Human Computer Interaction

This week I started my first Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course through Iowa State's distance education programs. The course is actually a psych class called "The Cognitive Psychology of HCI". This is my test to see how working and going to school mesh for me and to see if I'm interested enough in the area to complete a graduate certificate or full degree.

I have decided to post interesting things I learn to spread the news. The class is based around distance collaboration, so we have a wiki with personal information that will also be used for our team project. We also use a discussion board so that off-campus students like me can participate. One of the "open forum" posts by a student included a link to the site of a Mozilla developer about usability deemed the 10 Commandments of Usability. It's all good, but some quotes I particularly enjoyed are

• "Users aren’t dumb. They just have better things to do with their lives than memorizing the internal data model of our screwy software."
• "The job of the UI designer is to provide what the users need, not what the users say they need."
• "The science of design can tell us that interface foo is X% more efficient than interface bar, but bar is Y% more learnable than foo. Choosing between foo and bar — that’s where the science ends and the art begins."
• "When we blame the user, we teach them that technology is perfect and that the errors are their own. Because technology is hard to use, we are teaching a generation to be afraid of technology. We are teaching a generation to believe in their own stupidity. This is a sin, too."

Wall-E

We stopped to visit some friends from college at the start of our vacation and caught the last showing of Wall-E Friday night. I love Pixar movies and haven't been disappointed yet. This one was no exception.

I love how Pixar can personify objects and animals so well. It's amazing how they can evoke feelings about cars and create robots with emotions. I also loved how the Mac start up sound was used when Wall-E rebooted! I wonder how much that cost them.

The other thing I loved is how Pixar throws up mirrors (not literally) so that we can take a nice long look at ourselves during the movie. If you have seen the previews then you know that the story is based on humans ruining Earth with garbage and pollution. The the real kicker for me is how they show our race over 700 years after they left. I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it yet, but I do applaud Pixar for making a statement in their entertaining way. Unfortunately, the people who most need to see it probably won't or they won't understand the relevance outside of the theater.

I guess this is my official plug for Wall-E. See it to be entertained, see it to think, see it to love Pixar and their awesome productions.

Chance to Start Again

Cedar Rapids, IA, where I live, has currently been hit hard with unprecedented flooding. Fortunately, my house has not been affected. My company's office building, however, has had an estimated 5' of water on the ground floor in its downtown location. Our local and national news has been showing many pictures of the downtown Cedar Rapids area and it is an understatement to say that the downtown has a massive clean up ahead.

With this tragedy is the opportunity for a glorious rebirth. Our city officials have been making plans to improve the downtown area anyway, and now we have been offered the option to show how we can come back and improve upon what the downtown once was. Starting July 1st I will be a member of the Corridor MPO (Metropolitan Planning Organization), and I hope to post some ideas I have that are more specific to that, but right now I wanted to highlight the importance of the Cedar Rapids Downtown Rebirth, CRDR, I just made that up, but it kind of has a nice ring to it.

1. The city should continue with plans for revitalizing the downtown, with the one addition of protecting the area so individuals and businesses will stay and more will come. Dubuque built a wall along the Mississippi and it definitely saved them this time (and it's gorgeous). We may never know how high is high enough, but I would vote that using this year as a reference point would be a safe bet.
   
2. Encourage businesses to stay downtown. I have several selfish reasons for this, but a lot of them are reasons that the others in the city have too. I love riding the bus or biking to work. I love that restaurants are starting to succeed and stay downtown so I can walk to lunch. I love that the YMCA is right down the street. If my company moves to a non-downtown location, I see that as losing a huge benefit of working there.
3. The location makes the city cohesive. If we lose our downtown, then the center of the city dies and we lose the connections between the sides of town.
4. The downtown is home to people and many businesses. If they leave then it could be hard to retain them in the community in general. This may be a reason for some to move out and start fresh somewhere else like several of the Katrina victims tried to do when they moved to CR.

