Category: Uncategorized

Most people set their New Year resolutions for the new year at this time. We know from history that many people don’t stick to those resolutions, often failing to get in better shape, eat better, or other similar personal changes. I think the average person has bailed on their efforts by Feb 1.

I think some of this is precisely because they’re not goals that are specifically written down and committed to. It’s easy to say you want to make some grand change, but the reality is that you need to focus on one small goal at a time and make a concentrated effort to achieve it.’

Many of the Microsoft MVPs and active, successful community people I know create goals. They list a series of things that they want to accomplish in the new year. Some of them are big goals (publish once a month), and some are small (take a test, attend an event), but they are a list of measurable goals for the new year.

And most of them then look back at the previous year as they’re getting ready. I did my goals for 2009, a series of updates through out the year, and then a final look back. I had written a way to measure my success (or failure), which is something I’d recommend as well. I did all of this before writing goals for 2010, using my thoughts on 2009 to look forward to 2010.

Here’s what I’d suggest, since it’s not too late:

1. Think of some goals for 2010 that you want to accomplish. They can be big or small
2. Write them down, along with a way to decide if you’ve succeeded or failed.
3. Set a quarterly reminder to revisit your goals and see how you are doing.
4. Analyze how you did between Christmas and New Years next year.
5. Repeat.

Is that really what people want? At least in the US? This note talks about how KPMG surveyed executives and while biodiesel wasn’t on the list, hybrids and electric power were. They seemed to think that was the important thing to focus on to make sales.

I wonder if that’s true. Is this a case of the industry focusing efforts in an area that may not be that popular, but raising awareness and using advertising to influence people? Or is it really what many people want?

It’s a hard thing to decide. Looking at many businesses, and reading about them, it seems the line between success and failure is often a good amount of luck. So many executives guess at things and steer the company that way. If they succeed, they’re smart. If not, they’re fired.

I like my hybrid, and it has some great qualities, but I’m not sure it’s worth the extra $$ for many people. Especially if you don’t drive a lot. So convincing people to spend the extra $$, is that good for consumers and what they want? Or just good for the auto industry?

The CES show this week had a few new e-reader concepts coming. I think this technology is due to explode, though only if someone tackles it in a way similar to how PCs were handled, not the iPod. The Kindle is still the king of this world, but I wonder for how long.

One of the very interesting readers is the Liquavista full color reader. I like the idea of color for magazines, though I’ve never been concerned about it for books. It’s compared here to the Sony reader.

As long as battery life doesn’t suffer too much, I think this is great. It means that I’m likely to consider this for magazines and other places where pictures matter.

Now this reader from Skiff is one that I am interested in. When I first heard about e-ink, this is what I had in mind. A more flexible, construction paper like membrane that would rewrite itself.

I just hope there is some durability here to drop this in a laptop bag or suitcase. If there is, then I might consider one of these.

I actually had pictured something like this enTourage reader, but with the flexibility of the Skiff for my ideal reader. Something that let me approach life like a newspaper, going from page to page, closing it when I wanted to. The Kindle with a case was like this, but the cover felt like a waste. If there was something there, it would be nice.

This reader, however, looks too bulky for me. That’s the wrong direction, in my mind, though if you could turn off half of this and save power, it starts to get interesting. Running Andriod, this is very interesting, especially if you can move those images from the e-reader to the laptop for color.

I’ve been reading a book with charts and graphs, and they don’t scale well on the iPhone. Even on the PC they’re hard to read inside the Kindle reader. The problem is that they need to get out of the Kindle environment and allow the reader to zoom in enough to use them. This would be critical for textbooks.

Overall it’s great to see new devices coming onto the market. The problem, in my mind, is that we are still too fragmented in terms of the “stores” and “networks” for these devices. I want to be able to buy the enTourage, or Skiff, and still buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I shouldn’t be locked into just one store, and I think this type of bundling, is ultimately what needs to be fixed. While iTunes exists for the iPod, I can easily load my Amazon MP3s or CDs into it as well.

I used to think that too much data was never a bad thing. That having more information out there is good. However I’m starting to wonder if moderation might be in order here.

I’ve been thinking of getting a spare laptop since Toshiba isn’t too concerned about getting mine fixed. So I’ve been looking at other ones, and I think that I settled on an Acer 1420P tablet. PDC attendees got them for free this fall, though they are supposed to go on sale soon here in the US. It’s a good deal from a developer that doesn’t need it, but I’m getting off track.

As I was trying to decide if I wanted this one, I ended up searching out some other ones, including a nice ASUS from Amazon that had a good price and long battery life. I went looking for reviews, but outside of those posted on Amazon’s site, what I found was a bunch of blogs.

And NONE of them had reviews. It appears that someone, or a bunch of someones, copied the specs from Amazon, either with the graphics or without, and then posted it as a blog, generating rankings that made them appear on the first and second page of results. I checked a dozen or so and none of them provided “information”, they just repeated what Amazon had shown.

I’m sure this is a way to gain some Adwords traffic, and it might make you some money. I guess if you’re a programmer and you get $50 a month from Google on something like this, or even some Amazon Affiliate money, it’s worth doing. After all, how long can it take to copy and paste stuff up there?

Especially when it’s free on so many blog sites.

I’ve had a couple similar experiences lately when researching things, and slowly it appears that there are places where the Internet isn’t useful because there is too much of this “speculation”  taking place and hiding information. I’m not willing to search through 12 pages of results to find another nugget of information that ought to be on the first page.

With so many affiliates and opportunists, it seems some days that we’re moving closer to Idiocracy than Star Trek.