Core Dump

Amanda and I recently got back from a trip to the Caribbean – specifically, to the island of Saint Martin – and while it was tropical and warm and lovely (you can see all my pictures from the trip here), it was also a bit of a culture shock – but not for the reasons you might think.

It wasn’t the food – there are enough tourists coming to this island to ensure that there’s always some typical American-style food near at hand if you aren’t feeling gastronomically adventurous.

It wasn’t the language – almost everyone spoke English, except for a few people in the remoter sections of the French side (naturally).

It wasn’t the fact that they use different money – the Dutch side pretty much exclusively uses the US Dollar (although their official currency is still the Netherlands Antillean guilder), and although the French side officially uses the Euro, they also accept US dollars pretty much everywhere (although sometimes at a slightly unfavorable fixed exchange rate).

It wasn’t the people – aside from their crrraaaazy driving, they were pretty much like people anywhere else, with the usual variations for culture (Dutch/French) and for climate.

It wasn’t the culture – although it was quite a bit more “relaxed” than our often tense, high-strung east-coast culture here in the US, it was quiet and nice and not at all jarring.

No, the biggest shock to us was the almost complete lack of Internet access.

Now, as Americans, we’ve become accustomed (in just a few short years, if you think about it) to ubiquitous, free, unlimited high-speed Internet access (via both wired and wireless connections).

We’ve become so used to it that we sort of expect it wherever we go – we expect it to be always on, and always available, no matter where we go. We expect to be able to pull out our iPhone or whatever and update our Facebook page from wherever we are in the world.

And when we finally find ourselves someplace where this is no longer true, it can be a bit of a shock!

In Saint Martin, for example, we landed and found that there was NO signal whatsoever for Amanda’s iPhone – it just could not pick up anything. It detected some of the cell networks on the island, but it could not connect to them. (Ironically, my old, old, old Motorola RAZR phone connected just fine – but of course it can’t browse the web or send email or really do anything besides make calls and send text messages.) Even at the airport there was no Wi-Fi available (not even the paid variety!).

Our situation did not improve when we arrived at our hotel, either. Again, our expectations were tempered by what was commonplace back in the US – where a hotel without Wi-Fi, or at least a wired Internet connection in each room was considered an abomination.

Oh, the hotel had Wi-Fi – but it wasn’t free. In fact, it was ridiculously expensive (by our standards, at least). And it was also slow – a single 1 MB connection was shared by the entire hotel (both guests and staff!). And of course it was only accessible from your room – there was not enough range to keep using the Internet all the way down to the pool or the beach, even when the pool and beach were only a couple dozen feet from the hotel.

So in the end, our use of Internet was limited to short bursts in our hotel room, checking mobile sites (mainly Gmail) that were very light & fast, so that they didn’t feel abysmally slow on the pitiful 1 MB connection.

In truth though, it was a very eye-opening experience – a reminder that although the Internet has indeed become ubiquitous in many places, it is not everywhere… and even in places where it is available, sometimes that availability is much more limited than we here in the US are used to. It also made me realize just how much we take it (the Internet) for granted sometimes.

But at the same time, it was also interesting to “unplug” for a while – easy enough for me to do, actually – and remember what life was like before we were all electronically connected to one another.

Although I wait eagerly for the day when fast Internet is freely (or cheaply) available world-wide, I think it’s still worth having a few places where the Internet can’t reach, if only to let us “escape” it for a while. Even though going somewhere without Internet can be a bit of a culture shock to those of us who’ve grown up with it, I think it’s still good to get culturally shocked from time to time – just to keep us all on our toes, and remind us of how good we all have it.

Sometimes I have to just stop and be amazed at the things we can do these days – things that would have seemed like futuristic science fiction when I was a kid (or even when I was in college).

For example, just this weekend I was doing some cleaning around the house (cleaning up the bunnies area) and I wanted to have some relaxing, chillout music on while I worked.

For me, the easiest way to accomplish this was to boot up my netbook, hook it into my livingroom stereo (via the same cable I use to hook up my iPod), and just play some streaming music from Shoutcast (the Digitally Imported Chillout Dreams stream, to be exact).

