Adventures in home working

I’m a big fan of Camtasia products, both Studio and SnagIt, so I’m delighted to see that older versions are now available for free (for PC Plus users in theory).  Camtasia Studio is for screen recording and SnagIt is probably the best screen capture utility around.

Provided you don’t run Vista these versions are still great products and met most of my needs for years.

Not only can you download these old versions, but you get the option to upgrade to the latest versions at a pretty good price.

Download Camtasia Studio here and the key here

Download SnagIt here and the key here

For a long time now I’ve watched Jeffrey Snover and admired his passion, Graham noticed as well and linked to this short video that explains some of what motivates Jeffrey.  As Graham points out the all important ingredient is that Jeffrey really believes that PowerShell is going to improve the lives of IT administrators everywhere and I think he’s right.

This sort of passion drives me as well – at least it does when I’m convinced that the technology and process innovations I’m working on with CSC are really going to makes peoples lives more productive and fun.  That’s not always the case of course sometimes the enterprise agenda and the end users agenda are not perfectly aligned, but whenever possible I’m trying to find ways to make what we do a “win win” for CSC, our customers and our users.

This blog reflects my focus on the end user more than my other work in CSC but I’m never more enthusiastic about work than when I think there’s a chance to help people.  Right now though I’m worrying about a few things:

1. Is ever more technology in our lives really making life better
2. Is always on communication disrupting our work life balance
3. Is addiction to email, social networks, computer games, eBay etc going to be as damaging as other forms of addiction
4. Is mobile working really more productive
5. Are constant interruptions making us dumb
6. Do we really need to keep on top of all this information that’s flowing our way so efficiently
7. What’s the long term effect of virtual work and play on our mental health and the quality of our relationships
8. Do end users need protecting from themselves
9. etc

In all of the examples above,  I think the answer turns out to be “it depends” and its part of my job to help reduce the level of uncertainty in the answer.

I had a good laugh at this article in Wired where Seth describes how the search for increased productivity can easily become a goal in itself, in fact dwarfing actually doing real work.  This snip tells it all:

When my fiance came home from work each evening, we’d ask each other how our respective days had gone. She’d describe the small frustrations and victories that punctuate office life. I’d say something along the lines of “Today I spent three and a half hours organizing my Google Bookmarks” or “You’d be amazed at what you can turn up if you play around with Google US Government Search.” Then we’d both laugh. It took a couple of weeks before I finally noticed the concern in her eyes. Then she asked: “What else did you do?”

That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. My campaign to increase productivity had become yet another distraction — and a significant one

It’s a big issue, sites like LifeHacker (and so many others) provide a constant stream of new tips and tools to improve your productivity, but they become an end in themselves.  Part of my job is to work through the hype and make recommendations to enterprises on how to improve personal productivity so I’m in an even worse situation,  I’m paid to try out all of this stuff. 

Still I have a real job as well so I have to work hard at finding balance, but tweaking is so much fun!

Within CSC we have recently been seeing a strong trend towards consumerization of IT with many tech savvy employees now pushing for control over their work IT, especially their desktop PCs, collaboration and personal productivity tools.  A few years ago these desktops were locked down business tools, now users are happily tweaking away and managing them themselves. 

Certainly they are happier – everyone likes control (at least when things are working) – but are they more effective?  Our current focus is on finding the sweet spot:

1. Giving people enough control to allow them to innovate and tweak to suit their personality and skill level
2. Making it easy to fix things when they go wrong, a bit of – protect people from themselves
3. Making their environments transparently secure
4. Making it easy to do the right thing, and find out what the “right thing is”

Hopefully avoiding Seth’s situation:

Thanks, Google. You’ve turned me into the most efficient time-waster ever

I’m a user of Web 2.0 applications and on the whole I find them great.  However although I know almost nothing about the current technologies involved used in their development, although I’ve become increasingly nervous about their complexity.  Then I listened to a very scary talk by Rasmus Lerdorf who invented PHP and now works for Yahoo.  Rasmus explained some of the security issues associated with modern JavaScript dependent web sites.  Rasmus concluded that it’s essentially impossible to ensure that the web is a secure place to work and he himself for example uses two browsers, one for personal work (buying, selling, banking etc) and one for everything else.   He mentioned IBM’s web site on Cross Site Scripting pointing out that it was in fact vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting! 

He went further saying that he had developed a scanning tool that looked for web sites that were vulnerable to various attacks but couldn’t release it because he found that almost every site on the web was vulnerable.  He didn’t want to be responsible for bring down the whole Internet.

