Honestly, make your IT Consulting business better (and stress free)

“Sorry, I borked your system,” is a completely acceptable answer to a business manager or owner as long as it is followed up with, “You will be back working ASAP.”  The idea that you will be immediately replaced keeps IT in fear and leads to blaming anything from the new secretary to some mysterious virus and does not help the person you’re talking to perform her business any better.  Whether you have an existing relationship with your client or you are building a relationship with a new client, they will respect your honesty.  Hopefully you’ll never have to deliver this news, but you will.  If the client does decide to release you from your services, then it is a godsend as they are more than likely going to be a problem client down the road.  If you give this response repeatedly, then a good client will explain to you why they are bringing their business elsewhere with the same honesty and judgment that you have shown them; this will be a professional gauge for you that the job may be more than you are qualified to handle.  This is a tough pill to swallow and brings me to the next point of the need for honesty in IT.

Be honest with yourself first, then be honest with your client.  You have abilities and a grasp of Information Technology above and beyond the people you’re dealing with.  This is why they hired you.  The bad news is that you have shortcomings too.  Just because you understand subnets and can even set up user accounts does not automatically make you a SQL Database programming expert.  The worse news is that clients will not get this.  They see it all as your job because it deals with computers.  The worst news is that you don’t get it either.  You’ve set up a Database in Access, so this shouldn’t be a problem.  Right?  Hardly.  Assess yourself and be aware of your limitations.  As I used to tell singers, “Just because you know the words to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should sing it at an event.”  Stop and think about the opening of the last commencement you went to the next time someone asks, “Can you do it?”  Imagine Simon is asking you to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” for karaoke night.

“I don’t know” is also an acceptable answer as long as it is followed up with, “would you like me to research that?”  So many techs, so little room for all the egos in the room while changing a lightbulb.  I know too many people who are regarded as gods by their clients.  Just because you are asked a question, this does not require you to make up an answer just to have one.  I was once told by an employer, “If anyone asks if we can do it, say YES!”  While this is great for getting the blood pumping and the stress levels up towards the deadline, it sets unrealistic goals for you and the person who contracted you is making business plans based on your answer in that moment.  Research the issue and be sure to get back to the client with your progress.  If you’ve established this honesty as a relationship, then that client will not be going anywhere while you’re researching.  This is especially important when you are just starting out and eager to get business.  When you promise a product or service and cannot produce it on time or perform it at a sub-par level, the bad words come out…    and they come out really loud…    and more people hear it.

Don’t actually use the word “honest” when talking to your clients, you will sound like a used car salesman.  Businesses are always on “the sell,” which means they are selling as much as they can to their clients.  They will be expecting the same from you when you first put your foot through the threshold, so don’t think that you’re clever sneaking in for a computer cleaning and then trying to

 

Google Docs survey

I’ve never really used Google docs to its full extent, but I’m slowly but surely getting around to the features that everyone else already probably knows about.

Today, I am testing the survey and form feature for a one-off Excel class I have to teach.  I would like feedback from the class participants and I found this while trying to upload materials for the class.

So….
Loading…
…but you’ll need to be invited.

 

Would you give me 3 million dollars? Please?

June 12, 2008

Click here for the quick link to send an email to Louisiana congress about the Senate’s three-hundred percent pay raise.

I’m not joking The Louisiana Senate just passed SB672 which TRIPLES their annual pay. Think about the last time you got a raise. Three percent? Ten percent? No percent because times are hard and the company can’t afford it with the rising gas prices, rising bread prices (the lower production of wheat in favor of Ethanol producing corn drives prices up without the oil crisis), less revenue because of lower cost competition (due to the outsourcing of services to foreign countries or illegal workers), etc? We’re talking THREE HUNDRED PERCENT here people. The average Louisiana worker’s pay is $37,946. This is one time I wish I was average (I’m a teacher, what can I say). The average pay tripled is $113,838, and before you run to your trusty “Little Professor” calculator, the difference is $75,892. For 39 senators that’s right at 3 million dollars MORE a year total if they were an average Louisiana worker. The actual figures of what it would cost us tax paying citizens is estimated at over 5 million dollars annually.

