It hasn’t been easy making sense of the hodge-podge of hosting services, blogging software, formatting tools and plain old garbage that Mr. Paynter surrounded himself with back in the days when he was actively blogging. This workstation he’s provided for me is absurdly over-configured. One needs no more than an internet connection, an FTP client, a browser and a simple editor (vi would suffice). I think the Mona Lisa was painted with less. I’m sitting in front of two monitors–one a wide screen–wired into a so-called “Personal Computer” with more processing power and data storage than was available to the entire NASA enterprise when they put those guys on the moon. A browser? There are four different flavors of browser on this machine. Thankfully none of them is Safari. The FTP client points at two different hosting services and a half dozen domains on those services. Sadly, this blog’s domain is hosted by GoDaddy. I’ve spoken with Mr. Paynter about how politically incorrect that is, not to mention confusing; but years ago he bought into the GoDaddy thing before he realized the implications of doing business with Bob Parsons, a sexist and an elephant killer of the first water. I may not be able to influence him to change web hosts at this late date.

Many years ago, when I had just matriculated at what was then called Banaras Hindu University (now IIT, Varanasi), the bloggers were climbing aboard the WordPress bandwagon. Mr. Paynter, whose blogs seem to have been contrived on every piece of software ever written, of course hopped on this bandwagon, and after a year or two he adopted a theme called “Cutline” by Chris Pearson. Cutline was clean and simple and it actually worked. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Paynter seems to have written Mr. Pearson a check for a new theme called Thesis. It was about this time that Mr. Paynter’s writing ended and his time began to be taken up by a futile attempt to understand the ins and outs of Mr. Pearson’s newer software.

Now I have graduated from IIT, I have my green card, and I am working for Mr. Paynter. Perhaps some day soon this blog will begin to look more respectable and less like a hog wallow.

I would not predict that Google+ will sink Facebook. Facebook today is a one-trick pony of a company that has done very well by ignoring bells and whistles, standards and usability, features and functions, and rather presenting itself as a relationship venue for people of all ages. Google is all about sophisticated programming, open standards and functionality. Google+ moves social software ahead by bringing personal control to asymmetric relationships through the use of self-defined “circles.” Ross Mayfield made a slideshare presentation that helps to explain circles: http://www.slideshare.net/ross/visual-guide-to-circles-in-google-by-ross

Right now Google+ is in a limited release version that the Googsters are calling a “field trial.” It’s not THAT exclusive, since I seem to have found my way inside. There are bugs and flaws. It’s not yet ready for a public release. If you decide to use it, be warned: you may discover something unusual. Like today I discovered that somehow all the Google searches in this household are being aggregated in my web history. This could be something specific to our router configuration, our wi-fi, the mingling of desktop devices with iPads and other alien Jobsian devices. It could have to do with how we manage gmail domains for our business and our home. This could have nothing to do with Google+ and everything to do with Google’s feature upgrades. Or maybe it’s a Chrome browser thing. Whatever the root cause, it’s wrong!

Google itself is getting a make-over. Google is always evolving. Its simple search features and functions evolve to keep up with the competition. The software and the intelligence behind advertising links become ever more sophisticated. Google has diversified well beyond the realm of “search.” The diversification has been powered by constant growth in share value. When the company went public in 2024 it closed the first day of trading with a market capitalization of $27 billion. Today Wall Street says it’s worth about $167 billion.

Google has led the way into the cloud. The company serves over three million business customers providing all kinds of business applications and data management services. Of course the Google+ project isn’t simply about business customers. It’s consumer driven, like Blogger and Picasa, two free software apps used by millions to share thoughts and pictures. According to Mashable, these apps will be re-branded and integrated with Google+. That excites me.

