For several years, I have avoided the Blackberry phenomenon. It’s a little weird because I have been known to enjoy the gadgets. But really, when it comes down to it, I’ve never liked the thought of being ‘connected’ and accessible 100% of the time. I’ve also always thought that a phone should just be left to being a phone. I don’t need anything super-fancy. It just has to be kind of cool looking and usable.

Then I started my new job where they pay for me to have a Blackberry…

At first, I wasn’t so OK with that because of the reasons stated above. Not only that, but I started thinking about ‘those people’ in meetings where they have their BB in one hand and they are half paying attention and how annoying that can be. I don’t ever want to be one of those people.

Now that I’ve had it for a several weeks, I’m actually figuring out that it’s a pretty useful tool, and if you use it right (like anything else) it can be something that increases your productivity and communications quite a bit.

I’ve noticed is that it actually suits my communication style a little better as well. I don’t like the phone very much at all. I make it a rule for myself to make phonecalls as little as possible, and when I am on the phone, I tend to want to cut to the chase pretty quickly.

When you’re on the phone, you’re on the spot to come up with something to say right then and there. When you’re e-mailing or BB Messaging or texting, you have some time to think about what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. It forces you to be concise as well, and that’s something I’ve had to work on for a while. I’ve been known to send out some monster e-mails…

The only thing that I’m even mildly annoyed with is the fact that, when someone e-mails me or communicates with my via BB, I feel the need to be responsive. I’m a firm believer in the idea of unplugging and unwinding so your brain has a chance to recover from the rigors of a work-week. I guess I don’t have to be responsive 100% of the time. Nobody is holding a gun to my head saying that I will be executed if I’m not super-fast on the draw. I suppose that if you are 100% responsive, you are setting yourself up for some small amount of failure in that you are creating the expectation, the appearance, that it’s just fine to ask you to do things anytime, anyplace, anywhere. That’s not fair to yourself, and to some degree, it’s not fair to the other person because you get it in your head that if you are going to be available, then they should be available too when they might not necessarily want to be.

In a world where things are becoming increasingly more and more ‘on-demand’ we need to be cognizant of the effect this has on our relationships with others. We need to be understanding that people are people are people, and that just because they have the tools to be reachable 24/7, that doesn’t mean we should abuse it or take advantage of it. Afterall, the world isn’t going to end if that Sujnday e-mail isn’t sent until Monday. Or maybe it’s that you can choose to send out the e-mail, but don’t unfairly expect a response if until a reasonable hour.

So for now, I’ll view it as a nice tool that my company has bestowed upon me and hope that everyone is just as thoughtful as I will try to be when it comes to a reasonable amount of communication.

Guess that makes sense and all, seeing that they are my client and all…specifically the Small to Medium Business unit (SMB).

I came to work on my first day to be greeted by a ridiculously large cardboard box…one that looked like it should be carrying a giant nuclear tower or something like that. It was very ugly and had a huge black Dell logo on the side of it.
This was quite the opposite of of my Macbook Pro purchase.

After plowing through opening the thing, I realized that, buried beneath several other smaller cardboard boxes, was a flatter, more thin cardboard box containing a brand spanking new Dell 630C laptop. After getting it all setup and running, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with it.

The overall look of it is pretty aesthetically pleasing. Though it’s certainly not anywhere near as sleek and ‘designery’ (I made up another word…awesome) as a Mac, it doesn’t look like a brick of black electronics. It’s black and grey, and the plastic used seems to be of high quality. It’s thin and light, but it doesn’t feel like if you were to drop it, it would shatter or break.

There are two things about the feel of it I noticed right away. First, the hinge on the lid is almost perfect. It adjusts very easily, but it doesn’t make you muscle it to get it to a proper viewing angle. Once you get it in place, it doesn’t move or wobble. And second, the keyboard is fantastic. It feels very solid, tactile & responsive.

Overall operation of it feels fast. I guess it should, seeing that it’s a 2.2 Dual Core Intel chip w/ 4 gigs of RAM. The video card is an nVidia Quadro 135M, which isn’t a slouch when it comes to strictly business-class usage. It operates quietly, the fan kicking on only every once in a while. Otherwise, it runs cool. Using it normally, I can have it sitting on my lap with some shorts on and it doesn’t burn my legs.

