Bugga!
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What you need to do.
I’ve been busy lately with coding, with family, with the kids. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. Especially if you want to *do* something like writing your own analytics for Twitter 
which sorta consumes you if you are just a one-man show.
But sometimes you find something that is worth mentioning. Heck that is worth shouting out for and saying, Yep! This is it !
So without further ado: This is what an entrepreneur (or anybody else for that matter) needs to do. Image by Bud Caddell.
Technology Advancement (1990)
When I left for work this morning, I took my iPad with me. While I was reading my mails in the train via my 3G connection, I suddenly realised how much advancement we have made, how much easier things are now technology wise speaking:
In 1990 when I was studying Information Science (or started to) :
- email was something used in universities
- bulletin boards via dial-up modem were still the rage
- Punch cards where still a required learning subject, so was assembly code
- I learned C (not C++) via a terminal on a mainframe that emulated C in order to run it, and took up a whole room
- We still had big rule printers in separate rooms which made the most godawful noise printing on paper fed from a box below them
- We had Winchester disks for our mainframe, mounted on wooden blocks. When our class initiated the database queries we learned, they all vibrated like washing machines.
The year after I graduated, they replaced the whole caboodle with 2 Unix machines that fit in 2 shoe boxes – one for the hard drive, one for the cpu.
And now, almost 20 years later, I’m reading my email via a wireless 3G connection on an ultra-slim touch-enabled device that seems to have dropped out of some futuristic movie, and it seems that hardly any time has passed.
But in reality, lots has changed in those years. And when I think back on those years without the internet, I feel so very happy to be able to participate in this, the knowledge available at my fingertips, the social media to find just the right persons to communicate with, the speed with which you can do calculations, the ability to share your work with others, the connectedness of it all.
And I’m just really glad to be here in the now and not 20 years ago
iPad.
Well, I’ve just returned from a 10 day trip or so around Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, and for once I didn’t take the laptop with me. Instead I brought my iPad along, and it served very well as a light-weight replacement ‘entertainment device’.
No programming at all, just consuming lots of different media, for which the iPad is more than up to it.
I watched a few movies on it using the Videos app, read a book using the Kindle iPad edition, and some comics on it via Comixology, and kept some spending figures in a spreadsheet using Numbers. I also used it a lot with Offmaps, an offline map reader for which I had downloaded the appropriate openstreetmap part of france before I left. It’s no match for a gps, but coupled with the GPS that is in the iPad it’s like map reading with the added ability of seeing where you are and zooming in and out of the map as you please. I really hate those small screens of the current gps devices, it’s so hard to get an overview of where you are going, with the iPad it’s just natural !
One thing I do miss is that I can’t download new pictures out of my camera like I do using the laptop with the SD Card reader although I believe there is a camera connection kit on the market.
The next few trips will also have an iPad as long as I don’t have to do any programming…
I find this touching.
“Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
- from The Old Astronomer by Sarah Williams
Gardena Accu Lawn mower – first impressions.
I had my old “Greenway” electric lawn mower for over 10 years now, and it did it’s job, but it was time to get something that was a bit less hard to work and wrestle with.
So I recently replaced it with a Gardena Accu Lawn mower – no more wires to cut accidently through, a lithium-ion battery that does not run down over the years, and a very functional design that allows you to raise or lower the mower with just one toggle. Plus a manual that is well written and if you follow the instructions correctly, it’ll have you up and running in no time. It’s very refreshing to read a manual that’s exact and knows what it is trying to explain and does it so well !
All in all, a difference of night and day. I do have two issues though:
One: The Battery.
Today, in hot weather of more than 30 degrees, I decided to cut my lawn using the mulch function of the mower. Previously I could cut more than half of the surface of my lawn with the one battery, and since it is divided into 2 already, I didn’t mind. And the battery lasted about 40 to 50 minutes.
But now, the battery ran down after just 20 to 30 minutes, even before I could finish one half of my lawn !!!
And since I have only the one battery, I’m done for the day. Charging times are 7 hours or so to fully top them up, so I put my lawn mower back into the shed.
I knew that I would have to buy another battery to be safe for future years and do my lawn in one go, but this is just ridiculous ! I hope it’s the heat that made the battery less performing, but it was a serious disappointment !
Two: The fail-safe handles.
The handles have a button you need to press and on both sides, a lever you need to pull out, preventing accidental startups of the machine. I totally get this. But do those handles need to be so tight ? My hands are in continual cramps of clutching those 2 handles all the time. They are so damn fiddly, you need to press really hard on them to prevent an instant stop.
Apart from that, a wonderful machine.
Another post is up at DataConnect.be: #nmbs analysis
I’ve analysed and graphed the last 30 days of twitter activity for the #nmbs hashtag.
You can immediately see that May 26 was a ‘special’ day…
Empathic Civilisation
Those Royal Society videos are actually really good to get the gist of something quickly! Here’s one that presents some findings about empathy and how this might affect us all in the long run.
Sam is 5 years old.
How the time has passed!
He’s almost ready to cycle on 2 wheels, he’s totally different from Tom, has a big mouth but a small heart. He does things his own unique way.
Happy 5th birthday, my independent little man !
Money is not enough for knowledge workers…
Quote: If you pay enough money to people to take money out of the equation, then people are motivated to focus on the job instead of on getting enough money.