The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Saturday, December 28, 2002

Break time

Just taking a break from A+ studying this afternoon to install PC Inspector File Recovery. I picked it up from an issue of Lockergnome a few days ago. It looks like it might be pretty useful bit of freeware, I'll let you know. :)

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Friday, December 27, 2002

And on we go with another year

It's soon going to be 2003. This is a year I've actually looked forward to for quite some time. There's quite a lot of unfinished business that I'm hoping to take care of this year, professionally. Obviously, that will start on Jan 6 when I take the A+ certifications. From there it'll probably move into the Network+ certification as well as more time spent playing with OS X and Linux.

Can you tell that I'm trying to beef up the skills that I list on my resume? Yes, the new job search will also start in 2003. I will have been here long enough to be fully vested in the pensions funds at the end of 2002, so I owe it to myself to see what other possibilities are out there for me. I at least owe it to myself to see whether there is a possibility of working for a more leading-edge, or visionary company. One that actually grants their IT people some authority and respect. :)

Does that mean that I might possibly not be a One-Man IT Department any longer? Yeah I guess that is possible. I might have to change the name of the blog then, eh? *L* I don't know what it means, we'll see when/if we get there.

Whatever it means, I'm excited, and a little scared, of the possibilities. For all the things I dislike about my current job, there's a certain security in having my own boss not understand what I do. It's comfortable. Heck I can generally blog and read blogs all I want while I'm working, that's not always possible in other workplaces. But it's time. It's time for a new challenge. It's time to take the skills I've perfected over the last 5 years and use them in a new environment, while adding new ones that will never be possible in this environment. We'll see if I can do that. I know I'm not going out into the greatest tech job market in the world, but it's time to at least see what's out there for me.

It will also be the year I move over all the Child Abuse stuff, and try to grow that area of the site. I know there's a lot of good to be done with that site, and I want to do as much of it as I can. Child abuse is a devastating event, and any effort I can make to help the victims of child abuse, whether it be giving contributions to Prevent Child Abuse, like it says above, or just providing them somewhere to be heard, is worth it.

On top of all of that, I want 2003 to be a year in which I learn to be a better husband than I already am, a better uncle to my 3 year old nephew and month old niece, (Who I absolutely fell in love with after finally being able to spend some time with her at Xmas. She's beautiful..) and a better friend to the people who matter to me.

Should be an interesting year, and I'm sure most of it will be documented on one blog or the other. :)

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Thursday, December 26, 2002

Other stuff

Non-Scoble items for today... :)

BTW, on a slightly related note, I did make a recommendation about a product once where I looked at enthusiast sites and journalist sites and took their word for it. It was OS X for our graphics person. All of the zealots told me using Classic Mode was no problem. I should have been more cynical, because it has been nothing but a problem.

Gangs of New York was excellent. I highly recommend it, and not just because I'm Irish, Catholic, raised in New York and descended from immigrants either. :) Angela was raised in the South and the Draft Riots of 1863 were a side of the Civil War she had never really been exposed to this in-depth, so it's got some education for everyone. We also saw Two Weeks Notice yesterday, a cute movie. Definitely chick-flick material but cute and fun nonetheless.

After getting the Dell Axim early, the rest of my Christmas presents were decidedly low-tech, with the exception of a Think Geek Foobar T-shirt. (Yeah it's spelled FooBar instead of Fubar, interesting, almost makes it seem like some sort of top-secret Foo Fighters t-shirt..*L*) I'm glad though, I like to have non-tech interests as well, makes for a more well-rounded approach to life and work.

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More Scoble stuff

Hmm it seems that Robert has made a few more comments about my posts this morning. Let me counter his feelings bit-by-bit:

"sorry, I don't agree with you that talking generally about the Tablet helps NEC all that much. If you decide to buy a Tablet based upon my comments, but you end up with a Compaq or Acer unit, that doesn't help me at all

Robert, I know you're not that shallow. You know marketing a tech product is all about generating hype, you know that if your blog can get 50-100 people thinking about buying a Tablet that hadn't thought of it before, that NEC will see a share of those sales, especially since it was you who got them thinking about it to begin with.

