Graham Chastney

How long do you think that you spend looking at some form of screen every day?

Television? Laptop? Mobile phone?

According to the New York Times it’s likely to be longer than you think:

In fact, adults are exposed to screens — TVs, cellphones, even G.P.S. devices — for about 8.5 hours on any given day, according to a study released by the Council for Research Excellence on Thursday. TV remains the dominant medium for media consumption and advertising, the study found. The data suggests that computer usage has supplanted radio as the second most common media activity.(Print ranks fourth.)

That’s right 8.5 hours a day.

Even excluding TVs that’s a lot of time, spent on screens at work. So why do we spend so little on the actual screen itself? It’s the primary tool that we use.

I’m constantly amazed when I go around offices to see the way that people are using and abusing the screen that they use all day, every day.

I’ve already written about multiple monitors. If I could communicate one thing to people that I know would radically change their productivity it would be that. But there is more to it than that.

In most organisations that I know screen purchases are tightly controlled. You have to be really special to have anything more than the standard screen. In many ways this control is completely disproportionate to the value that a good screen gives and the relative cost.

The number of people who have cracked or severely scratched mobile phone screens never  ceases to amaze.

There are times when I feel like going around with a cleaning cloth and revealing to people the wonders that lurk beneath. Go on, I dare you, clean a screen today.

I’ve spoken to a few people about social networking, and many of them really struggle to understand the “business value” of the types of interactions that social networking technology allows. The following video has some interesting insights for the changing interaction between organisations and customers.

Probably the most interesting quote comes from Scott Monty of  Ford:

“We’re not interested in advertising on social networks. It’s about getting in there and interacting with people. Now, more than ever, people can self publish, put up their own content and be there own publishing houses, they have a voice and they expect to be heard. And when a large organisation pays attention to them and starts conversing with them it really lifts the lights for a lot of people”

That’s quite a powerful statement about customer’s changing expectations. The part that struck me, though, was to think about all of the customers that we all have.

I work for an IT service organisation and we are definitely seeing this shift in expectations. It’s no longer acceptable to have a service desk that people phone into, people want to take the relationship much further than that.

Something to make you smile on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Some people think I have strange pass times.

Hat tip to Bill Seaver

I love the TED talks, they are great way of hearing thought provoking ideas presented in a way that is always engaging.

This morning I listened to Stuart Brown talking about why play is vital – no matter your age.

Speaking as a British person, we have a strange relationship with play.

We have invented some of the worlds most popular sports and continue to create new ones, but business is a serious business. And yet, there’s still a lot of business getting done on the golf course.

We all grown when someone asks us to do an “ice breaker”, but I’ve seen people turn into children as they do.

I quite like the concept of the wearable meeting – you’ll need to watch to find out.

There are also interesting thought here for people who work from home and only interact with people on the phone.

What I tend to do is put the TED videos onto my iPod and listen to it in the gym. The audio is often enough, but you also get to sense when there is something interesting to see and can go and have a look.

I’m about the shut down my old blog address and move exclusively to this one, so I thought I would write a little about my experiences.

I’ve not been updating the other one for a while now, the traffic has mostly moved over because of the joy of RSS and Twitter.

What hasn’t moved over are a few search terms where I was quite prominent. These were relating to my posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary, Windows Server Single Instance Storage and most significantly all of the thinking about Brain Strength.

The posts on Windows Live Writer Dictionary are largely obsolete, and the information on Single Instance Storage in Windows is very old now.

There are still a bucket load of internal links to fix, but I’ll get around to that in time.

It’s certainly not a seamless exercise, but it’s quite nice to go through it and know that my data is mostly portable.

What would you like to see in the “about” page on this site?

If you click on the heading “about” you’ll notice that it doesn’t say anything of any value. This is primarily because I’m not quite sure what to write. So I thought I would ask the people who read what I write to tell me what they would like to know (Yes, that’s you).

If you want to know it then there is a reasonable chance that someone else would too.

