A couple of posts ago I mentioned how excited I was about the upcoming movie The Social Network, and how much I'm looking forward to the dramatization of the founding of Facebook. On that post I also embedded a short clip from the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which was about the (now) early days of the Mac vs. PC wars. The specific clip dramatized the time in 1980/81 when Microsoft sold its operating system, DOS, to IBM.
Here's another clip from the film. This is near the very end of the film, and it dramatizes the Apple release of the Macintosh, which happened just a few months before Microsoft unveiled Windows, its graphical interface for DOS that looked VERY much like the Apple Macintosh operating system. VERY MUCH. So much so that Steve Jobs (played by Noah Wiley in the clip) is a little upset.
As with the first clip, here's another example of where being first or even being best isn't necessarily important in the computer industry--knowing how to leverage, promote, and sell a product IS. The actor playing Bill Gates says as much right at the end of the clip.
As far as I know, neither of the meetings in this clip actually happened, at least not the way they're portrayed here (Bill Gates, though, DID appear at the keynote address when the 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad aired). But that's okay--writers of docudramas often use a little bit of dramatic license, and I think that what's happened here, and I also think it doesn't necessarily hurt anything--the gist of everyone's feelings during the time is captured pretty well here.
(I can't see the video.)
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Nothing New Under the Sun
I'm looking forward very much to the upcoming film The Social Network. It's been a long time since there was a non-action or non-Disney movie that I wanted to see in the theaters, but this is it, for several reasons:
1) It was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and A Few Good Men. As with those works, I'm expecting a lot of fast paced, witty dialogue.
2) I like many of the actors in the film, including Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg.
3) It's about social networking! Going to see the movie is practically part of my job description.
I will say one thing, though. I'm surprised that many people are upset that the film is going to portray Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg in a negative light. According to a news article I was just reading, the director states that the film portrays Zuckerburg as "prickly and smarter than everybody else and makes no apologies for it." The film also portrays Zuckerburg not as the real creator of Facebook, but as someone who used his business savvy to profit from the work of others. Zuckerburg is portrayed more as a businessman than as a computer genius.
Huh. Kind of reminds me of another rich computer genius:
(I can't see the video.)
1) It was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and A Few Good Men. As with those works, I'm expecting a lot of fast paced, witty dialogue.
2) I like many of the actors in the film, including Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg.
3) It's about social networking! Going to see the movie is practically part of my job description.
I will say one thing, though. I'm surprised that many people are upset that the film is going to portray Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg in a negative light. According to a news article I was just reading, the director states that the film portrays Zuckerburg as "prickly and smarter than everybody else and makes no apologies for it." The film also portrays Zuckerburg not as the real creator of Facebook, but as someone who used his business savvy to profit from the work of others. Zuckerburg is portrayed more as a businessman than as a computer genius.
Huh. Kind of reminds me of another rich computer genius:
(I can't see the video.)
Friday, September 3, 2010
Prayer for the Educational CIO
I found myself actually saying a variation of this prayer at a long traffic light one morning this week. Dear God,
All my life I wish to serve You, and in my current job, I serve You by serving other people. Help me remember that.
Help me remember many things, Lord:
--That not everyone I talk to spends 40 hours a week buried in technology, and that many of them don't know a gigabyte from a kilobyte from a dogbite. Help me to not talk over their heads.
--That many people I work with are AFRAID of technology, and if I appear rushed or dismissive to these people, or if I seem to judge them for not being proficient in technology, they may give up and become even LESS inclined to use technology.
--That I shouldn't yell at this person for not knowing that you can turn off a computer by holding the power button in and counting to ten.
--That no piece of technology is worth more than a human being, especially the human being who is seeking my help right now.
--That though I may have fifty things more pressing to the school district than the issue that this person is telling me about, their problem isn't unimportant to THEM, and that I shouldn't sound dismissive to them.