These are only some of the reasons that I have thought of and discussed while watching the news. Many of these stem from my personal stake in the issue, so other views are welcome. I don't have the high power to make everything happen, but that hasn't stopped me from trying before. Our downtown does affect our city as a whole and I want to see our city improve its status to become the best that it really can be.

Google Docs and Blogger Work Together

I noticed a while ago that Google Docs had new features. They have several more announcements now, but I'm talking about way back when they added the ability to publish to your blog. They currently support Blogger, BlogHarbor, BlogWare, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, WordPress, and any site that uses the Blogger, MetaWeblog, or MovaleType API. I use Blogger and have been fine with typing in the text area they provide, but this could be helpful if you publish with several other people on a blog and don't want them to see your work in progress. In my case this would be more useful to hide how long it can take me to finish a post that I start. So I finally tested this feature out on a recent post to a green blog that I contribute to. It's nothing fantastic, but it worked. I do have two complaints. The first is that the settings ask if you would like to include the document title when posting (if possible). I selected this option and expected that since I use Blogger, this would be possible. Apparently not. Hopefully this will change, but it is annoying for now. The second gripe I have is adding tags to your post. This was also mentioned during the publishing process, but there wasn't a way to add them without going in to Blogger and editing the post. I'm trying this method once more with this post, but I think I'll stick with Blogger until they make a more compelling reason to switch.

Power Hour

The joy of living in a four season location means that I always have variety. The weather even varies within a season which can be interesting, but also dangerous and annoying for some. Recently the Midwest has been hit with several winter storms including ice and what they call a "winter mix" which consists of ice, rain, sleet, and snow. The great part about this is that it is our first winter in a house (that we own) so we get to shovel, chop, and scrape. I'm not sick of it yet, but I will mention that we had ice an inch and a half thick on our driveway. We finally got it all off after three weeks thanks to some warm days.

So getting to the point of this post is the hazards of storms like the ones we have seen this year. Not only are the streets and sidewalks dangerous to drive and walk on, but the heavy ice and rain that freezes can cause power outages. We have been quite lucky and haven't lost power yet (knock on wood), but several of my relatives and co-workers have not been so fortunate. A few weeks ago we had a particularly crappy day weather-wise and very few people actually made it in to my work. I was able to make it in safely thanks to the awesome bus drivers here, but I kept an eye on the weather the whole time I was in. The tools that I used to keep up on the latest status included the following:

1) weather.com - the radar is pretty awesome and accurate. That day in particular was pretty scary seeing the long path of white (snow) and pink (mix/ice). The thing I really like about this map is that it moves with time so you can see where the storm is heading.

2) KCRG - This is our local news channel, not extremely helpful, but I can count on them listing announcements if things get really bad (read: "news worthy").

and finally,
3) Alliant's electrical outage summary - this doesn't say exactly where or which customers in each county are out of power, but if the count is particularly high in your area, it can alert you to the possibility of your house or business place being affected.

Also note that Ryan pointed out the "Report your outage" link at the bottom of the page. If you don't have electricity, how in the world are you going to have the ability to use that link? Just call it in yo!

So what other sites are useful in these situations?

The holy grail of Bluetooth mice

This past year my loving husband decided to get me a Bluetooth mouse for my birthday. I work with Bluetooth every day, so it may be surprising that I didn't already have my own, but I guess I was just content to use his "unacceptable" castaways. I have grown to love my MacBook track pad (the pawing action is to die for), so I don't use a mouse with my laptop very often, and I certainly wouldn't travel with a mouse, at least I haven't crossed that line yet. These details put me in a more relaxed quest to find a Bluetooth mouse than my husband whom, I have found, is quite particular about his Bluetooth mouse preferences. Anyway, this birthday present "promise" happened in January, and, until Thanksgiving night, I still had not received the perfect mouse.

