My favorite coffeemaker, the Senseo^®, uses coffee pods that are becoming increasingly difficult to find at retail and when I do, it’s usually for a flavor I don’t drink (like the Dark Roast pictured above). Any smart techie and ‘net user like me would just go online and order them in bulk, right?

The answer is “yes” but in a strange twist on the “I can buy that cheaper online” phrase many of us use when trying to negotiate while shopping in a bricks-n-mortar store, the online purchase of coffee pods are much higher ($.50 – $1.60 more per pack) than I could buy them at Target, Cub Foods or other outlets.

What’s driving this lack of inventory at retail? I’ll boil it down to one development over the last several years: choices in coffeemakers. From traditional percolators to drop-in little ‘cups’ to several different types and sizes of coffee pods, for retailers it would be like trying to stock DVDs in half a dozen formats so they just don’t and they’re bound to be out of one of them at frequent intervals.

But it’s not just specialized coffeemaker coffee that is homeless.

I’ve begun to see this occur with technology more frequently, especially with Web 2.0 sites or even community add-on technology for open source software (Note: at another of my sites, Minnov8, we relied on Podpress, a podcasting plugin but had to change since the developer wasn’t keeping up with changes to the core of Wordpress, our site tool). Here’s a logo explosion image of Web 2.0 sites now in the deadpool and gone, a few of them (like Pownce, edgeio, and divshare were ones I once used):

From c_'s photostream on Flickr

So what to do? Stop using products or wait until they’re mainstream in order to be assured they’ll stick around? Good question but I’ve stopped, for example, buying highly narrow products (er, like the Senseo) or signing up for cloud-based sites that don’t have background info on who started it, what their vision and commitment to it is, and other criteria I use to make my purchasing decisions.

Is Your Favorite Product Homeless? is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Doug and Alice Lamb in 1950

My father-in-law’s passing this month has seen my wife (and her six sisters) realizing that there might be only one of a specific family photo. Since my bride had built a collage of photos when she was a young girl living at home, I offered to scan and retouch them so everyone could have a copy.

The issue? There are hundreds more where those came from and how do we create them digitally so 50, 100 or more years from now some offspring of ours can even see them?

Most of us have hundreds (if not thousands or like me, 20,000+) digital photos sitting on hard drives, at Flickr, or on some old and obsolete media? In my home office closet I have Syquest, Jaz, Zip, Mac OS 7 formatted CD’s, DOS CDs, and other media I can’t read NOW…and it’s been less than 15 years. My grandchildren or great-grandchildren will pick up a Jaz cartridge and say, “What the heck is this!?!” Viewing the photos on that cartridge? Not a chance.

But it gets worse since most of the digital media we’re creating today may not survive the media it’s on, let alone if it’s in a proprietary format.

I’ve been doing quality scanning and photo retouching for many years — and try to continue to earn the role of family archivist — but I’m highly sensitive to longevity of the media I’m putting my photos on. With these Lamb family scans, I realized that it was an imperative that I thought ahead to future generations and how they’ll likely use this media and how it must be stored:

1. The resolution of the scan (300 pixels per inch? 600? 1200?) I chose 300ppi for ease of printing today but have them in higher resolution
2. The file formats. I included compressed .jpg’s (to print with most current photo outlets), uncompressed .tif’s and a couple of key photos in Photoshop’s .psd format
3. The CD burning I did was with the ISO9660 standard, which means that everything before the “.” in the 3 letter filename suffix could only be 8 characters. This standard, however, is readable on a PC, Mac or Unix box from over 20 years ago, supported today by Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, and is likely readable far into the future.

I care deeply about future generations after continuing to be haunted by an article I read in the January 1995 Scientific American entitled, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Media” (PDF) by Jeff Rothenberg. In it he describes how unlikely it is that future generations will have access to digital media we’re creating today, and that our digital artifacts are dying (again, unlike what we can do now with photos as old as some I’ve scanned from the 1800s). Rothenberg also does a great job at articulating all the issues we have with media created with today’s applications on today’s operating systems and how it’s improbable they’ll be accessible even 25 years from now. His predictions have (unfortunately) come true for me already.

The Rosetta stone has far outlasted digital media. Photo by Jeff Rothenberg

Imagine all the digital videotapes you have that will be toast in three or so decades. Thousands of digital family photos from you, your siblings or cousins that all start with “DSC” or “IMG” and are all over the place, some on computer hard drives probably making pre-failure crunching noises as I write this post.

