
January 31, 2021
GameStop Is What I Call A Sh*t Store

August 11, 2016
Transitioning To Virtual Ease and Triviality
As we abandon department stores and the Mall for online shopping,
movie theaters and playhouses for home theaters and video streaming,
physical activities for gaming and virtual reality,
and even factories and office work for telework and robots,
soon we will have no real place to go and nothing to physically do.

Transitioning To Virtual Ease and Triviality
February 17, 2014
Alert, Alert, And More Alerts
As a kid, we get our first alerts usually from the fire alarm going off in school and practicing the buddy system and safely evacuating.
As adults, we are used to get so many types of alerts:
- Homeland Security threat alerts
- Breaking news alerts
- Emergency/Disaster alerts
- Severe weather alerts
- Smog alerts
- Transportation delay alerts
- Accident alerts
- Fraud alerts
- Economic and financial alerts
- Amber missing child alerts
- Internet security alerts
- Power loss alerts
- Home or business intruder alerts
- Fire alerts
- Carbon Monoxide alerts
- Medical/health alerts
- Chemical spill alerts
- Product safety or recall alerts
- Unsafe drinking water alerts
- Active shooter alerts
- Work closure alerts
- Parking garage alerts
- Dangerous marine life alerts
- Dangerous current or undertow alerts
- Air raid siren alerts
- Solar eclipse alerts
- Meteorite or falling space debris alerts
- Special sale or promotional event alerts
With the arrival of highly successful, mass social media applications like Twitter, we have alerts aggregated for us and listed chronologically as things are happening real-time.
The brilliance of the current Twitter-type alerting is that we can sign up to follow whatever alerts we are interested in and then have a streaming feed of them.
The alerts are short--up to 140 characters--so you can quickly see the essence of what is happening or ignore what is irrelevant to you.
When more space is needed to explain the details behind an alert, typically a (shortened) URL is included, which if you click on it takes you to a more in depth explanation of the event or item.
So alerts are a terrific balance between short, attention grabbing headlines and links to more detail, as needed.
What is also great about the current alerting mechanism is that you can provide concise alert information, including:
- Message source (for ensuring reliability)
- Guidance (for providing immediate instruction on response).
- Hazard (for specifying the type of incident)
- Location (for identifying geographic or mapping locality)
- Date/time (for implications as to its currency)
- Importance (for determining severity such as catastrophic, critical, etc.)
While we remain ever, hyper-vigilant, we need to be careful not to become anxiety-ridden, or at some point, simply learn to tune it all out, so we can actually live life and get stuff done.
It's good to know what's going on out there, but can too much information ever become a bad thing? ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Alert, Alert, And More Alerts
February 3, 2013
A Seeing Eye
This video from NOVA is an amazing display of the surveillance capabilities we have at our disposal.

A Seeing Eye
August 12, 2011
To Follow Or Not To Follow
Twitter is a great streaming feed for news and information, but what you get depends on who you follow.

To Follow Or Not To Follow
December 12, 2010
3G, 4G, XG...Huh?

There is a huge need for speed on our networks—as we demand the latest and greatest download streaming of books, movies, games, and more.
The network generation (or mobile telephony) standards have evolved to soon to be 4th generation (or 4G).
While 3G standards require network speeds for voice and data of at least 200 kbit/s, the 4G-performance hurdle jumps (500x) to 100 mbit/s.
The chart from Wikipedia shows the various standards and how they have evolved over time.
What are interesting to me are two things:
1) Network carriers that are competing for your business are already boasting 4G deliveries even though they do not meet the standards set out by The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the U.N. According to Computerworld (22 November 2010), the 100 mbit/s standard is “about 10 times the performance that any carrier…can offer today.” Moreover, technologies such as LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2 that are expected to be 4G complaint aren’t “expected to go live commercially until 2014 or 2015.”
2) While the carriers are touting their various breakthrough standards, most people really have no clue what they are talking about. According to the Wall Street Journal (4 November 2010) on a survey by Yankee Group that “of more than 1,200 consumers found 57% had either never heard of 3G or didn’t understand the term. [And] With 4G, the ranks of the confused jump to 68%.”
Some lessons learned:
In the first case, we need to keep in mind the principle of caveat emptor (or let the buyer beware) when it comes to what the Wall Street Journal is calling the “increased rhetoric underscoring the high-stakes games played by the carriers as they jockey for position.”
In the second, vendors and technologists should understand that they are losing the consumer when they talk “techno-geek.” Instead, all need to use plain language when communicating, and simplify the technical jargon.
The comic in Computerworld (22 November 2010) summarized it well with pictures of all the various GGGG… technologies and the people next it to it saying, “At this point the labels are ahead of the technology.” Of course, I would add that the labels are also ahead of most people’s ability to understand the geek-speak. And we need to fix the communications of both.

3G, 4G, XG...Huh?