10,000 steps with the iPhone

Over the years, I'm sure most of us have heard the common wisdom that walking 10,000 steps a day is a great way to get and stay in shape.

Until recently, that would have been hard for me to achieve. But I now have a walking commute of 0.4 miles. So back and forth, plus back and forth for lunch is 1.6 miles right there. Plus I extend my "commute" by coming in a side gate and walking the zoo grounds.

So I dug out my old Omron  pedometer, replaced the battery, and added it to my belt. The belt is staring to get Batman-envy, but hey, this is science in the name of health!

I quickly discovered that even with my walking commute and extensions, it's hard to walk 10,000 steps in a day! That's about 5 miles. If I walk the zoo in the afternoon, or have a particularly busy time supporting the staff, or if I walk the dogs... then I hit 10K (haven't yet hit 11K). I make it to 10K about 1 or 2 days out of seven.

I was perusing some twitter posts and came across an article that mentioned a free app called Moves. Oh my goodness, an appaholic's dream come true. Moves records your steps as well as other "moves" you make throughout the day. So if you drive a bit, then walk, then bike, it gives you a nifty timeline of your activity. Clicking on one of the legs, you get a map marked with your route. Neat!

I love that this app is just on all the time - no need to start if up or even think about it. It is a bit of a battery drain, but nothing that a nightly recharge doesn't solve. I've gotten rid of the Omron pedometer (sadly, but probably accurately, Moves seems to record fewer steps than the pedometer. I think the pedometer was easily fooled by other movements like rocking in a chair). I have my phone on me all the time, anyway. And now I can go back in time and see what I did yesterday or last week. I suppose I should be creeped out or worried that this level of personal detail is being uploaded to the web, but somehow I don't care. The app is just too useful. It's 4 in the afternoon and I know that today I have walked 8,570 steps so far, walking a total of 1 hour and 34 minutes and covering 3.4 miles.

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MOOCs and Coursera, or getting a free Stanford education

Recently I was sitting on my front porch, smoking a very nice Partagas cigar, and watching TED videos on my iPad. I happened upon this one:




and, as has so often happened with TED, I was inspired. This was the first time I had heard of Coursera. I had often had the thought that gee, it would be great to take a college class. Maybe learn Biology or History. But then the impediments presented themselves: even if I could go as an alumus to my alma mater school, there would be costs, probably pretty staggeringly high costs. And the class would be during working hours. I'd be twice or three times the age of the other students. And so I never went further with the thought.

Coursera and MOOCs have changed all of that. I am currently enrolled in a Duke University Behavioral Economics course (A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior) and I am signed up for a University of Melbourne course on Animal Behavior beginning in August. How perfect - I work at a zoo!

The cost of these - essentially zero. I say essentially because at least in the case of the first course, there is a $20 bundle of 3 books that I bought from Amazon and have loaded onto my Kindle.

My other objections - hours and student demographics - are also solved by Coursera. The course runs 6 weeks and there are reading assignments, lecture videos, quizzes and tests. But I can do them at my own pace, whenever during the week I want. So all I need is the discipline to work an hour a day.

My classmates? Well, there are probably more than 100,000 of them. They come from all over the world and are of all ages. We come together in discussion fora. Other students form study groups, some of which meet IRL and others virtually.

At the end of the class, assuming I do the work and pass the tests, I will be given a certificate. So while it doesn't much matter to me, I could add these to my resume. Others manage to transfer these to their colleges for credit. Still others get work recognition and promotions based on their Coursera achievments.

This is going to revolutionize the world. I was at the Georgia Technology Summit yesterday and Ray Kurzweil talked about MOOCs. I had to look that up - Massive, Open, On-line Courses. In a funny bit of syncrhonicity, Dr. K was talking about the very thing that TED had inspired me towards. He talked about MIT. He estimates that over the course of its entire history, MIT has taught 85,000 students. Their MOOC for Introduction to Programming had 125,000 enrolled and 20,000 complete the course.

Dr. Kurzweil talked about how this model will help us "cure ignorance."

Someone in the audience asked a great question, though. How will we prepare our children so that they have the foundation necessary to take an MIT or Stanford class and have a chance of succeeding. So there is certainly a continuing role for classroom education. One of the key things you are taught (hopefully) is how to learn. But once you have that under your belt, MOOCs can open up an incredible world of lifelong learning opportunities.