What to do?

a) Most markets have pro photography shops that offer workshops in photo scanning and retouching or they deliver services that will ensure your print photos are created digitally as perfect as possible. Start now to scan them and do a few each day since even a box of a couple of hundred photos can take several weekends

b) Request “archival paper” for your prints. It’s easy (and not much more expensive) to get paper that is rated for 60-100 years and at least some future family archivist like me will be able to scan a keepsake photo

c) Choose open formats and standards and burn your CDs, DVDs and other media to them. This will ensure that some miscellaneous “.zzz” format won’t be dropped by the manufacturer or the tools to make it (or read it) won’t disappear. Think that’s not possible? I have iMovie’s I created in Mac OS X Panther that I can no longer open…and that’s from 2005 (though I have workarounds and know Final Cut so all is not lost)

d) Backup your media. If you put all of your digital family photos on some huge 2 Terabyte hard drive, buy a second one (they’re now $150-ish) and store it somewhere else. This includes ever more inexpensive photo sharing sites as well as storage where you can keep your digital media forever (make certain you instruct your heirs to keep paying the bills!).

Here is a “view only” version of the scans I did. Some of the photos were in pretty bad shape, others were tiny and are, post scan, suitable to be printed at 8″ x 10″, and still others had water damage that’s now gone. The best part? Everyone in the family will now have copies and they can make copies-of-copies with no loss in quality.

Will Your Photos & Digital Media Survive? is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

I follow the White House blog and came across this post. It seemed interesting enough to blog about since it gives Spielberg & Hanks’ motivation behind the making of this miniseries and is kind of a fun peek behind the scenes.

White House Screening of “The Pacific” is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

This sort of miscommunication is becoming more problematic…not less…especially as real-time communications occur with services like Twitter. Add to that a limit in the number of characters these services allow us to use and you can see how challenging it is to convey any kind of deep meaning using real-time communications.

My son had an assignment for English class that had the following thought provoking table showing how easy it is to make a statement and have it come across COMPLETELY WRONG depending upon the emphasis of one specific word within that statement. You’ve probably seen this sort of stuff before, but it never hurts to be reminded how ONE WORD can completely change the context of your communication.

Think about this the next time you’re ready to click “send” on that tweet.

Be VERY Careful Using Social Media is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Watching this video, I was a bit taken aback at how happy everything seemed but with a lack of joy on the faces of Hormel workers, cutting apart pigs and knowing that today, most of these workers are Hispanic and not the 40-something white males of European descent depicted in this happiest of slaughterhouses in southern Minnesota.

Bonus feature: see Spam being made but alas, no factory worker falls in to the hot dog grinder nor are any social media people shown at a breakfast pleased that bacon has arrived:

The Happiest Slaughterhouse! is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Rebooting the device during a commercial break was a mistake since it took forever and didn’t fix the problem, so I grabbed my iPhone and did a search on Twitter for the word “comcast” to see if it could possibly be a network issue others were experiencing rather than my cable DVR failing.

I was stunned to see that there were dozens of people tweeting about the “stuttering” and “pixelation” of video and audio and it appeared that most of the problem was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the surrounding metro area (see SheilaBird; KeinKernMusic; DFRevert; CSWebGrl).

But in further investigation this morning, I’ve discovered that many of the people tweeting were in Illinois (e.g., JoshMeans) so this might’ve been a regional problem. During the Oscar telecast I reached out to Frank Eliason via Twitter (@ComcastCares and he’s Comcast’s “Twitter man” according to BusinessWeek) and he was, with his typical Johnny-on-the-spot follow up, checking into the issues but nothing has come of it yet. I’ve reached out to him this morning to ask for a statement about what went wrong, what Comcast did and is doing about it and he responded by asking for a DM with my email, so we’ll see what Comcast says about the issue and I’ll update this post if-and-when I receive something.

I suspect that this sort of “fail” is going to become more frequent rather than less so. Especially with more and more of us maximizing the use of our wired and wireless internet connections and with the cable companies trying to shove more services down a pipe that — while admittedly fat and robust with seemingly high capacity — is still a finite resource.

UPDATE 4:07pm: This morning’s post was one that’s received a fair amount of traffic today and in it I promised I’d update you, so here you go.

Mary Beth Schubert, VP of Corporate Affairs, Comcast

Moments ago I got off the phone with Mary Beth Schubert, Vice President of Corporate Affairs for Comcast in Minnesota. While pleased to receive an apology and that my squeaky wheel was getting greased, essentially there’s no identified cause and I came away from the call not knowing anymore than I did before receiving it.