The senate knows that we have a new and hopeful Governor in office with a lot of good ideas for the state, but he needs the help of the Senate to pass the bills in order to even get to his desk for approval. If Bobby Jindal does not approve this raise, the Senate could stall his proposals and therefore he will have to “play ball” the old Louisiana way. This is borderline extortion, or racketeering (remember what Edwin Edwards went to jail for). A quote from the Advocate:”Asked if he had been threatened by lawmakers, Jindal said he would not discuss private conversations with legislators.” In Louisiana, this more than likely means “yes”.

“I don’t want to give anybody any excuse for slowing down any of the important reform going through the legislature (that are) important to the people of Louisiana,” — Bobby Jindal

You’re sitting there reading this thinking, “Yeah, but what can I do?” I thought about that too, which brings me to this email. We can do what Bobby Jindal cannot for betterment of the state. I know you people send on much more mundane chain letters than this, but now it’s time to use chain lettering for good. I have provided a link which will automatically address EVERY Representative in the House and every Senator of Louisiana (the addresses are found at http://senate.legis.state.la.us/Senators/ByDistrict.asp and http://senate.legis.state.la.us/Senators/e-mail.asp if you wish to check). All you have to do is click on the link which will automatically compose an email to send them telling them that you do not want this passed. If you don’t like the text, feel free to change it, it’s your freedom of speech after all. Then, forward this to every person in your contact list and have them do the same. I’m going to step this up a bit: if you don’t have many people in your address book, then dig through your emails and find ten people who are tax paying Louisianians and send them this email requesting they do the same. If that doesn’t sound enticing enough, I can make it sound like a chain letter for you:

Send this to ten people or you will lose 5.34 million dollars!

Click here for the quick link to send an email to Louisiana congress about the Senate’s three-hundred percent pay raise.

You may not get the 5.36 million dollars for forwarding this, but the spouse of a Fireman or a Police officer who has died protecting you might. 5.34 million dollars may put Railroad Crossing lights where they’re needed. 5.34 million dollars may help supply Louisiana school children with materials to be competitive in the employment market. Or, if you just want to give 5.34 million dollars away, then I will happily provide you with my Paypal information to give me 5.34 million dollars. I would really like a hybrid car, but I can’t afford one.

It’s only a couple of clicks y’all. At most it may require some copy and pasting from the address, subject and body into your web based email (Yahoo mail, Gmail, etc.), but it’ll take no more than five minutes. That’s at least $1,000,000 a minute worth of time.

Put your powers of chain mailing to good use.

Sincerely,
Thad

For reference about this information, check out the Advocate at http://www.2theadvocate.com

…also, feel free to comment below after you’ve sent you mail and forwarded this on.

 

Brainsick or touched: Ubuntu Studio 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on a Sony Vaio VGN-nr160e

Ubuntu Studio 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on a Vaio VGN-nr160e:

Initial woes: no internet applications (other than Firefox 3 Beta), no office suite (at all),, no automount, no email or IM, no “Custom” radio button in Visual Effects…. oh, and we’re out of coffee.

I can understand the decision not to automount. The constant polling for automount devices makes Jackd jittery. I can understand if they decided to release Studio sans Visual effects, they’re more resource intensive than someone needing to do audio/video/graphics work should need, but this was a Compiz/Ubuntu problem. Compiz is actually installed, but I don’t think the manager was.  It took me a while to find out that it has its own icon in System->Preferences cleverly named “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings”. I was just used to finding it in the Visual Effects tab of “Appearance”. I’m happy again. I can do some light recording and wow onlookers at my eye-candy desktop (before anyone trolls this: I do like Enlightenment, but E-17 is too jumpy for my taste. I run E-16 on my production box)

Initial weirdness: wireless works, but there’s no activity light. The range seems to have improved considerably, but I’ll have to test it more over time. I can now access my wireless from my back patio… errrrr… I mean office (before I had to be halfway down the hall to my office in order to get signal). The package manager said that Network Manager was already the newest version, but it took a reboot before the panel icon would show up. I no longer have to type in my keyring password twelve times to get WPA authentication. After all this was said and done, I was excited again. When I got to work and booted up, I discovered the AP and was immediately on the network. I was soon wracked with despair and was going to sail my laptop into the pond when the internet stopped responding, then I discovered that my boss unplugged the uplink (yes, on purpose).

