Twitter - Jumping the Gap

Perhaps it's because I'm more involved in Twitter these days but I'm finding more and more evidence that Twitter is jumping the gap - beginning to cross the chasm between early adopters and going mainstream.

Of course, for some, this is about as welcome as jumping the shark but this is the stage of maturation I really love. I love the discovery of something new, figuring out how it can be useful, and then sharing that vision with others until they get it themselves. My first experience with this whole World Wide Web aspect of the internet was like that and now with Twitter, I'm actually melding that with a return to a comfort zone distinctly reminiscent of the early days of BITNet.

Near daily, we're finding new uses for Twitter. Now that it's not just about what sort of coffee drink the person in front of you is ordering, it's not just about marketing either. During the snow storms last month in Seattle, finding out weather and road status were invaluable tools for coping with all the disruption.

And Twitter is great for breaking news. Tweets today started full of news and speculation about Steve Jobs and quickly moved on to subjects like the plane crashing in the Hudson River and other topics that regularly take a bit more time to reach mainstream media.

In fact, it was at least three days between when I heard about the pantsed Vail skier via Twitter and the first forwarded email in my inbox. News junkie that I am, I'm following news-oriented Twitter accounts as fast as I can discover them.

From these uses, it's not at all a big leap to thinking of using Twitter in emergency situations including using Twitter as an emergency broacast system and the possibility of having Twitter play a role in a larger technology solution for emergencies and disasters.

Twitter has been a great discovery mechanism as well - finding new people, finding blogs like the one published by Washington State Department of Transportation and finding lots of other great sites and interesting information.

It wasn't so very long ago when the notion of being rescued with Twitter was a big deal. Now that this seems an obvious go-to, I wonder where we'll head next with this technology. We like to make predictions this time of year - how do you see Twitter being used in the future and what would it take to get there?

In any case, the pattern I've noticed is technology is often used for fun before it's real usefulness is identified and put to work. It doesn't hurt to think about what's fun in our own lives and how that might be made useful.

How do I use technology to move me forward?

Runners and Technology

Sometimes the only thing that gets out is technology. For another couple of hours yet, we're not going anywhere. We've got the Seafair Marathon going out our door and with the half marathoners still coming up the "last killer hill" just to the south of us and the marathoners coming up the hill just to the north, there's really nowhere to go.

But you can see the pictures. This is the top three elite runners just joining up with the half marathon runners.

And meanwhile, at City Hall, the Eastside Amateur Radio Support group is participating in Field Day, the annual event where ham radio operators practice using technology to get the word out any way they can when nothing else is working.

So -I'll walk down to City Hall in a bit. That will still work. And in the meantime, we'll tune out with some reggae designed to make the last mile a little more fun for the runners. At least it's a nice gradual downhill from here!


How will you get out?

HIT Me

If you've been paying much attention to the news this past week, you know that Nevada is not just for gamblers and skiers. It's also a place popular with some aviation enthusiasts - and a place where some of them go missing, the latest of whom is apparently Steve Fossett.

I like to keep an eye on Slashdot. I don't read everything, but I do keep a lookout for things that interest me that I wouldn't find out about otherwise. Over the weekend I learned from a Slashdot article that the search for Steve Fossett has gone high-tech, using Amazon Mechanical Turk.

With experience flying (with even quite a few hours in a Bellanca Citabria 7GCBC) and an interest in technology as a meaningful solution, I decided this was an excellent opportunity to actually do some good and not just settle for slacktivism.

I know what an experienced pilot is likely to do in a variety of situations. I know what kinds of perils exist in the air. And I have a rough idea of what a crash site is likely to look like. So, I started reviewing HIT (Human Interface Tasks) photos myself.

At 10-20 seconds for a decent look at most and up to a minute or so for the more complex photos where I feel a need to cross-reference with Google Earth views of the data, I've been able to process more than a hundred already in just a couple short-ish sittings.

Of course, that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the more than 65,000 photos that showed up on the list when I first looked. With so many people working on it though, that number is coming down rapidly. Currently, it looks like it's dropped to just over 52,000. Wow, that's a lot of hands making light work!