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Quick Outlook Macros to Forward email to Evernote or ToodleDo

I use Evernote for all of my documentation needs. I also use ToodleDo to manage my To Do list. Both of these services allow the documentation or task to be emailed into them. This is quite useful when you're going through your email anyway. I am trying to practice "Inbox Zero" as much as possible.

It's not a big deal to click forward and then forward your message manually. Doing so is made easier by having a contact for Evernote and one for ToodleDo.

But I do each frequently enough that I found it worth my wile to write macros and attach them to buttons.

This also helps with the tag, folder, and other options that can be included on the subject line to help Evernote put your note into the right notebook, or ToodleDo into the right folder.

So here are my macros:

Sub ForwardToodleDo()
Dim objMail As Outlook.MailItem
Set objItem = GetCurrentItem()
Set objMail = objItem.Forward
objMail.To = "myaddress@toodledo.com"
objMail.Display
Set objItem = Nothing
Set objMail = Nothing
End Sub

Sub ForwardEvernote()
Dim objMail As Outlook.MailItem
Set objItem = GetCurrentItem()
Set objMail = objItem.Forward
Dim NewSubject As String
' drop the FW: at the beginning and append the destination folder
NewSubject = Mid(objMail.Subject, 5) & " @Zoo_Documentation"
objMail.Subject = NewSubject
objMail.To = "myaddress@m.evernote.com"
objMail.Display
Set objItem = Nothing
Set objMail = Nothing
End Sub

Function GetCurrentItem() As Object
Dim objApp As Outlook.Application
Set objApp = Application
On Error Resume Next
Select Case TypeName(objApp.ActiveWindow)
Case "Explorer"
Set GetCurrentItem = _
objApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)
Case "Inspector"
Set GetCurrentItem = _
objApp.ActiveInspector.CurrentItem
Case Else
End Select
End Function

It's easiest if you create a macro digital certificate (so you can trust yourself) and then assign these to toolbar icons as I've shown in the diagram above.

Without much effort, it would be extendable to prompt with a drop-down for tags, folders, notebooks, etc. But since I am doing this primarily from my work computer, I am comfortable with sticking items in the @Zoo_Documentation notebook.

I could also perform an objMail.Send instead of objMail.Display and this would then send it without further prompting. But I often add an into note.

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My new favorite iPad accessory

I have written in the past that my favorite handwriting app for the iPad is uPad. It remains my favorite, and my use of it has skyrocketed since I bought the Cosmonaut Stylus.

Every other stylus I have used has (a) tried to emulate a pen and (b) has a rubber tip that sticks and skips around if you try to handwrite with it. I tried the trick of coating the tip in superglue, and that helped a lot but the superglue always flaked off. It was just unsatisfying.

Not the Cosmonaut. First, it is roughly the size and shape of a whiteboard marker. It has a wonderful feel - perfectly weighted and with a comfortable black, rubbery grip. It is extremely well designed, and like such things, it is a joy to hold.

But the secret sauce here is it is friction free. Writing with it is fast, simple, easy and even pleasurable. I now use my iPad and uPad and Cosmonaut combo exclusively for taking notes in meetings. And a feature that still blows my mind - for important pages, I send them to my Evernote account. And since I have printed neatly, Evernote goes ahead and OCR's the pages for me!

When I moved houses, I took measurements of my furniture, trying to figure out in advance where everything would go in the new place. I hand wrote that on a piece of paper, and then decided since I was moving and packing everything, I had better take a picture of the page. I sent it to Evernote not thinking much about it. But then when I searched Evernote for "Desk", up popped the picture of my handwitten notes with the word "desk" highlighted.

Like I said, that's mind-blowing. And now I save the whole taking a picture part by simply writing the notes directly into uPad. Once they're in Evernote, they are searchable.

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The Dojo has moved to Atlanta!

I was quiet there for a while as I was busy changing my whole life around. Now that I have, I will get back to blogging about my technology experiences.

In February I began as the Senior Director of IT for Zoo Atlanta.


This is an amazing opportunity for me. I get to work with brilliant people and magnificent animals. I have the opportunity to interact with nearly a million smiling visitors a year. And I am now able to (am compelled to!) get back to more hands-on tinkering and programming.