Less weirdness as this hasn’t changed from Gutsy: [Fn] + Volume keys and mute key works, but there is no nice on screen notification as there was in 7.10 (note: later, it has magickally reappeared I think maybe it had something to do with compiz… but I dunno). [Fn] + Brightness still does not work. Plugging the headphones in does not turn off the built in speakers (again, as it did in 7.10). There is a conf file fix for this which I’ll get to below. The mic works. Last time I had to manually build alsa and then edit a .conf file, but it worked perfect after that. I’ll track the steps.

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

I had to do this in 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon which will work if you have that version, but is unneccessary as Hardy already has this alsa version built in (alsa-1.0.15). There’s already a bit too much betaware in 8.04 for my fancy and I’m even usually the “bleeding edge” kinda geek. Alsa version 1.0.16 is out. It has been out. I compiled it two months ago onto this very laptop. Why is Hardy shipping with 1.0.15?

So, I tried this:

cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

and get the string for the card model (in my case ALC262):

Codec: Realtek ALC262

Codec: Conexant ID 2c06

…then went to
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3796486#post3796486
and matched it with one of the headings (in my case ALC262):

ALC262
fujitsu Fujitsu Laptop
hp-bpc HP xw4400/6400/8400/9400 laptops
hp-bpc-d7000 HP BPC D7000
benq Benq ED8
benq-t31 Benq T31
hippo Hippo (ATI) with jack detection, Sony UX-90s
hippo_1 Hippo (Benq) with jack detection
sony-assamd Sony ASSAMD
basic fixed pin assignment w/o SPDIF
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)

the leading bold line on the list should be put into your modprobe configuration file by editing the respective file using gedit, nano, or vim. For the copy/pasters:

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

or

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.conf

There should only be one or the other, and if you’re using 8.04, then you’re going to want the prior with /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. Last time around (this time as well), I had to add:

options snd-hda-intel model=sony-assamd

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

…as a side note, I tried (unsuccessfully) adding:

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio

to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. If you have some other model, then you may try this, but YMMV.

I Added the following @audio lines to /etc/security/limits.conf
@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock 1024000
@audio - nice -19

# End of file

NOTE: USING THE MEMLOCK SETTING LISTED HERE WITH YOUR SYSTEM WILL LOCK UP TO 1GB of your RAM. I do not know what will happen if you attempt to lock the memory and you DO NOT have the memory available. I’ve got 2GB of RAM in my system which is plenty for the OS, desktop and the audio applications to run and still lock up that much RAM. You may want to adjust this number accordingly

@audio is for the group that your user account should belong to. I apparently belonged to the group, but there was no “audio” group…. weeeeeiiiiird. So, I added audio in System -> Administration -> Users and Groups then added my username to the group. The last parts of this conf settings means: Real time priority, maximum memory to lock, and default nice level. The lower the nice number is, the better, but -19 is as low as you can get with a nice setting.

Then I started getting
late driver wakeup: nframes to process = 1024.
late driver wakeup: nframes to process = 1024.
…over and over again. I figured out that this number is directly equal to double the “frames/period” setting.
This may have been happening before, but I’ve just turned on Verbose messaging. I swear this worked once, and only once. I was even playing my keyboard through Qsynth… Chop stix off of vkeyboard using the “z x c v b n m ,” and “.” keys. …regardless.

time to try compiling alsa from source:
install the kernel-headers and glibc-devel

sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses-dev gettext linux-headers-`uname -r`

I downloaded the alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages, then

sudo tar xjf alsa-driver*.bz2

sudo tar xjf alsa-lib*.tar.bz2

sudo tar xjf alsa-utils*.tar.bz2

I ran the following on each:

./configure

make

sudo make install

…and lastly reboot.

