So after my blog post “Too Plugged In?” I thought about it and the way I use voice mail. I use it as a tool to manage my communication and availability.People are surprised when they are talking to me in my office and I let an incoming mail roll to voice mail.
If I am focused on a task, I will let the phone go to voice mail. If I am at lunch, I will let a call go to voice mail. If I am spending time with friends or even more importantly the wife, I sometimes let a call go to voice mail. If I am sleeping and the phone wakes me up, I might let it go to voice mail.
If someone had walked down to my office and seen that I was talking with someone, they would wait their turn. So I look at using voice mail as a way to queue people up in the order of conversations. I also have seen how someone will call me on one the desk phone/landline then if I don’t answer that call me on my cell phone, then call again, then e-mail. It is od as it is almost as if I can’t have anything else to do beside answer their call. I understand that something might be pressing, but I also understand that I need to manage the time and attention I give to tasks and people.
So if you call me, if it is not important enough to leave a message, why would one think that I should drop what I am doing to grab the call immediately. Especially if I do not recognize the number.
So I tried writing offline using MarsEdit in the previous post, I just now got around to posting and reviewing it.
Here is why, it does not seem to actually do any better of a job than writing in the text editor in terms of formatting and spacing. It seems to still have the same issues of the items not having the right line spacing. Also the image inclusion does not include SmugMug, it wants to upload an image to the server it does not seem to have an easy way to link to it. It also did not seem to allow the caching of Tags so that one does not create new ones unintentionally.
The other big one was that it did not let me open up a post and edit it easily. When I opened up the previous post the images looked like this:
Click for full size
So I am thinking that I am still looking. Maybe it is not worth the work to find a replacement for just doing it as a text document.
So one of the challenges I have had is that I often have trouble finding time to write a blog post when I think of it. This situation most often occurs when I am traveling for work. The reason is that most times I am thinking about this stuff while I am sitting on a plane. Typically there is no internet access. I have thought about writing offline by using a text editor or other program, but I have not been exactly enamored by the process of writing and then transferring the information. The formatting does not always look right.
I looked at the idea of using Contribute as part of the Adobe Creative Suite, but well I can’t even get that to run on my computer. When I contacted Tech Support they did not really help with my issue as when I explained what I was trying to do, they simply said that Contribute does not support Word Press. So I found this program called MarsEdit that I think I will try out. I don’t remember where I found it, but figure I might as well try it. It is not open source or free ware but it does have a trial period so I figure I will try it out.
One of the things that is interesting is that it has an option to upload images and place them inline. I have not decided if I want to do that or keep with putting stuff in SmugMug. So this will be my first post using MarsEdit. If I don’t like it, it might be my last.
I wrote this post offline and will try to post it once I connect.
So today’s blog post was originally going to be a Brad’s Tips and Tricks for how I do data indexing and retrieval. However connectivity has put a change to that. What is kind of interesting is that my fear has come to be realized. Today (well Thursday, March 19, 2009) we changed from having an analog phone line to going to a single provider (Comcast) for phone, internet, and digital cable. It was also the day I decided to turn off the fax number, literally for the first time in over a decade I do not have a home fax number.
We decided to make the changes for the following reasons:
- Save money
- Get more movie channels
- We have not gotten an inbound fax in a year
- We thought about it and have not had a cable outage since we moved
So does anyone want to guess what happened this evening about midnight? I could not connect to the internet. I did some troubleshooting and could not ping anything outside of my local home network. Maybe stuff needs to be rebooted after all the configuration changes today. I rebooted the wireless router. No change. I rebooted the modem. No change. I go to get the phone to call for tech support. No dial tone. I then noticed that the TV had no signal.
No big deal I figured it was probably a configuration mistake. We had changed service so maybe someone forgot to check a box. So I got out my cell phone and called and went through the phone tree. The first thing the phone system tried to do was figure out my account by the phone number I had called from. It was different, so then I had to enter the number manually, not really hard but first inconvenience. I got that entered in, and the “helpful” automation indicated that I had an appointment scheduled for March 18, 2009 between 4PM and 7PM. It then asked if I wanted to cancel, confirm if the technician was on the way, or reschedule. I thought wow, how cool is it that they can move time backward and undo stuff like that over the phone. I pressed the button to indicate that was not the issue.
The system then asked me what I was calling about from a few options. I selected the outage option. The system then indicated that the outage had been reported and that the schedule restoration would be at 1:09AM March 19, 2009. It then asked if I wanted to get a call when the system was restored. I indicated yes. It then said it would call back between 8AM and 9PM. It did not indicate which number it would call. So I am waiting to see which one it does call.
There were two things that made me think that this was a comical situation:
- If the system knew there was an outage, why didn’t it tell me that it was reported and they were working on it as soon as I entered my phone number? It seems that would be the most likely reason I was calling – not to reschedule an appointment in the past.
- It seems that like clockwork there is always a problem the day after we get an installation. The last outage was when there was a scheduling error when we moved into the house. They came out and hooked it up on the move in day. They then came out and disconnected it at the pedestal the next day. I called and they dispatched someone the next day.
So what have I learned?