The trackpad feels decent. The ‘eraser head’/'mouse nubbin’ is throwaway, but is OK nonetheless. There are 4 USB ports, a 1394 firewire port, an SD slot, 1 PCMCIA slot, DVD-RW/CD-RW, a serial port and a VGA port. The screen is 14.1 inches and looks decent, though just a tiny bit on the dull side. Of course, I’m spoiled by my Macbook Pro; the screen on that thing is pretty much unbeatable in my opinion…

My point isn’t to write an in-depth review or anything like that. Rather, it’s to point out that I think Dell has made some pretty great strides in their product line over the years. I mean, yeah, I’m ’supposed’ to say that, seeing that technically Dell keeps me in a job. But I honestly feel like this is a great improvement over what I used in the past.

I’ve also seen some of the XPS M1330s floating around, and those are pretty nice looking too, though I haven’t used them at all. They have a very sleek look about them…

Anyway, so overall, I’m not disappointed with my nifty new work laptop. Then again, just about anything would be better than the piece of crap Trashiba…whoops…Toshiba…I had previously.

So…if you’re looking at buying a PC, buy a Dell. Not only will you be getting what seems to be a pretty darn good quality machine, you’ll be keeping your ol’ buddy Andrew in a job that much longer, and that’s what we all want, right?

Right.

.:microsoft can be okay sometimes:.

let me just point out the obvious. a lot of the more ‘hardcore’ computer users out in the world simply do not like microsoft. there is a bevy of reasons for that, but i won’t get into that right at the moment…

i think silverlight might change the view of some people who are very much against microsoft products.

let’s start off with, ‘WTF is silverlight, mate?’

.:WTF is sliverlight, mate?’:.

this all started as an arm of the whole initiative of microsoft live. i feel like (in my own humble opinion) that MS dropped the ball about 2-3 years ago when the concept of web 2.0 was beginning to come into play. they were not innovating. they were resting on their laurel’s and not working fast enough. they really let google…and in some cases, yahoo!…take the lead in the commercialization and accessibility of consumer-friendly web applications.  some will argue that MS has just been taking it’s time to create a product that is really superior, that truly ties in easily with the web and on your desktop. so first they rolled out live…which is essentially MS’s new cool (and very pretty) search engine. there are a bunch of services that branch off of it, but at it’s core, that’s what it is. and then you see this new release of the hotmail webmail platform (which i have to admit that it’s pretty slick)…

and now we see silverlight…

about a month ago, MS released this nifty new piece of software that is going to be a competitor to flash. but, instead of just ripping flash off directly, they really made an effort to make something a little bit different.

one of the coolest things about silverlight is the fact that microsoft has integrated in functionality to host and stream large, high definition media files over MS networks. that’s pretty huge, as it’s really expensive to do this either quickly OR realiably for up-and-coming developers. and it’s free for the first year (”the first hit is free, kid…….”). after that, distribution is set to be free up to 1 million minutes a month. undetermined fees will be set after that.

delivery is one thing…but what about the actual code? MS created this language called XAML (extensible application markup langauge, and that’s basically how content is ultimately created and displayed. why is that different from flash?  flash delivers content in a package that is very pretty…but it’s just not that incredibly easy to optimize for search engines. there are several extra workarounds that one has to perform in order to get a flash site to be SEO’d. silverlight solves that problem with the XAML language, as it can be crawled by search engine spiders.

silverlight is also small…around 4 megs…, it’s fast, can display video content in high-def by working with native resolutions and will (supposedly) integrate seamlessly with windows mobile devices.

i’m not saying it’s the second coming or anything…and MS will definitely have a very hard time moving the general design/development community away from adobe (read ‘flash’) products. but i’m glad they are taking the initiative to do this, as a lot of people have been frustrated with flash for the past couple of years. the market is ripe, friends…RIPE…

one of the cool things that you’ll eventually be able to use that was created using silverlight is called popfly. MS just released this into private beta, so it is, unfortunately, invite only at the moent. however, from what i’ve read about it, it’s pretty darn cool.

popfly is another ‘mash-up’ creater. i talked about something awhile back called yahoo! pipes; this is very similar to that. essentially, a mash-up creator is a tool that allows your average user to go out to the web, find useful applications and then integrate them into one central tool without knowing a bunch of programming.  so, for example, i could create a tool that only provided me movie reviews from a specific genre of film from five or six different sources and put it into one place for me to view. i could have that tool send it to me via e-mail or SMS. i could have it send to other people that i chose as well.

this is an area that is going to be really, really huge, as it empowers average joe user to be able to create pretty cool little web applications without actually having to know much about coding.

anyway, so popfly is apparently extremely easy to use. it allows you to create a number of things, from applications to widgets to web pages and then share them via a social networking component.

keep your eye on it here.