got the previous from:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

where it also says to:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

…but this may not need to be done. My alsamixer and alsaconf already worked just fine. Now, I’ve got a really strange “problem”. When I run jackd on my Intel built-in card, I’m getting soft xruns for days and a lot of hard xruns with the same “late driver wakeup” errors filling up the message log as above (I guess computers are sleeping late like their owners), but Qsynth and my Maudio keyboard are not producing jittering or crunchy sounds. The output sounds actually normal. Of course, I haven’t put the system under stress yet, and I grew tired of troubleshooting the built in card so I grabbed my FastTrack USB box to try it. It works fantastic with no xruns yet. I apologize for any previous comments in the forums about throwing this at the next Mac user I see. I even have the latency down to 8ms running it at a sampling rate of 96000. I’m done with the audio for now.

Next issue: video. Miro works! Unless I’m using the desktop cube that is. then it looks like a crashed Windows computer without the words “Fatal Exception error at XXXXXXXX”. Just blue. Sound comes out, but it’s like I’m watching the Phantom Menace before any CG frames get added… blue. I hear Patrick Norton from Sysm, but the screen is like my jewels on my Junior Prom night…

…hopefully, you get the idea. The Totem Player works, MPlayer works, VLC media player works, PiTiVi even works (PiTiVi never worked for my Gutsy install)! Now I just have to go grab Cinelerra and Jahshaka to see if they’ll compile or break my system.

My webcams are still a no-go. I’ve got a glimmer of hope in the future purchase dept…. I see that the Cliquecam HUE comes with drivers for Linux kernels 2.6 and up. I just don’t think I can afford to shuck out 80 bucks for something that I can’t find a real review on. Everything I find about it is pre-release PR or people citing the PR, Engadget and GeekBrief rehashing the specs in a humorous or cute way. Has anyone in consumerland actually plugged one of these into a USB port yet? Side note: it does find the USB audio device on my Micro Innovations webcam, but no video driver. Video Skyping is out of the question for daddy nobucks still.

Burnt like the last forgotten hot dog on Labor Day. Oh well, more later…

 

We’re off to see the Heron, the Hardiful Heron of Oggz

Things in life that I love:

Xiomara

Free Beer

Free Speech

Free Operating systems (and along those lines…)

The new Ubuntu ad campaign. It looks so…. professional. Almost in a bad way that I had a knee jerk reaction to close the window because there is no way that an open source project is going to “dazzle” their fans. Yeah right. “All operating systems include stuff you’ll never use. For example Ubuntu 8.04 LTS includes a simple uninstall feature. We know- completely redundant.” This comes across the screen in a flash animation (unexpected as I was on the site yesterday) finishing the presentation with a nice button to Download the OS ISO. I’m lolzing around giddy as a school girl. My little operating system that could is growing up and becoming a blossoming flower.

Okay, so it’s been grown up for a while and like the system administrators of the world (Windows, Mac, and Linux alike) it’s probably a bit more irreverent than some people are willing to accept with the office door open and people standing around outside. You’ve got to hand it to the Ubuntu community: the last few releases have progressed far beyond most expectations. Luckily for me on this bandwidth impaired day while people everywhere are downloading this new OS, I only have to upgrade.

Yes, I’m already using Ubuntu 7.10 with a couple of components which are probably in the new release, so this will save me from having to wait for the download of the whole ISO file just right now and just install what I need instead. I’m doing this now. There is this nice little applet which is performing my upgrade for me. This is also unexpected. I was waiting for everything to be handled through the package manager (as it has in my past experiences). It’s just disabled my third party repos and is setting up new software channels. I’m writing this on the same computer as I’m upgrading. I’m anxious to see a couple of things: 1. if the Network Manager has been re-vamped. Since the last couple of updates, it’s been working at a bit longer wireless ranges and has not been asking me two and three times for the WPA keys (which are supposed to be stored in the keyring anyway so I’m not supposed to be re-typing them at all). 2. if any of my webcams will work. I haven’t gotten my inexpensive hardware to operate as of yet. …and 3. I want to see if this is going to properly upgrade my kernel. I am actually using Ubuntu Studio with the modded real time kernel, but this upgrade is still telling me it’s available.