You may think that this ideal mouse would involve ergonomic design or perhaps the right amount of buttons or controls, oh no! My husband had two simple requests in a Bluetooth mouse:
1) It must be rechargeable. Who would want to have to replace batteries... ever?? Ok, I can agree with him here. Rechargeable is the cheaper and potentially more environmentally sound solution.
2) It must have an on/off switch. This is where I lost interest. My needs don't require an on/off switch. My use case would be to have a recharging station that would keep the mouse charged until I used it and all would be well. Since my husband travels with a mouse, he was looking for the additional benefit of turning the mouse completely off while it sits in his laptop case so that he doesn't have to carry extra cables just to charge a mouse. These exist as you can easily find Bluetooth mice with an on/off switch.

Now the obvious problem occurs when you combine these two requirements; rechargeable and on/off switch. His arguments were valid and the technical point of view was even in line. Being able to charge your mouse and then ensure that it was ready at a moments notice was ideal, and "it's only an on/off switch, that doesn't require much engineering". But I was more pessimistic. I countered that there would be very few users as picky as him and even though it may not be a lot of extra cost, what company would add a switch if they didn't have to?

Well I am proudly announcing today that I was proven wrong. After standing in line at CompUSA for the Thanksgiving night sales, bringing home my birthday present, opening it up to charge for me to use in the morning, and then excitedly realizing that this wonder of wonders Bluetooth mouse was not only rechargeable, but (gasp!) also had a power switch, my triumphant husband trucked back to CompUSA to fight with the morning crowd and buy one for himself. We now own two Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000s.










There may be others out there with these features since ours had no documentation on the box that proclaimed the power switch, but this was a story with a happy ending so far.

Picture This

I was recently married and we have been "combining households". One of the things that we have a lot of are pictures. Digital ones are pretty easy. Most of them are already organized into folders and, given that we've only owned digital cameras for no more than the past 6 years, we can remember details to file random ones. The organization problems start with hard copies, especially hard copies that were given to me or are my husband's. These in particular tend to not have descriptions written on the back and therefore will someday be lost to the WTF? pile. Some of them we can remember the people, but not the location and here is where I would love to have a tool.

We have been able to search for information for many years . We can also search for images and videos now, but each of these searches is initiated by text. What I need is the ability to search via the image itself! How awesome would that be? Scan in and upload a picture to a search engine that could analyze the picture and at least tell you the location. "Did we take that picture in Colorado or Utah?" Even better would be an approximate date or information about the location. "When did Pepe's Pizza close? Sometime after this picture was taken, but what year?"

The algorithms and time needed for this go way beyond my patience, but I'm sure it will happen some day. I just hope I'm still around so I can finish categorizing our pictures!

You Decide

So this "Global Warming" thing gets a lot of attention from both sides of the fence. There are those that believe we are a main cause for the climate changes and there are those who believe it's just part of Earth's natural cycle with or without us. I'm not going to debate that now because there is enough of that going on. What I am going to do is post several links to sites that have information about how to cut down on energy and ideas to improve our lives. This has become very important to me and once I move into my new house, I hope to make more positive choices. No matter what side of the fence you're on, this information can help save you money, if not give you a good feeling about your actions, and who doesn't like saving money?

A site that I found recently focuses on improving bicycling in communities throughout the United States. I like it because they have great resources for helping out cities and counties to create better environments and opportunities for biking. This encourages exercise, cuts down on car traffic, and can be positive advertising to people looking to move into the area. Not only do they focus on construction efforts, but they also suggest training traffic engineers, motorists, and bicyclists about mixed traffic with cars and bikes living in the street together. I'm hoping to get something like this going in Cedar Rapids.

The next area I have several bookmarks in is alternative energy. This is important because we all know that non-renewable resources are being depleted and we will have to find better ways to maintain our standard of living. Some links to sites I like include projects with wind and manure and solar. I was also impressed to hear that the US government is actively looking into nuclear energy plants and several plans for building them are on the way.

One way of dealing with CO2 that is growing in popularity is consumer carbon offsets. Here is an independent study done to compare the many carbon offset providers to help consumers understand what they are paying for more and encourage the programs to become transparent to provide the best solution for everyone. The provider that I have used so far is NativeEnergy. This type of program is used to help offset the amount of "unclean" energy you are using and usually put it towards "clean" energy projects. Most sites will also have a calculator to add up how much energy you spend.