.: articles die/insanity ensues:.

holy crapola, batman…not sure if you were privy to seeing the chaos from earlier today on digg…but MAN…it has now completely reinforced the thought in my head that what the mob wants, the mob will get. especially when it comes to community driven news.

the short story is that the decryption key for HD-DVDs has recently been leaked. of course, it was only a matter of time. and of course, it was only a matter of time until someone decided to post it on a site like digg. when digg received a take-down order, they went ahead and complied.

and someone else put it back up.

and they took it down.

and someone else put it back up.

and they took it down AND suspended accounts.

and someone else…and someone else…and someone else…and someone else….etc. put it back up.

finally, digg said, ‘whoa nelly! ok…we get the point! we’ll go ahead and just keep it up and suffer the consequences if something bad happens! woohoo!’

that’s pretty crazy, and takes a lot of balls to do…especially when the long arm of the law gets involved. i feel a little bit bad for them; it would be a serious shame if they go shut down because their community decided to be insolent. on the other hand, like the title of this post says…the mob rules.

sometimes i think about what might happen if the 70-some-odd percent of the country that didn’t like W decided to march on the capitol and insist that he step down. i guess if anyone really REALLY cared, that would happen…

anyway, so congratulations digg mob; you guys definitely made a fantastic point. and kudos also go to digg for deciding to go with it and keeping the spirit of what the site is…

note: here’s a great example of a really cool widget i found. go ahead. click play and you can hear what kinds of music i’m into.

.:go go widgetization:.

widgets…gadgets…capsules…snippets…

it’s out of control.

it also happens to be a hot ‘newer’ trend in web technology.

what exactly are these things? well, let’s start from the top.

according to wikipedia:

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications.

in layman’s terms, they are basically mini dynamic web-driven applications usually limited to one very specialized thing. for example…a weather widget or a calendar widget or a concert ticket widget. in the past, one may’ve just bookmarked the actual weather.com site or the ticketmaster site to find the information they wanted. now a user can go to one place, like the google start page or even your desktop, and get all of these things in one central location. it adds a large measure of convenience and provides one with the choice of getting the information that one really wants in one easy sitting.

it is absolutely where the web of tomorrow is going in that these widgets are actually allowing users to piece together their own mini personal versions of what the internet is supposed to be through the use of many pieces of code. it’s kind of like programming on a super-base and very visual level. you can visualize the entire internet as your framework and widgets being the code by which you’re creating your own programs.

it all started with with a little program called ‘konfabulator‘ on the mac (because all innovative cool stuff begins with a mac… ). it did extremely basic things, like weather and stock quotes and notes and put them in neat little floaty windows on the mac user’s desktop. sound familiar? that’s when apple decided to take the idea a step further and introduce it directly into Mac OSX. any mac user knows that hitting F12 pulls of your widget desktop that you can fill with any number of cool looking useful little widgets. then, of course, yahoo! and google jumped on the train for PCs. and now you are starting to see their proliferation out onto the web…especially on sites like myspace. now just about everyone has a video widget or a music widget or a photo widget built into their myspace page.

something very important is happening right now with the web, and that is it’s cracking like an egg. this isn’t a bad thing; it just means that, like everything else, it has become something that is being shaped more and more by the common user rather than by giant companies. but that has a lot of implications for big companies that are relying on their page content to drive advertiser revenue. going to your yahoo! start page certainly shows you the content that you’d like to get to, but it also shows you a ton of extraneous advertisements that you might not particularly want. web widgets put a stop to that annoyance. and if more and more people are jumping on board, then that eliminates the relevancy of the ever-important page view…because when you think about it, your traditional page is no longer there for people to view. people are creating their own ‘pages’. as usual, advertisers will come with ways around that, the most obvious being that you’ll start seeing some kind of advertisements in the widgets themselves. but even now we’re seeing things being take a step further in that now there are sites that are actually allowing you, the user, to create your own widgets. check out widgetbox.com. if you look over to the left you can see that i made my own widget for geochurn.com. it was extremely easy.

there are a million things i can think of doing in a web widget for businesses. ebay, for example. i could potentially build a widget that goes to ebay and searches for guitars (specific brands, years, etc.), portable mp3 players (specific brands, sizes, models) and ps2 games. all of this information could be served up into a nice little user interface that is branded in the typical eBay fashion. when something comes up that interests me, i could create a button that allows me to bid on that item. i could set all the limits directly in the widget. i could set the widget to refresh every time a new bid comes in on the item. i could even have it e-mail me or text message me whenever someone beats my bid. notice that i have not once had to go to eBay; i’m forcing eBay to send all of the information to me in a way that i want it.

here are few cool places where you can find really cool widgets and even build your own:

springwidgets
widgetbox
yourminis
snipperoo