Well, I’ve hit a bit of a snag… the upgrade needs 2GB free on the / partition and, well… I don’t have it. I emptied the trash and ran sudo apt-get clean as suggested, but the short truth is this: I don’t partition my / that big to begin with. I think they left out those of us who’ve been using Unix for a while and like to tune up our drives with separate partitions for different mount points. Oh well. I was preparing for that JIC and I’ve already started downloading the ISO DVD for Ubuntu Studio using jigdo. I think I’m going to bed now and let that finish up. I’ll post here how the whole process went. Hopefully on a spank-me new Ubu system.

Peas.

Pseudo related sidenote: to mount an iso image directly in linux:

make a directory like:

mkdir /media/iso

…then mount that bastard with an “O” face (and switch):

sudo mount -o loop /blah/blah/blah/cdOrDvdImage.iso /media/iso

et voila! Smokin!

 

Take a deep breath… then get spammed

I don’t like my diet right now, but I really don’t like spam.  I’ve recently found out that there is a particular name for the unsolicited messages on my favorite VoIP program:  Skam (it’s okay to capitalize the “S” for Skam, just not spam).  I really don’t like it because it’s getting worse.  So, for more than 100 billion minutes served to the Free Talking people of Skype all we get in return for this statistic is zero support, zero acknowledgement that this is a problem, and zero assurances that anything will be done.  Add those three zeroes to the number of minutes used by Skypers and that’s 100 trillion, which is coincidentally the number of times ebay has turned something golden and useful into something seedy and underhanded by not proactively nurturing the supporting community.

So, the spam messages I was recieving undoubtedly wanted me to “chat” with some sexy French waif or watch a Russian “babe” insert things into nefarious places, but would have most definitely redirected me to their website had I wanted to see these things in the first place (and I must admit, it did peak my interest with the Russian, but I resist temptation well…    well usually).  So, to remedy this upsurge of unsolicited usurpage, I denied all messages from anyone not on my list, which is something that I don’t want to have to do.  As the first person I know to start using VoIP, any of my IRL friends I have left by the time they discover internet video conferencing may be looking for me.  I wouldn’t want them to feel unwelcome in my message window.  Also, most of them have not the patience to set up a profile, so even when they do try to request to be on my contact list, I am going to deny them thinking that they are these same people who used to randomly send me Skam messages and are now sending me Skam contact requests.

…and one day I’m just going to unplug and walk away from all of this.

 

Software Removal Makes Me Nervous

So, I tell my PCLinuxOS office computer to run upgrades on all my software packages (which is probably very needed), but it wants to REMOVE a truckload of packages as well.  Most of them are the Beryl packages I worked so hard to configure in the first place.  Then it wants to remove the x11-driver-video-i810, which I don’t even think I’m using according to anything I can find by using “lsmod” or “lspci”, but…  (Optiplex GX270 btw).  However, Miro keeps crashing when I pause or stop a video and MPlayer needs updating, and…   ohhhh, so many things to list.

The short of this rant is…    if I don’t make it back here after the upgrades, please feed my digiguppy.

tj

 

Can you see me now? No? … o_0 … shit.

I’m far away from being a Linux developer, but I have been a Linux user for about 9 years now.  I’ve been just about exclusively using different distros of GNU/Linux for the last 4-5 years.  That being said, I’m feeling like a big noob right about now.

I’m still fighting with these frelling webcams!  I’ve got one Micro Innovations Zoom 2.0 (The model number on the bottom of the device is IC460C) and one cheap Chinese webcam that looks just like the Gnome Foot (which serendipitously came in as the same color as my laptop).   After some plugging and unplugging I can finally get the cameras to show up on the USB hub with `lsusb`, but no drivers are installed and no /dev/video0 is made.  This is driving me nuts.  I’ve been working on this for weeks downloading packages for V4L, V4L2, gspca, spca5xx, linux-uvc.  I’ve modprobed, plugged, unplugged, insmodded, ./configured, made, made installs…  still I get “could not connect to /dev/video0″  I gave my Microsoft LIfecam VX6000 a shot even though it’s not on the supported devices list either, but still, no-go.