And lastly for this post, if you're looking to get a new car here is the government's fuel economy site where you can find all sorts of information.

So you decide on what you believe and what you want to do, just do something.

Poof! Blog Reading

Blogs have revolutionized the way we disperse information. Blogs can represent a personal diary, a list of tips, a way to publicize a cause, a means for companies to reach out to investors and a slew of other uses. I previously used Wizz RSS Reader to check on my favorite sites. I say previously because as of this past weekend I have started using Google Reader. There are lots of goodies so I'll try to talk about what I have noticed so far.

First of all appearances. If you like the look of GMail, then you'll like Google Reader. They fit together like they're in the same family as it should be. There is a "List View" which displays the blog entries just like emails show up in GMail and you can star entries just like emails. And if you like the backgrounds and themes of various blogs, you can open up a new tab or window to view a post from the original site by clicking the double arrows at the end of an entry.

You'll also notice the simple navigation on the left of the window. Choose how you want to sort posts, subscribe to blogs by adding the feed url or searching, view only updated blogs or all, and categorize your favorites. This portion was, for me, to be expected from Google, now on to the ooey gooeyness that made me want to switch.





First, I am a Google Homepage user and Google Reader has a widget that can be added and lets you see what new posts you have to read in a
glance. I don't have any new posts in the picture, but if I did they would be listed similar to emails in the GMail widget. This tidbit made it easy for me to try it out. What I really like about it is that I don't have to click on every blog feed link to see if there are new posts and I don't have to open up a new page either. I just open up my web browser and right there on my homepage it tells me if there are new items to read and what blog they're for. This also allows me to take my blog history with me. What I mean by this is that no matter what computer I'm on, Google Reader knows what posts I have already read and has them marked accordingly.

I have to say that my favorite part of Reader right now is the expanded view. This shows all of the posts in order so that you can scroll right from one to the next and the best part is that as you scroll past the posts, Reader marks them as read... niiice.

The auto marking may be my favorite right now, but there are several features that I'm excited to dig into more. Reader's settings even has a section called "Goodies" that several of these are in. One, like most web tools, is that you can read from your phone. The bookmark link is one that I haven't noticed anywhere else before. It allows you to bring up the next unread post by clicking a single bookmark. This would be a very simple way to move through new posts without even going to your homepage or navigating to Reader. I think I will continue to prefer seeing my new posts listed, but this is a cool idea. The next goodie listed is "subscribe as you surf". Simply, if you're chugging along popping through new blogs and find one that you want to add to Reader, you just click this bookmark and it gets added to the list. I'll definitely be using this one.

The last feature I'm going to mention is one that I'll also be using. It's the Share option. This can be seen in the left navigation area and it lets you share posts with friends, family, and the world. One thing some of my co-workers were discussing today was the lack of searching or saving in Reader. While this isn't the best solution, one thought I had was to share posts that had information I wanted to remember or use again, or posts that I wanted to save. This would make them easily available and "save" them for future reference. Again, not the best, but I think I'll give it a try when I'm playing around with this feature.

Work Jams

You like music, right? I mean, who doesn't? Music is great in the car, at home, at a party, at a bbq, while shopping, while eating. It's great anytime! It is even great at work. The problem at work is that you have to play nice with your co-workers and not distract them, so you have to wear headphones of some sort so you don't interfere with their productivity. My main problem with headphones is that I don't want to know that I'm wearing them. I don't want to feel them over my ears, and I definintly don't want to remember they are on by a sudden jerk when I try to go past the cable's length. Of course you can use wireless headphones, but ideally I could just jam "out loud" so I didn't have to shell out money for a nice pair.

What I want is music piped throughout my work space. It would be awesome to have a daily playlist (and I don't mean like the radio) to work to. I want to share the musical experience with my cube neighbors and be energized or relaxed through my ears. I want to be able to stand up and take a dance break to a good beat without getting my head jerked back. Being open to all kinds of music, I'd also like to know what my co-workers like to listen to just to switch it up.