--That my job is NOT to tinker with technology all day. My job is to help others to help students to learn, and if I'm not doing that, if I can't trace what I'm doing somehow back to that simple idea, I'm not doing my job.
--That the guy who couldn't get an email attachment to open so he tried to reinstall Windows and in the process corrupted his computer, was NOT trying to sabotage my day. He was TRYING to help, and he probably wants to be thanked.
--That though I may already have been told 17 times that email isn't working, this is the first time THIS person has told me, and they're not just telling me again to tick me off.
--That no matter how many times they're instructed otherwise, people will open unknown attachments and get viruses, and people will purchase technology without checking with me to see if their computer can run it or our network is compatible with it, and people will try to send emails about their yard sale to every student and staff member in the district, and people will email me instead of creating a work order, and then they'll create a work order that they can't get their solitaire program to work. People are dumb, God, and give me the patience and the grace to say that to You and not to them.
Help me to remember these things, God, so that I can do my job well, and so that I can help everyone else do their job.
But it's not just they that need help, God. I need help, too, so I ask these things of you:
--If there's a virus out there, help my machines to be patched.
--If there's a thunderstorm coming, help it to not knock out the power and in the process, fry some server.
--If I have important drives whose back ups are corrupt, help the drives to not fail.
--If I have an important report or technology plan or grant proposal or whatever else due, help me finish it on time.
--If I have to recommend a particular piece of technology for purchase, help it to not break six days after it arrives.
And finally, God, help me to remember that in the grand scheme of things, my job really, honestly, truly is not all that important. When I'm dead and gone, people will not remember how well I kept the network running, or how quickly I came and fixed their computers. People will remember how I treated other people, and what kind of person I was.
Help me, God, to be the kind of person that I'll want to be remembered as...
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Useles Error Message
This afternoon at work I tried to send an email using my new Microsoft Outlook 2010 program. When I hit the "Send" button on the program the following box popped up:
I laughed out loud when I saw it, especially the hyperlinked question at the bottom of the window: "Was this information helpful?" The message "Cannot send this item" could not be LESS helpful! It's almost not even necessary. The fact that the error box popped up when I hit "Send" pretty much told me there was a problem. What I need to know at that point is WHY it can't be sent so that I can fix the problem.
And the fact that the button ASKS me if the information is helpful tells me that Microsoft KNOWS that it isn't. And don't assume that the link is at the bottom of every error message in Office 2010. It's not. I intentionally caused several other common errors and different message boxes appeared that did not have the hyperlinked question at the bottom. Microsoft KNOWS this is a dumb error message, but doesn't know how to put anything any more informative.
Or maybe the programmer is just mocking me!
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Social Networking is changing us
A few months ago I made a post about my older daughter, who is now 13, setting up and using an account on Facebook. The next day I wrote another post that linked to an article that talked about how social networking was actually CHANGING the younger generation. Earlier this week a new study was released that said texting has become the primary way teenagers communicate. They text more frequently than they speak aloud!Here's more evidence that social networking is changing us: This past weekend the daughter of a friend of mine got married,* and when the vows were finished the minister said, "I now pronounce you 'Man' and 'Wife.' You may update your Facebook status." At which point the bride and groom pulled their cell phones out of their tuxedo and wedding dress and actually updated their status from "single" to "married" BEFORE kissing one another.
They were making a joke, of course, but there's a little bit of truth behind every joke. We are becoming as married to our social networks and to the accompanying cell phones, netbooks, and computers as we are to our spouses. And our Facebook "status" is nearly as real to us as our actual status is.
My wife even sometimes refers to our home computer as my partner in an affair. She has a name for the computer: Della (You only get one guess what model of computer I have at home). And lately, thanks to Facebook, I've started referring to the computer as Dale.
And I've noticed the changes in other places, too. I call my parents less often than I used to, and they call me less often as well. Why do we need to talk? We're reading all about it online. And when I run into friends, we no longer have to ask, "So...what's been going on with you?" We already know what's been going on with each other because we've been reading about it. Instead of that age old question, we're able to jump right into the meat of the matter with, "So...you and your daughter have been fighting lately. What's going on?" or "So...did your mother make it home from the hospital?"
