techcafeteria

I’m the proud owner of a new T-Mobile G1 – UPS delivered it yesterday.  The G1 is the first phone to use Google’s open source Android mobile operating system, and it rocks.  This is the first true competitor to the iPhone, with a large touchscreen and a desktop-class web browser on a 3G network with WiFi, GPS and a flip out, full QWERTY keyboard.  The G1 is particularly compelling if you use GMail, GTalk and Google Calendar – the integration, particularly with GMail, is phenomenal.  The email is pushed to the phone, and the application for reading it is on a par with the standard web client – insanely easy to archive, label and delete messages.  This is much better than the GMail for Mobile App that runs on other phones.  The other compelling thing about Android, which I’ll blog more about at Idealware, is the open source OS and open programming environment.  Android reeks with potential.

But, if what you’re looking for is a cool phone, it’s important to point out that this is brand new, and, as an early adopter, I’m paying some early adopter dues.  If you aren’t the pioneering type, you’ll do much better with an iPhone.  The Android environment is open, but the number of apps available is pretty slim, with some glaring holes.  Missing on G1 Day 1 (which, officially, is today, October 22nd), there is no Notepad/Text Editor; limited video playing, no secured storage (for passwords and the like) and very limited connectivity with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.  There’s no desktop sync program for Android—you can mount the phone as USB storage and drag files to and from it, but the only synchronization available, so far, is the built-in sync with GMail apps (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and a couple of brand new apps that can sync contacts with Exchange, given the right conditions.

My situation is this:  I work in a Microsoft environment.  We run Exchange 2007.  I have an active extra-curricular professional life that lives in GMail and Twitter, primarily.  So the G1 handles the latter beautifully—there are already three Twitter apps available—but the web site works great as well.  It handles GMail phenomenally.  But what about my work email, calendar and contacts?  Solutions should pop up eventually.  Funambol is promising an ad-based service that will start with Contact Sync, then grow to include Calendar and Email.  A Google ContactSync app is available at the Android Market (you can install it from your phone), but it requires Exchange 2007 with the Web Services Extension enabled.  We’re not doing that at Earthjustice, and I made a vow not to ask my Sysadmin to reconfigure the server for me (she’s got enough to do!).  Finally, Google does have a Calendar Sync app, but it only works on Windows; I’m on a Mac, and while I have VMWare Fusion and Windows installed, I only boot up Windows when I have to, not often enough to keep the calendar up to date.  So here’s what I’ve done, which is immensely kludgy.

Email: I used an Administrator-only feature to forward a copy of my mailbox to GMail.  If you aren’t, like me, an IT Director with admin rights to your Exchange server, you’ll have to buy the System Administrator a healthy Amazon gift certificate and grovel a bit, most likely. On the Gmail side, I created a filter that labels each message from work with “earthjustice” and set up my EJ email address as a valid one to reply with, along with the “reply to address sent to” default.  Now all of my work mail arrives twice – once in Outlook, once in GMail.  I am hesitant about replying in GMail, because the Sync is only one way, and those replies won’t land in my Outlook Sent folder.  But I get all of my mail pushed, so I don’t miss anything, and I can always jump to Outlook Web Access if I want to reply “in country”.

Calendar: this was a real kludge.  Again, if I used Windows daily, I’d use the Calendar Sync.  But I use my Macbook at home and work and generally log onto Outlook over Citrix, which I can’t install the sync on without installing it for the whole company.  I worked out a complicated solution by publishing my calendar in icalendar format to iCal Exchange, a free server for storing calendars, then subscribed to it at Google Calendar, only to learn that either iCal Exchange is not sending the proper refresh headers to GCal, or GCal is inept at refreshing them.  I couldn’t get it to recognize an update in three days, so I ditched that plan.  But then I noted that, when I received Outlook appointments at GMail, they came with “Add to GCal” options.  Since my Calendar was synched (via Google Calendar Sync on my Fusion WinXP desktop), I realized that I can just accept each appointment twice to keep both calendars in sync.  Again, kludgy, but suitable until something better comes along.

Contacts: As mentioned above, there’s a contact sync app available, but it requires Exchange 2007 with web services enabled.  I’m going to hold off.  I have about 200 work contacts, and about 350 more personal/Nonprofit contacts, so my GMail contacts list is much larger than the one at work.  I’m going to maintain them separately for the time being.  So, no definitive answer here, but keep your eye on Funambol, who promise to have this going quickly.

It’s only a matter of time before someone licenses and resells Microsoft Activesync for Android, and other sync options will pop up like crazy.  But, if you’re like me, and couldn’t wait for this phone, I hope there’s enough here to get you going.  Please be sure to leave additional and better ideas in the comments.