Taking it one step further into less realistic territory, an out-of-the-box corporate benefit would be to hire a private DJ for the company. I can't take credit for this idea, Ryan actually mentioned it first. It's a fun concept though, and it could be personalized by mixing employee favorites. Until then, or until I get wireless headphones, I'll be getting whiplash.

Poof! Bluetooth

Bluetooth: useful technology with a lot of potential.
Problem: the average non-techy Joe is easily caught up in some of the hazy workings of Bluetooth (see the RadioShack commercial).

Scenario: you run out to fight with the shopping crowds to grab the great deals. You snatch some $9.99 Bluetooth headset/$100 Bluetooth headphones/$40 Bluetooth keyboard. You bring it home, open the packaging and attempt to read through the directions. They say to charge the device for 2 hours (damn impatience!). You watch the blue/green/red light as the energy flows. It's done! Then the instructions say hold down the big button, flip the doohicky up and down three times, and sing row, row, row your boat until a light blinks morris code in various colors. You make a mistake and sing Mary had a little lamb instead and you get an f-you beep from the device. You end up feeling like you just lost a game of Technology Twister. So you go through the steps again and sing the correct song: it's visible now! So you grab your laptop/cellphone/PDA and try to search for your new toy only to find out that the blue light doesn't mean that your laptop has Bluetooth/your cellphone doesn't support some A2DP thing (wtf?), and you have to type some magical passcode on both your keyboard and PDA and then hope that they dig each other just one of the times that you run through the steps.

Holy crap, you just wanted to get rid of a wire! Your new toy to help simplify your life has just given you the gift of a migraine and doubt that technology is really on our side.

Never fear young grasshopper! Bluetooth is not perfect, but not much is. Look at history, most technologies had their bumps in the beginning and the ones that got it together moved past that. The Bluetooth SIG has been working hard at improving the user experience including icons (again, not a perfect solution in my opinion, but a step), and working on simple pairing techniques.

In my opinion, the simple pairing would make the experience worlds better. Imagine not having to know anything about Bluetooth, nothing about profiles, not having to push and hold and wait, and blink, but instead taking your new, exciting toy, turning it on, and with maybe a simple push or touch, Poof! Bluetooth. *Sigh* what a wonderful world it would be. Until then, practice your right hand on red button twister move.

Poof! Skills

Have you ever wished you could just snap your fingers and gain knowledge or skills for something? Well this evening I had a similar experience, but from a different perspective. I had the pleasure of going to my cousin's elementary school orchestra concert... ouch my ears. Honestly, it was better than I expected, but I still had the urge to be able to wave my hands and magically make them sounds less painful.

I can distantly relate it to times when I've stood witness to someone doing something for the first time, and see them struggle like a child learning to walk. I know I can't just do it for them, they have to learn, but there is still that urge deep down inside that just wants to at least show them how easy it will be once they learn it.

Another example is my mom and ebay. She's used ebay to buy things several times and now she wants to start selling things. I haven't actually done this myself, but I know it isn't that hard. However, she has herself convinced that it will be complicated and that makes it sort of scary, as in right before you jump into a pool and find out if it's cold or not. She has even bugged me repeatedly to convince my good friend Aaron (ebay whore enthusiast) if he will sell her stuff for her. Now at first he considered it, but after we pondered a bit, we both realized that this is definitely something that she needs to do herself; a character building experience if you will.

This got me thinking about how one could make those firsts in life easier. There are things that help like having an older sibling or a friend that has done something give you tips or let you know what to expect. With so many things posted online these days, it's pretty easy to research stuff before you have to do it. But what about the things that aren't covered by these aids? Well after about 5 minutes of concentrated thought, I have decided that there shouldn't be a "safe" way all of the time. In fact I identified situations where I was nervous or unsure and paused for sometime to worry about it and that made it more thrilling, think of the slow ride up to the top of a roller coaster (worst part of the whole ride). Once I actually started in on my "first" it was more fun and more satisfying.

So while sometimes I may wish to be able to make someone more improved to save my ears, I have also decided that it may not always be a good thing to have a magic wand that I could wave and go Poof! skills.