“The particular incident that you mentioned I can confirm and that it was in isolated spots in Minneapolis and the southwestern suburbs and was intermittent. We cover 111 different cities — and you’d mentioned Chicago or something — but it was isolated to small areas of the Twin Cities,” said Ms. Schubert. She then mentioned feedback she’d received from Comcast engineering staff and that, “It appears the problem was first identified at approximately 8:15pm (CST). We immediately began researching the cause of the interference and it appears that it cleared itself about 11:15pm late last evening. We continue to look in to the cause of it.“

The anecdotes I, and others on Twitter, had about this stuttering and video pixelation going on for at least two days wasn’t formally acknowledged and not addressed. “Again, we have recognized, our engineering area, that the interference was identified approximately 8:15pm on Sunday and gone late that evening.“

Perhaps it was record viewing of this year’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards, too many people tangling up the series of tubes by sending their internets, or some internal infrastructure fail as Comcast does away with analog signals over cable so the tubes don’t get filled up (you know, like with trucks), I received no hard data on why the Oscar telecast was a disaster for so many of us and what they’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Ms. Schubert was very gracious and listened patiently to my additional concerns — and I do appreciate her reaching out — but I think Comcast needs a blog to talk to customers, some transparency, and especially system updates that tell us what’s going on and what they’re doing to fix technical issues since it’s highly likely we’ll see more of them. Maybe (and since they’re literally across the river from the upcoming light rail depot in downtown St. Paul) they’ll be able to easily catch the Cluetrain.

Comcast’s Oscar Fail is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Do you deserve coffee?

At least a dozen times at sales meetings over the past 15 years or so, many sales leaders have trotted out this video snippet from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and then expounded on its virtues, clearly using it as a great kick in the seat of our pants as salespeople.  I’m here to point out how that this clip (after the jump and NSFW, by the way) is relevant to anyone who has to produce…whether you’re a developer/coder, factory worker, farmer, call center or support person, or in any field where results matter.

Alec Baldwin is on screen for less than seven minutes and, in my and many other people’s views, his is the defining performance of that movie and incredibly powerful. The premise, according to the Wikipedia article about the film, “Early in the movie Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent by Mitch and Murray (the faceless owners of the real estate office in which the main characters work), to motivate them by announcing, in a torrent of verbal abuse, that only the top two sellers will be allowed the more promising “Glengarry” leads, and everyone else will be fired.“ This confrontation sets up the rest of the film: the motivations that the characters feel that this rainy night is a make-or-break one; the reason the incident with the Glengarry leads that occurs later on; and the promise that — if only each salesman was better at closing like Blake — that they could achieve the same sorts of results as a guy that made $920k, drove an $80k BMW and sports a $25k gold Rolex.

Anyone whose been in sales for any length of time knows that there are many variables that enable one to achieve wildly successful sales numbers. An enterprise software salesperson in New York, L.A. or Chicago has more opportunity than one in Kansas City, for example, and top performers are usually in major markets. Same thing holds true for those who sell into vertical markets where they canvas accounts across many geographies.

But any salesperson who has been even modestly successful also knows one fundamental truth, and it’s a truth that cuts across all professions and labors.

That fundamental truth is this: it is up to each of us to make it happen. To get results. To create opportunities. As a salesperson to “help people buy” rather than shove products or solutions down their throat. To ABC (Always Be Closing) since if you don’t ask for the order…you won’t get it. To create and deliver not just results….but rock solid ones. TO STOP WHINING AND SAYING ‘OH…WOE IS ME’ TO ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN AND STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR THE LACK OF RESULTS.

Same thing holds true for other professions. Let’s say you are a developer creating a web or mobile application. You find it a challenge, stay up all night several times per week, work weekends, and do so for months to get the thing out the door. But there are so many bugs in the software, or you didn’t pay attention to details of the user interface, that the end user experience is horrible! People stop buying and word-of-mouth means your creation fails.

Or you’re a call center support person who answers the phone like you could give a sh*t, barely help the person at the other end, and do your best just to get off the phone and word gets around that the company offers horrendous customer service (and “customer service is the new marketing” as many now believe in a day of social media). Or you’re a factory worker that builds products and you do just the base-case work on them. The fit-n-finish isn’t that great and eventually the quality of the overall solution this product fits within sees sales drop because it’s now crappy and you come up with all sorts of excuses why it failed and it was your failure.

