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First, a bit of background. In 2007 I was a heavy Macintosh user and I had been an Apple fanboy since the early 90′s. I had lived through the dark times, survived OS 8 & 9, and then basked in the triumphant transition to OS X. Yet after proselytizing the Mac for many years, both personally and professionally, I actively avoided the iPhone when everyone around me was loving theirs. So when the android OS was first announced I was sure this would be a promising replacement for my aging blackberry and might give me the features I wanted without binding me eternally to iTunes. I had already heavily invested into the Google provided services and I hated AT&T with deliberate determination. (aside: this stems from them being SBC and not the AT&T we all grew up with.) Then when the G1 was released, three different people in my office bought them within a few days of each other. I was awestruck at what android provided, including copy and paste. I waited a month and a half until the end of our current cell phone contract, then my whole family went to T-Mobile to get new phones. My wife, unfortunately, picked a sidekick and my daughter got a windows mobile phone. But that was all a distant distraction, I finally had my G1. The early days of the G1 were a trying time, spent mostly waiting for applications to be released. Over the course of the last 18 months I have had uncountable twitter clients, to do apps, and notepads programs. I have watched the evolution of the ipod as a gaming platform, and the release of ever better android phones. All the while my G1 got slower and less stable.

So why, in the context of these problems and the ever widening dominance of the iPhone platform, would I choose to reinvest in android? I believe it will offer me the best solution for my needs. I will explore the three biggest factors in this conclusion: Integration, flexibility, and community. Yet to me the most telling point is that my biggest hesitation doesn’t come from the newly announced iPhone OS 4 or the recently released iPad but from the speculation that Google may release a Nexus One Pro with a keyboard. This speaks volumes about the decision I’ve made and how confident I am that android is the right solution for me.

As I said, even before my first android phone, I was deeply invested into Google’s services. GMail was my primary email, Calendar organized my time, and I practically lived in Reader. Since living with android and the integration into these services that it offers, I have become even more dependent on them and I don’t regret it a bit. My Google Contacts list is the way I keep track of the people I want and need to stay in touch with. Picassa is where my photos live online and Docs holds everything that the “My Documents” folder was designed to hold. Even when I had an iPod it’s biggest use was for Podcasts. Now I swear by Google’s Listen app. It’s Podcast done better that iTunes ever could. This level of integration has given me more than just a connected device, it’s really a connected system. A startling side effect is that my Laptop had become mostly just a host for my browser. The majority of apps I run are web pages turned to apps with Chrome’s “Create Application Shortcuts…” feature. I am almost living with Google’s Chrome OS already.

For me, though, this connected system really shines because it’s open and therefore more flexible than Apple’s solution. As an example I’ll discuss exchange integration. I recently started a new job where they offer the ability to connect a personal smartphone to the company’s exchange server, provided it supports certain security features. If I had an iPhone I would have to choose between syncing with my Google information or my work’s exchange server. On the android platform there are several exchange solutions, some baked in from the handset makers and others from third parties. I found Nitrodesk’s Touchdown and was elated. Not only did it provide a complete exchange solution, including all the security required by my company, but it kept all my work info separate from my personal Google stuff. It’s basically Outlook for android. This app, by virtue of it’s “duplication of built in features“, would never be approved onto the iTunes App Store, regardless of the number of users who would like it. I’ve found this to be the case numerous times with android applications. There are third party solutions for accessing Google Docs, Google Reader, and GMail tasks. How many solutions does the iPhone have for accessing iDisk or Mobile Me content outside of apple’s built in apps? And that’s when they eventually provide a solution.

But what, you may ask, about the future developments which are clearly leaning toward the iPhone. Most new apps are debuting there and it’s adoption rate isn’t showing any signs of slowing. To that I would answer with the community which has grown up around android and Google’s services. I can say it was liberating when I first Rooted my G1 and installed a custom ROM from Cyanogen. I was able to take my mobile computing into my own hands and, while excepting the risks involved, get better performance and functionality. Ever since then I have had a steady stream of new features and even updates from newer android versions that T-Mobile wouldn’t have sanctioned. And when there was a clash between Cyanogen and Google it wasn’t the Zero Tolerance policy that Apple has aggressively enforced. The end result was an amicable agreement that allowed new ROMs to be released and allowed Google to protect the components they had promised to their distributors. Because the parent company isn’t hostile to the moding community, many more high quality mods are available, including many impressive themes and several custom ROMs. This is most strongly evidenced by the existence in the android market of apps to download Cyanogen’s ROMs and third party themes. Both of which require a Rooted phone to work. Would Apple ever allow that?

I still maintain that the iPhone is a wonderfull solution, I tried to convince my wife that It would be a great solution for her needs just a month ago. She did eventually however choose a Blackberry 8520, which she has come to love. For me though the android philosophy is a closer fit and a better solution for my needs. So now I wait for FedEx to bring me my own Superphone and open the next chapter in my mobile computing life.

