Technology

When talking about consultants, the term “road warrior” isn’t so much about driving an SUV with a bunch of scrap metal welded to it while wearing hockey armour/squirrel pelts. It’s more about being completely mobile and able to do your work under most conditions. For most people, this means a smart phone and a laptop. You can take it a bit further by getting a sturdy external battery and a 3G wireless modem for your laptop but for most people, a smart phone and laptop will suffice. Despite having moved into a new office in September, I was grateful that I am still well equipped from my road warrior days.

I knew that there was going to be a problem yesterday morning when I got close to the office because all of the traffic lights near my building were out. A quick glance around confirmed my fears – the whole neighbourhood was blacked out. I entered the building anyhow and my building manager had implemented his blackout plan – glow sticks in all the stairwells. We had no emergency lighting.

I had a significant amount of work to do and I was concerned that the whole day was going to be a wash. Thankfully, I had my laptop, heavy duty external battery [read my review here]. I didn’t have internet access because that requires electricity but I could send and receive e-mails from my BlackBerry. In a pinch, I could use my BlackBerry as a wireless modem (and risk going over my data limit on my cellular account).

The power came back on by 2:30pm but I learned a valuable lesson – no matter how comfortable I get in my new office, I need to keep being a road warrior to a certain degree. I suggest that anyone who does consulting for a living should have a good “go bag” that allows them to work from a coffee shop, their car or their own office in case the power goes out.

According to When Did You Join Twitter, I started messing around with the service 419 days ago. In these 419 days, I’ve seen a few trends and have been a little taken aback from the recent jump in popularity. Its membership has been growing exponentially since the start of 2009. I lump most of the people I follow into a few categories:

1. Twitter Shitters
   

   These are folks who tweet about everything that they’re doing every moment of the day. I just stopped following three such people because they were driving me up the wall with the inane shit that they were posting. These people say that they’re the “real” users of the service. I think they just have too much time on their hands and an over-inflated sense of their own importance. I liken them to LinkedIn “LIONS”. [READ] They don’t really get what the tool is for.

   

2. Lurkers
   

   There have been a lot of studies coming out this week analyzing Twitter’s users. [READ] One interesting stat is that 40% of Tweeters never tweet again after their first day. Some studies are chalking this up to people who have forgotten their login information but I think they’re actually lurkers – people who like to read the tweets but never respond and never tweet. They’re like eStalkers.

3. Marketing Guys
   

   Someone in the last year put the bug in the ear of marketers that Twitter is a great platform for pushing your wares. Pho Citi Noodles (@phociti) in LA is a prime example. This Vietnamese restaurant tweets many times a day trying to get people to come in and eat at their restaurant. I don’t know how effective this kind of strategy is. It actually seems kind of dumb to me.

4. SEO Junkies
   

   I think I fall into this category. SEO Junkies are typically bloggers that are looking to increase the exposure of their blog to the masses by using whatever means possible. I have a plugin for my Wordpress blog that automatically tweets for me when I publish a new blog post. I see Twitter as a platform to increase my exposure and I follow a number of people who use Twitter in the same way. I find their tweets useful and informative and to be frank – I’m glad these people don’t post about what they had for lunch.

5. Facebook Lite Users
   

   The last category I would put people in are Facebook lite users who see the Twitter platform as a social networking tool. I’ve certainly responded to people who reach out to me via Twitter. I’ve had people in the last week as me for recommendations on moving companies, research methodologies, baby strollers and the like. I don’t mind answering these questions with a short reply or direct message. I think this is what Twitter’s founders were probably envisioning when they created the tool back in 2006.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still not convinced that Twitter is a mature communications tool – especially when compared to other social networking platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. It’s an interesting tool though and I’ll continue to play around with it. If I end up roaming into category 1 or 3, someone kick me.