The work helps keep some of the normal speculation at bay. There's only so much hangar flying that's useful in these situations. I've found that it helps deal with the ambiguity - if it could happen to someone good like that, it could happen to me - by finding reasons why it could have been pilot error. We all secretly hope to determine it was an error that we can learn how to avoid once we've inspected every last aspect of the scenario and decided how we would have handled it differently. Beyond that, it's just talk.

General public with little or no experience in aviation likes to jump to conclusions for entirely different reasons. "Aviators are risk-takers to be avoided" seems to be the theme I run across most frequently. These are the people most likely to blame an accident on the lack of a flight plan, which is ludicrous.

No matter how short a flight I intend, however, I always file a flight plan because while lack of one may not cause an accident, it sure makes it a heckuva lot easier to find you should you need to be found. Not filing a flight plan is a meaningless gamble that you'll arrive at your destination safely without need of outside intervention.

Given that it's way easy to file a flight plan, it seems worth the extra time to just let someone know where you're headed - and then also let them know if your plans change. Place your bet on the possibility that you could need the help rather than the probability that you won't. Gamblers do generally prefer long odds as the better payoff anyway, right?

So go ahead, satisfy your curiosity and help out with a few Fossett-seeking HIT photos. Then, if you still feel a need for some more hangar flying, feel free to comment or send your discussion-starters to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and we'll hash out amongst ourselves what could have happened, what should have been done differently, or what we should be doing next. I'll be processing a few more HIT photos myself in the meantime.

What small and seemingly unnecessary steps could I take now to mitigate risks later?

Internet Off the Grid

For the past year or so, the thought has occurred to me that conditions could reach a point where energy is precious enough that we may be pushed out of urban centers to better situate ourselves to grow our own food or at least live closer to its production. That's not the only cause or justification, but you get the drift - people more spread out instead of more concentrated. People quite likely living off the grid.

And if that were to happen, the question I keep wondering is whether that would result in going back to an agrarian society or whether some other way of being might evolve.

I'm comfortable enough with the former, having grown up around wheat farming and having helped raise cattle myself. But I'm betting on the latter. There is so much of what so many of us do that is virtual anymore that if there were a way to stay virtually connected via the internet, despite the distances and the changes in availability of energy, then I'm sure we could rebuild a spread out, virtual society.

It's an interesting thought anyway and now it seems there really does exist the technology that could take the internet off the grid. Makes you think about where the new power centers are likely to be, doesn't it? Of course, with the combination of the decreased daylight and increased clouds and storms in the wintertime, the Seattle area would likely be open for business only in the summer months.

So - what's your most interesting and/or optimistic post-apocalyptic scenario assuming there are still computers and ways for them to stay connected over distances? I love science fiction "what-if's" so send yours to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and let's riff on it a bit. You never know where it could lead.

Where do I want to be in twenty years? What's likely then? And what can I do today to make the two mesh?

Hell Week(s)

I'm having trouble imagining the full impact the I-5 construction is likely to have starting Monday morning. No big deal or bigger than we all figured or what? Here's a thought - how about buying some time to see what it's really like before venturing out into the mess by test-driving the telecommuting component of your business continuity plans.

You know, the plans that take into account the possibility that some flu pandemic could hit, or the 520 bridge could sink or float away or the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct could pancake (especially after having been damaged in the Nisqually Quake), leaving workplaces not nearly so accessible as normal.

Having already had to restore tech support services offsite once when our building was red-tagged after the Nisqually Quake, I highly recommend making sure you can keep doing business from a remote location. That capability could come in handy over the next few weeks if the traffic really does get as bad as they predict.

I'm interested to hear how you'll deal with the anticipated construction havoc. Send your thoughts to techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com about what you will (would) do if getting to work is difficult (or impossible).

What's in the way of your goal and what will you do about that?

Readiness Is All

Shakespeare had an uncanny ability to sum up larger life lessons within the context of scenarios designed primarily to entertain. Certainly this quality has much to do with the abiding popularity of his work. I found myself so touched last night – and fascinated too – to see how well one teacher is able to reach at-risk grade-schoolers and help them develop life skills that prepare them for greater success than they typically see on a day-to-day basis.