It’s official – I’m not even trying to keep this blog up to date anymore, because I aaccepted a volunteer gig blogging regularly at Idealware.  As I’ve mentioned before, Idealware strives to be the Consumer Reports of nonprofit software, and, in my opinion, that description doesn’t do the site justice – it’s long been one of my most referenced resources; the place that a nonprofit can go to get focused, concise answers to those tricky questions like “What software is out there?”, “Which one fits my needs?” and “What are the best practices for deploying it?”.

I have two things up on Idealware this week:  My new article, “The Perfect Fit: A Guide to Evaluating and Purchasing Major Software Systems” and my first blog entry “Smartphone Follies“.

Needless to say, I’m honored and excited to be publishing regularly to Idealware, and urge you all to go there and subscribe to the articles and blog, which features some very sharp friends of mine, as well:  Steve Backman, Heather Gardner-Madras, Paul Hagen, Eric Leland, Michelle Murrain, and, of course, Laura Quinn, the founder and genius behind Idealware.  See you over there!

Mozilla.org just released one of the most exciting Firefox add-ons to come down the pike – Ubiquity. This is very alpha – the user interface will definitely mature, so what’s there now is best suited for geeks like me who have always liked command shells and already do things like use the Mac’s Spotlight as their calculator (if you type 2 + 2 in Spotlight, it will tell you it equals 4).

Ubiquity is best described as a macro language for the web, or a personal mashup engine. You assign a hotkey (such as Alt-space or Option-space) and a box comes up, which you can enter ubiquity commands in. I’m not going to tell you all about them – just watch the video:

At this point, Ubiquity’s functionality pretty much requires a Google account – the email, calendar, maps and contacts integration is all with Google’s offerings. I expect that to change rapidly, as developing custom commands for Ubiquity is at a very basic programming level.

The case uses that are immediately apparent include adding maps and multimedia content to emails and blog entries (I use Scribefire – this assumption assumes that you compose your blog in your browser); having a lot of info available without having to tab away from the web page you’re on; and making some complex web tasks far more efficient. Mozilla is ambitious, though – they see Ubiquity as the ultimate personal web assistant, that will someday let you issue a command to book a trip; issue another to set up a multi-party meeting, and, who knows? Vacuum the house and feed the fish. Aza discusses that vision here.

Try Ubiquity out. Install it from here. Let me know what you think, and what case uses you envision for it.

In addition to my primary pursuits—managing technology at Earthjustice and being a good member of my family—I’m working on a few additional projects that I’m also excited about:

• Virtualization Webinar

I’m preparing a webinar for NTEN on the power and benefits of Virtualization technology. Geeky stuff, yes, but the entire concept of server management has been turned on its ear by this development and it’s fascinating stuff for even smaller nonprofits.

• Software Purchasing article

Idealware will likely publish an article I’m writing on how to successfully accomplish a major software purchase. How to identify the suitable apps, prepare the Request for Proposal/Quote, and get the right people at the evaluation sessions.

• BDP Website

The Briggs Delaine Pearson Foundation is a nonprofit in Clarendon County, SC, where the first action in what eventually became Brown vs. the Board of Education began. My Grandmother-in-law was one of the original signers of that petition, along with other family and the attorney, Thurgood Marshall. My wife and I are going to revamp the current website to tell the story in an engaging fashion, invite participation from others, and, ideally, make the site more of a tool in garnering support for an organization trying to accomplish the unfullfilled promise of the Brown decision in the community where it all began.

What are you up to?

Over the weekend, I downsized Techcafeteria.com, something I probably should have done close to a year ago, when I started my job at Earthjustice. What’s left is pretty thin, and is less of a web site than it is a supplement to other things online.

Some say that we’re moving away from blogging to the next trend, dubbed “Lifestreaming“. But I wouldn’t call this a lifestream. “Stream-supplementing” might be more to the point. I hang out in a number of places online, the key ones being, in some kind of meaningful order:

LinkedIn – this is where I keep my resume and stay connected with people I know through work and community.

Twitter – This is where I do most of my online communication lately. My Twitter community is mostly made up of people I know through NTEN and other NPTech circles. You may think I’ve been pretty quiet in the two or three months since I last blogged, but I’ve published about 700 tweets.

NTEN, or, more accurately, the NTEN Groups like NTEN-Discuss and the SF-501TechClub. These are online lists, sponsored by NTEN. I’m also reasonable active on Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s excellent Information Systems Forum, a Yahoo Group.

Idealware – Laura’s made me a staff writer, of sorts, and I should be contributing more articles this summer. I also comment on the blog regularly. Some of my Idealware articles are also picked up by Techsoup.

So, those are great places to find me. And this is where you come to contact me, or catch up on where I’ve been. I can’t call it “lifestreaming” – my life isn’t a show, and if it was, it wouldn’t be a very interesting one. But I do publish he pieces of it that I think might be valuable to others, and I’d rather publish them in places that others go, so it makes sense to have a web site that serves more as an signpost than a destination.