Don't hear me complaining about it. I'm not. I don't really see this evolution as either good or bad. It just is. But I'd daresay that it's the biggest cultural shift I've seen in my entire life...save maybe for the way we all changed after September 11, 2001.
I know we've all changed because I read about it on Facebook every year on the 11th!
______________________________
*There's a post for another day...the fact that I'm old enough to have friends whose kids are getting married! Some days I can hardly believe that I am married!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Good News about Technology in Kentucky
Holy Cow--This is what you get when someone tells me to man an Information booth and no one has any questions--one of the longest posts I've ever written...
As I've mentioned in several of the last few posts and tweets I've made, I've spent this entire week in Louisville at the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference. While I was sitting in on a session today, something occurred to me that I've thought about often in the past, but never written about on this blog. It's a good news story, one that I think it's about time more Kentucky tax payers knew about, so I'm making it my mission tonight to write about it.
It's easy for people to knock "Big Government" and to complain about the many ways that government can waste your money. And from $500 hammers to "pork" spending stuck into health care legislation to Bridges to Nowhere, the government does supply plenty of easy targets. But in Kentucky, at least, there's one place where "big government" actually saves money, and that is in education technology spending.
When it comes to education technology spending, Kentucky does something that almost no other state in the union does: it standardizes on just a few models. Rather than the free for all that happens in most of the other states, the 174 school districts in Kentucky are REQUIRED by statute to purchase technology off of state approved bid lists. Thus, every school district in Kentucky that buys a computer buys either a Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Apple machine. You won't walk into (or at least, you SHOULDN'T walk into) a public school classroom anywhere in the state of Kentucky and find a Gateway computer or an eMachines computer. And more than that, we aren't just required to purchase from those makers--we're required to purchase specific models of products from those manufacturers.
At first blush, I guess, maybe that sounds like a BAD thing. This is America, after all, the land of the FREE! No one likes to be REQUIRED to do anything. It's unAmerican. And there are people out there who complain about the requirement. "Why should I pay state prices for that Dell computer," someone might ask, "when I can get this other Dell computer that looks just like it for $100 less at Wal-Mart?" And computers aren't even where the biggest price differential appears. In networking equipment, it's much worse. Someone who doesn't know much about computer networking (and I'll admit that I'm an educator first and a techy second, so I don't know a WHOLE lot about networking) might wonder why that 24 port switch (a device that you plug all of the computers in a building into to give them Internet access) on the state contract is $2,000 when there's a 24 port switch from another manufaturer online for $300. Is this another $500 hammer?
But there's more to this story than just the initial purchase price. Kentucky's usage of standardization has saved the Kentucky Department of Education, individual school districts, and ultimately, we Kentuckians, literally millions of dollars. Let me tell you how standardization is saving the state money:
1. The Purchase Price Savings. It may not seem like it with that network switch I described above (I'll get back to that in a moment), but standardizing allows the state to drive down costs. My school district has 2,300 students. We spend somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year on desktop and laptop machines. That's quite a bit more than--say--the average individual consumer spends on computers, but in the grand scheme of things, we're a little fish in the sea. Dell or HP or Apple or Lenovo isn't very motivated to give us much of a break on prices for computers compared to say--Jefferson County Schools in Louisville--which has an enrollment of almost 100,000 and which spends I'm not sure how much on computers a year, probably something like seventy kajillion dollars. Dell and HP and Apple and Lenovo are VERY interested in making sure they provide the most competitive price to Jefferson County Schools.
