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Reflection:

What are the three things we all need in life.

• To be with someone that loves us and cares for us when we are happy and when we are sad.
• A roof and a chance to eat every day (I used to cry sometimes when kids would come to school not having eaten since lunch the day before I kept snacks in my classroom for that very event).
• Freedom

Freedom is much more than a word. I watched protestors in China being carted away by people in civilian clothes (so you are never really quite sure if they in fact are authorities or simple really not nice people). They don’t have all the freedoms they deserve. Much as a lot of the Arab doesn’t which resulted in the Arab spring and beyond.

Freedom is a protected right. Once a group of people earn Freedom they have to protect it. The question is how responsible are the free for the freedom lacking in the rest of the world?

Lots to do today so another short blog!

.doc

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The plug lament…

• I am one plug short of a full recharge.
• My kingdom for another plug.
• 1 plug short of the line.
• A plug in time, saves finding another one and forgetting you are charging your device.
• I regret that I don’t have a plug to give for my country.
• “Its alive.”

It seems strange that power becomes the problem. Shakespeare said that power corrupts, so I suspect that is why rechargeable devices require occasional recharges. But he also said absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t suffer from that problem because I am one plug short.

For lack of a plug I was not able to recharge everything I wanted. So, I wonder when the concept of universal power supplies and wall power strips will in fact take over. Forget near field communication, I was near field charging. I am tried of carrying extra batteries with me, so that I don’t run afoul of the no charge beast.

The last line of course is not related to the quest for power plugs but instead is me paying homage to Gene Wilder.

The battery is the great freeing and the great tethering device. It is the biggest change in the past 20 years – being able to run all day on a single charge would be nice – but not likely – I talk on the phone far to much. Still, it seems intriguing in the end to consider the concept of near field charging. There are a number of devices heading that way.

I have played with a couple of idea generation applications on the iPhone recently. My one week sickness enforced blog break (and walking break) has made it harder to get back into my groove. So I’ve been toying with the applications for idea generation. So far they aren’t helping a whole lot but I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Update:

1 months with the METAWatch – I will have to say it has grown into a part of my routine. Charging it once a week, and being able to see caller ID on my watch in a meeting is a blessing.  I have played with creating the perfect watch face for me – so far I haven’t gotten the exact right one but it is fun to play with them.

.doc

Scott Andersen

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I left teaching 22 years ago. There are times I miss it, not the politics or the crap you have to put up with but the kids. I do stuff with my own kids because a part of me still wants to teach, still wants to be engaged with young people. I also do some demos at schools showing what computing can do for the students.

Overall though, I do miss teaching a little.

Seems funny 22 years later to realize the one thing that I would miss about teaching is the kids. But then, I suspect you get into teaching because you want to help young people.

I’ve learned a lesson from the past, Barb and I always give each other a small gift on Christmas Day and on our birthdays. But we also give each other a little cash to spend. I’ve always spent mine in the days leading up to Christmas (since my birthday is right there as well). This year however I decided to save the money and spend it after the CES show releases all the cool new gadgets into the market. I think I have finally mastered the reality here.

There are a number of interesting gadgets coming this year. So, now I have cash to spend on them!!!!!

time to get rolling on a Monday am.

.doc

Scott Andersen

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I’ve been thinking about a couple of blog statistics the last couple of days.

• The number of unique visitors is important.
• The number of views by visitor is interesting.

I won’t do my KM argument for the reality of views versus visits. It is just an interesting statistic that WordPress provides for now. I suspect you can play with the overall numbers but in the end that is more marketing than blogging for me.

The reality of connections.

I have owned a number of cars now with integrated car phones. Each of them operates a little differently, but over the past 10 years they have continued to improve every year. As the integration gets better (I can for example say a contact name in my mini and then say take me to them and the car will input the address of the contact into the car GPS. There are bugs – for example the voice recognition isn’t as good as it could be so sometimes the wrong contact is selected (about 60% of the time in fact) what is the next big thing for car phones?

Today on the iPhone (and I suspect android and windows phones as well but we are creatures of our phone OS) I can have my texts read aloud via the car phone. I can respond to them out loud as well. I can have my emails read to me and I can respond to them via voice as well. We could argue that talking on a car phone is only marginally better than holding the phone to your ear while driving. The marginal improvement being you have two hands to operate the car instead of one. What is next for the car phone?

There is an interesting commercial that makes me laugh every time I see it. How many buttons does your tablet have? is the premise of the commercial. It was obviously done by a non-technical person. My tablets have thousands of buttons each. Each button represents a different set of activities that my device can accept and operate against. In fact my tablet has infinite conceptual buttons and at least 4 physical (volume up/down, power on/off and mute). Conceptually my buttons are bound as much by memory available as anything else.

So how many buttons does my tablet have? Infinite. Thanks for asking.

Like I said, the commercial makes me laugh. Not because it was meant to be funny, rather that it was meant to be serious and it is funny.

.doc

Scott Andersen

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According to my word press annual report I only missed 11 days of blogging all of 2012. Most of it was from December 22nd to December 29th when I didn’t post a single blog. Wow!

I want to increase the number of comments on my blogs this year.  It does present an interesting problem however, I get a large number of comments today via email from friends and people I work with. So it is an interesting conundrum.