Where do you live?  Where do you hang out?  Does your social life revolve around a particular location?  Presumably, your social life is only as geographically restricted as your travel budget allows.  You can meet your friends at a coffee shop, mall, park or home.  You don’t always meet them at the same place; and you don’t go to that place to call them..  So why should your online social life be any different?

This week, Google announced that their internet portal page, iGoogle, would be incorporating widgets, or, as they call them, Gadgets that perform the type of social networking functions that online social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace provide.  This comes at a time when Twitter, the group chat/micro-blogging tool has been rising up the social staircase and getting a lot of new users and attention.  Twitter, unlike the more established social networks, is more commonly accessed through third-party, desktop applications than the twitter.com web site.

I like this trend.  My primary social networking site isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn—  it’s GMail.  Twitter is the first thing to challenge that.  Because, for me, it’s not about the brand – it’s about communication.  So Facebook has it’s ouvre, it’s demographic market, and, like everyone else, it’s mission to learn everything there is to learn about my network’s shopping preferences, and the slow website and constant “spam your friends” requirements of their tools really puts me off.  LinkedIn has a cleaner, more professional aesthetic that I find a lot less annoying, but my favorite new feature of theirs is the ability to subscribe to the feed of my network updates in my RSS reader (something Facebook doesn’t provide).  So I’m rooting for the destruction of the social networking brands, and the ultimate incorporation of powerful social tools into my my desktop, RSS Reader and email.

At that point, I’ll be able to take advantage of the powerful interpersonal tools that the web enables. I’ll still travel to my friends and associates web sites; and I’ll still visit the Ning and Drupal communities that matter to me.  I won’t need a middle man like Facebook or MySpace.  That will be a happy day!

I took a trip up to Juneau, Alaska last week (April 16th, 2008).  Didn’t get too many pictures, but the ones I did included an avalanche in motion – we had a foot of snow while I was there (very late in the season).  So, here’s a good test of Wordpress 2.5’s new Gallery feature. These shots were taken while driving around Juneau checking out potential office spaces for the Earthjustice office to relocate to during a potential renovation.  The avalanche starts in the second row, coming down the mountain and then billowing up in a gray cloud over the building on the right.  The second to last shot – the one with the colorful houses – is the view from outside of our office (which is in an old house).  Beautiful place, Juneau!

A sad, but all too common problem was presented on NTEN’s main discussion forum yesterday:

An IT Director in New York City, working for a large nonprofit (650 people, multiple locations, full IT platform), got approval from his boss to hire in a Systems Administrator (punchline here) at $40,000 annually.  Understand, System Administrators rarely make less than $75k a year at similarly sized for profits.  The boss pulled that number out of a salary survey, but, given the quality of it, I say he might as well have pulled it out of a hat.

Determining what’s fair—or, as we call it “market”—pay is an art in itself, and good salary surveys, like the one NTEN produces, offer far more than suggested wages – they provide context, like location, industry standards; they discuss trends, and the best ones frame the survey results in what the numbers should mean to us.

So, when I read the NTEN survey, and saw what were still ridiculously low salaries in comparison to the for-profit pay scales, I didn’t read it as “these are good numbers”.  I read it as “our industry doesn’t value technology.”  Literally.  If our salaries are at 50-75% of the rest of the world’s, how are we going to attract long-term, talented people?  And if we have a revolving door of mediocre (or, more accurately, some stellar, some miserable) sysadmins running our critical systems, how much money, productivity, and plain competence at our important work are we going to sacrifice?  What’s the cost of maintaining instability in order to save bucks on payroll?

So my pitch is that we have to stop thinking that there’s a metric called nonprofit wages.  There are market rates for positions, and there is a value in serving a mission.  So a nonprofit salary is a market salary (what a for profit would pay), less the monetary value of being able to serve the mission.

Nonprofits can’t keep thinking that they exist in some world within a world.   They complete with all businesses for talent, and, in the IT realm, for profits not only offer better compensation, they offer more toys, bigger staffs (which translates to more techies to pal around with, something a lot of my staff have missed in nonprofit), and, often, newer technology to learn and deploy.  In our field, it’s all about current skills.

So I feel for my compatriot in NYC, and hope that he can muster a case for his boss, for both his and his bosses sake.  If NTEN is reading, a great accompanying metric for the salary survey would be IT turnover tracking, as well as interims when key poisitions (CIO, Sysadmin) are unfilled.  Info on how that impacted business objectives.  We need to do more than just report on the pay – we have to document the impacts.

