Gadgetphilia

I wrote an article on my more personal blog (which I’ve used in fits and starts over the years) about how the gadgets my dad brought into the house growing up shaped my sensibilities about technology.  I link  to it here because it’s a bit of an “origin story” for my professional career, and it’s an interesting journey into some older computing and electronics technology (which especially for people younger than me will seem irresistibly foreign and exotic).

I think we are shaped by the technologies we’re exposed to in ways we don’t fully understand.  It’s probably valuable to reflect upon the tools you have used, and how they affect how you attack problems these days.  Both to take stock of what your experience brings to you, and what you might perhaps need to discard to move forward.

On Complexity, and Why We Don’t get Conference (and Classroom) A/V Right

I’m inspired today by an offhand comment by the famous (in our circles) Bryan Alexander, who is a frequent keynote and guest speaker at conferences all over the world, and has a lot of stunning and evocative things to say about not just higher education information technology, but the state and future of higher education in general.  If you’re not familiar with his work go check out his blogs and articles.  Even if you don’t agree with them he will get your brain moving.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that an offhand comment on his Facebook got me thinking:

“I’m fascinated by how conference A/V is still flawed and failure-prone, everywhere.

Continue reading On Complexity, and Why We Don’t get Conference (and Classroom) A/V Right

My new bag

In my previous post about EDUCAUSE, I mentioned that I needed a new bag instead of my very heavy and unwieldy Samsonite leather laptop attache I’d been using, and that I was down to either a Tom Bihn bag and a Timbuk2 bag.

Well, I ended up getting a Timbuk2 Command Messenger TSA Laptop bag in black. Medium.

It’s really good.  I’m still finding pockets in it.  I just noticed a few days ago a zipper that led to a pocket near the bottom of the bag–would probably work well for a compact umbrella.  It’s got tons of organizer pockets but they somehow don’t get in the way either.  The main big compartment seems almost big enough to put a weekend’s worth of clothes in, for the right weekend.  The shoulder strap is super comfortable and wearing it messenger style works.

The laptop compartment is basically awesome.  It has a large part which can easily fit a 15″ laptop, and fits my 12.1″ ThinkPad Yoga very well.  The compartment also has another pocket for a tablet, which I use to put my Nexus 10 (and sometimes Nexus 7) into as well.  The whole thing unzips from the main case to lie flat for TSA purposes, which I got to check on our trip back from Oklahoma this Christmas (oddly, on the way down they didn’t have us take anything out of our bags or lie them flat–they didn’t have any bins at the TSA checkpoint and were just running things through intact.)  It’s filled with this cool foam that is more like webbing, lined with nylon mesh.  It is super cushy and super comfortable.  There’s also the Napoleon pocket which you can jam all the stuff from your pockets into when going through airport security, which is great because then you can just pull it all back out as well and it doesn’t get mixed in with your other stuff.

The bag is at least 3 pounds lighter than my old leather attache and is so much more comfortable to carry it’s not even funny (I think I messed up my knee carrying my old bag around EDUCAUSE and it’s just getting better.)

I’m sure a Tom Bihn would also have been a great choice.  My only complaint about the Timbuk2 is is’t not an elegant bag.  I mean , it looks good, but it’s decidedly geeky.  I almost got the Proof bag but I decided to save the money in the end.

At any rate, I’ve been using it for work and for air travel at this point and I keep being impressed with its capabilities, so I can recommend it.  I’ll have some more travel this year and I’ll check back in on its performance and capabilities then.

 

Resolutions

2014.

It was a year.  Actually a good year–some things that were in limbo are no longer in limbo, and that’s a good thing even if everything didn’t fall out the way I thought I wanted it to.

So I have some resolutions for 2015.

The standard one–lose the holiday weight, get in better shape.  This is a specific weight goal and getting to finally run a 25 minute 5k.  I got really close last year, and then a bad bicycle accident last July knocked me off track.  I’ll get back into it again, I’m sure.

Reduce my procrastination and improve my time management.  This actually relates to another goal, which is to be more consistent in my follow-through on things.  One of the things I learned this year is that I haven’t been where I thought I was on this issue, and that I can greatly improve things by ensuring that people can feel they can rely on me.  (Which they can.)

I think people will find their resolutions, if they have many, are in fact related, and in fact have a root cause.  Fixing that root issue will make the rest work out.  Follow-through may in fact be my root issue, and by doing better on that, I will be able to more easily accomplish my other resolutions.  I also notice that by finishing things I am no longer weighed down by formless worrying about them, and I can use my forward momentum to keep accomplishing.

I know I’m supposed to know this, but I think we all need to be reminded of it once in a while.

One of my other points of follow-through is maintaining this blog.  I hope people are reading it.  I think I have a sense of the mix of things I want to put here, and what I want my voice to be.  If I can semi-regularly publish content and work things out here it will also help me keep things moving.

So here’s to onward and forward.

On Decisions

I realized something recently.

I am, in many ways, quite cynical.  The reasons are numerous and varied, and perhaps not entirely all good.  It’s not that I don’t care about anything, it’s that sometimes other people care a whole lot about things I don’t consider important.   This came about when I said that most of the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis in our work, things like what software to use, what specific methodology, etc., basically don’t matter.  Or, while we might agonize over the criteria used to evaluate one item over another, many of the differences in choices are not discernible before implementation, and may not even be discernible after implementation.

Continue reading On Decisions