But in Kentucky, it's not just Jefferson County Schools that get special treatment. By combining Jefferson County Schools with Fayette County Schools with Kenton County Schools with my school district and with every public school district in the state, Kentucky becomes a behemoth of a buyer, and those computer makers are VERY, VERY, VERY motivated to provide the lowest price possible. As a result, Kentucky often gets products that are just a few dollars above cost, and occasionally even below cost for the manufacturer who would rather lose a few dollars per machine on tens of thousands of sales rather than allow its competitor to make those sales.
2) The Reliability. But the purchase price isn't the only benefit of the state contract, and it isn't the only way that the state saves money. Another benefit of standardization is increased reliability. This comes about because the state has something which many school districts (including my own) do not--people who work there with the knowledge and expertise to understand the needs of enterprise level technology. This takes us back to that $300 switch I mentioned earlier. Paying $300 for a switch instead of $2,000 seems like a great idea...until that switch a) breaks because it's cheaply made or b) doesn't provide the speed necessary for teachers and students to do the things they need to do or c) can't be managed to allow district staff to do things like limit how much of the network is used for gaming or Facebook so that teachers and students can get out on the Internet to the sites where they're going to really learn something.
And that Dell computer at Wal-Mart might really be $100 cheaper than the similar looking Dell computer on the state contract, but has anyone considered that the state contract has a next day, onsite, 3 year warranty, whereas that Wal-Mart computer has a 90 day mail in warranty? And that Wal-Mart computer is consumer grade instead of commercial grade, made from bottom to top cover with flimsier parts than what are in that Kentucky education system?
I can speak to this one personally. Until about five years ago there was a state contract for ink jet printers. Everyone complained that ink jet printers had gotten so cheap that there really wasn't a need for a state contract anymore. Why pay $149 for a printer on the contract when there were printers being sold in department stores for $50? Heck, there were computer manufacturers GIVING printers away when a computer was purchased.
The state agreed, and released districts to purchase what they wanted. One school in my district decided that it was going to purchase a whole bunch of $50 HP printer/scanner/copiers. They all worked great..for about three months. And then I started getting complaints, almost every day and always at least once a week, that the printers stopped feeding paper. They ended up trashing the majority of them at the end of the year.
I'm not saying that the state SHOULDN'T have dropped printers from the state contract. They should have. They WERE too inexpensive to justify all of the added expense of testing the products on the state level. After all, there isn't a state price contract for pencils, either. Just too cheap to justify the expense of standardizing. All I'm saying is that during that two month time period when all of those printers died at once, I really wished someone at the state level had tested the printer and looked at the specs regarding monthly usage, ink capacity, and so on.
3) A Community of Users. The last really big positive with standardization, as I see it, I don't think was an intentional thing on the part of the state. I think it actually is a byproduct. But it's still pretty cool, and in the end it's another way to save money. Since everyone in the state has similar products in their school districts, we all share an understanding of the technology that we're each working with...because we're all working with pretty much the same technology. Because we live outside of my school district, my children go to a different district from where I work, and when I walk into a classroom in that district, I can tell you exactly how old the equipment in that room is. The same when I go to other districts in the state for trainings. That's a Dell Optiplex GX260, I'll say to myself. That thing is seven years old, and probably by now as slow as Christmas. If that thing is being used for anything other than word processing, the user is probably pretty frustrated.
And because we all use the same stuff, we are all a resource to each other. I belong to an email group and not a day goes by that someone doesn't post a question like, "Okay, I have an Enterasys switch as my core router, and I'm having an issue with it dropping packets mysteriously. Anyone have any idea why that's happening?" Within just a few minutes people from another district have emailed replies, and usually someone is able to help.
And we help in other ways as well. A few years ago one of my routers died (Routers are basically like traffic cops--they make sure than the information from the network gets sent to the right place. When you type in google.com, it's a router that makes sure that Google's homepage makes it to YOUR computer and not your neighbor's). It was an old router, a VERY old router, and it occurred to me that--since Kentucky has always had standards--there was probably a district nearby that had retired the exact same piece of equipment and would be willing to loan it to me. I sent out an email and in 30 minutes had gotten a reply from a district that was about 40 minutes away that it had five they would GIVE me if I'd come get them. I did so, and the school that was being serviced by the router ended up being down for a couple of hours rather than days.