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I understand the problem everyone is having with Google Wave. I really do. From cries of “I don’t get it” to “This isn’t going to replace email” there is a roar of dissatisfaction with the initial release of Google Wave. I think this comes from people trying to set it into their current modes and methods. Wave doesn’t really replace any existing product completely. Wave won’t kill twitter or get you away from email. But I think Leo Laporte put it best on several of his Netcasts “Maybe for a paradigm shift it needs to be a product that we don’t get initially”. This sums up the disconnect many people feel with Wave. They have a hard time fitting Wave into their current view of work and communication because it isn’t the same as the tools they have used before.

Just as “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” holds true for situations with a lack of tools, I believe that once you get a screwdriver you don’t ask “how do i use this to drive nails”. A new tool can complement, rather than replace, existing ones. A new tool can both give you a better solution to existing problems (not inserting screws by hitting them really hard) and give you new capabilities that the old tools didn’t (you can remove screws as well). I think this is the state of Google Wave. It’s a tool that will make some current processes better, not emailing 12 versions of word documents back and forth, and allow new ones to be developed. This second part is what really excites me, what new things will we start to do with wave once it finds it’s place in our current workflows. How will we leverage it’s unique many to many, real time model to create things we couldn’t easily create before. All of the wonderful examples in the oft linked Lifehacker article are using wave for things that are currently accomplished with existing communication tools, most using one to one or one to many methods (ie. phone calls or email). And while I think that wave will be a great new tool in these areas, I really want to see what things will we use it for that we aren’t doing today because the existing tools fall too short to be workable.

So yes it slices, and you can use it for dicing if you want, but it won’t make thousands of Julienne fries. It may, however, help you create a new way to carve up your work.

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The big development in IC social networking tools hitting the news recently is A-Space, essentially a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoogleDocs designed to be an addictive work environment for analysts with access to sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT). A-Space will have status updates a la Twitter, subscriptions to updates, feeds and friends, activity streams, content management a la Sharepoint, a community grid tag cloud, RSS feeds from outside, drag and drop capability, discussion/question threads, a ’scrapbook,’ and widgets.

But most importantly he finishes with this revelation.

This system – frankly better than anything I know about in the private sector at the moment – should increase collaboration and analytical thinking.

A-Space’s launch is a great opportunity for the internal communications of the government to get a much needed upgrade. And I’m all for the US Government taking advantage of great ideas for social networking. I just want them to share with the rest of us. I know first hand how the lack of internal tools can motivate users to take advantage of public sites or implement their own solutions. I would love to make a resource like A-Space available to my users. Currently we are using an internal Wiki and an IM and IRC server and while these tools have served us well they are limited in scope. I can imagine how a locally hosted service with the above listed features could offer a great opportunity for increased collaboration, especially across different teams and business divisions.

More importantly than the affect that this could have on my own company, I think about all the other small and medium sized companies who could really benefit from an A-Space. Having a centralized, easy to deploy, managed social network that lives within the corporate firewall could quickly open communication channels and build the relationships that most of the actual work at companies is based on. It is the implementation of tools like these that give us IT professionals an opportunity to have a substantial and lasing impact on not only the company but the effectiveness of individual employees.

There are, of course, several commercial options including from tech giants Microsoft and IBM. These solutions are usually best suited for companies that have existing installations that already use these company’s technologies. There are also open source projects working in this direction but they don’t seem to be as feature complete and robust as A-Space sounds.

This leads to the ongoing discussion of open source and government. If the taxpayer’s money was used to create software, the argument goes, then the taxpayers should benefit from that investment. I think the reuse by other departments and the release from vendor lock-in are better reasons for government projects to be created under an open source license. I understand the government’s desire to keep some things out of the public eye and under raps. I know that many security related projects wouldn’t be open sourced for fear of someone finding an exploitable bug. Yet I think that A-Space is a perfect example of the kind of government project that should be open and available to the general public. The value in this system is the content, personal connections it allows, and it’s internal access controls not the code of the system itself. The government could benefit greatly from any outside development done by the open source community that would develop around such a product. I understand that any community code would be meticulously reviewed before use inside any government network. But this code review would still cost less, in developer time, than developing the same features from scratch.

So just as President-Elect Obama has embraced Creative Commons for the Change.gov site, I hope that A-Space is released as an open source project so that others can benefit from and contribute to this resource. In the absence of this unlikely event, I hope that the open source community takes this as an opportunity to step up and create the missing A-Space for me and everyone else.

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My friend is definitely a power user. While not a professional Geek, he certainly enjoys the learning and doing parts enough to have grown well beyond casual use. He frequently trouble shoots his own problems, customizes his software configs, and tweaks his system in interesting ways. I know that when I get a call from him, either he needs a sounding board to bounce an idea off of, or he has a real problem that will require more than a reboot or a reinstall.

He has had his share of Vista complications. Foremost of which is Cannon’s decision to support Vista on it’s combo Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax systems starting with the model directly after his. He was able to get the XP driver installed and he can at least print. Alas, scanning and faxing seem lost to him. His other major issue, which others have repeated, is installing software. His work around to the access issues he has encountered is to use the “Run As” command on the Setup.exe in order to execute it as Administrator. This has resolved the majority of his issues, although it did require several reinstalls of software he has setup before discovering it.