- My fear of putting all our communication with one provider came true less than eight hours after the change over when we lost all of it
- I have great timing for getting an outage to occur
- Time is relative, when they say something is going to be fixed at 1:09 don’t believe it. It is currently 1:22AM and the system still says 1:09.
So I was chatting with friends over the past few days about just how much communication there is going on. One person asked me if I was on Twitter or Facebook. I said no. The other was saying how we had communicated more over the past few days since he found out that I had a Blackberry and he was using the chat client on there. So it got me thinking about just how we communicate as people. It is not just about the information superhighway, it might be the information supersaturation of communication. I went through and started to count how many communication tools/identities I have:
I have e-mails attached with some of the Chat Clients I use, but I don’t really count those if I don’t use them.
- Personal E-Mail
- Administrative E-Mail for the domain
- “Rounders” Personal E-Mail
- “Rounders” Adminstrator E-Mail
- “Rounders” Financial E-Mail
- BMW MOA Foundation E-Mail
- ISP Provider E-Mail
- Google Mail
- Main Work E-Mail
- Work Help E-Mail
- Work Custom E-Mail
Messaging IDs
In alphabetical order:
- America Online Instant Messenger
- Bonjour
- Google Chat
- Mac iChat
- Microsoft/Hotmail Messenger
- Skype
- Yahoo
- Blackberry Messenger (It is a work Blackberry)
Online Communities
In alphabetical order, once again the ones I frequent:
- BMW MOA
- Digital Grin
- Plaxo
- “Rounders“
Phone Numbers
- Work Main Line
- Work Key Account Phone Number
- Work Direct Dial
- Work Cell Phone
- Work Fax
- Home Phone
- Home Fax (soon to be disconnected)
So there are quite a few ways to get in touch with me. I do have a work Blackberry and a wireless broadband card for my laptop so the internet is never far from me. I am even contemplating adding a personal cell phone so that when I am “off” work I can unplug from work. With all these methods of communication, people are asking if I use other “communication tools” such as Facebook, Loopt, Google’s Friend Connect, or Goggle Latitude. If I am thinking of adding Google Voice? They are asking if I want to join them on some of these services. My answer is “No”.
Do I want everyone know where I am and what I am doing all the time?
If I want people to know what I am doing, I can contact them. I should not rely on a service to broadcast this information for me. I do update things in the forums/communities at my choosing. I will contact people when I am traveling to their areas or the trip might interest them. I can post things to this blog and people can come and read it if they want. I consider what I should and should not post of this blog, what should be public for everyone, both known and unknown to me to be aware of and what should I share with people I know.
Do I need to know what everyone else is doing?
I am not sure I am actually that interested in what everyone else is doing that I need to see what is going on in their life or where they are located. I understand that people want to share stuff and think that some of these tools are ways of broadcasting their locations, thoughts, and actions. (I will freely admit that I am doing this exact thing here.) I understand how from a social interaction standpoint this could be cool. If one is traveling for work, they might want to know if any friends/acquaintances are in there area so that they can meet.
Do I need to be in contact with everyone at all times?
I need the ability to focus on the task at hand and manage who and when I can be contacted. My office phone system has Avaya’s Unified Messaging and I have turned off most of the features that Google Voice is touting.
I want a control over my status, mood, and location – as well as who has access to it. While chatting online with one of my friends we swapped stories about people reading our blogs. I indicated how I am starting to be more careful in what I am posting in my blog after a coworker came up to me and asked if they were the subject of a blog post. It was very awkward. My friend indicated how it was weird after a relative of his passed that people he did not know were coming up to him and saying that they were sorry for his loss.
I also thought about just how much information people are sharing about themselves. At some point are people so busy living vicariously through other people, their blogs, their tweets, and their websites that they don’t have enough time for their own activities? At one point I was so involved with the online forums that I spent about four hours a night online reading every post on one of the forums I am a member of. I literally read every single post on the forum. I did not realize the amount of other things that I was missing as a result of the time spent reading all these things. What did I gain from this information on the forums? To be honest I could not retain or comprehend much of it, I was too busy just reading it to “keep up”.
So while talking with a friend, the topic of how many RSS feeds he was subscribed to came up and it was more than he could count easily. I asked him how he read them all. He indicated that he goes not always get to them, but he has them divided into days of the week so it is reasonable amounts. I was in shock, I wonder how much is just plain overload and not being retained. Will it be awkward when he reads this post be the RSS subscription he has to this blog on Monday? I actually think it depends if he can absorb it with all the other things he is reading. In full disclosure, I subscribe to about ten feeds for work purposes some of which are internal feeds to let me know what has been updated on our intranet; for personal use I have 40 currently of which three are my own feeds. Many of these RSS feeds are infrequently updated, such as when my family posts new pictures, when a friend has a new blog post, or when there is a new product update. I use it as a tool for the software to go out and get the information I am interested in, instead of reading everything out there and getting distracted by tangents. I will also browse the shared items from friends through Google Reader. However I find that I spend about fifteen minutes a day on RSS feeds, very reasonable in my opinion.
Just for laughs I searched for myself on Google and Yahoo and was amazed at how much of the results were truly me, and not just similiar names. (Yahoo had more about “me” than Google which showed that one truly does get different results.)
Now if you will excuse me, I am going to spend some time reading a book as I want to know more about Cascading Style Sheets