The Zoo is a non-profit, and what that means is my IT budget is an order of magnitude smaller than what I am used to. And yet the demands may be the greatest of my career. We're open 363 days a year. We have a complex topography, exotic species, and the aforementioned million annual visitors.

I also have a new city within which to build professional and personal networks. I spent my career in Washington, D.C., and so this is a big change for me. The Atlanta technology community has been welcoming, and zoos are very collaborative, so I'm off to a good start.

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Not faster than a bear experts

There's that old joke: two men hiking come across a bear. One man says I'm going to run. The other man tells him he can't run faster than the bear. His reply: I don't have to, I only have to run faster than you.

I got to thinking about the disappearance of deep expertise. I am finding most of the consultants and other self-proclaimed experts in various fields are taking the approach of the bear joke. If they are one step ahead of the client, but only one step, they can tout themselves as experts.

I've seen it in SharePoint development, in data warehousing and BI. You and your staff have a certain level of expertise in these things. But something comes up, and you feel like you need to hire the big guns. The trouble any more is the big guns are hard to find! And so you often end up with someone who is only marginally more knowledgeable than you are. In many ways you end up teaching them.

I suppose a part of this is the fear of specializing. If you spent a decade becoming a deep expert in a narrowly focused area only to see that technology wane and die (Novell, 3 Com wizards), then you are at deep risk of losing your livelihood. And so today - is SalesForce or SAP something you want to gamble your career on? Or do you have a set of general skills - a jack of all trades, master of none?

But now as a hiring manager and CIO, I am on the hunt for the bears themselves, not the people who can outrun me.

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Then: Military to Consumer Now: Consumer to Military

When Sputnik launched, the US was so alarmed that it formed, within the week,  the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). One of ARPA's early successes was to create the Internet. The goal was to have a self-healing network that could survive major portions being taken out by nuclear strike. It didn't start being called the Internet until 1984, but instead and in recognition of who created it, it was called the ARPAnet

The ARPAnet's first 4 connections were at Xerox PARC and 3 Universities. And so the next place the Internet took hold was in Academia. It was at the Swiss particle physics accelerator at CERN that the World-Wide Web was created. I think you could argue that CERN is a bit military in origin.

And then the Web made it into business and then made it into personal use.

The same trajectory is followed by most technology advances (see my post for more on this topic). Take for example the computer itself.

But I think a subtle reversal is taking place. The ubiquity of the web, the cloud, mobile devices and the ease of writing mobile device applications are all leading to a much more "consumer first" delivery. Social networking's first real example might be the old Bitnet broadcasts of what happened at Tienamen Square. Facebook and Twitter took social networking to new heights, and now there is SalesForce Chatter and Yammer and other forays by the business sector. Social Networking is now a way for the military to boost morale. I think it is also a way for them to increase surveillance.

Which will bring things full circle. Warfare will now be cyber-warfare. Attacks will be on economies, which is pretty much nothing new. The U.S. outspent the Soviets in the cold war, and that war was won on an economic basis. Old warfare would be won by who ran out of money to build armaments first. New warfare will be more about directly disrupting the economy.

But maybe the "consumer first" reversal of technology origins will have a calming effect on societies. It is easiest to hate the "unknown other," to treat them as somehow less than human. But now that we are in daily contact with people from all over the world, they are becoming less unknown. Those very first Internet-broadcasted images of the flower in the tank at Tienamen Square may have very well changed the world much, much more than the tank.

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Mind versus machine, technology versus art

One of my high school friend's father was a scientist. That was his actual job title - Scientist 4 for the Franklin Institute. He loved a good debate, and would conclude most dinners with a challenging question. For example, once he said, "any problem you can name in America is a problem of plenty."

I miss those dinner debates and wish I could throw this in for debate. Maybe my internet friends can help?

I have long contended that any human technological advance can be traced to one or more of only four motivators:

• Dominate it


• Kill it


• Eat it


• Mate with it

The 4th one - mate with it - is the master one that drives the need to dominate, kill and eat. Once we've passed on our Selfish Gene into the pool, the universe is fairly well done with us.

Facebook? Twitter? Let's face it - designed to help with mating. How much time between the creation of texting before it also became known as sexting?

But then I got to thinking about art, in its many forms. Some would argue that culture is just another "technology" that is used to dominate, kill, eat and mate. One of the better presentations of that is in the book Guns, Germs and Steel.