In the end he is genuinely happy with both Vista and his new hardware. I hope that others find Vista as positive an experience as he has. Unfortunately from the reports I have read, he seems to be among the minority.

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I have just heard the first reports back and he described it as “Blown Away.” He seems to be enjoying Vista itself, beyond the new hardware benefits he is getting. I hope that my cautionary tales of Vista’s successes and failures helped him in having a positive, yet realistic, mindset for the transition. I will gather more in depth information tonight and we’ll see if the initial enthusiasm holds up under scrutiny.

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This system served me well through college and up until I got my first “Tech Support” job. I was working as a bench tech at CompUSA and one of the other techs was trying to sell his palm pilot pro. This was in 1998 and I already had a newton message pad. But it had never really supplanted the organizer for all my planning needs. Now I had an opportunity to get a pilot. It even had the “upgrade card” to make it equal to a Palm III. I don’t remember how much he wanted for it but I knew it was a great deal. I also had to get an adapter to plug it into my Powerbook 3400. But once I had it up and running there was no looking back.

I completely digitized my organizer. Every scrap of paper, every phone number, every note went into the palm. I swore that I would carry it everywhere, and I did. I searched for a great belt holder and pen/stylus. I was going to be fully mobile. I’ve always considered myself a road warrior with nowhere to go. The palm accompanied me to the mall, camping, on job interviews, and even doing the laundry. You see my paper organizer was always with me and significantly larger so the palm was easy to justify and carry. I just never became as easy to use.

I upgraded to newer models and constantly searched out better programs and accessories. I read palm pilot news sites and discussed them on some of the first forums dedicated to palms. Yes I was a true believer and followed in the way of the palm. I ever wrote a short story almost entirely in graffiti. My whole life was in there and I could find no fault in it.

No fault, but always a nagging feeling. I was still looked upon as the organizer, but doing so seemed harder. I felt more pressured to look at my palm. I was always trying to justify using it more or buying another accessory. It had become an extra step in everything. I had to force myself to look at it to see what I had to do. I stopped writing in it as much.

Now I don’t mean to portray this as an overnight change. I have been using a Palm OS device for 8 years now. I have always found it useful but never inviting, functional but not empowering. I always felt I should be using it more than I was. The most productive I ever felt with it was when I found a program called MacNoteTaker the let me sync a folder of text files to it, edit them on the pilot and sync the changes back. This was true power and one of the few things I really miss when I went from a mac to a Linux box.

Now I find myself looking at my palm pilot, which is also my phone, only when I have to. Things have been lost in it’s to do lists and the notes are almost completely empty. Only the calendar and contact list are regularly used. I feel that after 8 years I could get a non-palm phone, provided it syncs my calendar and contact list on Linux, which none of them do, and be just as productive.

So now I’ve gone back to paper. I have found GTD and it’s working well so far (2 weeks in). I’m carrying a hipster PDA based on the templates from DIYPlanner.com and joined the 43 folders forums. But the real proof of my return to paper is this writing itself. It his being written on my first Moleskine, or at least the first draft is. I rarely write and yet I have spilled out 6 pages so far and I feel better about it than The entire short story I wrote on the palm (As I add “Finish Short Story” to my next action list).

I feel that in returning to paper organizing has become about the information again. I am worrying much less about what I am doing with that information and more about what I am doing. Hopefully this will help me make the most out of GTD and stop missing so many of the things I need to be doing. Plus if I start writing more then writing behind the keyboard should get easier.

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• I need to clear out the Moleskine that this lives in before I finish it out and start another one.
• I hope that by finally transcribing the contents I can get some perspective on my views at the time.

I have one more long piece and a short one that I hope to get up soon. This is coming out in near first draft form. I have decided to do only minimal editing and just post it as it was written. I would love comments and feedback, as long as you remember that these were from a year ago and a lot has evolved since then.

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• Expansion of writing as both a skill and a habit within my regular routine
• Journaling my thoughts and interests for my own and others review
• Communicating my realizations and conclusions on certain topics
• Generating a conversation with others who may find my ideas compelling
• Chronicling my experiences and exploits so others may learn from my mistakes

I also think there is value in stating what this blog isn’t and what I hope to keep it from becoming.

• A Diary
• The complete chronicle and record of the insignificant portions of my life
• A list of web pages I think are useful (For this I suggest my del.icio.us page)
• Links to content without attempting to contribute to the topic or discussion
• A money making venture
• An Ego centric tribute to my own greatness and intellect

I hope this will give us both a better idea of what I hope to achieve and avoid with this effort.

For the sake of full disclosure, I have started this blog 4 times in the past, in different forms. None of them has taken off beyond a few casual posts on a semi-regular basis. I hope to hold myself to a tighter schedule this time. I would like to post three days a week as a minimum. I’m not sure how realistic that is but as least it’s a good goal to set initially.

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