Day 3 of iPad adventuring. After getting set up on day1, my kids started asking what games I had on it. First request was for Bejeweled (Callie). Second request was for Angry Birds (Cameron). And then they both clamored for Fruit Ninja. I blame their grandfather for the first two, and their babysitter for the third. I did download a free Angry Birds and spent too much time throwing feathered missiles at pigs. I had had a version of AB on my Android and never been impressed. On the iPad, the user experience worked a bit better – still a pain in the neck game, in my opinion. Though that hasn’t stopped me from spending too much time on it.
Typing this blog post from my laptop for no really good reason – I pulled out the laptop to do some Javascript development. So I now have my Android in front of me, updating its apps and downloading Google Voice to let me do some voice command trickery I saw on LifeHacker; I have the iPad in front of me that I’m using as my eBook kind of thing to read ‘Learning Ext JS 3.2′. And, of course, I’m typing on the laptop for my blog. I type all right on the iPad – it’s just that I type faster on a physical keyboard as of yet. Appreciating some of the niceties of the on-screen keyboard: if it knows I’m entering in an e-mail field, then the ‘@’ sign is part of the primary keyboard; as I shift to type a punctuation mark, after I type the mark, it returns me to the main letter keyboard. However, it doesn’t do that if I’m typing numbers – very smooth.
Did finally set up a cellular plan on the iPad. $20 / month for 1GB data. I figure if I primarily use the thing at work and at home, both have wireless connections. But the $20 gets me accessibility in other places, without relying on wireless networks that I worry may be less secure. That reminds me: I need to find some sort of virus and other network protection software for the iPad.
Having a very funny geeky weekend!
July 4th, 2011
So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad. I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones. There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.
iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated. For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable. They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it. Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me. It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it. Not sure where they got it. Slightly weirded out. Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.
I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)… It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”. Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that. Giving ‘em the fake number run-around. Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.
Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature. I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.
By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard. Nice touch.
July 2nd, 2011
After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad. Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G? There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side. But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto. Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract. In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.
Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad. Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with. Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.
Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32. Probably still more than I need.
Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy. Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.
Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing. You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them. The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes. Really? They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base. I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.
Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration. Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.
July 2nd, 2011
A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month. Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good. Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way. Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.
The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace. One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential. It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve. What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?
Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women. Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.
April 15th, 2011
A few years ago, someone I worked with at the time invited folks to attend a ‘Dynamic Marriage‘ class he was facilitating at his church. We got a lot out of it, and have in fact made some weak efforts to bring it our church. (Weak meaning, talked about it amongst ourselves, talked it up a few times to folks at church, introduced some of the materials at a mens’ retreat… but mostly just talked.) This isn’t a ‘on my turf’ thing, but our friend’s church is a half hour away. Packing up the kids and schlepping a half hour away to go meet with folks you don’t know at first? Likely a stopper to getting this kind of information in the hands of most of our fellow church members or in the hands of other folks in our local community. We were surprised by another reaction in class this evening, though. When it was our turn to introduce ourselves, we said that we had been through the class before, thought a lot of it, and had considered taking it back to our church, but hadn’t really done anything substantial there. I was surprised to hear the question “your church?”. Realized we surprised folks by not being from their church. May even have surprised them by suggesting that we were not considering joining their church. May be just my read on their reaction: maybe they were just generally curious. But it made me think some more when we got home…
I realized in “our” church, I’d likely have had the same reaction. If someone’s in my church, I assume they’re a member, visiting to consider becoming a member, or visiting because some member made a reach out. But not just visiting, or visiting to interact in a program that my church doesn’t have, or heck, visiting to interact with another area of God’s church. Intellectually I realize His church unimaginably wider/deeper/more diverse than my little pew bench. But someone I’m still my little pew bench focused. That pew bench focus is broken up a bit when I think about sharing with the less fortunate via missions or charitable giving, but I can’t say that I necessarily think beyond that to sharing of a less one-way directed manner.
Not sure what to do with these thoughts, as yet… just thinking them. Wondering if there’s some interaction there with the high school ministry, or that long thought about clowning ministry. But it’s making me think about broadening that horizon a bit more than just that pew bench.