The one thing I was going to do over my vacation (besides seeing family) was to upgrade a computer to windows 8 as a trail balloon. I have a computer (mac) that doesn’t have much installed on it and I was going to upgrade it to the latest and greatest (Win 8), it has the nice 27inch apple monitor and of course the Wacom bamboo touch tablet. Should be a perfect fit. I will have to spend some serious time upgrading it now during an evening – have to fit that around my IU BB schedule .

I’ve been playing with Android 4.1 (virtual desktop). Overall it seems like a much better release of the android OS. It still isn’t quite the iOS experience however. While it is less memory hungry than iOS it also has some minor connection issues that are annoying. Its like the Ubuntu desktop, sure its good enough, but is good enough good enough over the long hall?

Back to work today – first time at work in 10 days. I actually missed my job .

.doc

Scott Andersen

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Internet funding the Kickstarter story.  It is an interesting story to me. I am a huge proponent of what is to come (or what may yet be) so Kickstarter is intriguing to me. You can bet on what you think will take off. I was one of the first few people to jump on the Pebble Watch – it is now well funded and underway for this fall.

There are a number of intriguing solutions that are out there on Kickstarter now, both hardware and software. Solutions  that solve point to time realities.

Now I don’t claim to have a crystal ball just a peaked interest in certain technologies. It has been something I’ve been interested in for years, but now can dabble. Who knows, the next big thing may be just waiting for the right people to get engaged so that they can release that new thing upon the world around us.

Or not.

Kickstarter is a great to indulge your “future self.” Of course who knows what they may have on there next!

.doc

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Yesterday the boys, Dylan and I went for a walk. Its becoming a habit and frankly I have to say I enjoy the process. My mother used to say that with each passing milestone your kids got to be more fun (well that’s not exactly what she said but as she often says “its my memory.”). Loosely she said that watching and participating in your children growing up ends up being quite fun.

I have a new gambling habit. It’s less about giving money to a casino, more about betting on technology futures. The web funding organization Kickstarter has a growing number of projects that I find interesting. So you bet on the reality of what the projects are doing by agreeing to fund them to a certain level. If it doesn’t work out, you lose your money. But if it does work out you get in on the ground floor of exciting new technologies. The Pebble Watch is a great example of what this can actually do They raised ten times the amount of money they were shooting for in roughly 1/4 the time.

The concept of crowdsourcing carried to funding. Its intriguing and the projects are interesting views of what may yet be so in the end its not really gambling, its more hedging the future.

.doc

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Back on my Washington Area drivers rant. Saturday I saw two drivers racing behind an ambulance. If there was ever the need of a police officer that was the time. Not sure why it drives me nuts but it does.  Lately I’ve been driving in the left lane and going exactly the speed limit. Its childish but I can’t help it.

We watched the new version of Footloose last night. The dancing in the new version was much better than in the old one. But the acting was no where near as strong.  Plus it went past my bed time so I am tired today.

I am excited by the upcoming Pebble watch. It will connect to your iPhone or android phone not just as a watch but as a second screen for developers to build applications against. I owned the previous version (INpulse) and it was a great tool to make the blackberry a little more effective a tool. The new one promises to be an even more effective tool.

I’ve been catching up on training and trying to figure out what the difference is between verbal harassment and bullying?

.doc

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Sometimes it is what you say. Well sometimes it is also how you say it. Its never however a good idea to mix the how and the what together .

I have to go into work today to work on a proposal. I love my job so I actually don’t mind. I wish it weren’t the Saturday before fathers day but its not as bad as it could be. I was thinking about my old job and the reality of workforce realignment.

Organizations need to move people around over time. It’s the right thing to do for the organization but it isn’t always the right thing to do for the people. You have to be careful that you don’t cause your high performers to consider their options. High Performers are the ones who can walk out the front door any time they want. When you start to lose those top people your organization actually has to relearn a bunch of old things, again. Its that process that becomes a painful reality.

In the book good to great (and again in How the mighty fall) Jim Collins and team look at the how and why of companies being successful. It’s a affirmation culture building into a resilient reality. The funny thing is at some point if your smart people leave you can’t build an effective affirmation culture. Its about affirming the right things not the right way.

I learned once a great saying “do the right things and the money will follow.” Its true for every profession in the world. Do the right thing.

Ethics is the essence of success. Because if you succeed without ethics in the end you fall.

.doc

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I have to ask a question. In the end does it really matter? Who the question is for and what is about is for me to keep private. But for now, it is something I just needed to get off my chest.

This morning I was watching traffic, not sure why today but for some reason today stuck in my head. I had a writing teacher many years ago at Indiana University that used to say, work through the things that get stuck in your head. Those tend to be the interesting nuggets about how your mind is perceiving an event or process.

I noticed that a number of drivers wove in and out of traffic. They were “important people” who were in a hurry.  The obvious importance was only out weighed by the fact that they were obviously late for something that only important people can know about so they wove in and out of traffic a lot to get to that important event.

As a non-important person (I knew that because I didn’t have a reason or need to weave through other cars) I realized that in fact there are three kinds of drivers on the road. The important people who can’t stand not moving and have somewhere important to be. The observers, these of us who watch the other drivers wondering what they will do and finally the let me just get to work crowd more focused on their daily commute than anything.

Which one are you?

.doc