Tails up tip

I love to dance. Performing, social, club, whatever, I love it. What I would like to focus on tonight is social dancing. For those of you who don't have experience with this, social dancing in my dictionary is basically ballroom/latin/country dancing with either digital music or a live band. There are usually a lot of people of varying skill levels and it's a great time. There is also something called dance etiquette, and that folks, is the topic in question.

There are few things that can put a damper on my evening of dance. Being sick is one of them, a smokey is another, but the biggest thorn in my side is when people don't at least have some personal awareness of their actions. This may not be their fault or these poor souls may need some guidance, so I have a nice list of etiquette rules to help you continue dancing and making friends.

1. Freshen your breath.
Everyone gets cotton-mouthy after dancing for hours, so after you've eaten, if you smoke, if you've been dancing awhile, do your partner a favor and take a second to prevent them from holding their breath the whole dance.

2. Know your skill level.
I honestly love dancing with beginners. They tend to be timid and may step on my feet frequently, but how else are they going to learn, but by dancing? I honestly love dancing with experienced dancers. They can give me that yummy feeling that only some higher level moves can give. I honestly hate dancing with people who think they are at a much higher level than they are. Everyone makes mistakes and I, nor anyone else, am perfect, but just because you learned some cool move at a workshop, does NOT mean that you know how to lead it, and just because I didn't do what the dancer in you head was supposed to do does NOT mean that I didn't follow what you lead.

3. Do not teach your partner a new move on the dance floor during a social unless you are asked.
Maybe they don't want to do the sequence you learned with a flick because they don't want to look stupid like you do (ok that one was pretty harsh, but deal). If you lead something I don't know and I want to learn it, I will ask you. If I don't ask, don't do it again. Simple.

4. If you need to count the beats, count to yourself and make sure you're counting on time.
I understand that many people have a hard time counting music and learning to dance to it. What I don't understand is how saying the counts very loudly and blowing them into your partners face (even worse if you haven't followed tip #1) makes you dance on time. Maybe it helps you dance on your own personal beat, but most likely you're counting so loud that you can't hear the beat of the music you're counting to. Just keep the numbers to yourself. If you're lucky, the people in your head will help you out. You can also admit that you need some help and ask your partner for guidance. Use this if the people in your head are on break.

5. Keep the free styling to a minimum.
This is a hard one for most. You only know a few steps in the dance, but you have previous dance experience or just like to get your groove on, so you want to break into some freestyle when you run out of moves. Personally, unless I am good friends with you or am trying to help you feel less self confident, stick to the basics. I would much rather do a basic step the whole dance than have to fake enjoying you shimmy. Exception: merengue <--- do pretty much whatever the hell you want here.

6. Don't critique.
Unless you are paying a compliment after the song ends, keep your trap shut. This goes along with tip #3. Socials are for fun, not for being an ass. You may think you're helping, but in reality you are just less likely to get to dance with that person again.

7. Thank your partner.
Whether it was good or bad, you don't have to say, but you can gain points by simply thanking the person for the dance and not risk building a bad reputation.

8. Assume the worst at first.
If you're dancing with someone for the first time, assume that they are a beginner, or even better ask them what level they feel comfortable dancing. Then slowly add more difficult moves as you go along until you get an idea of what steps they can handle (<-- leaders. followers, you just follow). If you use this technique you'll never make a fool of yourself.

9. Learn to navigate.
Traffic can be as bad as L.A. so do your best to navigate even if it means doing more basic steps. This will mean less collisions and less bruises for the follower which makes for a happy follower.

10. Don't grope (leaders and followers).
Guys tend to be the offenders more often because they tend to have better access. Just remember guys, if you violate this too many times, you'll get an "accidental" bloody lip the next time the lady's elbow is free, and for me too many times is 1.5 and I have good aim.

There are a few other things that could be mentioned here, but if you can handle these ten you can pick up on the rest.

Poof! List

This is the first of what will probably be a series of posts. I'm going to call it the Poof! Series. I have found that there are several things that should just happen to make life easier or more seamless and I will post them as they come to me.