And the impact on these kids is huge – I mean really, how many boys are that might otherwise be considering getting involved in a gang are able or willing to cry openly as the class reads about Huck Finn finding within himself the courage to reject societal norms and do what he believes to be the right thing? Heck, the whole class was sobbing after their final performance of Hamlet on their last day of school. You can’t buy or force that kind of compassion and closeness nor the sort of personal convictions that arise from that.

Rafe instills in his Hobart Shakespearean students two priorities – Be Nice to one another and Work Hard. The rest follows from this and it’s a good start; simply put, there are no shortcuts to these words of wisdom. Rafe also understands that what it is they do with his gifts when they leave him is entirely up to them. Fortunately, it sounds like many of them take the foundation provided them and really run with it. Their implementation must be good for these students to end up places like Harvard, Stanford & Yale especially when they’re literally pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s not the kind of success that can be pushed upon a kid.

This is heartening to see in a time when so recently we have seen the devastating impact of both insufficient readiness and problematic implementation of an entirely different sort.

Quite frankly, I believe that it would have been impossible to fully anticipate and effectively deal with a storm as horrific as Katrina. Where I gag is in knowing that those things for which we could not prepare did not have to be nearly as devastating had there been sufficient preparedness for that which was predictable and had those plans been carried out more effectively. And by all means, if you see a storm that effectively fills the entire Gulf of Mexico, take seriously that it’s likely to be very bad!

Now is a good time for all of us to take stock. While it is reasonable to expect the government e involved in emergencies and that it be the federal government when the disasters are large-scale and regional in nature, it’s also important to consider the role of individuals too.

In the US, most of us are in danger of one kind of natural disaster or another – if it’s not hurricanes, it’s tornadoes, or earthquakes… or river flooding or flash flooding… or volcanoes… or blizzards, or… well, you get the idea. Those who know me are probably not surprised I’m harping on this topic yet again.

What is likely where you are? Start with what preparations are reasonable for your situation to ensure that you as an individual (and your family) are ready to be self-sufficient for a minimum of 48-72 hours. The notion that being on our own for an extended period of time truly is a possibility even in our industrialized society is perhaps the biggest wake-up call for us recently because clearly this is not something we’ve necessarily understood well in the past.

I am one of those who can be easily overwhelmed by a task that seems too large. The good news is that there are monthly/weekly To-Do lists available that can help make the task of preparedness more manageable and at least one that I’ve seen even includes suggestions such as completing some first aid training – making it much more than just a kit list. If you don’t like what you find, make your own master list and then post it together with your shopping list so that you can buy one item at a time along with your normal purchases.

The other clear lesson both from Rafe’s classroom and from Katrina is that good communication is critical to any long-term success.

• Know how you will contact your family in the event of an emergency of some kind, keeping in mind that alternatives to cell phones and downed land lines might be needed sometimes.
• Keep an FRS radio handy, keep appropriately-sized alkaline batteries around, and practice disaster communications in your neighborhood.
• Find out if you have a ham – an amateur radio (HA or HV) operator within walking distance.

For that matter, get kids interested in ham radio and use that as an opportunity to get involved yourself if you’re so inclined. Not only is it fun and interesting, it’s clear that ham radio works and that there’s still a need for amateur radio operators even in this age of cell phones and trunked radio systems. While I highly value the Elmers in my own life, I know there are some things I can do now that I won’t be able to do in my later years. Even if I could, we need to keep younger generations involved just to keep up the tradition.

Once you’re able to start working on your individual disaster preparedness, take a look at your work family and your business operations. Even if it seems like something somebody else should be paying attention to, there are people you care about and skills that you have that make you uniquely qualified to come up with questions and solutions others will not have without your input. Undoubtedly there is also something about your work that you know better than anyone else and so they’ll all be relying on you to help figure out how to keep operations as normal as possible in the event of a disaster.

Start today. Start small if you must, but start – Work Hard. And coordinate with the other people you interact with both at work and in your personal life – in other words, Be Nice. If that readiness is necessary, the results will be far better than if you put off the effort.

It’s also likely that we’ll be better off for having engaged in these efforts even if they’re not needed. Work Hard and Be Nice is just good advice no matter what the circumstances. We’ll know more about our business operations and the people we work with, we’ll know better how to deal with sports injuries should they occur, and we’ll be closer to our neighbors. How can any of that be a bad thing?

