The 30th Annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival: The IT crew and friends held down some nice seats on the main floor of the gorgeous Hill Auditorium. The first night included: Millish, Ember Swift, Martha Wainwright, Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, Jackie Greene, then an intermission followed by the Kiyoshi Nagata Ensemble and then the headliner Rufus Wainwright.

Second night was Daisy May, Bill Staines, Terri Hendrix & Lloyd Maines, Paul Thorn, Over the Rhine, intermission, Mountain Heart, John Prine. Paul Thorn was an immediate favorite, even before he played a note. He came out on stage and in his deep southern drawl told us how his guitar had been stolen that very day. Luckily he had a loaner from John Prine, and opened his set singing about it being a great day to “whoop somebody’s ass.” Good music and good humor.

As my workmates now know, I’m not a big fan of receiving thank-you cards. On first hit it’s nice but then I feel obligated to hold on to them, to display them, to not throw them away… Argh. On the other hand, my workmates seem to love receiving them. Sigh.

So I made up some thank-you cards for the IT office to use. I came in on a Saturday and wandered around taking a gob of photos of things in and around the office that had some IT’ness to them. I then chose 5 of them and uploaded them to Shutterfly and ordered the Set of 12 Note Cards for $7.99 (now $9.99). I liked the fact that I could order matte or glossy and so I was able to choose the finish to match the photo but I was disappointed that I couldn’t add any text to the card like you can with the larger cards. I would have liked to add a caption for the photo on the inside. The quality of the product was stunning - much nicer than I expected. I then took my 5 orders and shuffled them together and distributed them to the 5 of us in IT.

Having the cards on my desk makes me think of opportunities to thank people, which is a good thing. I also bought some Pilot Petit1 fountain pens from JetPens for everyone to make it fun to write.

I got tired of trying to recite MAC addresses to people on the phone and not knowing what word to associate with D and E to make them sound different. So this morning, knowing I had to read a bunch of letters and numbers to a Comcast tech, I went and looked it up. How? I just started googling words like Foxtrot and Baker and things I could remember and let me just tell you, Wikipedia is my friend. Here’s the NATO Phonetic Alphabet with all the goods. And it’s Bravo, not Baker. Baker was WWII. (Which is different from WII.) Anyway, I still messed it up on the phone but now I have the resource.

In the Wikipedia entry it says, reassuringly, “It has found heavy usage in the information technology industry to accurately and quickly communicate serial/reference codes (which can be and are frequently extremely long) or other specialized information by voice.”

On Demand Books created the Espresso Book Machine - an instant book printing machine! You press the Order button and it prints you a crisp new book in seven minutes! I want one.

In the video of the launch, the producers talk about what makes it awesome (zero inventory, zero shipping costs, instant gratification, among others), how they see it being used, and how it works.

January 2008

The Zing Spell Check Tool (SCT) has been in use for nearly 12 months now. It’s been installed on all ZCoB desktop computers - remotely installed on Windows computers using group policy in Active Directory - and has received lots of positive feedback. Writing and emailing in the MS Office suite (Word, Outlook, Excel, Entourage, etc.) is easier and more enjoyable because of all the ZCoB jargon and foodie terms included: no longer is Weinzweig or Binny’s unrecognized and marred by squiggly red underlines; prosciutto is no longer embarrassingly auto-corrected with prostitute.

When the Zing SCT was first rolled out it had more than 6,000 terms. Now, thanks to the SCT submission form on the Zingtranet, the total number of terms is over 8,000. When ZCoBbers find a word that they want included in the SCT, they log on to the Zingtranet, click the Spell Check Word Submission link, and enter a word or phrase. It’s then sent to me, spelling verified, and crosschecked against the existing word list. Updates for Zing SCT are issued quarterly.

OMG, this is an amazing information tool! Makes the sociologist in me drool.

Google Gapminder

What we’ve got here is the ability to compose visual pictures of dynamic global information on many different matrixes. Such as how does income affect life span across all countries while showing the countries by population and then run it as a movie across the last 30 years. Then change all the variables. Wow.

See the one minute tutorial.

Such a nice code green: “Consistently amazed that a dept. of five people are so on the ball about assisting the many Zingerman’s businesses. We always receive instant extra mile service from them - even for our prehistoric technologies. After saying they were going to send us a whole new heatless laminator, 3M actually sent us a part that we had no idea how to install. Hannah took it down to IT and they proceeded to completely dismantle it, install the new part and reassemble the laminator quickly and immediately. Truly excellent above and beyond service on a technology outside their job descriptions, I’m sure.”

You can now easily check the status and location of the bus from your smartphone. I’ve setup a favorite from my Treo and it works quite well–just scroll to the bottom of the results page for the info. Here’s the full scoop from Scott at carfree ann arbor:

A while back we got the tip on AATA’s new RideTrak internet service. Choose a route at the AATA website, and it gives you the current location and status (early, on-time or late by X minutes) of the bus. While we were excited about finally getting access to the info, we mostly grumbled about how the service could be better. We, and many others, contacted AATA through their comment form to throw a bunch of well-intended, if demanding and uninformed, suggestions at them. High on that list was mobile access to the updates.

Well, ask and ye shall receive. The front page of theride.org now announces that riders can direct browsers on their PDAs and mobile phones to mobile.theride.org for mobile access to bus updates. We haven’t tried out the mobile edition yet, but are impressed with what seems like a pretty fast response to rider requests by AATA. If you have tried the mobile version of RideTrak, let us know how it worked in the comments.

This week Mo wrote us with an excellent product review of a screen cleaner he tested on his MacBook. Here’s what he had to say:

From: Mo Frechette
To: IT Support
Subject: crappy wipes
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:44:38

make screen all streaky! no buy!

Solid work, Mo. Thanks!

In Jakob Nielsen’s annual intranet design roundup, he outlines some major trends and winning features of successful and usable intranets. Some new and interesting ones:

1. Photo of the day on the homepage (how about zingy illustration of the day? oh that would be so fun!)
2. Webcams (done!)
3. Managed news feeds, filtered by an editor for relevance
4. Star ratings and user comments
5. Wikis (done!)
6. Employee directory search (done!) plus degrees of social distance (what?!)

What I am most excited about working on is determining the ROI of our Zingtranet. How can we measure its effectiveness?