Blog – Page 123 – Stilgherrian

11 August 2013

Weekly Wrap 166: Early spring, with fewer distractions

My week Monday 5 to Sunday 11 August 2013 saw the return of productivity. While I didn’t get everything done that I’d planned, I’m very happy with what did appear.

And that’s despite Thursday night being much later than planned, thanks to further train delays and a strange incident with a drunk and potentially violent man, and losing Saturday to a sore throat. But I won’t dwell on that.

Podcasts

Corrupted Nerds: Conversations 3, being a wide-ranging conversation with Peter Coffee, vice-president and head of platform research for Salesforce.com. His reasoning being why everything will eventually end up being done in the cloud, and what will unfold from that, are just two of the many highlights.

I’m pleased to say that Corrupted Nerds is now available in Apple’s iTunes Store.

I had hoped to kick off The 9pm Election podcast too, but the sore throat put an end to that plan. To be honest, I’m now thinking that it’d be adding just a little too much to my workload. That, plus the fact that I’m starting to find the obsession with the minutiae of the election campaign to be really, really boring.

Articles

Yes, Senator Abetz, ABC’s Vote Compass is indeed Orwellian, ZDNet Australia, 5 August 2013.
Can Australia’s digital spooks escape an NSA-level backlash?, ZDNet Australia, 9 August 2013.

Both these stories generated quite a bit of interest, it seems. I also wrote for Technology Spectator, but that piece has been held over until next week.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday, I spoke about Vote Compass on ABC 666 Canberra, along with its creator, Cliff van der Linden.
I was interviewed by ITJourno for a piece about Corrupted Nerds that’ll appear some time soon.

Corporate Largesse

On Thursday, I popped into the Australian Direct Marketing Association’s conference in Sydney, where refreshments were provided.

The Week Ahead

I’m keeping things relatively flexible, but there’ll be quite a few media objects produced. Another episode of Corrupted Nerds is almost ready to post and will likely appear on Tuesday, and I’m committed to writing two pieces for Crikey and one each for ZDNet Australia and Technology Spectator.

I’ll be in Sydney on Friday night for the launch of Dom Knight’s new book, Man vs Child, and may well stay in town overnight.

[Photo: Railway Parade), photographed about 1km east of Wentworth Falls on 5 August 2013. Spring is coming very early this year.]

11 August 2013

Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 10

“‘Day 10’? But the last post was Day 5,” I hear you complaining. Well, the dynamic of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial changed a bit last week, so I’m skipping over the dull bits.

Day 10 is Thursday 8 August 2013, and the photograph with this post was taken one minute before dawn on that day.

In the intervening days, I had continued to use the Lumia 925 much as I had been, and I continue to appreciate the quality of the camera and the ability to customise the start screen in Windows Phone 8. It makes the iOS grid of icons look positively old-fashioned.

However you may remember that I was having trouble with the Wi-Fi link dropping out when the phone was physically handled. Well, I put that question to Nokia and Microsoft on Monday.

Continue reading “Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 10”

10 August 2013

Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 5

It’s time to catch up on my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial, skipping over Day 4 to Day 5, Saturday 3 August 2013 — when I finally discovered the proper way to synchronise the phone with my MacBook Pro.

I’d been frustrated by the slow process of using Bluetooth to transfer photos. Nowhere in the “Welcome” booklet that comes with the phone is there even a suggestion that you can plug the phone into a computer, let alone that there exists an official Microsoft Windows Phone for OS X application!

And it works!

Furthermore, if you use Apple’s default workflows for managing your images in iPhoto and your music in iTunes, then that all works too.

OK, so I’m an idiot. Maybe I should have looked, or perhaps browsed Nokia’s support site. But I still think this is something worth mentioning from the beginning — particularly as certain phone configuration options are only available from the management software.

Continue reading “Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 5”

08 August 2013

Why are corporations so paranoid, Telstra?

With all their constant worrying about whether people would recommend them or not, like this example from Telstra, I’m starting to think that most big corporations are paranoid psychotics — and not in a good way.

The other day I conducted a perfectly routine transaction at a Telstra Shop. I cancelled a mobile broadband service and replaced it with a different one. As with many businesses, my visit was followed up with a brief survey, “Please tell us how you feel.”

There were four questions, but none of them actually asked me how I felt:

Is your new Telstra service working? If you answer ‘no’ to this question, we will present you with options to get in contact with Telstra to resolve your issue on the next page.

OK, that’s fair enough. You need to know that the customer has a working broadband service. But the other three?

When you consider all aspects of buying and connecting your service — how likely are you to recommend Telstra to a friend or colleague?

Thinking about your in-store experience, how likely would you be to recommend the store to a friend or colleague?

What are the most important reasons why you gave us this score?

Guys, this goes way beyond “Does my bum look fat in this?” This is self-obsession. “What are you going to tell people about us? Why, what did I do?”

These constant questions about likelihood of being recommended are a sign of paranoia. I don’t care how you feel, I gave you money. Recommending you or not just isn’t a KPI for me.

How about you ask questions that reflect the customer’s needs and aspirations? Or even just concrete questions about how long I had to wait, whether staff were polite, or whether the service meets my needs?

06 August 2013

“Corrupted Nerds” podcast goes cloud and big data

I’ve finally posted a new episode of my Corrupted Nerds podcast, a wide-ranging conversation with Peter Coffee, vice-president and head of platform research at Salesforce.com.

Cloud computing is inevitable, says Coffee. “Processing power has grown at about 25% per year, and compounded over a period of 30-some years that’s a lot. But bandwidth has grown at about 45% per year over that same period of time.”

So whatever the application, no matter how complex, eventually it’ll be cheaper to process the data somewhere else, and your device — desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone — only has to manage presentation and interaction.

I’d been wanting to catch up with Coffee for two or three years, and we finally managed to arrange being in the same room at the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it too.

05 August 2013

“Fleeting mists” goes Android

I’m re-posting one of my favourite photos from last year, “Fleeting mists”, because it’s being used in the new Android weather app BWeather by Denver-based developer Brit Clousing of Atomicboy Software.

There’s a screenshot of the app at right, and you can click through to embiggen it. The app itself you can download from Google Play.

It’s Clousing’s first smartphone app and it’s pretty basic — but it’s free and there’s no advertising, and I really like the way the temperature for the days ahead is shown as a vertical bar.

“The photograph displayed on the top section is designed to match the current weather forecast. There are about 20 different photographs for the different weather and day/night conditions,” writes Clousing in an email.

I’m hanging out for a foggy day to see my photograph in context.

Clousing was previously responsible for the turn-based strategy game Empires of Steel, published in late 2009.

I publish most of my photographs under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so they can be used for pretty much everything. I enjoy knowing that they’ve been appreciated by someone else.

[Photo: Fleeting mists, originally posted in Weekly Wrap 89: Storms and too many podcasts in February 2012.]