So that is exactly what I did.

Simple, easy, and straightforward – and it doesn’t take a whole bunch of complicated steps to get going, nor does it take very long (just long enough for my netbook to boot up – which is pretty fast – and to load the radio stream).

It is just amazing to me that this little computer can sit there, pulling music literally from thin air. And of course, the fact that streaming Internet radio gives me an almost unlimited library of music to pull from doesn’t hurt, either.

Now, while this was pretty darned cool, it did make me think of something that was… not so cool.

I have a Windows Media Center Extender right there, just to the right of the Wii in the picture. And the whole point of the Media Center Extender is to do exactly this sort of thing. So why wasn’t I using it?

Well, the short answer is because it’s too slow, too hard, and it doesn’t work with the streaming radio stations I like. The Media Center Extender takes a long time to boot up (longer than my netbook), the interface is slow and clunky, the remote control is awful, trying to enter text is an exercise in frustration, and getting streaming radio to work on it is… well let’s just say “not easy” and leave it at that. You need to add special add-ins to the Media Center PC (not the Extender), which of course must be downloaded, installed, set up in advance, etc. In the end, it’s just not worth the effort.

(In it’s defense, I don’t think the Media Center Extender was ever meant to work with streaming radio from the Internet – it was meant to stream music from a local Media Center PC instead… but really, if it can do that, it should be able to do both. But I digress…)

Anyway, despite the failings of the Windows Media Center Extender, listening to streaming music in my home while I clean is pretty darned neat.

The future is pretty awesome. I love living in the future!

Recently someone asked me why I don’t have a Facebook account.

The simplest answer I could come up with was that I simply don’t need it – for me, Facebook is redundant.

The person who asked me tried to tell me how great Facebook was, and how you could do so many things with it, like connecting with friends, keeping up-to-date on what you’re doing, and easily share photos (among other things).

But the thing is… I can already do all of those things without Facebook. So what’s the point? Where’s the benefit for me?

I mean, look at it this way:

• I own my own domain and have my own website.
• I have and maintain my own blog, which means I have total control over every aspect of it (appearance, function, etc.) and to which people can “subscribe” using the RSS feed (an open standard).
• For sharing pictures, I have a Flickr Pro account. Because Flickr is dedicated to sharing photos, it does a really good job of it.
• For messaging, I have IM and Twitter and of course email.
• For people trying to find me, I have a Google Profile (and of course I am not a hard person to find – one of the advantages of having a very unique name!).

(There’s also the fact that I consider Facebook – and all similar sites – as being the modern reincarnations of  the crappy websites that populated Geocities back in the early days of the web.)

So really, Facebook offers no compelling advantages for me – no real reason for me to use it. Everything it can do, I can already do without having to sign up for yet another online account.

Excitement! Adventure! Really wild things! Firefox 3.5 is officially released today!

I’m quite excited about this new release – this is, quite frankly, a really big release for Firefox that includes a lot of really cool, neat things, including (but not limited to):

• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags (including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio) – this means Firefox 3.5 can display video and audio natively in the browser, without the need for plugins like Flash or Quicktime. (Sweet!)
• Private browsing mode
• Much improved JavaScript performance thanks to a new JavaScript engine (which means websites that use JavaScript a lot – like GMail and other “web apps” – will run faster!)
• Location-aware browsing (handy for searching for things “nearby”)
• Faster rendering of web pages (always nice)
• Web worker threads (use that fancy dual-core CPU to make your browsing experience faster than ever!)
• A whole bunch of new support for web technologies like downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, and a whole bunch more

If you want to see everything that’s new, just check out the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes.

If you haven’t started using Firefox yet, now’s a great time to switch! Firefox is fast, safe, easy-to-use, and totally customizable – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as there’s a whole bunch of other reasons to switch.

So what are you waiting for? Get Firefox 3.5 right now and be part of the future of the web!

Back in the old days, your signature (or “.sig”) was a statement about who you are – and in some places (such as forums like Slashdot), it’s still used for that purpose. (In a way, it’s like having an electronic bumper sticker!)