One area I want improvement in is using lists. I have gotten better at keeping lists of things that I need and organizing them by store, but my problem is that I always forget to bring the list(s) with me. Not very useful... I either forget it at home when I leave, or don't even have it with me when I have time to run errands. We already have ways to create and manage lists efficiently and they can even be sent to our mobile units. So what more can I want? Smart lists! I want my mobile unit (phone, PDA, whatever) to be able to tell which store I just walked into and from that, bring up items from my list(s) that I can purchase there. What would be even better is if it could also display the prices of those items in the store or even the aisle it was located in!

How awesome would that be to walk into Target and have your phone display your list?

Paper towels $1.99 aisle 5
Toothpaste $2.49 aisle 9
lamp shade $2.99 aisle 21
puffs $1.99 aisle 5

(as you can tell, I would probably not be good on the Price is Right)

If it's doing this much already, why not have it sort the list by location so I don't have to go back to aisle five 20 times to get all of my paper products? Ooo I'm getting goosebumps!

As an incentive for the stores, maybe they could throw in related items that I might want to buy just like ads anywhere else we go nowadays.

In future revisions of this application of technology, I would like to see price comparisons done using the current store you are in and other stores that you frequent. This would be a great way to make buying essentials less tedious and Poof! have a useful list.

This post was brought to you by the Poof! Series.

OMB... you'll get it

This takes iPod accessories to a whole new level. Oh the random stuff you find on the internet :)

Do you SIP?

One of the topics that always tends to come up in work conversations is how much phone, internet, and cable providers charge for their services. I'm not a fan of paying a lot for these services, and phones are a big thorn in my side. Having had a particularly unpleasant experience with Qwest (MN) two years ago, I decided that I didn't need to even think about a land line until I moved into a more permanent dwelling, aka house. Right now I just use my cell phone for my limited amount of calls, but the problem is that my number is not local to where I live. Great for my parents, not for my friends and family who actually live near me. With this in mind, the only real benefit from getting a land line now is to be nice to other people and there is no way I'm going to pay a monthly bill to a phone company just to be nice; sorry guys.

So what has caught my eye? More and more VoIP services have sprung up as a great alternative to your standard phone options. You can get Vonage for about $20/mo which isn't too bad, but still not good enough for me to hop on. Skype also offers a pretty good deal for SkypeIn and SkypeOut is free which means you could choose to only pay a monthly fee for incoming calls made on land lines. A few of the concerns are that it's still only in beta and I haven't been super impressed by their computer to computer service, although not deterred by it either.

Today I read about the Gizmo project and this sounds promising. It does have a per minute charge of $0.01 cent for out going calls to land lines, but their incoming calls are a slightly cheaper than Skype if you pay for a year. The niceties include being able to call 60 different countries (Skype only does US and Canada), it's compatible with GoogleTalk, and it has this Area775 option. I've only looked into the 775 thing enough to know that I probably won't need it, but it seems like it could be useful for a small or home business. It allows you to be reached through your computer or "real" phone and can be switched (for a fee) during the call. You can also get a fax number and screen your calls, features that Skype is lacking as far as my minimal digging has shown.

While I don't intend to try any of these tools out right now, you can be sure that I'll be keeping my eye on them to see where they go.

Lego my Bluetooth

Everyone's favorite lifelong toy LEGO has made a cool announcement. They have added Bluetooth for LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT! I would love to get my hands into this and play around. The little demo robot kind of looks like Number 5 which is also appealing :). I could use a sidekick don't you think? Oh the temptation!

Bringing Up Baby

I found this link about taking your child to work while I was flipping through my Gmail random links. It isn't really what I expected, but I got to wondering how many people actually take their children to work, even for "Take your child to work day". I remember going a few times with my dad to work, and if I went with my mom, well I got to go down to our basement since she worked from home. It seemed more like and excuse for some kids to get out of school, but under the right circumstances, I think it could benefit older kids to see what their parents do and what working could be like.