Video cam support is critically lacking in Linux.  This was tolerable back in the day when webcams and webcammers fit into more of a hobbyist genre, by now they’re becoming norm and setting up webcams has got to get easier to implement for Janes and Joes to help spread GNU/Linux out of its own hobbyist circles.

TJ

 

Clean for a year. (Where do I get my MA pin?)

Hi, I’m TJ. It started for me a while back (queue squirly, wavy lines blurring into another scene that looks a lot like a really cool live music dive parking lot.)

2005, and I’m playing in a band called the Milk Carton Kids. Some fancrazed groupies rush us and ask us to sign their MySpace pages.

“Friends don’t let friends MySpace,” I respond, but more and more fancrazed groupies kept pushing on…

“Just try it once, you’ll like it.”

It came to the point that someone made a page for the band. Well, I had to lurk on the page, so I needed an account. Justification is how it all starts. Of course I knew about the other social networking sites, but I’m out of college, so no Facebook for me. Xiomara had set me up a Friendster account already, had added 8 people to my friends (which is all that I still have) and I never once checked it. Myspace seemed to be a little more band friendly and one could post more pictures than Friendster at that time, so WTF. I had little to no time to play on the internet as I was already neck deep in consulting work, but I said that I would try to spare some time in the evenings to take care of and nurture my friends list. Besides, I could get back into blogging (again with the justification).

Well, it exploded from there and people started finding me, I started finding people and the rush was on. Before I knew it, people were trying to add me who I didn’t know IRL, and I’d have to check them out before adding them or denying them (which garnered some hurt feelings from these people who I didn’t know and who are trying to look like K-Fed in their pics or bands who wanted to push sub-garage music into my playlist). I started making rules to clear the air:

Rule 1, “If I do not know you and you do not seem interesting, I am not adding you.”
Rule 2, “If I do know you, and your pictures or bio do not identify you so that I do not know who you are, then I do not know you.”
Rule 3, “If I do know you, and your pictures make you look like either biological parent of Britney’s children, I really must not know you that well. I will pretend not to know you.”
Rule 4, “If I do not like you IRL, why would I add you in Myspace? You do not know me. I do not know you.”

Then the “tweaking” habits became aggrivating (which led to more rules being created). Anything relating to MySpace that comes to your mind when I say “Tweaking” was probably aggrivating to me. People “Tweaking” their pages with no regard to style, color, epilepsy, or style (yes, I had to say it twice). The site itself which needed “Tweaking” due to the growing number of users, and causing pages to be “unavailable” with a “Sorry” message. People themselves “Tweaking” when I didn’t add them within a few hours.

Rule 5, “If I can’t read your page to find out who you are because of your color scheme, I am not going to find out if I know you.”
Rule 6, “If your page does not load within a minute because of a) Music you’ve put on your page b) videos you’ve put on your page, or c) massive amounts of Flickr photos you’ve put on your page, I’m reverting to the outcome of Rule 5.”
Rule 7, “If MySpace crashes when I go to check out your site, fate must be stepping in to tell me I don’t know you or you are not that interesting.”

When I started ignoring the bulletins from the friends who made it through the filters because of chain letters and other bullispam, I started to get shit in my comments. It had gotten to the point where I didn’t even want to get on my own page, and that’s bad as I’m a slightly narcissistic fuck. The aggrivation was mounting. Then a light dawned on me, “just quit.”

I started a new job, got new friends, real friends that I could touch and smack on the ass and yell, “Good Game!” I cleaned my image back up to an all time low. I’ve been clean now for year. How did I do it? Well, it helps that the content filter at work blocks myspace and all the proxy sites. Also, the predilection to do something productive with my life is overwhelming. Lastly, it makes people be on their best behaviour so that they can be the first person I add when I return to CrackSpace… …until they realize that I’m not going back anytime soon, and then they get pissy. I find that hilarious.

I’ll probably eat my words and fall off the bandwagon one day finding myself pressing the “Forgot my password” button, but for now I’m happy to be doing something with my life… …like blogging to the masses of people who will never read this, but hey, you don’t have to “become a member” to be here right.