The lesson for all of us with Alec Baldwin’s tirade is crystal clear: it’s the results that matter and YOU are the person that gets them!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

Coffee is for Closers is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Salman Khan of KhanAcademy.org

I’m biased, but there’s no question that I fundamentally believe that the future of education is online. Talking to my daughter yesterday, a student at the University of Minnesota, she’d mentioned how dismayed she was having to take the bus to campus, walk to the one class she had that day, sit in a lecture, and then go home. “What a waste of time,” she said, “But I have to go since my prof takes attendance.” So I inquired if they streamed the lecture online. “Are you KIDDING ME!?!” she exclaimed. “Most of these professors and TA’s can barely hook up their computers!“

What you’re about to view is an excellent example of the types of teaching that are exploding on the ‘net. From Instructables to Howcast (the latter is where I learned how to fix the overflow valve on my toilet) to this young man, Salman Khan of Khan Academy, most of this sort of teaching will be pooh-poohed by traditionalists and seen as augmenting existing meatspace education in buildings.

Fortunately, people like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen see things differently. Christensen has described the three stages of disruption, the status quo will first see disruptors like Khan as “crappy” and ignore them, then they’ll become “less crappy” and early adopters will flock to them, and when they become “good enough” is the tipping point when disruptors kill status quo industries and yes, education is an industry since they still teach using an industrial age, factory model.

Watch this six minute video (discovered via Sid Yadav) and you’ll see what I mean about what one disruptor guy is doing for math education:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kly25zVbco

This Kind of Guy is the Future of Education is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

I used to be a bit disturbed over how simple it was to manipulate photographs. Now the video/film manipulation has far outpaced that and can make whatever vision the director has possible. I’ve now watched this video ten times and I still find it delightful to see what can be done with strategically placed green screens and matching footage. My favorite parts are the walk through Red Square in Moscow, the ship on fire and the snow scene probably shot in July in L.A.

Watching this also is heightened if you have an appreciation for the challenges in matching the lighting in the scene and other environmental conditions.

What happens when fun, photorealistic 3D characters are matched with this kind of realism? Though many say we’re a long ways off from being able to faithfully recreate a human digitally, I’m not so sure that we’re closer than people think. The fun aspect still exists with many 3d photorealistic characterizations — and it’s easier to pull off believability when it’s basically a major stepup from a cartoon (e.g., Toy Story, Up, Shrek) but what happens as the creation and rendering technology gets so good that it is indistinguishable from reality?

Heavy Rain is an upcoming game that has gamers all abuzz about its photorealism and you should watch this HD trailer (you have to watch a lo-res advertisement first so hang in there) to see why there is so much excitement. Yeah, it’s awesome. OK…it’s still easy to tell it’s a game.

But for how much longer?

It’s Fun To No Longer Trust Your Eyes…Isn’t it? is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

While I feel like I have 50% of the facts (e.g., we don’t see what he was doing as he photographed so can’t ascertain anything about his behavior) I still applaud him standing up to the police and not automatically handing over “his details” (i.e., his name, ID, etc.) without them telling him why he was being detained and specifically what he’d done.

For a country that could’ve easily succumbed to the tyranny of the Nazi regime — a government that didn’t allow their own citizens to do anything without having “their papers” on them at all times — I must admit not appreciating the irony in London police trampling on their citizen’s civil liberties. I do appreciate the tensions in London, what with their experiences with the IRA and other horrific acts of terrorism.

But anyone with half-a-brain and any technical chops knows how incredibly simple it would be for real terrorists to surreptiously photograph any spot, building or crowd without anyone being the wiser so it’s highly likely that this continued confrontational attitude by London police is akin to the security theater in the United States.

It also makes me wonder about my own behavior on a family trip to London a few years ago where I was probably “suspicious” as I photographed like mad near Downing Street, all the governmental buildings along Whitehall, waiting for my wife and kids as they souvenir shopped as I lurked by a pillar in Trafalgar Square snapping photos with my Nikon DSLR, and essentially playing the role of obnoxious tourist.

What will I be able to do next time I’m in London? For instance, I enjoy snapping photos of many things: alleyways; police cars; doorways; street perspectives; people; and crowds. Is my behavior going to cause confrontations with the London police? Probably, so I’ll undoubtedly be seeing the inside of a London jail but one that isn’t exactly geared to tourists!

London Photography Will Get You Arrested is a post from: Connecting the Dots and published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.