But it still rings hollow to me. The cave drawings by Paleolithic man may have been a hunting instruction manual, but I think not. I think there was an artistic urge in man that needed expression. A need for beauty, in and of itself. A need to create and for others to consume beauty. Vladimir Nabokov said that writing a novel was a necessary thing for him - that he had to get it out of him, like the demands of childbirth.

And then I got to thinking about something that lies between the two realms of physical survival and mental beauty: chess. I grew up as a tournament level chess player and I was at the height of my playing abilities and rating back in the Fischer-Spassky days. I closely followed the development of computer chess.

There is a theory about chess - that it was invented in India for a military king to develop strategic thinking. But anyone who has played chess at a certain level knows that within those 64 squares lies incredible beauty, elegance, surprise and even humor. I have literally LOLd at some chess moves. A great chess game is like an opera spontaneously written by two composers.

And also consider this: there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. And we, humankind, invented that. We then went ahead and invented the computer. We thought hey, this is terrific, let's have the computer learn to play chess.

Then we came to bemoan the day when computers started beating humans in most chess games.  Personally, I thought, big deal. My car can "outrun" any Olympian. I suppose it was in the realm of "thought" that we were disturbed to be outdone. OMG, can Skynet be far behind? But for me, I'm amazed that humans held on as long as they did, and can still draw and occasionally win against the best supercomputers.

Let's compare. The supercomputer can analyze and evaluate billions of board positions every second! They have access to a database of every game ever played. So they can just look up the best theory. When it gets to the endgame with a few pieces, the computer has everything solved in advance.

The human grandmaster has his memory. He uses his intuition to know which few avenues to explore. A great player can feel force vectors radiating on the board, as if it is a living thing. He has the ability to visualize a few paths maybe 5 or 10 moves deep.

So really,  it's actually quite magical that such a meat machine can beat the relentless electronic calculating monster. It's a clear indication that we are only simulating human thought with our calculation engines, and that actual human thought is somehow very different.

Gary Kasparov, perhaps the greatest player ever, is now suggesting that instead of human versus human and computer versus computer matches (there are now separate world championships!), we should have humans with computer augmentation playing other humans with computer augmentation. For now, that would be a mouse and keyboard and touchscreen interface. But it's easy enough to envision the day when there is a more direct cognitive connection.

Kasparov argues that this would create the most beautiful chess, this combination of our way of thinking with the computer's incredible memory and calculating engines. I think he's right, and I also think that other art forms may be similarly transformed through this marriage with technology.

And hopefully that will help add a fifth and more powerful motivator to technology advances - to create and consume ever greater beauty.

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What's the right size for a tablet?

I originally wrote this way back in December of 2011, but it holds today.

***
With the advent of the Kindle Fire, rumors are starting to swirl that Apple will make a similarly sized iPad.  I hope this doesn't turn out to be true. If anything, I hope they go a little larger; here's why:

I have (and use for hours every day) an iPad 2, an iPhone 4S and a third generation Kindle (not the Fire).

The iPhone is always on me. I am of the generation that doesn't mind the belt holster look; it helps me recall my slide rule days. Honest to God, I used to wear a slide rule in a leather holster in the 7th grade. I have read that the average smart phone is rarely more than 5 feet away from the owner, and that is certainly true for me. With my new eyes, I can see it fine. And even though I have guitar playing fingernails, I generally type with a stylus. More and more, I am using Siri and the other voice input functions of the newest iPhone.




I carry the iPad around with me. I take it to lunch. I take it to bed with me. I evidently have a deep personal relationship with my iPad! But like virtually every other iPad user I have seen, I keep mine in a case that then folds open and props the iPad at various angles. So it's quite comfortable to use it sitting down or lying in bed. I take it to meetings and type (or handwrite) my notes on it.

The closest I can come to personal experience with the Kindle Fire is my Kindle ebook reader. It's actually smaller than the Fire, with a 6" screen. It's very light and compact. But interestingly. it is more work to hold it than to let the iPad rest on my lap. Still, I like it for two reasons: I actually read whole books rather than letting my ADHD get the better of me, and I can read it in bright sun.

But here's the thing: even this smaller unit is too big to stick in a pocket. And even if I could, I'd be worried about breaking it.

