Nontrivial Exercises

America’s Telecommunications Network Outages: Fewer But More Severe

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the downtime trends in America’s telecommunications network. (The Journal is running a week of free on-line access this week, so you can see it for a couple more days for free; then it will only be viewable with a subscription).

The authors, Jesse Drucker and Amy Schatz, highlight results of a report compiled by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, which looked at the performance of our communication networks in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The data shows that the number of outages – or instances that a significant portion of phone service was unavailable to users – has been steadily decreasing over the past 4 years. However, the average duration of each outage instance has been increasing.

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Import the Dallas Mavericks Schedule to Outlook

I’m excited about the start of this NBA season, and especially about my Dallas Mavericks. This is a very intriguing team, with several unique players, not the least of which is Dirk Nowitzki, an interesting study of a player learning to use and further develop his significant talent.

The NBA is offering something unique as well for fans to keep up with their teams’ schedules. If you’re interested in keeping track of the Mavericks – or any other NBA team for that matter – NBA.com has made it fairly easy to add a team’s schedule to Outlook. I don’t know if this has been available in the past or not, but I think this is a great way to help connect fans with their teams schedules without having to keep referring to the refrigerator magnet or tri-fold pocket schedule.

Here’s how to get it set-up:

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My Quest for Electronic Magazine Reading - Part 1

One very natural use of tablet PC’s is the way you can read traditionally paper media in a comfortable format of a slate tablet, or a convertible in slate mode. eBooks are growing in popularity, with several selections on Amazon available for download in electronic format. There are still not enough books in ebook format for me, though, as I did a quick search through my Amazon wish list and found only a couple of the titles available electronically.

Magazines are also exploring electronic delivery, though in various formats. Reading magazines electronically is much more productive for me, as it allows me to more quickly get to where I want to go, and to capture any articles or sections that I want to keep – either via printing to a PDF or capturing to OneNote.

What appears to me to be the de facto and near-ubiquitous standard application for reading magazines in electronic format is Zinio Reader. The application is free, available for Windows and OSX, and the latest version has some added interface elements tailored for the tablet pc. You download the reader and then create an account that you can then link to electronic subscriptions to several top publications. [Note: Zinio offers some titles that are not exactly family friendly, and the Zinio home page displays the covers of these, though they don’t appear to be as explicit as they could be, just suggestive.]

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Branching out from Internet Explorer - I’m Trying Out Maxthon

Like many others, I have become frustrated with the limited user interface functionality in Internet Explorer. However, some pages on my company’s intranet require IE, as well as the new MindJet MindManager browser plugin, which uses ActiveX to display MindManager maps in your browser. Thus, I haven’t really wanted to switch to Firefox and have continued to use IE. However, today I started using Maxthon, a browser that uses the IE core browser engine but adds several features.

Since I have begun using MSN Desktop Search, which allows IE to support tabbed browsing, I have been able to keep using IE without having so many IE windows open. IE has still become somewhat “clunky” to use for me, though, and seems to be a resource hog without much pay back in terms of advanced features. I didn’t really have a choice, though, since I needed the IE functionality.

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T.C. Doyle Re-Thinks Tablet PC’s

T.C. Doyle, a contributor to VarBusiness magazine, writes an interesting editorial in this month’s edition of the magazine. I always enjoy reading Doyle’s thoughtful and witty back page commentaries, but this month he writes about how he has recently been confronted with some new thoughts and data that have changed his mind about a couple of IT-related points.

The first of those things he mentions is the market for the Tablet PC. After talking with Mark Simons, general manager of Toshiba America Information Systems, and with Brian Russell, VP of sales at Central Telecom, a solutions provider that sells Toshiba notebooks, he no longer thinks “that the tablet PC is an innovation in search of a purpose.”

Russell tells Doyle that 40% of his sales today come from tablet PC’s, and that could reach 70% next year. Another proof point:

After all, I’ve never see executives from the companies that make tablets actually using them themselves. And, as you know in IT, you can never fully trust a guy who won’t eat his own dog food. Turns out, Simons and his team at Toshiba are chowing down.

My Second Toshiba Support Experience - Still Decent

After going through my first Toshiba customer support experience, and being left with a machine that was not quite 100% functional, I decided I wasn’t going to accept that and I called back in to open a new support case. The end result is that I have an M200 that works very well now, but again it was not quite as smooth of a process as it should have been. I’ll give the chronology again below.

The issue with my M200 after being fixed the first time was that the tablet was not sensing the movement of the screen from laptop to slate mode and automatically changing the screen orientation.This became very annoying as I switched between laptop and tablet modes and had to manually adjust the screen orientation. In addition to that, however, it became clearer that the whole hinge and rotation of the screen was not as solid as it used to be – it was pretty loose and there was a lot of “play” in it as it hinged and turned.

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