satorimedia

4/6/07 moblogging, here we come.

I can now post to all of my blogs from my treo.

And a shout out to my friend's nascent tech blog, Beauty and a Geek . Even if I don't understand what she's saying, she says it well.

Wow. Restech REALLY sucks

I was frustrated not having constant wireless access, so I decided to try out one of Madison's two "ubiquitous coverage" wireless services, ResTech. For about $20/month, there's "unlimited" access.

Fine, except for the "access" part...which has speeds resembling the good ol' dialup days, but not quite as reliable. The killer is that the break area here at my work cannot receive their signal at all...which is a dealbreaker to me. Of course, their website doesn't have a clear way to cancel an account, so I've got a phone call, and customer service, to look forward to.

But to add insult, I got this spam in my mailbox, advertising the "Ruckus"--a wireless card designed to optimize their service, for only $104 (don't they realize most laptops come with wireless built in? How about fixing their network, instead?). There is this "incentive":

There is a 15 day trial period* during which you can return your Ruckus for a full refund.

*Users returning a Ruckus after the trial period will be charged a $25.00 restocking fee.

Huh? So it's a full refund, except for the $25 they keep? I don't get it.

Can't cancel this service fast enough. Kind of scared to try out the other, Merr.com....

New Tool from an Old Friend

The website SearchMash seems like the logical next step in the Web 2.0 search engine wars. A Google Killer? Well, no, because actually apparently Google owns searchmash, and this is sort of their sandbox to see how it works.

Gina Trapani isn't very impressed due to the lack of supported filetype delimiters, but I think that's simply something that's not in the first iteration. I also don't use those very much in my own searches. On the other hand, having images, blog entries (wonder if this could work with Technorati?), and videos all easily accessible on the page, I think that's fantastic.

The ability to drag-and-drop your results into your own order is nifty, but not very useful until they add a "save results" or "export results" (or hey, how about an RSS feed?) to the page. Still, if it's really Googles experiment...can that really be too far off?

Rules of Technology

A long time ago I came up with what I called the "Rules of Technology." In brief, they are:

1. It works better if you plug it in.
2. It works better if you turn it on.
3. It sounds better if you turn it up.

There is also Murphy's Law of Performance Technology, gleaned after many, many stage performances involving tech. It states:

"Everything that can possibly go wrong already has--you just don't know it yet."

That being said, there is another side to technology than making it work--there's also not letting it control you. "Don't live to geek, geek to live!" is the LifeHacker mantra. The Rebel Dad came up with some really useful rules for that, including the counter to number 3: Sometimes it sounds better when you turn it off.
Five Tricks to Tame Technology - On Balance

Waving a Wand

I've been having troubles with a printer all day. It needs to print--and ONLY print--to some DVDs. Not burn them. And it's been finicky, and randomly shut down, and at one point my mac--yes, that's right, I'm using a dear old Mac to do this--it just refused to print anything anywhere. "Error while printing" was the only message it gave. I deleted prefs, I tried this, I tried that...finally I did a google search, under "error while printing mac osx."

It led me to a help page on the Mac website, where it suggested:

Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/).
Type: ls -la / | grep tmp
Press Return.
Look at the resulting text. If it matches the following line (which would indicate that /tmp is still present) then this document does not apply to you, and you should stop here and try another troubleshooting path.
lrwxrwxr-t 1 root admin 11 Jan 15 11:00 tmp@ -> private/tmp
The timestamp following "admin" will reflect the current date.

If you do not see the line above, then type:
sudo ln -s /private/tmp /tmp

Press Return.
Enter your administrator account password when prompted, the press Return.

I hate directions like this. They make no sense, they do not tell you what it is you are doing. They could have put "dance a jig and say booga-booga three times" and I would have done it, because to me it makes just as much sense as what I did.

But worse than that: it worked. Like a dream. The printer is humming along, happy as a clam.

I think that's even more annoying. And I'm not sure if it's simply because I've hit my head against the wall of my own ignorance, or if it's really bad user support. A little of both, I suspect.

It certainly makes me want to break out the old linux manual..

Luddite

Hello, and welcome to the new home of satorimedia. That is the name of a company started out in the early days of the web boom, that somehow never managed to latch onto that VC funding that caused so many other flashes-in-the-pan. Perhaps that's why I'm still around, though my job has changed at least as much as the web itself. Whereas I started it seeing myself sitting behind a desk, designing copy and running servers, instead I'm much more likely to be consulting with podcasters, running over slideshows with presenters, or teaching video design. Not that I don't still have a server, and design a website or two.

But I'm finding that I'm more about the message than the medium these days. I work as a media alchemist, transforming voice to digits and video to images. Which is why I responded, rather vehemently, to a question the lovely and talented Heidi Miller posted in her recent blog: "Are Luddites Bad?"

Specifically, I objected to the premise: "Do you think that drinking the social media Kool-Aid is keeping you from your "real" life in any way?" The main problem I had was this whole idea that the person that I was chatting with, IMing, or emailing was any less real than you, dear reader, sitting and looking at this blog.

Here is a portion of my response:

"Shame on you, from your very first statement ("a real one, not online!"). It reminds me of people who used to walk up to me when I would be in a coffee shop. "Are you busy?" "I'm chatting with my friend in Chicago." "Oh, well then..." and they would sit down, as if their presence in "meatspace" gave them some greater rights or presence than my online conversation.

When you are chatting or IMing, you are talking with a REAL PERSON. The fact that it is using a computer and text makes them no less real. The fact that the internet allows conversations to happen outside of the constraints of "real-time" and with people across the globe does not, in my opinion, make those conversations any less valuable.

...The idea that a person living next door is inherently more interesting or more deserving of your attention than your friend in a London flat is, to me, ridiculous. I have heard people say "Well, you'll never actually meet the Londoner" to which I reply A) you don't know that; if I ever decide to go to London, I've got a place to crash, and 2) I already have met them, and we've become great friends by communicating.

...So I say, shame on you for implying that there is inherent virtue in lo-tek; I believe, and have always believed, that the value is in the clarity and expression of the ideas, regardless of the medium."

To be honest, I'm a little embarrassed and surprised at how emotional my response was. Especially as someone who has been bemoaning my need to return to my beloved moleskine. Her much more reasoned response clarifies the question, somewhat:

Online tools are great, and I'm glad we live in an age when we can develop extraordinary business and personal relationships online. However, is that to the exclusion of, for example, going for a walk on a beautiful Chicago spring day?

And therein lies the answer. Don't hesitate to use all the tools at your disposal, including the ones on the ends of your legs and stuck on either side of your nose.

But bring your digital camera along, so you can blog about it later.