Graham Chastney

Attention deficit and the impacts of multi-tasking have been themes on this blog for a while now. It all started with me thinking about whether it is possible to have a “strong” brain, and whether it was possible to do things to exercise your brain and make it “stronger”. Along the way I came across the issue of attention deficit trait and the impact of multi-tasking.

Walter Kirn has written a fascinating article on the impact of multi-tasking. It starts with this bold statement:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity.

It even gives some wonderful statistics on the impact:

Six hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s what we might call our National Attention Deficit, according to Jonathan B. Spira, who’s the chief analyst at a business- research firm called Basex and has estimated the per annum cost to the economy of multitasking-induced disruptions. (He obtained the figure by surveying office workers across the country, who reported that some 28 percent of their time was wasted dealing with multitasking- related transitions and interruptions.)

But the real joy in this article is the story that surrounds all of the information, and for that, you need to read the article.

One of the reasons I am writing this post is that I had planned to work from home today because I need to get my head around some thing. Working from home normally allows me to blank out everything and focus in on the core task. Unfortunately my neighbour has started some building work today and the trucks keep reversing up the cul-de-sac with those annoying reversing warnings blaring away. However much I try to focus in on the important thing, the distractions keep coming, and you can only turn the quiet music up so load. There’s no point in me trying to get my head around the task that is ahead of me because I will just get distracted, try to regain my thought, get distracted, get frustrated, and on and on.

If this post comes to you as an interruption – sorry, but it’s really your fault for not turning off the notification on whatever reader you are using. You are allowed to turn things off you know.

(Jimmy and Grandad are watching Mr. Benn at the National Media Museum in Bradford. One of the attractions of the museum is to be able to go into one section, choose a programme from the archives and show your kids what television was like when you were a kid. We were all surprised how slow Mr. Benn was. Another sign of the impact we are having on our brains.)

There are a lot of things that I am starting to really appreciate about Office 2007.

The first one is probably the most cosmetic, but it’s making a real difference and that’s shadows.

I have always been stunned by the lack of flexibility in shadows in earlier versions of Office. Let’s be honest, they didn’t even look like shadows. I’m not sure what they looked like, but it wasn’t a shadow.

The new shadow capabilities in Office 2007 are far batter. They now look like, and behave like shadows.

The options in 2003 were so limiting as to make them unusable:

What can I do here? I can make the shadow bigger, I can change the colour, and I can make it semi-transparent. And the result:

Even the drop shadows in Live Writer look more like a shadow than that.

In 2007 it’s all changed:

The presets in there own are enough, but I now have the ability to adjust so much more: transparency, size, blur, angle, distance.

Now that actually looks like a shadow.

I’m not sure how much fiddling I will do with these new options though, because the Quick Styles do a pretty good job on there own (another post, another time).

And that’s just shadows on objects, shadows on text has radically changed, and definitely for the better (another post another time).

Sometimes it’s the little things that get noticed.

The other day I wrote about the strange experience of getting a rather odd font for the iTunes Update License Agreement.

Today I am using a different machine, and I got a different odd font:

At least I’m not the only one being picked on. Search the Internet and you’ll find hundreds of examples – not surprisingly. At least I could just about read both of mine unlike this person.

Anyone else think it’s rather shoddy?

It seems to have been a very busy period for those acquisition lawyers (they are obviously hoping for a good quarter ). Some of these purchases have the potential to significantly change the IT landscape. Here are the ones that I have noticed:

• 2nd Jan – IBM to acquire XIV
• 3rd Jan – NetApp to acquire Onaro
• 8th Jan – Microsoft to acquire Fast Search and Transfer
• 15th Jan – VMware to acquire Thinstall
• 18th Jan – Sun to acquire MySQL
• 18th Jan – IBM to acquire Net Integration Technologies
• 21st Jan – Microsoft to acquire Calista

And that’s not including the spate of acquisitions at the end of 2007, including IBM’s purchase of Cognos.

All of these things take a while to work there way through, but there are some interesting moves ahead.

(Seems a bit ironic to be writing this as stock markets around the world are tumbling – but that’s the way it goes sometimes.)

As seems to be mandatory after Macworld – today iTunes has been updated.

I’ve ranted about the volume of updates and the level of disruption that iTunes updates cause in another post – so I’m not going to do that today.

Today’s observation is a quirk. For some reason the update program decided upon a rather strange font for the License Agreement this time.

Not sure what it would do to my head if I actually tried to read this thing in that font.

I’m giving Apple the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this is a quirk on my machine and that they haven’t gone completely mad.

See you soon – my machines off for a reboot now, in true iTunes update fashion .