Buhjillions

Ars Technica has a review up of the iRex iLiad ebook reader. The Amazon Kindle got fairly positive reviews from the likes of David Pogue of the NY Times, and the Ars review is pretty positive on this one as well. Has the time finally come for ebooks?

For one thing, the technology has finally stood a fighting chance with what it’s up against: real books. This was the much decried problem with ebooks from bygone days–it was just too damn uncomfortable to read any significant amount of text. The resolution was too low, as was the contrast ratio. There was the glare and the problem of short battery life. The now-famous (in some circles, anyway) eInk technology has now come down in price and performance to put in a handheld. They ain’t cheap, but within the reach of early adopters and people with lots of disposable income.

The inexcusable flaw in the Amazon Kindle, as far as I’m concerned, is the inability to display documents without some crazy-ass conversion process on their end. As far as I understand, you can’t get it to display ordinary PDF files.

As a scientist, I download and read journal articles pretty often. They come in PDF and I print them off to read them. That’s one of the reasons why the iLiad is so exciting–I wish I had £449 to drop on one, but I don’t. It will display “anything you can print from your PC.” So all my papers, as well as documents I’m working on, could go with me in one tiny package. Bonus is the fact that it has an integrated Wacom drawing tablet, which lets you mark up documents just like real paper (well, almost: you’re limited to black ink). If only I could get digital copies of Horowitz & Hill’s The Art of Electronics and Sakurai’s Modern Quantum Mechanics I’d be all set.

I’m hopeful that other electronics manufacturers take notice and drive the price of these babies down so I can pick one up in a year or two.

iRex Website

Sure, email is an easy way to send important information out to a large number of people. It’s almost too easy, and many people’s definition of “important” borders on ridiculous. The marginal cost in computing resources and effort to reach additional people is so tiny, it can be neglected in any reasonably sized organization. In many cases, targeting a specific subset of an organization is significantly harder than blasting everyone. For this reason (among several others) everyone gets too much email in the sense that the majority of it is either straight up spam, “important” information that we’re not interested in, or poorly targeted emails which don’t apply to us. I get tons of the latter at The Department, “To all Post-doctoral Research Staff,” (I’m a grad student; you’d think they’d have separate lists).

It’s easy to get overzealous in clearing your inbox when you come back from an afternoon away from your desk. I’m very good about reading my email, but enough is enough. Anything with that stupid red exclamation point or the capitalized words IMPORTANT or PLEASE READ in the subject line is on its way to the Deleted Items folder faster than my average ping to icanhascheezburger.com. There are people who let emails sit unread and undeleted in their inbox for days, nay weeks. Which brings me, finally to my thesis:

You can’t depend on email to convey critical information, especially if it is time sensitive.

Yes, email is easy. Yes, finding other ways of communicating with your fellow humans feels so 1989. But email is a congested medium and people find that a lot of it just wastes their time. Don’t blame your users for this! The solution is not to tell them they need to pay more attention to their email. The solution is for you to pay more attention to them. Take a multi-pronged approach which is appropriate to your organization. Are there noticeboards? Information screens? Put notes in people’s mailboxes, or post extremely critical information on the door as they walk in. Like this guy:

This, on the door to our office, got my attention. They were going to shut down the power the next day–would I have seen the email in time? Maybe. Would I have realized it meant me before deleting it? Maybe. Alan in building services, well done.

Sometimes low-tech is better than high-tech.

Further to my previous post about Humanized Enso, I’ll pass on the word that Humanized have decided to make Enso free.  That was nice of them!  Now stop reading this and give it a try.

Can I just say that among my email pet peeves (and believe me, they are numerous) is when anti-virus software appends a message to outgoing mail, along the lines of:

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.20/1259 – Release Date: 4/02/2008

I copied this from a friend’s email, I won’t say whom. Remember, this is the sender’s computer which is appending this message. If my friend’s computer were infected with a nasty virus, which was spreading itself by sending email unbeknown to him, the virus could very easily add a similar tidbit to the end. Rationally, seeing such a message at the end of the email should in no way affect my confidence about whether or not this email contains a virus. It’s the equivalent of writing “This is not a mail-bomb,” on the front of every package you send.

I’m often confused, and usually amused when people say they don’t have and don’t want a mobile phone. My mom is one of these people, but I’m not confused by her reasoning. It seems a bit dismissive to say, but really, she doesn’t get out much. I don’t mean this in a she’s-out-of-touch-with-the-world way, she just isn’t really interested in traveling around. Home is her base of operations, she doesn’t have time to chat while she’s at work, and she’d rather visit her friends than talk on the phone. She’s no Luddite, either: she’s perfectly happy to bust out Skype to call her sisters, or chat with them on IM. She’s simply ambivalent on mobile phones.

No, I’m primarily referring to people who are too cool for mobile phones. They don’t have one and are proud of it. “I just couldn’t stand to be that reachable all the time,” they say. “Sometimes I don’t want people to be able to get a hold of me.” There is something charming about being old fashioned; insisting that the music from the 70s is way better than any of the crap they put out today and even having an honest-to-God turntable to play your vinyl on. One guy I work with says he likes the idea of actually planning things ahead with people, like when and where to meet up, and not being able to change it at the last minute.

(Photo by Ronrag, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 License)

What gets me is when people try to make up practical reasons for their (perfectly understandable) desire to be fashionably out of the mainstream. The fact is that having a mobile phone instead of a landline actually gives you more control over how reachable you are, not less. People don’t switch off their landlines. They could unplug them, but lets face it: that’s odd. People who call you will imagine horror-movie scenarios of you trapped in your house with a serial killer who has cut the power and telephone lines. No, to be “unreachable” with your landline, you have to leave your house. With my phone, no matter where I am, I push a button and I’m totally incommunicado on phone, text, and email. And I’m not afraid to do it, either. None of my friends need to worry about calling too late or too early, since my phone is off before I got to bed. It goes on silent when I’m enjoying a movie or spending time with my girlfriend. When I look at it later, my messages, texts and emails are patiently waiting for me. And if I get a call at an inopportune time, a quick dive into my pocket shuts it up. Contrast that with the telephone ringing in your house or office that you don’t want to answer: four rings until the answering machine gets it, loudly announcing the message to anyone within an earshot.

—–

“Heydude, what’s your mobile number?”

“Don’t have one.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty much too cool for that sort of thing.”

“You’re probably right.”

How hard was that?