this out and are busy creating hybrid outsourcing solutions for companies. American software developers working for Quovix don’t make as much as they might on projects they land on their own, or if they were on salary somewhere, but they also don’t incur the overhead and marketing costs, either. Meanwhile, off-shore developers make more than they normally would - thereby moving closer to the day when the playing field is really level in terms of cost parity.

  It seems to me that there is a fundamental, structural change taking place in the American economy. Clearly, our employment and other economic metrics are no better suited to coping with this change than our education system, mired in an industrial age paradigm, is suited toward preparing our children to deal with it. Politicians, who have generally never really had to worry about getting a job in their lives, don’t understand it either. Economists, ensconced safely in their ivory towers, lack sufficient data about what’s in progress to make projections that are any more reliable than they could make by scattering chicken blood and diving the future by the pattern of the splatters. We can’t even rely on the wisdom of our elders, who’s experience of the Depression, WWII, and the booming economy of the 1950’s prepared them for a world and labor market that simply no longer exists.

  You’re on your own kids. Be careful out there.

   

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