A few of my friends and colleagues have recently started using Twitter. Like LinkedIn, Twitter is fast becoming a viable social media tool for business. So, for my friends who are new to Twitter, I wanted to share some interesting tricks that I’ve picked up in the few years I’ve been using it. As an aside, if you want to follow me, I’m @Cruikshank. [LINK]

Tweet from Your Cell

No, not your prison cell… Unlike Facebook, there are no apps that you can download to your phone to enable mobile tweets. If you want to tweet from the road, you have two choices: use your mobile web-browser (assuming you have a smart phone) or SMS the tweet to your account. I prefer to use SMS (text messaging) because the web interface for Twitter loads really slow on my phone. Here’s what you do to tweet from your phone (in Canada):

1. Log into your Twitter account
2. Click on the Settings tab up in the top, right-hand corner of your account
3. Click on the Devices tab at the top of this page
4. Put your phone number with in the box in the following format: +1(your area code)(your 7-digit phone number)
5. Check the box and click Save. (Don’t worry – it won’t send you txt messages unless you ask it too and if you’re not a Bell customer, it won’t work anyhow)

1. If you did it right, you should get a screen that tells you to verify your phone by sending a six digit code to the Twitter SMS number (which is 21212 in Canada)
2. After you txt the verification code to 21212 (the Canadian Twitter tweet number), refresh your Devices page to see if it’s set up. It should look like this:

1. If you really borked it up, hit the Delete and start over button.
2. If the verification code doesn’t work the first time, try re-submitting it (by txting the six-digit code to 21212) a few more times. It took 15 minutes to verify when I did it this time.
3. Once you’ve got your device verified with Twitter, you can tweet any time from your phone by texting a message to 21212.

Tweet When You’re Asleep

Using an application called Tweet Later [LINK], you can pre-schedule tweets and have them send out at a specific date/time. This obviously has applications if you’re trying to work Twitter into a marketing/communications campaign. Check it out. I could also see this having some great applications for when you’re committing adultery or playing hooky from work. This is similar to the scheduled post features in Wordpress. For example, I actually wrote this post on April 4 but scheduled it to go live on April 6.

Search Twitter for Tweets You’re Interested In

There are a number of good Twitter search engines out there but search.Twitter is probably the easiest [LINK]. Like Google, you just type a search term in and hit “Search”. Why would one do this? It helps identify thought leaders in a particular interest area. For example, I typed in Nanotechnology as a test search and it came up with some great blog posts on nanotech that I might not have found easily through Google. Google can find anything but it doesn’t highlight the most interested things – Twitter can do that. People would only tweet about an article if it was something interesting that caught their attention, right?

Run Analytics on your Tweets

I use Google Analytics to track my blog traffic. As you can see from the screen capture from my Google Analytics account (below), I got 13 hits from Twitter in the last month. I can also see that people who come to my site from Twitter are spending more time reading my site and viewing more pages. However, if you’re not in love with Google Analytics or want to try an alternative, there are services like Tweetburner [LINK] and budURL [LINK] which allow you to see who’s clicking through on what URLs from your Tweets. These services have one major advantage over Google Analytics – they’ll let you track click throughs to site that you do not have Google Analytics access to. I can easily track when people come to my own site from Twitter but what if I post a tweet with a link to someone else’s site? How do I find out how many people clicked on that link? You’d have to use Tweetburner or budURL.

Get the Equivalent of Google Alerts from Twitter

If you don’t get time to surf Twitter all day, you’re probably missing out on the latest and greatest on topics you’re interested in. Tweetbeep [LINK] has got a solution for you. I set one up to send me a daily digest of any tweets about consultants or consulting. If you were say, for example, a professional organizer, I’d set up the keyword as “organizing” or something like that. From there, it’s a simple matter of inserting yourself into the conversation or finding new leads.

The media in BC has tried to make hay out of an incident at a school in Port Hardy, BC [map] where a high school principal bought an illegal cell phone jamming device to prevent students from texting and surfing the web on their phones during class. [READ] After discovering why their cell phones suddenly stopped working at school, the students at this school confronted the school administration and informed them that cell phone jamming is in violation of Federal telecommunication regs. The principal of the school explained his reasoning for the jamming – he felt his confiscation campaign was not successful in discouraging students from using cell phones in class and felt that the school was suffering. In my opinion, he did the right thing. Federal regulations be damned. It leads to a bigger discussion about the role of technology in public education. Technology provides amazing new ways for kids to not pay attention in school.

