The High Road and the Low Road

My world is full of technology. Everyone's is these days, for the most part. Sometimes there are some interesting juxtapositions between high tech and low tech aspects of my world. Today, in addition to self-checkout at grocery stores and hardware stores, you can also rent movies from a vending machine for a dollar a day, right there at the grocery store. How cool is that?

Last night, I rented Stranger Than Fiction from a DVD rental machine. All three of us loved the movie. Small Person laughed out loud as soon as he realized that Will Ferrell's character could hear the narrator, and everything about the film - from the graphics that showed how his brain saw the world, to the real end of the story - really worked. What really stuck with the junior member of the partnership, though, was the author's typewriter.

By the end of the movie, Small Person was expressing a wish for a typewriter that he could use, a manual one, no less. It turns out, that I have one - my high school graduation present from my parents. For some reason, he was interested in the typewriter being portable too and it turns out further that this is exactly what I have. Before we all had computers (let along laptops), my parents wanted me to have a portable typewriter so that I could be anywhere in the world and still write - letters, manuscripts, resumes, whatever.

And after all these years, I still have my old portable Olympia B-12 and it's in terrific shape though it hasn't exactly seen a lot of use lately. Even so, it works great and has some rather cool features - like an automated space bar, and a backspace key - that weren't so common on manual typewriters. Of course, manual typewriters - portable or otherwise - weren't exactly common either by the early 80's.

In any case, even with the ribbon pretty dried out because it's been ages since I've used or replaced it, Small Person happily sat down to type on it right away, coming up with some rather amusing stuff in the process. If you happen to run across a story about a wristwatch that's as unhappy about screaming as it is about having ended up lost and on Mars, in all likelihood it started here in this house.

His keyboarding skills are fine but the added pressure needed to get the keys to strike right was a bit tough for him. We figure it's good finger-strengthening exercise for the piano, though, and keep encouraging him to stay with standard fingering rather than lapsing into two-finger keyboarding.

So how strange is this - a digital native going back to visit the old country, seeing for himself why QWERTY keyboards are the way that they are and learning about platens, end-of-line bells, carriage returns and so forth and so on? Next session, I'll teach him about correcting mistakes in the world where backspacing doesn't equal deleting.

For now, I'm just letting him enjoy himself.

Meanwhile, I myself am playing on the computer with ActiveWords, after having heard about this pretty nifty little tool at a recent Seattle Lunch 2.0 free lunch/networking event for geeks. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about capturing keystrokes just yet, nor do I have good data yet on how much memory the application consumes. I can say, however, that the ease with which I can now launch some of my favorite applications makes it pretty slick to use and I know that's just the tip of the iceberg.

For instance - I have also worked out how to use ActiveWords to navigate to URL's I visit a lot. Right now, I'm navigating quite a bit to a couple of different Basecamp accounts, one for Startup Weekend Seattle, and another that we've set up for one of my closest friends who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

What we decided was that all of the logistics around battling breast cancer - researching information, gathering the right health care professionals, strategizing and making plans, mobilizing all of the friends and family who are offering to be resources, and so forth - was just like managing the kinds of projects some of us do for work. And so now we have Project Boob Management, which makes me - for the time being anyway - the Project Boob Manager. Life takes odd turns.

As useful and interesting as high tech can be, I find it can also take over our lives in ways that are not so helpful. Now that we both have laptops, there are times when I realize that Tall Person and I are both in the living room together, navigating around in our own personal online worlds with little or no conversation between us. Something similar happens when we read sometimes too, but somehow it's different and even more disconnected when it's the computers. It's times like these that I see how important it is to strike a balance between high tech and low tech.

For those of you who who agree and are still striving for that kind of balance in your own lives, you might be interested in the Soul Tech workshop put on by Leif Hansen. If you missed out on tickets for Startup Weekend Seattle, it might be a great way to spend your Saturday afternoon this weekend. I wish there was a feasible way for me to be in both places at once, as it's a topic I feel strongly enough about to sometimes wish it was my workshop. Leif is good people though, and I'm glad he's getting such great attention for his work.

In the end, high tech that helps facilitate more human interaction - by making it easier to find each other and work together, or by saving time and reducing stress so that we have more time to spend with one another with fewer headaches - is probably some of the highest and best use of technology. Where it interferes with human interaction is probably a mistake, something I'm far more likely to think about the next time I go to the grocery store and am making the choice between using a check-stand with a real-live checker and going through the automated self-check.

Those automated movie vending machines are way cool though, just about any way you look at it. I have even noticed DVD kiosks in hospitals. I know from past experience that sometimes connecting over a good escapist-type movie can be a great way to recover from surgery or get through chemo if it's one of those times when no one really feels like talking that much.

I'll be sure to add that one to the Basecamp-supported Project Boob Management idea list.

And you should feel welcome to add a comment if you have questions, thoughts, ideas, around taking the high (tech) road vs. the low road.

How is technology helping or hindering what's important in life?