Just leave a comment on the bottom of this post and I’ll see what we come up with.

I reserve the right not to include your ideas though, I’m not leaving myself that open.

If you think that I was rambling on in my post about Broader Networks, Larger Storage, Faster Processing then you should perhaps watch this video:

It’s from a session given by Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop.

In many ways the fancy, even magical, world of IT can be broken down into three basic elements; storing stuff, calculating stuff and moving stuff. Everything we see around the Internet is driven by the inexorable progress of broader networks, larger storage and faster processing.

Ten year trends for networks, storage and processing show them getting ever faster, broader and larger.

We may not yet know how we are going to use all of this extra capacity, but one thing we can say is that the past shows us the future.

I started my IT journey at a time when we regarded kilobit networks as broad, megahertz processors as fast and megabyte storage as huge.

When I started in IT as a career I supported IBM DISOSS on the mainframe and the nearest thing anyone got to a desktop device was an IBM DisplayWriter. There were also a few VAX machines around used by those specialists in the engineering organisation.

The DISOSS system I supported, for those of you too young to know any better, was an early email system. It was so early, in fact, that it was pretty much bounded by the mainframe on which it ran. There was no connection to the internet, and limited connections to other parts of the organisation. SMTP was frowned upon as not being ready for the enterprise.

Apart from the DisplayWriters everyone else accessed the system via a dumb terminal over a dedicated SNA network; TCP/IP wasn’t ever discussed. We now have access to megabits of bandwidth at our houses, all of it running TCP/IP of one form or another.

I carry around more storage in my bag than was available within the multi-room mainframe that I started on.

The way that we use applications and services has changed radically. The internet has seen to that.

Information was an expensive commodity back then, most information is now effectively free. Search is expected and it’s free too.

Text was the only way of communicating, even tables within text were difficult. Every day I deal with diagrams photographs, graphical representations. Every time I start Audacity to edit some audio I am blown away by the realisation that I am doing this on a consumer PC with free software.

Years ago I used to have a set of floppy disks in a draw. Managing the data on these disks would take a significant amount of time. I probably had less than 100MB stored, but managing it was a complete pain. I now manage over 1TB of data, but only spend a minimum amount of time managing it.

I used to spend more on a CompuServe email account than I now spend on hosting this blog where I get unlimited storage. The paid-for email account could only handle a tiny amount of storage and it couldn’t handle attachments at the beginning. I now have a choice of multiple free email services allowing me to store hundreds of gigabytes and easily handle large emails.

To use someone else’s words, remember: “you aint seen nothing yet”.

Anyone who knows me will see the irony here:

He has more hair than I do though.

I have to admit that communication is a complete mystery to me. I like to think things through logically,  but I’ve never been able to fathom communication.

I’m constantly amazed by the things that people regard as exciting because they understand it, even if it’s not really very exciting at all. I’m even more amazed by the things people regard as exciting even though they don’t understand it.

I’m sure that the answer is in communication, but that is still a mystery to me.

A little while I started out on a mission to have more meaningful conversations. My aim was to have one every day, well that has proved impractical, but I have still managed a significant number.

What I am starting to conclude is that communication is more of an art than a science. What I mean by this is that communication involves far more emotion and heart than logic. Engage with people’s feelings and they are open to communication, engage with their logic and most people aren’t. Be passionate about something and they will engage, give them the facts and they probably won’t.

Why don’t people engage with emails? Because it’s just communicating facts.

Why do people engage with video conferencing? Because it engages their feelings.

The challenge and the mystery is born out of the subjectivity of any art which means that people engage with it in completely different ways.

How you engage with the picture at the start of this blog depends on so many different things. I was there so I know what it felt like, but how the picture makes you feel depends upon your history, your upbringing, your experiences, your preferences. Each one of these will influence your emotional reaction to it.

I’d like there to be a formula for communication, but there isn’t one, I’ll just have to learn to be a better artist.