More Robert:

Excuse me, but until you've had your hands on a Tablet for a couple of days, how can you say whether or not they are lacking in anything?

By using the very things you said about it, that's how. Let's take a look shall we:

"No. I couldn't get it to recognize my own name properly for the first 20 tries. Then I changed my handwriting to what it wanted to see and it works great now."

"The other thing I noticed -- at least at first -- about the Tablet is my frustration. "

"Too bad Tablets today are so expensive (some, like the Gateway/Motion machine are selling for $2700-$2900, others, like the Acer, are selling for about $1600)."

Those are three negative statements made by you, and you love it! That tells me the product is lacking because I, and many others, don't want to have to change the way I write to get my PC to work. (How many people will bother doing it 20 times in the first place?) Every other thing you mentioned as plusses, other than drawing and writing, I can already do with a combination of desktop and PocketPC, which combined are still cheaper than a Tablet.

Does a Tablet have some advantages, yes, like you said, you can use it while standing up, but honestly what do you use it for while you're standing up? Reading? I do that with a PocketPC, it's a smaller screen, but at 1/5th or 1/10th the price I'll deal with that. Writing? You admit yourself that the handwriting recognition is difficult to get used to. It may be a perfectly fine piece of tech, but I still don't see the real need for it, unless it gets handwriting recognition flawlessly. Then you've got something! It's got a Compact Flash slot? So does my Pocket PC, I can take the card right out of my camera and display pictures on it, again, smaller screen but at $250 compared to $2700? Get real!

No, I admit I haven't played with it, and I make that very clear in my posts on the subject that I haven't, I think that's pretty fair disclosure on my part. I'm basing an opinion on what other people have said about it because I don't work for NEC, and don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in the real world where forking out $2700 to "play with" new technology is not possible. (You know, the small business world, in the Midwest? You may have heard of it, or maybe flown over it?) Sorry, I have budget limitations and if I'm going to convince my employer that we need to look at spending that kind of money so our workers can "use their computer while standing up", I had better know exactly what the advantages and disadvantages are, which means I read between the lines when salespeople and enthusiasts write about their products, and I take a good hard look at what journalists, both pro and con, have to say. Right now, there are too many if's and but's when it comes to using the Tablet for me to make that kind of purchase. The ability to draw and use it like a laptop while moving around isn't worth the money I'd have to fork out to buy it. That's my opinion based on where I work.

That's what this blog is, nothing less, nothing more. I'm not here trying to get people to buy or not buy any product, I'm here sharing the things I deal with in my job, and the reasons that I do or don't think something will work in this area of the market. For all the wonderful things you've said about the Tablet, you've not addressed this market at all. You've talked about how you use it, how kids might use it, how it might be used in other countries, but nothing about how a small business can benefit from having a Tablet as opposed to a laptop or PocketPC. I'm not convinced, and that's what I based my opinions on. You, and every one of my readers are free to not agree, heck for your own situation the Tablet may very well be worth that kind of expenditure. If you think it is, I wish you good luck with it! I don't think it is and that's what I wrote.

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So Scoble IS a Corporate shill afterall!

In response to my previous comment, Scoble had this to say:

"Of course I am, if I am posting stuff about NEC (and anytime I write about NEC you should take my writings as such). But, yesterday, I was not writing about NEC's tablet per se. Just the Tablet experience."

Subtle difference, but I'm not buying Robert. You work for NEC, NEC has a Tablet coming out, NEC, and you, have a vested interest in seeing the market and hype for Tablet's grow. You're hyping Tablet's on your blog. Whether you mean it to or not, it looks like you're hyping Tablet's because the company you work for, (and you're even in marketing, correct?) happens to have a Tablet coming out soon.