It's a savings for the state in so many ways. It's really a big deal. So the next time you complain about government spending out of control, keep in mind that at least one part of the Kentucky Department of Education has gotten it right. The Office of Educational Technology has long been a good steward of the taxpayer's money.
As I've mentioned in several of the last few posts and tweets I've made, I've spent this entire week in Louisville at the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference. While I was sitting in on a session today, something occurred to me that I've thought about often in the past, but never written about on this blog. It's a good news story, one that I think it's about time more Kentucky tax payers knew about, so I'm making it my mission tonight to write about it.
It's easy for people to knock "Big Government" and to complain about the many ways that government can waste your money. And from $500 hammers to "pork" spending stuck into health care legislation to Bridges to Nowhere, the government does supply plenty of easy targets. But in Kentucky, at least, there's one place where "big government" actually saves money, and that is in education technology spending.
When it comes to education technology spending, Kentucky does something that almost no other state in the union does: it standardizes on just a few models. Rather than the free for all that happens in most of the other states, the 174 school districts in Kentucky are REQUIRED by statute to purchase technology off of state approved bid lists. Thus, every school district in Kentucky that buys a computer buys either a Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Apple machine. You won't walk into (or at least, you SHOULDN'T walk into) a public school classroom anywhere in the state of Kentucky and find a Gateway computer or an eMachines computer. And more than that, we aren't just required to purchase from those makers--we're required to purchase specific models of products from those manufacturers.
At first blush, I guess, maybe that sounds like a BAD thing. This is America, after all, the land of the FREE! No one likes to be REQUIRED to do anything. It's unAmerican. And there are people out there who complain about the requirement. "Why should I pay state prices for that Dell computer," someone might ask, "when I can get this other Dell computer that looks just like it for $100 less at Wal-Mart?" And computers aren't even where the biggest price differential appears. In networking equipment, it's much worse. Someone who doesn't know much about computer networking (and I'll admit that I'm an educator first and a techy second, so I don't know a WHOLE lot about networking) might wonder why that 24 port switch (a device that you plug all of the computers in a building into to give them Internet access) on the state contract is $2,000 when there's a 24 port switch from another manufaturer online for $300. Is this another $500 hammer?
But there's more to this story than just the initial purchase price. Kentucky's usage of standardization has saved the Kentucky Department of Education, individual school districts, and ultimately, we Kentuckians, literally millions of dollars. Let me tell you how standardization is saving the state money:
1. The Purchase Price Savings. It may not seem like it with that network switch I described above (I'll get back to that in a moment), but standardizing allows the state to drive down costs. My school district has 2,300 students. We spend somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year on desktop and laptop machines. That's quite a bit more than--say--the average individual consumer spends on computers, but in the grand scheme of things, we're a little fish in the sea. Dell or HP or Apple or Lenovo isn't very motivated to give us much of a break on prices for computers compared to say--Jefferson County Schools in Louisville--which has an enrollment of almost 100,000 and which spends I'm not sure how much on computers a year, probably something like seventy kajillion dollars. Dell and HP and Apple and Lenovo are VERY interested in making sure they provide the most competitive price to Jefferson County Schools.
But in Kentucky, it's not just Jefferson County Schools that get special treatment. By combining Jefferson County Schools with Fayette County Schools with Kenton County Schools with my school district and with every public school district in the state, Kentucky becomes a behemoth of a buyer, and those computer makers are VERY, VERY, VERY motivated to provide the lowest price possible. As a result, Kentucky often gets products that are just a few dollars above cost, and occasionally even below cost for the manufacturer who would rather lose a few dollars per machine on tens of thousands of sales rather than allow its competitor to make those sales.