So I don't get the point of a 7" tablet. You sacrifice a lot of screen real estate and end up with a unit that you still need to carry around. Maybe if I used a purse, I could see the attraction of slipping it in there, but otherwise? Otherwise, I would use my iPhone. In a pinch I can read Kindle books and surf the web on my iPhone. It isn't ideal, but as they say, the best camera is the one you have on you. This is true for web activities as well. The best web device is the one you have on you. And in the iPhone's case, it's also the camera. It's a guitar tuner and metronome. It's a GPS.

So my vote would be for a 10 or 11 inch iPad. If you could do that and keep the weight close to the same then I would be thrilled. Magazines would look gorgeous. Videos would be better. I could put it on my music stand and display full pages of musical scores that I could actually read. None of that would be true with a 7" tablet, and yet it would be too big for a pocket.

Now I can foresee the day when flexible displays allow a unit to fold up like a book. In that case, if I could safely keep that in a rear pocket of the pants, by all means give me a 9 1/2 inch display that I can quickly open up. While we're at it, make it a phone in the closed position.

Better still, and inevitable, will be the contact lens screen. But for the time being, if I have to carry it I'd rather have a bigger display.

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NetApp versus Jungle Disk:ROI of the Cloud

I was at a company recently that had 60 TB of NetApp SAN Storage, in 2 different data centers (primary and business continuity). When they put it in 3 years ago, there wasn't really a compelling cloud storage alternative. But now there is, so the question arises -  where should the next 10 TB come from?

These 60 TB cost $1.5M in hardware, software and implementation fees. I don't think it's reasonable to capitalize any IT gear for more than 3 years, so let's call it $488,260 a year in capital depreciation. The service agreement runs $174K for 3 years. So one year costs come to $8.81 per GB. Another way to look at it is $106 per month per user for data storage provisioning.

ouch.

So I look at Jungle Disk. $4 per user per month plus 15 cents per GB. For 60 TB and the same user population, annual costs are $130K or $2.13 per GB. Or a quarter of the cost. And with cloud storage, there is no capital outlay.

Is NetApp local storage "better"? Absolutely. It's faster and located next to servers, with servers connecting to the backplane at 100Gbps. You need high-speed connections for databases and transactional systems, for data warehouse ETL, and query. For VMWare images to properly replicate and backup,  local connection and company WAN speeds are critically important.

But all of those VMWare snap and mirror images - they're huge. And that's another drawback to the SAN - you need to duplicate storage for disaster recovery. So it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they're really spending $8.81 x 2 = $17.62 per GB per year. There are other costs to consider, some of which are small, but they all add up. Take power to the SAN. Let's say the whole thing draws 6KW.  That's another $5,256 per year just to power the SANs.

The much bigger cost is, of course, staff to manage the SAN. I haven't developed benchmarks about how many systems engineers it takes to manage a given size and complexity of SAN, but for our example let's say it adds $100K of resource burden, annually. You can't get away with zero IT staff managing cloud storage, but it is much more of a vendor management role than a systems engineering one.

So NetApp is better, but is it 4 or 8 or 10 times better? Well, for user storage at least, the answer is an emphatic no. In fact, something like Jungle Disk, Box, Dropbox or, to go a more secure route, Amazon S3, offers much more in the way of functionality and anywhere, anytime access for the end user. It's easier to charge back. If they need another terabyte today, no problem. So end users love cloud storage, in contrast to the traditional IT department that puts 100MB limits on them and takes weeks or months to add additional storage.

When Windows first hit the market, it was competing against Novell for file server market share. Novell was in the 75% market share range. So IT managers like me purchased Windows servers and put them alongside the Novell servers in our data centers. More and more services started being ported to the Windows servers, and we all woke up one day and said well, Novell may be a superior fileserver, but I don't need it anymore. I can get adequate file services from Windows plus a whole lot more. So now, Novell is no more and Windows dominates the corporate data center.

I can see a similar path for Cloud Storage versus SAN storage. Companies will start to put their next 10 TB of storage in the cloud. When that works out, they'll move more and more there. At some point, IT managers will start to question the investment in local SAN storage, and they will pressure their vendors to make moving to cloud storage a workable proposition for even heavily transactional and high-traffic data.

The real death knell will only toll when we no longer have our own data centers. But I don't think that day is too far off. Many companies I have consulted at are in a transition similar to Novell->Windows. They have outsourced many of their critical applications. So they may see the day when everything is outsourced. In the meantime, it would pay to look at storage costs and alternatives.

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