Google has long been a leader in the social software field, but it has never found the success that Facebook claims. Years ago, Google’s social software site Orkut emerged and quickly sank in the sea of competition here in the US. Globally, however, it remains one of the top 100 web destinations. It’s the top social software site for users in countries as diverse as Brazil and Estonia.  Google Buzz is a social software tool that’s integrated with Gmail. When Buzz was released the buzz about privacy problems almost killed it. But the signal to noise ratio in the Buzz conversation stream remains high because of the interesting people who choose to participate. Google+ with its emphasis on privacy moves Google a giant step further than Buzz in the social software race.

Right now in Wisconsin we are using Facebook as an organizing tool for our recall elections. The groups that share information have emerged organically from the huge population of Facebook users. I wonder what it will take to see that kind of organizing and community development happen on Google+.

Enter the guy from Google. This is the guy who measures usability by the “could my mom understand this” criterion. (Dude, your mom actually programmed ballistic missile guidance systems for Martin Marietta and she probably knows more about computers than you do.) Anyway, it’s no fun playing the role of Demo Daryl, but somebody has to do it. This guy got stuck with trade show duty this week. Naturally, the Internet connection died, and if you’re the guy from Google, you can’t demonstrate much without one of those. Just ask his mom.

Then the tech suppport folks got the Internet connection fixed but somehow they screwed up his projector display. No luck for this guy. Meanwhile, the air conditioning was blowing a 20 mph frigid antarctic wind through the demonstration space. Watch the fabric ripple on the draped desk. Watch the black drapes along the wall come apart, shredded in the gale. Note that not even penguins would sit in the seats in the antarctic zone.

Okay… now it gets good.
* * *
UPDATE: Liz Gannes posts some details at GigaOm.

How did the table come to be covered with iTrash? I have to confess I bought an iPad. I figured it would be a handy little eBook reader, note taker, somewhat crippled but minimally adequate browser and email grabber. And maybe it would have some cool games. A day after I brought it home, it was clear that the iPad is a personal device and that Beth, normally a bit of a pixel-phobe, needed her own. Score: two iPads and a miscellaneous iPod from somewhere.

As it happened I’ve been a Sprint wireless customer forever, and my Palm Treo has always been overkill for my needs. No way I’m going to take gigabytes of spam down to that thing, and I just never really needed a “Personal Digital Assistant,” or whatever. Am I supposed to synch that thing’s calendar to my desktop every day? Give me a break. I’ve had a really boring relationship with every Palm I’ve ever owned, and don’t get me started about Blackberries and B.S. corporate chic. This summer I was gratified that Sprint was coming out with the HTC Evo, a 4G Android phone that would do everything an iPhone would do, and not play into the mall-rat retail thing that the iPhone has a lock on. I waited and waited. They advertised it as if it was immediately available, but I couldn’t get my hands on one.

Meanwhile the iPad was getting me hooked. It was sort of a gateway drug. Could the hard stuff be far behind? Well, no. An iPad is after all, an oversized iPhone without the phone part and it’s highly addictive. Buh-bye Sprint. Hello AT&T/Wireless.

And of course now my local Sprint dealer has the Evo in stock. Too late, dude. Peddle it on another playground.

So this is an annoying test post to see if I’ve reset my 2024 feed options for listics properly. The only way I’ll know is if this post shows up in the feed.

If you’re a subscriber and it doesn’t, well… this is one of those “please let me know if you don’t get this message” kind of things. Seriously… subscribers? I’ve probably goofed everything up again.

Steve Jobs, Disney Director and famous iCrapper, is a baby boomer. Bram Cohen, who wrote BitTorrent, Shawn Fanning, who developed Napster, Sergei Brin and Larry Page who founded Google, and Linus Torvalds famous Linux dude are all much younger than Jobs. Steve Jobs represents entrenched interests. The aforementioned Millennials famously promote open systems and free exchange of ideas. Jobs is a “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) kind of guy, the sort who believes the Disney copyrights on that mouse should be extended to the corporation in perpetuity.