2) The Reliability. But the purchase price isn't the only benefit of the state contract, and it isn't the only way that the state saves money. Another benefit of standardization is increased reliability. This comes about because the state has something which many school districts (including my own) do not--people who work there with the knowledge and expertise to understand the needs of enterprise level technology. This takes us back to that $300 switch I mentioned earlier. Paying $300 for a switch instead of $2,000 seems like a great idea...until that switch a) breaks because it's cheaply made or b) doesn't provide the speed necessary for teachers and students to do the things they need to do or c) can't be managed to allow district staff to do things like limit how much of the network is used for gaming or Facebook so that teachers and students can get out on the Internet to the sites where they're going to really learn something.
And that Dell computer at Wal-Mart might really be $100 cheaper than the similar looking Dell computer on the state contract, but has anyone considered that the state contract has a next day, onsite, 3 year warranty, whereas that Wal-Mart computer has a 90 day mail in warranty? And that Wal-Mart computer is consumer grade instead of commercial grade, made from bottom to top cover with flimsier parts than what are in that Kentucky education system?
I can speak to this one personally. Until about five years ago there was a state contract for ink jet printers. Everyone complained that ink jet printers had gotten so cheap that there really wasn't a need for a state contract anymore. Why pay $149 for a printer on the contract when there were printers being sold in department stores for $50? Heck, there were computer manufacturers GIVING printers away when a computer was purchased.
The state agreed, and released districts to purchase what they wanted. One school in my district decided that it was going to purchase a whole bunch of $50 HP printer/scanner/copiers. They all worked great..for about three months. And then I started getting complaints, almost every day and always at least once a week, that the printers stopped feeding paper. They ended up trashing the majority of them at the end of the year.
I'm not saying that the state SHOULDN'T have dropped printers from the state contract. They should have. They WERE too inexpensive to justify all of the added expense of testing the products on the state level. After all, there isn't a state price contract for pencils, either. Just too cheap to justify the expense of standardizing. All I'm saying is that during that two month time period when all of those printers died at once, I really wished someone at the state level had tested the printer and looked at the specs regarding monthly usage, ink capacity, and so on.
3) A Community of Users. The last really big positive with standardization, as I see it, I don't think was an intentional thing on the part of the state. I think it actually is a byproduct. But it's still pretty cool, and in the end it's another way to save money. Since everyone in the state has similar products in their school districts, we all share an understanding of the technology that we're each working with...because we're all working with pretty much the same technology. Because we live outside of my school district, my children go to a different district from where I work, and when I walk into a classroom in that district, I can tell you exactly how old the equipment in that room is. The same when I go to other districts in the state for trainings. That's a Dell Optiplex GX260, I'll say to myself. That thing is seven years old, and probably by now as slow as Christmas. If that thing is being used for anything other than word processing, the user is probably pretty frustrated.
And because we all use the same stuff, we are all a resource to each other. I belong to an email group and not a day goes by that someone doesn't post a question like, "Okay, I have an Enterasys switch as my core router, and I'm having an issue with it dropping packets mysteriously. Anyone have any idea why that's happening?" Within just a few minutes people from another district have emailed replies, and usually someone is able to help.
And we help in other ways as well. A few years ago one of my routers died (Routers are basically like traffic cops--they make sure than the information from the network gets sent to the right place. When you type in google.com, it's a router that makes sure that Google's homepage makes it to YOUR computer and not your neighbor's). It was an old router, a VERY old router, and it occurred to me that--since Kentucky has always had standards--there was probably a district nearby that had retired the exact same piece of equipment and would be willing to loan it to me. I sent out an email and in 30 minutes had gotten a reply from a district that was about 40 minutes away that it had five they would GIVE me if I'd come get them. I did so, and the school that was being serviced by the router ended up being down for a couple of hours rather than days.
It's a savings for the state in so many ways. It's really a big deal. So the next time you complain about government spending out of control, keep in mind that at least one part of the Kentucky Department of Education has gotten it right. The Office of Educational Technology has long been a good steward of the taxpayer's money.
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