1. Cell Phones
   

    

   I have heard some horror stories from colleagues of mine who teach about kids using cell phones to cheat. The kids’ excuse: they use their cellphone as a calculator. I’ll concede that but anyone who is tech savvy knows that a modern smart phone can save and display documents (think cheat sheets) and look stuff up online in the middle of a test. Is that fair? No. I think it’s completely reasonable to ask students to not use cellphones in class. Academic honesty needs to be a foundation in public education. Cell phones are also distracting. Just as my adult colleagues get distracted by their BlackBerries when they are supposed to be paying attention in meetings, young learners can be distracted by mobile games on their phones, texting their friends or using MSN Messenger on their phone.

    

2. The Web
   

   There are two issues with the web: academic shortcuts and the role of social media. There are plenty of ways to shortcut research for a school paper online. You can pay someone in a developing country to write it for you. You can cut and paste vast tracts from other peoples’ published work, Wikipedia and/or blogs. Cheating on term papers with the assistance of the Internet is a trend as old as the Internet itself. There are businesses that thrive on exposing plagiarism from the web for teachers marking assignments.

   Then there’s social media. High school had enough drama when I was young but social media has made it easier than ever for teenagers to do shitty things to one another. Find a scandalous picture of the head cheerleader? Publish it online so everyone in the school gets to see it. Think someone is a jerk? Twitter about it. It used to be that the high school drama soapbox was limited to the number of people in your personal network. Social media allows angry teens to broadcast grief with the click of a button.

    

3. MP3 Players
   

    

   Many of the things you can say about cell phones can be said about MP3 players. I have an iPod Touch, for example. Yes, it’s an MP3 player but it essentially does everything the iPhone does except make calls. That means I can embed text file cheat sheets onto it and check them out while pretending to browse my track listings during an exam. I also don’t buy the fact that kids can pay full attention to what’s going on in class while they’ve got a headphone in one ear.

Cell Phone Jamming Technology

To loop back around on this cell phone jamming issue. The technology works by broadcasting on a frequency that cancels out cell phone signals. It’s a form of radio jamming, to put it simply. HowStuffWorks.com has a good article explaining the technology. You can pick up these devices on the Internet for between $150 and $400. The specific regulations regarding cellphone jamming are from the Radiocommunication Act of Canada.

If you’re not from Vancouver (or don’t listen to the news), you might not have heard the story of Michael Cox, the 53-year old Vancouver bus driver who just lost his job because he posted some criticisms about the company he worked for on his blog. [READ] It’s an interesting story from several aspects:

1. He loved being a bus driver and only posted one or two critical posts out of dozens. The criticism was constructive and borne out of winter-weather related frustration at his bus getting stuck. Who can blame the guy?
2. Official communications people within the bus company were (allegedly) looking to partner with him because his writing about the life of a bus driver was so good.
3. He was still on probation and thinks that if he was in the permanent role, his status and the union would have prevented him from getting fired.

Now, I can sympathize with Michael. I had to leave a job once for making an honest (but critical) observation about a company’s HR policies on a web forum that allowed users to swap youth recruitment best practices. Turns out the company I had maligned on a small circulation forum was on the advisory board of my employers, read the post and demanded that I be removed from my role. I didn’t get fired but this event (and another unrelated incident) made it clear that my employer and I needed some time apart.

Michael, in a radio interview I heard this morning, said the same thing. Something along the lines of “even if they offered me my job back… I wouldn’t want it back.” He also made some great comments about his preference for “Marxist re-orientation training” as punishment instead of dismissal but the point was that the relationship between employer and employee was now broken.

I wanted to call attention to this story because we all have online lives now – Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, blogs, twitter posts, etc… and those lives can affect the relationship between us and our employers. I think that the bus company should have given Michael a chance to make up for his (mild) public criticism of his employer because the resulting media attention has made the bus company look far worse than any small posting criticizing a logistical screw up ever would have.