Network Gnoshing

It looks like at least a couple of us associated with Seattle Startup Weekend will be at the Seattle Lunch 2.0-organized Happy Hour event tomorrow (try not to get confused), hosted by Avvo. If you're there, be sure to find me and say 'hi' - and feel free to ask about Startup Weekend. Or Zeenami. Or just avoid me altogether.

I probably won't feel bad.

If you're thinking of participating in SSW, though, I recommend registering first and asking questions later. As mentioned previously, tickets seem to be going pretty fast.

What defines "fun" for you?

Seattle Startup Weekend

The folks at Almost Live! would be proud. First tests of the Startup Weekend - Seattle signup form have been less than perfect. I'm sure we'll get that worked out shortly. The important part is that we've got a date (January 25-27) and a location (Adobe), and we're on the move!

Now it's time to get the word out, find people who want to participate, get sponsors, and start pulling together all the elements needed to make this an awesome event. We're number 14 (or so I've been told) in the list of Startup Weekend events and we have quite a lot to live up to at this point. Since Seattle is definitely a hot technical community, I personally have pretty high expectations.

Even though it's nearer the end of January and we'll be starting to see a bit more light by then, don't let that distract you! Come join us. You'll have fun. You know you will. Even if it is in Fremont.

Oh, wait a minute... I used to live in Fremont... and that was back in the days when it was more hippies than wealthy people who work in the information industry. That's right... I remember now... I like Fremont.

I'm sure I'll like it even better in January. See you there!

What feeds your passion?

The Changing Nature of Communication

You can tell we're in the midst of a shift that doesn't yet really know where it's going. The below-30 crowd almost exclusively communicates very publicly with one another using Facebook and MySpace while at the same time somehow expecting more privacy than such openness would suggest. The over-30 crowd, having mostly come to terms with the usefulness of email, is starting to venture into social networking a bit late into the game. They're not quite certain of its relevance in their own lives and more wary of the additional exposure.

While these things shake themselves out, I keep coming back to thinking about how what we say is impacted by how we communicate.

Over the years, I've given a fair amount of thought to that. There was a time in my life when the idea of a graduate degree - just to have done the work to get one, not for any particular use for the degree itself - was appealing to me. As my mind wandered down that potential path, I pondered over what sort of research I'd want to do. The question that interested me the most was "How does the method of communicating impact the nature and effectiveness of communication?" - or something like that anyway. I'm sure a good advisor and mentor would have helped me refine the question into something better if I'd ever gone down that path in reality.

Context is helpful here. When this question first came up for me, I was a college student at a time when only scientists, military, and government had ready access to the internet as a general group. College students, if they had access to the computing labs did too, but that capability was generally limited to those of us in engineering or computer sciences in the earlier days.

This also pre-dated today's ubiquitous cell phones, and flat-rate long distance plans and inexpensive calling cards were also still well out in the future.

So, the communication landscape of the day consisted primarily of letters and post-cards. If you had money and it was worth the expense, you might call long distance on the telephone occasionally but it was something a starving college student thought about before doing... and even then, we tended to count on parents with enough money to reverse the charges and kept the calls fairly short out of necessity.

In mass communication, the notion of satellite transmissions making a broader range of television programming available to more people was just catching on for real, finally becoming more of an expectation than a novelty or luxury. The 24-hour news machine that burst onto the scene in the form of CNN coverage of the transition from Desert Shield to Desert Storm was still in our future. We were just getting cozy with the joke of "50 channels and nothing to watch."

These days, it's more like eight hundred and fifty. And still nothing to watch.

When I think of the fact that being limited to these forms of communication is entirely foreign to my 11-yr-old and as good as that to the 23-yr-old in my family for all he remembers of life before the digital divide opened up into a chasm, it boggles my mind.

Pen pals were fun to have but the time it took for letters to transit state lines took special care and nurturing to keep the relationships going. Overseas pen pals were even more cool but further complicated by the typical two week lag (one-way!) and the space restrictions that accompanied the use of the "aerogramme" letters. Still - if you ever received one, that characteristic lightweight - nearly flimsy - blue paper held such an exotic quality that it made one think of faraway places and the other cultures found there.

The real-time chattiness of phone calls was reserved for cross-town family and school friends. Cross-country calls were rare for "regular folks" and were usually placed only if there arose some urgent need - such as to communicate a death or some grave illness. I don't recall much overseas calling at all - telegrams were still the more common method for communicating urgent messages and paying by the word meant everyone kept telegrams brief.

Having grown up as a world traveler at a time when such a life made me and my lifestyle exotic, the global nature of relationships made possible by the Internet felt like coming home. I felt at more at ease with BitNet communications than any other form I'd experienced previously. I temporarily lost any sense of urgency with regard to ham radio and fully embraced the beginning of the digital age.

And this is when I began to notice that just as email was different from snail mail (though I doubt we'd really started calling it that yet - more likely it was just 'real' mail) and phone conversations, it was becoming clear that email was also different from group internet relay chat, which was also different from the person-to-person BitNet messages, with their 80-character limitations.