What is one thing you are willing to do this week toward being better prepared?

Being Prepared at Work and Home

Imagine going to the bank and not being able to withdraw funds because the teller could not confirm the balance on your account. This was the very real scenario presented to me once when I was working as a support analyst. What turned out to be interesting about this incident had nothing at all to do with the solution for this particular problem.

Actually, I’m sure the solution was exactly what mattered most to the bank people and ultimately we did get that squared away. For me, though, what was interesting was the side comment that had been made when the customer was sharing with me how grave a matter this was. It turns out, that during this period of time there were still some banks working through paper processes but the computerized processes worked so much better and so much more quickly that the paper processes had been abandoned completely… so completely, in fact, that no one knew anymore how to manage the process other than by computer even though this was still technically possible at that time. This was fine, of course, until the network communications went down, or power in general was lost, taking down computer access to the ifnormation they needed. Then it wasn’t so fine because no one knew how to deal with such situations.

Fast forward to my years as a manager… Although my own experiences with power outages in the workplace have been a rarity, they have occurred. Funny thing about power outages in a contact center – the phone usually still rings! Of course, there are many things one cannot do when there is no computer access: changes cannot be made to accounts, software patches cannot be sent, and knowledge management solutions cannot be researched, to name but a few. We can, however, still talk to customers and often we can provide them with at least some answers. Moreover, if we take down all of the appropriate information, we can even handle their requests later, once power is restored. The trick, of course, is to know what information is needed and to capture it in a way that can be used later.

It takes knowledgeable people to respond intelligently to requests for help – this is largely true even when the knowledgebase is accessible and is particularly true when it’s not. And good customer service is good customer service, no matter what else is happening. That part is simple. When we prepare for emergencies, however, how often do we think in terms of what capabilities and responsibilities remain and how we will conduct ourselves under diminished capacity? Do you have paper data entry forms that can substitute for the real thing under mildly difficult conditions that diminish your capabilities as a contact center (or whatever it is that you do) but don't completely inhibit your ability to work? Will your agents have light to work with? What else can you do and not do if you lose power or lose phone service? What is the best way to respond to your customers and let them know what is happening and that you are still available – and to what extent?

Disaster preparedness is important at home too. Have you thought about the sorts of emergencies, large and small that are predictable enough to prepare for and how you would meet those challenges? One realization that has dawned on me recently is how important communication will be. The one serious earthquake I’ve experienced made it quite clear to me that ensuring each other’s safety is one of the first things on anyone’s mind. First there was my staff – in my case, there were thirteen at the time and having been their manager for just shy of a week, I didn’t even know all their names yet so the effort of tracking everyone down and ensuring they were all okay kept me occupied for a bit.

Once I was reasonably assured of their safety, my next thoughts went to my family. This was when reality truly struck – everyone else in the region had the exact same thoughts as mine and while cell phone towers may have been mostly intact, the many calls for service had completely jammed the network. For all practical purposes, no one was reaching anyone by cell phone. As one person put it to me recently, there are only so many dial tones to go around.

All of which brings me to present day – communication is how work gets done, it’s how communities and cultures are formed and preserved and it’s how service is provided, whether that service is business related, or health and safety related. It occurs to me that whether we’re talking business or neighbor-to-neighbor, the ability to communicate with one another is one of the most important capabilities worth preserving. To that end, I was glad to see that my city recently sent out an all-call to licensed ham radio operators to come participate as volunteers assisting in communications support. Feeling as I do about communication and disaster preparedness, I enthusiastically responded even though I have yet to actually go on the air with my own license. In fact, I’m starting to get rather excited about participating to some extent in the upcoming Field Day. Maybe the small person in my life would even be interested in joining me. It seems to me that anything we can do to spark and preserve an interest in Amateur Radio with the newer generations is a good thing.

During my first meeting with my mentor, I also found out about his efforts to organize his neighborhood to help look out after each other using the handheld radios so many of us use for camping trips, amusement parks, and skiing. His theory is that if they can all talk to each other, they can help each other out where needed and if they can talk to him, he can coordinate any necessary communications outside the immediate area with his ham radio gear.