I guess my take-home message is two-fold:

Employees – think before you post. You could get fired.

Employers – think before you fire. You might think you’re doing damage control when what you’re actually doing is making things worse.

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece on a couple of speaking engagements that I have coming up. [READ] Both of them are at local universities and to modest-sized crowds (no more than 75 people each). Both gigs are pro bono gigs as well. Despite the non-lucrative sounding nature of these speaking engagements, I’ve had no less than three people contact me asking how they can get into these kinds of speaking engagements. I do these gigs for purely philanthropic reasons and to keep my public speaking chops up. I can see, however, how someone might have other motives for these kinds of gigs. The “how” part of this article is simple – pick up the phone and start shopping around for opportunities. The “why” is a bit more complicated.

Why

There are several good reasons why someone would want to give a free talk to a group of impressionable youth or other community members:

1. Free publicity

Discounting the time it takes you to prepare for the talk and the opportunity cost of attending the event, it’s a great opportunity to tell people your story and let them get to know you. It’s hard to predict what kind and quality of business leads might come out of a speaking engagement like this but you never know.

2. Goodwill

I’m someone who definitely believes in the concept of building up a goodwill (or Karma) bank. I believe that you make deposits in this goodwill bank when you do pro bono work and you can make withdrawls just as easily when you need to. For example, some of the work that I’m doing for UBC right now requires me to call on volunteer panellists to help evaluate technology that could be commercialized. I know most of the people I draw upon from other volunteer gigs that I’ve done. They know I’m someone who gives generously of my own time and know that I will appreciate it when they do the same.

3. Recruiting

Particularily when you’re going out to talk to university students – you’re not just giving up some time. You’re putting yourself in front of dozens of potential employees. We are moving rapidly into an era where providers of labour (students leaving the school system) will have all the levarage. You want them to think of you fondly as someone that they might want to work for in a few years’ time. Some of them are looking for work now. I always get a few calls from students after doing this kind of thing and they’re interested in working for me.

How

Now that you understand why it’s an attractive prospect, here’s how you land some of these speaking engagements:

1. Contact universities

Go back to your alma mater – specifically the department that you studied in and tell them that you’d like to give back to the school and if there are any opportunities to talk to the current crop of students to give you a call. You’d be surprized at how often you’ll get called. You can also go to schools that you didn’t attend and offer to do free talks. Universities love brining in guest speakers.

2. Non-Profits

Non-profits (there are millions of them) also love bringing in guest speakers for their membership and public events. Find a group (or group of groups) that you feel passionately about and have something to say. Again, just pick up the phone and call them.

3. Industry Associations

Many of these are non-profits – with an important discinction. They’re non-profits that work with real commercial entities that might hire you to do something. Examples are Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, BC Business Association, Canadian Trucking Human Resource Council. There are thousands of these organizations out there. They are all looking for ways to bring value to their members. I’m sure you can think of a few ways to bring value to their membership with a speech or two.

What

The real rub is once you’ve landed a speaking engagement – you have to come up with something to say. If you’re already someone who writes lots (eg. a blogger), this is going to be easy. Just pick a topic and pull together a slide deck on it. My rule of thumb is 2-3 minutes per slide. If you have to give an hour-long talk – that’s 30 slides, tops. The key is to be confident. Confidence comes from knowing the material and having a defendable “angle” on the topic.

For example, I’ve given talks on finding jobs in the “hidden” job market in the past [READ]. I’m no HR expert but I found a way to talk about looking for jobs using some of the tricks and tools I use in market research. It was a very popular talk. Think of an interesting angle. Unless you’re close to retirement age, no one is going to take you seriously if you position yourself as the “voice of experience”. Think more about your unique experiences and how you can help someone discover something about themselves by hearing what you think.