I don't know if I would bring any of my (future) children to work with me, or if they would even be interested, but if others out there do, what do you do with them? Do you treat it like they're shadowing you doing your job? Do you use it as an excuse to not do work? Do they get to sit in your office or cube all day entertaining themselves? I almost think that "Take your child to work day" has been moved into middle school or high school where kids can job shadow someone for a day, but then it's more like "Send your child to someone else's work day". It seems like bringing your child to work may be frowned upon at most middle to large companies, but maybe some still see a benefit in it.

Resources

The recent desk upgrade and interest in making large purchases (bike, MacBook Pro, house) spurred me to start keeping track of my finances in a way that I could forecast and see what I was spending money on each month. I have a copy of Microsoft Money so I chose to use that. So far it seems like a typical Microsoft product. It has a lot of features that I most likely will never use, the basic tools to input individual income and expenses are easy, but when you start to use the budgeting, forecasting, and reporting tools along with automatic downloads, glitches tend to happen. For example, I setup my online banking and credit accounts so Money can automatically download my statements each month. This worked well, and other than having my 'Payee' and 'Memo' fields flipped, I was pretty happy with the ease of the task. Then I started to set up my budget information including recurring bills and income. Then Money asked me if I wanted to have my taxes tracked to get an estimate for this years taxes. I thought, why not? It would be handy to know approximately how much I would have to pay or would get back. So I grabbed my latest pay stub, input my gross income, pre-tax deductions, taxes, and post-tax deductions, click and done. Then I go back to the main line item list and hover over my latest paycheck item... Click: would you like to add this as a recurring item? Um... I thought I just did, but sure I guess. Rinse and repeat. Go back to the budget page. What happened to my income (input twice already)? Geez I guess I have to do it again! Third time through the process. Now I go to the budget area and I have three recurring income items! Well isn't that special? Microsoft thought that I should be getting paid triple, what a tease. Once that got cleared up things moved a bit faster. One thing I did like in particular was that you can add financial goals to your budget and set dates for them. So I added in things like "bike", "house", and "Europe trip with Wendy and Brad" then I set dates ranging from now to three years from now.

I'm still sifting out which tools I want to really use and which ones are just fluff to me, but the ability to automatically download my statements shows much promise for continued use.

Hungry for travel

About a month ago I got to go on an awesome trip to Europe courtesy of my mom. We traveled to Austria (Vienna and Salzburg) and the Czech Republic (Prague and Klatovy/Pilzen). There are a few things I don't like about traveling, mainly long flights and stupid American tourists, but even those downsides can't overshadow the thrill of getting lost in another culture and coming back to tell everyone about it. There are too many details to tell the whole trip here, but I can spare some highlights and some pictures. I can't say that I have one favorite place or event from this trip, but one of the most thrilling things for me is navigation. Just getting from place to place, finding travel options and blending in with "the locals". Give me a map and a list of places you want to see and I'm happy. Both Vienna and Prague were very easy to get around in. They had plenty of restaurants, history filled buildings, and "government buildings" according to my mom. If you're looking for hot European shopping, Vienna is most definitely NOT the place to go. With my mother in that city for 5 days, we found no good shopping areas and that is impressive. Prague however had tons of places if you're looking for either cheap touristy knick knacks or beautiful crystal or garnets.

An insightful thing to think about is how you deal with pictures while traveling. Are you the type that wants to take a picture of everything even if you don't know what it is, or won't remember what it was when you get home? Or are you the type that prefers to enjoy the moment and then hopes that someone else got a picture of where you were? I definitely fall into the latter until I get home and try describing the trip to people and have few visual aids. Then I wish I were more of the former. I was somewhat lucky in that the three other people I was traveling with on this trip all took pictures of everything, so eventually I could have pictures of everything times three.

In summary, I make a good, cheap tour guide... hire me for your next trip! Just make sure to hire someone else as a photographer.

Here are some pictures from this adventure:

Me and Amy in Grinzing, Austria with the Lamm sign














St. Stephans Church in Vienna















Charles Bridge seen from Prague Castle














Changing of the Prague Castle guard (in the pouring rain)