I would need to get my own gear set up to take it that far but my family does have a pair of the FRS radios we could start using and I’ve decided to start forming a neighborhood NET in my area. Small person has most definitely been enjoying learning to use the radios and I like the idea that he’ll know how to use them responsibly as well as having fun.

Quite frankly, I’d never thought before of how important these handheld two-way radios could be in an emergency. And in not thinking of them as a resource, it also never occurred to me what preparation might be necessary to maximize their usefulness in such situations. Fortunately, there are a few resources out there on the internet.

Some best practices I’ve gleaned so far with regard to emergency communications:

• Agree on a channel with your family to use in the event of an emergency – it has been recommended that we all set aside FRS channel 1 for emergency use only; a secondary channel to move to for extended conversations would probably be a good idea as well to keep channel 1 as open as possible.
• Keep your rechargeable batteries recharged and fresh non-rechargeable batteries on hand in the event your radios are needed for extended periods of time.
• Know how you will reach emergency services should you need them and know how you will ‘make do’ until they are available.
• Know how you will use your radio in an emergency situation.
• Include your neighbors in your emergency planning so that you can all help look after each other should the need arise.
• Keep your radio with you (even in the car) in the event disaster strikes when you are somewhere other than at home.
• Test your plans periodically.

Of course it’s also important to be prepared in other respects beyond communications. I favor building up supplies a bit at a time. If the effort is so scary and overwhelming that we never even begin, it won't serve its purpose. I encourage everyone to do one thing today to be more prepared for whatever emergencies concern you most; even if it’s a small thing, it means you’ll be better off should some emergency situation arise than you were yesterday. And if you keep building on that, your chances (of surviving, thriving, etc.) will be that much better.

If you have emergency preparedness tips for home or business, it would be nice to share these around. Send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and I'll post what's useful for everyone.

What can I do that increases my likelihood of success?

Creating Luck

When I was a kid, I was fortunate enough to spend time living on a lake. It was a particularly good lake for waterskiing but only if you got an early start in the morning. Near the beginning and the end of the school year happened to be some of the best conditions because of the combination of the weather and the fact that other people mostly had school in mind instead of skiing. Going for a quick pull before school was not necessarily the norm (no one planned it) but if you were awake, had eaten breakfast already, homework done & clothes laid out - short, if you were prepared - when the airhorn sounded... well, you just might have a chance to sample perfection for a half-hour or so and start the day out right. There was nothing like early morning sun on my back, wind in my hair, and the smoothness of the water that time of day.

Why does this matter in the context of this column?

The point is, are you ready for whatever opportunity is right around the corner or perhaps even staring you in the face? Are you even ready to recognize such an opportunity?

There is a project providing scientific proof of a sort that is starting to get some attention that we do create our own luck... and that staying optimistic and keeping a broad focus that makes it easier to spot a variety of opportunities (even those that come disguised as disasters) is an important component to that process. For more information on the Luck Project, go to www.luckfactor.co.uk, recently written up in Fast Company.

For die-hard pessimists, the same can be said about disasters. I carry water with me on desert hikes and matches on hikes in areas with wetter climates. What sort of preparations have you made in your career to be ready for whatever difficulties or opportunities may come your way?

My favorites include:

* Keeping a running list of the projects I'm working on and the skills I'm developing and the results I've achieved
* Using this and other information to keep my resume updated at least once a quarter ("whether I need it or not")
* Staying in contact with a variety of individuals in and outside of my industry
* Making sure I'm doing as many favors for the people I know as they're doing for me
* Add new people to my list of contacts with each new project, job, or role that I'm involved in
* Regular mental run-down on of how happy and satisfied I am with my work, what drives me right now, and where I feel like I'm really making a difference
* List of skills I want to add - these I either make time to add or are the first things I jump into in the event of having unplanned time on my hands, such as happens so often with unemployment.

What it comes down to is this... Some of the most important turning points in our lives, good and bad, don't bother to announce themselves in advance. That means we've got to be ready for them before they arrive.

How do you stay optimistic? What personal disaster recovery plans do you maintain on a regular basis? Send your suggestions to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and I'll share the best ones here.

Just know that when that airhorn blows, you've either got your swimsuit on already or you get left on the dock.