Is Our Concept Of "The World" Coming To An End?

The title of this post is really for shock value... but it came from this:

I figure if Twitter is having issues on a Friday... it must mean the world is in true peril!


Jokes aside, the importance of electronic communication in our society is not even a question anymore... it's a given. So what happens when these tools are unavailable or we aren't able to access them? Well, the world as we know it practically falls apart. This is very apparently in my office, where if/when the network goes down, nearly everyone in the office says "I guess I'll go home and hopefully the network will be up later so I can finish my work". THAT'S how dependent we are on technology!


And thats's just a single server.... when the power goes out the world practically stops. Heck, when we had that huge power outage a few years back we couldn't even pump gas to put it in our cars!


Either way, I'm on a tangent here (surprise, surprise). These tools do make us more interconnected (and therefore more vulnerable), but I came across this excellent video from TED where Jane McGonigal is trying to convince the crowd about how Gaming can actually change the world as we know it.


Take a peek and tell me what you think. I think it's a stretch to say gaming can save the world, but I think the novel idea here is "how can we organize the world to be more like a game... with targetted incentives and a constant sense of reward, even when the challenge is difficult and takes a long time to achieve?"


PS: She talks about World of Warcraft a lot... so check out the title link for a peek into my WoW life. :)

A Weekend Off The Grid Was Much Needed... Even If I Couldn't Wait To Get Back

It's official.

I have an internet addiction... ask my gf, she'll tell you. This is me after about 1.5 days without access:

Now, it's more like a Coffee addiction than say, hard drugs, but it's an addiction nonetheless. I spent the weekend at my lady's parents house eating delicious food and playing with their new puppy (who is adorable), but in order to get the great scenery and sounds of the great outdoors, I was confined to only having dial up internet access. I must admit it was a great throwback (my gf and I had a good debate on the merits of ICQ... but eventually decided we didn't need to redownload it for nostalic purposes!)

I did manage to survive it all, and I have about 5lbs worth of extra weight to prove there are other unhealthy things that I could replace my internet use with... but for now, I'll stick with the highspeed!

If I was less of a procrastinator I wouldn't need technology... but alas, I am.

I've gotten myself pretty backlogged (in both work and personal life) over the last few weeks, and I have no one to blame but myself. Luckily for me, I've has a great week technology wise and I should be able to use my "electronic crutches" to help me get back on track!

On Thursday I brought in my work computer to get the external backup software looked at. Luckily for me, the gentleman working on it was extremely helpful. He realized almost right away that my duocore laptop was somehow set to only work on one processor! To be honest, I had no idea that could even be done... I knew that software may not take advantage of the duocore, but the processor was literally working at half capacity. I was annoyed that i didn't know to look for this myself, but frankly I was ecstatic that my poor little HP had hope of running faster than molasses on a cold day in Quebec... and this was just the beginning!


 Friday I did manage to upgrade to Office 2007 which is a VERY welcome change to my work technology experience. I'm still waiting on my license for OneNote 2007, but that should be ready to go when I get in tomorrow morning. These new software packages alone are going to make my life substantially better and easier to keep myself organized. As to why I'm upgrading to 2007 software in mid 2010, I think I've already covered the issues with large corporate systems in a previous post.

As I sit here now, its a dreary Sunday afternoon, so it's not so bad that I've let my work week creep into my weekend. I'm sure my weekend has creeped into my work week someone, hence the backlog situation I'm in now. My current task is to organized a multi-tiered project across a number of organizations. For this I wanted to create a fancy timeline I could share with people, but honestly after some searching I couldn't find something that suited my needs. I found tons of templates based in Excel or Word, but frankly, I can put one of those together easily. I also found some really awesome looking web-based timelines like this (but this would not allow me to include sensitive information in the timeline as its outside the company firewall), as well as some software based packages, both free and paid (I almost shelled out the 50 bucks!). To be honest, I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, so maybe it doesn't exist!

After wasting a couple hours doing that, I realized that I really just needed a simple project management package similar to Microsoft project, but without all of the bells/whistles/costs. Creating/managing a simple task chart was all I needed. I'll save the whole story, but I looked through a bunch of options including Gantt Project, but after downloading and trying it out, I realized its export features were too limited for my liking. I eventually settled with Openproj, which is probably way to powerful/complex for what I need, but it seems fairly intuitive, and its license allows anyone to use it for personal or business use so it's safe from any "not for commercial use" warnings. It still doesn't have perfect Excel export features, but I can at least get the task list and key dates copied over to Excel to share with colleagues.

Most importantly though, it should help me keep all of my various project tasks organized.

I'm hoping that by this upcoming weekend I'll have my work life fully organized via OneNote, so I'll likely have some opinions to share on that. :)

Last.fm is pretty cool if your are an audiophile... could use a better UI

I signed up for Last.fm today and I've been pretty impressed so far in terms of music selection. 