March 9th, 2011
I have a not-so-secret dream to be a clown. As a kid, I dressed up as a clown for my kid sister’s birthday party. As an adult, when I temporarily left my software development career, one of the alternates I considered was being a clown. I’ve done the clown thing at Pioneer Girl events: dressing up, doing balloon twisting, juggling, … I wouldn’t consider myself good at it, but it does seem to be a theme in my life.
One of the avenues of “clownship” that appeals to me is that of a Christian clown. Clowns seem to cause polar reactions. Folks are either clown-phobic (a few, and often little kids), or are drawn to them and interested to see what the clown does or says. What a great platform for a whole bunch of things: for just giving someone the gift of a little bit of enjoyment in their day; for giving a parent the gift of seeing their child light up; for distracting someone from pain, whether that be physical pain in a hospital or emotional impact; for giving someone just plain attention which in some cases is a gift some folks too rarely receive; and for expressing truths in a way that causes folks to look at them in a new light. I’m really attracted to the concept of gospel clowning, a way of sharing God’s truths in a manner that helps folks look at things in a different manner. If I just go up to you and tell you God loves you, you’ll treat that as an odd behavior and throw away the message. If I find a way to show you that in a gospel skit, well, you expect odd things from a clown and might just hear it out.
So…. I’m on the lookout for gospel clown skit inspiration. Got to do one at our church talent show a few weeks ago, and hoping to use that to seed thoughts in a few folks’ minds to start a little clown troupe. If you’ve got ideas, thoughts, donations, interest, … and oh yeah, that prayer stuff, too – all ears. Or, in my case, all clown feet.
March 3rd, 2011
This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.
Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.
All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ‘em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it's accepted... need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.
Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!
February 6th, 2011
I’m helping out with my daughter’s Upwards basketball team this season and loving it! This is her third season with Upwards – the first was cheerleading (no chance there of me helping!) and then she transitioned to basketball. [She decided that the basketball players looked like they were having more fun. Go, Cora!] This season the coach sent out a message looking for a ‘Team Mom’ and ‘another Dad’ to help with the drills. Uh…. hmmmm… snacks or drills? Think I’ll take drills, thank you very much. One email later, indicating history coaching kids’ sports and doing kids’ ministries, I had me an assistant coaching gig! Except that coach neglected to tell league commissioner, and then coach’s kid had an emergency the first night of practice, leaving assistant coach to introduce herself to the league commissioner and tell him coach wasn’t going to make it. Awkward! Commissioner, to his credit when confronted with an adult who he had no knowledge of, ran practice himself. 2nd practice went a bit more smoothly: coach was there, I knew the kids, and good basketball drills were had by all.
Can’t say enough good things about the Upward program. Kids athletic based ministry to communities. Multiple sports (cheerleading, basketball, and soccer at least), all kids play equal time, devotions both in practice and in the games… oh, and did I mention the homily for the parents at half-time in the games? What a way to intersect with parents AND kids! Very glad to get to participate and contribute. I’m not a member of the church that’s sponsoring this Upward program, but maybe I’ll get invited to stick around.
December 7th, 2010
Had a training day earlier this week. Great class, interesting topic, instructor was pretty good, and my classmates were interesting and engaging. I was fully engaged through the morning.
And then lunch hit. Eating food didn’t kill me. It was seeing the email backlog of things piling up, that I was otherwise ignoring by being in class. Lunch hour wasn’t nearly long enough to deal with them all, so I went back to class mentally prioritizing and preparing responses to the growing pile.
Not sure how to handle that well. That email didn’t interrupt me physically didn’t save the backlog of tasks from interrupting me mentally.
Worst part? The afternoon’s topic was on listening.
August 26th, 2010
One of my goals for this year was to speak at a conference. Guess what I got to do last week? See http://www.mil-oss.org. SlideShare’s not playing nicely with me at the moment, but the deck’s up at http://www.slideshare.net/onesimplehuman/mil-ossowf.
August 12th, 2010
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