Recently though, I’ve been thinking about signatures, and whether or not they were still useful in the context of email – specifically in the context of business emails. I mean, really, when was the last time you actually found someone’s email signature useful?

I’m talking, of course, about those huge, obnoxious, totally unnecessary email signatures that seem to be the norm nowadays. The ones that contain pictures, six different phone numbers, an email address (often a different one than the one in the email itself!), a picture, a long title & company name, colors, pictures, flashing lights… okay, maybe that last one was made up.

I’m much more old-school in my opinion of what a signature should be, mostly in the fact that I don’t think an email signature should have any formatting at all – it should be plain text only. I also think that shorter is better. I think 3-4 lines is about the max you’d want – any longer than that and your signature starts being significantly larger than most of the emails you’re sending!

Really, all your email signature should be is:

• Your name
• Your company name
• Your phone number

Why is that? Because:

• I already have your email address (or else how would I be seeing your email??)
• I already have your web address, by virtue of your email address (we’re talking about “business” signatures here, so I’ll assume you’re not using Gmail or Hotmail or something like that, and that your email address’s domain name is the same as your web site’s domain name)
• If you’ve got other methods of contact (IM, Twitter, blog, whatever), then you can just tell me those in the body of your email. There’s no need to repeat them to every single person you send email to.
• Any flashy graphics or pictures just distracts from your message, and in all likelihood will not look right for at least some people (so why take the chance?)

While some people think of their email signature as being like their business card, I think that comparison is a little off for one major reason: people don’t have to look at your business card every single time you talk to them. On the other hand, they do have to look at your email signature every time you send them an email. So it’s important not to overdo it. After all, “less is more,” and simple is always tasteful.

The alternative – for those that feel that they absolutely must give out all of their contact information at once – is to have a signature you use when you first email someone, and then a smaller signature (or none at all!) for follow-up emails after the fact. The problem with this is that you’ll forget, and eventually you’ll just fall back to sending the big signature to everyone.

I think of an email signature as being like “fine print” – the less of it there is, the better. And conversely, the more of it there is, the more… formal, harsh, corporate, and impersonal your email will sound.

There’s another aspect of email signatures as well – the closing line.

Some people include a closing line in the signature block that their email client auto-attaches to every email – which I find annoying, since every single email from them has the same “yours truly” or whatever attached to it and it sounds like I’m talking to a robot.

People who add closing lines like “yours truly” or “sincerely” tend to come from the world before email – that is, the world of physical letters & correspondence. Email is not a direct replacement for old-fashioned mail (for better or worse), and I think it’s inappropriate to try to “force” things that were meant for a different medium onto email.

Although I do sometimes like to close my emails with outrageously formal and archaic closing lines, just for fun – I have been known to use “I have the honor to remain / Most Sincerely Yours.” But that’s for special occasions, not for everyday use.

Other people will close emails with less formal, more casual phrases, such as “ciao” or “cheers,” perhaps hoping to lend a little “international” flavor to their message. My opinion on these sorts of closing phrases is mixed – they tend to be hit or miss, depending on the context.

For myself, as I’ve said, I’m quite old-school, so my emails end quite simply. If I want to use my name (rare), I’ll simply write:

-Keith

Often with no closing line at all. As for my signature, that is just my name, company, and phone number. (My personal signature is equally short – just the tagline of my blog, my blog’s address, and a URL to my PGP public key).

In the end, people who try to make their email signature be more than it really is are just deluding themselves and annoying others.

For more on the do’s and don’ts of email signatures, check out these two articles:

• What does your E-Mail Signature Say About You?
• Email Signature Etiquette – Too Much Flair?

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that there are certain sub-industries where you can’t get around the need for an obnoxious email signature – where they may be mandated by law (or almost mandated by law). Take, for example, lawyers in the U.S. They have some of the longest signatures you’ll ever see – full of disclaimers, legal references, and so forth. Ernie the Attorney has a two great posts on these uber-long email signatures over at his blog which is well worth reading – even if you’re not an attorney (but are in an industry that has mandated email signature laws).