Think of lastfm like a mashup of Facebook and MySpace music profiles. As you may or may not know, management at MySpace has been shifting around (read leaving) quite a bit lately, so that could potentially help people make the switch from MySpace... we can only hope.

Either way, it was easy to set up lastfm and import my library, but i must say I think the user experience leaves one wanting. I downloaded the built in tool (with a cool name like Scrobbler who could resist?) and it automatically shares my itunes playlists with my profile... easy! However I wish it there was a button to just "play all" from an album instead of having to listen to the radio channel... maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but when I look up Dr. Dre and I want to listen to a certain album, thats pretty much what I'm there for.

I also don't like how when you leave the radio station on it automatically adds the songs to you last played, even if you skip it.... maybe this is just something I need to turn off. :p

Anyways, overall it's a pretty cool site and a great way to expand your musical horizon

ps: My gf just decided she's going to start her own blog, she just needs a topic... more to come on that!

When Your New Shirt Doesn't Fit... Just Go Back To Bed (Attempt 2)

**Warning- This is a total nerd rage post. :)**

I should have known today was going to be a doozy… I woke up to try on my brand new shirt from Burlington Coat Factory (a steal at $9.98 I thought) only to find out I grabbed the wrong size… way to go Tyhurst.

I brushed it off, as it was only 10 bucks, plus I was able to get some sweet deals on some sandals, a belt, and a shower bag that are working for me just perfectly! I then headed off to work and my training session first thing in the morning everything was running smoothly. The guy giving the training, a sales guy turned IT department kind of fellow, commented on how unusual it was to have no technical difficulties at all for a training session such as this.

So, picture this… it’s 8am, your shirt didn’t fit, and your meeting is about to start without IT difficulties… trust me, this had bad omen written all over it.

I continued on through my day messaging my gf via text message and updating my twitter. Of course, I wasn’t getting many responses today because my gf had a big exam, so I knew she was focused on that. Most of the day at work went off without a hitch… another indication of awful things to come!! :p

Eventually I get back to the hotel after a quick break for lunch and then I realize that the internet isn’t working NOR are my texts/tweets going out from my cell. Not a big deal, I’ll do some work offline and then hopefully the net will come back up. Did that till about 8pm… still no dice.

This is when the story started going downhill. I hadn’t heard from my gf and I wasn’t able to check Facebook so I figured I’d shell out the $3 for the international call on my cell phone to give her a call and check in. Sure enough, she was still alive, but as I was on the cell phone clock, we didn’t get a chance to talk long.

So, I head out to dinner to try this Brazillian steak place (www.boinabraza.com). I had been by this place on several occasions on my previous trips to Cincinnati, but I had never went in to try it. I finally decided to take the plunge, but to be honest, I wasn’t ready for the bill I was about to get. I got the special, which was absolutely delicious, I had some lamb, some filet mignon, some breaded parmesan pork loins, as well as a large salad with mashed potatoes. The food and service was great, but so was the bill… let’s just say this one will have come out of the Tyhurst personal budget and not the travel budget… and I’m not going back for a while. lol

So dinner was bittersweet, but it continued to get worse as I came back to the hotel… I asked the front desk about the internet situation… no change.

They gave me a code to use in the “business center” aka The Closet with 5 computers attached to credit card readers that doesn’t have any climate control. I fumbled with the code for about 5 minutes, but it was clear that the number of digits on the tag I was given did not match the number of digits I had to enter to get internet access! The gentleman beside me was equally confused so I decided to ask the front desk for help. Of course they gave us the wrong codes so once they sorted that out we were good to go. I only had 15 minutes of time (how ghetto) so I quickly checked my facebook and decided I’d use the rest of the time to write a blog post about how I can’t live without the internet and my smartphone (This was attempt 1). Wouldn’t it be my luck that as soon as I go to publish it (3 minutes still remaining on the clock), the internet on those computers conked out and I lost my post. At that point I said “screw this” and stomped upstairs irritated as hell.

Luckily for me, I have an amazing gf who always knows how to take my mind of things. We spent an hour debating the merits of statistics courses at the masters level (trust me, this was not the best choice of debates), but it served the purpose nonetheless. Then, when I realized my mistake of focusing on the stats thing too much, we had a good discussion on social policy relating to the homeless. Again, probably not the greatest topic, but I don’t think either of us thought about stats during this time. :D

I began writing Attempt 2 of this blog post in a word document, but as it stands it’s 11:47pm, my internet is back on, and I have to get up at 4:30am in order to catch my plane.

SO, the only thing left to do is publish this bad boy, go to sleep, and hope that the shirt I put on tomorrow fits, because if it doesn’t, I’m just going to go back to bed.