This article is meant for consultants whose fiscal year end is December 31 and who are looking to spend a few dollars on some new gear for the business in order to chalk up tax deductions. It’s worth thinking about your tax situation at this time of year. A well-spent $800-$1,000 on supplies/equipment for your sole proprietorship at this time of year can put you in a lower tax bracket. I’ve compiled a list of five technologies that you could consider picking up for your consulting business in the next few days:

1. External Battery for Laptop

I’ve written about this gadget in the past [READ]. Most laptops only run for 2-3 hours on a full charge – and only for the first year or so. Battery life deteriorates rapidly as the computer ages. Battery Geek Inc. makes a range of external batteries compatible with just about every laptop on the market. I bought their highest end model earlier this year for about $400 and haven’t regretted it. With my internal battery fully charged and the 200 Wh Portable Power Station, I can work a full 8 hours with WiFi running and no outlet in sight. I’d get more battery life if I had a more modest laptop but my current laptop is a full desktop replacement.

This is an easily justifiable expense. $400 for a battery seems like a lot of money until you’re trying to work out of a coffee shop out of town and there isn’t an outlet in sight. Mine paid for itself the first time I had to rack up a full day of billable hours off the grid.

2. Windows Home Server

You may have heard about these devices before – they’re basically servers for the home (as the name implies). The operating system is based on Windows Server 2003 SP2 (a good, stable operating system, by all accounts). If you’re not familiar with Servers – they’re a low-end PC tower without a monitor, mouse or keyboard that you hook up to the network and cram full of hard drives.

The most common WHS you’ll find on the market is HP’s MediaSmart Server. It comes in in 500 GB and 1 TB flavours with the option to add up to seven more hard drives as you go. The 500 GB version runs for about $550 and does all of the following:

- Centralized, Automatic Backup of up to 10 PCs on the network
- Health Monitoring of all the PCs on the network
- File Sharing across all of the computers
- Print Server
- Shadow Copies (so you can recover older versions of files)
- Remote Access Gateway so you can access your files from the Internet or any other computer on the network
- Media Streaming so if you have an XBOX 360 hooked up to your home theatre, you can use it to stream your MP3 collection to your stereo or view your photo collection on your TV.
- Data redundancy if you have more than one harddrive in the box.

I’ve used external hard drives and manually backed up my files periodically. Yes, this is the cheaper option but a lot more prone to human error/ hard drive failures (in my opinion). I’m going out to pick up one of these HP MediaSmart boxes tomorrow. I’ll write a full review of it in January.

3. Presentation Remote

If you have to make presentations on the road, I always think it’s much more professional to have a presentation remote so that you don’t have to stay anchored to the PC hosting the deck. Part of good speaking skills is actively engaging the audience. That’s hard to do when you have to keep running back and forth to your laptop to hit the space bar.

There are lots of presentation remotes on the market and I’ve used four or five over the years. I don’t own one myself but I plan on picking one up in the new year (along with an LCD projector). Remotes can be had for as little as $50 but for a full-featured unit (some of which double as wireless optical mice), you’re looking at more like $100. I don’t have any particular models to recommend but they’re readily avaiable at any store that sells laptops and accessories. Many of them also come with laser pointers.

4. LCD Projector

This might seem like overkill for a small business but they’re relatively inexpensive and can make you seem much more professional. It’s also an added service you can offer to your clients. I often moderate meetings for my clients and usually ask them to provide an LCD projector. Most of the units my clients have are old, beat up and there’s always a hiccup when I try to link it to my laptop.

If you have your own projector, you can do a sales presentation anywhere there’s a white wall. You can also use it to show movies on a 300″ screen to your friends and family. I’ve used many projectors in the past. Epsons, in my opinion, are garbage. I’ve had a lot of luck with Sony projectors. The last one I bought was a Sony VPLCX100 [LINK]. It was bright, quiet and very portable. It’s not the cheapest projector on the market but it’s the cheapest one Sony makes. The VPLEW5 [LINK] also looks good – especially if you’re planning on using HDMI and HD content as an input. Both units run for just under $1,400.

