Carl Setzer

I just received an recruiting email, where the writer found me via my long neglected Indeed.com resume. It got me thinking about all the sites I've used over the years, that I've eventually abandoned, or at least dropped into neglect. Profiles on Monster, Indeed, NWJobs, MySpace...what do these say about me? To the recruiter emailing me about positions at Microsoft, what is there expectation of who I am, and would any elements of my current reality match? On a somewhat related note, Om Malik recently posted You've Go (No) Mail . He talks about the sense of loss accompanying the ending of his Gigaom email. I've felt these twinges in the past, with the suspending of my Starbucks and Microsoft emails. But those were different at an elemental level. Regardless of my emotional connections to those institutions, I didn't found them. They didn't hold my name, they never represented me at the same level. The closest I could imagine is with this site, and the email ass...

This morning I popped onto my computer to get some work done. After a bit of work (some email, updating social media, zap out a few blog posts) I'm struck the fact that nothing on my computer is open safe Chrome. I also have my task manager open, and a document for my son (for school). My browser has really become the center piece of my computing. I've noticed this coming for some time. Yet, today, it gives me deeper pause: how will this affect us going forward? One obvious piece: tablets & phones. The more tools available via browsers (at least those optimized for HTML 5), the more effective and powerful these devices become. More and more of my work gets done on my tablet. I expect this will drive us more into the world of such tools as Chromebooks as well. Hard-drive space will become less critical for the average user. I expect the demand for laptops will whither, much like desktops have. Don't get me wrong: there will always be demand for laptops and desktops, bu...

I'm puzzled. Why is Sony deferring to the PDRK?  There's nothing dramatically new about this latest round of adolescent posturing. Of course, the North Koreans haven't taken responsibility. But, why? Is it the threats of violence, which seem rather unexecutable at this point. Perhaps it's simple economics, with a significant lack of theatres willing to show it? Perhaps the other production companies lobbied hard enough, worried about getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak. Perhaps it's the hacking. Looks like Sony had been hit hard. But, is it really so bad that they'll dump the whole $44 million movie production investment? It's looking that way. Of course, most of the coverage I've read has been focused on the hacking. When a global company is reduced to handwritten paper memos, the threat must be considered severe. I'm disappointed that these self-styled Guardians of Peace won this round. Should give us all pause, though. This is a distur...

Years ago, I was quite facile with styli. I took meeting bits several times in my Palm, even with the cryptic survival script. As I evolved to Blackberry, then to iPhone, my utilization of styli vanished. Now, though, I see a renewed interest in these devices. There's become quite the secondary market growing. I've found, especially with tools like Swype, styli really enable a significantly greater efficiency. And this is fun for me. I have one by Zagg, which is good, but small. Then I just got a NEBO one, with more heft. That seems to really help my accuracy. There are so many more, though. We'll see which, if any, rise to the top.

"Back in the day", after a wave of nausea, or a fever, etc, you needed to loudly groan, whimper, or whatever you could muster for assistance. "Honey, please bring me a wet washcloth/towel/undertaker". With cell phones, you can now text your wife/spouse/mom "please bury my corpse to the left of the roses but not over the septic tank" without expending much energy at all.  See, technology makes our lives better in so many ways. 

My started with a few chums wishing me a happy birthday. Problem? It's not my birthday (October, if you care). Turns out, my Skype profile was displaying today is my day of happiness and aging acknowledgment. My profile in Skype was right. So, after a brief, and fruitless, web search, it finally occurred to me, "check the website". Sure enough, my profile at Skype.com was pretty weirdly messed up. My full name appeared in my First Name spot, my picture was gone, and my birthday was today. Oddly, I made the edits, clicked save, then pinged a friend to see if they'd taken. Nope. Then I tried the slow approach. Changed the profile pic. Saved. Clicked out, then back into my profile. Edit. Change Name. Out. Then back. Change birthday. Out. Back. I've logged out, then back in. The changes seem to be holding. We'll see. My theory is something got mucked up during the port over the Microsoft. Perhaps with the interconnection with my Hotmail account. Or, well, who ...

A self-observation: I have several hundred contacts in my addressbook. Synced automatically with the cloud, my laptop, and OTA with my iPhone, I just haven't thought about them. I can search for who I want. Or, even better, when I'm typing an email, boom, it pops up. Done! However, I'm certain I have duplicate info, and, worse for a data-driven geek like myself, bad data . I know I have expired email accounts, old phone numbers, and worthless addresses. A quick skim shows people I haven't talked to in years, as well as people I don't know. (I've long had the habit of making sure key project contacts were in there "just in case". Some never needed calling, and, thus, their relevance to me has faded form memory.) Cheap storage and good search tools have made this something of a non-issue. But I like my data clean and accurate. Plus, this does provide opportunities for confusion. I have a few folks I infrequently email, and have with multiple email ad...

Re: " An Infection, Unnoticed, Turns Unstoppable " Brief summation: boy gets infection via a superficial seeming injury. Multiple medical professionals fail to catch it as it escalates, eventually killing the boy.  Reading this piece in the NYTimes is painful. As a parent, these stories rattle your paranoia. Parenthood seems to be that thing which shakes us from a "it can't happen to me" attitude. Yet my parental paranoia wasn't the only issue raised. I left wondering what could've been done differently, or, more specifically, how could technology help to prevent such tragedy. Some key data were missed in the process, in particular several key elevated levels ("His bands were 53% (normal high is 15%); absolute neutrophils were 13.5 (normal high is 8.5); absolute bands were 7.8 (normal high, 4.2). On the other hand, a blood value associated with viral infection was low. His lymphocytes were 3% (normal low, 28%).") were, for whatever reason...

My inbox is out of control. I know others feel this, too. This blizzard of information, inboxes, tweets, Facebook, texts, calls, news-sites...on and in it goes. We've gone far past data saturation. I's wondered lately where we go from here. How do we cope with this? Tools are being developed, but most seem to focus on new ways to deliver. Perhaps different packaging, clever design; but the problem isn't readability, it's volume. How do we filter? Our culture has never faced this before. Never has information been so commoditized. Never have we had all the world's assembled knowledge sitting in our pockets. Most of us filter by ignoring, where it's views we don't like, voices we find annoying, or just deleting this one email "this one time". Yet, for me at least, that's unsatisfying. I value discussion. Value getting new voices heard, new ideas expressed. Yet, without finding away to increase our absorption rate, it seems we're faced...

From Evernote: Our Records, Our Digital History Interesting piece by TechDirt: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100909/20294910958.shtml Can crowd-sourcing work as an historical tool? Properly, I guess, the term should be historiography. Anyway, thinking of these films, disbursing them across society would greatly increase the likelihood of any one of them making the transitions to new media. Once digitized, transferring from one format to another is simply waiting for the right enterprising computer scientist to turn their mind that direction. The same holds true for photos. Many pieces have been written exposing the superiority of print. I remain unconvinced. If your entire collection is digitized, it's quite likely that someone, when a new format is developed, will craft a conversion tool. Print's solid advantage: never going obsolete.  However, one can make a very limited number of hard copies of any image. Copying them is a relatively expensive ...

A friendly reminder that video cameras are everywhere. Shout out to AdRants for this. And this is from a promo postcard for an upcoming movie, "Look" .

Introducing the Foleo . Interesting idea….