Mobile Mainframe

Another story on information overload:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071226-interruptions-info-overload-cost-us-economy-650-billion.html

I routinely use to setup filters in my email account at a large educational institution, so that 70% or more of the email never got to me. Even with this I would every Christmas delete 200 or more unread emails from my inbox. No one noticed or cared that I had and it made no difference to my productivity, infact it enhanced it.  Now days I read my email twice a day and no more and use some techniques to action each email (file, respond or delete) quickly, so I rarely have more than four or five emails in my inbox (thats in total). I can't take credit for the idea about managing email and will blog some more on it later. There are a number of people in the self development and productivity areas who advocate switching off from distractions and suggest processes like the one I use. Getting my email organised and being disciplined in its use is the single most important thing I have done to become more productive.  Thing is if something like email causes this much of a hit on productivity, what about tools like SMS and Twitter?

Researcher: Info overload costs economy

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
Wed Dec 26, 12:03 PM ET

NEW YORK - Think twice before you copy someone on an e-mail or hit "reply all." Such practices have made today's workers less productive, a research firm concludes.

After years of naming a product or person of the year, Basex Inc. decided to forecast "information overload" as problem of the year for 2008.

"It's too much information. It's too many interruptions. It's too much lost time," Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. "It's always too much of a good thing."

Information overload isn't exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine.

Workers get disoriented every time they stop what they are doing to reply to an e-mail or answer a follow-up phone call because they didn't reply within minutes. Spira said workers can spend 10 to 20 times the length of the original interruption trying to get back on track.

He estimates that such disruptions cost the U.S. economy $650 billion in 2006.

Spira has a number of recommendations: Resist the urge to immediately follow up an e-mail with an instant message or phone call. Make sure the subject line clearly reflects the topic and urgency of an e-mail. And use "reply all" sparingly.

If you have an interest in history, especially military, then you need to look at the fascinating collection of WWII Nazi Propaganda Posters on the Calvin College web site here.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters2.htm

:)

Recently at the M-Learn Conference in Melbourne, I had the good fortune to meet Jim Plumber, a lecturer in Environment, Conservation and Horticulture from South Australia TAFE.

Jim’s presentation on RFID and his practical application of RFID in learning was one of the conference highlights for me. So it was a real thrill to me when Jim asked about taking back an rfid Learning Table with him to South Australia.

It didn’t take long before I received an email and these photos and an explanation of what he had come up with it. Its called “Ducks and Frogs” and uses rfid Learning Table to help explain to staff and students how a water recycling system works. Each duck or frog sits on a map that represents a part of the water recycling system. If you pick up and scan any of the ducks or frogs, the rfid tags embedded in the toys trigger an instructional video that explains that part of the water recycling process.

Jim noted that the rfid Learning Table was very well received by everyone and he has received a number of requests to demo the technology to other departments.

Thanks Jim for sharing your project!

The ducks and frogs laid out on the map of the water recycling system. The reader can be seen, just to the left of the map.

Some teaching staff give the rfid Learning Table a try.

A long, detailed and rather scary account of what its like to be a car salesman. This story was recently linked in the Aussie Ford Forums and was said to be a fairly accurate description of some techniques used on buyers. You need to know this before you buy your next car!

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article.html

Seems it not making much of a dent.

http://feeds.ziffdavisenterprise.com/~r/RSS/MicrosoftWatch/~3/201513763/rip_the_web_20_office_suite.html

First thing in the morning courier arrives with some new rfid goodies. Part of running a business like this is we constantly have to try out new ideas, concepts and technologies. I estimate as much as a third of our time and income is reinvested in learning and trialling new ideas and technology.

Today spent time with Andrew (the other NECS developer) doing a Scrum of all our projects and where they are at, as we prepare to wind down for Christmas. Afterwards we reviewed our project task list for the next release of rfid Learning Table and decided to start speccing out the database and feature list for the new Quiz component of rfid Learning Table. Yes if you read the blog, you might get the odd sneak peak at what is in future releases. :)

Did some story boarding and even role playing, as we tried to step through the process that a teacher might go through to create and setup a quiz. Fortunately this process is made a bit easier by the fact we both have a teaching background. Also thought about issues such as the user interface and some rough notes on the database design. One of the challenges is we are drawing up a featurelist they may not be seen by the user for several iterations of LT, but we still have to think about them and accommodate them in the work we do now. By the time we finished we had done about four hours of work on all this, with two brief interruptions for phone calls.

Spent some time near the end thinking about maintenance issues with the new quiz component and how to keep that manageable. With a Micro ISV support issues (and costs) are critical. If we have to do support work, then another project might be delayed. At the very least the family see less of both of us.

Tomorrow we spec out the database in detail and build it.

Finished the normal work day with processing an order and payment for LT, reviewing and answering some email (I do this twice a day) and researching a new drop down category listbox I want to code for another project called Time Trax.

About to finish and get a phone call from our hardware guru Alex Bell, who lets me know that a component from Switzerland we have been waiting on has arrived. Early testing looks promising. We are trying to find a way to cost reduce our desktop high frequency readers, so they are affordable for markets like education. He does advise me that we will probably have to roll our own device drivers for Windows for this to work. I've already played a bit with the hardware with a TTL to Serial adapter so was expecting this. Look at my project list and sigh. Looks like we have to squeeze that development in before mid year to meet our internal deadlines. Discuss some ideas to make the hardware easier and cheaper to pull together and agree to meet and discuss Alex's progress on the weekend.

Post a response on Sue Waters blog about the MLearn Conference and Sue replies. Sue has some excellent resources if you are interested in the web 2.0 world here. Sue is rather obsessed with the internet, even sharing and documenting her obsession with the lolly jar here. Give a quick reply to her and then think about dinner.

After dinner spent another hour or so with my wife (a PT TAFE Teacher) discussing the pros and cons of the database design. She had, as always another perspective on a couple of design issues. I documented them and will need to discuss them with Andrew in the morning.

Saw kids to bed and then updated one of our code tools (ReFactor) which had just been updated by the developers. Checked the readme file and was somewhat relieved to see it was just a maintenance release. In the past month we have had several updates of our coding tools that have mean't I have had to take time out to see what new features and changes were made.

Reviewed some blogs and web sites to see what IT news happenings went on today. Finally decided to make this blog entry and sign off for the day at 11:46pm.

I thought some of you might like an insight into some of the things we do as developers when working on projects like rfid Learning Table and Virtual Guide among others. So what I have decided to do is post this occasional blog entries where I will discuss some of the things we do in the course of a normal day, in the hope it gives you an insight into a Micro ISV (Independent Software Vendor) works. I have decided to tag these as “Coders Diary”.

My thanks to Harriet Wakelam from TAFE WA for the suggestion. Harriet and I both hope to expand on this concept in the new year.

An excellent blog post from The Silicon Valley Insider on how companies like Google disrupt and eventually will take over the lead from old IT like Microsoft. Microsoft themselves have used these techniques in the past to win market share. Anyone remember Netscape?

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/microsoft-in-denial-google-threat-is-classic-disruption.html