5. A Netbook

While I completely panned these sub-notebooks in an earlier article [READ], I will say that if your current laptop is a desktop replacement monstrosity like my current laptop, a netbook is a nice addition to your mobile arsenal. I think you need to be in a unique situation to justify one of these units. For example, I use my notebook PC as a desktop replacement at a clients’ office when I go in to work at their office. I have a desk there and go in as often as three times a week. I needed something that I could take home with me at the end of the day but with enough horsepower and a big enough screen to get me through 8 hours of work.

When I wish I had a netbook is when I’m on the road and just want to crack off a blog post or get caught up on my e-mail at a coffee shop. Arguably, I can do that kind of thing with my BlackBerry Bold but while the screen on the the Bold is lovely, the keyboard isn’t meant for long bouts of typing and you start to get eyestrain after an hour. Trust me, I’ve done it.

The most popular makes on the market are the Asus EeePC [LINK] and the Acer Aspire One [LINK]. Many manufacturers have gotten into the Netbook game lately including offerings from Dell, HP, Toshiba and range in price from $350 – $500. Don’t expect these things to replace all of the functionality of a normal laptop and as in my earlier review, I suspect anyone who thinks this is a realistic replacement for a normal laptop is using less than 25% of their laptop’s capabilities and isn’t a real business user.

The bottom line is these computers are cheap, fit in a purse or briefcase and can get you online, checking your e-mail or editing a document in no time from anywhere. They’re not a bad idea if you spend a lot of time on the road. I know that several times in the past few months, I’ve cursed my gigantic laptop as I struggled to fit it and my paperwork on a small coffee shop table.

On Tuesday night, at a networking event, my friend, colleague and sister-in-law – Baljit from Alchemy Organizing – noticed me cracking out a quick note to myself on my BlackBerry Bold and asked a question that I hadn’t really given much thought to in the past: “Do people like you who use their BlackBerries constantly end up with repetitive strain injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome?” It was a good question and one that I didn’t have the answer to. With my background in research, it was something that I got online last night and dug into immediately. Turns out that there are three negative impacts from heavy BlackBerry (or any smartphone, for that matter) usage that you need to watch out for.

Repetitive Strain Injuries

Informally, “BlackBerry Thumb” describes a “repetitive stress injury of the thumb as a result of overusing small gadget keypads”. [READ] What most people with BlackBerry Thumb are probably suffering from is DeQuervain’s syndrome – the inflammation of the sheath that surrounds the two tendons that control movement of the thumb. It makes moving your thumb to operate small device keyboards increasingly painful as the condition worsens. The condition is poorly documented and treatment seems to boil down to “whatever you were doing that caused the pain – stop it”. Like many RSIs, BlackBerry Thumb is one of those things that will probably go away with time – if you modify your behaviour, it will get better. However, like the Wired article (link above) suggests, people who get BlackBerry Thumb don’t stop using their BlackBerry – they just switch to another repetitive strain to work around their sore thumbs. Typing with a pencil? That sounds like a great solution. <- Sarcasm alert!

Injuries Resulting from Poor Posture

“Blackberry Thumb” was a big topic in 2005 but this summer just past (2008) saw a new focus on BlackBerry-related poor posture injuries. [READ] Richard Wells (kinesiology professor at the University of Waterloo) and Ben Amick (Director of the Toronto-based Institute for Work & Health) are teaming up to explore the entire spectrum of muscular-skeletal injuries that might be experienced by people who are heavy users of hand-held devices. They think BlackBerry overuse might be linked to neck, back and belly strain based on the strange posture that a lot of BlackBerry users adopt – hunched over, shoulders rising towards the ears, neck craning down to see the screen. Some ergonomists feel that by sitting up straight, rolling back your shoulders and keeping your chest open can avoid these injuries but from a purely inane perspective – what looks dorkier? Hunching over your BlackBerry or trying to execute the smartphone equivalent of competitive speed walking?

Addiction

I think the most serious and far-reaching impact of the BlackBerry is the psychological impact on heavy users. The device is lovingly referred to as “the CrackBerry” by more than a few people and there is mounting evidence that addiction to smartphones is a very real affliction. [READ] More and more employers are requiring meeting attendents to turn in their BlackBerries for the duration of the meeting while other employers (like a friend of mines’) are requiring employees to keep their BlackBerries on and nearby 24 hours per day “just in case”.