I took a brief trip to Second Life the other night, yet another web 2.0 trend that, like Facebook, sends my normally open-minded and curious instincts running for shelter.  I’ve never been into gaming, and I obviously don’t use the internet in order to do things anonymously – my username is based on my real name just about everywhere.  But I’m looking for any means possible to improve communication at my geographically diverse company, and to do it while reducing our carbon footprint.  So that’s quite a challenge – how do we improve communication while cutting down on flying, when we have offices in Honolulu, Juneau and D.C., among other places?

So it struck me that Second Life, as a virtual meeting place, has, at the very least, potential that should be vetted.  I have yet to do that vetting – I plan to give it a shot tonight by attending a virtual meeting with the Techsoup virtual community. On Wednesday, I created an account and figured out just enough about how Second Life works in order to get to the meeting later. Reactions:

Good:

• Second Life supports voice, if you have a microphone and stereo speakers, and does it well enough that, if you’re conversing with someone who is, in the Virtual Reality, standing to your left, their voice will come from the left speaker.


• It was easier than I thought it would be to move around and figure it all out.  Your mileage might vary.  It is, necessarily, a somewhat busy interface.

Bad:

• You are not only advised to not use your real name, you can’t.  The account creation process lets you create a first name (text input box) ad select a last name from about 25 in a drop down list.  After being advised to “pick my name carefuly, it’s permanent, and can’t be changed”, I had little option to actually pick a name that I identified with or took seriously.


• Big roots in the gaming community, obviously.  The account creation process offers you ten avatars to choose from (avatars being the cartoon images that will represent you in the virtual world).  Five female, five male – I was not going for the female impersonation thing, so that left me five.  Of those, one (“Boy Next Door”) was fairly innocuous, although it looked about as much like me as Fred from “Scooby Doo” does.  If I didn’t want to be Fred, my choices ranged from anthropomorphic fox people to what must be villains from the old “He-man, Master of the Universe” Saturday morning cartoon.  Mind you, I was able to customize Fred’s appearance, and while I was shooting to make him look like me (I know, completely unclear on the concept here), as close as I could get resembled my punk rock days in the late seventies.

So, I’ll do a follow up post after I get to do what I set out to do, and evaluate Second Life as a virtual meeting place.  But, already, I’m trying to imagine how I explain to the eighty or so Earthjustice Attorneys that step one is to pick a name like “John Vigaromney” that you’ll be known as, and step two is to decide whether you want to look like a furry animal or a grim reaper.  Then determine whether the avatars will reduce any serious meeting on global warming or mountaintop protection strategies to jokes and hysterical laughter.

I’m really not looking for Second Life, but there’s a huge—and maybe critical—application for Supplemental Life, which lets online collaboration more intuitively replace travel.

Everybody who enjoys calling tech support, raise your hand.

No one?

As a long-time IT Director, who came up through the system administration ranks, I dread those situations where the deadline is near, the answer is far, and the only option is to call the company’s support line.  Mind you, it’s never my first option – a well-phrased Google query, first sent to the web, then to Google Groups, is far more likely to get an answer quickly.  And there are those application manuals, gathering dust – the best ones will have good indexes. Also, decent applications have online support forums, and the best ones let you search without joining first.

What makes me crazy is this:  the chances that the $10/hr front line support person answering the phone will know more about the application than I do are slim.  This isn’t arrogance, it’s experience.  I’ve almost certainly installed more applications in my career than he or she has ever used.  And I know, for a fact, that that support person has a script—a series of questions that they have to ask me verifying that I’ve tried all of the things that I’ve already tried.

So my mission, should I be lucky enough to accomplish it, is to bypass all of this.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t – kind of depends on how much independent thought the $10/hr type is willing to apply.  Here are my techniques:

1. Remember that I’m speaking with someone who makes $10/hr (or less, particularly if it’s outsourced to another country) to take all sorts of abuse.  I’m patient, polite, gracious.  It’s not their fault that I have the problem, whatever the problem is.


2. Appeal to their intelligence.  Experience, which I have the edge on, isn’t intelligence, and salary level isn’t an indicator, either.  If the support dude feels like I’m treating him or her respectfully, they’ll be more motivated to really help me.


3. That said, still be authoritative and a touch arrogant.   Let them know that you are not a novice.  “I’m IT Director for a national organization and have years of experience with all types of software.  I have a specific question about this feature; I have tried all of the standard debugging methods and have been through the manual and support forum.  If you are not the person most knowledgeable about this area, can you connect me to someone who can assist me?”  Goal here – skip to the higher level tech support, do not pass go, do not collect half an hour of aggravation.

I don’t vary any of this for U.S. based vs. outsourced support.  It’s the same job and territory.  If anything, based on experience, it does seem to me that the outsourced first-level support is often more knowledgeable than American counterparts, maybe because it’s not an entry level job in India or China, or one with high turnover, as it likely is here.

[This post is a shout out to friends in the NTEN IT Directors Affinity Group, a few of whom made the request]