And ultimately, maybe that's the difference between us, Robert gets paid to hype new products and new technology, and that extends to his blog. I get paid, as the IT Department of a small not-for-profit, to not buy any hype and be skeptical about what salespeople promise me. I get paid to look past the hype and figure out what actually works for our business. I get paid to find products that will make my users more efficient at their jobs, at a price point that the increased efficiency will support. I don't see that in the Tablet right now.

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Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Short work day

Yes we are only working until noon today, which is cool. Angela and I are going to try and catch a showing of Gangs of New York this afternoon and dinner before the snow gets too bad this evening. I probably won't be blogging again until I'm back at work on Thursday, so let me just wish you all a very wonderful Christmas!

Go, make some wonderful memories with the people you love. :)

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Scoble's at it again..

So I took a look at Robert Scoble's entries from last night and he says some interesting things. Of course he sounds exactly like you would expect a guy in NEC Sales to sound, which makes you wonder if he's being honest or just a corporate shill, I've met Robert and I think he's probably being honest. Not that I agree with him, but I think his feelings on the Tablet PC are his own, and not his company's.

Here's where I disagree with him, however, Tablet's have been done before, badly. Granted I haven't had the opportunity to play with the latest Tablet PC's, but it seems to me they are still lacking. He assumes that people want to write to communicate and I don't think so. The greatest thing to come out of the PC age is not having to deal with anyone's handwriting any more! That's been as big a boon to communication as the tech behind the internet has been! How much easier is it to type an email than to write an note? And that's assuming the handwriting recognition works as it's supposed to, which from all accounts, it doesn't.

No, the problem here is that the Tablet makes you relearn how to use a computer. That's not good! That's something we should be moving away from, not towards! PC's, in part, became so popular in business because they are similar to using a typewriter, you didn't completely have to relearn how to do everything. He even admits he had to practice to get his handwriting better and that was a frustration. Consumers, and business markets, both want something that can be used out of the box, with no frustration! That's where the real advances in technology are going to be, not in something that forces you to learn a whole new way of using your PC before you can enjoy the benefits of it.

As far as Tablet's pushing Pocket PC's out of the marketplace, that's insane. The major benefit of the Pocket PC is it's size. I can throw my Dell in my coat pocket and have it everywhere, no luggage required. I can leave all the accessories sitting at home to be used while I'm there, and take the little PDA with me on all but the longest trips. Tablet's don't have the size advantage to be truly "mobile" in the same way, and they don't have the desktop/laptop advantage of keyboard/mouse input, which is easier to communicate with and navigate the PC with.

He predicts the end of Pocket PC by 2006, I predict that by 2006 Tablets will be, along with Segways, gathering dust in the back of people's attics just like every other gadget that served no purpose other than as a geek status symbol. Both serve no purpose in the sense that there are cheaper, easier alternatives that have already been established in the marketplace that accomplish the same things. Pocket PC and Palm already cover mobile computing at a much cheaper price than Tablets (and will get better at handwriting recognition in the next 3 years) and bicycles cover the environmentally-friendly, short distance travel at a much cheaper price than Segways.

Of course, I could be wrong as well. :)

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Monday, December 23, 2002

Sad news

Especially to those of us who grew up with The Clash, aka the "only band that ever mattered". Joe Strummer died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. Man, I feel a little bit older today.

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Note to self

Go read Kevin's evaluation of the Microtel $199 Walmart PC, later, when you have more time.

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I'll be in the workshop

Yeah it's time to crack open the case on that laptop and replace the hard drive. It occurs to me that of all the HD replacements I've done over the last few years of working here, this will be the first time I've done one on a laptop. That'll be something new and interesting to put under my "experiences" list, eh?

Anyway, I'll be over next door in my "workshop" most of the day, probably won't get caught up on reading blogs until tomorrow, or Thursday, or, well, never. *L*

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