It’s not really BlackBerries that people are addicted to so much as it is instant access to information and communication. The BlackBerry is just a little too good at providing that access – hence its strong association with information access addiction. Like many forms of addicition, therapy can help a BlackBerry addict of their affliction.

Update: Turns out the Pope thinks that information access addiction is “bad for the soul”. He may be onto something. [READ]

I first heard about Viigo leading up to the recent US Presidential election. The free utility for smartphones made Digg’s front page the day before the election touting its ability to provide live election coverage. Like many Canadians, I followed the results of the US election closer than I followed the Canadian Federal election and after installing Viigo on my BlackBerry Bold, I could see the election results live as they came in. After the election, I learned that Viigo can manage any RSS feed (including my Google Reader customized feed). Click on the following link to check out Viigo. [LINK]

If you’re not on the RSS feed bandwagon, why not? It’s almost 2009! Check out my post on RSS feeds. [READ] Here’s some tips from my experience using Viigo on my BlackBerry Bold for the past month:

1. Viigo comes pre-loaded with a bunch of RSS feeds that you don’t want – remove them

To remove a feed, highlight the feed, click on the BlackBerry button and select “Remove Channel”. That’s it. No more PopSugar or Reuters – Oddly Enough.

2. Add any feed by plugging in the URL of a site with an RSS feed

If a site has an orange RSS logo in the address bar, just add that URL to Viigo and you can get the feed on your smartphone.

3. Don’t use Viigo much if you have a limited data plan and no WiFi hotspot access

Reading feeds with Viigo is like viewing any normal webpage on your smartphone. It’s going to use up data and if you don’t watch it, you’ll get a nasty surprize on your monthly bill. If you have the BlackBerry bold, use your WiFi connection as much as possible.

This might seem like a minor issue but today, Vancouver and Toronoto Future Shop stores are cancelling their Gears of War 2 launch festivities. Why? Because some kid in Ontario had a fight with his parents about a video game (Call of Duty 4) last month, the kid ran away from home and was recently found dead in the woods. [READ] While I am shocked by the fact that big, bad Future Shop (subsidiary of Best Buy) would care enough to delay marketing activities on a game that will sell millions of copies – I am left wondering what the connection is between video games and the death of Brandon Crisp. In my opinion, there’s no connection – just another excuse for the media to use the video game industry as a whipping boy when some teenager does something really stupid.

Jack Thompson, former Floria Attorney (recently disbarred for his antics), made a career of trying to bring class-action lawsuits against video game publishers for creating what he called “murder simulators”. [READ] The first of these lawsuits tried to link a 1997 high school shooting in Kentucky to the fact that the psychotic teenaged killer played a lot of first person shooter video games (like Doom, Quake and Redneck Rampage). This suit was tossed out in 2001 but was the first in a long line of lawsuits with lawyers trying to pin all the crazy shit that teenagers do on video games.

I feel really terrible for the Crisp family but who’s to blame when a teenager runs away from home and winds up dead? The video game company that made the game they were fighting about? What if they had been fighting about what time the kid needed to go to bed? Would all mattress and bedding stores stop selling their wares for the next week out of respect for the family?

I also heard on the radio this morning that police are complaining that technology is making their jobs harder. For example, they were complaining that juvenile suspects in a recent assault case were text messaging each other while in police custody to corraborate their stories before being interrogated. The police put the blame on technology. I put the blame on police for not confiscating their fucking cell phones when they were taken into custody. They further complained that a recent murder case had become complicated when friends of a murdered teenager had been speculating about who the killer was on the deceased’s Facebook page.

All of these incidents lead me to the conclusion that it is much easier to put the blame for society’s ills on technology and video games than it is to be a responsible parent that keeps guns out of your kids’ hands or keeps them from running off into the woods. It’s easier to blame telecommunications technology when your officers are too stupid to confiscate a communications device from a suspect.