I finished listening to this talk a very worried man, but the worry faded over time, until today I read this article on the Google Android initiative which included the following statements:

“Web 2.0″ has to be the worst programming environment to ever achieve wide popularity. It is incredibly buggy, poorly standardized, slow, and basically broken in every imaginable way. So it is rather difficult to see its very real virtues.

and

“Web 2.0,” which is basically a collection of random unspecified features written by 23-year-old goth acidheads at Netscape in 1995, cannot even begin to solve the kinds of application problems that an Android Java application can solve. And the Web 2.0 platform is mature. You can slap layers on it, but the standard is unfixable and unimprovable.

Worse, every comment agreed with the analysis!  Now I suppose I should commit some real effort into exploring the reality of these risks. 

Only last week I was looking through the reliability stats for my PCs and noticed that web browsers (IE, Maxthon and Firefox) that I use were by far the least reliable applications that I use, doesn’t fill me with confidence as I depend more and more on these increasingly complex applications.

Its clear that Microsoft spent too long on Office 2007 fighting its historical desktop rivals through the introduction of a new user interface, file format, programming model.  These platform investments provided some user benefits but most importantly wrong footed competitors who had previously concentrated on cloning (which is a lot easier than developing) Microsoft Office capability.

However their focus on competing with the past resulted in them missing also completely the fact that there was a whole new crop of competitors who were not interested in simply cloning, but wanted to re-invent the whole office experience as a simpler, more collaborative, service based experience. 

I have no doubt that Microsoft has the ability to compete in this space technically, but it will require such a disruption of its current revenue stream that it will be a difficult management trick to pull off.  That said Microsoft does seem to understand and management disruptions with some skill and whilst commentators (like me) might criticise them for their lack of innovation there’s little evidence in their revenues (right now) that they are mismanaging this disruption.

Time will tell …

• Restarting my desktop PC, after 24 days uptime its suffering a bit of a slowdown. Then off out with the Twins #
• Watching the Blackpool cheering competition, Stephies team ‘Red Shoes’ competes at 16:00!! #
• Loading up my Blackberry with Music and Podcasts #
• My radio packed in today and I like to listen to the radio in the kitchen so eBay just provided a new PURE EVOKE 2 DAB radio #
• Going swimming with the Twins, Stephie still at Cheerleeding and Jen’s shoulders not yet healed enough for swimming #
• scanning feeds at home after 46 lengths swimming, the kids did 50. #
• Watching Numb3rs for the first time, realy cool – makes me want to go back to University http://www.cbs.com/primetime/numb3rs/ #

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• Relaxing at Boaters Landing. Very stormy and high tide, but the views still great and its warm and cosy here. Jen is coming soon after music #
• Spent whole afternoon catching up with housework. 4 kids makes for lots of washing and untidy bedrooms! #
• Watching My Son Jack on TV – excellent – and scanning my feeds #

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• Clearing the nights email. I’m not well ( a feet, knees, ankles and elbows day) so it’s time for a long walk – it helps that its sunny #
• Called back to Lincoln to talk with consultants #
• Ferrybridge services, trying to relax for a while and have some breakfast. Managed to get myself lost but Blackberry GPS saved me! #
• In Cafe in lincoln. Now need to wait till 16:00 to see consultant who is now delayed 2 hours #
• Home! Last night the Docs had given up on Dad. Today he woke up full of fight, they were amazed, we were thrilled. Futures still unknown. #

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• Trouble sleeping, so trying to get email blogging to work with WordPress, without much luck #
• Just clearing my emails before driving to Lincoln #
• Talking to Mark Luter about which windows mobile devices to buy #
• Listening to IT conversations podcasts while driving to Lincoln #
• At the hospital #
• Just left my Dad (still very ill, now also has chest infection) and stopped at Little Chef for a break #
• Home at last – heavy traffic, reading feeds while watching Heroes #

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• Talking to Doug when I should be asleep #
• Finished Emails, now going for a walk and then later to Chorley for the day #
• Reading my feeds from last night in the Cafe Nero in Lytham #
• Just got a report from my Brother that my Dads doing a bit better in hospital, setting off for Chorley now to meet Stu and Charlie #
• On my way home after a fun session with Stu and Charlie #
• Waiting for Stephie at the School #
• My email volumes faily low as well, due to always on IM and a weekly highlight report and lots of rules in Lotus Notes #
• Dropped Stephie off at Tae kwon do and now swimming with the twins. Jens operation went very well #
• Finished swimming, 40 lengths tonight feeling much better than yesterday. Chilling out by the pool for a while #
• Watcing stephie finish her training after a quick shop at sainsburys #
• Scanning feeds while watching Spooks on TV. The swims this week have helped my ankles and knees ready for the long drive tomorrow #
• Making my Twitter feed private, ie not part of the public timeline. I made it public because of Facebook but using twittersync instead now #
• Finished for the night. Now going to read a good book in a hot bath. Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy #

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