–tj

Shameless plug (and techie joke): If you have Vista and want to support me click here.

 

Lining up the ducks

In this strange brain of mine, it’s hard to get things lined up in a very chronological order. Which is why I end up with a lot of half finished projects. I’m not going to call the “problem” I have “ADD”, I’m going to coin a new term here and now called…. uhmmmm, what was I saying? j/k, I’m calling it:

MAD! Multitasked Attention Disorder. (I’ve got five desktops for different tasks, two Firefox windows, and thriteen tabs open). Running wiki searches while typing here.

Luckily though, through my latest round of devotions to the Penguin, I’ve found some more tools to help me wrap my latest project around my brain instead of the other way around. Like that’s what I need, more tools to learn, keeping me from doing the things I need to be doing. However, if I learn these tools, then I’ll be faster at learning more things in the future when I’m trying to learn a new tool to make my workflow move quicker, but that’s in the future.

Anyway, VYM (View Your Mind) at first sounded like a psychological test, and in parts, it is. It’s a program which allows you to take notes on the computer using Mind Maps. I’m familiar with the term because as a professor I have to attend seminars which teach us how to teach. They inform us to use mind maps as a tool for the students, but I’ve never been shown what a mind map was or how to use one. I wouldn’t have known how to start a mind map if it hit me like a flyswatter popping out of the ground. Hell, I stumbled across this program out of almost sheer narcissism. I thought for sure that I was going to get a map of my brain and it would look like a street map of New Orleans: logically laid out, but you have to look at it in a very twisted way. I got no such pleasure. Instead, I was greeted with a very blasé workspace with “New Map” in yellow in the middle of the page.

…thinking to myself, “WTF, jo0?” So, I took a quick trip over to Wikipedia.org to see what they had to say on the subject

…and their opinion was that it was supposed to look like this rare tropical plant thing from Little Shop of Horrors. Oooookay, so a little quick reading (skimming mostly… I think that I can type faster than I can read and I’m not that fast of a typist) on the topic and I was ready to return to the program to give it another good fair chance. Okay, in my brain dropping moments ago, I alluded to my typing skills being poor. That may be a bit exaggerated, I’m really a pretty adequate typist. Not quite legal secretary fast, but faster than your mother (unless your mum’s a legal secretary). I can also touch type (no hunt and peck typing for me) which helps immensely with this program. It’s not required, but it helps. On with it… arghhhh!

What this program does is helps you to build one of these “Mind Maps” by utilizing a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. It’s also great for brainstorming exercises and general non-linear notes (categorizing disassociated ideas about a single project for instance). I’m sort of a keyboard pilot, and constantly reaching over for the mouse while I’m trying to type out a brainstorm is just going to kill my buzz by losing the last bulleted idea. Some of the keyboard shortcuts are:

“a” – adds a new branch to the selected item

“s” – collapses/expands the selected item branch (toggle)

“Enter” – starts editing the selected item text.

The arrow keys navigate through the tree rather intuitively. Everything else, you can play with it and have some fun making a mind map. I actually used this program the day after I found it to take minutes in an advisory meeting. VYM has a built-in export to XML format for viewing in web pages (or for copy and pasting into Word like I had to do for the technically stubborn) which spit out 8 pages of outlines from a hour long meeting. I had to organize the map a little bit after the meeting, but I was very impressed with the results.

Supposedly it helps you learn better by allowing both sides of your brain to play with your notes instead of just your left side. That being said, this software does not work miracles. It’s fun to play with and although I’m not reticent to taking notes, I don’t use Document Editors to keep structured ideas in order. I find text editors too cumbersome to copy and paste text around with. I’ve never found a good program to work with which can keep up with my random brain ordering. VYM is fun to use (as fun as taking notes can be expected) and an interesting way to work through problems or to work out ideas. It will NOT take your notes for you, a feature lacking from just every other software as well, and it falls short on the “click here to learn everything automatically,” plugins, but VYM is easy to learn given the effort to time ratio.

Get it and play with it. It’s free! It’s Open! It’s….