Have something quick to say with the expectation of a real-time response... send a BitNet message. If you want to say more, save it for an email. These days, text messaging is similar to that earlier counterpart, but more prevalent because we all have cell phones and so with an even greater expectation of immediate responses.

The more public, group orientation of Facebook adds yet another dimension to communications while Twitter is particularly well-suited for announcements made just in case anyone out there cares. In fact it doesn't seem a lot different from times when Small Person (along with others I've known) announces to no one in particular that he's heading to the bathroom. Good thing he's far less technical than I am at this point. Maybe he won't feel inclined to be mad at me by the time he realizes I've invaded his privacy in such a public way.

The question of privacy in an online life is a tricky one. I don't pretend to understand how we'll come to terms with that one. The best I can guess at this point is that we may adopt some digital version of the traditional Japanese sense of privacy. In a world where many walls were nothing more than shoji screens, made with translucent paper, Japanese created privacy where there was none by politely pretending not to notice anything that couldn't be seen directly. Such sensibilities have even spilled over into forced face-to-face environments such as trains where crowds are necessarily able to see and hear things they might prefer not to witness.

Already I have friends online with whom I'm likely to pretend when together in person that we don't know as much about each other's private lives as we do. We're open and honest with one another and I believe that's admirable - it just shouldn't come back to cause problems or embarrassment later.

Until we figure it out, I think of my online presence in much the same way as I think of keeping teeth brushed and hair combed. Good personal hygiene is good practice anyway - and really important to make sure it's done before leaving the house. Similarly, I still advocate being ourselves - our best selves - online. Being our best selves means that we don't have to worry about whether parents and bosses are watching - which they probably are these days, along with a lot of other folks. .

It's an interesting conversation to have - what we have to say to one another, how we say it and what sort of expectations we have (and can have) around privacy - and whether that's the same as anonymity. I definitely encourage you to comment and get the discussion going. The more publicly we hold the conversation, the more robust it will be.

What do you have to say, and to whom?

Support for Support

The past couple of weeks have included an interesting confluence of events. First, I ran across someone wanting to know how to calculate costs for Support. This question on LinkedIn came to my attention just in time to use it as a starting point in a certification class for Product Managers, where we discussed some of the considerations involved.

I like to see interest in this sort of thing precisely because it's been so very rare in my experience. While it's great for me in that I don't have a whole lot of competition for my services, it's also not that great for the businesses where no one is thinking about Support until way late in the game.

My co-presenter, Nona, and I won't actually get into the detail of designing and costing out an appropriate Support organization until next Spring, but with a re-design in the coursework, we were able to get in early to at least raise the subject while the students were still working out their revenue models and business cases. This is as it should be and I'm glad that we got to spend some time in front of the classroom so much earlier than most people tend to think of Support.

Apparently some of the students are catching on to the importance too, as we saw at least one comment about a team that had completely overlooked the cost of Support up until that point. Whew, one pretend business saved from one of the many pitfalls that are out there!

After talking at extended length with another student who had a real-life need to make some decent cost estimates, I came home and started adding some more detail to the worksheet that I had developed a few years ago. I hadn't looked at it with a fresh eye for a while, so I'd forgotten how good it really is. Once I add in these new refinements, it should be even better.

As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, though, for my ability to accurately assess the expense side of Support and how it factors in to the rest of the business, I didn't figure out how to do all of this on my own. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Nancy Truitt Pierce and her Service and Support Consortium for all that I've learned over the years about the business of Support and the confidence I've gained in my abilities.

Sadly, I've just learned today that Nancy is closing up the Service and Support Consortium. Though I don't know why yet, I do have some guesses and can only say that it will be a major loss to the Puget Sound tech community. There are people and businesses all over who probably don't realize the powerfully positive impact that Nancy has had on their ability to succeed because of how much smarter the heads of their Support organizations have become under her guidance and with the help and support of their peers.

The loss of this organization means there will be some large, important shoes to fill. I'm thinking I see an online group in our future somehow...

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the SSC Alumni breakfast gathering on March 13th. It will be important to me, and I'm sure to many others, to recognize the passing of an era and reconnect with some great minds.

Each company pays differing amounts of attention to the business of Support. I'm curious about how much you think about that aspect of your business, how well you understand the costs and revenue opportunities associated with Support, and what sort of support is provided to your Support organization. Do share - it's how we all learn.

What support do you need?

Countdown to Crave

Seattle startup Zeenami is participating in the big Crave Show "Indulgence and Style" event for women at the Seattle Pike Street Annex today and tomorrow. And they'll have local coaches there too, helping women figure out what to do about life fulfillment scores that aren't what they want them to be.

Okay, so I'm a bit too geeky to really appreciate "Indulgence and Style" for myself but hey, I know LOTS of women who are into that sort of thing, so I'm thinking it's pretty cool to bring geek and coaching together.

If you plan on attending or have feedback, drop me a quick line at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - I'm interested in your experience.

What do you really crave?