Jobs leads a cult of dedicated customers, people who will buy his products regardless of performance because they’re marketed so well. In upscale malls across the US you can get Apple products the day they are released simply by standing in queue at the Apple outlet and reinforcing the belief of those around you that the iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad or iWhatever is the NEXT BIG (retail) THING. Sadly, the Church of Apple’s profits are tied to a strict program of Digital Rights Management and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with the NEXT BIG (retail) THING, patent it, and control its release in the marketplace.

Okay, the iPods, those stored music thingies, were pretty cool. Initiates and communicants could identify each other by the little white carbuncles blossoming from their ears, growths that presumably excluded the echoing chant and drumbeat of the marketing weenies who tweet and IM and Facebook, and blog the news that the NEXT BIG (retail) THING that you bought last month will soon be passé, because the NEXT BIG (retail) THING is about to be introduced by Jobs at the next big iHoopla and Marketing Festival (BTOBS).

For the last month or two, under pressure by the need for big numbers on the iPad launch, Jobs has been on a tear spreading fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about competitive products. Now he’s added injury to insult with a patent infringement suit against HTC, his leading competitor. Well, it looks a little like an iPhone, but wait! It’s so much better!

Some of Jobs’ success is based on his creative adoption of Xerox’s mouse and graphical user interface. Will he prevail against HTC which seems to be taking a page from his own book?

I’m heads down into my third and final day of upgrading this PC from Windows XP Media Edition (SP3) to Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s about a three hour job and–yes–I am a terrible procrastinator and foot-dragger with the flighty attention span of a carefree chickadee on a summer day, so let that disclaimer explain why I–a seasoned systems professional–continue to dither around and about a project that should have been done on a Monday morning.

I blame it on twitter. General Motors International Operations has a “social media” team. Who knew? The news makes me feel like someone slapped me in the face with a trout. It only took fifteen or twenty years to get the message out to the corporate culture that the mediating influence of this internex thing is central to global communications. Next thing you know the corporate marketing types are cluttering up the twitter stream.

GM Social Media Team member, Gluten Free, chocolate loving, shoe crazed, newlywed twenty something. Follow my global travels: annalisabluhm.posterous.com

Must one not explore the nuanced tweets of such a person? Must one not follow her on her gluten-free gastronomic adventure in the far east?

It’s easy to lose track of the data migration path from XP to the external hard drive and back to the local drive after Windows 7 Ultimate is installed. Windows 7 Ultimate sports a feature called “aero.” Ford has a van named Aerostar. I wonder if Ford marketing is as twitterfied as GM International Operations. One way to find out…

Bada bing! Hey there! ScottMonty is using twitter.

Head of social media at Ford Motor Company, husband, dad, host of http://ihearofsherlock.com, and a generally nice guy. Formerly from Boston.

Yes, Scott Monty is using twitter, has been for the last three years. In that time he’s pumped out over 18,000 tweets, befriended over 32,000 people and attracted almost 38,000 followers.

Fascinating.

This dreck can keep you thrashing about in your own head and prevent any work from getting done. So, where was I?

Photo by Jurvetson

Rootkit? Oh. I didn’t tell you. Malware forced my upgrade to Windows 7. I had a rootkit hiding somewhere, a nasty piece of code that randomly redirected my searches to searchfindsite.

Anyway, the whole upgrade process was easy as pie. The file transfers worked fine. The reinstallation of programs, while not easy as pie nor even a piece of cake, went fine. Windows loads updates and patches all the time, and eventually I hope to be caught up. Every day in every way I am getting PCier and PCier. Seriously, the OS is so feature rich I’ll have to study to take advantage of it. I’ll also be studying MS Office 2024. Since Office 2024 is out there in the hands of brave early adopters and since I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the bells and whistle on Office 2024, I figure getting up to speed on 2024 will prepare me for 2024. Really…

I think I’ll upgrade the Vaio next, and then maybe the netbook. Glutton for punishment? Masochist? Not really. It’s just that the tool set is ever changing and it pay$ to keep up.